Dimitri POV

I'd only been in the apartment for a few minutes before Christian came rushing in with such speed that the frint door banged against the wall.
"You need to come back, Dimitri." He said.
"I don't think that would be wise."
"Rose can't feel her arm. I mean, she can but not around the wound. She can't feel any pain. She flicked it, right in one of the slashes and she didn't feel anything. She didn't even notice that Liss had jabbed her with a fork. She can't feel it." He said.
"Vasilisa stabbed her with a fork?"
"Yes. Well, no. She poked her with a fork but Rose didn't see her and she didn't feel it. There's something really wrong." The worry was clear in his eyes.
I nodded and followed him back to their apartment. Roza and Vasilisa were sitting on the sofa, arguing about something. Roza looked up to me, though she didn't smile.
"Tell her. Tell her that she can't heal me." She demanded.
"Roza-"
"Damn it, Dimitri. You know that she can't. You know what's happening to her. It's not safe." She said.
"Until we know exactly what is happening with Roza, I'm going to have to agree with her."
"But-"
"Roza, perhaps you should go and take a shower. You have to keep the wound clean."
"You can shower here, Rose." Christian said and watched as she frowned and stormed out of the living room.
We sat in silence until we heard that the shower had been turned on.
"She's been poisoned, Dimitri." Vasilisa said, her eyes wide and her hands trembling.
"Why would strigoi poison her?" Christian asked. "Why not just kill her? Or kidnap her. Or turn her."
"Christian!"
"I'm not saying that they should have." He said as if that should have been obvious. "Poison is hardly their style though. And why go to all that trouble? I mean, they must have known that they'd be killed but why sacrifice themselves like that?"
"Kamikaze." I muttered more to myself than anyone else.
"Kama-who?" Christian asked.
"Kamikaze. In World War Two they were the Japanese version of suicide bombers. They flew their planes in to the ships of their enemy."
"So the strigoi were Japanese?"
"No, they were on a suicide mission. They knew that they'd be killed but they needed to get the poison to Roza. What we need to know is what kind of poison it is."
"How would they know that she was even out there?" Christian asked. It was a good question, even I didn't know that she was going to be out there.
"They must have been watching her ever since she came to Court." Vasilisa said quietly. "She goes out there all the time. When she needs to think about something or make a plan or just needs some space."
"She's been on bed rest for six weeks." I said, wondering how she would have gotten out there and why none of the guardians would have mentioned it.
"You haven't been with her all the time, Dimitri." Vasilisa said, her angelic face flushing slightly.
"You've taken her out of the wards? Liss how could you? You're the Queen."
"We always took guardians, Christian, I'm not stupid."
"Well, apparently Rose is."
"Gee, thanks."
We all turned towards the voice. Roza was stood by the door, wrapped up in two fluffy towels; one around her body and another hiding her hair as it twisted on top of her head. Against the white of the towels, her arm looked even worse. She was holding on to the frame of the door tightly, trying to steady herself.
"Rose, I didn't mean-"
"We get it, Rose is stupid." She said as she shakily walked through the living room. "I'm going home."
"You can't just leave, Rose. We need to talk about-"
"Liss, there's ten minutes until the sun comes up, I'm tired, I'm dizzy and I'm practically naked. I'm going home. You guys can talk about this for as long as you want."
I went to her side and wrapped my arm around her shoulders. "Let me help you, Roza."
"No thank you, Guardian Belikov. I'm more than capable of walking down the hall by myself." She snapped and did her best to shrug my arm off. I let her go and watched as she walked on shaky legs, slamming the door behind her. Roza only called me by my professional name if she was really angry with me, and she certainly was. Why though, I wasn't sure. It was me that should have been angry with her for being so careless with her own safety.
The three of us stood in silence, staring at the door for a few moments before I turned back to Vasilisa and Christian. "How long has she been getting these threats for?"
"A couple of days." Christian said quietly. "We didn't know that it was anything serious and she said that she'd told you. She came over today after getting two more. She showed them to me."
"Were you going to tell me?" Vasilisa asked. The hurt in her voice was obvious.
"I didn't want to worry you. You've already got so much going on."
"She's all the family that I have left."
"You have Jill."
"It's not the same. We share the same father but she doesn't know me. She hasn't spent her life learning things about me the way that Rose has. She doesn't know everything about me. She didn't go through everything with me. She's nothing to me, Christian. She's the product of an affair that my father had with her mother. That doesn't make her my sister. Not in the way that Andre was my brother."
"She's still your sister."
"Then why would I rather it was her that had been poisoned and not Rose?"
"You don't mean that, Liss."
"Yes, I do. If I could take it from her and give it to Jill, I would."
Christian looked up to me, his eyes pleading for help, but I didn't know what to say to either of them. Looking at Vasilisa, I knew that it was the darkness that was making her say these things. She had the same wild look in her eyes that Roza had had when the darkness affected her. I didn't know how to help her. I didn't know how to help my Roza. I didn't know how to help anyone. I stood there like a statue, feeling more lost than I had in years. Vasilisa turned on my then, her finger extended as she pointed at me.
"Is this why she wanted you to be my guardian? So that we'd leave? So that she could face everything alone?" She asked.
