Page 7 of Odder Still
Tavish makes a sound that’s almost a scoff if not for the little quaver at the end. His fingers tremble as he adjusts his coat, accidentally leaving the blood he picked up from the dead poacher smudged on one sleeve. “Please do explain how youaccidentallykill multiple people on a beach?”
“I don’t—” The words catch in my throat, rough and tight.
I can’t tell him the parasite made me do it, not for a million tiny reasons. It sounds impossible, should be impossible—he can’t even see the thing in my neck. I have no idea how he’ll react to it, this man whose family has collected every aurora and brutally killed the animals affected by their rainbow glow. I need time to match his perfectly pointed language with shrewd explanations of my own, but right now, all I have are blood smears and panic. My red-stained hands shake. I shove them into the water.
The orca gives a series of angry, hissing clicks as it attempts to twist free of the remaining netting, nearly swinging its tail into Tavish in the process. A new memory hits me, this one of my raised hand stopping my crocodilian, Sheila, from turning a trespasser into a snack, and with the line between my own goals and the parasite’s so blurred, I don’t know which of us grabs hold of it first.
“Whoa, whoa!” I force myself to project a feeling of calm despite the tension still rattling through me as I place a palm on the whale’s side.
It settles beneath my touch.
“That’s it, friend,” I coo, pulling back rope and net until it can roll itself freely into the shallows. The momentary distraction helps a little, but it can’t give life back to the bodies around me. It can’t fix the mistakes of this day, this month, this lifetime. There’s one thing I can do though.
I trudge soundlessly onto the sand. As I pass Tavish, I slip my hand over his wrist. He jerks away, looking more panicked than the mere startles my silent presence has inflicted on him already. I press his brooch quickly into his palm, and I let him go. “I’m sorry.”
Tavish’s expression loosens, and though there’s worry in the twitch of his lips and the shallow, tight way he draws breath, he almost smiles. “You are forgiven, this time.” There’s an edge to his words. His mercy is finite, breakable. He’s wiped my slate clean only so he might judge me afresh. Or leave me behind.
“I have questions still, but I don’t suspect you’ll want to answer them now.” I drop onto the sand.
“Because you’re a murderer? Ah, my apologies, an accidental killer.” With his cane tapping my legs, he steps around me with ease. Then he lowers himself, gracefully, to the ground at my side. His lips quirk. “Now I also ken you’re either a fool or a schemer.”
I can’t quite contain my surprise. “I’m what? Why?”
“You just handed me the one thing you could have bargained answers for.” He gives his brooch a small wiggle before pinning it to the collar of his shirt. “A schemer might give it in order to grant me a false sense of control, and a fool because they don’t understand its importance. Though you… Perhaps you’re a third option.”
I’ve lived beneath the heel of a boot long enough to sense whatever miniscule power I had left slip away. Of Tavish’s list, he is certainly the schemer, twisting every vulnerability into a shield. It’s intoxicating in its genius and distressing in its triumph. “Tell me, then, what am I?”
“A man on the verge of collapse.”
A schemer indeed, making me trust him more with every moment. “On the verge? I’m alone, very far from the only place I’ve ever known, with nothing to my name and no way to return.” I stop myself short of mentioning the parasite in my neck. I’ll have to tell someone about that, whether him or another member of Findlay Inc. But not yet. “I’ve seen death, particularly as of late, but I’ve never killed…”
The shudder that runs through me resonates between the parasite and myself. It snaps,‘You’ll hurt yourself.’
Impossible, silt-breathing creep.
Tavish stares out to sea, his fingers fiddling with his brooch. Finally, he lifts one hand and finds my shoulder, squeezing it once before dropping his arm. “Sounds to me like some real shite.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
After another pause, he laughs. “I highly doubt my meeting will take place, seeing as there are corpses strewn across the site. So, it seems I have more time for you after all.” By his smirk, he must be having far too much fun with this. Damn scheming aristocrat.
Still, I grimace. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long shot to start with.” He slaps his palms together and stands. “I’ll have someone collect these bodies later. I should even be able to convince the right authorities to excuse away their very obvious murder wounds. I assume there are obvious murder wounds?” There’s a tinge to his voice, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s hoping not for that answer, but for the one I never gave him earlier. The one against my neck.
I can’t bring myself to tell him yet, not with their bodies still floating in the surf. “I’ll pull them onto the beach.”
He makes a dismissive sound.
I lift the first body by the armpits, and his scarf slips from around his throat, revealing a clam-shaped brooch of precious metals. The symbol of wealth strikes me, such a contrast to the dull outfit he and the other poachers wear. I nudge it, and the silver inlay sparkles, a faint glow rising from it, remarkably like an ignit.
I glance back at the poachers’ boats, their rainbow-gashed victims decomposing on one of their decks. Lilias’s flask floats between the two burial grounds. Beyond the waves, the orca leaps and twists, a blur of color against the grey morning sky.
“The poachers said they were killing the creatures for something called ignation?” I ask as I drag the body onto the beach.
“Our local fuel source.”
I pause. “Another term for ignits, then?”
