Page 52 of Down Comes the Night

Wren pulled her hands through her hair. She needed patience, fortitude,calm.But how could she be unemotional when she was completely out of options? “I’m a failure.”

“You’re not a failure.” Hannah poured off the medication into a smaller glass jar. As candlelight refracted through the glass, it burned like liquid amber.

“Iam. If I can’t do this one simple thing—”

“This is not a simple thing,” Hannah said sternly. “It seemssimple to you because you’ve been doing this your whole life. But this is complicated. We just haven’t landed on the right solution yet.”

“Maybe.” Wren dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I don’t know what else to try.”

“You have a thousand of those little bottles in your bag. You’re only using half of it to make these medications.”

She did have a point. If no one or nothing could give her the answers she sought, maybe she could find it using what she had on hand. It would be wasteful of time and resources to combine things randomly, but what other choice did she have?

Wren opened her medical bag and emptied it onto the bed. Out tumbled the leather case that housed her surgical tools, a bag full of syringes, and a menagerie of glass bottles filled with tinctures and medications and herbs. One vial, filled to the brim with purple flowers, rolled toward her.

The goddessblood she’d taken from the Guiding Light Inn.

Wren stared at it for a long time. Symptoms of goddessblood poisoning included attacks on the heart, the kidneys, the lungs—symptoms that matched Hal’s. The chances of matching the poison were laughably slim, but it was all she had. “Hannah?”

“Yes?”

“Can you do me a favor when you’re finished with that?” She dug gloves out of the pile and snapped them on. “Can you bring me some boiling water?”

“Of course.” Hannah worked as meticulously as ever, corking the tincture and pouring hot wax over it to seal it shut. After she placed it alongside the rest of the bottles she’d finished this evening, she slipped out of the room to fetch the water. A few minutes later, she returned with a kettle, still roiling.

Wren emptied the goddessblood and some water into a mortar, then ground the petals until they reduced to a liquid as dark as blood. Brewing a poison was as foreign as it was satisfying. It was all passion and imprecision, mixed with equal parts intention and rage. Her apprenticeship, meanwhile, had instilled in her a slavishness, afastidiousness. She could close her eyes and feel Heloise there at her elbow, rapping a switch against the table while she measured out herbs by the gram.

Do you want to cure your patient or kill them?Heloise once hissed after Wren used far too much St. John’s wort in a medicinal blend.You must always consider the contraindications.

But this excessiveness—it felt good. Almost natural.

Wren strained the poison into a vial. It swirled behind the glass, strikingly beautiful. The color of a winter night set ablaze with stars. Hannah leaned closer. “It’s… pretty.”

“Don’t get too close.” Wren held up a hand. “It’s dangerous.”

Her eyes grew round. “What is it?”

“It’s, uh… a very experimental tincture. Unstable.”

Wren pipetted one lethal drop onto a glass slide and studied it beneath the microscope. She twisted a knob to examine Hal’s blood sample again.

An exact match.

Wren swore, nearly toppling over her chair in her hurry to stand.

“What?” Hannah asked. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Wren began to pace the room and bit the tip of her thumb. Of all poisons, ithadto be this one. The one no healer had cracked. Logically, Hal should have been long dead—probably within minutes of the first dose. “You told me every person who’s fallen ill has lived longer than the person before, right?”

“Yes,” Hannah said slowly. “That’s right.”

If that was the case, what if the poisoner hadn’t intended to kill Hal at all? What if they were experimenting with tiny doses and tracking the effects? Drop by drop, day by day. That was all it took to reduce the Reaper of Vesria to a shell of himself.

“This is bad,” Wren whispered. “Really bad.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Hannah’s voice cut through her panic. “You’re acting very strange.”

She knew it. She knew, but she couldn’t explain it. How could she possibly tell Hannah her friends had beenmurdered? Wren had no intention of uncovering the saboteur before she took Hal andnever looked back. She couldn’t live with herself if she abandoned Hannah with the burden of that.