Never Knew Another (26 page)

“I don’t think so. My name’s Jona, I’m the Lord of Joni but that doesn’t mean anything anymore. I’m just Jona. I’m trying to rebuild my family name. I make officer, and I raise my mostly-human kids to be a little stronger than me, a little better. I’m not as bad as my father was, not as bad as my grandfather.”

“I don’t have anything. I don’t even have a shadow.”

Rachel held her arm out against the wall. The lamplight shadows ended at the sleeve. Her hand had no shadow.

“Crazy.” Jona held out his own arm next to hers, his shadow parallel to her arm until the hand. Hers was absent. Then, he touched her hand. It felt real.

Rachel checked the lashes of her sleeve. She pulled it tighter, and checked the seams.

“I guess Senta’s a good disguise for you,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “No disguise,” she said. “Didn’t you see me with the koans? Maybe someday the Senta will figure out how the demon children fit into everything.”

Jona searched around the night for anything to help him know what he should say or do. She was waiting for him to speak. Was there anything else to say? Jona didn’t know. He looked at her, and remembered that he was going to kill her if he had to. It felt like a memory from a thousand years ago. It felt like a different life, and it was. It was the life where there wasn’t anyone like him that he could talk to about it. Salvatore was something else, a creature or a monster or a force of selfish energy. He wasn’t like her. Meeting her was different.

“What now?” asked Jona.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve never met another.”

“I met one other, once.”

“Was he evil?”

“He was evil, but he was no worse than the people he worked for. Haven’t seen him in a while. He doesn’t know about me, what I really am, but I know about him.” Jona scratched his neck and grinned, sheepishly. “You know, I don’t sleep with prostitutes. I just go now and then when I’m putting on the show of it for the boys. If I did, they’d just get sick, and I’d have a reputation that might catch up with me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Oh, I didn’t show you my tongue.”

She opened her mouth. It came out, like a lizard’s tongue. It had a fork on the end of it. She pulled it back in quickly. “Sorry, it’s kind of gross.”

“No worse than my wings,” he said. “You talk fine.”

“I have to. It took practice. I fold it up a lot, inside my mouth. If I get drunk, it starts to slip a little, so I don’t get drunk. I’ve got all these scales to keep covered all the time, and my tongue, and I don’t think I have anything else wrong with me. I think that’s all I got.” She bit her lip.

“Are you hungry? We should go somewhere else.”

He looked down at the canal. He had an image in his mind of a body falling into the water, tied to a heavy stone. He lost his appetite.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Neither am I,” he replied. “Doesn’t matter, does it?”

They walked a bit, to a cafe at the edge of the Pens that stayed open all night serving the sailors who rolled out of the taverns looking for something to eat before they stumbled back to their boats. Rachel and Jona didn’t eat anything. They drank bitter tea as stale as sea biscuits.

***

Hunting, always hunting. Jona’s mind dropped away from Salvatore, but we did not. I found a trail as black as pitch among the sewers, and old enough it only came through because the stain lingered while other things did not. It led deep into the city, to a building cracked down the center, and half fallen away.

I took to the stairwell, there, straight to Salvatore’s room. My husband scoured the rooms for anyone alive inside. There was no one. It was deep night here. I climbed the stairs. I knew the stairs. I had seen them in Jona’s mind. I knew the door, too. I opened the door, and saw the room.

The hammock was still there. Dust covered everything. The floorboards had rotted, as had the ceiling. Fingers of moonlight pushed through. I smelled him here. I smelled him everywhere.

I pulled the wolfskin from my back and I stood up tall. I tested the hammock. It still seemed strong. I sat on it, and leaned back. I imagined a life lived like this, in this small room.

My husband said nothing when he came in, searching the floorboards and the walls for anything that remained that might tell us where Salvatore had gone.

He pulled the skin from his own back.

The Night King knows where he is.

She will not welcome us.

