Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Impo

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  “That was different. I was unprepared. And the Jack Boots and I have an agreement now. Unlike some people, they keep their word.”

  “What kind of agreement?”

  “A private kind. Look, I know you think I’m an idiot and that I can’t do anything right—”

  “I never said that—”

  “Oh, yes, you have, and even when you don’t say so, you look it. See—you are doing it right now!”

  “I’m only thinking of you!”

  “No, you are thinking of yourself. You don’t trust anyone to know what they are doing. I’m helping Califa and you are gallivanting around like this is some sort of game. Jumping ship like that, with some fellow you don’t even know.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Udo, I thought, and don’t think I'm going to tell you, either. But I am willing to admit when I am wrong and I did so now.

  “I was a total snapperhead. I know it,” I admitted.

  “You gotta grow up, Flora. There’s a lot going on in the world, and not all of it centers around you. Think about someone other than yourself, for once.”

  “I said I was a fool—”

  “Ayah, you say so, Flora, but you don’t really believe it. You think you are smarter than everyone else.”

  I didn’t have to listen to this. I had admitted my faults, and still that wasn’t good enough for him. If he wanted me to crawl, well, he was in for disappointment. “Fine. Have fun with your pirates and your sparkly red boots. And if they turn you into a monster, don’t come crawling to me.”

  “No fear of that!” Udo answered hotly.

  I jumped off the barstool. I was so pissed that I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going; all I knew was that I had to get out of there before I blew up. Blindly, I roared out of the bar, far away from a vain popinjay of a pirate.

  “Hey!”

  A man had run into me broadside, almost knocking me down.

  “Lo siento.” He caught my arm. I turned to tell him to watch where he was going, but he raised his hand and flicked his fingers toward my face. I saw a brief twinkle of glittery dust, and then, before I could react otherwise, I had sucked it in. My muscles went weak and my knees gave out. I started to fall but the man caught me, and at his touch, my muscles stiffened again, but now they moved of their own accord.

  “Come,” he said, and I obediently followed him through the lobby, toward the elevator.

  The clerk at the desk waved at me, calling my name, but when I tried to answer, my tongue lay in my mouth like a piece of dead meat. I tried to stop, tried to turn around, but my legs would not obey. Puppet like, I followed the man into the elevator. The elevator door shut. He was standing behind me, so I could not see his face, but the hand that reached around to push the elevator button was long and narrow, and his fingernails were painted jade green.

  Only Birdies paint their fingernails jade green.

  I would have shrieked if I could, but I could only stand there, stock-still, as the elevator whirled upward. That glittery dust must have been Sonoran Zombie Powder, which paralyzes all who touch it. Udo had once used it to catch Springheel Jack, and I had used it to catch Springheel Udo. Now someone had used it to catch me.

  At the sixth floor, the elevator shuddered to a halt and the cage door sprang open. I walked down the long hallway, hearing soft footsteps padding behind me. At room 65, the long, narrow hand unlocked the door, and I marched inside. The door shut behind us. I walked over to the chair by the dresser and sat down. My captor walked into my field of vision and crouched before me, smiling.

  “Who are you?” the Birdie asked.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Frozen. Blood. Vision Serpent.

  I HAD NEVER SEEN the face of an adult Birdie before. Birdie aristocrats wear masks of jade, leather, or gold. Everyone else obscures their features behind thick paint. The Birdie’s silver mask dangled from his hand, and the face thus revealed was horrifying. The sides of his skull had been shaved and his warrior lock was long, stiff with blood, woven through with feathers, bones, and tufts of fur. His face was painted black, bisected with a yellow stripe across his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Golden thorns pierced his ears and his nasal septum, and his lower lip. His teeth, when he opened his mouth to speak, were stained red, the canines sharp.

  The Birdie said, “You are traveling with Wraathmyr, the wer-bear. You were with him at Valdosta’s.” He paused to lick his lips. His voice was strangely familiar. When he spoke again, saying, “You helped the skinwalker escape me,” I knew where I had heard him before.

