Firewalker (Worldwalker 2)

It had been a full day since they’d brought Lily back home, and Juliet had seen Rowan do amazing things. Things Juliet could not explain in a rational way. All she knew was that these things Rowan was doing were keeping Lily alive.

“Spray the tincture here,” he directed.

Juliet misted Lily’s exposed muscle and sinew with the combination antibiotic and analgesic potion they had made that morning in Samantha’s second-best copper-bottomed pot.

“Good,” Rowan mumbled as Juliet sprayed the proper amount of tincture, and then stood back to survey the gruesome landscape of Lily’s body. He went to the fire, over which hung Samantha’s best copper-bottomed pot, and deftly lifted out a strip of something that looked like a thin film of gauze about three inches square with the flat of one of his silver knives. This was not the first time Rowan had done this kind of surgery, of that Juliet was quite certain.

“Is that really Lily’s skin?” Juliet asked. She was fascinated now, rather than disgusted. She watched his stone’s mercurial light dance around the edges of the skin graft as he eased it down over Lily’s raw bones with infinite care.

“Yes,” Rowan mumbled, finally answering Juliet’s question after a long pause. “It’s not hard to grow from a culture—not even in inferior conditions.” Rowan paused to shoot Samantha’s pots a resentful glare. The cast-iron cauldron he insisted on hadn’t arrived yet, and Juliet had endured a full five minutes of his swearing before they went ahead and began the skin-growing ritual in one of Samantha’s “inferior” pots a few hours ago. “But skin patches are hard to align,” he continued, still focused on his task. “Every border cell must link to its neighbor seamlessly, or it will leave a scar.” He leaned back again to inspect his work and smiled.

“Will this?” Juliet asked anxiously, looking at his injured hands. “Scar, I mean.”

Rowan shot Juliet a cocky look as if to express how beneath him the notion was, even with his hands burned and bandaged. She almost laughed. He had a way about him that inspired confidence despite the desperate situation they were in, but before Juliet gave over to a moment of levity she stopped herself.

She didn’t know what to feel about Rowan. She was starting to trust him, but how could she trust someone with such an outlandish story about where Lily had been for the past three months? He claimed that Lily had been in a parallel universe, and that she had been burned in a battle against an evil witch. Juliet looked down at her sister’s three strange stones—willstones as Rowan called them—and grew even more confused. They winked and roiled with a light that looked almost alive. Seeing them and the eerie way they sparkled even in the dark told Juliet that something otherworldly had happened to her sister. And Rowan was undoubtedly using magic to save Lily’s life when not even the best medical attention in the world could have done so, whether Juliet wanted to believe it or not.

But what Juliet really needed to know had nothing to do with magic or willstones. She needed to know whether or not Rowan had any part in what had happened to Lily. But little things he said, and the way he seemed to feel so responsible for Lily, made Juliet suspect that Rowan had had a hand in burning Lily.

Rowan and Juliet worked straight on through the night, with Rowan peeling off and replacing Lily’s skin in three-inch squares, and Juliet spraying and dabbing and keeping everything Rowan needed within his reach. By dawn Juliet could hardly see straight.

“You should sleep,” Rowan said as he stood, appraising the last patch of newly applied skin.

“So should you,” Juliet said through a yawn.

“I’m still breathing for her,” Rowan said, fingering the stone at the base of his throat. She watched the light in his willstone subtly rising and falling in tandem with the rise and fall of Lily’s chest. She didn’t know how he was doing it, but Juliet could see that somehow Rowan was putting air in her lungs, and drawing it out again in a long, steady rhythm.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She hadn’t seen Rowan eat or sleep since he’d gotten here.

“Yes. Rest, Juliet.” He sank onto the floor next to Lily, never once taking his gaze from her. Juliet didn’t know what was holding him together, but she was too tired to try to argue with him about who needed to rest more.

“Wake me if you have to,” she said, too tired to think about it anymore. She pulled a quilt over her against the freezing cold and collapsed onto the couch.

She shut her eyes and, unfortunately, it seemed as if only seconds had passed before she felt Rowan shaking her arm.

“I need your help,” he said. Juliet sat up, still dragging her brain out of sleep. Rowan looked terrible. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks were tinged with green. “We need to wrap her before your mother comes downstairs,” he said.

Juliet followed him back to Lily’s body and understood. The patchwork of new skin was livid and swollen. Lily

looked like some hellish ghoul straight out of a slasher movie. They went to work wrapping Lily up mummy-style before Samantha could see her like that. While they worked, Juliet heard the phone ring and heard her mother answer the call upstairs. Samantha’s tone became increasingly agitated as the conversation dragged on. A few moments later, she joined them in the living room as Rowan hurriedly passed at least one layer of gauze over Lily’s injuries.

“That was your father,” Samantha said. She was pacing and wringing her hands. “We have to tell him.”

“Tell him what?” Juliet asked carefully.

“About your sister. That she’s back. The nosy FBI agent won’t leave him alone. She really thinks your father might be involved with Lily’s disappearance.”

“Mom, we can’t,” Juliet replied incredulously. She gestured to the living room. There were basins of bloody water and buckets of discarded skin on the floor. “We can’t let anyone see this.”

“He’s worried about her, Juliet, and I feel awful letting him think she’s still missing. Maybe dead.” Samantha gave her daughter one of those disturbingly sane looks. “You don’t know what it is to be a parent. He loves you girls, even though he’s not the fathering type.”

Juliet shot Rowan a look, and saw that he was as against involving their father as she was.

“That’s understandable, Samantha,” Rowan said equitably. “But right now our main concern has to be Lily, not James. If he knows she’s alive he’ll want to see her and she’s too weak to be exposed to another person and risk infection.”

Juliet shook herself and stifled her question. No one had told Rowan her father’s first name, and she already knew that if she asked him, Rowan would say that he knew James from this parallel world he claimed to come from.

“You’re right, Rowan. Of course you’re right,” Samantha said. She reached out and put her hand on Rowan’s shoulder, taking comfort. “I’m so glad you’re here.”