CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
You’re fierce as a falcon. You’re sly as a snake. You’re more beautiful than the first bloom of spring after a winter starved of light, than the first breath of autumn after summer’s haze.
He cleared his throat. That wouldn’t do.
“Your first kill was a pheasant,” he ventured. “You were eleven years old. He lives on your wall. Johanna paid a taxidermist to stuff him for you, though she loathed vanity, and he’s very handsome.”
Now, an embarrassed laugh escaped her, but her voice was warm. “Goose. I named him Goose.”
He could picture her, stoic and steady even as a young girl, but still unable to resist such a sweet, imaginative impulse. There was a bit of that warmth in her eyes now. He returned her laugh with a charmed hum of his own.
But at the sound, she looked up sharply, her eyes gone smooth as sea-glass.
If her look before had pinioned him, this one cut him loose.
She expected every sound that came from his lips to be barbed.
Even the unadorned expressions he kept forgetting to hide, the ones she kept luring out of him against his will.
She was right to. They often were. How long had that been the case? How long had he faced all the world with claws, with spite? How long since he had shed the man who, as a boy, pinned all his hope on penny watercolors and imagined flowers?
How long since he had let anyone peel him open like this?
He knew: never. Not once.
How did she do it? They had nothing in common; she thought him frivolous, facile.
While he pinned his hope wherever he could hang it, Anya didn’t pin hers on anything – didn’t even let herself have it.
It was too delicate; too distracting. Even the childhood act of naming her trophy was, to her, worthy of others’ scorn, a secret to keep close.
She met the world how she expected it to meet her: beneath a shell, sharp as a knife, hard as a stone.
And people like him showed her, again and again, she was right to.
Showed her that her casing was necessary, was earned.
As he had earned his claws.
But he didn’t want them. He didn’t want to use them. Not against her.
He was losing his mind. From the strain, from the blood loss, from the chase.
He must be, to want her to cut open the layers he hadn’t even realized he’d gained.
To want her to see not the crimson red of his claws, nor the muted beige of his affected indifference, but the trilling gold of the thing he thought – he hoped, hoped he was under all the rest. It kept slipping out, against his judgment, against his wishes.
That meant it was there, whatever it was.
Didn’t it? Would he recognize it himself?
He wanted to ask her if she knew. To ask her what exactly she was doing to him.
To slip the snare she’d trapped him in and run as far as he could in the opposite direction.
But then, something colored her face. He knew it, this color.
She kept it closely guarded, but she had let him see it before.
The languid rise of dawn, the blush of a rose unfurling.
In the birch grove, when she learned of his indenture.
In the glade, with his fingers on her cheek. Lovely, delicate, petal-soft.
Again and again, she had let him see it.
Desire swallowed him – a desire to pull her close, to kiss her and never stop. Hang the phoenix; hang it all.
“Anya,” he said. Before he could speak further, or even know what he meant to say, she shuttered once more, and he remembered himself. She pulled her hatchet free from her belt. She disappeared into the dark, taking the light with her.
“We’re wasting time,” she said over her shoulder. “Stay close.”
He had no choice. He followed.
As they walked, Sy kept his thoughts firmly trained on his goal, because to let them stray again, he risked tripping into another camouflaged, dawn-colored snare. Or a sea-foam green one. He was losing his head. He couldn’t afford to.
Both of them kept their ears tuned for sounds of the mimic – or of the phoenix.
If it was the true phoenix, they needed to find it before the mimic did, because, as Anya informed him, the mimic was not discriminating in its taste of brains.
Though, like any predator, it would likely target the easier meal: the two of them.
“More likely, you,” she clarified.
“I do hate that you remain so opaque about my prospects of brutal death.”
She almost revealed a rare smile and his heart fluttered. Seven skies, what was wrong with him? Blood loss, he reassured himself unconvincingly.
“This bird is ancient,” she said, saving him.
The bird, focus on the bird. “It’s never been caught.
It’s smart.” She pointed the torch ahead, into the dark.
“If the phoenix came in here, it knows a way out and went straight for it. If we’re lucky, then we’ll find an exit before anything else finds us. ”
Anything else. The mimic, or worse. Lurking, stalking them from the dark ahead – or behind.
