Blightborn (24 page)

“You’re the captain of this boat. You think you can make
me
do whatever you want?” She stiffens and sticks out her chin, defiant.

“Clearly not, what with the way you ran off after Cael and pointed a damn
gun
at my head. Same gun that punk used to kill my father. I still haven’t figured out what I oughta do to you for that.” Boyland growls and steps forward, his finger thrusting up under her chin, his lips twisting into an angry sneer—

Thwack!

He yelps and jerks his arm back, and a small rock rolls by his feet.

Boyland’s eyes cast skyward.

Up there, in the crow’s nest, is Mole. He yells down, “You be nice to her, now!” And then he looks at Wanda. His tone changes. “Hey, Wanda. Hey, look what I’m learning!” He
waggles a crudely made slingshot in the air. “You like the slingshot, right?”

She smiles awkwardly and wiggles her fingers. “Hi, Mole.”

Boyland yells, “You come down here so I can kick your ass!”

Mole spits a loogey that spatters against the yacht deck—Boyland has to dance out of the way so it doesn’t hit him.

“Looks like you have another protector,” Boyland says just to her. “Though for the life of me, looking at you and listening to that voice, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to protect you. Hell, even Cael doesn’t want you. Probably why he’s running—just to get away from you.”

She tries not to show her tears. Tries to keep her chin up as if she doesn’t care. But she’s not good at hiding that sort of thing.

Boyland’s pleased with himself. She can tell that just by looking at him. He chuckles and says, “Now get to the back of the boat. Go make eyes at the hobo; maybe he’ll give you some love.”

A JORUM OF SKEE

CAEL’S BEEN IN
this room for . . . weeks, maybe, he doesn’t even know, what with the way the rats are squeaking and chattering in their cages—little feet digging into thatch nests, teeth tapping against the metal ends of water bottles jury-rigged and hung outside the wires.

He’s been pacing. Doing push-ups. Sit-ups. Occasionally he visits with the little shuck rats since they’re the only interaction he gets most hours of the day. It amazes him how different each of them looks from the others. Some are all black. Others gray or brown. The one in the cage in the top-right corner is all white, with eyes the color of blood blisters.

Cael calls that one Old Scratch, and it’s either odd or utterly appropriate that the little albino rat seems the friendliest of the bunch. Squeaking and dancing around, trying to lick at his finger instead of nibble at it. He tells the rat, “If I saw you in the corn, I’d kill you and eat you.”

The critter eeks and clicks its teeth and dances in circles.

“Don’t worry, I’m not eating you today.”

He sits back down on the floor. Doing nothing makes his body ache. And his mind, too. His body can’t wander, so that’s all his mind does: drift, wind, double back on thoughts he’s trying to avoid.

Sometimes his fingers feel the top of his shirt, touching the small bump underneath. He doesn’t want to think about it, but how can he not? He hasn’t looked. He
refuses
to look. But he’s let his hand wander under the fabric. Felt the margins of the three—not two anymore but
three
—leaves. Bigger than they were yesterday. And next to the stem is another small lump. Like a sprout pushing up a bulge of dirt before it breaks through.

He fails to suppress a shudder.

The Blight will be the end of him. Assuming he
doesn’t
go the way of Earl Poltroon—taken over by vines and leaves, driven all the way mad by what must’ve been runners and shoots burying into the meat of his brain—everything is still ruined. The world will shun him. His friends will fear him. Gwennie won’t ever want to touch him.

But Wanda . . .

The look on her face—shock and dismay.

But something else, too. Sympathy. As if she still cared about him.

He thinks about her a lot. Which surprises him. She seemed different, somehow. Less . . . well, less like the Wanda Mecklin he remembers. She had a toughness to her. Way she stuck out her chin. Way she held that rifle.

Cael imagines Wanda walking to him through the corn, this time without a stitch of clothes on her—he tries to think about what she’d look like. A lot of freckles, maybe. Gwennie has a birthmark on the inside of her thigh, just a little thumbprint like a smear of chocolate, but even when he tries to think about Gwennie, he thinks about Wanda instead. His hands on her hips, his lips against hers. And as he thinks it he can feel his own body responding, his heartbeat quickening, his pants growing tighter as—

Suddenly his chest starts itching as if he just rubbed the skin with nettles, and he can feel the stem-and-leaves twitching, curling,
straining
—

The door to the rat-room opens.

Cael gasps. Stops scratching his chest even though it’s driving him batty not to.

There stands the raider who had the gun to Lane’s head.

The one Cael has come to understand is their leader.

The raider has a bottle in one hand, two tin cups in the other. He walks over to the corner, hooks a chair with the toe of his boot and pulls it closer, then sits down on it, leaning forward.

“Jorum of skee?” the raider asks.

Cael eyes the raider as the man holds out the two cups. He rattles them:
cluh-clink cluh-clink.

Cael reaches out, takes a cup.

The raider uncorks the bottle, which has no label.

He pours a draft in Cael’s cup, then his own.

“You first,” Cael says.

The raider shrugs, slugs it back. Sucks air through his teeth.

Cael bites his lip and then drinks deeply.

The whiskey is smooth. Burned sugar and charred wood. Lights him up like a hobo’s barrel fire but doesn’t sear him—there’s just a spreading warmth like a puddle of hot caramel.

“That ain’t no cheap fixy,” Cael says.

“Nah, it’s real deal skee,” the raider says. “We make it ourselves. We call it Hair of the Dog That Bit You.”

Cael drains the last drops of the whiskey and tilts the cup forward. “Might as well put some more in there.”

