Infidel (31 page)

“He’s hot on some girl at the gym,” Suha said.
 

“Better be a useful girl.”

“Maybe so. He said he met some other Nasheenian women—boxers—at another gym. Told him to get in some bag time and find out the names.”
 

“I wish you’d told me more about the note,” Khos said.
 

Nyx took off her burnous and tossed it on the bed. “Why, you looking for work? From the looks of your pretty house, you’re not hard up.”
 

“Rogue bel dames are everybody’s business,” Khos said.
 

Nyx shot Suha a look.
 

Suha shrugged. “Figured if he ran off before you got back, I’d kill him,” she said.
 

“Try,” Khos said.

Suha leaned back, so her long coat fell away, revealing her duel pistols. “Try me,” she said.
 

Khos looked back at Nyx. “I want to buy you a drink.”
 

“I’ve never been one to pass up free liquor,” Nyx said. She was curious about why he came. Did he miss slumming? “I’m gonna wash up and let Suha bleed you a little more, then we’ll get going.”
 

She cleaned up in the privy. When she returned, Suha and Khos had already broken out some bootleg whiskey.

“If you and Eshe go out tonight, add another name to your round,” Nyx told Suha as she pulled her burnous back on. “Woman called Leveh. Over thirty by now, I’d bet, but don’t quote me.”
 

“Bel dame?” Suha said. Her voice was a little drawl. Nyx didn’t blame her. She was ready to go out and get drunk, too.
 

“Likely. Maybe just a contact,” Nyx said. “And watch the liquor tonight. Set down some traps. I don’t want a repeat of Punjai.”
 

“Last one,” Suha said, and took a pull from the bottle.
 

“Let’s go, Khos,” Nyx said.
 

He pulled his big body from the chair and came after her. They walked downstairs in silence. She let the silence stretch as they entered the street.
 

“Used to live out here when we first came to Tirhan,” Khos said. “Good shebeen around the corner. Unlicensed.”
 

“Shebeen?”

“Like a tavern. Uh, less formal. You’ll see.”

“Thanks for bringing the whiskey.”

“Figured you’d need it. Been rough living in a dry country. You can still get it. Just a lot more trouble.”
 

They stepped into an old Ras Tiegan dive not much better than the hedge witch’s hovel in Punjai. The floors were dirt and most of the roof tiles were broken. There was one long counter along the far wall and dirty tables. Nyx set herself up in a corner so she’d have a view of the door. Khos bought the first round.
 

“What we here for?” Nyx asked, three drinks and a dozen nattering pleasantries later.
 

Khos shook his head. Nyx realized she missed his dreadlocks. Tattoos were the same, though. She always liked those.
 

“You should have told me you were looking for bel dames,” he said.
 

“You never asked.”

“Wrong. I did ask.”
 

“And you said trouble with bel dames scared the shit out of you and slammed the door. Why is it all the guys I put on my team are cowards?”

“We’re less trouble, I’d wager.”

“You looking to screw me again?”

His eyes widened.
 

“Not like that,” Nyx said, waving a dismissive hand. “The betraying part, not the fucking part.”

“I got a family now.”

“So you family guys keep telling me.”

“I’m here to help.”

“I’m listening.”
 

“I think me and Inaya can help you. Come on back to the house. She… she and I don’t get on as well as we used to, but you and her are working for some of the same things.”

Nyx snorted. “When did Inaya and I ever have anything in common?”

“She does… work. I suspect she has something to do with the Ras Tiegan underground. A shifter rights group. You know what that is?”

“Never heard of it.”

“She sees and hears things that might help you. I want you to come over and talk to her.”
 

“So… why isn’t she here?”

“I need you to ask her. I can’t.”
 

“What, she doesn’t know you know?’

“No.”

“What kind of fucked up relationship you two have?”

“No more fucked up than any of yours.”

“Why are you really here? Prostitutes not brutal enough for you? Lack of whores in Tirhan?”

His face reddened. “You’re never fair.”

“Just right.”

He started to stand. “I wanted to help.”

Nyx sighed. “Sit, sit,” she said. “Let me finish my goddamn drink. Should have known you and Inaya wouldn’t stay out of the covert business out here. Can’t say the same for Rhys.”

Khos sat back down, avoided her eyes. “He not what you expected?”

Nyx finished her drink and knocked the glass back on the table. The whiskey burned going down. God, she’d missed it. “No, he was everything I expected,” Nyx said. “That’s always the problem.”
 

“Maybe you should go after different types of guys.”

“Or more girls.”

“Or more girls. Though, as I recall, you like the same sorts of girls, too.”

“Which are those?”

“The ones who don’t want you.”

Nyx glared at him. “You want to compare bed partners? I’ll have you beat.”

“I don’t doubt it. I didn’t grow up the way you did.”

“How’s that?”

“With women. It’s another good reason to speak to Inaya. Maybe you can figure her out.”

Nyx laughed. “Because I’m a woman?”

“What?” He looked genuinely affronted.

“Khos, me and Inaya have nothing in common. When are you going to get that? We have as much in common as you and Rhys.”

She did like the fact that he was trying to get her to go home with him, though. It had been a long while since anybody tried.
 

A few drinks later, they caught the train to the city center. The trains were packed with revelers headed to the waterfront for the festival and fireworks. Getting a taxi wasn’t possible, so they walked up into the suburbs, which helped Nyx walk off some of the booze
.
 

