The Verdugo
Lisa shut the carriage door and sat heavily on the rear-facing bench. She tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling, and tried to calm down. The memory of his hair tickling her nose. His galloping heart close to hers. His slim, tapered hands shaking as she held them. His gaze, so flighty and evasive, fixing on hers when he said Yes.
Yes. It was all she could do to keep from kicking her legs like a schoolgirl. Her little fox, finally caught. Finally ready to be domesticated and kept. Again she imagined him unlit, his dark eyes made darker, beautiful and black, because of her, and it thickened her throat. No more dances with spoiled little heiresses, no more flinching when they touched, no bed to belong in but hers—mine, mine, he’d be mine.
But already the guilt was rising. Once she switched back to Annalise, it would intensify. This clarity of desire was about to disappear. It put a lump in her throat.
She told herself that he was a grown man, and it would be his decision to make. She told herself that she would be good to him, that she would keep him safe, and healthy, and happy, and he would never have cause to leave her. She reminded herself that even if they went their separate ways after she turned him, there remained a life for him in the Necropolis. A long and extraordinary life.
All these justifications and self-assurances would ring so hollow in a moment. Why must the rest of her always overcomplicate things? Why couldn’t she just be kind to herself? She rubbed her temples and sighed.
Let yourself be happy. Let yourself deserve him. You want him and he wants you. And it can just be as simple and beautiful as that. Remember that.
She took a deep breath, grabbed a fistful of hair, and pulled her head off.
The giddy hope and the determination melted with Lisa’s flesh from her skull. Her vision clouded. That woozy, weightless feeling as her Darkness took hold. Her eyesight returned, staring at her headless body from the open case. She seized her active head, stuck it on her neck with that ear-pressure pop, and Annalise was Annalise again.
“Fucking hell.” Her boot slammed into the seat across from her. Her grip tightened on her Lisa skull. A raw image came to her of dashing it against the wall. Stupid, disgusting, lecherous old hag. Why did she do that? Why did she say those things? Her stomach heaved with humiliated sorrow. What was she supposed to do now? Just keep ignoring it? But she’d told him that’s what she’d do. Saints fucking help her, she’d told him don’t give up on me.
The first friend she’d made in how long, the first pair of still-lit eyes that looked at her with something more than fear for the undead murderer she was, and she’d let her stupid Lisa libido drool all over him. A ridiculous tear beaded in her duct. She scoffed and wiped it away. You’re not a wee colleen anymore, Annalise. You don’t cry over boys. You put on your big girl pants and fix it while it’s still fixable. Up you get and clean up after yourself.
She opened the door to the deepening evening. The carriage squeaked on its shocks as she left it.
That’s you. The Orwinese Dray. Big blunt Annalise. You’re not some storybook heartthrob. Remember.
“Hello, Mother Classic,” Ofelia said, from her book-bolstered perch atop the carriage.
Tiago waved with his stirring spoon. “Draka’s got a pebble in her hoof. It’s poking her.”
“You get it out?”
“She won’t let me.” He tapped the spoon on the skillet’s edge. “You know how she is.”
She smirked. “Uh huh. That’s on account of how she can smell your fear.”
“She can smell my annoyance, maybe. I’ve been looking into it, you know, and there’s a hex engine depot in Fontana. I guarantee we’d get a discount. They do installments. Or we could buy one, and find the guy guilty of something, and chop-chop. New car.”
“You’re trying to upset me, boyo, just give me dinner.”
Tiago passed her a plate piled with his signature dish, which they’d all started calling crud. “I’m sure il Derriere has come up with all kinds of incredible recipes you can do off mincemeat and barley.”
“Il Derriere’s been done before,” Seth called, from his seat by the stove. The quickest of glances to him sent Annalise into an embarrassed spiral.
“All things have been done before,” Ofelia intoned from above. “And shall be done again, and again a thousandfold whensoever the turning wheel hath spoke its final spoke.”
“Is that from something?”
Ofelia underhand tossed Seth a book from her pile. “This one.”
“Shit.” He butterfingered it into the dirt. “Shit. Sorry, Feeli.”
“Oh, not at all. I’ve read it already.”
“Eat quick, kiddos.” Annalise took another flavorless bite. “If we give it a lash, I’ll bet we can make Jonquil before the sun’s through setting. A touch of early-evening scaffold work.”
Tiago’s brow raised. “You don’t want to roll in solo first?”
“Nah. This time I reckon we just get it done all together. I only just got back. Missed yas.”
“Bet you did. Choking down big city food at the Butterfly Pavilion. Pining for some good ol’ fashioned crud. Have a double.”
She chuckled. “I will, yeah.”
Tiago got up and spooned more of his pasty concoction onto her tin travel plate. “You get a chance to check that place out? Was it as good as you hoped?”
That made her remember the restaurant. That dimpled, lopsided grin when she’d called him a marvel. God, her dress. The way his eyes had wandered across her neckline, the way she could almost feel his attention, tingling on her skin. How pink his ears had turned when she said he could look. She should have burned that fucking dress years ago. A mother of two, how many years old, strutting around in public wearing that? Why did the version of her with the disguise and the fireballs have to be such a fucking floozy?
