9. Chapter 9
Chapter 9
I took my time in the bath. My stomach was in knots. The Raven hadn’t seemed like the kind of man that would issue warnings just to hear his own voice. There was something about the way his jaw ticked when he said it that made me think that my games were going to have consequences that I had not factored in.
In Detroit, my foul mouth and biting sarcasm could get me beat down and, in the most extreme cases, maybe shot. I’d never actually seen a shooting, though, despite the city’s reputation, so the odds were incredibly low I’d be shot. Here, in this twisted place, though, those odds seemed skewed. In Detroit, you couldn’t kidnap someone off the streets and mutilate them into your plaything. You couldn’t pull a sword on someone in a bathroom and walk away so easily.
Memories of news segments about human trafficking and people going missing all over the country flashed in my mind. Okay, maybe you could. I was starting to wonder if all the people who had been snatched off the street were as easy to snatch as I had been or if I was just incredibly dim witted.
I lingered in the bath, picking at a copper screw that was coming loose at the edge of the tub until I could pry it free.
“Just have to survive. Just survive,” I whispered to the screw as I dug into my foreign pearl-gold skin with it, below my hip at the meat of my thigh. Soft white cyclamen bloomed in the milky water as I dug in. “You’ve been here for less than three days. You figured a way out of the Blukman house. You’ll figure your way out of this. ”
The Blukmans had wanted me to be someone I never would be. Quiet, chaste, Christian, and subservient. It wasn’t the house where I had received the worst beatings, neglect, or work. It was the place where I felt the most suffocated, though. I was a shitty, snot-nosed fourteen-year-old girl with an attitude that wouldn’t quit, but I had never felt so rejected for who I was, and it had been mental torture.
It took me four months to get taken out of the Blukman house, and I burned it down on the way out, too, even if the match was only figurative. I felt bad later in life for the lies I had to tell to get out of there, but it was them or me, and I would always choose me. Long after the self-inflicted wounds I pinned on an alleged exorcism had healed, the investigation had ended, and I was safely languishing in another miserable place. I sat awake, thinking about what I had done. But I always came back to Rule #15. Even when that made me a bad person, I would always choose me.
At the end of the day, that was all I had—me. Rule #15: Always choose you.
My delaying of the inevitable did not go unnoticed, and The Raven’s back appeared at the door. “You’re stalling. Don’t make me drag you from the bath, Cricket.”
His tone was soft, a hint of regret coloring the corners.
“You’re giving a daoire privacy? Cute.”
Satisfied with the twenty-one carved into my thigh, I stood, letting the water flush down the little bits of milky golden blood still leaking from it. Its sting would remind me and center me as I moved through the madness of this realm. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. In this one thing, I was me, and my body reflected that. It wasn’t enough, and seeing it carved into my skin made me itch to take the screw to more of my body so I could, once more, be in a shell I had control of.
“It’s not much, but it’s what I can give.”
It was a rumbled whisper. I barely caught it as he disappeared beyond the massive wooden door.
I wanted to shout back at him, yell at him, and start a fight so that I could hold what was coming at bay, but that wouldn’t work. The only thing to do now was to just survive it .
The woman who joined me was not a daoire—or at least she hadn’t been altered as heavily as the rest of us in the warrens. Only the tips of her ears and her eyes gave anything away. Her eyes were moons in a sea of white, pockmarked and glowing like a silver moon hanging amid the clouds. I watched her as she moved around the room, graceful as a cat on grass.
“You should come out of that before the water gets cold.”
Her voice was a soft mist creeping along a deep winter’s night-swallowed garden.
When she began to dress me, she hummed softly, her touch cool and refreshing after the heat of the bath. “I’m Luna.”
“Of course you are.” Creativity in naming their daora was not the strong suit of the Fae. “I’m Cricket.”
“Like the bug?”
I chuckled. “Yes, like the bug.”
She scrunched up her nose as she did up the laces of the bodice of a green gown. “Are you going to ask His Majesty for a new name?”
I tilted my head to catch her moonlit gaze. “I didn’t know that was an option. Wouldn’t that get confusing?”
She shrugged, a simple roll of her shoulder. “Names we share with others are like underclothes here. Today, I am Luna. Tomorrow, I might be Star. The day after that, I could be Frost. Names matter little if they are just what you are called.”
I hummed in thought as I considered her words. “No. I don’t think I will. It has meaning to me.”
“Then, hold on to it tight. Don’t let them take it away from you. They’ll take everything else.”
When she finished braiding my hair, we both sighed, and I squared my shoulders.
“Before you go, Cricket, you should know that the King enjoys the hunt. If you can engage him in a game, do it.”
She was shooing me away before I could ask her what she meant. And I didn’t have a chance to consider it further, as I was being marched down another hallway, this one lavishly adorned .
The kin’tha followed at my ankle, long tail swishing with annoyance at having to dodge the long skirt of the gown. The Raven was at my other side, his palm resting on the pommel of his sword and his eyes locked ahead of us. He said nothing, and I felt like I was marching in my own funeral procession.
I secretly pressed my thumb into the aching wound at my thigh, trying to keep my heart from racing out of my throat.
When we stopped before an intricately carved set of double doors, he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. It was the same soft exhale he had made with the Laundress, not a breath of resignation so much as one of preparation but one to settle his body. I could imagine him with a gun pressed to his shoulder making the same exhale.
It was one I had made throughout my life. It was what calmed me whenever I walked into one of the foster homes I lived in. I knew that, no matter where I was, it would always be the same. It would be the feeling of needing to wash away my expectations and hope to return to an empty state, devoid of any emotion. There was no other way to survive a foster home but to be completely without any sort of need or desire. Foster homes were not the places you went to be held, nurtured, or to flourish. It was where you went when there was no other sanctuary for you, and it was your last chance at survival.
Many kids I had brushed with turned to the streets instead of the revolving door of deprivation. There were some homes out there that were not like that, where some foster parents were in it for all the right reasons. I had encountered only two of them in eighteen years, but I am sure there had to be more. If my shit luck let me encounter a pair of them, then there had to be more than that.
But those types of foster parents were the fairy tales we foster kids told ourselves at night to help us sleep. They were the fairy godmother that swept in to kiss your scraped knee when the cut was bone deep and resided somewhere between your stomach and that hunk of stone you’d let collect in your chest.
I imagined they were the El Dorado of parents. Instead of throwing yourself against the brick wall every few months to crack your skull open against the hopelessness, it was easier to make your own family on the streets. I understood them. I understood on a cellular level what it was like to need to find something stable. We all craved that, especially those of us who were in and out of the foster system.
I felt bad for the kids yanked between hope and the system to stay with family members. I had never had the same experience. According to my file, I had been abandoned at birth, but I had seen the haunted, wide-eyed stares of the kids who were back in the system when they had just spent two weeks at a family member’s house. The shell shock was one that I didn’t wish even on the prick standing next to me. To have that ripped away from you was true evil.
I had brushed with true evil, so whatever was behind the carved oak doors, I could deal with, too.
We were both stalling, staring at the intricate woodland scene that had been painstakingly etched into the doors. We had to move forward eventually, though. We couldn’t stand here and hope to grow moss before someone noticed us.
I looked up to him and watched as the muscle at the back of his jaw ticked in time to the slamming of my heartbeat. We both took two more deep breaths and then he slapped his massive hand against the wood and pushed it open.