The last time I snapped back in full fury was near the end of December after a spat with Liney. I was unpacking the goods from my first visit to the mainland. I hadn’t bought a kind of caper she enjoyed in our old life, and she cried that it would ruin Christmas. I called her spoiled. She ran out into the forest.
“She’s mourning,” he said. He’d taken a liking to her once he’d realized she wasn’t a conspirator in his murder. She didn’t know.
“What, mourningyou? Impossible.” I laughed. “She’s being stubborn. You don’t know her.”
“You’re wrong.” He’d floated around to face me, his translucentfigure close enough to touch, his long face crumpled in concern. “She could use a better sister. Someone who can understand her. That her life is—”
Those words,a better sister, drown out the rest of his words.
“You may call me demon, murderer, Devil’s whore if you must.” I listed off each term with my fingers. “But you won’t pretend to know my sister better than I.”
I don’t remember what we said past that. It was all noise and bluster. The particulars mattered little compared to our fury. We stopped only when I realized Liney had gone out into the winter winds without a coat.
That isn’t the same man who stands before me here, offering a seat and a consoling word. There’s no fire in him. He seems tired in his own right. Something—sympathy?—swims in his gaze below the surface. It crests in the creases of his brow.
I sit on the orange box. He sits beside me on air. I spot a trickle of rainwater on the wall nearest me. I’ll fix the leak tomorrow, yet I can’t stop staring at the storm’s intrusion.
“I came down to check on her,” I say. I can’t talk to him outside the context of my sister. She’s our anchor point. Anything else is too much.
“She’s fine,” he promises. He’s tense. Not in the muscles but the soul. This might be the longest we’ve ever spoken kindly to each other.
A weight lifts. If she’s stable, I can breathe. I have a moment to release. Showing my face to her now would cause even more friction between us, since the room is still tinged in red.
“No, she isn’t.” I laugh mirthlessly, a rumble that shakes me harder than it should. “She can’t possibly be fine. Safe I can believe. But not fine.”
Douglas thins his lips.
“What?”
“She’s stronger than you give her credit for.”
I lean back against the shelf behind me, closing my eyes. I was foolishto rush down here before my body cooled down. Another lightning strike makes me see the veins in my eyelids, and a thunderclap shakes the floor.
“You said that he tricked you. This is, I assume, the gentleman you—”
“He’s no gentleman.” I fight the urge to press my fingers to my lips. I can almost see him leaning forward. Smell that mixture of acrid and sweet. “Pratterman.”
Douglas mouths the word to himself. When I open my eyes, his brow is furrowed in thought.
“He was going to take Liney’s soul,” I explain. “He tricked me. I thought I was the only one he had a contract with. He turned my words around.”
Douglas’s gray eyes widen. There’s something there beyond concern, but I can’t parse it.
“I made a new contract,” I continue. “An amendment? I don’t know. To save Liney.”
Douglas’s upper lip twitches, causing his short mustache to quirk. His beard is dense but short, not the archetypal shape for a wickie.
“What did Pratterman get out of the new deal?” He measures his words carefully.
Whatever relief I felt descending from the tower is sucked out at his look of fear.
“I sacrificed the ship, and I must…” I pause to remember the exact wording. It’s key to the infernal riddle maker. “I must sacrifice the next living nonkin that I see. That’s it.”
The fear in him transforms into disbelief. “The killing continues.”
A painful prickle of humiliation washes across my neck, down my spine. I imagine it like the leaking spot in the wall, spilling my storming rage out.
“One more soul. That’s all,” I say in a rush as though it’ll lighten theblow.
