Lessons After Dark (15 page)

Then Gareth was in front of her, smoothing the loose strands of hair back from her forehead. “You did,” he said and shook his head a little, helplessly. “Young men are idiots. They're idiots no matter what you tell them. Getting them to their majority alive is a small miracle.”

Olivia looked up at him and laughed briefly. “I shouldn't find that reassuring, should I?”

“I wouldn't have said it otherwise,” said Gareth.

Their eyes met again. Even exhausted as she was, Olivia felt a brief resurgence of her earlier desire. More than that, there was a quiet comfort in his face and the touch of his hand. She could almost feel her nerves resettling themselves.

“You should go talk to Violet,” she said. “Thank you, though, and for getting me here faster.”

“Thank you,” he said, “for keeping us all alive.”

He fell silent and bowed. Before he turned toward the door, Olivia saw the startled look on his face, as if he was surprised to say the words or to mean them.

“Any injury can be more serious than it looks,” Gareth said. “Any injury can be less so. I've seen a man die from taking a punch to the stomach, and I've seen a man recover after being shot in the head.” Young Lewis had possessed a singularly thick skull in more ways than one, and Gareth had entertained a few suspicions about the quality of his enemy's powder. “You have to consider not just the visible injury,” he went on, “but also the possibility of hidden damage, not to mention infection, shock, and the patient's general condition. Miss Donnell?”

“Sir,” the girl said, lowering her hand slowly, “you said last week we often wouldn't have time to think very much.”

“Yes,” Gareth said. “I did. And it's true. Decisions about treatment and triage usually require significant thought. You…you five, especially, of all people, will almost certainly need to make them in moments, perhaps seconds.” He felt a wry smile cross his lips. “Mr. Grenville and Mrs. Brightmore ask you only to learn the unlikely, Miss Donnell. We're attempting the impossible in this class.”

Uneasy laughter followed. Miss Woodwell exchanged a glance with Fitzpatrick, who was sitting next to her on the couch. Waite and Fairley just looked a bit blank. Elizabeth curled the end of a braid around one finger. Gareth remembered how young she was and had the urge to say something comforting.

There was no comfort to give. None that would be doing Elizabeth or her fellows any service

Gareth sighed. They were
all
so young, really. None of the faces turned toward him bore any wounds, any marks of great grief or fear. He didn't doubt there'd been pain in their lives, but it had been the pain of any half-normal childhood. And he and Olivia and the Grenvilles, were sending them into…he couldn't even say what.

It was no wonder, in some ways, Waite and Fitzpatrick had come up with their particular form of idiocy. No excuse, but they'd likely get over being young and stupid. From the exasperated look Miss Woodwell had given both of them when they'd come to class, the story had gotten around the student body, and embarrassment might help as much as punishment.

Waite was more attentive than usual today, and Fitzpatrick, though sulky, gave his answers fairly readily. They were raising their hands at practically the same times, Gareth noticed, and glancing at each other whenever one got an answer right, one in triumph, one in annoyance.

Whatever the private aftermath of their summoning had been, it had not resulted in closer friendship.

Gareth, who had dreamed uneasily all the night before and had spent the day with a strangely diminished appetite, couldn't find much sympathy for them.

“Few lives go by without hasty decisions,” Gareth said now, looking down at the seated students. “I doubt any of them will be yours. Luckily, knowledge helps whether or not you have time to think. There's a point where theory and practice becomes reflex, just as it does in riding or shooting.”

“But it's never certain, sir?” Fitzpatrick asked.

“We're in the wrong world for certainty, Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Gareth said. “The best huntsman takes a toss every so often, the best shot can miss when the wind or the light is wrong, and the human body is far more complicated than either.”

He stopped and looked around the room again. All of the students were watching him now, nervous and earnest and waiting. He had planned to give them certain facts, basic and practical and perhaps somewhat dry. The rest, Gareth had thought, they could get from Olivia or the Grenvilles…or from life.

But neither Olivia nor the Grenvilles had likely been in certain situations, and life might break the unprepared.

