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Adrian is nine.
You know, because he turned nine last month, and you had ridden to town and paid a dear price for a pot of honeycomb. You’d taken it home and made honey cakes, and a few little candies with what you had left over, and then you’d made a candle or two with the wax. You’re not terribly good at candlemaking, and they came out lumpy and strange-looking, but you’d crushed some pine needles and mixed in the oil, so they smelled wonderful when you lit them. The candies had come out all right, even, which you had been worried about. The recipe was one you were hazy on.
The honey cakes were a hit, though. You do like to cook, a bit, even though there’s a measure of shame in it for you. You dislike taking such enjoyment in something so feminine, and ordinary, and… wifely. And you know it’s silly to be embarrassed by it. You tell yourself it’s just chemistry you can eat, and you say that to Adrian when you have him help you in the kitchen sometimes, and it makes you both smile.
Regardless. Adrian is nine. And despite his rapid aging — he looks more like twelve or thirteen — nine is far too young for him to have such a worried furrow pulling his pale brows together when he wakes you.
“Mother,” he says again, gently jostling your arm. “Are you all right?”
On reflex, you say, “Yes, of course, sweetheart, why? What’s the matter?” But then you push yourself up on one elbow and dimly realize the sunlight is coming through the curtains at the wrong angle.
“It’s nearly noon,” says Adrian, and the furrow in his brow deepens.
Ah, hell. “Oh! I’m sorry, darling. Give me a moment to get dressed. You must be starving.”
Adrian’s brow rumples into something different, some childish approximation of his father’s haughty airs. “Mother, I’m not a child, I can fend for myself. I was just worried about you, is all.”
At least the worry seems gone. “I’m all right, love,” you say, reaching out to pull the boy in to kiss his forehead. He runs so much colder than you. So much warmer than his father. “Is your father home yet?”
“He’s still gone. That means I’m to look after you,” he says with a measure of self-importance that he certainly didn’t learn from you.
“And you’re doing a lovely job.” You smooth his hair. “Thank you for coming to wake me. I might have slept all day long if you hadn’t. Now, shoo, I’m still in my nightgown.”
Adrian seems satisfied with that and sets off down the hall. You wait until his light steps are gone completely before you push yourself upright.
There is a tightness in your chest that doesn’t feel normal. You still feel tired, too, like you could lie right back down and go back to sleep. You run a hand over your face, but how are you to know if you’re running a fever? You’ll have to get dressed and poke around Vlad’s laboratory. You thank your absent husband that you’re staying in the castle for now, taking a brief respite from your work in the city. You wouldn’t have had nearly enough resources if you were staying at the cottage.
Laboriously, you comb the tangles out of your hair and get dressed. Your body aches, lightly, all over. It takes far longer than you’re comfortable with to get into your day clothes, and after tugging on your stockings you’re struck with a sudden fit of coughing that tugs sharply at your chest and leaves you winded.
You sit on the edge of your marriage bed to get your breath back and think. You were coughing a bit yesterday, but you’d written it off, since you’d spent a good part of the day outdoors picking apples with Adrian in the cold, and cold air is known to aggravate the airways. But this feels a bit beyond a simple chill.
You forego shoes and set about making your way to the laboratory. The castle is immense, and despite your familiarity with its twists and turns, it’s a long walk. You pause at the top of a staircase to catch your breath and plan. Horehound, you think, for the cough, and maybe a bit of coca leaf to perk you up for the day. Adrian knows how to make tea. You might send him to make you a cup later. It’ll give you more time to think of how to handle this, and give the boy something useful to do. You desperately don’t want to alarm him, especially now that you’ve already reassured him that you’re fine.
Drawing a deep breath, you make your way down the stairs.
-
Several minutes later, a mixture of horehound and coca still tasting bitter on your tongue, you glare at the mercury, sitting innocently in its bulb. It’s not the most accurate temperature measuring device, but it’s the best one you’ve got to hand, and it’s telling you that you do, indeed, have a fever.
There’s a soft knock at the laboratory door. “Yes, come in,” you call over your shoulder, quashing down the aching urge to cough that raising your voice puts in your chest. You hurriedly fill the glass vessel before you with strong ethyl so Adrian won’t smell the horehound and get wise to your ruse. (The boy has a vampire’s nose and a human curiosity, and for the first time, you curse yourself for teaching him so much chemistry.)
