Page 50 of Odder Still
I cup my hands around my mouth. “I’ll break the glass!”
Tavish’s nose wrinkles. “Rubem—”
But I’m already lugging the stool away from the wall phone. Two sets of feet pound up the stairs, bringing two men with them just in time to see me launch the stool across the room. Lilias’s next bullet whizzes by it as it flies through the spread curtains, past the now open windowpane, and into the air.
“They unlatch,” Tavish says, so flat I nearly choke.
I burst out of the kitchen to a rain of bullets, Lilias’s at my feet and her friends’ zipping around my head, too close for comfort.
“Don’t kill him, he has the aurora!” Lilias’s shriek follows me across the room.
You better not let us die here.
My thought sparks a rush of warmth.
I scoop up Tavish, plunging us both out the window. Tavish screams, but I hold him close, angling my back toward the ground. The parasite digs through the flesh along my shoulders, biting lines of black into my skin. All my better instincts fight against it, but I restrain them, waiting for the ground.
We hit the street so hard the impact sears into my bones, where the parasite consumes it, turning the energy from the fall into a feast for itself. As it devours, it digs. I roll us under the shelter of the brewery’s lower overhang, focusing on blocking the parasite in its tracks. The thought retaliates, as though I’m placing my own fingers in my mouth and biting down. The parasite cringes and goes quiet, not pulling back from the gashes it just made, but not tearing further into me either.
That was the last time.The words are for me, not it. I have to believe them. I have to make them true.
“A little warning in the future, please,” Tavish groans.
“How about we just don’t jump out any more windows.”
I pull him up. He sways and clutches his cane in a death grip. The few locals left on the street watch us with a mixture of dread and curiosity, their gazes darting to the open apartment window. An empty guard’s cart stands a few strides away, and the thrum of another approaches, but the soldiers themselves are nowhere to be seen. Lilias’s friends charge out her front door, both their pistols already aimed at us.
I step in front of Tavish. The black marks now cutting up my arm, over my shoulder, and down one side of my back all ignite in preparation. But before the pair can decide whether to shoot me down, the cart’s troop jogs out of an alley across the way—four of them. Electricity already pulses through their sticks. One drops a bundle of fliers at the sight of us: two assumed felons held up by a pair of ragged lower-city men with polished silver guns that look as though they were stolen straight off the Findlays’ personal security.
“Lower your weapons!” the guard in the lead shouts. One of Lilias’s friends swaps their aim to her. She freezes, but the rest of her team fans out on either side.
I motion vaguely toward the rebels. “They helped kill the Findlays!”
My words only draw two of the guards to us instead.
Tavish digs his fist into my shirt, clutching it like a child, but when he lifts his voice, it cuts in the way only a Findlay’s can. “These people are in defiance of the thirty-ninth statute by bearing projectile weapons within Maraheem without the permitted documentation of a personal bodyguard. For the safety of the city, it’s your duty to arrest them and their supplier, who lives in the apartment above us.” He steps out from behind me, his grip slowly settling. “We are unarmed and persecuted under false pretenses—”
“I have your knife still, princeling,” I whisper, holding it as nonthreateningly as I can manage.
Tavish swallows and starts again. “We arelessarmed and persecuted under false pretenses. Your first commitment is to the well-being of this great city, which is threatened by the very existence of those pistols.”
His words ripple like a physical force through the street. The rebels waver, as though Tavish is a bright light they can’t look directly at, much less aim for. When they turn both their guns on the guards, they’re met with straightened shoulders and buzzing electric sticks. The onlookers creep farther back.
A motorcycle turns the corner behind the guards, compact and agile but with an engine so loud, it seems to beg to be let loose, its silver sides glowing from swirling lines of ignation. A figure in black dismounts. As they pull off their helmet, their bangs resettle around their forehead.
“It’s Malloch again,” I hiss to Tavish.
“We have proof!” he exclaims. He waves for them, delicate as a diamond. “Those rebels are blocking the apartment of the woman who arranged for the murder of—”
Malloch cuts him off with a sound even more powerful than a Findlay voice: the ring of four consecutive bullets. In a row, blood blooms from the guards’ chests. One by one, they drop, sticks clashing across the ground.
Malloch turns to us, bearing an unnerving grin. “Would you look at that? They just dropped dead.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Easy Way Out
Stalled at the crossroad,