Gareth cleared his throat. “You
will
be wrong. Each of you. All of you. If you deal with injury and disease, and, I suspect, with everything else you're training for here, there will be times when you get bad information, when you lack the proper supplies, when you've had little sleep and less food and you make the wrong decision. There will be times when you know that. There will be times when you don't. There will be times when there's
no
right decision.”

The room was silent.

“Sometimes,” said Gareth, making himself simply speak and not remember, “there isn't anything you can do. Nothing that will make a difference. And sometimes you don't know if there might have been.”

“What then, sir?” It was Fairley who asked, the only one young and blunt enough to voice what was probably on the others' minds. “I mean, how do you—?”

“Cope with it?” Gareth asked when the boy was obviously lost for words. “Different men have different methods.”

Prayer, strong drink, or bad women
, one of Gareth's teachers had said, but they'd both been men, and Gareth had been of age.

“Religion is an aid for some,” he said now, and the words were stiff and awkward in his mouth. His father would have put it better, but also wouldn't have said
some
, and Gareth had seen too much to say
all
. “Sometimes music is a comfort, or art or the company of friends. And some,” he added, honesty forcing the words, “turn to other distractions. I'd recommend the less dangerous sort. Particularly if you think you'll need your wits about you the next day.”

Ordinarily, even such a veiled reference would have gotten a knowing smirk from Waite and Fitzpatrick. That they still looked serious reassured Gareth. He was making something of an impression.

Gareth just hoped none of them asked about
his
experience with self-destructive forms of comfort. He'd been lucky enough not to end up craving drink, and he'd never touched opium, but he couldn't pretend to have been completely temperate either.

“That,” he said, “is what you can do afterward. Beforehand, you prepare as well as you can, and you do the best job possible. That's as much as anyone can manage.”

He didn't speak for a minute, simply watched them. Elizabeth's lips were pressed tightly together, and her face was pale. Waite was frowning, but abstractly so, as if considering a problem. Fitzpatrick was studying his hands. Miss Woodwell just looked determined and businesslike, and Fairley chewed on his lower lip.

“In that spirit,” Gareth said and reached for one of his rolled-up charts, “let's consider the human leg.”

He'd told them as much as he could. The rest
would
be up to life.

***

“Dr. St. John?”

Gareth hadn't expected the voice. He'd turned away as soon as he'd dismissed the class, and started to straighten up the place. In truth, there wasn't much to do. He'd brought a chair up and some charts in, and the servants really would have done it all, but old habits died hard.

Old reflexes too. He'd turned before the voice, male, young but broken—therefore Fitzpatrick or Waite or a footman—had gotten more than halfway through his name.

Waite stood in the middle of the empty room, hands in his trouser pockets. At Gareth's sudden turn, he blinked but didn't step back. “I hope I'm not bothering you,” he added. “I was wondering if I could ask a question.”

“Any number of them,” said Gareth, tucking one of the rolled-up charts under his arm. “I might even answer a few.”

“Ah.” Waite smiled a little uneasily, remembering some of Gareth's earlier lectures, perhaps, or that Gareth had no reason to be particularly patient with him just then. “More in the line of a favor, really.”

“A favor,” Gareth repeated flatly.

“That's right. Not my day for it, I know. Only…” Waite extracted one long-fingered hand in order to run it through his hair. “Say a student wanted some more-advanced lessons than the rest of us do.”

Gareth lifted his eyebrows. Waite had done decently well in his classes, but he'd never excelled, nor had he seemed to find the subject matter particularly enthralling. Still, he wasn't inclined to discourage anyone who sought after knowledge. “Say one does,” he said and kept his voice neutral.

“Would that be the sort of thing you'd do? Assuming you had time, I mean.”

“That depends,” Gareth said, “on how the student was doing elsewhere, for one. I'm not the only instructor here, after all.”

He expected to see Waite flinch at that reminder of Olivia, but the boy just shrugged almost impatiently. “Quite well, from everything I know, though it's not like you give us marks here, sir.”

“No,” said Gareth, “there's a reason for that.”

He glanced around, making sure he'd gotten everything. Now the room could have been a model or the background in a painting: pale yellow walls, darker furniture, thick carpets, wide windows. There was no sign left of five students, whether lounging and listening or applying bandages to one another, and nothing of the charts they'd studied or the notes they'd taken. Only Gareth and Waite.

