Chapter Sixteen Shea #2
“She is exactly the sort of stimulus we’ve been looking for all this time,” says Egor. “The kind of trigger your father would have—”
“Stop.” Lys’s voice slips out like smoke. He’s not looking at Shea anymore.
A cataclysm , Egor called her. The word reverberates horribly between her ears.
Outside, there’s a new sort of commotion.
The splintering of a door giving way. It starts with a crack.
A second. A third, and the door falls flat, rattling the room and everything inside it.
Asher steps across the threshold, his shotgun at the ready.
On his heels comes Poppy, wide-eyed and tight-lipped.
“Kill him,” orders Lys.
Asher doesn’t move. He stays frozen, sighting Egor down the barrel of his gun.
“What the hell are you waiting for, Thorley?” Lys demands. “An embossed invitation?”
“He’s a civilian,” says Asher.
“This is a terrible time to get selective. Shoot him.”
“He’s unarmed.”
“I don’t care.”
“Lys.” It’s the first word Shea’s managed since she woke. It comes out thick, muddled by the swelling of her tongue. Lys blinks over at her, his jaw wiring tight. “No killing.”
It’s a push. She’s always pushing him. There’s a beat—a single, deadly moment—where this could go either way. Both of them feel it—that familiar precipice, the two of them teetering on its edge. He grimaces, as if the idea of doing as he’s told—of letting Egor live—repulses him. But he listens.
“Bind him,” he orders.
“Happily.” Shouldering his shotgun, Asher reaches for a loop of rope on the wall. “Put your hands behind your back.”
Egor splutters. “This is absurd.”
“His keys are on his belt,” says Lys.
Asher yanks them loose and tosses them to Poppy, who snatches them out of midair. She crosses to the wall where Lys is chained, her attention caught on the numerous lit specimens suspended in embalming fluid. She lingers at the fetus, looking contemplative.
“Take your time, Zahar,” snipes Lys. “I’m comfortable where I am.”
She frowns as she reaches up to unlock his cuffs. “That’s a baby.”
“Is it?” he asks thinly, rubbing his wrists. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re making a mistake,” calls Egor. “You know it as well as I do.”
Lys ignores him, heading toward the cot.
Shea sits on the edge, her feet swinging.
She feels as though she’s slowly resurfacing from some lightless depth, water in her lungs and pressure in her ears.
The lights have crawled into her head. The buzzing rattles her vision, turns the ringing in her ears to a staticky hum. Sick with it, she shuts her eyes.
“Open,” orders Lys, the moment she does. She finds his face an inch from hers, his gaze searching. His touch ghosts along her throat, lingering at her pulse. “Are you okay?”
“You have horns,” she says.
His face closes up like a fist. “It’s temporary. I’ll shave them down.”
“You don’t have to.”
Asher appears at Lys’s side, looking grim. The light clings to him in a way it doesn’t cling to Lys, illuminating him in a lambent cast. “What do you want to do with Van Haut?”
“Leave him here.” Lys coaxes Shea down off the cot. The room wobbles, or else she does, and he catches her just before she falls. They’re laced all together, her arm around his neck, his grip tight against her waist. His voice is a texture. A vibration. “If he gets out, he gets out.”
“And what if he doesn’t?” asks Asher. “He’ll starve.”
Lys’s smile is flat. “Do you know what desanguination is, Thorley?”
“It’s when a body is purposely removed of blood,” says Poppy, answering before anyone else can.
She’s still standing by the shelf, her arms folded conspicuously over the bib of her overalls.
The jar containing the fetus is missing, a dark ring left behind in the wood where it sat.
“It’s a form of bloodletting. Remove too much, the patient dies. ”
“Except we don’t die without blood,” tacks on Lys. “We desiccate.”
“Living corpses,” says Asher. “I’ve seen them, in the holding cells at the garrison.”
Lys makes a face. “I’ll bet you have.”
“I was only trying to help you, Oliver,” calls Egor. “It’s what your mother asked me to do.”
He sits bound on the floor, his arms behind his back and his ankles knotted. At the mention of his mother, Lys’s expression contorts.
“Let him starve,” he says. “We leave at dusk.”
···
Upstairs, they gather in a lamplit room, the dormered windows blacked out with paint. The wind has blown in a storm, and the rain hisses against the roof. The air smells wet and cold.
Still coming back to herself, Shea rests her temple against the wall and takes quick stock of her surroundings.
A bunk bed sits against the wall, a quilted full beneath a narrow twin.
It’s a child’s room, the wall papered in navy stripes, the shelves cluttered with knickknacks—green soldiers and stacked comic books and action figures with the faces worn blank.
A stark, homey opposition to the clinical horrors of the Van Haut basement.
“I’m going to do a sweep of the grounds,” says Asher. “The rest of you should get some sleep while it’s still light.”
“You won’t find anyone,” says Lys. “No one comes out this way if they can avoid it. Van Haut isn’t known for being a good host.”
Poppy sniffles, rubbing at her nose. “That feels like an understatement.”
“What?” asks Lys. “You’re not having a nice time?”
The door drifts shut on Asher’s scoff. In his absence, the room falls quiet. The only sound is the click of the radiator, the steady drill of rain against the glass. Shea feels like she is both light as a feather and heavy as an anvil. She tries to will herself to move and fails.
