Page 53 of Odder Still
My soft grin feels crooked beneath her scrutiny. “His safety will be my top priority.”
Sheona lets me go, her expression as loose and open as I’ve ever seen it. As she steps toward the garbage chute’s controls, though, a familiar hum reverberates through the tunnel. Malloch’s motorcycle whirls toward us.
They use the vehicle as a shield as they skid it to a stop. Crouching on their knees, they fire over the top. I dive in the corner between an empty wastebin and the metal wall. Sheona ducks as bullets whiz above her head. They crack against the front of the garbage chute, making tiny splinters in the thick glass. A trickle of blood joins them. Clutching the breathing device tighter, I follow it up Tavish’s arm to a light graze in his bicep. His hand lifts toward the tiny wound, the color leaving his face with the same intensity it fills Sheona’s. Before he can touch it, she slams a lever on the chute console. A hiss of steam fills the tunnel, and the glass slides down in front of Tavish.
Malloch fires again, but this time they aim toward the console. At Sheona’s exposed back. Red explodes from her chest. She wilts to the floor, where she gasps, drawing in a sob and letting out a growl. I feel the sound like a knife in my gut.
Tavish’s voice echoes through the sealed glass, calling out her name questioningly. Water fills his chamber. His brooch shimmers, a wave of color-imbued black dancing out of it, and he shifts from human to seal. Sheona watches him, clinging to the console with one arm. Her blood looks black where it saturated her dark clothing, but it plunks to the floor in scarlet drops, quickly forming a small puddle in the dirt.
I flick the breathing device between my fingers and try in vain to drive down my chaotic heartbeat. Malloch seems not to notice me hiding, but one wrong move could catch their attention. I can’t leave Sheona like this, though. I can’t stand here and watch Malloch kill her. Despite the pain pinching her features, she looks as if she might leap at them were they not aiming for her chest.
“Are you going to finish me off?” she hisses.
Malloch steps over their motorcycle, each stride so polished they hardly seem real. Even the dust doesn’t stick to their perfect black boots, the red paint from the pool room long since removed. “No, I ken you’re already finished.” They smile, something between a taunt and a reproach. “But I could save you.”
“What do you want?” Sheona snaps.
“Your allegiance.” Malloch stops, planting both feet firmly into place, looking so eerily like an image copied from the upper districts and pasted here without regard for the grime and stress and death of the dredges. “You’re the best in our family—I’m not so daft as to forget it. If you joined those who want to make this city right instead of siding with the bastards who have kept us as little better than slaves in their cycle of poverty, we would welcome you with open arms.” Their upper lip curls. “I know you used to hate the Findlays as much as I.”
As Malloch speaks, I slip the breathing device into my pant pocket and shift, ever so slowly, willing myself to be one with the curling vapor that swirls along the room’s edges in the wake of the chute’s release. The mist creeps in. I move with such silence that my bare feet leave nothing of themselves, not sound or print. Not even Sheona seems to notice me drifting toward Malloch’s back.
“I never knew you felt like this.” Sheona’s eyes dig into her cousin, raking them as though searching for a conscience beneath the refined exterior. “I guess you weren’t brave enough to voice it.”
Malloch’s façade slips in a twitch of anger. “I didn’t have the privilege of your skills.” Their aim shakes as they jab the barrel of their gun toward Sheona. “If I’d spoken my mind, no one would have hired me. But you were worth it to them.” The words bubble with venom. “Did all of Tavish’s pampering change you?”
Sheona goes silent. A thousand emotions pile through her features, running into each other too fast to make out. They land on desolation. She exhales, her sigh leaving nothing but exhaustion in its wake. Exhaustion, and a ghostly blanching that contrasts the red of her gushing chest.
Malloch laughs, but there’s something else in there, a hoarse kind of wetness. The beginning of a sob. “I didn’t let them get to me. I killed Ace—” Their voice hitches, but they breathe out. “I killed Ailsa. Because it didn’t matter what else she was—she was still a Findlay. So, have they corrupted you, or not? Are you too soft for them, or will you join us?”
“It’s just one Findlay I’m soft for. And you shot at him.” She closes her eyes, slumping a little lower against the console. A red stain follows her journey toward collapse.
Malloch snorts a sound that mimics the Findlays’ diamond tone so precisely that it shatters through their argument. “I should have aimed for his heart.”
The way that aristocratic snivel aligns with their perfected composure, their self-righteous commands, it hits me: they don’t want to simply remove the Findlays. Some part of Malloch, large or small, subconscious or not, wants toreplacethem.
A tear slips down Sheona’s cheek.
I grip Tavish’s ornamental knife as best I can manage amidst its inlays and ridges and tackle Malloch from behind. The blade slides easily between their ribs. With my free hand, I clutch at the pistol in their hands.
They react sluggishly, caught between a gasp and a shudder. Then their training kicks in. They bring their arm down on mine, twisting and shoving with a speed I can barely track. I block their swivel as they try to turn their pistol toward me, and ram down on their already injured wrist. Their gun flies toward the console. They lunge after it. I catch them by the shoulder and stab deep into their side once more.
Sirens blare through the tunnel, a deafening alarm bell that makes my bones shake.
“You have to-to leave.” Sheona sounds like a pale imitation of the fierce bodyguard I know. She holds herself up against the console, her blood coating the ground in a trail between us.
“Not without you.” I latch onto Malloch and slam my knee into the gash I just created, drawing a mangled scream from them as they struggle.
“There’s only one place I’m going, and I don’t want Tavish joining me there till he’s old and grey.” She coughs, a fresh stream of scarlet flowing from the corner of her mouth. Through the blood, she wheezes, “He’ll need you, you ken.”
I want to rebut her—he doesn’t need me, he needs her, too, I could never replace her—but the deep-red pool forming beneath her makes all of that meaningless. Tavish will have me or he will have no one. So hewillhave me, for as long as I can offer that.
“Thank you, Sheona,” I manage, because to sayI’m sorry—to apologize for her limited number of future heartbeats—is to declare that there is something worse to come after that final breath vanishes, and I wish not to believe that for anyone, least of all for her.
Shoving Malloch away, I leap for the half-filled garbage chute. The instant I squash into the mulch, Sheona, shaking and teeth grit, creaks down a second lever. The door descends.
As it closes, I shove the knife back into my belt and reach into my pocket for the breathing device. My fingers find nothing but lint. I grope at the emptiness, my chest filling with a hot, heavy panic that water will soon replace. No, no, it was just—
But through the locked glass I find Malloch half-hunched but holding the glimmering silver of my borrowed breather. Their polished features twist into a smirk, breaking free of their perfect formal mold and bending into something grotesque and bitter. As their smile reaches its peak, their pistol fires, Sheona’s finger on its trigger.
