Page 105 of Rule the Night
My gramps reached for his pipe and started packing it with cherry tobacco. “Shivved in the yard this morning.”
“Any details on why it happened?”
“Are there ever?”
This wasn’t the first time Whit had been sick or wounded in prison. It was a contained war zone where the inmates — and the guards for that matter — were so bored that the only way they could stay sane was to nurse a series of imaginary grievances and an endless string of interpersonal drama.
Whit had been stabbed before. He’d also been poisoned and beaten to within an inch of his life, the latter more than once.
“Will he be okay?”
“They think so.” My gramps paused to light the tobacco in his pipe, then took a puff to get it going. He exhaled the scent of my childhood and for a split second, Whit and I were running around the living room, arguing over who got control of the remote while my grams came after us both with a wooden spoon. “Came close to his spleen.”
“Did they get the guy who did it?”
“There were two of them from the sound of it. Got them in the shu.”
“Shu” stood for “solitary confinement unit,” one of many entries in the every-expanding Things I Wish I Didn’t Know file in my head.
“Well, that’s good at least. Can we see him?”
“Not until he’s stable. Sunday maybe.”
My grandparents made the hour drive to visit Whit every Thursday and Sunday. I couldn’t say the same — it had been over a month since I’d seen him — but I would visit as soon as he was well enough.
“Who’s the girl?” my gramps asked. “She’s pretty.”
“She’s more than that,” I said before I could think better of it.
He studied my face, his eyes lit with understanding. “Ah, it’s like that.”
He and my grams were the only people who could make me squirm. “It’s not like anything. Not really.”
The corners of his mouth turned up just the slightest in a smirk I recognized well. “If you say so, Hah-nu-nah.”
I smiled at the old nickname. There had been a time when I’d hated it. My friends had nicknames like “wolf” and “hawk.” Who wanted to be a turtle?
But as I’d gotten older I’d come to see the nickname as an honor. In our creation story, Hah-nu-nah was the world turtle, the one who had held the earth on his back. According to the legend, the ocean rose in great waves when he stirred, and earthquakes yawned and devoured when he became restless or violent.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
He shook his head. “Simple, Hah-nu-nah. Hold on to what is good.”
67
MAEVE
It tookme a minute to realize that the reason I felt shy around Poe’s grandma — a small, compact woman with long black hair and Poe’s dark blue eyes — was because I wanted her to like me.
Talk about trouble. It didn’t matter whether she liked me. I would be out of the Butchers’ lives in less than a month.
“You should sit,” she said. “Let me make you tea.”
“I’d prefer to help if that’s okay. I like to make food with my dad but I don’t get to do it very often anymore.”
She smiled. “Is he far away?”
I shook my head. “We’re just all… busy.”
