Daroc lowered her to the ground and then looked at me.
“Are you all right, my queen?” he asked.
I could not answer because I could not say. My body hurt, my arm burned where the girl had reached for me, and I had just watched Daroc kill a creature that looked like a girl. He rose to his feet and yanked a curtain panel from the window, using it to cover her.
“What happened to her?” I asked. I couldn’t take my eyes off her limp body.
“Hard to say,” he said. “We will have to take her to the Red Palace for an autopsy.”
Daroc approached, helping me to my feet, though my legs were shaking.
“You’re injured,” he said, eyes falling to my hand. I looked too, finding that there was a burn on my skin in the shape of a hand.
“Oh,” I said and swallowed. “It doesn’t hurt…not really.”
He frowned. “Come.”
I followed Daroc out of the apothecary and through the maze of buildings. As we emerged, Adrian turned toward me and frowned, his strange eyes brilliant against the gloom of the day. He started toward us, and when he came upon me, his hands cupped my face.
“You’re pale. What happened?”
“She found…something,” Daroc said. “A human…possessed by some kind of magic.”
Adrian’s severe gaze shifted from Daroc to me. “She looked like a girl,” I said, and my mouth began to quiver. “A little girl.”
I had watched her die.
“She is injured,” Daroc said. “Her hand.”
Adrian’s eyes fell to my arm, which I was now cradling with my other hand. He frowned as he studied the wound.
“The creature did this to you?”
“With only a touch,” I confirmed, staring at the wound almost blindly. My skin looked much like that of the dead—red and raw.
Adrian reached for me, and I let him take my hand as he examined it. I expected him to try and heal it. Instead, he said, “I cannot heal this. It is magic.”
He looked at Daroc, worry etched across his severe face.
“We will be at the Red Palace soon,” Daroc said. “Ana Maria can look at it.”
I did not know who Ana Maria was, but I wondered what she could do that Adrian couldn’t. Still, his jaw tightened, but I was not so much worried about my injury as I was about what had happened here.
“I don’t understand. Was that girl responsible for…all this?”
“Not her, but whatever possessed her,” Adrian said. He looked at Daroc again, offering a wordless command before the vampire bowed and departed, returning in the direction we’d come to retrieve the corpse of the girl, if I had to guess.
Alone with Adrian, he tilted my face toward his, and I got the impression he was trying to ensure that whatever had consumed the girl had not consumed me, but as I stared into his eyes, I could not help seeing hers, wide with the shock of death. I closed my own against the image and asked, “Who would do this?”
When Adrian did not answer, I opened my eyes again to find him staring off into the distance, his jaw set tight.
“Adrian?”
At the sound of his name, he looked at me.
“It’s hard to say,” he replied.
“But you have an idea, don’t you?”
Suddenly, all Adrian’s talk of good witches and gentle magic seemed like a trick. If a witch’s magic could create something like this, how could it ever have been good?
“Anything can be evil in the wrong hands, Sparrow.”
As the vampires gathered bodies to burn, another vampire tended to my arm. I had seen him around camp but never asked his name. I stared at him now, a handsome man with sharp cheekbones and dark skin and eyes. His hair was thick and braided, his hands gentle as he bound my burned arm.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Euric,” he said.
“Are you a healer?”
“No,” he said. “At least not in the same capacity as they once were.”
“What do you mean?”
“A true healer can mend by touch,” he said. “Your people called them witches and had them burned.”
“They healed by touch. That is magic.”
“It is a miracle, not magic,” he said. “Think of all the ways you cannot fight us. Now think if you had healers, at least you could fight our plagues.”
I stared at him, considering his words, and thought of what Adrian had said yesterday—that history was all a matter of perspective.
Euric rose to his feet and bowed.