A Breeding Darkness (Complete)

(15)

"We should go back to Krov Korol," she said. "Koshmar has started enacting bad laws while you've been gone. He's very anxious about you, and what will happen to the country with you gone."

Joon winced, his hand traveling up to his chest. "That name. It hurts." He tapped the skin over his heart, looking at Lucy as if she held the answers.

"He's your advisor. You're very close to him. You probably just miss him," Lucy said, but she was already focusing on pulling the ballerina from her satchel and examining the tutu. Her penknife was now unfortunately lost out in her field, but the edges looked sharp enough on the figurine. A fizz of hope burst under Lucy's skin as she imagined how just a brief prick would send her back to the city with the missing prince in tow. His savior twice in his lifetime, though the world would only know about one.

"What are you doing?" Joon asked, staring at the ballerina in Lucy's hands with drawn eyebrows and a tense jaw.

"I'm going to cut you with this, and you'll wake up back home," she said, taking his hand and pulling him close. She pushed the fact that he was covered in deep gouges from the Denizens from her mind. For all she knew, injuries from dream creatures couldn't send anyone back. Pricking him with the edge of the tutu would work. It had to.

Joon's hand lay flat against hers, his knuckles in her palm. She stretched his fingers out, giving her a large space to work with. Holding the ballerina around her waist, Lucy slowly lowered the sharp edge until it rested against Joon's skin. She glanced up, meeting his dark brown eyes for a brief moment, before pressing down on the figurine and feeling Joon's skin split away beneath it.

She waited for him to dissolve. She waited for the gush of wind and the fading of his outline that meant he was leaving. But nothing happened.

Looking down, she confirmed that a ribbon of pearled blood ran along the side of his palm. She rubbed it and saw Joon wince. Then, it wasn't just because the Denizens had given him the wounds. He didn't seem able to return home from any sort of wound.

"What was that supposed to do?" Joon asked, taking his hand back when Lucy released it. He held his thumb against the cut.

"Take you home." Lucy stuffed the ballerina back into her satchel. "It didn't work. We're stuck here."

"You can't go home, either?"

"I can. But I'm not going to." Lucy pulled away the front of his coat to inspect his wounds again. A few had scabbed, but there were many deep gouges that still wept blood over his ribs and down his abdomen. If he couldn't get home, she wouldn't be able to get him proper medical attention. And her plan of presenting him to Koshmar and gaining legal access to Zerkalo would fail as well.

"So you're going to stay with me?" He said it carefully, and if Lucy hadn't been paying attention she wouldn't have heard the lift of hope in his voice, as soft as a flower pushing through the snow. She glanced up under the cover of her curls, and saw his eyes echoed his voice.

Lucy nodded. "Come here and I'll do my best to bandage you."

While Joon stepped forward, Lucy grabbed a stick with a sharpened edge and used it to rip away the bottom edge of her skirts. Joon stood patiently while she took the freshly shredded fabric and wound it around his neck, her fingers feeling the pulsing of his heart through his veins. He complied with her request to take off the coat, and she stepped forward to bandage his ribs. The sight of his chest, muscled and sharp, was not anything Lucy had seen much of before. She held her eyes firmly on his wounds only and tried not to think of her hands pressing against his ribs and the ridges of his muscles as she worked on him.

When Lucy finished tying off the bandages, Joon bowed slightly and pulled the coat back on. "Won't your family be missing you?" he asked, his voice probing. She'd heard it before in her younger sisters, when they wanted her to teach them how to climb trees but they knew she should be helping with chores instead. It was a question, but one that meant more than what it was asking.

"Of course," Lucy replied, wiping her hands off and leaving blood streaks on her skirt. Her throat caught at the memory of her little sisters, their bouncing curls bound up as they played in the mud after a rain. She remembered her mother's sturdy smile and her father's sparkling eyes. "But this darkness has reached even our real world. Ever since you disappeared, we've been living in a never-ending night. If I don't help you and find a way to get us both home, I don't know what will happen to our country. Or my family."

Joon looked down at her lantern, sitting in the soft dead leaves while they had talked. "This darkness is in both worlds?"

Lucy nodded. "I came here to try and find the source."

"I think perhaps I know the place. There was a mountain I lived on for a long time," he said. "There was a spot on there that wept this darkness. Perhaps that is where it came from?"

Lucy's eyes widened and she grabbed his hand. "Truly? You saw that?" She couldn't believe that he knew where it had started, and that all they had to do was get back there. "Can you remember where it was?"

She had been imagining wandering Zerkalo for weeks, searching. She had no idea what would happen to her body in the real world if she spent so long in Zerkalo, or if Koshmar would find out that she was unresponsive in her room due to breaking his law. But Joon knowing exactly where the shadows had come from could make the trip as painless and swift as a trip to the grocers.