The air was cool, but not cold. Still, Nyx had her coat buckled up, and she was winded by the time they came to the top of the hill. Her skin hurt, and her left knee was starting to go out. As she limped along, she wondered if this was how Fatima felt. Broken down old crone at thirty-eight.

“What happened to you, anyway?” Khos asked. “Never seen you look so bad.”

“I pissed off the wrong people, that’s all. Bound to happen sooner or later.”

“Least you’re still breathing.”
 

“It’s something.”

Khos suddenly stopped. “You smell that?”

“What?”
 

“Smoke.”

“There are fireworks at the waterfront, drunk man.”

“Not that.” They were at the low end of the park, a couple blocks away from Khos’s house. The streets were quiet. Most of the houses were dark. Everyone had bled out downtown hours ago. Nyx couldn’t help looking across the park, toward Rhys’s house.

Khos started running.
 

“What?” Nyx yelled.
 

She jogged after him. Her body protested. Half a block up, she realized what was wrong. There was something dark billowing from the windows of one of the houses. Nyx heard the
crack-pop-roar
of a bustling little blaze, still hidden from view.
 

Khos ran up the steps.
 

The burning house was
his.
 

“Out back!” he yelled at her. “There’s a well out back! I’ll come help you with the pump!”
 

He pulled open the door, and a billowing cloud of smoke rolled out. Inside, something roared. She saw a wash of orange light.

“Inaya!” Khos yelled.
 

Nyx ran around the back of the house, into the garden. The back windows of the house shattered. Behind her, the house bellowed. Her skin throbbed. She rolled and scrambled up in the light of the blazing house. The skin on her shoulder tore, bled. She found the well at the bottom of the yard.
 

The well was already uncovered. An old bucket pull was set up over it. A large tree stood behind the well, clawing at the sky with branches clotted with tattered leaves.

Nyx put her hands on the edge of the well and looked down. The water was glassy black. She stared at her darker half, gazing up at her from the bottom of the well. There was nothing but water and her reflection and the stir of the water around the rope.
 

The rope.
 

She gave a sharp tug on the rope. It stayed taut. There was something on the other end.
 

The best way to poison a well was to throw a body into it. Nyx cranked the wheel of the pull, grunting with the effort.

She had one long stretch of time to think about who it was on the other end of the rope. Inaya? No… She knew how bel dames thought. They would have drowned the children here. Their bodies would be sodden and gray.

Prepare for the worst. Always prepare for the worst, because if you see anything less than that, it will be a prize, a relief.
 

Fuck, I’ve gotten soft, she thought, and was reminded of Rhys. She heard something splashing in the water.
 

Nyx let the lever catch. She leaned over to peer into the well again. There, at the other end of the rope, was the bucket, and a pair of hands desperately clinging to it while a smaller figure shivered inside the bucket. Two cold, wet faces peered up at her, trembling; their expressions shadowed and terrified.
 

“It’s Nyx!” Nyx yelled at them, stupidly, but it was dark, wasn’t it, and how could they know her, in the dark? Hell, how would they know her anyway? She’d only seen them once. “I’m getting you up. Come on now!”
 

She turned back to the lever. A stiff wind buffeted her from behind. She heard a scattering of dead leaves roil along the dirt drive. The wind stirred the tree. She raised her head and saw a hundred cicadas crawling along the trunk, flitting among the branches. As the wind stirred, the cicadas moved as well, flying around the tree like a cloud. She braced herself, squinted, prepared to be swarmed.
 

But something else happened.
 

The tree began to tremble. The wind died. The cicadas coagulated into a throbbing mass, then pulled
into
the tree, a tree that was rapidly becoming smaller, condensing. The dead leaves moved along the ground, drawn back up into the tree’s branches. They melted together like butter, merged with the cicadas. Nyx had a dizzying moment of vertigo. The world seemed to bend. Something in the air around her twisted, tore, and the tree and leaves and cicadas became a liquid thing, like mottled, melted flesh. Something screamed, something inside the tree; the cicadas, maybe, dying.
 

Branches flew up, a crown of leaves; branches became hands, the crown of leaves elongated, shuddered.
 

“Oh God,” Nyx said, and the breath left her body. She knew what it was becoming—what the tree, the leaves, the air, the bugs, were becoming.
 

“Oh God,” she said again, because she was suddenly sick, because it was like something in the world had been distorted; something… wrong.
 

As the tree’s color paled, the melted shape took on a more human form. The gaping hole in the face—the half-formed mouth—vomited a black cloud of flies, and with the flies came another scream; not from the bugs this time, but a true human scream; the rage and pain and terror of birth.
 

The figure stumbled toward Nyx, shaking and shuddering, slinging off long strings of mucus and leaf pulp, and the black eyes grew lashes and the irises formed and focused, and the cascade of hair and leaves went black, black and long as Inaya’s hair; Inaya’s face, round but still slack-eyed, and the fingers at the ends of the new arms were held in tight fists, oozing mucus and blood and something else that had the tangy smell of oak hybrid sap. Flies and leaf pulp, dirt and the shimmering wings of cicadas, stuck to the slick mucus covering her naked body.
 

The fists reached out, made open hands. Clung to the edge of the well. The eyes focused, and it was something more or less human, more or less Inaya, and Nyx knew her then, really knew her, and she felt a deep cramping in her stomach, sudden nausea. She backed a half step away and dry heaved.
 

Inaya screamed into the well. As she screamed, a handful of flies escaped from her newly formed lungs.