Chapter 13 #2
“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.”
“See,” I muttered. “Knew he could do it.”
But I finally forced myself to meet Willa’s eyes, and found a peculiar blazing expression reflected in them, one that made her whiskers twitch.
My gentle little mouse friend was… was glad I’d done it, I realized with a jolt, glad I’d defended myself in this way.
And that small bit of curdling shame in the pit of my stomach seemed to dissolve.
Willa smiled with her two front teeth.
“Just wash your knife before you cut my cheese with it, okay?”
Half an hour later, after a quick bath and change of clothes (I did, indeed, wash my knife in the bathing chamber sink, thankful that no one else was around to watch the blood swirl down the drain), I made my way down to the dining hall with Willa on my shoulder.
Only a few Wild Whisperers were up so early on the first weekend of the new year, so there wasn’t even a line to the kitchen counter.
After I grabbed a parfait and a side of cheese, I turned to realize I’d missed Rodhi, sitting at a table in the corner all by himself, nursing a mug of coffee as if his life depended on it.
“Hey.” I went over and sat down next to him. “You okay?”
Rodhi jumped, blinking at me rapidly before his face relaxed again. “Oh, hey, darling. Hey, cutie.”
He nodded at Willa, who actually batted her eyelashes at that. I wrinkled my nose at her, and she stuck out her tongue before scurrying down my arm and onto the table to start nibbling at her piece of cheese.
“Yeah, m’alright,” Rodhi said, uncharacteristically oblivious of all this as he sighed into his coffee. “Just had a long night is all.”
“Oh?” Usually when Rodhi said he had a long night, it involved his flask and a couple of girls—or sometimes even boys—and an after-morning glow.
Not now, though. Now he truly did look tired.
I picked at a few blackberries sprinkled over my parfait and said carefully, “I never saw you at Lander’s party.
” Not that I’d been in the right mind to keep track of everyone for the majority of it, but still.
Rodhi made his presence known wherever he went. “Where were you?”
Rodhi’s answer was a little too hasty.
“I had some stuff come up and couldn’t make it.” Before I could so much as raise my eyebrows at him, he turned his earnest expression toward me. “It wasn’t too boring without me there, was it? I mean, I know I’m the life of the party, but hopefully I’ve imparted some of my gregarious wisdom onto—”
He snapped his mouth shut, released his coffee as if it had electrocuted him, scooched his chair back, and… just walked away.
“Uh, Rodhi, what—?”
But I knew before I even turned around. Knew from the slimy, oily presence that had just wormed its way into the dining hall, from the way everyone around me had all jerked their gazes away, as if yanked by puppet strings. And not the Object Summoning kind. The Mind Manipulating kind.
The kind that directed brains instead of bones.
“Hello,” I said stiffly as Kitterfol Lexington sat in Rodhi’s vacant spot. Rodhi himself had already lumbered out the door, and Willa had stopped nibbling her cheese to gape upward with her two front teeth.
“Shoo,” Lexington said to her.
Willa squeaked and ran off, spiraling down one of the legs of the table, her tail flying behind her.
I wanted to punch him in the pockmarked face for that, but I supposed I should be grateful he hadn’t punched her and left her a furry, twitching mess. Yes, it was better that Rodhi and Willa were gone for this.
Lexington didn’t wait for my permission before he turned his cold, pale eyes onto mine and plunged into my mind.
I felt every thought and memory waft to the surface of my mind as he touched them, leaving his slimy residue behind in reverse order: there was me last night, chopping a guy’s fingers off, and the two of us grinding beforehand. There was the black mamba and the sundew and the fire ants.
And then there was him. Steeler. Besting me in the alleyway. Anchoring my wrists over my head.
Take this pill and I won’t bury this memory of us. You can show it to the Good Council—how you nicked me.
Well, Lexington was watching me nick him now. Through a hazy kind of film, I watched the color leak from his face—but only for a second. By the time he pulled himself out of my mind, his sneering composure was back.
“You let him go.”
“Not on purpose, obviously.” I steeled myself to say what I had to say, but Lexington cut me off.
“What did that pill do to you?”
“I don’t know.”
And you know I don’t know, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking. I can’t hide anything from your oily worms.
Lexington’s face twitched once. Before he could lecture me, I continued, “As you heard Steeler say, he’ll be back tomorrow night at the same time to give me another pill, and I can’t… I don’t think I can debilitate him, not by myself. So I need—”
“No.”