The boy was still there, standing straight and looking earnest. And he did need something to keep him out of trouble.

“Was there any particular aspect of medicine that caught your attention?” Gareth asked.

“Oh. It's not me, you see.” Waite gave him a rather sheepish grin. “It's Lizzie. Miss Donnell. Wants to learn surgery and all that…”
Don't ask me why
was all through Waite's voice, but he had the good sense not to speak it. “I said I'd have a word with you.”

Elizabeth made more sense than Waite, but…“Why didn't she ask me herself?”

Waite coughed and looked down for a second, for the first time in the conversation. “A bit scared of you, sir,” he said apologetically and added, “You know how girls are sometimes.”

“Not really, no,” Gareth said. His life since leaving home had sometimes involved women, rarely involved ladies, and hardly ever involved girls. Not until the last few months. “I'm hardly
frightening
.”

“No, sir,” said Waite politely.

Gareth chose not to pursue that particular line of questioning any further. “I'd be glad to teach Miss Donnell,” he said, “but I can't imagine the classes will go very well if she's too intimidated to talk to me.”

“Oh, shouldn't be a problem, sir. Not when she's not asking you a favor.” Waite waved a hand. “Besides, Miss Woodwell said she'd go along, at least until Lizzie gets used to the whole thing.”

“How kind of Miss Woodwell.”

“Oh, rather,” said Waite. “She's a jolly sort of a girl. Doesn't seem to mind getting a batch of younger siblings ready-made.”

“Neither do you, by the evidence,” said Gareth.

Waite shrugged. “I've two little sisters back home, you know. You'll probably have them on your hands in a few years, and God help you all then.”

“We'll try to be equal to your family,” Gareth said. He started across the carpet toward the door, and Waite followed. “But your parents may want to keep your sisters at home. It's not by chance we have only two young ladies here.” On impulse, he glanced sideways at Waite and added, “Most people think no more of female students than they do of female teachers.”

“Right, sir,” said Waite, looking satisfactorily uncomfortable. “Easy enough mistake, when you don't know better.”

“Most mistakes are,” said Gareth.

They walked toward the door together, in silence that wavered between embarrassed and companionable, until Waite spoke again. “Must have taken some getting used to on your part too, sir. Working with a woman and all. Not to mention the magic thing.”

“
Teaching
took some adjustment,” Gareth said. He'd meant to protest that he and Olivia didn't work that closely together, but then there'd been the day before, and the trip to the forest, and the feeling he'd gotten when Simon and his wife had left. If he put a hand out, he knew she'd catch him.

And she'd spent years falsely offering a hand to others.

Suddenly impatient, Gareth looked over at Waite. “You have somewhere to be, don't you?”

There was no omen of disaster. In fact, the day had gone fairly well. Both of the older boys, after the first bit of sulking, seemed to be taking their punishment with relative good grace, and certainly nobody had tried to summon anything
else
. Charlotte had kept Michael busy making a box for the hedgehog, which they'd named Star, after a book on Babylonian mythology had connected her species with the goddess Astarte, and Elizabeth was lost in a book.

She'd slept well for the past few nights too, or, if she hadn't, she'd managed to get herself down without waking Charlotte and thus Olivia. Olivia had followed her youngest student's example and, curling up in one of the library chairs, had immersed herself in
The
Moonstone
. Reading anything fictional these days was a rare enough pleasure to occupy all her attention. If the household had experienced any alarm, she didn't hear it…

Not until the door opened and Mrs. Edgar stood on the threshold, face white beneath her cap. “You're wanted upstairs,” she said. “Now, ma'am.”

“Who is it?” Olivia asked irritably, yanked abruptly from Indian diamonds and drowned maidservants. If Fitzpatrick and Waite
had
tried summoning again, she would personally feed them to whatever they'd called up. Feet first. “One of the boys?”

“No, ma'am,” said Mrs. Edgar, voice low and quiet.

Annoyance gave way to fear. “Elizabeth? Or—?”

“It's the master, ma'am,” said Mrs. Edgar. She swallowed and shook her head. “He's home.
They're
home. And something's wrong.”

***

Wrong
didn't begin to describe it.

