11 Elle To Exasperate
Elle
To Exasperate
I finish the dark prayers. The ship is consumed, each shudder of the island a testament. I’ve done my part. Mr. Pratterman stands beside me until the newly fueled red light passes across me, blinding me, then he’s gone. Only the howling wind and pings of rain and ice remain.
I’ll tell Liney that the ship was saved. Passed us unharmed. She’ll find nothing on the beach. Then I’ll fulfill the last soul I’m indebted for, and we’ll finally be safe.
My sight remains red-tinged as I open the trapdoor and head down the stairs. The cold doesn’t touch me, yet my muscles ache from the power’s rush. The chalky taste lingers in the back of my mouth. I need sleep. I’ll reassure Liney, undo the damage I had to cause, then rest.
It takes me twice as long as it should to reach the storeroom, between my body’s weakness and the shudders of the island. I wrench the door open. Douglas stands in the doorway. How long has he been waiting?
“What happened up there?” he asks, hurried. Liney was probably crying, and he’s scared her horrible big sister hurt her feelings.
“Nothing,” I mutter.
He doesn’t move out of my way. I don’t walk through him. Douglas and I are in a strange truce, allied from saving Liney earlier. Strange new waters for both of us.
“Your eyes.”
I hate how his features shift from hope to disappointment. It’s not my responsibility to become the person he wants me to be.
“What did you think I was doing?” I ask, flaring at his indignation. There goes our truce. “Checking navigational charts? Performing a shadow puppets show?”
“What was the outcome?” His posture rises to its full height.
I never noticed that he tends to slump. I’m tall for a woman, but he’s a full head taller.
The ruddiness of his large nose and gaunt cheeks nearly makes him look alive.
Except for the light that flashes through him as another strike crosses the sky.
It roars nearly instantly. The storm is truly on top of us now.
“It’s done. It had to be done.”
“We both know—”
“I had to do it!” My voice too loud. Liney can’t find me yelling at no one. “He tricked me.”
I surprise myself at admitting it. We’ve never spoken of Mr. Pratterman. Not directly. I’m breaking all the rules tonight.
Douglas gestures to a crate that once held a few dozen oranges. “Tell me.”
I hesitate. He’s being too nice. Something’s afoot. Could he be on Mr. Pratterman’s side?
He sighs. “We may be here many more years together, girl. Bickering over sins that can’t be undone.” Patience laces each word like delicate needlework. Easily broken. “Or we can help each other.”
I’m not fit for cooperation. Service, sacrifice, slaughter—yes. But this humanity from the man who lost his to me? It burns me harder than the spiral or Pratterman’s kiss. How can Douglas stand the sight of me, his end, let alone want to offer kindness?
I suppose anger can fuel a ghost for only so long.
He was furious in the beginning, after he stopped pleading for his life back and I stopped panicking at the sight of him.
He then tested what he could manipulate in the living world.
I passed off his cabinet door shaking and his creaking footsteps to Liney as the natural rhythms of an old lighthouse.
Douglas cursed my name, in both English and French.
He could drown out Liney on occasion with cutting words that warped into a Québécois accent I half understood at the apex of his anger.
I had to lie to Liney that I had an ear infection once when he tried hollering inches from my ear for hours on end.
While I learned how to operate the lighthouse, he scoffed and scolded my every move.
He called me a treacherous demoness, a self-entitled monster, and a remorseless murderer.
I fought back at first. I called him cowardly, gullible, pathetic. I put my guilt into him. It took all my self-restraint to stop when I’d see Liney coming back from her excursions.
After the first few weeks, I realized it wasn’t a fair fight. He’d lost everything. I had taken it all: his life, his clothes, his knife—even his occupation.
The last time I snapped back in full fury was near the end of December after a spat with Liney.
I was unpacking the goods from my first visit to the mainland.
I hadn’t bought a kind of caper she enjoyed in our old life, and she cried that it would ruin Christmas.
I called her spoiled. She ran out into the forest.
“She’s mourning,” he said. He’d taken a liking to her once he’d realized she wasn’t a conspirator in his murder. She didn’t know.
“What, mourning you? Impossible.” I laughed. “She’s being stubborn. You don’t know her.”
“You’re wrong.” He’d floated around to face me, his translucent figure close enough to touch, his long face crumpled in concern. “She could use a better sister. Someone who can understand her. That her life is—”
Those words, a better sister, drown out the rest of his words.
