Page 34 of Odder Still
I’m not sure who she speaks to—me or the parasite. I’m not sure she’s ever seen the difference. She tosses the paralyzing weapon at me.
My body moves, not on instinct this time, but on the will of the parasite. I grab the stone in my color-scarred hand. It vibrates, pulsing its purple energy. But instead of paralyzing me, its power slides up my arm like the first sip of booze. My fingers circle the ignit.
I crush it.
The solid crystalline energy stone shatters to powder in my grip. Its glow sinks beneath my skin and swirls up my veins, electrifying. Raghnaid chokes on her own voice. I take a step, my motions half my own now. But only half. Raghnaid moves back, not a retreat but the preparation for a pounce.
I follow her. “I just saved your fucking life,” I hiss, letting the ashen remnants of the once-luminous ignit slip in a trail through my fingers. The net flutters after it. “How dare you throw away mine.”
Raghnaid’s lower lip wavers between the start of speech and the gasp I see forming in her every time her eyes go from the parasite to the miniature gashes on my arms to the pieces of disintegrated ignit. The back of her knees bumps the love seat, and she falls into it. My fists tighten. With this much power, I could do something here. I could do what the lower districts have wanted for ages.
“Rubem?”
Tavish’s voice yanks me from the delusion with such force that I can’t tell whether it was even my own, or something parasite-born, morphed by its tingling power and wanton determination. The more I dwell on it, the more foreign the desire feels. And the more it eats me up inside. I step back from the sofa.
“Rubem?” Tavish repeats.
Ending Raghnaid might let her scientist help me without fear of her wrath. Or it might throw the whole system into such a mad transition of power that the assembly decides to lock me in a cage until it’s sorted through. I can’t risk that. “I’m here.”
A pair of bodyguards appear in the room’s entrance: Malloch with their face pale and their lips drawn back, and the final guard who appeared at the boardroom meeting. Their gazes both come down on me. I should leave. If I need to contend with both of them and the guns at their belts, I doubt my new ignit-destroying abilities will save me.
Sheona must realize it as well. We meet on either side of Tavish. She coughs still, dripping, but she holds her gun like she’s been trained to shoot her way through death itself and come out the other end.
“Malloch and your mother’s other guard are here,” I mutter to Tavish. “We’re leaving.”
He offers me his arm, and I take it, keeping my ignation-mutated skin as far from him as possible. I guide him between Raghnaid and her bodyguards—both the alive and the dead—careful not to step on the assassin’s still-wet symbol. Malloch has already gotten a smudge of it on their otherwise perfectly polished boots. I wait for Raghnaid to protest, but her lips remain clamped. She watches me leave with the serenity and determination of an empress.
The parasite’s touch doesn’t retract as we descend back toward Tavish’s floor, but it blends into the rest of my perception now, one stage closer to becoming me. In the dying fizzle of the alcohol, I want to rip it off my neck with my bare hands.
Blue and Lavender meet us at the bottom of the stairs. Sheona’s and Tavish’s footsteps ring along the quiet corridors, clipping and scuffing against the marble, and the cats’ gentle paws form a soft rhythm just beneath. Mine remain silent.
‘You’re a wee bit odd.’This time the parasite pulls up Tavish’s regurgitation of its favorite phrase. A spark of affection follows, but whether it’s from me or the creature, I don’t know. It’s worse not knowing.
We file inside Tavish’s room. Sheona latches the bolt into place and retrieves a pair of lower-city algae bulbs that come to life in swirls of emerald when she shakes them. They slowly settle after she sets them down. Lavender patters over to a pair of pearl-studded food dishes someone—perhaps Sheona—delivered here in our absence, and I catch the faintest whiff of litter box from what looks like a private cat-sized clam in one corner.
As soon as Tavish sets his shoes on the rack, Sheona wheels on him. She grabs him by the shoulders, her fingers digging into his thick arms. She doesn’t let go. “You fucking dobber, an assassin murdered your own damned brother—murdering himto death—just yesterday, and the first sign of chaos, you go racing into it!”
“‘To death’ is the usual meaning of murder,” Tavish grumbles, but his unfocused eyes form a sheen. “You were the one dying. I couldn’t—”
Sheona latches her arm around his neck, gripping him in something between a choke hold and an embrace. Her words come from between tight teeth, whistling like the spin of a projectile. “You do not risk yourself for me. My job is to save you—to die for your fucking fool of an arse if that’s what’s needed. If you go rushing into danger in my place again, so help me, no one will need to murder you because I will splay your guts all over the fucking ceiling my damned self.”
With a scrunch of his shoulders and a dramatic wiggle, Tavish frees himself. “Trenches, Nana, that child you were hired to protect is long grown. It’s my choice to risk myself, for you or for anyone else.” His hair sweeps disastrously upward, and a ruddy rise grows in his cheeks, but he holds his chin high, dignified beyond adulthood and into divinity.
“I’m not demanding, Tavish.” Sheona’s voice slides, thick and heavy, saturating the hallway. “I’m begging. You are good, and strong, and brave, and the world needs that, more than they will ever need me.”
All the indignation leaves him in a single breath. “Nana.”
Something creeps at the edges of my memories, a shadow I could identify if only I could touch it, but it turns to smoke in my fingers. The parasite tugs at the silhouette of my mother: slim and strong and far too young to die. Far younger than I am now. The vision of her stirs a deep cavity in my gut.
“If something happened to you because of me—because I couldn’t—” Sheona’s voice catches.
I’m an intruder here, barging into a conversation too intimate for someone like me who doesn’t quite belong. My insides continue to tighten. I’m no longer drunk enough for this.
Neither of them seems to notice me grabbing a light and slipping into the bathroom, the ache of sobriety landing on me with every stride. Their conversation continues, a string of frustrated hisses and tiny sobs and soft consultations repeating itself. I close the door over it.
I look tired and disheveled in the mirror, my earrings twisted at an odd angle and my braids piled awkwardly in a half bun I can’t recall having tied. A strip of dried blood coats my upper lip and trails out of my nose, from the parasite or the ignation or perhaps the fight with Raghnaid’s assailant. I dab at it with my saliva, wiping the crust away. One long look at my outfit, and I strip off the kitchen apron.
Delicately, I pull up my right sleeve to examine the damage the parasite wrought there. Though my fishnets hide them somewhat, the thin, straight, black lines of the parasite’s infection course with a vibrancy that seems almost toxic, their gleam noticeable any time I flex or release the muscles beneath.
