I woke to the barest hint of sunlight through the curtains.
My room was silent. I could tell that much without opening my eyes. The effort I had to put into even that simple task left me dizzy and sweating. When I managed it, I realized that I was alone. Was this another hallucination? It didn’t feel like one. There was the bedside table, there the tufted chair.
And I wasn’t in any pain.
I turned my head to look at the morphine drip (that took another eternity), but I didn’t understand how to read the dosage on the bag. Whatever I was being given, it was working. In place of the pain, there was a sort of bodily rebellion. I asked my legs to swing off the bed. They didn’t. I asked my arm to reach out for my water glass. It wouldn’t. I panted with the effort, and the panting took effort. I was about as weak as a newborn child.
“No,” a woman insisted in the other room. It was a voice I recognized, but from where?
“No,” she said again, angrier this time, and then fell silent.
It was Bryony Downs.
The meeting was taking place in the next room.
It was brazen of her to do it here, to walk into the enemy’s stronghold and cut a deal in the place where they had every advantage. She really did think herself invincible.
The antidote could be out there, nestled in her pocket.
No. She wouldn’t have brought it with her, not where it could be taken from her by force. She’d have hidden it somewhere nearby, only giving its location over when she’d gotten what she wanted. If Holmes gave her what she wanted.
Which meant, of course, that I would die, and in the next two hours.
I struggled, again, to get my legs to obey me. Move, I told them, as laughter pealed in the next room. Move. The shirt and soft pants I’d been dressed in were already drenched through with sweat. Sweat. Was that a good thing, sweating? Did that mean the nerves and veins inside me—I imagined them now, crackled black and breaking—were still healthy? Was I somehow beating this?
If I was beating this, I’d probably have working legs, I reminded myself. Grinding my teeth, I focused on my knees. Move.
And I did. I rolled right off the bed and onto the carpeted floor, bringing the bedside table down with me.
The crash was tremendous, and I lay in the middle of it, in the spilled pills and scattered tissues and the shards of my drinking glass, helpless.
I’d been in denial until that point, I think. But that was when it really hit me. That I was going to die. That they were going to put me in the ground, not years from now, not surrounded by books I’d written in the little flat on the Rue du Rivoli at age seventy-three, but today. In a matter of hours. I’d kissed Charlotte Holmes once, and I would die before I’d see a second time.
The door flung open with a bang.
“Watson,” Holmes said, going down to her knees beside me.
“Bring the boy in here.” The voice rang out like a sweet bell. “I’d like to see him.”
“Can you move?” Holmes asked, unnaturally loud. She put her hands under my arms. “If I get you to your feet, can you lean on me?”
“Yes,” I managed to say, though I had no idea if it was true.
She heaved me up to my knees. “Listen to me,” she said in my ear. Her black hair brushed against my cheek. “When I blink twice, you play your last card.”
“Okay,” I said, because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about was seven more words than I could force out.
“Milo,” she called, “I could use a hand.”
Together, the two of them manhandled me out of the bedroom and into the sitting room that, when I’d last seen it, had been empty. Under Holmes’s direction, Milo’s mercenaries had reassembled it into what it had been, which was something like a preppy brothel. A pink shag rug. Lucite chairs around a Lucite table. A sofa that looked like it’d been stuffed with marshmallows, and a pair of men’s trousers hung over its arm. An iPod dock and speakers, a haphazard setup of slides and beakers and a microscope (those must’ve been Dr. Warner’s).
A gilt mirror spanned the whole length of one wall, gathering the entire room in its reflection—Charlotte Holmes, in her trim black clothes, sitting on a fuzzy ottoman that looked like it escaped from Fraggle Rock; Milo, so close to his sister that their knees were touching; and me, slumped like a beached whale on one of those clear plastic chairs. If the beached whale had lost fifteen pounds overnight, coated his face in Vaseline and blacked his eyes, and then crawled up onto a beach to end it all.
Looking at me, Bryony Downs curled her lip in disgust.