“You may call me demon, murderer, Devil’s whore if you must.” I listed off each term with my fingers. “But you won’t pretend to know my sister better than I.”
I don’t remember what we said past that. It was all noise and bluster. The particulars mattered little compared to our fury. We stopped only when I realized Liney had gone out into the winter winds without a coat.
That isn’t the same man who stands before me here, offering a seat and a consoling word. There’s no fire in him. He seems tired in his own right. Something—sympathy?—swims in his gaze below the surface. It crests in the creases of his brow.
I sit on the orange box. He sits beside me on air. I spot a trickle of rainwater on the wall nearest me. I’ll fix the leak tomorrow, yet I can’t stop staring at the storm’s intrusion.
“I came down to check on her,” I say. I can’t talk to him outside the context of my sister. She’s our anchor point. Anything else is too much.
“She’s fine,” he promises. He’s tense. Not in the muscles but the soul. This might be the longest we’ve ever spoken kindly to each other.
A weight lifts. If she’s stable, I can breathe. I have a moment to release. Showing my face to her now would cause even more friction between us, since the room is still tinged in red.
“No, she isn’t.” I laugh mirthlessly, a rumble that shakes me harder than it should. “She can’t possibly be fine. Safe I can believe. But not fine.”
Douglas thins his lips.
“What?”
“She’s stronger than you give her credit for.”
I lean back against the shelf behind me, closing my eyes. I was foolish to rush down here before my body cooled down. Another lightning strike makes me see the veins in my eyelids, and a thunderclap shakes the floor.
“You said that he tricked you. This is, I assume, the gentleman you—”
“He’s no gentleman.” I fight the urge to press my fingers to my lips. I can almost see him leaning forward. Smell that mixture of acrid and sweet. “Pratterman.”
Douglas mouths the word to himself. When I open my eyes, his brow is furrowed in thought.
“He was going to take Liney’s soul,” I explain. “He tricked me. I thought I was the only one he had a contract with. He turned my words around.”
Douglas’s gray eyes widen. There’s something there beyond concern, but I can’t parse it.
“I made a new contract,” I continue. “An amendment? I don’t know. To save Liney.”
Douglas’s upper lip twitches, causing his short mustache to quirk. His beard is dense but short, not the archetypal shape for a wickie.
“What did Pratterman get out of the new deal?” He measures his words carefully.
Whatever relief I felt descending from the tower is sucked out at his look of fear.
“I sacrificed the ship, and I must…” I pause to remember the exact wording. It’s key to the infernal riddle maker. “I must sacrifice the next living nonkin that I see. That’s it.”
The fear in him transforms into disbelief. “The killing continues.”
A painful prickle of humiliation washes across my neck, down my spine. I imagine it like the leaking spot in the wall, spilling my storming rage out.
“One more soul. That’s all,” I say in a rush as though it’ll lighten the blow.
“Are you not one more soul?” Douglas puts his head into his hands, gripping his own curls. “How many seconds did you consider his new deal before you agreed to it?”
Very few. I tried. But I’m more hound than detective.
Point me at the problem to run it down to the ground, but don’t leave me clues.
The ship was so close. Liney had to be protected, even if only to save her a short while.
Was that not worth it? Besides. The storm’s the worst I’ve seen yet.
Would the ship have made it to port? Or was it destined to be dashed on the treacherous harbor mouth rocks, wasted and forgotten?
Douglas continues through my silence, head still bowed.
“If you see a sailor die but you aren’t the one to do it, is that a failure?
What if a ship passes tomorrow and you spot the skipper at the helm but can’t reach him in time?
If Liney were to swear herself no longer your sister—would she still count as your kin? ”
Each question is more pointed than the last. It should’ve been him bargaining with Pratterman. He would’ve found a way. No. He wouldn’t have sought him in the first place.
“Pratterman promised—”
Douglas’s gaze turns withering. “Right, I forgot. The Devil plays fair with you, yes? He’d never manipulate you into agreeing to a worse deal than you started with.”
I slump farther down on the orange crate until I’m nearly parallel to the floor.
“What else could I do?” I don’t mean it rhetorically. I’m asking my own victim for advice. “It was either let him threaten Liney’s life for the rest of—”