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The Circle stumbles back to the Antiquarian under the cover of darkness. It is a warped mirror of how they reached Greyslate earlier in the evening.
Cosmo is semi-conscious in his wheelchair, pale from blood loss but no longer actively losing more. His glasses are slightly askew on his face where his head lolls onto his shoulder. The street lamps aren’t bright enough to illuminate the red of the stain on the fur still draped across him, but it still shines wetly, and that would give enough away for someone with sharp eyes.
Madam Glask is upright, but from the grip she has on the handles of Cosmo’s chair — tight enough to have the tendons along the backs of her hands and up her forearms straining outwards, defined even through the fine cloth of her gloves — she remains so through willpower and adrenaline alone.
Oscar is outwardly the most steady of them all. There’s dirt on his pants and his jacket from his clash with the Serious Man and a strange new darkness in his eyes, but he’s strong enough to carry the chewed-up, inflamed body of the man over one shoulder. He walks just a step behind and to the side of Madam Glask and Cosmo. His head swivels in constant observation of the street, but seems to stick on his son’s — his son’s — slumped form at every pass.
Elsie and Rajan follow behind. Rajan, aside from Cosmo, took the worst of it. He walks with concentrated evenness, like one slight jostle in his step will send pain reverberating through his torso, through his head. He’s got one arm tucked protectively around his middle, keeping what remains of his jacket closed around the empty cells of his hive. Elsie can see the flex and release of his jaw muscle from her peripheral. He’s stumbled a few times on uneven ground, and Elsie wonders if his vision has been affected by the cost of commanding his swarm.
Elsie herself is still trembling faintly. Her muscles burn like she ran a great distance, or carried something too heavy for too long. The sharp catch at the apex of each breath she takes is — strangely — comfortingly familiar after every horrible thing that has happened. Her breath still feels too big for her own lungs, as if she’s still the Beast, breathing in great gasps of foggy air into much larger organs.
They reach the shop just as the barest hint of dawn is beginning to lighten the sky. Elsie silently takes charge. She locks the door behind them, and it seems to snap Oscar out of some kind of reverie. He deposits the broken body of the Serious Man onto the kitchen table, secures him with rope, and then mutters around the hard candy in his mouth that he’s going to ‘check the place is secure’. Elsie helps Madam Glask get Cosmo to his bed. By the time she looks up from securing fresh bandages on the old man’s wound, the Madam is gone.
Oscar slips in when she opens the door. There’s guilt in his eyes, worry, and something too complicated for Elsie to read.
Oscar tips his head for her to leave. “It’s okay, Doc. I’ll keep an eye on him.” He hesitates, rolls the candy around his mouth once. “You should check on Raj…if you can.”
She’s already in the hallway, Cosmo’s door shut softly behind her when she realizes that Oscar said Raj. Not his highness, or prince, or anything else.
Elsie makes her way to the guest room at the end of the hall. The door is ajar, but the interior is dark. She finds after the recent events of killing her friend and then choosing to bring out the Beast and kill the Maw, she can no longer think of a valid reason to be afraid of the dark.
But she was raised in polite society, so she knocks lightly on the open door. “Raj?”
There’s a hum and a shift of cloth from inside the room. Elsie pushes the door open wider, and sees the glint of the embroidery on Rajan’s jacket. She makes out the outline of him, sat on the edge of the bed, bent over with his elbows on his knees and his head cradled in his hands. He does not look up at her as she enters, and that tells her enough about the amount of pain he’s in.
Elsie closes the door behind her. She already noticed the little hand lamp on the beside table, and moves in the dimness to light it. When she does, Raj curls in on himself a little more.
Light sensitivity? She wonders.
She steps closer, pitching her voice low. “Rajan.”
“Little bird.” His voice is a rumble, low and rough with exhaustion and a tight note of strain. He swipes one hand down from his face, leaning heavily on the other. Elsie catches a glimpse of his chest through the slashed open front of his shirt, at the crumbling honeycomb beginning just below his clavicle, and the still fresh, smooth-looking structure continuing beneath it.
One of his eyes peels open to regard her — it’s not the one on the side where his scars have grown, Elsie notes. He looks exhausted, but the warmth that is always in his eyes when he looks at her is still there.
He huffs at her scrutiny. “The others need your help more than I.”
