A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,25

few precious inches, and I was able to grab on to the top of the wall with both hands. From there, I pulled myself up and managed to swing my right leg over the edge.

For a second, I straddled the top of the wall, catching my breath and surveying the dark courtyard and the small, weird forest it contained. After a moment teetering between two worlds, I swung my left leg over and dropped into the garden. The bottoms of my sneakers met slick bricks, and I lost my balance. The last thing I heard before my head hit the ground and I blacked out was a shout that may or may not have come out of my own mouth.

I woke up to a dizzying blur of green leaves and dark sky. Scattered drops of rain were falling into my open mouth and onto my dry lips. Above me, the indistinct figure of a small person came into view, a veil of black surrounding a face. The person, a girl, was saying something; it sounded like she was shouting at me through water.

I was being moved. I could feel my skin scraping against stone. After mumbling something about a butcher’s son and love letters, I blacked out again.

I woke for the second time to the sound of a wasp buzzing in my ear. My eyes snapped wide open, took in the bright moon above, and slammed back shut. I brushed my hand up against my ear, but the buzzing didn’t go away.

I remembered: jumping, falling through the leaves, the feeling of being dragged across something hot and hard. My forearms itched. I held them up to my eyes. It looked like the skin on both was covered in blisters.

A girl said, “You’re awake. I was starting to get worried.”

I craned my head in the direction of the voice. That slight movement hurt, bad.

“Who . . . ?” Just the act of forming a word was painful. My peripheral vision was filled with leaves, and they seemed to sway in slow motion, like the tentacles of a giant sea creature.

The girl leaned over me, and the dark and wavy tips of her hair nearly grazed my face. “What was that you said earlier about a butcher?”

“A butcher’s son,” I slurred.

“A what?”

“I . . . I’m sorry.” I dragged one of my palms across my eyes to try and push the pain out of my head. It didn’t work. “I thought you were a nun.”

“You know,” she said after a pause, “I’ve never thought of it that way. You’re sort of right, though. I am a nun. And this is my convent. Welcome. Finally.”

Slowly and with my head still spinning, I stood. I blinked—one, two, three times—and the girl finally came into focus. She didn’t have green skin and grass for hair. She was around my age, but bird-boned and short, dressed in jeans that were patched in places and rolled up to her ankles. The hood of the blue long-sleeved sweatshirt she was wearing was thrown over her head in a way that made her look fierce, like a cruiserweight primed for a boxing match.

Prune-purple rings circled her near-black eyes; her brow was furrowed like someone who’d spent her entire life anticipating a fight.

I wasn’t feeling like much of an opponent right then. Too much was still out of focus.

My forearm itched like crazy, so I scratched it. This was, apparently, was not the right thing to do.

“Don’t do that!” One of the girl’s hands flew in my direction.

I kept scratching.

“Those types of rashes have a tendency to spread,” she said, cringing. “Just leave it be. You’ll be fine in a few hours.”

I stopped to hold my arms up to my eyes so I could study the tiny white dots on my skin by the light of the moon. The dots squirmed like maggots. I blinked; they stopped.

“You landed in the plants,” the girl said. “I had to move you away from them.”

I dropped my arms and peered at the girl in front of me who still seemed less like a solid person and more like a dark, nebulous mass.

The only thing I could do was state the obvious: “They’re poisonous. They cause hallucinations. I heard they killed a kitten.”

“My dad’s a scientist. He studies plants.” She smirked. “You have similar aspirations, yeah?”

Her accent was strange: partially British or Irish like that of the scientist, but also suggesting that she’d spent a lot of time on the island. There were hints