Page 35 of Creatures that Breathe

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.” Her eyes drop. Dismissive, guilty.

I lean forward, bringing our eyes to the same level. The contrast of the powder blue and black of her pupils is striking. Harrowing. Mesmerizing. “Answer the question.”

She dabs at the lines in my palm, clearing nothing. Mumbles under her breath.

I shouldn’t press. I do. “What was that?”

“Shadow daddy, okay?” She rips the skin of my palm on her next swipe. “Don’t look so smug, I couldn’t put ‘homicidal silhouette’.”

I’m positive I’ve never been more smug. “Too many syllables?” I tease.

“Oh shut up,” She pins me with an annoyed, definitely putting tacks in my shoes glare. “It worked, didn’t it?”

Got me there. “Almost fatally well.”

“If you wanted to deter me. You should’ve used the daggers or the gun. That you didn’t just confirmed everything I’d already guessed.”

I tense. “And what is it exactly that you know about me?”

She shrugs nonchalant, but doesn’t face me.

“Leni.”

I cling to the curve of the couch, waiting for my name again. My name from those lips, bracing for happiness to siege. But what she says next is worse. Forces me to take a single sawed breath against the burn on my chest.

“I know,” she says quietly, resolutely. “That despite the rumors you’ve spread, that you’re still Kingsguard, through and through.”

My lungs empty.

Happiness always turns into the same thing: dread.

7

Leni

no sand, no surf, slight humidity

Before the first onyx candle—because black is much too trite for use with the Gods—was lit in His Majesty King Kadmos’s remembrance, Yaya ran. Rinsed off her war paint— Chanel Rogue—laid down her mightiest weapon—a tricolor pen—and delivered the harrowing truth to the family heads: We are doomed. Return home. Savor the time you have left.

At least, that’s what I think she would’ve said. Something ominous and precipitant, threatening, a little bitchy. I like to imagine she was one big bowl of gleaming marbles back then. Succinct and rational and fearless.

The opposite of the female who raised me. More strategic crusader and less stuffs-metal-chopsticks-into-outlets. Still, she did her best. Rubbing those last two technicolor marbles together to teach me centuries of wisdom.

Intense, write-this-down-now scraps of gold nugget knowledge, including: Never brush your hair before your teeth; yogurt keeps; and purple is not, and never will be, pink.

All information was subject to change. Erasable pens only.

The only Yaya gem that never changed: Better fucked in here, than fucked out there.

She’d tap the center of her forehead when she said it, burrowing into her cheetah robe and wraparound sunglasses the way a fat squirrel tucks in for hibernation. That’s kind of what we did. Bunkering down in our home on the water. It was cute in a Leaning Piza way. Crumbling roof, creaky floors, windows painted shut. We never traveled or entertained, we never acknowledged the realm beyond us.

Yaya took a long walk off a short pier when Draven came to collect me.

Surprise. In between burning books and chugging Petite Sirah, my agoraphobe, childphobe father had approved my marriage in exchange for one lump sum. An arrangement formed before I’d even been born.

Shaking in my glitter puppy rainboots, I threw up Welch’s all over Draven’s pristine camel leather car interior and he put a matching purple spill across my cheek. I was eight.

My motto since then: Better alone. I’ve not once faltered, never once revised or revisited the words tattooed on my sternum, until this exact moment.

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