To heal a Rogue

LYSANDER

The Delicate’s eyes rolled white the moment her palm made full contact with the dead woman’s leg.

A sharp, involuntary gasp tore from her throat.

”She suffered,” Her voice had changed. The words came thin and strained, as though she were speaking through someone else’s pain. ”She didn’t want to die. She fought it, in her own mind. But something in her had already stopped listening to her. She had to obey.”

Tears slipped down her cheeks.

At first, they were ordinary tears, clear against her pale skin. Then her shoulders began to tremble, the movement spreading through her arms until her entire body shook beneath the dark fabric.

”What else?” I stepped closer. ”Who did it?”

”She was heading back after her shift.”

Her eyes remained rolled back, showing nothing but white.

”She was tired. Thinking about her bed. Thinking about sleep.”

Her fingers twitched against the dead woman’s leg.

”Then she was stopped.”

”By who?”

”I’m close,” Her breathing hitched. ”I’m close.”

Then she went completely still.

Every muscle in her body locked at once. Her arm remained rigid, her hand pressed against the dead woman’s leg, while tears continued to slip silently from the corners of her eyes.

I took another step toward her. ”Well?”

But she stopped answering. In fact, she now looked frozen.

The next tear that escaped was red. I watched it crawl down her cheek.

Another followed. Then another.

I was certain my eyes were deceiving me. So I blinked. But I was indeed seeing this.

It was indeed red.

Thick drops of crimson gathered beneath her jaw before falling onto the floorboards with soft, wet taps.

I turned toward Bradley, wondering if he was seeing what I was now seeing.

He has this shocked look on his face and he wasted no time at all.

He started moving.

”Girl,” His voice sharpened. ”Are you all right? Maybe you should stop.”

He caught her wrist and tried to pull her hand away from the dead healer’s cold leg.

Nothing happened.

Her fingers remained locked against the dead woman’s leg.

Bradley pulled even harder, but the Delicate’s arm didn’t bend. Her fingers didn’t loosen either.

It was as though something had fused her hand to the corpse.

”Let go,” Bradley ordered.

Her head turned. Slowly.

Her white eyes found me.

There was something unsettling about looking at eyes with nothing but whites in them.

Nothing in those eyes should have allowed her to see me at all, yet her gaze settled directly on mine.

”I shouldn’t have looked.” Her voice cracked. ”I don’t think they liked me looking.”

I felt the room change. The air seemed to contract around us.

Then, to everyone’s suprise, her eyes caught fire.

White flame erupted from both sockets and she shrieked in pure horror.

The sound ripped through the room and spilled into the corridor, followed almost immediately by shouts from the sentinels outside.

Bradley recoiled.

The Delicate’s hand finally tore free from the dead woman’s leg.

Both hands flew to her face.

She clawed desperately at her burning eyes, nails scraping against her own skin as though she could somehow tear the fire from her skull.

”Get her back!” Bradley shouted.

I barely heard him.

I couldn’t look away.

The flames weren’t spreading.

They weren’t consuming her face.

They were burning from somewhere behind her eyes.

I had seen this before.

The thought surfaced through the noise, sudden and unwelcome.

When? Where?

”Your Majesty!” Bradley’s shout broke through the fragments circling my mind. ”Get away from her!”

I couldn’t.

”Get her down!” I yelled instead.

I was already moving too.

The Delicate’s knees buckled, and I lunged forward, but Bradley reached her first. He dropped to his knees and caught her before her skull struck the floor, then seized both her wrists and dragged her hands away from her face.

He swore seeing the sight. ”Selene!”

”Hold her,” I ordered.

Her fingers still twitched, trying to claw their way back toward her eyes even though she was already slipping into unconsciousness.

”Someone get water!” My voice cracked with urgency, and I didn’t care. ”Now!”

It was that moment that the white flames guttered out.

One moment they were blazing from her sockets, filling the room with that impossible light. The next, there was nothing. Only a thin curl of smoke rising from the edges of her eyes remained.

Her body went slack in Bradley’s arms.

I stood over her, breathing hard.

The dead healer still hung above us, swaying faintly from the ceiling beam. Beneath her, the Delicate lay unconscious on the floor, her pale face streaked with red tears, half empty eye sockets and smoke.

Something cold settled beneath my ribs.

Whatever we were dealing with didn’t want to be found.

It didn’t merely hide its tracks. It destroyed anyone who came close enough to uncover them.

I’d seen something like this before. With the witch.

The memory surfaced more clearly now.

Her eyes...

The fire in them...

The way she’d been punished the moment she reached something she wasn’t supposed to see.

Only this was worse. Much worse.

I stared at the Delicate. And then I remembered.

Not the witch. Something before her.

Something I’d seen long before I understood plenty about the world.

My breath caught. I had seen this before.

I knew exactly when. And I knew where.

***

The room dissolved around me, the walls and the blood and the Delicate’s slack body folding away into something older, softer at the edges the way memory always was.

I was younger and Uncle Cornelius was crouched in front of me, his hands braced on his knees, his face carrying none of the formal distance he usually wore in front of the people.

”I believe you, son,” he said. ”Your father told me everything. About the girl in the woods. And I’ve brought someone who can help us understand what happened to you out there. What you saw.”

”Who, Uncle?”

”A Delicate,” he said. ”Since that scrap of rag still has this strange girl’s blood on it, she should be able to tell us a great deal about who this girl actually is.”

He rose and crossed to the door, pulling it open. ”You may come in.”

A woman entered first. She wore gloves on both hands and dressed with a plainness that made her nearly forgettable. She was the epitome of the kind of woman built to be overlooked in any room she stood in. Behind her, a man followed, taller, and quiet looking. His eyes swept the room once before settling on nothing in particular.

”Who’s he,” I asked.

”Her handler,” Cornelius said. ”You’d call them business partners, I suppose.”

I nodded, though the word meant little to me at that time.

”May I have the item,” the Delicate asked, her voice soft and measured.

I got up from the bed and crossed to the wooden chest against the wall, digging into it until my fingers found the small scrap of fabric I’d hidden there. Rusted blood stained one corner of it, dark and old by then, though at the time it had still felt fresh enough to make my stomach turn every time I looked at it.

I handed it over.

She took it in her gloved hand first, turning it over once, before peeling the second glove free and pressing her bare fingers directly against the stained fabric.

She gasped.

That wasn’t all too. Fire caught in her eye sockets almost instantly, white and blinding, the same impossible light I’d just watched consume another Delicate decades later in a room stinking of blood and suffering. I remembered screaming. I remembered my uncle grabbing me, pulling me back against his chest, his hand covering my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch whatever came next.

The memory snapped shut, and I was back in the present, staring down at the unconscious woman in Bradley’s arms, smoke still curling faint from her ruined eyes.

The girl in the meadows... That had been Fia.

And I knew what Fia was.

From every conversation we’d had since, from the careful way she always spoke about her own abilities, there had been some kind of protection built around healers specifically. Some... ward meant to keep exactly this from happening to anyone who tried digging too deep into what one of them actually was.

My chest went tight.

Was the attacker a healer? A rogue healer, powerful enough, old enough, to trigger that same defense mechanism in anyone foolish enough to try tracing them?