The door swings open and Adrian crosses the room to offer you a steaming cup of tea. “Here,” he says, but there’s clearly something else he wants to say but won’t.
“Thank you, sweetheart. It smells wonderful.” The steam from it makes you cough, suddenly and violently.
Adrian sets the cup down and there, the furrow is back between the white-gold brows, hell, you’d better have a damn good lie for this, and you’ll need a stronger dose of horehound. You wave him off, even though the boy hasn’t made much of a move towards you. “Sorry,” you wheeze, struggling to get your breath back under control. “Strong solvents.” You wave at the glass full of ethyl before you.
The furrow unknots, a little, and you count that as a success. “Oh,” he says. “Right.” And you know he doesn’t believe you, or he knows something else is up, and you’ll want to head this off now before you dig a deeper hole for yourself.
“Well, I do have a bit of a cough today,” you admit as casually as you can. “But I’m sure the tea will help. And if not, I’m preparing some medicines as a backup, just in case I need them before your father comes home.”
Adrian nods solemnly, suddenly doing his best to act like a grown-up. “I knew it,” he says, doleful. “I should have let you stay in bed.”
“No, no,” you say, “that’s not the takeaway here.”
“It is. You always say rest is one of the best remedies.” He says this last part with a bit of accusation in his voice, and you do have to admit he’s right. You do say that a lot.
“I’ll have a nap later on,” you promise. “Now, pull up a chair and watch closely, I’ll show you how I make a cough remedy.”
-
You do take a nap before dinner, mostly because Adrian is following you everywhere you go, gold eyes wide and nervous. You can’t imagine what’s got him in such a state. You’ve been down with a cough before, or caught a chill, or taken a cold from one of your patients. But he’s so terribly insistent that you rest that you do, eventually, have a lie-down back in your bed, if only just to placate him. You tell him to go work at his studies, but when he assures you he will, you can’t shake the feeling he’s the one placating you.
You sleep for an hour or so and wake up no better. The aches across your body have only intensified with your inactivity, and the urge to cough is what wakes you, in the end. You stifle it into a pillow so the boy won’t hear.
Your mouth is dry and your lips chafed, so you get up and make your way into the lavish bathroom adjoining the bedroom. It’s far too opulent for just you, but Vlad just says some nonsense about running water anytime you try to cajole him into the bath with you, and you’ve never quite been able to tell if he’s joking. You splash some water on your face, then take several gulps straight from the tap. It’s colder than you expected and the shock of it makes you gasp. Or perhaps your fever’s gotten worse.
Whatever the case, you comb out your hair again and make your way slowly downstairs. You refuse to cough.
The tiny kitchen is warm enough to feel stifling. The hearth is burning low, but it’s clear your son has been keeping it going since midmorning, if the ashes are anything to go by. You eye up the larder bleakly. What could you cook, you wonder, that will take little effort to make and less to eat?
After a standoff with yourself, you sigh and pluck a few handfuls of dried rabbit strips from a basket, some basil, and a few fresh apples. Spartan, maybe, but you doubt Adrian will complain, and you can’t find it in yourself to prepare anything else. Even the light smell of the salted meat makes your stomach turn. On a thought, you reach up for a bundle of dry spinach hanging from the rafters.
It’s good for blood, Vlad told you once, before you were wed, with a wicked look to see your reaction. Puts iron back in the veins. Never to be intimidated, you’d made the appropriate sounds of interest and study, then, looking him dead in the eye, you’d torn a leaf from the plant and popped it into your mouth.
Ah, youth. The brass-boldness you had in those days, to march into a lion’s den and demand a boon from the beast inside. And even stranger, that the lion had shared its knowledge — and later, its bed — rather than slaughter you. In those first few years, you’d found it so strange, the sense of safety you felt in these howling, empty halls. How queer, you thought, that you could sleep easier cradled in the mouth of Hell than you ever could in your parents’ home.
The fire in the hearth crackles and spits a waft of smoke that doesn’t quite make it up the flue, and you cough against your fist, dinner forgotten. Every rattling breath you suck in between bouts makes your head throb. More smoke seeps from the hearth and makes your eyes water.
Maybe two minutes pass like that, in a fit of coughing that refuses to cease. Eventually you get your hands on a bottle of mild wine that you sip carefully until your lungs stop seizing. You’re left gasping at the kitchen table, one hand at your heaving chest, the other clutching the neck of the bottle with a white-knuckle grip that reminds you far too uncomfortably of your father.
