Never Knew Another (23 page)

“Who, me? No.” Turco took a deep breath. He stood up and stretched. He opened the door. “Come on, then.”

Inside the room, the single, small hookah was planted in the center of the room. Men sat in the dirt around it. Sparrow was sitting in a corner. She glanced up at Rachel, then turned away.

“Not arrested,” said Turco.

She recognize him when she saw him. He was blissed out, the edge of a hookah stem tied to his fingers. He was lying in mud, staring upwards, seeing nothing.

“Oh, no…” said Rachel. Her brother, her champion, the man who had protected her all the days of her life. “Oh, no…”

Turco untied the stem of the hookah from his hand. “I’ll help you get him home.” He grabbed Djoss by the arm and hefted him up. Rachel took the other arm. His legs weren’t working well. He made low groaning noises.

“Is this really what you do when you’re out with him late into the night? Is this what your mysterious life has been all this time?”

Turco didn’t say anything about it. He helped Rachel drag her brother up the stairs, and into the store. The baker’s shop was empty. Out on the streets, which were were all empty.

Djoss got his legs back under him half way to the new rented room. He smiled like it was the greatest day of his life. He looked over at Rachel and smiled at her. He was happy to see her.

When Djoss got his feet under him enough to walk on his own, Turco bowed out. He said that everything would be fine in a while. He had to get back to watch the room.

Then they were alone, Djoss still smiling.

“Hey,” said Rachel. “Bad news. We have to run again.”

He coughed. “What?”

“They’re looking for me at the brothel. A man tried to pull my clothes off, found my scales. I spit on him. He saw my tongue. He knew everything, right away. Sentas stand out around here. They can find me easy.”

“We have to go?”

“Are you in any condition to run?”

“No,” he giggled. “Sorry. We have to, though. How much coin do we have?”

“Djoss, I have to tell you something.”

“If we can hide a while… Maybe Turco knows a place to hide us.”

“Djoss…”

“It would only be a matter of time until he found out…”

Rachel stopped, and pressed her heel into the ground because she couldn’t kick him. Djoss was slow. His reactions were still blurred. He turned. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Rachel…What is it?”

“I was lying,” she snapped.

He took a breath. His face dropped cold. He turned back to the new room.

She shouted. “You can’t be like that if we have to run!”

He kept walking. He got to the door before she did. He left it open behind him.

The other demon child she had discovered was the last thing on her mind. When it rose to the surface, she didn’t want to talk about with Djoss. She didn’t want to say anything to anyone about it.

In the morning, Djoss left again, without saying good-bye. Rachel watched him leave in silence. She didn’t know what to say. She sat down on the cot. She put her head in her hands. She looked around and wondered where he was going, how long he would be there, and what would happen if she tripped and fell, and her clothes tore a little. If she were robbed and beaten and left bleeding somewhere, her blood killing grass where it spilled, then she’d have to run.

Djoss was trying to settle down here, and they should never have settled anywhere. They should have just kept running south from the boat that smuggled them in.

She started to cry. Her demon tears were her own acid blood. She wiped it away as best she could with the cot’s blanket. The acidic blood melted through the ragged cloth to the wood floor, which began steaming. She wiped with her hands. She was panicking. She began crying even harder. This would be it if it ate through. She’d have to run if the tears went through the floor, and her brother missing, and people looking up through the strange holes in the floor.

“Stop crying,” she said, to herself. “Stop it.”

She rubbed at her eyes with her clothes. She rubbed at the blood tears that had already fallen with her shirt sleeve. She sat down on the floor, pressed the back of her leg into the acid, where she could get the most of it covered with her leg. She felt it eating up towards her skin, burning the leather and heavy cloth ragged.

“Stop crying,” she said, again. The tears got through to her skin, all the way through the leather, burning her.

“Just stop.” She breathed. She tried to focus her breathing and choke it all down. The koans came to her, unwanted, like a stillness. The fire came to her. It burned the ground where her tears had fallen, singing the floor. She quickly iced the fire over, before it could spread.