“Mom.” Tiago’s mouth tugged down at the corners. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Is everything okay?”
Whenever her son was concerned for her, he looked like Kevan used to, back when he cared enough about Annalise to spare her more than a mean glance. It was in the edges of his eyes, the way they scrunched up. She’d never, ever dare to tell him so—he’d melt his face off with acid to avoid looking like that man—but it was a comfort all the same.
“Ah, sure,” she said. “It was tasty enough for how many braces I dropped on it. I’ll take us when we’re back there on business. We’ll spook all the sauciers. Maybe they’ll put it on the house.” She tousled his hair. “G’way with you before I kiss your forehead again. Feed your sister. I’ll scarf this down and then help you with Draka.”
“I’m not hungry,” Feeli called.
“Yes you are.” Annalise stood up and strolled past the camp oven, trying to look casual and not like she was walking to the headtaking scaffold. “Sethy. Shake a leg with me a second. Take your food.”
Seth took up his half-finished crud and hurried after her. “Where are we going?”
“Just a circuit around the digs,” Annalise said. “Need to do a little debriefing.”
Seth quickly fell into her same casual artifice. “Sure.”
Annalise occupied her mouth with chewing until they were enough paces from the kids. “I, uh, owe you an apology, I suppose, Seth. Another sorry to add to the pile.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I keep on putting on new heads and underestimating how much they’ll muck about with you.”
He grinned. He’d been grinning bigger, lately, with a bit of teeth. They were nice teeth. Not straight, really. But nice. “I didn’t exactly mind this time.”
“Well, you should have, Seth. We can’t…” Annalise billowed a sigh. Just rip the bandage off, girlie. “We can’t operate like that.”
Seth’s lips pursed. “Okay,” he said, with the deliberate care of a seraph-nest vanguard. “Why?”
“I can’t be responsible for unlighting you, is why. I’m your boss, I’m your elder, and I’m gonna speak sense if you can’t.”
“You told me you’d say all this.”
“You don’t have to tell me what I said, Seth. I remember all of it. ” Annalise felt her reins go taut. Give him some slack. Don’t be fierce. “And I really shouldn’t have, idiot that I am. I didn’t mean to confuse you, or make you uncomfortable, or…” She cleared her throat. “Or lead you on.”
His jaw set. His pace slowed to a halt and forced her to do the same. “That’s what you’re telling me it was, then? Leading me on?”
Just tell him yes. Just lie to him. But saints, his eyes. His seeking eyes. The rest of him was so slight and sprightly, like a prey animal, born to be fleet and fearful. But he had predator eyes, the way they locked on. Like the Fox on his back. He could see right through her.
She wanted to scream at him, to tell him she didn’t want him, that he was a barely grown troublemaker, and to wipe that knowing look off his smarmy little face. She wanted to catch him around the neck and squeeze, to ask him how it felt, to know that he was losing his soul through his skin, and why the fuck he’d want to throw the rest of it away, his color and youth and light on an old battleaxe like her, and maybe she’d make that sound come out of him again, that helpless, ecstatic whimper of crystalized need, with his jugular drumming against her palm, and she wanted—
She turned away from him. She had to.
“When I was a young wan,” she said, “running barefoot around the Haldwoeiy highlands, I couldn’t wait to get out. I’d imagine myself a Lady Knight of the Pladuriya, adventuring up and down the Territories. Slaying seraphs and stealing kisses.”
“What’s that? A Pladuriya?”
“Old Orwiny legend. Warrior women. It’s not important. And I got older, and the waiting only got more keen. And those old Orwinese legends got brittle. I couldn’t understand why my family and my village were so old-fashioned, still acting like relics of the first emergence. And I met a man, coming back from a tour on the Iron Artery, and he was from so far away, and I thought he was so handsome, and he told me tales of travel, and called me beautiful, even though girls like me… well. You ever hear people talk about Orwinese Drays?”
“It’s a kind of horse, right?”
She shook her head. “There’s no such thing. Orwiny’s never bred dray horses. An Orwinese Dray is an Orwinese girl. They’re big and strong and not very bright, they don’t complain, they’re not much to look at, but they’re fit for a good hard plowing. And you ride ‘em till they’re worn out, then get yourself a new one.”
“Oh.” Seth found something interesting to look at in the webbing of his hands. “I thought it was a kind of horse.”
“That’s on account of you’re a gentleman.”
The way he perked up when she called him that brought a chuckle to her traitorous lips. Fucking hell, why did he have to be so cute.
“Dunno why I thought this fella was, too,” she continued. “I was such a Dray. Stupid, stupid girl. Chased a dream right into a nightmare.” She ran a hand along her seraph-bleached forearm. “And now there’s no going home anymore. Never again.”
“It seems to me like you’re home wherever you are,” he said. “Got your kids, Ofelia’s got her books, Tiago’s got a big collection of wooden training-sticks he can hit me with…”
“The point I’m trying for is that you can’t go throwing your future away for a roll in the hay with me. It’s unfair. It’d be irreversible for you. A big fuckin’ dividing line in your life. For me, it wouldn’t—”
Wouldn’t mean anything? That would be a lie. And lying to Seth il Gutierre was proving harder than lying to her lie-detecting daughter.