  He was Madama Valdosta’s buddy at the lodge. The man who had set us up. “He belongs to the Lord of the Smoked Mirror, the skinwalker does. He has been marked. But you, you are very ... familiar to me. Who are you?”

  The Birdie licked his lips again. He needed to get some Madama Twanky’s Lip Repair, I thought somewhat hysterically.

  If they get you, said Nini Mo, keep yer yip shut. I tried to stay silent, but I could not. At the touch of his finger on my lips, my mouth opened. Luckily for me, the compulsion was simply to speak, not to tell the truth.

  I croaked, “What skinwalker?”

  “The boy,” the Birdie said impatiently. “His scent is all over you.”

  “I don’t know anything about any skinwalker.”

  The Birdie touched my lips again and I shut up. He raised a quizzing glass to his eye, peering at me through it. But he couldn’t be looking at me, for the glass itself was black, completely opaque.

  The Birdie let the quizzing glass drop on its chain, and stood up. His black shift was tufted with golden fur around the neck; his bare arms were covered in long scratches. Some were half-healed, still scabby; others were new enough to be stippled with red. He was either a magician or a priest—or both. But he wasn’t a Flayed Priest; his skin appeared to be his own. Beneath my fear, another terror, even sharper, began to bloom.

  He said, “I saw you in the mirror, while I was tracking the skinwalker. You are so familiar, and yet why? The Smoke drifts in your veins, twisting and turning, and yet you do not control it. Who are you?”

  Now my fear shifted into hope. He didn’t know exactly who I was; he was suspicious, that was all. If I could persuade him I was nobody, then maybe he’d let me go.

  I whispered, “My name is Nyana Romney. I’ve been in the Current, it’s true, but I’m not an adept.”

  The Birdie looked amused. “You call it the Current, as though it is something that can be channeled, controlled, or ridden. It is not a Current, it is a Smoke that drifts where it will; you cannot control it, only drift with it, go where it goes. I think you are lying to me.”

  “I am not,” I protested. “I swear I’m not—”

  “We shall see. Hush.”

  My protests choked and died. He stood staring at me, head slightly cocked. I recognized the look—it’s the same one Flynn gets when he’s trying to figure something out. Then he leaned closer, breathing deeply, and I realized, with a mental shudder, that he was smelling me. He pushed up my sleeve, turning my arm so my wrist was exposed. The cut I had made for the Blood Working was scabby, half-healed. He traced it with one green fingernail, and his touch made me cringe.

  “You must be careful,” he said. “You went too deep. You are lucky you didn’t bleed out. And the cut is too long. Never use a razor.”

  Now he leaned so near that I would have choked if I could have. How could he smell me over the stench of himself? He absolutely reeked, of smoke, of rotting blood, of musky animal.

  “Hmm...” he said. Briskly he removed my dispatch case from my shoulder and carried it out of my view. I couldn’t see him going through my gear, but I knew from his murmurs he wasn’t impressed.

  He came back to turn out my pockets. He found my toothbrush and a bar of chocolate; two unspent rounds and a casing from my last target practice; six divas; my collapsible drinking cup; Pow’s soother. He picked up my right hand and raised it to his face—for one horrible moment, I thought he was go
ing to kiss it, or bite it—but instead, he just sniffed at the cuff of my buckskin jacket. There was a stain on it, I remembered, very old and faint. I’d always assumed that Tiny Doom had trailed her sleeve through gravy or something, but by the way the Birdie was huffing at the leather, I had the sudden awful thought that the stain wasn’t gravy at all.

  “Where did you get this jacket?” the Birdie hissed, dropping my hand and wrenching my face toward him.

  “I got it at a jobber,” I babbled. “In Califa. It cost me twenty-two divas—”

  His fingers squeezed my cheeks. “You lie. There is blood on this jacket and I would know its scent anywhere.” He yanked the jacket off me and patted me down, running rough hands over my sides and front. He yanked off my right boot and then my left—and the map of my Working fell out.

  Oh, fiking pigface Choronzon.

  “What is this?”

  “Nothing. A stupid thing. I was just fooling around with a Charm I’d found, a Locative Spell—”

  He sniffed the map. “You have used blood. What did you seek? It is no small matter, a Blood Working.”

