Secondhand Shadow

by Elizabeth Belyeu

  In one move, Westley wove effortlessly through Galatea’s guards and lifted her onto his shoulders. She caught Paris’s now-unimpeded throw and loudly clapped the soles of the reunited boots together, a sound that brought a chorus of cheers and groans from the others. She and Westley raised their arms with a synchronized victory-whoop, then, laughing, Galatea bent to lay a loud smacking kiss on Westley’s forehead.

  They both hit the dirt hard as Jewel fell against them.

  “Foul!” Paris cried.

  “I tripped!” Jewel, tangled with her victims on the ground, scrambled away from a snarling Galatea, whose teeth snapped audibly, maybe an inch from Jewel’s face.

  Paris snatched Jewel away and dragged her to her feet while Westley did the same to Galatea. When the taller girl made another lunge at little Jewel, Westley leaped between them, arms outstretched to shove them apart.

  “It was an accident,” Westley said. “Game’s over, no more bloodshed! Let it go.” His gaze snapped back and forth between the two of them. “Let. It. Go.”

  Galatea shook off his hand and walked away to retrieve the dropped boots. I couldn’t see for sure, but she seemed to be scratching welts into her own arm. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

  Dove was smiling at my elbow, sweaty and panting. “Jewel and Teya not always get along,” she said apologetically.

  Screams and laughter broke out again, and I realized Adonis was hanging out an upstairs window, dropping droopy ovoid shapes — water balloons.

  “Water fight!” Paris cried, and ran for the back door.

  The others shouted up at Adonis, insulting his hygiene and lineage and getting doused for their trouble. Jewel took a boot from Westley’s hands and tossed it at the window, laughing as if nothing had happened.

  Dove giggled and chucked a rock into the fray, apparently just for the joy of it. “Probably should be you stay with me, Naomi. Water fight maybe get rough.”

  I’m going to die.

  Paris burst back into the backyard with an armful of Super-Soakers. The orphans fell on them like piranhas on a cow, and I barely had time to wonder if I could hide in the azaleas before the arcs of water started flying.

  Darling came running, half her hair-spikes flattened with water, and tossed a water gun to Dove. “Let’s go let’s go!” She grabbed Dove’s arm, Dove grabbed mine, and off we went pell-mell into the woods.

  Wheeeee.

  .

  Under the trees, dusk fell fast, which bothered Dove and Darling not at all, but left me stumbling and feeling my way through waist-high saplings, weeds, bushes and briars.

  Whoa. Easy there. I disentangled my arm from a thorny vine with the tenderest of care. Last thing I need is to start gouting blood, alone in the woods with a pair of vampires.

  The giddy laughter of the first few minutes of the water fight had largely subsided; Dove and Darling slid through the trees now with the same cheerfully predatory tension I had felt building before the Boots game.

  “You okay, Naomi?” Dove whispered over her shoulder.

  “Um, yeah. I’m great.”

  “This fun, huh?”

  “Loads.” I fiddled with the trigger of the squirt pistol they had given me. I would rather have remained unarmed. Leave the non-combatants out of it, see?

  All right, lighten up, I told myself as I followed Dove and Darling down the side of a hill, trying not to slip on pine needles and wet leaves. This is called a game. It’s fun. And they’re including you in it, that’s a compliment, an overture of friendship. At least try to participate.

  At the bottom of the hill, Dove and Darling dropped into distinctly non-human crouches, hissing faintly.

  I froze.

  They exchanged a flurry of hand signals, then Dove moved off. I choked down a wailed Come back! After all, Darling wasn’t going to eat me.

  Probably.

  Darling straightened out of her crouch and gestured for me to join her. Hesitantly, I half-slid the rest of the way down the hill.

  “Where did Dove go?” I asked.

  “Paris is just ahead,” Darling whispered. “We’re going to get him from both sides. Got your weapon?”

  I held up my water gun, rounded up some enthusiasm. “Yeah! We’ll get him good!”

  “Don’t point it at me.” Darling irritably shoved the barrel away from her face.

  “Sorry.”

  “We need cover. See that fallen tree there?”

  “Um… I think so.” The best I could make out was a dark lump.

  Darling was already moving, soundless even in her clunky boots. Possessed with a sudden fear that she was leaving me behind, alone in the dark woods, I lurched after her.

  And tripped. On a root or a rock or my own stupid feet, impossible to say, but down I went down like a felled tree, twisting to avoid mashing the Wonder Tummy. I landed hard on my right knee and arm before bouncing onto my back.

  “Owwwieeee,” I moaned, and decided to lie still for a moment.

  “What did you do?” Darling’s shape appeared over me.

  “Owie,” I repeated, and made a half-hearted effort to sit up. It failed.

  “Oh. Crap.” A sharp scraping sound, the smell of sulphur, and a match was burning in Darling’s hand, casting a globe of unsteady light onto her face. She was staring down at my — legs? — with eyes gone wide and round. “Oh. Crap.”

  “Oh, crap, what?” I said, and followed her gaze down — to where my disarrayed skirt clearly revealed the knee I had landed on. The knee that was now a mess of abraded skin, blood glistening in the light of the match.

