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“Magic,” he grunts and leans back. “Do I have to list all my abilities for you?”
“No,” I snap, looking away and seeing Limi under his seat, her pink eyes glowing despite the rest of her body being hidden. Ren frowns, following my gaze and looking under the seat. He picks up Limi, who hisses and spits at him as she tries to claw his face off. How is he picking her up? I assume it’s because he is magic too.
“A straggler.” Ren sighs, his hand going to his sword.
“No, I touched her.” I show him my hand, which he grabs instead of the sword. “Would it hurt me if you kill her? Her name is Limi.”
“Yes,” Ren growls at Limi, not me. “And you should know better than this. I don’t let things like you on my ship.”
Limi hisses at him and speaks into my mind. “Tell your guard dog to put me down!”
“Ren, please don’t kill her.” I blow out a breath. “She won’t cause any trouble, and if she does, then you can kill her.”
“She’s young and not fully grown. Her eyes aren’t red because she hasn’t eaten a mortal soul yet. She will eat yours.” He shakes her. “Some used to keep these things as trained pets. You are insane if you want to do that, Map.” Ren sighs when he looks at my face. He knows and I know he won’t be killing her. He looks back at Limi, holding her gaze. “Her soul isn’t yours to take, it’s mine. Don’t fucking try it.” He drops her on the floor, and she scurries back to curl around my neck, which only makes Ren look more disgusted. Like I’ve taken on a flea as a soul-bound pet instead of a soul-eating ghost cat with a bad temper who thinks I’m stupid. He may be right. “It’s not sleeping in our bed.”
We both know she is. I clear my throat and change the subject. “The map changed on my stomach. It showed an island with crescent moons all around it. I’m thinking it’s Moonend.”
Draven grabs the oars and starts rowing. “This day just keeps getting better and better. The map is sending us to a certain death.”
Chapter
Twelve
Limi is curled around my foot, like she is most late afternoons, her tail touching all the way up my calf. She might feel like ice, but after a long morning of training with Ren, who just barks orders and makes me run around the ship to “build up my resistance,” as he puts it, having my new ghost cat curled around my legs is refreshing, like sitting in cold water. Limi is watching Mellyn sing and play his guitar, and even as I try to tune out the words to his songs, some of them still echo through my mind.
“On a haunted night, a friend was betrayed. He roared to the gods as his world was stripped bare, but they laughed,” he sings, making a jarring sound with his guitar on that last word. “And he found himself on a ship cast away, adrift. On a ship at sea, never to land at home in the shadows of land.” Mellyn’s voice gets louder little by little, and the guitar begins to build. “Oh, a ship at sea, never to land at home until the star falls and the shadows will not end.”
“The boy is creepy,” Limi whispers into my mind.
“Literally, so are you,” I whisper to her, and she hisses at me. The crew is not happy about my new ghost cat. Freckles is outright scared of her. And to make matters even more fun, Limi still isn’t nice. In fact, half the things that she says to me are nothing short of insults, and it’s almost like she doesn’t know how to socialize without insults.
I haven’t worked out how to talk back in my mind to her, if it’s even possible. So when I talk to her, it makes me look crazy to pretty much everyone except for Ren. He seems to understand that she can talk in my mind, and he doesn’t look at me like I’m insane. He still looks at me like I’m the most annoying person in his life, and that’s fair. It’s my goal to become that and make sure I leave a few gray hairs in his perfectly soft hair before we part.
Limi also sleeps at the end of his bed, and she is there every morning I wake up alone, just like I go to sleep. As much as Ren wants me in his bed, he doesn’t actually sleep in it. Or he might, I can’t figure it out. There is always an imprint of his body on the left side of the bed every morning, and his scent is everywhere around me, but his side of the bed is cold, like he wasn’t there at all. Limi refuses to answer my “pathetic,” in her words, questions about Ren’s sleeping situation.
I’m glad when Mellyn’s song ends, and I don’t know anyone who was betrayed and roared to the gods, or any of the “trapped, unable to go home” part. He puts his guitar down on the crate next to him, swinging his legs from side to side as he looks at Limi and me.
He’s a happy boy, healthy, and my heart hurts because this is what Rowe should be like. He should have color in his cheeks, smiling like this and running about. “We should go to dinner, Miry. I can smell it is done, and it smells so nice.” He jumps off. “Is your cat coming?”
“You’re not scared of her?” I ask as I get down too, Limi detaching from me and strolling along the crates. The only upside to a ghost cat pet is that she doesn’t eat and costs nothing to keep alive. Rowe always wanted a pet, a dog more than a cat, but I couldn’t justify having one with the risk to Rowe’s health and the fact I couldn’t feed it. Most dogs are stolen from the rich houses for food anyway, and there are only a handful in the Stilts that I ever saw, skinny things that wouldn’t be worth anyone killing for food. Plus, they were mean as hell, but that’s survival in the Stilts. Cats…well, they were nasty, fast, and fat on fish they swam to catch. They weren’t considered pets mostly because of the illnesses they carry and their temper.
“No, I mean, she is a little scary to look at, but I know she is safe.” He pauses, seeming to search for the right word. “Just strange.”
“She thinks the same thing about you, to be honest.” He giggles, and I grin at him. Sometimes I come down here just to be around him because it makes me feel less like I’m going to break apart from not seeing Rowe when Mellyn is here. I like Mellyn too. The world has clearly tried to beat him down, and he hasn’t let it take his humor or smile. Only the brave can face the worst of the world and still smile at a stranger. My homesickness is nearly gone when I talk with Mellyn, when I’m keeping him company as much as he is fixing the newly broken parts of me.
Limi has chosen a crate ten down to curl up in a ball on, and she has gone to sleep. She doesn’t always stay at my side, but after a few hours, she is always back, and she stays close for a good five minutes. Almost like being apart for too long is testing her.
I inhale deeply, and it smells delicious. “Dinner definitely smells nice. I think it’s chicken. Maybe the same as last week? That was my favorite.”
“The beef stew is mine, oh, and the cherry cakes too!” He claps excitedly. “You look better now. You’ve been eating on the ship for a while. When you first came here, you were so thin. You reminded me of the older women from before the ship and how they were always so thin, like the wind might snap their bones.” He blinks. “I don’t see their fates anymore.”
I wonder if that is because they are dead. “I’m sorry. What was it like there?” I quietly ask. He doesn’t answer, so I share what the Stilts were like. “At home, we don’t have a lot of food, and the poor suffer because of it, but there are no slaves. People are free, but it comes at a cost. What is freedom if you starve?” I shrug. “You need family connections to avoid the worst fates.”
“I was too gentle, never really won any of the fights, but I managed to keep myself alive by singing. They liked my singing and made me sing all day and night until I fell asleep from hunger or thirst.” He looks down at the floor. “I liked when I fell asleep. I didn’t have to see death and…”
“Maybe I can teach you to defend yourself, if you wanted. When I was younger, I felt weak against everything that was happening in the world, and the only way I felt even a little better was when I learned to fight. When I felt like I might win if someone came after me.”
“Yes, and I’ll sing you songs, and then we’ll be even.” He grins and hugs my waist. I hold my arms up for a second before wrapping them around him and kissing the top of his head.
