Home > Misrule (Valentine #3)(4)

Misrule (Valentine #3)(4)
Author: Jodi McAlister

‘Hot or cold?’ I ask her.

‘Hot,’ she says. ‘Please.’

I turn the water on. She just stands there.

I sigh and unbutton my jeans. This is probably the worst thing in the world I can do for my shoulder – you’re not supposed to get open wounds wet, are you? – but the world feels like it’s ending and I don’t have any options. ‘Come on.’

This time, she doesn’t slap my hand away. Both of us in our underwear, she lets me pull her into the shower.

The water that runs off us is red – dark red at first, and then gradually getting lighter, until it’s almost pink. Awkwardly, roughly, I try to wash the blood out of her hair, although I don’t do a very good job because I only have one hand. I do an even worse job on my hair, but it’s so short that hopefully it won’t matter much.

The water turns cold before it turns clear. I see her shivering – we’re both shivering – but better cold than covered in blood.

‘Come on,’ I say, when at last there is no more red. ‘Let’s get you out.’

I fumble for a towel and start to dry her like I undressed her – like a little kid – but she takes it from me. ‘I can do it.’

I dry myself too, but I can’t dry my bandaged shoulder. The cotton – are bandages made of cotton? Why don’t I know what bandages are made out of? Surely that’s a thing I should know – is a heavy damp weight against my skin. I can feel it sticking and I hope it’s wet because of the shower and not because I’m still bleeding. I’m running on pure adrenaline right now and I probably already need seventy-four blood transfusions without adding a seventy-fifth.

I’m going to collapse soon. I’m going to fall in a heap, adrenaline or not, and I need to make a plan for what I’m going to do when that happens.

Phil disappears into my room to get dressed. I wrap Disey’s bathrobe around myself, pick up my jeans with my thick, heavy fingers, and dig my phone out of my pocket, where I felt Matilda put it when I was half-asleep on Phil’s kitchen floor.

There’s a thin spider web of cracks across the screen from where I dropped it. The centre of the web is right over Finn’s left eye.

My shivering gets even worse.

I make myself breathe and steady myself.

I need you to come to my place asap, I text to Cardy and Holly. Please.

Then I take another deep breath and tap lightly on my bedroom door. ‘Phil?’

She’s standing at my window. The curtains are open and she’s staring out into the night, that vacant stare back in her eyes.

‘No no no no,’ I say, yanking the curtains closed. ‘Away from the window. Trust me, all kinds of things have turned up out there and we’re not equipped to deal with any of them right now.’

Her fingers curl into fists and then uncurl again, but stay tense, like she might lash out with her fingernails at any moment. ‘Just leave me alone, Pearl.’

‘No. I’m not leaving you alone. Not a chance. So sit down – or better yet, lie down and get some sleep.’

‘I want to be alone.’

‘No.’

‘Get out!’ she screams. ‘Get out get out get out get out get out get out!’

‘No.’

She shoves me, hard, in the good shoulder. I stumble backwards, and she shoves me again, sending me sprawling out the door. I try to protect it, but my bad shoulder crunches into the hallway wall and lightning flashes across my vision and it’s a summer storm, Valentine, a summer storm! the skies are singing because you have returned to us and I’m bleeding again, hot wetness seeping into the bandages and Phil’s saying something something something you never listen why do you never listen and the door slams with a crack like thunder and it’s black, everything is black, and everything is quiet, except the singing of the sky.

 

It takes me a long time to peel myself up off the floor. My legs don’t feel like they have the strength to hold me, but it’s not like I can crawl with my shoulder the way it is, so I stand up shakily, using the walls to support myself. I worry that I’m leaving smears of blood on the wallpaper as I lurch down the hall, but then I remember that no, I had a shower, my hands are clean.

But there was so much blood.

We studied Macbeth in Year Nine. Is this what Lady Macbeth felt like?

How am I thinking about school right now?

I go to the kitchen, because I don’t have anywhere else to go. I put the kettle on, because I don’t know what else to do. I keep standing, because I don’t know what will happen if I let myself fall.

Shad always complains about his joints when he shuffles out of bed in the early evening. I’m like an old man, he moans. Listen to that creak, Pearlie. That’s my knees. That’s what you have to look forward to.

My joints aren’t creaking. They feel … gelatinous. They feel like the results of some disastrous dessert on MasterChef or My Kitchen Rules, where they were supposed to be frozen and solid but they didn’t set right.

My bones could turn to water and I could melt at any moment.

No. I looked the Crown Prince of the Seelie fairies in the eyes. He is a fairy and he can’t lie but I told him he was a liar. I will not melt.

I looked Finn in the eyes too. I saw how frightened he was.

And I turned around and left him there.

I left him … where?

How am I going to explain that Finn Blacklin has quite literally disappeared off the face of the earth?

Of course I’m shaking, so of course I burn my hand when I pour boiling water into my mug. I run it under cold water, and the tears are running down my face again too, because apparently there is still something left in me to lose.

I think I’ve imagined the knock at first. I’m on the verge of a spectacular crash, and the pulsing of my blood and the beat of my heart is starting to feel like someone’s hitting my head with a hammer.

It comes again.

I turn the tap off.

A third time.

I exhale. Cardy and Holly made it. They’re alive.

I stagger to the front door. Once they’re here, I tell myself, all of this is going to be someone else’s problem, because I am done. I am so done. I am done to the nth power and the infinite degree and every other formula in my maths textbook.

There’s just enough coherent thought in me to check my iron ring is in place and press my eye to the peephole before I open the door, because it would suck to have come this far only to get assassinated by some random fairy.

And then I’m not done any more, and there are more tears left to cry, hot and salty, because it isn’t Cardy or Holly that’s come knocking.

I open the door and fling myself at the most beautiful boy in the world.

Finn catches me, and his arms fold tight around me, and it’s the best thing, the best, best, best thing. ‘You’re okay,’ I say, pressing my lips to his neck, his jaw, his lips, any part of him I can reach. ‘You’re all right. You got out. I’m so sorry I left you there, Finn, but I couldn’t leave Phil, and I –’

He takes my shoulders in his hands and peels me off him. ‘Where is she?’

I look at him. He looks back at me, coolness in his green eyes, a cold, deep ocean.

That’s when I realise I’ve made a terrible mistake.

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