Chapter 13 #2
“So what if I did?” Kathleen tosses her head and leers at Noemi. “I got away with it, didn’t I?”
Andreas gets up from where he was cowering on the floor, brushing off his suit. He clears his throat. “Let’s kill them both and be done with it. There are more of them outside. We can escape down the servants’ passage and start over wherever you want.”
“Like hell you can,” Noemi says.
Kathleen laughs, pleased. "You always were the smart one. Smarter than your mother. Back in the day, I liked your father. Did you know that? But Marisa got the looks and the man. Too bad she didn’t get the fucking brains and balls." She laughs. “In the end, I won. I got her.”
"What?” Noemi whispers. “They died in a hit-and-run.”
Kathleen’s eye roll is exaggerated. “Your father was weak. Your mother was a fool. And I wanted the building that they’d invested in. Your little bookstore.” Her lips curls. “I’m going to burn it to the ground once I kill you both. Take the insurance money and start somewhere new."
“Oh, Aunt Kathleen. How could you?” Her voice is tearful, but her expression doesn’t show any of that sadness. She seems to be scheming at a time when it could cost her life.
For fuck’s sake. I keep my eyes on Noemi the whole time. She darts her eyes to the right, quickly. Either to Andreas or Kathleen. I give her a puzzled look.
Noemi loves you, Beast says, low. He isn't pushing now. Don't let this woman take her.
"So what's the move." Noemi keeps her voice level. "You shoot me here and he does to you what he was about to do to Andreas. That's the whole plan? It’s terrible."
"The plan," Kathleen says, "is to make him watch."
Her eyes flick off Noemi for half a second. They land on me, because the watching is the point. It was always the point.
Noemi drops.
She doesn't grab or lunge. She just lets her knees fold. All her weight goes straight down out, of Kathleen's grip. Her hand knocks the muzzle wide on the way. Kathleen fires on reflex and the round buries itself in the doorframe. Noemi hits the floor and rolls clear.
As she curls into a ball, protecting her head, I summon Beast. “Save her,” I say.
The world goes red at the edges. and then
knuckles. hot. a scream, a sharp snap.
a sound that isn't coming from my mouth, except it is.
the rope. the rope is in my hands. when did—
copper washing my tongue. a woman's voice screams. Andreas gurgles—
mine, the thing in me snarls, ours, she's ours, this is what happens, this is what happens to the ones who reach for what's
dark.
* * *
I come back to myself with my chest heaving.
"Fuck," I gasp.
My lungs saw in and out. My arms ache the way they ache when I've used them a long time. There's a weight in my hands and I look at it without understanding, and it takes me a long, swimming moment to work out what I'm holding in my red, slick fingers.
I open my hands and let it drop. It hits the floor wetly. A piece of someone. May they rest in fucking piss.
The room is wrong. It takes me thirty seconds to land on why, which is that I can't hear it. No sound at all, just a high thin whine, the ringing scream of not-hearing, like the inside of my skull's been scraped clean and left humming.
I touch my ear and my hand comes away red.
A bomb. A bomb went off. I stand there with my bloody fingers in front of my face and try to make the pieces line up.
There is a chunk of wall missing directly in front of me.
Water streams from the ceiling. All the furniture is missing or badly jumbled, like someone shook the room like a giant snowglobe.
And all of it happened while I was gone, under. I'm still dragging myself out of the dark where Beast took me, and the climb back is agonizingly slow.
Did we plant bombs? Hale sets charges. Hale always sets charges. But not while I'm inside. Never while I'm inside.
Either the plan changed while I was gone, or something went wrong. And I can't remember which, because I wasn't here for it.
This. This is why I don't let him out.
I lost time. Whole minutes of it, gone somewhere I can't follow. A man came apart in my hands while I was away. A woman too, maybe. That's the part that turns my stomach, and it isn't the blood.
Noemi.
It comes back all at once and takes my legs out from under me worse than the blast did. Noemi. Noemi on the floor.
I turn, my heart hammering. There she is, pressed into the angle of the wall where she rolled, her arms over her head. Small and alive and looking up at me with a face gone white. Her mouth moves. I can't hear a word. I don't need to.
I get to her the way a man crosses a frozen lake. There’s no thought for anything but the next step. I’m almost on her when the air changes again. Some animal piece of me understands what it means a half-second before it happens.
I cover her. I get my body over the whole of her, her face tucked under my jaw, both of us in the corner. And I make myself as large as I have ever been. Her jaw works, but I can’t hear her.
The charge goes.
The blast takes me across the back like a wave of something solid. I feel my body try to come apart. I hold myself together over her by refusing, simple as that. The same way I hold the door, except this time it's her I'm keeping the dark off of and not the other way around.
Heat. A long pour of grit and plaster. Her hands fist in my shirt underneath me, holding on.
She's under me. She's breathing. I can feel it against my chest, fast and real.
Then the world tips and the floor isn't where I left it. I'm down, sprawled, the not-hearing still like a flatline, one long unbroken tone.
I close my eyes. I'm so tired.
Get up. Beast's voice, far away, losing ground. Get up. You let me out and now look. She's waiting. Get up. Get UP.
I try.