Page 9 of Odder Still
“Is someone coming?”
I respond by wrapping my arm around his shoulder and pressing a finger to his lips. Something rustles beyond the door. The knob rattles. I hold it closed with my shoulder, quickly checking my stolen pistol for when I pull the trigger on Lilias. There’s no hesitation in the thought, not anymore, nothing but that terrible sound of her kicking my bleeding caiman over and over and over again. The gun clicks as I cock it.
Tavish goes stiff. I scoot away from the door, letting go of him to reach for its handle. He whirls, his cane moving with him. My instincts jerk me back. His cane slams into the pistol. It drops, skittering across the stone.
Tavish flings the door open. “Oi, get lost, did you?”
I try to tackle him, but our stalker vaults through the doorway like a bullet, barreling past him. She launches into me. Her fist collides with my jawline in a crack of pain and a smash of blackness. Heat springs from the parasite, but no haze of anger comes with it, just the subtle sense of determination. Through my blotched vision, I elbow her back. She catches my arm. Twisting her knee beneath mine, she plants her hip to mine and throws me.
As my shoulder hits the stone floor, I roll—straight into my fallen pistol. I grab it as I pop back to my feet and spin, the barrel already aimed. It comes up level to my attacker’s chest. My finger grips the trigger.
I freeze.
Orange hair spills around my attacker’s freckled face, well-muscled build, and fiery gaze; a striking resemblance to Lilias. But this woman—this selkie, her brooch clearly poking through her tight, black cloak—is a little shorter, her snarling lips painted a deep maroon, and her wide eyes curve delicately around fine wrinkles, hooded beneath sloping lids. Her flat nose looks nearly bridgeless as she scowls. Water drips from her hair.
Tavish’s cane hits my side, knocking the wind from my lungs. I barely register the selkie woman as she snatches my pistol out of my hands and knocks me back with a heel to my gut. Suddenly I’m the one staring down a barrel.
My breath returns with an ache, stirring my heart into an uncomfortable rhythm.
“Some fine perimeter scouting that was,” Tavish grumbles. “Did you check for every potential villain but the one right in front of me?”
The woman talks over him, her voice rough and loose compared to his. “Hands up,” she yells at me. “On your knees.”
I’m not even surprised somehow, as though a part of me always figured it would come to this—to me following orders, carried by the tide. I let myself sink, lifting my hands slowly. The movement shifts my shoulders. My loosened scarf slips.
The woman’s brow hitches, and in a shadowy blur, she flips my stolen pistol. Its butt crashes into my temple, sending a wave of pain through me. The world transforms, starry black. My palms hit the stone floor, then my shoulder, and I groan as I lie there, cupping the aching knot with one hand while my place in existence pieces back together.
The woman lays her boot against my neck, just above the parasite’s resting place. Her voice echoes a little in my head as she rambles off without pause. “What’s happened here, Tavish? Who is this? Has he done something to you?”
“Of course not, Sheona, I’m fine.” Tavish reaches for her, so solid and decisive, like he knows she could never hurt him, not even on accident. His fingers find her shoulder. “Look at me, I’m fine, you ken? Rubem means me no harm.”
“This crook?” Sheona presses down with her boot as she says it, the edges of her soles biting uncomfortably into my skin. “Then why’s he has one of your family’s auroras on—in—his neck?”
Through the pressure, I wheeze, “It’s not—”
Sheona’s foot snaps back, landing between my ribs. A flicker of warmth comes off the parasite, so slight I could have imagined it, but it’s my own instincts that make me curl in my knees and cover my face with my arms—reflexes well honed by bands of Murk teenagers shoutingriver-born silt stinkat me and by river-born shopkeepers who gave one look at my warm-toned skin and decided the only way to remove it was to cover the shade in blood. Here I am again, somewhere I don’t belong. Only this time, I can’t simply limp back to no-man’s land.
And with each new pain, the fire that’s driven me this far shrinks a little, the effort needed to stoke it just a smidgeon too great. The parasite lies listless within my neck muscles. Not invested enough, or perhaps just as tired as I.
I am alone. Even surrounded and embedded, I am alone.
Sheona’s foot returns to my neck.
Tavish’s face pinches into something unreadable. “Please,” he says, though it feels like a courtesy not a plea, “even if this is the case, my family is not worth hurting him over.”
Sheona goes still. “Fine.” With the gentleness of a cat awaiting the pounce, she nudges my shoulder. “Tell us, then, wheredidyou get it?”
It’s almost funny how perfectly this moment mirrors the one that started it all: the piercing gaze of a redheaded woman, the constant presence of a gun barrel, the will to protest slowly sinking out of me, leaving only fear and fatigue and the great need for a bottle of wine. Lilias had held the gun that time, still just a nameless phantom, someone I’d ignorantly assumed I could scare off with a few shots to the sky. Someone I hadn’t anticipated would return with friends.
It was her friend’s weapons that turned the tide. They’d already nicked poor Sheila’s leg before I managed to send her into the water beneath our stilt-house, and they continued to track my jaguars—hulking old Diadem, whose back leg had never quite healed after something bigger and meaner tried to tear it off, and little Monsoon, whose mother had vanished the week he was born—like they might shoot both cats just to stop their pacing, the harmless cub alongside the limping elder. It hadn’t been a choice then, not really. I would have done anything to protect my pets. Anything, including joining the people threatening them.
Sheona nudges me again, harder this time.
I cringe. “There was this woman, a selkie, I assume—she has a brooch too. I only know her as Lilias, or by her signed name, a Lily. She came to Manduka in search of ignits and auroras, kept threatening to bring more of her people, to tear apart the jungle, my home, if we didn’t give her what she wanted.”
I had to do it,a part of me cries,I couldn’t sit back and hope she was bluffing, hope she wouldn’t manage it.But Tavish and his companion won’t care about that. They won’t care how I had nothing else, nothing but that one little plot of no-man’s land and the animals who found refuge on it. Or how in taking the aurora for Lilias, I’d betrayed the Murk to appease her. Or how the guilt of that had carved itself into me, yet to scar, much less to fade.
I grit my teeth. “An aurora seemed like the easiest way to be rid of her, but then the creature I collected decided for some dreadful reason that I looked like a viable host and clamped onto me. When Lilias failed to tear it off, she brought it here—scared, I think, that if she was the only other thing around when she killed me for it, that it would latch to her instead.” The cold floor digs through my hips, my shoulder, my limbs, forcing its way into my bones, where it meets a completely different chill: my fear over why the parasite chose me, a sapient creature, so different from anything their kind ever latches onto, and what it means to do with my body if it can gain control of it. “I escaped her this morning and immediately ran into Tavish. I thought, if your people knew more about the auroras, then maybe they could remove it for me.”