“I’ve already seen to them.”
“How efficient of you.” His smile curls up the exposed side of his face. His teeth glint in the lamplight, and Elsie is uncomfortably reminded of the Maw and her Beast’s own teeth snapping up the creature's soul.
Rajan must see the flicker of it cross her face, because his smile drops. His sigh is long and through his nose. “You need to rest.”
“I need to finish the job I started in that hole before we had to flee.” When she’d held Rajan’s face in her hands after he’d collapsed, felt the desperate clamor of his pulse and the ragged rhythm of his breath. Touching him like that again after so long had sent a staticky kind of thrill through her. She has it under control now, despite the fondness she sees in the lines near his eyes at her insistence.
“I said I would come running…” There’s warning in his low voice now, testiness at her intrusion.
Elsie ignores it, feeling frustration build behind her breast. “I came to you. Now let me help.”
He growls, and makes to stand. Standing, he’s taller than her, broad enough in the shoulder to make her feel petite when internally she feels anything but delicate and feminine these days. She doesn’t want to have this confrontation feeling small.
The Beast within her rumbles in return, and she moves.
Elsie steps forward before he can get his feet fully planted, slipping between his knees and sweeping his other hand away from his face with one arm. With the other, she grasps his chin, tilting his newly reformed scars toward the light. It’s only when she hears him gasp does she realize how unnaturally fast she moved, the preternatural strength in the grip on his arm and his chin.
Raj resists only for the barest moment, then stills under her touch. His dark eyes — one the same abyssal umber, the other glittering unnaturally black — are wide, but not with fear.
Elsie exhales a measured breath. She focuses on the new rawness of the claw marks across Raj’s temple and crown, the depth of the one curving closest to his eye. The flesh is the tender, inflamed pink of a new scar; other than applying a salve to ease pain there’s not much she can do. She moves on to inspect his eye. At a closer glance, she can see the multi-faceted, fractal refractions of light in it. It no longer looks human.
“Raj…” she breathes before she can bite it back.
His arm turns in her grip to hold her in return. “I will be all right.”
“You’re in pain.”
His brow lifts, “So are you.”
Elsie sucks in a breath to chastise him, and her own lungs prove him right when the cutting sensation cullet is known for sears through her chest. Her exhale wheezes.
Rajan’s dark eyes pool with heartbreak. It’s the same look from when Elsie had finally admitted the truth of her condition to the rest of the Circle: a yawning sadness as fathomless as the late Maw’s hunger, all because of her.
Where his hand has curled around the bend of her elbow, his thumb begins a soothing stroke. Back and forth and back again. It is the same caress she’d seen when Raj had appeased Mr. Sarkis, at the beginning of this terrible day.
"My darling…”
Elsie nearly shivers at the raw timbre of Rajan’s voice, the anguish in it, the care. She meets his eyes again.
He swallows, and she’s suddenly hyperaware of the flex of the vulnerable muscles on the underside of his jaw pinned within the clawed grip of her hand. It’s not dissimilar to the way the Beast had held Oscar just before crushing his throat and ending his life, and Elsie should flinch away at the thought, remove her hand from where its starting to tingle against the stubble lining Raj’s jaw, but something in his dark eyes keeps her there.
Raj seems to realize his own weakness in the same moment. His nostrils flare as he breathes, and presses his jaw more firmly against her grip. Into her hold, not away from it.
Somewhere in her, closer than it rested before, the Beast purrs with satisfaction. Elsie no longer feels its lust for destruction. Instead, it is simply lust, and it is hers, so deeply intertwined with the vastness of the Beast within her she cannot tell where she ends and it begins.
From the way Raj’s breath has turned shallow, and his pupils have blown wide, he seems to feel similarly.
It would be an indulgence. A capitulation. Like the way she willingly summoned the Beast tonight.
It is too high a risk.
Elsie steps back. Light and air seem to return to the room, and Rajan gasps as if she had been choking him. The want in his gaze does not recede.
“Elsie…” his tone is softer than before. Apologetic.
She swallows past the glass-shard sensation in her throat. “I…I should get some rest before we debrief tomorrow.” She retreats two steps, grasps the doorknob behind her back. “Goodnight.”
Elsie flees. The rumble of the Beast quiets, but does not go away.