Page 49 of Odder Still
Her words twist up my heart, trying to find a place to take root. But they’re met with only the hard velvet of a dislocated aurora. I grant her a single shrug. “You hurt the Murk.”
Lilias opens her mouth, but all I hear is the squelch of her boot into my dying caiman. When I yank her to her feet, all I feel is the fading heartbeat of every swamp-born creature she didn’t find worth sparing, and when I bind her wrists tighter, all I smell is the innocent blood she’s spilled to reach this point. But it doesn’t quite cover the shuffling coming from the bedroom, or the way Lilias stiffens, the color leaving her face.
“Please,” she whispers.
I want to reply that whatever she’s asking of me, she won’t receive it. Then, the bedroom door swings open a little farther. A small boy steps out, clutching a wooden cow in one arm, a tattered blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His muss of orange curls nearly covers his bright green eyes as his gaze flows over us, brow ever tightening.
He lifts his free hand, almost losing his blanket in the process, and signs a familiar word, “Mama?”
The motion tingles in my fingers, so close to the sign I’d used as a child. This time it’s not warmth that travels up my arm, but a prickle of pain that digs itself into my chest.
Lilias jerks against the cords on her wrists, and she mouths a word:noor maybego.
But the child steps closer, watching my pistol with such confusion that I can’t imagine what Lilias must have told him about the weapons. He slips his little cow figurine into a pocket in his oversized bed shirt to make use of both hands. His signs stray from the dialect the colonists of the South picked up from the Murk, but I catch his meaning well enough: “Mama, okay?”
The pistol weighs more and more the longer I hold it.
“Ruby, what is it?” Tavish asks.
“A child.” The word rubs wrong against my throat. “I think he’s deaf.”
“If you touch him…” Lilias’s threat sweeps like a miasma from her quivering lips. Within her weakness, her desperation, her obvious, terrifying love, I have never been more afraid of her.
I take a step back, not daring to lower my pistol even if I don’t dare fire it either. A knock at the metal door reverberates through the space, tearing my gaze toward the stairwell.
Lilias crashes into me. Her forehead hits the underside of my chin with a crack that sends stars across my vision, and the pistol flies from my grip. It skitters along the floor, flickering in and out of view as it passes under a row of chairs and finally comes to a stop beneath the sofa nearest the bedroom door.
As I latch my arms around Lilias’s shoulder, fighting to keep her in place without accidentally driving Tavish’s knife into her arm, the pounding at the entrance grows stronger.
“If those are the guards—” Tavish starts.
A gruff voice through the door cuts him short, muffled by the metal. “Lilias! You going to let us in or not? The streets are crawling.”
“Get the spare, dammit,” Lilias shouts. “The aurora’s here!”
I punch her across the jaw. She totters on her bound feet, and another hit sends her sprawling. Her plaid shirt lies crooked over her heaving chest when she sits up, the shine of her crab-shaped brooch peeking beneath her collar. She knows better than to ignore an attacker while she’s down, yet her attention flies to the gap between the chairs, fixing on her son. My heart jolts with the remembered ache of a boy watching his mother in pain.
But the child looks oblivious. He sits on his knees, the fluff of his hair shielding him from the sight of us as he reaches beneath a sofa. And draws out the fallen pistol.
The world turns glacial, freezing us in a quiet so complete I can hear every soft brush of the little boy’s fingers on the pistol’s metal. He cups the base of the barrel, twisting it toward himself as though inspecting a new toy—a toy his mother’s been keeping locked away. His nails tap the trigger, slipping over the sides without pulling it. Each beat of my heart breaks me anew, repeating my mother’s death in reverse.
The sight holds me in place as though a vine connects me to the gun, its thorns growing through the edges of my eyes. I have to help, but my bones lock, the parasite’s warmth not making it past the cold horror in my muscles. With the prickling agony of rending flesh, I move my hands.
“That will hurt you,” I sign, my usually fluid motions shaking. “Set it down. You have to set it down.”
The child notices my movements and lifts his head from the gun. He fumbles it in his grip. Each centimeter his little hands slip around the barrel takes a thousand years and half a heartbeat.
A sound not humanoid, not even animal, leaves Lilias, breaching her like a void coming open. She kicks the back of my calves. As I fall, she dives onto my knife, haphazardly cutting her wrist bindings across it in mid-roll. Blood rises in a line up her forearm, but she plunges onward, crashing over a stool and lunging for her son. Her hands clamp to the barrel of his gun, yanking its aim away from his stubby legs in the same instant his fingers catch on its trigger. It fires.
The explosion hits me late, a distant blast I can’t quite hear, then an endless tinging over silence. Lilias’s eyes widen. Blood pours from her left hand, streaming from the spot two of her fingers should have been, and angry burns sear up her palms. Pain peels itself in ribbons across her face, the sort of shock-silted agony that coils deep and reemerges eternally.
Her son shakes, but besides the red sprinkles on his bed shirt, he looks untouched.
Somehow Lilias pushes through her anguish and takes the pistol from her son’s trembling hands. She scoops him up, burying her face in his messy hair, staining his back with streams of scarlet as she clutches him. A sob leaves her, wet and relieved. For one blessed moment, the scene is almost peaceful. Tavish even leans out from his cover between a cabinet and the living room windows.
Then, a key rattles against the downstairs lock.
Lilias scrambles into the bedroom with her son. He vanishes behind the metal wall, and she reappears with the pistol, her hold on it precarious. I jerk back into the kitchen as she fires. Her bullet ricochets near my feet. Across the living room, Tavish folds himself into what little cover he can, the window at his back.