The raider hesitates. “First, introductions. My name’s Killian Kelly.”

“All right.”

“And you are?”

“Bored. Pissed off. You give me some sweet-tasting whiskey after leaving me here for Lord and Lady know how many days—”

“Two weeks. Or thereabouts.”

“And now we’re expected to be all chummy. But last I remember you had a gun to my friend’s head and a bunch of you dog-headed bastards blew up our one chance to get on board the flotilla, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t feel like being chatty to some raider scum.”

“Scum. Okay, Cael McAvoy, don’t tell me your name.”

“How the—”

“Your other friend. Lane.”

Godsdamnit, Lane
. Cael snorts. “I bet he’s all moon-eyed over being held hostage by you raiders.”

“He seems sympathetic to our cause. And I thought you might be. Especially given that rifle you were carrying.”

“My rifle ain’t got anything to do with your cause.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Where I’m from we don’t dance around the things we want to say; we just say the dang thing and get it over with. Like pulling stitches: just make it quick.”

Killian’s grin wavers a little before bouncing back. “One sec,” he says, holding up a finger.

Then he steps back out of the room—Cael thinks,
When he comes back in, I’ll rush him; I’ll knock his ass to the ground and
—but when Killian steps back in, he has Pop’s lever-action rifle in hand.

“This rifle,” he says, pulling a small tool from his pocket. Screwdriver, by the look of it. “Is really quite interesting.” He flips it around, starts unscrewing the butt-plate at the far end of the rifle. Cael’s about to protest, but then he sees that someone has done a repair job on the splintered stock. Screws through metal plates do a hasty but effective job of bolting the wood back together. Finally, Killian says, “Here we go.”

He turns the gun around so that the stock is facing Cael.

With the butt-plate gone, Cael sees a symbol in the wood. In black char, as if carved there and then burned, too.

A wolf’s head inside a circle.

“That’s our sigil,” Killian says.

“I . . . I see that.”

“This rifle belonged to a raider.”

“That rifle belonged to my
father
.”

Killian gives him a look like,
Well
.

“Oh, hell no,” Cael says. “My pop was no dang raider. He hated you Sleeping Dogs same as any of us did.”

“Then he must’ve stolen it from one.”

“Must have.”

“Though with as few bang-sticks like this one out there, I can promise that no raider gave up a shooter like this easy.”

Cael shrugs, sticks out his chin. “Then Pop must’ve killed someone for it.”

“That who your daddy is? A killer?”

“Say that again, I’ll grab that rifle and stick it so far up your ass you’ll taste gun oil for weeks.”

Killian grins. “Maybe you’re a killer, too.”

That’s it. No more of this
.

Cael launches himself up, grabbing for the rifle.

But damn if that raider isn’t fast, and Cael is slow. Killian darts aside, leaving only an empty chair for Cael to crash into. He cautions Cael—“Stay down, Cael”—but Cael doesn’t listen. Instead, he grabs the chair, plans on throwing it from the ground up into Killian’s dumb, smiling face.

Then Killian’s boot connects with his side.

Pain throbs up and down his body, and he finds it suddenly hard to draw a breath. He rolls back over and makes a bridge out of his body and just . . . stays like that. Panting. Wincing.

“I hope I didn’t crack a rib,” Killian says.

“Go to hell,” Cael groans.

“Yeah. Well. Here’s the deal, Cael. You want me to spit it straight, I’ll spit it straight. The Dogs are a shit-or-get-out-of-the-outhouse group. So I’m making you a choice: you either reel it in and decide to don the dog-mask with us, or you keep on clawing and hissing like a licked kitty and I dump your ass off into the corn. Though, to be clear, not before we slice off your tongue and slap you about the head and neck with it.” He
grins and winks. “Just to make sure you don’t blabber to any Empyrean about us.”

“My friends won’t stand for that,” Cael says with a groan.

“Lane’s already on board. He’s an eager boy. Hungry for a little rebellion. He’s got a real rage-face for the Empyrean—just the thought of him kicking their ass gets him a little stiff, I think. We can use that.”

Godsdamnit, Lane!

“And Rigo?”

“Rigo, yeah.” And it’s here Cael sees the raider’s smile give way to a grim mask and he starts to speak but no words come out. Finally, he says, “Time we had a real talk about your friend, Cael. I’m sorry, but . . . but Rigo didn’t make it.”

OBLIGATED

WANDA PACES THE
back of the boat. Anxiety is like a wave of pins and needles washing over her. She doesn’t trust Boyland. The hobo just keeps staring at her as if she’s a shuck rat dancing back and forth. She hasn’t been home in weeks, hasn’t seen her mutt, Hazlenut, or her parents or Boxelder, and even though it’s silly and hasn’t really been
that
long, it’s almost as if she can’t remember what it all looks like: Was the window on Busser’s tavern door a porthole or an octagon? Did Doc Leonard have chairs out on his front porch or was that the general store? Will she soon start forgetting things about her family and her dog?

But all that’s a distraction. Pulling her away from what she’s really trying oh so very hard not to think about—but that keeps haunting her like a ghost from the mouth of the Maize Witch—

Cael has the Blight.

She tells herself maybe it’s not true. Maybe what she saw wasn’t what she saw. They were all fighting in the corn. Maybe a bit of plant fell off, hooked on the underside of his shirt, stuck to his chest with a little . . . stem sap or whatever and . . . dangit, is stem sap even a real thing?

It was the Blight.

She could see it. Not just stuck
to
skin but growing up out of it, the way a plant grows out of the dirt. Pushing the skin up. Leaves uncurling.