I open my eyes and see a figure outlined in the darkness, tall and berobed.
My legs snap together and I sit up with a gasp, pulling the fingers out of me as I shift back. I look down and see a dead hand between my legs, sticking up out of the ground. It’s searching for me, the wet fingers pale and distended with death.
I wake with a cry, my chest heaving, eyes wide and staring in the darkness. The room is freezing cold and clammy sweat covers my body. I’ve had dreams about Meremon before but nothing like that. Nothing where I did such things to myself.
I knew it was a dead hand. I knew it was dead all along and I let it touch me.
It was just a dream. It wasn’t real.
I have the terrible sensation that someone’s watching me and my eyes snap to the right. Is there someone in the room or is it the last vestiges of that terrible dream?
I sit up and call, “Hello? Who’s there?”
What will I do if Meremon is here? I’m alone, friendless. But there’s not a sound, not a flicker in the shadows. It was just a dream. A nightmare.
Finally, I lie back in the dark, breathing hard, still feeling eyes on me, and something else. Restless dissatisfaction. The fingers of my left hand are wet and slippery.
It takes me a long time to find Meremon in the morning because his house is a maze of rooms and staircases. Eventually I locate him on one of the lower levels in a room filled with books and strange smells and things bubbling in glass jars. The light filtering through the dirty windows is thin and gray.
A large book is open on a bench and Meremon is poring over it. He looks up at me, his eyes dark as he tracks me across the room. They’re not black as I thought they were. A band of silver encircles his pupils, reminding me of a stalking wolf.
This man is all silver and darkness. Did he watch me in my bed as I was touching myself? Did he make me have that terrible dream?
I wait expectantly for him to tell me when we’ll be off. I’m anxious to see how my sister fares and to know if the rest of my family is safe. Meremon comes around the table toward me, a faint clacking sound coming from his clothing. There are things hanging from his belt on thin silver chains. A bird skull. The jawbone of a wolf or dog. A stone with a hole worn through it by water.
He stands before me, staring down at me in silence and I don’t know where to look.
“The children,” I say, indicating a hand over my shoulder in the direction of the village. “We should go while the weather is good.”
The sky is heavy with white cloud this morning and there is a pristine fall of snow on the ground, but for the moment it’s not falling and the wind has dropped. We should make it down the mountain in just a few hours.
Meremon shakes his head.
My mouth falls open. “You’re not going to help them?”
He keeps staring at me in silence. He’s only spoken a dozen words to me since I arrived and each one has made me more uneasy than the last, but him saying nothing is even more unnerving.
“I want something,” he finally tells me.
An uncomfortable sensation rolls through me and the skin on my left hand prickles. He’s had far too much from me already. “My father didn’t have to pay anything when you saved me.”
“Didn’t he?” Meremon asks quietly.
With just two words he’s stolen all the breath from my lungs. My father wouldn’t have bargained with my life. Not knowingly.
“What do you want?” I ask cautiously.
He looks around at his laboratory. The books in piles. The little cabinets with drawers hanging open and contents spilling out. The unwashed glass vials and instruments. “Help me here until the next full moon.”
That doesn’t seem so bad… I think quickly to remember the current phase of the moon and realize it’s still waning. “But that’s weeks away!”
“I am not a healer. I am of no use to the sick until they are nearly dead.” He holds out a pestle to me and indicates a mortar on the table, filled with dried herbs. “Grind these to a fine powder.”
I take the pestle from him, trying to make sense of what he’s said. “I can’t stay here so long. One of the sick children is my sister.”
But Meremon goes back to his workbench and turns to his open book. I didn’t ever consider that it was strange a necromancer had cured me. I thought that any type of sorcerer would do, that people like Meremon just knew the healing arts. But look how he approached my deathbed, first with a dagger and then with that terrible kiss.