A shiver ran up his spine, vibrant as electricity.
The tunnel was large enough that something could have skirted the edge of Anya’s torchlight, slipped past them.
More than once, he had felt a presence beneath the open sky.
It was not hard to believe more terrors awaited beneath the swallowing earth.
Especially not after his unsettling, magic-tinted dream.
Suddenly, he stopped. He felt as if someone had called out his name behind him, though he’d discerned no sound. Anya kept moving. A prickling sensation scurried across the back of his neck.
Reaching for his pen, he started to turn, but a strange sight drew his eyes forward.
“Light ahead,” Anya said at the same time he saw it. “Sunlight, looks like.”
“A way out?”
“We’ll see,” she said warily.
At their approach, the sunlight and Anya’s torch revealed a fork in the tunnel. One way, dark as the one they had been traveling.
The other, damp and muddy under a ceiling of roots and showered with streaks of light from the world above. And directly ahead, radiant in a beam of light and pecking at a puddle of mud, was the phoenix.
Heart in his throat, he turned to Anya, unsure of how she would react; but she was gone. By the bounce of the torchlight, she had run ahead, down the dark tunnel.
He started to call after her but stopped. Why had she run? Had she seen the phoenix, too? If she had, which was the true one?
Or perhaps she had merely grown tired of escorting her rival closer to his prize and, seeing an opportunity to desert him without leaving him completely helpless, had taken it.
Regardless, if he called out, the bird would be startled. If it was real, it would run. If it was the mimic, it would make brunch of him.
And unfortunately, if it was real, he had no way of catching it without Anya. Perhaps he could coax it toward him, offer it something to eat. Did birds like salted mackerel? Did mimics? Neither could hate it more than he did; he’d be glad to be rid of the stuff, but he did need it for his blood.
The phoenix still hadn’t moved. Perhaps he could just…grab it.
Quietly, so as not to alert it to his presence, he stepped toward it. It flapped its wings and disappeared down the passage, past the filtered light of the roots, into the dark. Slowly, he followed it, stopping at the edge of the curtain of roots, peering into the darkness after it.
He registered movement behind him. Heart hammering, he braced to run; but it was only Anya, returning from the other tunnel.
“Did you see it?” she said when she reached him.
“It disappeared again,” he said. “You saw it too?”
“I thought I did, until I shot it.”
“The mimic?”
She nodded. “It’s dead.”
Not a hair was out of place. She hadn’t even worked up a sweat. “Easy prey, for a predator,” he observed, frowning.
“All in a day’s work,” she said breezily. “I told you I’m the best there is. It did look real, though. The one you saw was the true phoenix. There must be an opening ahead.”
He hesitated. “We know there’s no danger the other way. Perhaps we should try that way, first.”
“No, if the phoenix went this way, this is the way out.” She started forward again. “We’re wasting time.” She lifted her torch. He noted the torchlight reflected in the white of her eye.
“How do you know it’s safe?” he asked, pulse quickening, thinking on his feet. “Did Goose tell you?”
“Of course,” she said without inflection.
His breath caught, and he took an involuntary step backward. “Anya. Tell me my secret,” he said abruptly.
Anya stopped and turned to face him, a familiar, sardonic look on her face. “Which secret? You have so many.”
“The one I just told you,” he prompted, stalling. Uselessly, he reached for his pen. It certainly seemed like her. Was she testing him? Revenge for all he’d put her through? “The one no one else knows.”
If it was the mimic and he started to draw his blood, it would surely attack him. If it was the mimic, he had to do something, or he was going to die soon.
Could he stab it? Could he make himself stab a neck that looked anything like hers?
Unsure, he pulled the pen from his satchel. As he did, his uncertainty evaporated. Anya’s face ripped and stretched, rearranging into an appalling melt of woman, insect, and amphibian. With a rippling like wet clay, the rest of its body shifted, and the mimic revealed its true form.
Now twice Sy’s height, its pale and hairless body looked soft and fleshy, but it was encased in a thick carapace, shaped almost like a spidery cave cricket, with six long, crooked legs.
It had no mouth and its four eyes fixed on him, uncannily small and milky white.
The ends of its jagged front legs were sharp and pointed like protruding fangs.