Gareth stood by the bed in Simon's room, looking down at his friend's still body. Simon still breathed regularly, and he'd had the strength to reach his room with Gareth and Mrs. Grenville supporting him, but he hadn't moved since he'd fallen onto the bed. His eyes didn't seem to focus on anything either. He didn't speak, and his skin had gone a shade of grayish green Gareth had never seen before and could only assume was a very bad sign indeed.

Not, however, as bad as his right arm.

Snaking up from Simon's wrist, the lines of his arteries stood out as if his arm had been a picture on one of Gareth's charts. Unlike in the picture, though, Simon's arteries from his elbow down were glowing a sick purplish black that looked like it shifted every time Gareth blinked. Like it
squirmed
.

That was mad. Light didn't move on its own. Then again, a man's blood vessels didn't glow either.

Gareth looked up. Simon's room was rather pleasant as such things went, done in shades of blue and gold, with a fire already blazing in the fireplace. Painted lamps cast their own circles of light over the bed, and a small pile of books lay on the night table. It was all very civilized. Mrs. Grenville stalked through it as if it were a jungle. If she'd had a gun, he almost would have expected her to start shooting holes in the mantelpiece.

Sensing his gaze, she spun and glared at him. “Well?”

“What
is
it?” Gareth tried not to sound querulous. He did usually like to know the normal facts about a patient before viewing him in any other way. He wasn't sure there were that many normal facts in this case, but the theory, notwithstanding, held.

“A curse. Or something.” Mrs. Grenville shrugged, the first desperate and uncertain movement Gareth had ever seen from her. “On a rose, of all the stupid things. It hit the first finger on his hand. Goddamn
classic
,” she spat.

He supposed it was, as curses went. Gareth picked up Simon's hand and turned it over . It felt unnaturally cold, he noted, even while he screamed his own, rather less-effective curses in the back of his mind. There
was
a hole on the right forefinger. Not large. “How long ago?”

“Half an hour. We'd just gotten into the carriage when he collapsed.”

“Right. Give me a moment.” Gareth switched his vision and almost immediately felt his stomach turn over in revolt.

As bad as Simon's arm looked in the normal world, it was far worse in the spiritual plane. The light that had clustered around his arteries was thicker, almost viscous, and a dark gray that brought to mind old bread dough. Gareth could almost smell the decay. That wasn't the worst of it.

When he looked at the light through his aethereal vision, it
did
squirm, growing thicker in places before splitting up again and sliding farther along Simon's arm. Gareth could see the dark blue shape that was Simon breaking apart before it, slowly but steadily. The rest of Simon was paler—energy expended to try and fight the intruder, Gareth assumed—but nothing like what was happening midway up his arm. Gareth suspected it wasn't simply flesh and blood that crumbled.

No, dammit.

He flung power out without thinking, slamming it down into Simon's arm in a wall between the rest of his friend's body and the invading, rotting light. There was a blast of amber fire in the aether. From Mrs. Grenville's startled curse, Gareth thought something had showed itself in the normal world as well.

The rotting light…
retreated
wasn't a strong enough word. Gareth's power blasted it backward, down the long paths it had climbed to get so far, and left it midway between Simon's wrist and his elbow.
Radial
, Gareth thought absently, textbooks turning their own pages in his mind,
ulnar, brachial
. For the moment, the light's restless writhing movement halted.

It wasn't out yet. But Gareth had made a good start. He took a breath, feeling renewed confidence fill him along with the air…

Then the rotting light turned its attention on him.

***

Nobody was screaming this time. At first, Olivia found that a relief. Then, as she made her way up the stairs and down the hall, the silence became more ominous. There was carpet on the hallway floor and no way her footsteps should have echoed. They echoed in her mind anyway.

Mrs. Edgar opened the door to the master bedroom and stood back, farther back than simply letting Olivia inside would have required. There was no explosion, however, and nothing rushed out the door.

Olivia rushed in.

The room receded in her vision, its furnishings becoming faint and then almost translucent. None of them mattered except Joan, pacing the room like a caged beast, and her husband, lying on the bed and looking about three steps from a corpse.