  “Uh, I was, uh, looking for, uh, my friend, Udo. He got taken by pirates, he was with the Infantina. I thought maybe I could, uh, do a Blood Working and find him, help rescue him—”

  The Birdie opened the map and looked at it. He licked his lips again—pigface, if he did that one more time, I would scream. I said quickly “It didn’t work, ’cause he’s here, I saw him. If you let me go, I’ll show you—”

  “Callate,” he said, and I was silent again.

  Fike, he didn’t believe me, but it didn’t matter. The map had no inscription on it, no This Way to Tiny Doom, nothing to give its purpose away. He would never get the truth out of me, no matter what he did. He could kill me and I would go to my grave with Tiny Doom’s secret. Even if he found out who I was, I would never tell him about Tiny Doom. Never.

  The Birdie picked up the quizzing glass—it must have been some sort of a scrying glass—and peered at the map through it. He moved out of my line of sight and I heard the sound of rustling, as though he was fishing around in a trunk or a drawer, or maybe a bag. And then, from somewhere behind me, an order: “Sit down at the table.”

  I got up and walked over to a table and chair I hadn’t known was there. A small brown bowl sat on the table; next to it lay a leather case. The Birdie sat down across from me and unrolled the leather case. Inside, small silver tools nestled in a chamois sleeve.

  A bleeding kit. Buck hates bleeding and never allowed it to be done to us, not even when Idden had scarlet fever and the doctor said she’d die otherwise. I’ve never been bled before, and I certainly didn’t want to be bled now, and not by this man, and not in this manner. But I was powerless to stop him.

  “Give me your hand.”

  He placed an obsidian rod in my palm and closed my fingers around it. He trailed his fingernail up my inner arm and came to a stop in the crook of my elbow. He tied a black ribbon around my upper arm, tightly, and then flicked his finger at the veins until one stood out.

  He selected a small silver box from the case: a scarificator. One side of the box is pierced with small holes; when a button is pressed, small blades spring out from the hole. It’s a fast and easy way to get a lot of blood flowing.

  “Clench your fist a few times,” the Birdie ordered and, like a stupid puppet, I did. I tried to yank my arm out of his grip, squirm away, hit him, kick him, but no matter how much I struggled, I was trapped in my own skin. My writhing was imaginary; my body remained frozen and obedient.

  The Birdie pressed the box to my skin. The spring made a popping noise as he thumbed the button; I felt a quick silvery pain. He removed the box from my arm, revealing four rows of little red dots. He lifted my arm and placed it in the notch of the bowl, which I now recognized as the polished brainpan of a skull. The dots grew, trembling, and then became trickles. The blood flowed down my arm like red ribbons unwinding into liquid red satin, pooling in the bottom of the bowl—which was, I realized, a well-polished skull cap. As the blood flowed, it seemed to take all the tension with it. My muscles, so tight and taut, loosened. My fear and revulsion began to vanish into a hazy warm lassitude.

  A heavy formless feeling washed over me, as though my body were dissolving into nothingness, my mind going gooey and soft. I heard the steady thump of my heartbeat, the tidal roar of the blood still in my veins. My head felt full of pressure, my brain too big for my skull. Everything seemed faraway and unreal. I watched calmly as the bowl slowly filled, and then the Birdie lifted my arm, pressed a wad of spider-silk to the little wounds, bound them up with a strip of cloth.

  The Birdie laid my arm gently on the table and picked the bowl up. He angled it, swirling the blood within, gazing into its depths. Then he raised the bowl to his lips and drank deeply. I saw the length of his throat convulse as he swallowed. His lips, when he set the bowl down, were wet and red. He sighed and closed his eyes. Another pair of eyes was painted on his eyelids: golden eyes, the eyes of a jaguar. They stared at me, unblinkingly, glinting liquidly

  “Hotspur,” the Birdie said. “I have tasted him before. No wonder you are familiar to me. He was a great fighter, a great warrior. To see him on the plinth, with the feather spear in his hand, was a fearsome sight. What a pity he broke. You are his daughter. But you taste of someone else, too.”

