The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (48 page)

he next thing he knew, he was blinking his eyes open to a sterile white room. There was a fat woman hovering over him with a caring face, and she was saying just loudly enough to disrupt from sleep, “Mister Buckley, you need to wake up, now.”

Every muscle in his body tensed as he took in the three linked circles on the woman’s white uniform above her heart and smelled the aggressively clean hospital scent. He sat up quickly―too quickly. The room spun wildly and his stomach lurched. Blight lights exploded before his eyes and the lifeknitter was taking him by the shoulder and forcing him back down onto the pillow. She was surprisingly strong for such a fleshy lady. “There, there,” she said. “You can move about if you like, but do try to avoid sudden movements, dear, or we’ll be pouring you back into bed.”

“Rosemary,” he said, and then, remembering what had happened more clearly, “Olivia.”

“What day is it, dear?”

“What…”

“I need you tell me what day it is, please, dear.”

He pulled his brows together and stared at her. Just what was she on about? “…Eadday,” he answered.

She nodded and made a note on the board she had tucked under one arm. “And what is your given and family name and categorization?”

He shook his head in bewilderment. “Christopher Buckley. Wordweaver,” he responded dutifully, and then, “What are you doing?”

She smiled at him. Despite her homely face and three chins, she had a radiant smile. “Don’t worry, dear, you did just fine.”

A familiar voice piped up from beyond Chris’s field of vision. “You hit your head hard enough that your brains got rattled, Christopher.” Olivia’s tone was both sour and playful. “She’s just being sure they all went back where they belonged, isn’t that right?”

Her voice didn’t sound like she was in terrible distress, but Chris still fought to slowly bring himself up to a sitting position and look about the room. Everything stayed still, this time, both outside of him and within. The lifeknitter gave him an encouraging smile.

Without his glasses, edges were blurry and undefined, but he could make out enough to see by. The room was white. They always were. He hated hospitals. There was a window, the light from which seemed too bright, and contained two beds. He lay in one, but the other, to his surprise, was unoccupied. Instead, Olivia sat in the chair beside it. Her leg was wrapped and wrapped and wrapped again in white bandaging, and a pair of wooden crutches was propped up against the wall beside her.

“Gods,” he said, leaning back against the pillows again in relief. “You’re all right.”

There was a moment of silence during which the lifeknitter fluffed up the pillows behind his head so he could see Olivia better. When the fat woman moved out of the way and bustled for the door, there was a softness on Olivia’s face of a sort he’d never seen before. “Somehow,” she agreed.

He shook his head in disbelief. Had it all been real? The explosions, the debris, the fire, the salamander. He recalled in a blinding flash of memory how he had…
commanded
that elemental, and then shelved it. There still wasn’t time to consider all the…the hundreds of dizzying implications that might have. Instead he sifted through all of it with surprising alacrity considering how “rattled” his brains had gotten, and honed his focus in on the last thing he remembered before it all went fuzzy, and then dark.

“Rosemary was there. She saved us…” he said, still not quite able to believe it.

Olivia rearranged herself in her chair. Her face tightened in a wince, one she tried valiantly to hide. “She’s a beautiful girl,” she said with lightness in her tone even Chris could tell was feigned. “She doesn’t look a thing like you, aside from the eyes.”

“Why was she
there
?” Try as he may, he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. How had she known he was in trouble?
He
hadn’t even known where he’d be, so how could she? And while he couldn’t possibly say how long they’d been trapped in that hellish inferno, it couldn’t have been
that
long…could it?

Whatever Olivia might have been about to say, Chris would never know. There was a flurry of activity near the entrance of the room, and moments later, Rachel Albany rushed in.

Chris couldn’t have been more shocked at her appearance. His governess’s plain grey dress was splattered with mud and her cheeks were heavily flushed. Her hair was only half held back by its usual prim bun, and the rest fluttered around her head in wild wisps. With his vision so blurred and the colours all running together, it made it appear she had a nimbus floating about her head, an angel’s halo. Before he could really process her presence, she locked eyes with him and rushed to his side, dropping onto her knees beside his bed.

“
Christoph―
” The flush in her cheeks deepened even further as she visibly corrected herself. “Mister Buckley,” she tried again, reaching out to grip one of his hands in both of hers. “Mother Deorwynn, thank all the Gods you’re all right. When I heard―when I heard you and your employer had been on that block, I―” She cut herself off there, clearly overcome with emotion. Her big brown eyes scanned his face, and she released his hand to reach out and lightly brush her fingers across the puckered skin at his hairline. “Gods, this looks as if it hurts.”

Chris found his own cheeks reddening at the gentleness of her touch. Awkwardly, he turned his face away from her, only to catch Olivia eyeing him with one eyebrow in her hairline. “Friend of yours,
Christopher
?” she asked mildly.

He regretted giving her permission to make use of his given name. “My governess,” he said through clenched teeth, and sharpened his look into a glare when Olivia’s second eyebrow climbed to meet the first. He pulled away from Miss Albany’s prodding hands. “I’m quite fine, Miss Albany,” he muttered. “There
really
isn’t any need for such a display.”

Her hands stilled, and then dropped to her side. “I…” Miss Albany said, and then cleared her throat. When she spoke again, her voice was as controlled and poised as ever. “I was very concerned, Mister Buckley, very concerned. All they told me on the mirror was that you were here, after having been on the block. Ever since that awful man arrived and took Rosemary with him, I―”

Chris snapped his gaze to his governess’s. He narrowed his eyes. “What?”

One of Miss Albany’s hands flew up to her throat. Her eyes widened. “You…you don’t know?”

“
What
man?” he demanded.