The fire hisses and dims, and you look to the hearth in time to see Adrian knocking the ashes over the coals to smother them. You’re not sure when he came into the kitchen, or how much of your fit he heard, and that faintly alarms you. You’re usually hyperaware of your son’s presence — like he’s a bright candle you can see and feel and sense, even if he’s down a hall or in another room, and the fact that he’s managed to sneak up on you without even trying is… concerning.
But then his cold little hand touches yours, hesitantly, and he asks in a very small voice if you’re all right. There’s almost a formality to the way he asks, like he knows you’re not — and he does, you can see in his tense shoulders and stiff spine — but it’s a rite to ask, in case you want to deny it further.
“I’ll be all right,” you say instead. “Maybe you’re right. I should be resting.”
You leave the wine on the table and let Adrian tug you back to your bedroom.
-
He’s afraid to mix medicines on his own. You and Vlad have maybe stressed too much the dangers and gruesome results of overdoses and chemical interactions, and he turns a great deal paler than usual when you suggest he make a cough remedy for you unsupervised.
But he does, eventually, bring up the horehound and a vial of flaxseed oil so you can instruct him from your bed. He measures so carefully, his bright eyes locked on the vial, his pale hands gripping the instruments so tightly that the shaking is nearly imperceptible. Afterwards he brings you willow bark tea for your aching muscles. And after that, he hovers, desperate for something to do, some way to help. The sun is setting by the time you shoo him away to get himself dinner.
“What should I bring for you?” he asks immediately. The precious boy.
“Oh, darling, not anything much. Maybe a bit of bread. I’m not dreadfully hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten all day, Mother.”
“Because I haven’t been hungry all day. I’ll be all right. But, perhaps an apple, as well? One of those fresh ones we picked yesterday.”
Now with a task, Adrian darts away, so quick that you wonder if he tried to teleport. You’ve banned him from trying that indoors — he misjudges distances and tends to crash into things — but it’s not like you’re going to get up and stop him.
While he’s gone, you make another trip to the privy to do your business and wash your face and cough so hard and for so long you throw up in the sink. It’s a long walk back to your bed, and you sit heavily on the edge of the bathtub to catch your breath before you start the trek back.
“Definitely just a cold,” you mumble out loud to yourself. You’ll be lucky if you haven’t caught pneumonia, or consumption. You spare a moment to wish Vlad were here before heaving yourself back onto your feet.
There’s a moment of brief, violent vertigo, and then you collapse.
-
The expensive Greek tile is cold against your burning cheek.
-
You wake to cold hands on your face and a voice that sounds like you’re hearing it from underwater. It takes several sluggish moments before you can pin it as your son’s, and that gives you the rush of awareness that forces you to full consciousness.
He is knelt next to you on the tile, eyes wide with alarm, shaking your shoulder with one hand, the other a bright spot of cold on your cheek. “Mama,” he’s saying, “Mama, can you get up? Please?”
He calls you “Mother” these days – a distancing of himself from childish things that breaks your heart even though you’re so wildly proud of his maturity – and that, more than anything, is what pushes you upright. “Yes,” you say, or you try to say, but it comes out in a garbled wet hack of a cough. The room smells of vomit and sweat and you realize in a fuzzy part of your mind that this will cause your son no end of nightmares, to find his mother ill and unresponsive on the floor, but you’ll deal with that later, you suppose.
Sitting up sends a wave of vertigo over you and Adrian has to hold you up by the shoulder, though you can feel the trembling of his fingers through the fabric of your clothes. His grip, however, does not waver as he helps you up and out of the lavatory back to your bed. The sheets are rumpled and unwashed, but you can’t bring yourself to care.
Things afterwards are blurry.
-
There is willow bark tea that your boy spoons into your mouth with little whispers you can’t quite hear. It’s too hot to drink, but you can’t find the breath to tell him so. It scalds your tongue.
-
There is the chamber pot beside your bed that you struggle with.
-
There is the sound of your father’s booming voice, roaring at your mother over a leak in the roof, and then a breaking bottle, and then your mother’s soft and shuddering breathing that means she is desperately trying not to wail in pain.
You are too delirious by then to remember that your parents are far away and that you are safe in your husband’s home, in the den of the lion where no one would venture to hunt you down. You try to shout at the ghost of your father to leave her alone, as you’d done so many times when you were a girl, but all that comes out is a wet rasp and then a hacking cough that goes on and on and on until you black out or fall asleep or simply stop remembering.
