Page 6 of A Touch of Poison
His silence made my heart sputter.
“Right?”
His gaze dropped away. “No.”
I shook my head. “You’re wrong. It must. It’ll stop the poison in my system, so it will stop me being poisonous. I don’t believe you.” He couldn’t lie, but he could be wrong. “Bring me the antidote, and I’ll take it and I’ll show you.” My words came like my breaths—too fast, too shallow.
A hug from Ella. A dance at a ball. Morag’s occasional touch on my shoulder. These things couldn’t all suddenly become forbidden—deadly.
Elthea had called it a gift. What Bastian described was no gift.
“Bring me the antidote.”
He watched my fingers knotting together as I tried to hide their trembling. “It’s already here.”
There was no vial of liquid or jar of tablets on the side table, just Elthea’s discarded gloves. No sign of an enchanted necklace like the one unCavendish had given me or any other magical jewellery, either.
Behind him, jagged reflections played on the cabinet’s glass doors. “In there?” I leant forward, halfway to rising.
He swallowed and shook his head.
“Thenwhere?”
His gaze drifted up from my lap and met mine. A slow, sorry smile claimed his scarred lips as he spread his hands, indicating himself.
That meant…
Bastianwas my antidote.
3
Kat
Bastian was apersonnot an antidote.
And yet as I stood, he was still talking about it like it was true.
“The antidote was already in my system, fixed by Asher.” He watched me take a few experimental steps. I wasn’t as wobbly as I’d expected, but he looked as though he might swoop in if I fell. “With the points of connection between us—blood, Asher’s magic, and Elthea’s magic—she was able to use that to make it so I was… your opposite. Your touch poisons; mine remedies.”
As my brain glitched on Bastian’s explanation like a mechanism with a broken part, I ducked behind a dressing screen and removed my nightgown. “Why can’t I just take a potion—the normal antidote?”
A long pause followed, and I yanked on the dusky grey dress that hung waiting for me.
“The changeling did something to the poison to make the normal antidote ineffective. This is the only way.”
“Fucking unCavendish,” I muttered, fastening tiny crystal buttons down my front. After another pause, I stepped out from behind the screen, buttoning up the cuffs of the close-fitting sleeves.
I wanted it to be a joke. Or a lie.
Anything but the truth.
But Bastian looked at me with the same dread I’d seen earlier. He rose from the chair as I emerged, all tight with anticipation of what I was going to make of all this.
What the fuck was Isupposedto make of it? There was no guide in any etiquette book. This wasn’t amongst my father’s lessons. It wasn’t something society had hammered into me about how I had to behave.
I was like my sister: in uncharted waters.
I shook my head and retreated into practicality. “So, what? I have to touch you every day in order to stay alive?” My words dissolved into laughter, because it was the most incredibly fucking ridiculous sentence I’d said in my entire life.