“Avery Combs,” she spat. “He appeared at the estate with five other men and took Rosemary. I
tried
to stop them, but I swear, it was as if…every single muscle in my body was
paralyzed
, Mister Buckley. I couldn’t move an inch. When I called out after them, it was like they didn’t hear a word I said. They said something about a tip that ‘
those reformists
’ were going to sabotage some bindings, and then they were just gone.”

His heart thumped in his head and his knuckles whitened where his fingers grabbed the bed sheets. “Where are they now?” he gritted out.

“
Here
,” she said. “In the front hall. They―”

Chris was out of bed before she could finish his sentence. The room spun sickeningly and colours blinked across his vision, but he grabbed the wall to steady himself and didn’t stop to so much as catch his breath. He saw his clothes folded in a pile by his bedside, realized he wore nothing but a bed gown, but the thought of taking the time to dress seemed absurd. “Christopher!” Olivia called after him, and he heard Miss Albany hot on his heels. They were both in a different world.

He blocked out the starched white sheets, the bleached white walls, the lifeknitters in their white uniforms and three linked circles who watched him pass by. All hospitals were easy enough to navigate, and with his mind completely focused on getting to his sister as quickly as he could, it wasn’t long at before he was in the foyer, which was locked in utter bedlam.

Miss Albany stopped beside him while his eyes scanned the room, trying to pierce the confusion to find what he was looking for. “I couldn’t even get through to see her,” Miss Albany spoke breathlessly. “Combs’s men pushed me aside when I tried to get close. She should be―” She pointed, but Chris had already spotted the collection of bodies surrounding an unseen figure by the front window, and his heart sank even as he started moving.

Flashbulbs were going off and the entire area was bathed in flickering alp-light. Reporters shouted questions, all trying to be heard over one another, their assistants standing around weaving furiously onto their notebooks. Chris could barely hear his sister’s high little voice, but he
could
see Avery Combs and the strong men who surrounded him, all with their thick arms crossing their barrel chests. The thought of those men manhandling Rosemary out the door of her home made his fists clench and his jaw tighten, and he pushed past the scurrying people who filled the room as if they were made of paper and twine. Silence seemed to fall behind him as the gathered people saw his face, and he began shouldering through the clump of reporters and photographers with only one thought in his mind.

Strong arms seized his elbows and grabbed him back, lifting him up. He growled and kicked out, twisting his head to one side. Flashing lights blinded his vision and a wave of sickening dizziness threatened to make him spew his breakfast onto the backs of the reporters in front of him. One of his flailing feet connected with and shoved a photographer hard. The man lost his grip on his camera, which shot forward and, despite his grasping hands and cry of alarm, hit the floor. The flashbulb shattered in a blinding burst of light. A spiral of black motes danced and swirled in the afterimage.

A collective gasp went up from the reporters, but before the alp could even fully materialize, Rosemary’s sweet voice rose in song.

The press cleared a path between Chris and his sister. He watched her raise her hands and close her eyes, her face locked in that euphoria he only ever truly saw when she was binding. Before all the gathered press of Darrington, her perfectly pitched notes guided the half-formed outline of the alp, gently suggesting it might find better and more satisfying times on its own plane. Its image wavered only slightly―to which Rosemary raised her song’s pitch just a single note―before collapsing in onto itself, vanishing in a tiny black pinprick and a flash of light that made many of the gathered members of the press to raise hands to shield their eyes.

After a moment of reverent silence, during which Rosemary’s face was frozen in serene peace, the press
exploded
once again, even louder than before.

“Mother Deorwynn!”

“Miss Buckley, is it true your father taught you to―”

“―the history of your family and your impressive bloodline surely―”

“―six
Gods
, like it was
nothing
.”

“When did you first ‘bind? Was it always so
easy
?”

“After what she’d already―”

“
Enough
!” Chris roared, giving a sharp twist in the grip of the man who held him immobile. His voice simply seemed to drop into the cacophony of noise all around them, with only the closest members of the press noticing―and them turning only to give him a sharp and disapproving look. The man who held him tightened his grip and went to turn him away and propel him elsewhere…but then Rosemary’s eyes opened and locked right onto his.

“Chris!” she said with relief and love plain in her voice, her first words since dismissing the alp. She pushed aside the closest reporter and rushed down the closing gap that had opened between them, throwing her arms around him and the man who held him, both. She buried her face in his stomach, rubbing herself against the fabric of his bed gown. “Oh, Chris, you’re okay…”

Finally, the reporters quieted. The man holding Chris’s arms slowly, reluctantly set him down on his own two feet, and then disentangled himself from Rosemary’s embrace to step away. The only sound was the murmuring of questions from those not close enough to see, and the
pop pop pop
of flashbulbs as photographers from every paper in Darrington took front-page shots of Christopher Buckley in his nightshirt.

It wasn’t exactly the social debut he’d always dreamed of, but at the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“Rosemary,” he murmured, leaning down to bury his face in her raven-black curls.

“I didn’t know you’d be there,” she said quietly. “When I saw you and Miss Faraday, I almost tripped up the song. They said you just hit your head and you’d be all right, but I was still worried. The lifeknitter said she could see a bruise on your brains.” She raised her blue eyes to meet his, and scanned his features. She made a face, standing on her tiptoes and reaching up to touch the puckered place at his hairline. “I think you’re going to have an ugly scar, big brother,” she said, and though her voice had its familiar teasing tone, he could see how dull her eyes were, and the pinch between her brows. She’d drained herself again. “Your poor pretty face.”

He smiled and chuckled quietly. “At least it’ll be hidden in my hair,” he said lightly.