Gareth was standing over him, holding out both of his hands. A faint golden glow had formed around them, contrasting with the rather leprous air Olivia could see around Mr. Grenville's arm as she got closer. Closer still, she saw the pallor on Gareth's face and the sweat on his forehead.

He was fighting something with all his strength. She had no idea whether he was winning.

On her way out the library door, Olivia had retained enough presence of mind to snatch up a candle and matches. She lit the wick now and made hasty gestures to the four directions, invoking all the elements to protect her in whatever happened thenceforth. It was a hasty compromise. She didn't have time for a proper shield, but she wasn't fool enough to go in without one. Not the way Mr. Grenville and Gareth both looked.

A word in Enochian brought her more knowledge, and she caught her breath with the terror of it. Now she could clearly see the writhing foulness inside Mr. Grenville's arm, insidious and persistent and awfully aware, like nothing she'd encountered and only barely like anything she'd read about. It seethed in his hand and his forearm, but a wall of dark amber power blocked its further progress.

For the moment.

The light was throwing itself at the wall, a steady stream of gray rot that, at the moment, beat itself against the power to no effect, but that didn't let the power progress any farther either. Stalemate, Olivia thought. In time, Gareth's power would weaken and so would the wall, even if he fed it with his own life force.

That was if the light didn't begin to attack him directly. Olivia could feel it in the air now. It was blind malice, but it wasn't quite senseless, and it knew Gareth was there. If the light found the link between power and man…it would be very bad. And there was almost nothing she could do. The light was magical, but it was physical. It was part of Simon's body now rather than a spell Olivia might lift.

She swallowed. “A healing spell might help,” she said, turning toward the door. “I'll get the notes.” Olivia tried not to think of the time it would take or how she'd never had call to use that particular sort of magic. No need, when Gareth had been there. No need now, perhaps, if he'd had enough power.

Abruptly, she turned back. A few more steps carried her to Gareth's side, just within arm's reach of him. Olivia bent and traced symbols on the ground, calling on power, and saw the world shift again. It wasn't as dramatic as it had been in the forest, but it was enough, and she bit back an oath at the roiling half shape the light took on in that view.

Warmth rose up from her feet and spread throughout her body. If working with power was enough to let her see the light's true shape, hopefully the power itself would be enough to defeat it. Olivia remembered the way she'd grounded Elizabeth's energy, fixed her mind on reversing the process…

…and placed a hand on Gareth's shoulder.

***

For the first few seconds, Gareth wasn't sure where the rush of energy came from, nor did he care.

The rotting light had been pressing forward relentlessly. He'd been holding his ground, pouring more and more of his power into the wall, and it had held under the assault. Only held, though. Gareth was no tactician, never had been, but he thought trying to gain ground might be disastrous for him and for Simon. As it was, he had started to feel the price in his own body as the light came onward.

The thought had occurred to him that he was in over his head.

Injuries didn't fight back. Disease did, in its way, but any illness he'd ever faced had been a pale shadow of this, whatever it was, which coiled and gathered only to surge again. The sense of its hatred for him, for all normal life, had crept over Gareth like the faintest brush of the power itself. Balam might have killed them all, if he'd gotten out of the circle, but he had been straightforwardly predatory compared to the cold and slimy thing in Simon's blood.

Gareth had been trying not to think much about that.

Then, like a drenching of cold water on a hot day—energy. It flowed over him and into him, and Gareth took it without thinking. The wall blossomed outward into amber flame, driving the rotting light off, back, then out, destroying it on the way. Gareth's head was full of a high buzzing he thought was the light screaming, and he felt himself smile at the sound. Hurt, did it?
Good.

Somewhere nearby, Simon was breathing more deeply. His hand clenched and then relaxed, fingers spreading, and the last of the light vanished.

Gareth sent his power through Simon's arm once more, scouring his veins for any trace of the curse-or-whatever, and smiled when he found none. Energy still lingered in his body. When he shifted his sight back to normal, he thought he probably looked slightly mad.

No matter. Mrs. Grenville was kneeling by Simon, her hands on his good shoulder, and talking urgently and intently in a way Gareth didn't think he should watch. Instead, he turned to see who his rescuer had been.

Deep brown eyes met his, shining with the same energy and triumph Gareth felt.

Olivia.