Poppy has no such trouble. Stifling a yawn, she climbs into the top bunk and collapses, face first, atop the pillow. Above her, a pink prehensile tail curls around the narrow wood of a ceiling joist. Kit’s ghostly face appears, his eyes squinted nearly shut against the lamplight.
“Oh, there you are!” Shea hears Poppy say. “You missed all the excitement.”
Within minutes, her soft snores flood the room. Shea watches, her heartbeat sticky, as Lys drops to his back on the bottom bunk. Awareness crackles between them as he settles into place, his arms crooked behind his head.
He looks like a prince of death, the white of his horns gleaming like opals.
It gives him an oddly fae appearance, like he’s a thousand years old.
She can’t stop herself staring. As if he knows it, his eyes drift to hers.
His gaze is heavy, and she feels it like a physical touch.
She gives an involuntary shiver, that funny underwater haze clinging to everything.
“It’ll wear off,” he says, like he knows just what she’s thinking.
“Maybe.” Her voice is thick. “What’s proprioception?”
His mouth turns down at the corners. “Who knows? Come over here.”
“I don’t think I can. My legs feel like lead.”
“Shea.”
It’s less a push and more of a nudge. She feels it just the same—a compulsion.
A tightening, as if he’s tugging on the other side of a rope.
Willing herself off the wall, she makes her painstaking way onto the bed alongside him.
He holds himself still as she crawls into place, staring up at the top bunk.
Above them, the thin wooden splines are stuffed with baseball cards, glossy placards interspersed with vintage matte.
She feels like she’s crawled into a coffin alongside him.
The air is tight, the space enclosed. They lie in silence and listen to each other breathe.
“The Titan of Terror,” he whispers when her eyelids grow heavy. “The Colossus of Clout.”
She angles her head toward his. “What?”
“Babe Ruth.” He tips his chin toward the planks deckled in cards. “The Great Bambino. Twenty-two seasons, seven hundred fourteen home runs. Not the record but close.”
Directly over his head is a man in blue-striped knickers. He’s squinting into the sun, his wooden bat in mid-swing. The card is bent at one corner, the details sun-spoiled from years of exposure. It looks like the card he carries with him, its corner fingerprinted in blood.
“It hurts,” he says, when the quiet deepens. “Desiccating, I mean. You feel everything.”
A wordless anger sinks its teeth into her. “Did he do that to you? Egor? Did he drain you of blood?”
It’s a while before Lys answers, his voice wry. “?‘There can be no progress nor achievement without sacrifice.’?”
She rolls on her side to face him. “Who said that?”
“Van Haut. Although I think it’s a quote from someone else.”
“It sounds like bullshit.”
His smile is rueful. He still hasn’t looked at her. “Sometimes on the very worst days, I used to list all the baseball stats I could remember. It was a trick my mom taught me, to hold on to myself if I started to feel like I was coming apart.”
She pictures him small and starving, his eyes black all the way through.
It doesn’t fit the image she has of him—the Gravewood Devil, spat out of hell.
King of the runaways, motherless and wild.
She swallows the shard of glass in her throat.
She forces herself to ask the question she’s been turning over since they first came upstairs.
“Is this your bedroom?”
“No.”
“Oh. Because the way Egor talks about you—” She pauses, reconsidering, and then approaches it from a new angle. “It’s just that it seems like maybe a little boy lived here.”
“A little boy did live here,” says Lys. “I occupied it for a while, but it isn’t mine.”
“Whose was it?”
“A miniature Van Haut,” he says. “Insufferable little shit. He used to talk all night.”
Poppy shifts overhead, coils creaking, and they both go quiet until she settles.
“He’s dead now,” adds Lys, offhand.
There’s something raw in the way he says it—something open and bleeding that doesn’t invite further probing. Instead, she asks, “Did you grow up near here?”
“In Pennsylvania?” he clarifies, like he’s never heard anything more horrible in all his life.
“Yeah, in Pennsylvania.”
“No.”
She’s not given the chance to investigate further. The door skids open to admit Asher, his dog tags gleaming and his hair slicked flat by the rain. He casts a hard look in their direction as he shuts the door and locks it. Silence hangs, deep and expectant.
“I call little spoon,” says Lys, puncturing the quiet.
Asher’s gaze shutters. “Toss me a pillow. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“I can take the floor,” says Shea, already sitting up. “I don’t mind.”
“Parker, stay .” Asher barks the order like a commanding officer. She freezes, one leg already off the bed. With a groan, he scrubs a hand through his wet hair, turning it to spikes. “Sorry. Just—throw me a pillow, will you?”
“Put him out of his misery,” says Lys. “Can’t you see he’s having a crisis?”
Shooting Lys as deadly a stare as she can muster, Shea tugs his pillow out from beneath him.
He thumps back onto the mattress with a laugh.
She tosses the pillow to Asher, who swipes it out of the air and gives it a single, firm plump before dropping it to his feet.
With a grunt, he lowers himself to the hardwood.
The floor creaks as he tosses first this way, then that.
Finally, and with a weighted sigh, he flops flat onto his back.
The ensuing silence has a heartbeat. Three of them.
“Sweet dreams, Sunshine,” says Lys.
Asher doesn’t answer.
Not one of them sleeps. Not until dark.