She knows exactly where he is. He’s too hard to find if he was just by himself. He’s not this smart. He can’t be without much memory to guide him. He has friends even if he doesn’t remember them.

Is anyone here?

No.

It will rain tonight. It is a good night to burn this building down.

***

Jona and Rachel were walking on her way back from work. She noticed how the people looked at her differently now that she walked with a king’s man. She didn’t know what to think about that, but she liked him.

She took his hand. She smiled.

He looked down at her hand as if he didn’t quite understand why it was in his. She squeezed, and let go. He nodded at her. “Oh,” he said.

“Sorry.” She let go.

“Sorry, nothing.” He took her hand. He held onto it.

He didn’t want to let go.

CHAPTER XVII

W
e hunt the living not the dead. Salvatore eludes us. Rachel may return to Dogsland, if her brother returns.

I see with my eyes, my senses, deep enough into Jona’s memories. I can see more than he ever did. His memories lead where they lead, and there is never too much information for hunters to know their prey.

Is it real? Will it help us if it isn’t real?

No memory is real.

If it helps us hunt her, then it is real enough.

***

The next evening, Rachel opened the window to a dreary sky drenched in gray clouds and rolling thunder. She sipped her tea and watched the storm coming.

“It’ll pass,” said Djoss. “A dry spell is coming.”

“Since when do you know anything about the weather here? We’ve only been here a few months.”

“People are saying it.”

“You think they’ll want us to work tonight?”

“No,” he said.

“Have we got enough for rent?”

“We do,” he said.

“Do we have enough for me to have some fun?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I want to go dancing! Come dancing with me, Djoss!”

Djoss shrugged. “All right,” he said, “Where?”

“Anywhere. Just don’t leave me alone. I miss you.”

He sighed. “I miss you, too,” he said. “I have some things I have to do first.”

“What?” she said.

He squinted his eyes, thinking. “You know what? I guess I can skip it until tomorrow. You wouldn’t like it, anyway.”

“No, I’ll come with you,” she said. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just… We’ll go do something fun. It will be empty except for us. It’ll be our own, personal, flooded city. One of these days we need to invest in some parasols.”

The first thing they did was slip into the night between the worst of the storms. The second thing they did was slip into a bar, drenched from head to toe from the rain. The bar wasn’t playing any music. They stepped outside. They clomped across a bridge of planks to the other side of the road. The bending boards sank the edges of their boots into the water that had emerged from the sewers. This late in the season, the sewer water mostly ran clear. Anything that hadn’t washed out into the bay by now was never going to leave. The heat was coming back. The dry time was coming, when it wouldn’t rain for weeks at a time, and then only a little.

The next tavern they found only had one musician, a single drummer. Djoss and his sister danced awkwardly—her in all her Senta attire, and him terrified of stepping on her feet with his huge boots.

The drummer smoked a pipe while he drummed. When his pipe ran low, he gave the two dancers a loud, fast finish.

Djoss, Rachel, and the bartender clapped for him. No one else was there. Djoss got them both a drink and a little stew. She asked him where he’d been all these nights. He asked her the same thing. Neither of them wanted to admit to anything.

Djoss tossed some more money at the drummer, and they danced some more. They didn’t have to talk if they were dancing.

When the drummer ran out of weed again, they sat back down and drank some more. They talked about the different ales they had had from all the different places they had been, and at last, after false starts and too much effort, they gave up. They stepped back out into the street.

Looking ahead, Rachel saw the widow’s middle child leaning against a wall and glaring at them. He faded into the night behind the storms of another weeping cloud.

Djoss and Rachel went home, eventually. She borrowed one of his huge shirts. He had three of them, now. None of them ragged thin. She sat on her cot in the dark, looking down at her legs. She rarely looked at her own body. When she did, it didn’t seem real to her. Sometimes she could forget that she wasn’t a normal person, and she walked and moved among the people as if she was safe. She ran her hands over the jagged scales. She was so dirty, and so smooth.