  “Oh, crap,” we said together.

  I scrambled backward on my heels and elbows, nearly tripped again getting to my feet.

  Darling, still staring at my knee, stepped toward me.

  Babysitter Voice. Babysitter Voice. “Darling, stay back.”

  Her voice was a half-whisper out of a motionless face. “Trying.”

  “Do, or do not. There is no try,” I said. “Um. Scratch the ‘do not.’ Just… stay back.” My skirt had fallen down over the wound, now, but it didn’t seem to matter. Would it help if I bandaged it? With what?

  Darling took another step forward. I stepped back.

  Is this how Martin Iverson died?

  Another step — forward for her, backward for me. How was I going to get out of this?

  You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention. Not that I didn’t already have her attention in its fullest, most undivided state. But anyway, I’d seen that game. No way could I outrun her.

  “So bright… and I know better, I know better, but…” Her head tilted to one side. “I was okay until you started bleeding. Oh, this is not good.”

  I pressed the fabric of my skirt against the wound. It couldn’t hurt. “Darling, you know how this works. My blood’s not really going to help you. You know that. I’m not your Lumi and I never will be.”

  “I know.” She took another step forward. I stepped back, and felt a tree press against my back. She stepped forward again. She could almost touch me now, one hand reaching—

  The flame in her other hand reached her fingers. She yelped and dropped the match.

  I turned and ran. The forest was almost entirely dark, but I turned each trip and stumble into a longer stride, keep going keep going—

  Something snarled and hit me from the side, my shoulder slammed into a tree and I went down, arms shielding my head, possibly screaming. But the sharp, toothy embrace I anticipated didn’t come. After a moment, I opened my eyes.

  Darling was crouched over me, pointed teeth locked together in a silent snarl, eyes tightly shut.

  “Trying,” she said breathlessly. “Tell me. Tell me.”

  “Get off me, Darling!” I tried to convert all my fear into an angry bark. “Get off!”

  She backed slowly away, one step, another. “Damon will kill me. In front of Dove. Tell me.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me!”

>   “If you hurt me, Damon will kill you. Right in front of Dove. Is that what you want? Back off!”

  With a deep, shuddering breath, she stepped out of reach, the deadly tension fading — almost — away.

  Two figures crashed out of the shadows, and I had just time to recognize the long dark sheet of Dove’s hair — and the gleam of a knife in her hand — before she hit Darling, tumbling her right past me into the brush.

  “Don’t hurt her, don’t hurt her!” I screamed, and in a moment of utter insanity, shoved myself between them.

  Dove leaped back. “Don’t hurt — She hurt you!”

  “No, she didn’t, I tripped, I’m fine, she’s fine!”

  Dove looked past me to Darling; I looked over my shoulder.

  “Not that it wasn’t a tense moment,” Darling said shakily. “But I did it, Dovie. I put it back in the box.”

  Dove’s shoulders drooped with relief, and she sheathed the knife. “Good girl, Darling. Good girl.” In the near-dark, I thought I saw tears glitter in her eyes; she stepped past me to hug Darling tight.

  “You should take her back to the house,” said the other orphan who had arrived with Dove — Paris, his super-soaker dangling forgotten from one hand. “I’ll get Naomi bandaged up before bringing her back to the lions’ den.”

  “Okay,” Dove said. One arm around Darling, like a tired child or invalid, she led her away, pausing to look back at me. “Thank you.”

  “No prob,” I said, and sat down hard on a log.

  They disappeared up the hill. Paris, pale and indistinct in the near-dark, tugged his shirt over his head and began ripping it into long strips.

  “What… was Dove going to do with that knife?” I said.

  “We have rules,” Paris said. “You kill a human, you’re dead.”

  “But — she didn’t kill me. Dove wouldn’t really have hurt her, right?”

  “Dove? Ha. She’d rather die than hurt Darling. But we have rules. Dove was doing her job as Darling’s hunting partner — protect the human at all costs. Give me your knee. Other knee, atta girl.” Exasperation colored his voice. He wound a long strip of fabric around my knee, then another around that. His hands were icy. “I’m not going to bite you, FYI, no matter how good you smell. I’m pretty attached to not getting my throat cut.”

  “Would Damon really—”

  “Oh, you bet your sweet… kneecap. It’s that or let the Formyndari kill the lot of us. I know which option I prefer.” He tucked in the end of the makeshift bandage. “That ought to hold for a bit. I think you’ve stopped bleeding anyway, but better safe than sorry. Upsy-daisy, now.” He seized my elbow and hauled me to my feet. “Here, let’s hold Uncle Paris’s hand like a good girl, we don’t want to trip again. Wrong way, blockhead.”

  I bit my tongue and let him lead me up the hill, his hand tiny and stiff in mine.

  “Incidentally, you’re an idiot, jumping between Dove and Darling like that,” he said. “You could have gotten knifed, bit, or just plain obliterated in the clash of the Titans. What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t,” I admitted. “It was dumb. But I couldn’t just sit there. Darling hadn’t done anything.”