“I mean saints’ sake. It’s been, what? A week?” That got through to him, she could tell. She pressed the advantage. “If it was just a tumble to get it out of our—your system, that’d be one thing. I’d still be too old for you, but we could leave it where it laid. But this.” She pointed at her shadowed eye. “This means it can’t be casual.”
“Annalise, I’m not trying to get in your pants, like today. I hear what you’re saying, really I do, I just…” His plate was mostly empty. He fidgeted with his spoon around the last few gray lumps. “I don’t know if I can go backwards from this.”
Of course he couldn’t. She couldn’t either. How could she pass judgment? But you learn how to be a hypocrit when you’re a mother. “We don’t have to go all the way back. I’m greedy when I’m Lisa, and I’m covetous, but I do like you, Seth. I mean… you’re the first real friend I’ve made in the new territory. And we’re closer now after all that guff. Closer friends, yeah?”
For a moment his face looked as if she’d kneed him in the gut. He recovered quickly. “Okay. Uh, okay.”
They started walking again, now in a brittle silence. Annalise watched her big lumbering boots crunch the drying grass.
“You’re right,” Seth said, eventually.
“What about? Friends?”
He shook his head. “A week is too short. But I’m… I’m interested, okay? I can’t bullshit you.”
Annalise groaned and halted again. There was a stone ripe for the sitting nearby; she sat. “Sure look. There’s someone out there who deserves the interest a boy like you. And it’s not a chewed-up, spat-out professional killer who’s old enough to be your mam.”
“That’s not how I think of you, Annalise.” There wasn’t a rock for Seth; he just shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I think you’re pretty fucking amazing, actually.”
“Fine,” she said, as her chest tightened with a cruel, unwanted joy. “Okay. Just don’t think of me like… that. Just think of me as a friend. Right? It’s—it’s been a heightened few days, that’s all.”
“It’s been a heightened week,” he said.
“Exactly.” She set her empty cutlery aside and leaned her elbows onto her knees. “When we come back to Fontana, we’ll have a week off, for me to send some mail and get some back. Long enough for a silvertongue like you to find some leggy spring chicken who can warm you up at night and clear your mind, and you’ll see you don’t need an old battle axe like me. I saw you dancing with that pretty blonde lass. She had bedroom eyes all up and down you.”
“You saw her?”
“Sure I did. She was dressed like a dust devil hit a dress shop.”
“Aren’t you trying to get me to date this girl?”
“I’m sure she’s a peach besides,” Annalise said. “And plenty peachy under those ridiculous feathers.”
“She said my suit looked like a rental.”
“Well, it was.”
He gestured to the rags that remained of it after the seraph’d had its say. “Not anymore.”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Stick around for a season, or longer if you fancy, get a big ol’ rake of cash, and then pick your favorite place we’ve traveled to and get yourself a gorgeous Plainfolk nymph who’ll give you a half dozen adorable little brown-eyed moppets.”
He gazed into his plate. Looking at his reflection through the grease, maybe. “You really think that’s the life I’m headed for out there?”
“I’ll make sure it is,” she said, softly. “I’ll get you trained and paid and we’ll find you the life you deserve, Seth. Not this one. Full of death and fear.”
Seth chewed his last spoonful of crud for longer than it deserved.
“I will stick around,” he said, eventually. “I’ll keep doing what I do for you, because one, the way you look at me after I steal something for you makes me feel like a fucking king.”
She scoffed. “I’m being a bad influence, then.”
“Sure, but I’ve always been a preening little shit. It’s nice to have an external reason. And two, you’ve promised me a big fat bonus.”
“And I re-promise it here.”
“And three. Because if I stay long enough, and see enough of this supposedly horrible life you say you live, and it doesn’t send me running to some Plainfolk nymph, eventually you’ll have to take this thing seriously.”
Annalise grunted in exasperation. “You are a pain in the seraph-fucking neck sometimes, il Gutierre.”
“You said don’t give up on me. You’re the one paying me, supposedly. So I’ll do what I’m told.” He folded his arms. “If you want to tell me different now, tell me. Say give up on me.”
“You don’t want my love, Seth. My love just hurts people. My love’s an affliction.”
He didn’t reply. Just stared.
“What?” she prompted.
“I’m just waiting for give up on me,” Seth said. “Because that’s not what you just said.”
“I’d say it if I thought it’d do a damn thing.” She stood from her stone and tried to look aggravated as she stomped back toward the carriage. “You pure melter, you.”
He shrugged amicably and followed her, brisk to keep up with her longer legs. If he’d had a tail it’d be wagging.
This wasn’t how she’d meant this conversation to go, not at all. Why couldn’t she just say it? Damn Lisa for putting her into this mess. Damn the blackened heart they shared, for keeping give up off her tongue. And thrice-damn it for how its beat quickened when Seth il Gutierre smiled at her.