Page 88 of Odder Still
He laughs. “And always you, forever standing in my way.”
“Until death,” she says, and lifts her stolen gun. Without a twitch or a flinch or even a tightening of the brow, like she has played this out in her dreams, she pulls the trigger.
It only clicks.
Raghnaid Findlay, owner of the auroras, the most powerful woman in the North, looks at her weapon with the stunned expression of someone who has never had to number their life in bullets before. I almost laugh, but the sudden inhale makes my head spin.
Raghnaid drops the gun and launches herself at Lachlan, the curls of her dress waving behind her. They tumble like a pair of jaguars, rolling and crashing, the vials of my silvery blood pinched between them. As they come to a stop beside the aurora tank, Raghnaid’s hand slides beneath it. She draws out the scientist’s fallen eruptstone-tipped knife and plunges it into Lachlan’s chest.
A little shudder goes through them both. Lachlan gasps as his wife pulls the blade back out. Gurgles of dark crimson seep through his shirt. A maniacal sound bubbles from him as he touches it. Raghnaid’s grip tightens around her knife, but when he reaches for her, she doesn’t stab again. He cups the side of her face. She jerks back, leaving streaks of red running down her cheek, and as she does, her gaze catches on the vials of my distilled blood—on the cracks now running through them. Their iridescent light spills onto Lachlan’s stomach.
Panic takes Raghnaid. She clutches at the fabric. “No. No, it can’t—”
“Mother?” Tavish shouts, half a king and half a child. Or, perhaps, all a king, now that the old king is dying. Which he doesn’t know. But the way his chest quivers, he must guess.
If he stays here, he’ll share his father’s fate, one way or another. On the black-and-white security screens, more blood spills in the form of a burst of dark grey out the back of Greer’s head as a small rebel band rounds on the company heads. But the thought of getting past Raghnaid and the rebels both—of just crossing the room—makes my head spin.
“Tavish?” I whisper.
His head whips toward me. “I’m here,” he says, so softly that it seems his diamond voice is only for me. Slowly, he moves in my direction.
As he does, my parasite drags our attention back to Lachlan so fiercely that it nearly drops us to our knees as it slams me with its view of the world, colors taking on a silvery haze. Lachlan’s chest heaves. The distilled blood soaked across it glows, the shine burning to black behind my eyes. It twists around his gash like a curious dog. Then, it dives in.
It splits into a hundred threads as it winds through him beneath the veil of his skin, like the light and dark through the auroras or the backlit pictures of my parasite through me. His back arches in a soundless scream, and the cords within him thrum.
Raghnaid curses and scrambles away, still clutching the knife. Her back hits the stairs.
Pained wails rise from the ignation mutants. Through my parasite’s vision, I see the iridescent-lined blackness that flows through them, turning into those ghastly splotches of color where it brushes against their skin. Each strand within the mutants vibrates like an instrument being plucked.
The threads of my distilled blood vibrate in Lachlan, too, with each silent chord mirrored by the mutants a moment later: his pain, his death, played right into their souls through some kind of other-dimensional resonance. Not-Jean catches the chords with the most precision, echoing his being like they’re one and the same. She clutches at her chest just where Lachlan’s wound sits, her eyes pinched shut and her body stiff.
There is something terribly and utterly wrong about all of this—wrong in a way my parasite cannot explain and I cannot understand but can still feel, aching, blistering, overwhelming.
Lachlan’s shuddering chest heaves a final time, then releases. His threads fray at the edges, curling into nothingness within him, until he is a husk again. A corpse. The room goes silent, each earsplitting howl and tragic whimper cut out as the mutants cease echoing his emotions.
Tavish stalls, halfway between the center of the lab and where I stand at the table. “Rubem?” he whispers again.
But his soft words are cut into by another sound: the slice of Raghnaid’s eruptstone-tipped knife and her sharp, breathless muttering like the chink of diamond on diamond.
“I will… not lose,” she snarls.
She stands at the top of the aurora tank’s stairs, tendrils of glittering black dripping from her mouth as dark, thick, rainbow-laced lines work their way down her chin and across her throat, diving beneath her strings of pearls. Her irises turn a haunting array of colors against her whites. Her lips turn black.
Suddenly, the aurora within Raghnaid goes taut, stopping its progression. Her muscles strain as though she’s forcing her will upon the creature. It rattles with anger.
I don’t know which of us breaks free of our horror first, my parasite or me, but we have to do something, anything. We step around the table, toward the tank, each stride tunneling our vision further. Through the part of us that isn’t in this body, we reach. But we can’t quite grasp the other aurora’s hand any longer, too much of its consciousness sealed away within Raghnaid’s as they battle.
Threads of their fury and pain resonate through the mutants. The wolves snarl and grate their claws down the glass as the walruses bash their tusks and the cats hiss and leap. Mutated dolphins and sharks pound themselves against the translucent lab floor. The whole building trembles as something larger and stronger crashes into it. An alarm blares, a red light flashing above the ignation mutants’ cages. One by one, their doors slide open.
The mutants burst out, some ramming into each other with tooth and claw as others smash through shelves and scratch at the glass floor tiles as though they might tear the eyes from the mutated dolphins that snap at them from below. Through the howls and crashes, Tavish doesn’t notice the emaciated bear loping toward him, doesn’t feel its presence in his chest the way my parasite and I do, its rage almost as sharp as its teeth.
We tuck our body into a protective nook between the table and one of the lab machines and focus our attention on the bear, calling to it the way we did the orca. The strain of it aches in our bones the moment we do so, feeding off our limited strength. But the rhythm of the bear’s threads shifts to match our own. It shies away from Tavish, circling him and snarling at the other ignation mutants.
A hot, wet line drips from my nose. My parasite wipes it off. We call to Tavish, but he turns away from us. We try to step toward him. I stumble, and my parasite catches us on the table.
Our attention slips to the security screens where a figure appears in the largest of them: Lilias, ignit peeking through her satchel as she wavers alone in the tower hallway. I feel just a hint of its energy already. She must be right above us. Fear vibrates through me, reflected off the bear protecting Tavish. It cowers away from a rampaging wolf, and I force myself to refocus.
The mutants slam their ignation-strengthened bodies into the lab, and an ominous crunching resounds through the ceiling. The room jerks to one side, throwing me against the table. Supplies spill out of their containment, and the eruptstone-tipped knife clatters across the floor. The mutants slide and skid with a chorus of screeching as the ceiling grinds like metal coming apart. Raghnaid seems not to notice.