It took me a moment to follow her line of thought because she'd completely changed the convrsation. It was the darkness I knew, scrambling her thoughts and making her sound slightly crazy. "I-"
"Did she really think that we'd just leave her?" She demanded. "Or that we'd leave Christian with a guardian that wasn't able to protect him?"
"I wasn't aware that she'd suggested it."
"Of course you were. You know her. You know the way that she thinks. You've been with her since you dragged us back to school. You know her, Dimitri."
She was right, I did know her. I knew the way that Roza's mind worked. I knew what she was thinking when she pulled a face or made the slightest noise. Or at least I thought I did. Standing there, I wasn't so sure that I knew her at all. There was one thing that I was absolutely certain of. "She would do anything to keep you safe, Vasilisa. She's spent her life doing it and she will keep doing it for as long as she can. If she suggested that you and I leave, I can only assume that it would be to keep you safe."
"And what about her?" Vasilisa screamed. "What about her safety?"
I didn't get the chance to answer her, not that I really had an answer, because the door burst open and a red faced Simon burst in to the apartment. We turned to look at him but we didn't get a chance to say anything.
"Forgive the intrusion, Your Majesty, but it's Guardian Hathaway. She collapsed in the hall and she's unresponsive."
We rushed to the hall and saw Roza, lying in the middle of the floor a few feet away from our front door. Her arm was still bleeding, though it was a slow flow. Someone had draped their jacket over her, presumably to keep her modesty intact. I looked up at the guardians and saw that Milo was standing in just a white shirt. I slipped my duster off and laid it over her, knowing that it would provide her more warmth than the jacket, and handed the jacket back to Milo.
"We've called for the doctor but he's had an emergency and he doesn't know when he's going to be able to get here." Simon said quietly.
"Go and fetch him." Vasilisa said.
"But-"
"Go and fetch him right now. Tell him that the Queen demands his presence and if he doesn't come-"
"What's the emergency?" I asked, stopping Vasilisa before she could make any threats.
"One of the Moroi went in to labour and it's been a complicated birth. He can't leave her or both she and the baby could die."
"Then he's where he needs to be." I said, brushing Roza's hair out of her face. "She's got a steady heartbeat and she's breathing. She'll be fine for a little longer." I said, more to assure Vasilisa than myself. She did have a steady heartbeat but it was becoming weaker and her breathing was shallow. I scooped her up in my arms, resting her head against my chest, and took her home. Everyone followed; Vasilisa and Christian, and all of the guardians that were on duty. It seemed unprofessional but I knew how much Roza meant to them all. She'd risen to fame with her extraordinary number of strigoi kills and then she'd jumped in front of a bullet to save Vasilisa. She'd made friends with all of Vasilisa's guardians and Christian's too. She was one of those people that you couldn't help but love and in their own ways, they all loved her. It didn't seem to matter anyway. They were there to protect the Queen and Lord Ozera, both of which were inside my apartment.
I took Roza to the bedroom and laid her down on the bed, removing my duster before I tucked her in. I pressed my lips to her temple and then just sat beside her, wondering how she could be so stubborn.
From what I could gather, she'd always been the same way; headstrong and unmoving when she thought that she was right. Still, I couldn't help but wonder why she hadn't come to me. Was it because we'd argued after her doctor's appointment or was it because she was trying to protect me too? I knew that she must have been; why else would she have offered Vasilisa to trade guardians. My stubborn Roza was going to be the death of me and probably herself, too.
I couldn't be sure how long I'd been sitting there beside her, my fingers pressed to her wrist as I monitored her heart rate. The sun was filtering in through the blinds, but it didn't matter to me. I needed to monitor Roza until the doctor came, though God only knew when that would be.
There was a gentle knock on the bedroom door and Simon came inside quietly. "There's a call for you, Dimitri."
"Who is it?"
"It's your mother."
I took the phone from his hand, waited until he'd left the room and tried to speak to her, but there was a knot in my throat that stopped me. "Dimka? Dimka are you there? Yeva insisted that I call you. Is Roza okay?"
"No, Mama."
"What happened?" She asked, her voice cracking. Mama loved Roza as much as I did. She'd welcomed her in to the family when she'd gone to Russia, hunting me down. She'd come to Court when Roza had been shot and she loved her like she loved me.
"She... She's..." I tried but couldn't bring myself to say the words.
"Yeva is here." Mama said and then passed the phone over.
Yeva came on, speaking to me in Russian. "The poison is from an Amphisbaena."
"I don't-"
"Listen to me, Dimitri." She snapped. "If that girl dies, the world will change. You don't know how important she is."
"Yeva-"
"The Amphisbaena is a creature of legend and myth but they are real. A two headed serpant with wings and deadly poison. When was she infected?"
"Just after yesterday's sunset."
"What does the wound look like?"
I looked closely at her arm, my stomach rolling as I did. The slashes in her arm were jagged and oozing a thick yellow substance. There were green lines under skin that were as thick as my thumb and getting thinner as they carried the poison further in to her body. She was warm to the touch and her skin had a sheen of sweat over it. I relayed the information to Yeva and she sighed.
"Then you're running out of time. She needs the antidote within the next twelve hours or she'll die."
I thanked Yeva for calling and hung up, wondering where I was going to find the antidote to the poison of a creature that I'd never heard of. Then it came to me.
I called for Vasilisa, who came running in to the bedroom.
"Call her parents." I said, my mouth set in a grim line.