-
There is Adrian out in the hall, just outside your door, crying quietly. The lamp in the corridor sends the shadow of him, sitting against the wall, knees hugged to his chest, splashing across your half-opened door.
You want to call to him, to ask what he’s upset about, but you’re so dreadfully tired. You’ll ask him later.
You wish your husband were here.
-
There is vomit in the chamber pot. You don’t remember throwing up.
-
There is the taste of horehound on your sore and burned tongue. You are glad, for a moment, that your son is confident enough to mix the medicine on his own, and then you fall back asleep.
-
There is crying again, this time in your bedroom; little hitching sobs and shallow gasps. It’s you. Adrian is drying your face with the edge of the sheet, ignoring the tears streaming down his own pale face.
-
There is a chill in the room that doesn’t seem to go away. You shiver and shake and pull the blankets around yourself, but the chill remains and buries itself in your bones. When your son brushes your hair from your face and whispers to you, it takes all of your focus to not bat away his freezing hands.
-
There is a sweltering heat in the room that doesn’t seem to go away. You kick the blankets away and try to pull off your cotton shift that is stuck to your skin with sweat, but Vlad will not let you. He seizes you in his long clawed hands and presses a kiss to your forehead and tells you to be still, that it is only a fever, that he is here, that he will take care of you.
Your father roars from several rooms away and you cry out and cower and cough and cough and cough.
-
There is the taste of horehound on your tongue.
-
There is your father standing in your bedroom, eight feet tall, fanged and clawed and coming for your blood.
No matter how much you try to scream, your mouth is too dry and your lungs too shallow.
He tears your throat out.
He does it the way Adrian used to do with small animals, when he was very small and had the self-control of any toddler. He would dart away from you with more grace than he had any right to, and by the time you caught up with him he would be covered in hare’s blood, his fledgling fangs dark with it, the bite sloppy and ragged in the hare’s flesh as it spurted the last drops of blood.
-
When you wake crying or gasping or coughing the next time, someone dries your face again with the edge of fresh sheets. You can’t recall anyone changing them. The chamber pot by the bed is empty.
-
There is the taste of horehound and something sweet on your tongue.
-
There is willow bark tea at your lips. It is warm, but does not hurt your scalded tongue this time.
-
There is your husband by your bed, quietly turning pages in a book that looks older than you are.
“Vlad,” you manage before you start to cough again.
The book shuts and his face, grey and fearsome and noble and alien, appears close to yours. “Yes, my love.” There is a cup that smells of horehound at your lips, and you drink. “Be still. The worst of the fever is over, but you are still ill.”
“Adrian,” you start.
“He is asleep. Don’t wake him.” Vlad points one long, razorlike fingernail towards the foot of the bed. In the faint starlight filtering in from the window, you can see a little pile of blankets and feather-pillows strewn in the corner that rises and falls with peaceful breathing.
You swallow down another sip of the horehound before your husband puts it back on the night table. “I frightened him,” you say. The words rasp and scrape at your raw throat.
He chuckles at that, and the starlight glints off his teeth. “You frightened me too, at that.”
You cast a look at the door, hanging ajar. The lamp in the hall has been put out. There are no shadows lurking there, and there is no ringing boom of your father’s drunken rages. “Sorry,” you whisper. “Mortality, and all that.”
Vlad’s hands, cold and enormous, close over yours, and he bends over you to press his forehead against yours. “I am the one who should be sorry,” he whispers, reverent as a penitent at confession. “I left you and our son. Anything could have happened–”
“Don’t,” you say as forcefully as you can, and it sends you into another coughing fit.
He looks at you, eyes and fangs in the dark over your bed. Anyone else would be afraid. Anyone else would be right to be. “I will not leave you,” he says. “Not ever again.”
“That sounds inefficient,” you manage once you’ve got your breath back. “Unsus… tainable.” Your hands look so small and fragile in his. Best not to dwell on it.
He kisses your knuckles like you’re some sort of empress. “If harm came to you,” he says in a tremulous thread of a whisper, “or to our son, and I was not here to protect you, I… I don’t know what I would do.”
You pull his hands to your face. They are colder than Adrian’s and they are so large that it makes you feel like a child again. There is a difficult conversation to be had, but you will wait to have it. “Don’t wake the boy,” you whisper.
Tonight you will rest, and have your son and your husband at your side, and things will be all right.