The black thing moved.
Rosalie Ashford jerked backward so sharply that the oil lamp nearly slipped from her hand.
Across the table, Gideon Rook watched her face instead of the porcelain bowl.
He could not hear the faint scratching beneath the lamplight, but he understood terror well enough.
His right ear was bleeding.
A thin crimson line ran down his neck and disappeared beneath the collar of his sweat-soaked shirt.
Rosalie forced herself to look again.
The object she had pulled from his swollen ear was nearly an inch long, dark with blood and wax, segmented like an insect larva.
It twisted once, struck the side of the bowl, and curled upon itself.
“Dear God.”
Gideon saw her lips move.
His hand immediately reached for the notebook.
What is it?
Rosalie swallowed.
She had grown up around animals.
She had cleaned infected wounds, helped her mother deliver calves, and once
removed maggots from a sheep after a summer injury.
But this was different.
Because Gideon had suffered since childhood.
She dipped the tweezers into alcohol and carefully turned the creature over.
It moved again.
Rosalie wrote beneath his question.
Alive.
For the first time since their wedding, genuine fear appeared in Gideon Rook’s eyes.
He touched his ear.
Then wrote:
Inside me?
Rosalie nodded.
His face drained of color.
She examined his ear again and noticed something else.
The swelling had partially collapsed after the creature’s removal, exposing a narrow pocket of damaged tissue she had not seen before.
Inside that pocket was a tiny hard edge.
Not flesh.
Not bone.
Something metallic.
Rosalie brought the lamp closer.
Gideon stiffened.
“What happened to you when you were a child?” she whispered, forgetting he could not hear.
He understood from her expression.
His pencil moved slowly.
Horse accident. Age nine.
Rosalie