Lexington picked up Rodhi’s abandoned mug and drained its contents in one gulp. Then he leaned back in his chair to cross his arms.
I stared at him.
“What?”
“No,” Lexington repeated, his jaw ticking. “We can’t help you.”
I looked around the room to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating this entire conversation. Every Wild Whisperer in here was still craning their necks, forced to look away.
“But the pirate breaches. The attacks. The danger to—”
Lexington wiped his mouth with the edge of his cloak.
“Listen, you idiot girl. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have hired you to perform this task in the first place. But as it is, our leader—” Something flashed in his eyes at that “—well, she is the only woman on this island more powerful than me. Too powerful for me to influence.”
He flexed his fingers, and I suddenly knew, as if the residue of him in my mind had let it slip, that Kitterfol Lexington had tried to take Dyonisia to bed.
And failed. And every time he spied on something intimate, every time he creeped and crawled over someone else’s private moments, he was imagining himself doing those things to her.
The next second, Lexington closed his fingers into a fist and wrenched that residue of himself out of my mind.
“As I was saying,” he said coldly, “our leader believes you are capable all by yourself. And she has ordered for none of us to intervene. You are to bring Coen Steeler to us without help.”
I was sure my face had gone slack from the shock as all thoughts about Lexington’s personal love crisis faded in comparison to this news.
Dyonisia Reeve had ordered the Good Council to… to stay out of this? I’d been so sure I was simply the bait, the temptation to lure Steeler in… but what if I wasn’t? What if this was all just a test?
It’s a thigh sheath. I had the best of my blacksmiths in Belliview tailor it especially for that knife of yours. So that when you do meet up with Coen Steeler, your weapon of choice will already be on you.
And:
A well-aimed blow—perhaps to his undeserving brand… it might hinder his magic as well as his strength.
Was Dyonisia, perhaps, trying to test out her mutilated brand theory with Steeler and me? If so, why couldn’t she just cut up someone else’s brand herself and see what happened? It would be cruel, yes, but… well, she was cruel.
It didn’t make sense for her to use such a serious mission as this one to experiment with the destruction of magic.
Lexington, of course, heard every one of those thoughts as they darted across my mind. And I was sure he felt the accompanying pain throb in the back of my skull, because his lips curled in a hideous smile.
“Whatever her reasoning,” he said, leaning forward again, “I can assure you that she has infinitely more patience than I do. She might be okay with sitting around for another few months and watching you fail miserably, but I am growing bored of you and your cold, empty mind.”
He didn’t say his next words out loud. Those I heard in my head.
Punish yourself.
My hands flew up to my own neck and clamped tight.
I gagged soundlessly, but couldn’t budge them. Couldn’t—
Tighter.
Now my hands pushed in treacherously, digging into my windpipe until bright spots dappled my vision, and everyone was still looking away, and the pain in my head flared with heat.
Tighter.
No, please, no. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t—
“That’s enough.”
Lexington stood with a graceful flourish of his cloak, smiling as I broke into frantic gasps.
This was worse than the almost-drowning incident with the octopus—worse because even my knife, strapped to my thigh this time, wouldn’t have been able to save me anyways.
“Find out what those pills are for,” Lexington said before striding away, his boots clicking against the polished dining room floor. He looked over his shoulder once. “And next time you decide to mutilate someone, make sure it’s an actual traitor, not an innocent Esholian boy.”
As soon as he left the room, everyone’s rigid postures deflated. A few Wild Whisperers blinked down at their breakfasts, obviously confused, but I didn’t wait to explain or make sure they were okay.
I was already running, leaving my parfait behind, up the stairs and out onto Bascite Boulevard. Toward the Wild Whisperer sector and past the arboretum, where the jungle fell into eerie silence.
Dazmine was right where I thought she’d be—not sleeping in like everyone else, but talking to the sundews. Stroking their curled, sticky-ended heads as if they were cute domesticated pets and not giant man-eating traps.
The moment I broke into the clearing, however, she withdrew her hand and whipped around to face me.
“What the hell, Rayna? Why are you everywhere?”
Behind her, the sundew uncurled themselves. Poised. Waiting to strike on command.
Every breath burned in my throat as I winced at the girl who hated me and said, “I need your help.”