Katie gasped. "Justin. Please don't tell me that's—"
"It's a vampling bite." The punctures were as black as the day before. The skin around them looked slightly bruised.
"Do you want me to suspend you?" Meghan asked, kneeling to run her wand over my skin. "The rate of infection seems much slower than usual, so you might have more than a few days before—before the end."
I glared at Elyssa. "See? No cure. Waste of time."
Her jaw went tight. "It is not a waste of time. Now we know your infection isn't spreading fast. We have time to find Nightliss."
I wanted to feel reassured, I really did. Instead, the clock in my head just ticked louder.
Nightliss, damn it, where are you?
I wanted nothing more than to see her. To know help had arrived. A wave of dizziness washed over me. It took everything I had not to stagger as my balance teetered on the brink. I didn't want to give Elyssa any excuse to make me take the Sleeping Beauty option from Meghan. I might have days or a week, but the truth was obvious now. This infection was as relentless as the vamplings.
And it wouldn't stop until I was dead.
Chapter 28
Katie shrieked when we walked into the cabin.
The gray man still sat where I'd left him, a frightening leer plastered on his face. The god-awful expression vanished as his lips resumed their normal flat state. "I have been practicing being happy, Justin," he said in his calm voice. "It is not easy."
"You call that being happy?" Katie said, a hand pressed to her heart. "Smiling like that?"
He nodded. "From what I understand, smiling is an important part of being happy. But smiling is very difficult."
"It is when you're not happy," I said, frowning. "How do you know all this stuff? Do you have a bunch of information programmed into you?"
He tilted his head. "I am not programmed like a computer. My spark contains a great deal of data, although I do not know its origination. Some of this data is already organized into information, linking it to what I have seen in the world. Other parts are quite raw and scattered, and I must research them."
"Such as how to be happy?"
He nodded. "Emotions are very hard to understand. From what I have gathered, one must experience such things to understand them."
"Get a girlfriend. You'll figure out a lot of emotions really quick."
"Hey now," Elyssa said, punching me on the arm.
The gray man looked from me to Elyssa. "Finding someone who wishes to be with me in that sense would be very difficult, Justin. I believe many here would rather see me burned to ash and forgotten."
"Like little gray cinders on the wind," Katie said. "How sad."
The golem studied Katie for a moment. "I have decided my name."
I cocked my head. "Really? Is it George?"
"How about Dexter?" Katie said. "I love that name."
"No. It is Cinder."
"Huh?" I said, failing to see why he'd choose such a name.
"After Katie mentioned the word, I looked it up. It describes me rather accurately. I am gray. I am not a full being in any sense of the word, but an ashen representation of a human. I am but gray dust molded into form."
I stared at him dumbfounded for a moment. "That was almost poetic. But isn't a cinder hot ash?"
"I do have a spark inside me. While it is not hot, I believe the name will suffice."
I stood up and walked across the room to him, held out a hand. He stared at it for a moment before standing and extending his own.
I gripped his hand and shook it. "Nice to meet you, Cinder."
He looked at me. I caught the twitch in his eyes, almost too slight for anyone without supernatural senses to have seen. "Thank you, Justin."
"Congratulations, Cinder!" Katie said, clapping her hands.
Elyssa stared at us like we were crazy. "Yay. The golem has a name. Now, instead of wasting time, let's do something to find Nightliss."
"I believe I have pertinent information regarding this entity," Cinder said, flicking his fingers across the arctablet Katie had used earlier.
A picture of the dark angel hovered above the table. Rustic buildings, roofs laden with snow lay behind her as she stared somewhere off into the distance while swirling snow surrounded her. She wore only a simple black dress despite the sub-zero temperatures. The shadowy outline of wings hung from her back, and her black hair billowed. Beneath the image was a caption: Crazy beautiful girl with