Djoss scrubbed their clothes in the bathtub with a washboard he had picked up with all his new money. Rachel had stopped yelling at him about buying new things. They had furniture, cutlery, and herbs in pots in the window. He hung her clothes to dry in the apartment because of the rain outside.

In the apartment above them, two people were making slow love.

Rachel took a deep breath.“Djoss,I want to tell you something important.”

“What is it?”

“I think we need to run, and soon.”

“Why?”

“I found someone else like me, I think. I did. We should run.”

“If no one knows about you, we should stay. This has been good for us. We’ve never had it so good. Beds, clean clothes, and everything. You just stay away from her. You see her, you turn the other way. She doesn’t need to know about us if she gets caught.”

“It’s a man, Djoss. We’re both getting used to this place,” she said. “It scares me. How’s Turco doing? How is your thing with him?”

“Basement’s flooded out. Nobody’s going down there until it dries. He’s looking for a new place.”

She knew he was lying. She had been in the basement in the worst of the rains and it had never flooded. “Do we still have enough money?”

“We’ve been keeping our hands busy,” said Djoss.

“Doing what?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Djoss, doing what?”

“Try to get some sleep. Plenty of work in the dry season, and no monsoon rains us out.”

She looked down the shirt she was wearing. Some of the sweat stains on it were a strange rust-color, like blood, diluted.

***

When the rain faded, Djoss and Rachel went back to work as quiet as ever. The night passed easily enough. Sailors had money and whores had easy lies and no shame. Rachel cleaned up after them without a word.

In her mind, she saw a whole city spread out before her full of taverns and brothels and men looking for women and women looking for money and her brother punching people and smuggling from one building to another to pay the rent for the woman he kept on the side and her kids who were growing up to be criminals and the daylight world was just noise, while she slept, of shopkeepers and people that don’t talk to each other and everything in the city was lonely and wrong and sickening and nothing was good in her world. The only person she was talking to then was Jona, in cafes and quiet corners of the city where they could speak alone and only for themselves.

When she told that to Jona, he hugged her. He said,
It isn’t all bad all the time. It’s just like that when you stay in the Pens too long. I’ll take you to a ball. You’ll see something new, something wonderful. Do you have a gown?

Of course not.

Well, I’ll find you one.

I don’t want to go to a ball. I want to go to a place where I don’t have to hide who I am. I’d have to do more than hide at a ball. Jona, I don’t know what I want.

Well, when you know, tell me. I’ll help you. We’re friends. We should help each other.

Maybe. I’ll think about it. What do you want?

I want to know what dreams are like.

Oh.

That next day, the shift ended, and Djoss was missing, and Rachel couldn’t stand it anymore. She went straight to the baker’s basement. She walked in, and ignored the baker, and went to the stairs in back.

The basement wasn’t flooded out. She had been there in the rains. She knew Djoss had been lying to her.

She knocked on the door. Sparrow opened it. Rachel had expected Sparrow to be there, with her stooped shoulders and her mean face. This was no surprise.

Rachel pushed her way inside. The widow said nothing. She sat down in the mud leaning back against a post.

“What do you want?” said Sparrow.

“Djoss keeps you here, doesn’t he?”

“He does. Turco’s spreading out. Didn’t need this anymore. People don’t like how muddy it is. Djoss said we could stay here.”

“He’ll never stay with you. Not for long.”

“I thought you said you were his sister.”

“I am. I’m not jealous. Djoss and I… It’s only a matter of time before we have to leave this town. I hate it, but that’s the way it is. And when we go, no one follows us. We’re just gone. Poof. Like smoke.”

“For now, my boys get to sleep indoors. You take him with you, you take care of him when he’s stumbling in here too pink to walk straight.”

Rachel leaned against a wall. “When does Djoss get here?”

Sparrow shrugged.

“How dangerous is this stuff they’re doing, him and Turco and Dog?”