Page 11 of Odder Still
“She sounds like a lower-city sort, I doubt we’ll see her,” Tavish replies. Before I can finish properly swallowing whatlower-city sortmust mean to an aristocrat whose family owns all the auroras in the region, he taps his cane against the floor, his expression too bright for me to tear down. “Come, then, no time like the present!”
The rain returns to a heavy mist as we cross the courtyard, heading back toward the beach. Sheona stalks one step behind me. Every haunting wave of a flier and gust of the wind and rattle of a shutter feels twice as lonesome now that there are three of us, as though I went from being a ghost in a graveyard to an invading force, a thing that doesn’t belong.
When we reach the beach, I leap from the boardwalk while Tavish and Sheona make their way down its stairs. Tavish’s confident stride looks smaller and clumsier with Sheona at his side. She scoots around him, always one step ahead, one motion away from catching or stopping or redirecting. It slows him down. But he says nothing.
He steals beneath the stairs to strip.
“Damn towns. How did anyone form shift here? Out in the open?” Sheona snorts. “Where are the lockers, the showers, the fucking modesty? It’s shite.”
“I don’t enjoy it any more than you do,” Tavish shouts, then grunts when he bumps into something.
“You chose to come out here.”
“I happen to believe a deal with Greer O’Cain is more important than a clean transformation.”
Another snort leaves Sheona. She digs through her coat and draws forth a little, rubbery half-moon device with a metal front. Silver ignation gleams inside it, pulsing through the workings in a thin stream that casts a faint rainbow glow. She shoves it my way, waggling her hand when I don’t immediately take it. “Put the soft piece in your mouth. It’ll let you breathe.”
I accept the device, wondering if she means for me to do so now or once we’re in the water.
“You still have it?” Tavish steps onto the beach. His toes sink into the sand as he moves slowly on the balls of his feet, a blanket bundled tightly around him.
“It’s handy, isn’t it?” With that, Sheona stalks beneath the stairs herself.
“It was a gift to her spouse,” Tavish explains.
I bounce the thing cautiously along my numb knuckles. “And it’s fine that I use it?”
“I doubt they’re coming back for it.” There’s a second meaning there: I doubt they’re coming back forher.
“Ah.” Despite all I don’t understand of the woman, my heart cracks for this part of Sheona. Perhaps certain people are made to be used and left behind. People like us.
My gaze lands on Lilias’s empty flask still bobbing in the water, each subtle rise and fall a taunt.
A deep-grey seal emerges from under the stairs, her silver-and-gold brooch catching the pale-grey light. Tavish hands his blanket to me and contorts in on himself. The snap of bone and the scratch of skin form a symphony both grotesque and beautiful. He shakes himself as his fur settles. With a whisker wiggle, he heads for the water.
I tuck the blanket into the chest for him and follow the selkies into their sea, a faded Maraheem flier twisting along the beach in my wake.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lose the Lost
I am not only replaced, but also consumed.
Not a shiny, new person, but the old, hollowed through.
The longer I linger, the more I’m eaten away
by each denial and indifferent day.
BACK HOME, THE SEA is warm. On a good day, it calls like a siren song, promising to soak away all worries in gleaming waves of crystalline blue. On a bad one, it assaults the coast, dousing the mangroves in its salt and ravishing the land. But always, always, it’s warm.
My numb feet should not be able to feel the cold any longer, yet the northern sea nips at my toes the moment it sinks through my boots. It bites up my ankles, then freezes into my thighs. By the time it hits my chest, I can barely breathe. Clenching Sheona’s device between my teeth, I hope for the best. I dive.
Ice floods my veins. I shake from the inside out, then back in again, as though my shivering reverberates into something greater with each tremble. My chest burns. I stop myself from shooting to the surface and gasp into Sheona’s device. Air floods my lungs. One breath at a time, I grow accustomed to the sensation.
I swim after Sheona’s and Tavish’s elegant seal forms, waiting for my body to acclimate to the chill, but the shivers only grow worse. For once, I wish for the parasite’s warmth.Gods, you could at least be a little bit useful while you’re killing me.
In response, the parasite heats back to life and yanks a memory to the forefront of my mind: me three years ago, maybe four, attempting to remove a pair of leeches from a jaguar’s leg as it twists and snarls, snapping at them anxiously itself.‘Calm down, you fool. It’s not killing you.’
