Page 6 of Odder Still
“What—what do you—are you from the Findlays?” His arms shake and his breath comes in pants, blood smeared across his forehead. “Did they send you to help? We lost half the crew already today. This one was a beast to drag up, but we’ve finally tired it. With an extra hand, we’d have its body returned to Maraheem by midday.”
“You have to stop this.” It’s my voice and my words, but not my emotion or my decision, at least not fully.
“They’re Alasdair’s orders.” He stares at me. “We’re supposed to collect the ignation.”
Ignation?
The orca’s writhing knocks into one of the poachers on the ropes, and the other two hunker down, shouting, “Hurry it up,” and “We can’t hold it much longer!”
The harpoon-blade’s bearer turns back toward the orca. The creature makes no sound as he raises the blade above its neck, but the animal’s endless black eyes bear down on me like a starless night. In the boat beyond it, I glimpse flesh with its same rainbow streaks—the raggedly beheaded corpses of two small sharks and a dolphin.
The squelch of Lilias’s boot against my dear Blossom returns. With it comes more of the parasite’s strange, foreign anger that feels like I’m watching my own temper rise from a distance. I try to calm myself, but the parasite burns against me, grasping at the memory of Lilias’s kick and the fall of flower petals over my mother’s corpse and every other death I’ve witnessed. Like a tsunami, it takes me over.
Tavish approaches. “What is going on here?”
But he’s too late. The parasite’s desperate rage fills me straight to my bones. It crashes through every misgiving I’ve ever had, every self-proclaimed banner of pacifism, and it’s me who feels like rampaging, me who wants it in a way that annihilates all else. It’s me, and it’s not, and it is.
My muscles tighten. And my body moves on its own, leaving my mind to drift an instant behind it as the parasite and I fly at the poacher with the harpoon.
My hands snatch the knife from his belt. His brow lifts, but he turns his larger weapon on me a moment too slowly. I plunge the blade through the side of his neck. My lungs catch at the feeling of the metal slipping through flesh, but my burst of horror is consumed by the parasite’s fury. As I pull back the knife, blood sprays from the man’s gash in torrents. His eyes roll back, and his body drops to the water, the executioner’s axe beside it.
The woman behind him stares at me in shock before releasing a grating shriek that hurts even through the foreign anger. She launches at me. Beneath the parasite’s emotions, I want to run or to apologize, but that burning desire to save the orca is too thick and suffocating not to yield to. Knife already raised, I dodge her swing and I cut across her throat as though my hands have done this a thousand times instead of never. She collapses.
The third poacher drops his rope to reach for his weapon. I spring through the shallows faster than should be possible and wedge my blade through his ribs, angling it into his heart. His blood drips down my hand, hot and slick. Nausea coils through my gut and up my throat, nearly piercing through my haze of unnatural fury.
The final living poacher dives for deeper water. Mid-leap, his body contorts. A torrent of the parasite-like rainbows spills over him as his arms meld into his sides. Brown fur springs along his body. His shirt grows tight, and his pants split around legs that aren’t legs anymore, but fat, furry seal fins.
The orca lunges at him. Its teeth close around his lower half. He barks, the sound turning into a scream as all his human bits reappear in another wave of color, arms and skin and a pair of bloodied hips caught in the orca’s teeth. It chomps down.
The parasite’s hostile anger vanishes in a storm of bile that burns the back of my throat. I stumble. My arms shake, and the knife drops from my fingers, landing in the water with the corpse of the poacher I just killed. ThepersonI just killed.
Killed.
All the other despicable things I’ve done in my life feel small and fragile compared to this. This monstrosity. I’d have liked them to let the orca free, sure. I absolutely didn’t want them dead. But while that anger surged through me, I had felt as though I wanted that, the way I’d wanted Tavish’s brooch, only a thousand times worse.
Tavish slings frazzled questions of “What’s happening?” and “Did they leave?” but the parasite is all I can think about, all I can fear.
“Oh, fuck. Fuck.” I tug at my neck, leaving red smears along my skin as I drive my fingernails into the parasite.
Parasite.
The word closes around my lungs as though the creature is physically weaving itself through them. Maybe it already has, one of its black tendrils wrapping around my chest, through my heart, and the other sliding up my spinal cord. The thought makes me want to tear out my bones.
‘That would be counterproductive.’ The voice of my right-hand man from my month with the cartel rolls through my mind like lyrics sung to the wrong tune, regurgitated with force.
Get out of my fucking head.But it’s a command I have no way to enforce.
In reply, the parasite warms my neck. ‘That would be counterproductive,’ it repeats.
Is that all you can say?I snap back.
My skull pounds like a vicious hangover, and the parasite’s twisted tone comes again, this time dragging up a memory from a few years back: a wine bottle under one hand and beneath the other, a newborn jaguar cub with a twisted paw I’d rescued from a boa. ‘Lie down or you’ll hurt yourself.’
I can’t tell if that’s an answer to my question or a new rebuke. It doesn’t matter, because Tavish interrupts us by storming down the beach, his cane waving like a commanding scepter. It just misses one of the poachers, but then his boot connects. He bends down, feeling the corpse. As his fingers move from fabric to blood, his expression changes.
Slowly, like the building of an avalanche, a shudder slips through him. A breathless “oh” spills from his lips, tight and tumbling. He rises. “I thought it couldn’t possibly…” His diamond-edged voice falters as he transitions from a stoic mask to a disconnected wobble. “You killed my brother’s crew? Oh. Oh, good fuck.”
“No!” It comes as a shout, too caught in the fear still pounding through my chest. I lift my hand toward my mouth, stopping only when I smell the blood drenching it. My stomach turns. “No, I never meant to kill them,” I whisper. “It was all an accident.”