Once the stain was contained, it was so small: a couple of spots on the floor, no more mysterious than spilled food. When it had started, it was the greatest danger in the world. She laughed at how scared she had been. She laughed because she needed to laugh, at anything at all. She looked down at her clothes, ripped open, and she laughed at those, too. She was not a vain woman, but she thought about her clothes more than even the vainest woman in the world. She didn’t have anything else to wear that wasn’t precariously damaged, and Djoss was nowhere to help her. He would probably be out and angry a long time. She filled the tub with melted ice again. She tore off all her clothes, and threw them in the water. If the blood still smoked a little, the water would dilute it enough to save the rest of the clothing. Rachel knelt before the basin, scrubbing at the wilting stains with her bare hands. The clothes were ruined, of course.

She’d have to find new clothes, but in dark enough light, she might be able to keep her scales covered.

She pulled the clothes out, wet. She tugged them on. She looked down at where the leather had been gnawed through. The holes were on her arms, and the back of her leg, mostly. If she was careful and moved her arms carefully, no scale would show itself beneath the burns.

The leather was damaged, but the clothes weren’t totally ruined, yet. Rachel looked around the apartment for any cloth at all to cover herself. All she saw was the cot. She stripped her boots off. It wasn’t hard to tear up the cot with her talons.

She did her best to cover her leg, especially. It was in back, where she couldn’t watch it. It was a place where no one would mistake the scales for some kind of blemish in her skin. She wrapped her leg in cloth where the scale was exposed. She tied it tight enough to hurt. With her wet pants on, she ran her hands over the hole. She felt nothing but cloth. It would have to do.

She pulled together all the money she had.

In the streets of Dogsland, she could find anything. She could find food. She hadn’t had anything to eat in a while, and her hunger hit her like a crash. She bought food. After she ate, she felt better. She could find a new job. Djoss would come around. They’d been through too much to fall apart over this.

She traveled a long time on foot, to the north, then the east. She took a ferry across a river. She waited until sunset was gone, and the cloudy sky had no moon. She walked in a straight line towards a river. She was looking for another Senta, and a place where one might be working in a nicer crowd than the Pens.

The watchtower lights along the eastern wall blended with the night sky on the horizon, like low-lying stars.

Rachel found a Senta turning cards in the shadow of a tavern between a wool exchange and a field of mud stripped raw for a stacks of crates on pallets. Rachel had stopped here. She had seen a Senta that was blind. Her eyes were completely white with cataracts.

Rachel coughed.

The Senta pulled out her cards and touched the top of the deck.

“Hello,” Rachel said.

“Hello,” the Senta replied. She sounded like an old woman, but she had looked young enough in the slanting light of the tavern.

“How do you read the cards when you can’t see them?”

“I can feel them,” she said. She held one up, for Rachel to touch. Rachel ran her hand gently over it. The paint was thick. The strokes were clean and precise. The images were blurred from her touch. “I make them myself,” she said. “They don’t look like much, but I know them.”

“I’ve never heard of that before. I, too, serve the Unity. I need new clothes. I don’t know where else to go. I have coin to pay for them.”

“Wealth?” said the Senta. “A waste of time.”

“Do you have spare clothes?”

“I do,” she said, “and I can smell yours from here. You stink. What happened?”

“An accident, I assure you.”

The Senta smirked. “An accident,” she said. “That is almost the truth. Show me your knowledge, Senta. Prove to me that you serve the truth. I cannot see, and I cannot believe you.”

“Hold out your hand,” Rachel said and reached inside of herself. She brought forth ice and placed it into the Senta’s palm.

“Nothing,” said the Senta. “You are barely beginning.”

“As are we all,” Rachel replied.

The Senta nodded. “Yes,” she said, “that is true.”

“You look like you’re almost my size. You are dressed well. I have not been as fortunate on my path.”

“Follow me.”

Rachel followed the old Senta. The woman’s room on the top floor of the inn was practically the whole floor. She had heavy furniture, and a bird in a cage who moved nervously from foot to foot when the two women came in.

“Your smell gives you away, demon child,” she said. “You smell like damp brimstone.”

