Chapter Fourteen – Osric
Chapter Fourteen
Osric
I stand at the bottom of the stairs, car keys in hand. My control is nearly gone.
The car is already loaded. I did it while they were upstairs, arguing and packing. Water, money, and travel supplies.
I keep my eyes glued to the door and wait.
Esme comes down first, carrying her heavy bag, and Darina follows a step behind with hers. Darina is quiet. Her jaw is set, her shoulders are drawn in, and she keeps looking between me and Esme, though she doesn’t say anything.
Esme is far from quiet, though.
“You want us gone, so let’s do this,” she says. “I packed. I’m not going to stand here and ask you to keep me. It’s embarrassing enough that I had to ask once, and you rejected me so hard that you nearly pushed me to the floor.”
At that, Darina shoots her a concerned glance. I grit my teeth and reach out for their bags, throw them in the back, then motion for them to get in.
“You don’t get to be the wounded one,” Esme says as she settles in the back seat. “You’re the one throwing us out.”
Her anger should make this easier. It does the opposite.
Her eyes are bright and furious, too proud to beg, too upset to be quiet about it.
Part of me wants to laugh, and part of me wants to close the distance between us and shut her up with a kiss.
I do neither. I get into the front seat and start the car while I hear her huff at my back.
Nim watches from the shaded ledge above the door. She doesn’t come down.
I check the sky, curse under my breath, but keep driving.
The light has gone flat and coppery, the color that announces a storm.
The heat is too still. There’s no wind moving through the trees, and the cliffs around Haara stand out sharp and hard against the pale ground.
Low on the horizon, there’s a smear of black where the sky should be clear.
Neither of the women notices. The signs mean nothing to them.
I tell myself we can reach the lower terraces before it breaks. We have to, because I can’t have Esme in the house for an hour longer. I won’t survive another night locked in my room when she’s down the corridor.
For a while, the road is clean. Dust curls up behind the wheels and drifts sideways, the thornbrush along the shoulder bends in small, nervous movements, first in one direction, then in another.
But soon enough, the wind descends hard, the copper light thickens, and the sky darkens.
Ahead of us, across the whole width of the desert, a wall of dust rises and starts to move.
It’s an Otheeran blackstorm.
I push the car harder.
Blackstorms come with the monsoon season. They’re not supposed to come now. This one is early, too early, and it’s either an anomaly or a warning. I don’t really care which, because we’re out in the open with nothing to shelter us.
The front moves quickly. It rolls over the desert and covers the road, the cliffs, and the last of the sky. The first grit reaches my face and stings across my shell. The wind hits the car full on, and I feel the frame groan and shudder.
Darina cries out. Esme grabs the side of the vehicle and holds on.
“What’s happening?” she yells at me. “Osric?”
I pull off the road before the wind can shove us sideways into a wash or roll us over. The car stops with a lurch. Around us, the air is full of dust and thorn fragments, and small pieces of black stone ping and crack against the metal. I can see nothing past the hood.
I get out. The wind nearly takes me off my feet, I brace against it and haul the back door open.
“Under the car,” I say. “Now.”
Esme doesn’t move. She stares at me through the flying grit with her hand still locked on the frame.
I have no room left for her pride.
“The wind can blind you,” I say. “It can strip the skin off you. It can throw a rock hard enough to break bone. The car frame is the only cover we have. Get under it.”
Darina moves first, jumping out of the car without waiting for my help. She drops to her hands and knees, and crawls under, between the wheels. Esme shoots me one last defiant glance, then follows Darina. She smacks my hand away when I reach for her, but once on the ground, she hesitates.
I take her by the arm and guide her under the car, pushing her to the center.
I make sure they’re both where the undercarriage is heaviest, away from the open side where the worst of the wind drives under the car.
Darina curls up against the far wheel with her knees drawn to her chest and her eyes shut.
Esme goes in the middle, and I come in last, on the open side.
I place my body between them and the storm.
It feels like the world is gone, swallowed by chaos.
The car rocks over us. Grit scrapes along the ground and blows under the frame in low, stinging sheets. Something sharp strikes the metal above my head. I hear a hard crack, then another. The air is dry and hot.
“It’s a blackstorm,” I say, loud enough so they can hear me. “A monsoon windfront. Either the season started early, or it could be just one bad storm.”
Esme presses into me. She’s shaking, and she turns into my side and pushes closer.
I want to move her off, but she whimpers, and I can’t do it.
I can’t push her away now. Every rule I have set for myself requires space between us, but there’s no space here, there’s only her weight against my chest, and her breath against my shell.
She’s frightened, and protecting her is what I’m for. It’s my fault she’s out here.
I wrap one arm around her, and when she doesn’t protest, I wrap the other. My tail comes forward on its own and curls around both of them, tighter around Esme, closing off the gap where the grit blows under the frame, so it doesn’t reach her face.
She freezes against me. Then she looks down, where my tail holds her around the waist, the stinger at the end of it close to her ribs.
She knows what I am, even if she doesn’t know that the sting is part of the mating ritual.
I’ve read the guide myself, and I know it leaves that piece of information out.
On purpose. Still, she knows that I’m venomous and one careless graze of the sharp point across her skin could kill her.
She should be afraid. She has every reason in the world to pull away from me.
She doesn’t. Instead, she relaxes.
The clicking starts in my throat. I crush it before it can build.
I feel her go tense against me for half a breath, then she settles again.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t look at her.
If I look at her now, pressed to me, trusting me, relaxing in the grip of the thing that could end her, I don’t know if I’ll survive it.
So, I keep my eyes closed, keep still, and let the storm rage over us.
Her hands come up to touch my face. Her palms are cool where everything in me runs hot.
She’s gentle. It feels like tenderness, but I don’t let myself think too hard, because I don’t know what she’s thinking, and I can’t afford to be wrong about it.
I don’t open my eyes to look at her. I revel in the feel of her hands, and the careful way in which she holds my face, and memorize this moment.
We stay like that until the worst of it passes.
The wind calms down, and the strikes against the car grow further apart. The rain doesn’t come. The storm moves north.
I pull away from her, and she reluctantly lets me go.
I come out from under the car, into the settling dust. I check the vehicle, the road, and the sky.
The car is battered. Grit has scoured the paint, and a crack runs across one of the lamps, but the wheels are sound, and the frame held.
The stormfront has moved past us toward the cliffs. The road is perfectly passable.
“You can come out now,” I say.
The women crawl out, holding onto each other. They’re disheveled, dirty, shaking.
“Get back in,” I say. “We can still reach the city.”
Esme pulls free of Darina’s grip, straightens her back and smooths down her messy hair. She fixes me with an intense gaze and stomps her foot. Literally… stomps her foot.
“No,” she says. “I’m not leaving.”
“Get in the car,” I sigh.
“I changed my mind. Take us back home.”
“No.”
“You don’t get to decide.” She is nearly shouting now. “I won’t be shoved through a portal because you’re too frightened to tell me the truth. Because there’s more to it, isn’t it?”
The last of my control dissolves.
I close the distance between us and take her by the arm. It’s a gentle hold, careful, only enough to let her know I’m not playing this game.
“You don’t understand,” I say in a low voice. “If you stay, you’re as good as dead.”