  He raised the bowl again to his lips and I heard the sound of his tongue licking the dregs. Putting the bowl down, he sighed contentedly, eyes still closed. I stared at him, my mind adrift and hazy; he seemed distant and unreal; I felt distant and unreal. Perhaps this was a dream, and soon I would awake, home in my own snug bed, Flynnie at my feet, and Poppy shouting, “The waffles are ready! Do you want syrup or jam?” while the delicious smell of fresh coffee drifted into the room, the sun slanting on the wall, the burr of voices in the kitchen below, Pow shouting happily, the sound of Mamma’s bath running—

  The Birdie opened his eyes.

  “Haðraaða,” he said softly. “Ah, I would know that taste anywhere. You are her child, Azota’s child. He is your father, but she is your mother. And so I wonder what you are seeking with your own blood.”

  He took the map and crumpled it up, dropped it in the bowl, where now only a skim of blood remained. Light flashed at his fingertip and the paper exploded into a flare of fire, crackling and hot. The map burned quickly, a thick column of smoke rising up from the bowl, oily gray smoke that twisted and turned like a gauzy veil. The tendrils coiled around each other like a serpent, and then I began to think I actually saw a snake, diaphanous and scaly, floating in the air. The serpent’s flat head hinged open, revealing a cavernous mouth and long sharp fangs, a wispy forked red tongue.

  The serpent undulated out of my field of vision; I felt a gentle tickle on my ear, and then horrible awful pain, as though someone had hammered a spike through my brain. The pain echoed through my skull, turned my vision black, reverberated through my entire body, sucked all the air out of my lungs. Then it began to recede into something else, something far worse: a tiny squirmy tickle, a horrible itchy sensation of something slithering around inside my head. It was as though my brain was a little house, and each memory, each thought, each emotion a separate room. Now the serpent was slithering through those rooms, rifling through my thoughts, my dreams, my desires, my hopes and fears, looking for my memory of the Blood Working.

  Eventually, it found it.

  I felt the serpent slither out of my ear. I blinked away tears and saw the smoky serpent hovering before the Birdie. He opened his mouth, and the snake slithered inside. He swallowed. The map was gone, the blood bowl full of ashes.

  “She is alive!” the Birdie said, and he sounded almost glad. “I do not know how this can be, for I killed her myself. But it is so.”

  He ordered me to lie down on the bed, and, of course, I did so. My limbs felt thick and heavy and my head was still spinning. He wrapped me in a blanket, tucking me in like a baby. I felt tired,
oh so tired. I was lifted and carried, and then laid down again, this time on the floor. He rolled me over, and by the dust and darkness that suddenly enveloped me, I realized that he had pushed me under the bed.

  I desperately wanted to slide into the darkness, to disappear to a place where none of this was happening, but I forced myself to stay awake. The Birdie’s feet walked through my field of vision. He had been wearing black boots; now his feet were bare. His toenails were also painted green and his feet were very long and worm-white. They disappeared under a fall of fabric, which he then kicked off. I heard a thump, and four black paws padded by me.

  The Birdie had turned into a jaguar.

  He wasn’t just any Birdie. He was a nahual and a priest sacred to the Birdie god Tezcatlipoca, the harbinger of death. A skinwalker and a cannibal and a vampire.

  And he knew where Tiny Doom was.

  I closed my eyes and gave in to the darkness.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Luggage. Escape. Umbrella.

  A BLAST OF cool air brought me out of blissful darkness, where there had been no Birdies, no stolen maps, no betrayals, no certain deaths. A hand fastened on my ankle and I was hauled out from under the bed. I opened my eyes; the room was dim, lamp-lit. I was dying of thirst.

  “Sit up,” the Birdie commanded.

  Every muscle in my body screeched with pain.

  “Drink.”

  The Birdie cradled my head, very tenderly, holding a cup to my lips as one would help a child to drink. The water drove an ice-cold spike through the fogginess of my brain. Although I could still not control my body, suddenly I could think more clearly. Probably not what the Birdie had in mind.

  “Don’t be afraid, muñeca,” he said, stroking my forehead. “I promise you, when the time comes, there will be no fear, no pain.”