Page 41 of Odder Still
“Has something happened? It smells off.” One of his knees gives out, and he leans his weight against mine, a hand over his mouth. “Oh. Oh, fuck. Is she...?”
With an arm around Tavish’s back, I press through the dust motes, working us around the desk. Ailsa’s blood drips in slow trails from the great red gashes on either side of her throat, a bead of it dried on the ragged, self-inflicted wound in her lower lip. It slides through the upturned feathers of her cloak and feeds into the stain on the rug. The circled, red symbol of a slim fish bumps up against her splayed hair.
Her eyes are already closed, long eyelashes brushing pale cheeks. The body seems too perfect to warrant a death proclamation, as though it’s all not quite real enough yet, but with my free hand, I sign out the two most basic words:become one.
Where the fuck was Malloch? I don’t need any help to remember our first meeting in this room, Ailsa’s voice so flat:No one cares if I’m murdered.Staring at her corpse now, her bodyguard nowhere in sight, the statement makes me bristle.
“The assassin must have found her waiting for us here.” I draw my palm up and down Tavish’s arm as I speak, an awkward, uncertain motion that I hope comes off as supportive. “I’m sorry.”
Tavish wipes a glimmer from the edge of his eye. “Is there somewhere I can sit?”
I unclutter a chair of dissected book spines and help him into it. I feel his sister’s corpse at my back all the while, guilt and grief hitting me in turbulent waves: guilt from me, and grief, well, I assume the grief comes from the parasite, its rush too distant and unreal, too disconnected from Ailsa, but the creature’s warmth in my mind feels dormant.
In the swirl of the library’s dust, I see the petals that fell around a different body. Thisismy grief. It’s just not meant for Ailsa.
“I’m sorry.”
“Aye, me too,” Tavish whispers. “We were nearer in age than either of us to Alasdair, and we’d played as bairns. She was the only one who would, with me. She’d yell at the others with that voice of hers, so like Mother’s and Alasdair’s, the one that cuts through sound like it’s a blade.” His words dip, more ice than crystal. “I always wished I could speak like that.”
“Now you do,” I remind him. “You figured it out.”
“No. No, I imitate, but it’s not the same.” Tavish straightens his shoulders, setting both hands firmly on the chair’s armrests, his cane crossed over his lap. Another tear streaks down his cheek, but he doesn’t move to wipe it away. “Right. What else do you see? Clues, notes, anything?”
“There’s that red fish the assassin painted last night.”
“It’s probably the same as the one they found with Alasdair’s body: the weaver fish symbol the last rebellion used, back before we were born. The venomous spines behind its head are shite to step on.”
The phrasing pulls to mind Ivor Reid’s bar, one of the cardplayers shouting above the rest of the talk,See, they can’t step on us forever!
“Anything else?” Tavish asks. “Anything new?”
“I don’t know. There’s a lot of decimated books.” I step through them on feet that barely touch the floor, as though I’m walking over Ailsa’s grave instead of around her life’s work. “It looks like they’re primarily some kind of science—odd diagrams and equations and charts. She wrote notes over everything, but I can’t read most of it.” At a distance, Ailsa’s scrawl through margins and between lines looks like a pattern of lace or vinery instead of genuine script.
“My reading aids could never pick up her handwriting, it was always so atrocious.” Tavish draws a long, ragged breath. “She practiced her penmanship just for me.”
I slip around the edge of the blood stain. This side of the room resembles the other, but from here I can just make out a bundle of papers forced between the hardcover of a plain green novel, the whole thing caught beneath Ailsa’s dead grip, half buried in the feathers of her cloak.
“She kept a notebook.” I slip it out, picking through the pages as though they might turn to dust under too much pressure. Their torn edges look half-decomposed already. “I can’t read most of the text, but this seems aurora related.”
I scan the words for anything legible. One line sticks out, circled twice:explosions transport to second dimension?The idea of another realm reminds me eerily of the twisted version of reality in my dream.
‘Pulled from a secondary place,’The parasite murmurs.
Another place. Another dimension. None of it tells me how to rid myself of this thing in my neck.
I set the notebook aside. As I stand, the shine of light on metal beneath the desk catches my attention. I lean over Ailsa’s corpse, careful not to touch her cooling body, and nudge out a long, elegant knife with a blood-stained edge. It takes me a moment to recognize it.
“Gods is this fucked.” I handle the weapon gently, hoping I’m wrong. “Tavish, I think I might have found your knife.”
Tavish jolts out of the chair, barely catching his cane before it topples to the ground. “That’s not possible—it’s been in my room—my lock was never tampered with.”
A curse rises in my throat, coming out in my voice as a twisted snarl. “I left the door propped open when I came here last night. I was drunk, I didn’t think—I’m sorry.”
“Perhaps it’s only a similar style.” Tavish holds out his hand for it, and I tuck the hilt into his grip. He slides his fingers along the elegant patterns of sapphires and pearls to a small, swirling pattern on one side. His face goes slack with horror. “It’s mine,” he whispers.
The squeak of polished boots resounds form the hallway, already too near to run from.
“Really, Ace, I don’t think it’s necessary for me to—” Malloch freezes in the doorway. Their face pinches, and they draw their gun, not taking their eyes off Tavish and me as they shout down the hall for help. Through their teeth, they hiss, “Put the weapon down.”