“Oh?” said Rachel. She hardened her heart against the woman. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I am too old and too blind to stop you. Please, just take what you want. Please, just hurry.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t help your nature,” the Senta said. “Take whatever you want. I couldn’t stop you. By the time I cried for help, you’d kill me, devour my flesh, and you’d still escape in time.”

Rachel frowned. “I would never do that.”

“Your tongue is as forked as your soul,” the old woman replied. “I hear your voice, but I don’t know where it comes from. It’s not a human voice. The shape of your mouth is wrong.”

“I don’t want to steal from you, or hurt you,” Rachel protested. “I just want to buy new clothes. I’m Senta, just like you.”

“No, not like me,” the woman said. “Please… Please, don’t hurt me.” She was calm. She sat down on the edge of her bed. “Take whatever you want, but please don’t hurt me. I’m an old woman. I’m blind. I won’t stop you.”

Rachel pulled out a coin and tossed it at the woman. The coin bounced off the bedspread. It fell to the ground. Rachel picked it up from her feet. She put it on the Senta’s lap. The woman snatched Rachel’s wrist from the air. Her breath quickened. Her fear jumped out. “I won’t report you! Just take what you want and go!”

“I’m not evil!” Rachel snarled. “You don’t know anything about me!” She yanked her hand back. The old woman sat on the bed like a panting statue, breathing hard and terrified.

Rachel pulled new clothes out from drawers, and changed there. She watched the blind woman sitting inside her fear, unmoved, unmoving. Rachel didn’t try to cover herself. She just changed. The old woman said nothing.

“You are a living affront to the Unity,” the woman whispered, when Rachel was almost finished.

“I didn’t choose my life,” Rachel said. “I never had a choice about it. I just must make the best of things. I’m not evil. I don’t hurt people, or dig into the ground.”

“Please, just take what you want and go…”

“Treating me like a thief makes it so easy steal from you,” said Rachel. She picked up the coin she had tried to give to the Senta. She left, running into the streets, back to the Pens where no one looked at anyone. She wanted to keep running, and escape the city.

CHAPTER XV

A
t night, I pulled the wolfskin across my back. I left my husband sleeping. I crept down the stairs on padded paw, to the main hallway. Everyone was asleep, here. The doors were closed and locked. I didn’t bother with the front door. I slipped into the back room, where I know the innkeeper slept with an open window. I heard the flies buzzing in his room, and the engorged mosquitos joyfully making love in his blood. His window was open. I wasn’t sure if I would fit through it. I placed my paws on the windowsill, and peered out. I saw the city there. I jumped out into the night. My heart longed for the wild places of the world. I walked at night where the lamplights burned down, out of oil, where darkness filled the streets. The fireflies came out in great numbers, calling to each other there. I walked among them, blessed them as best I could in my wolf form. I ignored the noble estates with manicured trees and deer chained and penned for hunting. I slipped into the ruins of old buildings. I sniffed the rats and mice and owls that lived in rotting bricks. Beyond these, the housecats and tomcats and butcher’s dogs and chickens and pigs and all the creatures of the city, mindmute and indifferent to all the sorrows of the men and women of the world, sang to me of sorrow and felled trees and mud and crowds. I sang back a song of the hills. I stood upon a warehouse roof and howled my song of the hills, and the hills rolling, and the hills covered in green grass and trees, and the hills in the first rainfall of autumn. Oh, I sang.

I sang to drive them all away, somewhere else far from the world of man where they could be happy—where Erin would grant them peace.

The dogs barked at me like I was some kind of invader here, and I was. This was Dogsland. I belonged in the hills.

My husband found me soon enough. My howls were not discreet. We walked together to the reeds at the edge of southern side of the city, where snakes chased frogs in the grasses ignorant of the poor men building shacks on beams above the wetlands. A snake would not believe me if I told him he was in a city. All he was grass and rotting wood.

We walked, my husband and I, through the wild places at night.

At the end of the night my husband nudged me.

Did you see anything you recognized?

Yes. Did you?

You know what I mean.