Page 34 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
Dazmine looked at me like I was a pile of Willa’s droppings.
“One, I literally don’t care, and two, never call me Daz again.” It looked like she was about to turn off her lantern and climb back into bed, but she paused long enough to wrinkle her nose at me again. “For God’s sake, you could at least wash your face before you fall asleep.”
My eyes fluttered shut. “Probably,” I muttered.
For a microsecond, the start of a dream tried to tug me away… but then a cold, dripping washcloth was slapping me back awake, with Dazmine’s look of pure contempt staring down at me.
“There. It looks like you have… is thatbloodsplattered all over your cheeks?” After a few shocked blinks, she shook herhead and turned back toward her own bed. “I don’t even want to know—unless you’ve murdered a classmate again or something.”
The tone was sarcastic, but such sorrow edged her voice that as soon as I was done scrubbing my face, I whispered, “It’s not me who killed Fergus. And it wasn’t Jenia either.”
Dazmine twisted back around, her braids flying.
“But you know who did? He’s really…” Her voice wobbled, just for a second. “Fergus is really dead?”
“Yes.” If Coen’skilling that kid was all meclaim was true. My eyes were closing again against my will as I sank my head back into my pillow and let the washcloth drop to the floor.
“Well then you need to tell the Good Council!” Dazmine’s voice seemed to echo from far, far away. “Maybe they’ll bring Jenia back if there’s proof that she didn’t hurt him—”
“No,” I breathed. “They won’t bring her back. The pirates aren’t the good guys, Dazmine, but neither is anyone on the Good Council. No one is good.” Another dream tugged at me. “No one’s good.”
My last thought before drifting away was thatIwanted to be good. But after what I’d done to that Shifter’s fingers, after how quickly I’d resorted to violence without considering any other options…
I didn’t know if it was possible for me to ever be good again.
“Wake up, sleepyhead.”
A little wet nose sniffled against my chin, and I peeled my eyes open to find Willa in my face, sunlight fissuring in through gaps in the vine-smothered window behind her.
“There’s a bird pecking on your window,”she said,“and I don’t have the hissing skills to scare it away. Or the hands to strangle it.”
No sooner had she said it than a sharptap, tap, tapsounded against the glass, and I blinked at the bright blue cotinga visible through a small gap in the foliage curtain. On either side of the room, Emelle and Dazmine’s beds were empty—Dazmine’s crisply made as if she’d never slept in it at all—but Cilia was drooling into her arm across from me, reeking of the same kind of hangover weighingmedown right now. She must have stumbled in last night after I’d passed out.
Moaning, I rolled out of bed and just barely managed to catch myself before crashing to the floor. I dragged my footsteps to the window, opened it a crack, and rubbed my eyes against the whoosh of a warm morning breeze.
“Hello?”
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” The cotinga hopped inside. “Are you Emelle’s friend?”
“Yes.” My heartbeat spiked. “Is she okay? What happened?”
Emelle spent the night with Lander a few times a week, so I hadn’t even thought to worry about her whereabouts, but…
“Oh yes, she’s fine, fine, fine!” cheeped the cotinga. “She’s at the Shape Shifter house. She just asked me to make sure you’d made it safely to your room.”It twitched, fluffing up its feathers. “So did you make it safely to your room?Did you? Did you?”
“Um.” I glanced around at my room. “Yes, I believe I did.”
“Great! I’ll tell her! Bye, bye, bye!”
The cotinga fluttered to Emelle’s bedside table, pecked at the birdfeeder half-filled with various kinds of seeds and nuts, and flapped off again with a happy chirp.
I shut the window, just as Willa scurried up to the ledge where the bird had perched and rolled her beady black eyes.
“I thinkIneed some coffee after hearing that thing talk. Shall we go to the dining hall for some breakfast?”She paused to study me long enough for Cilia to break the silence with a snore. “I’m sure you’re starving after mincing up some good old-fashioned fingertips.”
“Shit.” I groaned into my hands. “Does everyone know?”
“No.” Willa continued to study me. “Nobody besides us mice knows anything. My cousins say the Shifter cried and raged and did some very gross things to himself that involved his good hand… but he didn’t tell another soul.And by the time he passed out, they say he’d regrown them. The fingers, I mean.”