  “She nearly killed you. Me and Dove came running as soon as we smelled blood — we know Darling’s track record — but we wouldn’t have been nearly in time, if her control had slipped for even a second. You risked your life to protect someone who didn’t eat you only by happy accident.”

  “You want I should sit and let Darling get killed for not snacking on me?”

  “You do realize there is only a slim minority of actual orphans who don’t think we should all be killed on sight.”

  “So I’m weird. This is not news.”

  Paris said nothing more as he led me back to the house, but his hand in mine seemed a little less stiff.

  He dropped my hand, of course, as soon as the house came into sight, and slinked off into the shadows when we reached the door. I poked my head in, reluctant.

  Dove and Darling were nowhere in sight, but Westley and Adonis were clearing dishes from the table. Westley puffed a breath of relief at the sight of me.

  “Dove said Paris had the situation in hand,” he said, “but I was about to come looking for you anyway. Bleeding stopped? Good. Come in, for heaven’s sake. Darling’s upstairs, if that’s what you’re worried about. I hope she didn’t scare you too badly. She’s a good kid — kid, heh, she’s fifty years older than me — but she’s … well, anyway, you’re all right and that’s what matters.”

  “Um, yeah. Let me help y’all with that.” I reached for a dirty plate.

  “Oh, let the boys get the dishes, Naomi, it’s their turn,” Jewel called from the living room. “Come play Chinese checkers with us, it’s better with at least three people.”

  Westley had already gone into the kitchen; Adonis just shrugged. Uncertain, I drifted into the living room, where Jewel and Galatea were setting up a Chinese checkerboard on the antediluvian coffee table. My gaze caught on a framed picture on the wall — a path through black, grasping trees. Ahead, a light shone at the end of the path, warm and clear. It was hand-painted, by someone with a great deal more talent than I. In shining golden ink at the bottom was a single Chinese character, and an English word, assumedly the translation. Hope.

  The painting seemed rather randomly placed, too low for ideal viewing, too far from the other wall decorations, and I realized it was covering the hole Adonis had punched in the wall.

  “Come sit down, Naomi,” Galatea called, taking a seat on the duct-taped couch while Jewel nestled into a pink beanbag on the floor. They were both all smiles, which made me suspicious. Since when were they best friends?

  “Oh, here, I’ll move that.” Galatea scooped an armful of knitting — a tangle of blue and green that might someday be a glove — out of the way, and I hesitantly settled onto the couch next to her. This was the shoestring-snapper, was it not? Westley’s roommate and kisser of foreheads. The seven scratches she’d put on her arm were healed, assumedly thanks to the cooler of blood upstairs, leaving her skin smooth and perfect.

  “We all knit,” Galatea said conversationally. “Orphans are usually either too depressed to move, or too depressed to sit still. Knitting works for either mood, keeps us occupied, and it’s more useful than video games — though they’re also a favorite. We knit for ourselves, for each other, for premature babies, for victims of natural disasters — we’ve knitted loads for the kids at this one Chinese orphanage… Even Damon knits.”

  “That’s… difficult to imagine.”

  “I never said he knitted well. When his first glove came out with six fingers of vastly different lengths, he decided woodworking was more his thing.”

  “That, I can see.” It was hard not to stare at Galatea’s skin. When I was teeny, and our neighbor Laronda would baby-sit me, I would love to just sit in her lap and stroke her arms and face, fascinated by her dark skin. Galatea’s had a perfect chocolatey luster that put Laronda’s to shame, and a waterfall of thick, interestingly-textured hair, longer than I had ever seen on a black girl, at least without the aid of extensions.

  “So, Galatea,” I said hesitantly, as we arranged our little colored marbles on the board. “That was the statue in the old Greek story, right? About the sculptor that carved the perfect woman, and the gods brought her to life for him?”

  “The name means ‘white as milk,’” she said dryly. “After the marble she was carved from, one assumes.”

  “Oh. That’s… ironic.”

  “A bit.” Her mouth twitched. “It’s your turn.”

  Somehow I had ended up with the yellow marbles. Usually I liked yellow, but these were a mustardy, institutional yellow that made me think of unpleasant odors. I wrinkled my nose and moved one out of my point of the star. Jewel’s marbles, I noted jealously, were sky blue.

  “So when are you due, Naomi?” Jewel asked without looking up from the gameboard.

  “In a couple of mont
hs.”

  “Not soon enough, I bet. If I were you, I’d be in quite a hurry to dump all that extra cargo.” Her voice was sympathetic, but I still felt stung. And bloated.

  “Yes,” I replied, “well, you have such a small frame, I’m sure it would be quite a burden for you.” It was as close as I could come to Bug off, shrimp.

  She gave me a sad smile. “Not a burden I’m likely to be saddled with.”

  Oh. Yeah. Orphan. Now I felt stung, and bloated, and guilty. “Well, seems like taking care of this bunch would satisfy anyone’s maternal instinct, right?” I floundered.

  “Damon and Westley do most of the caretaking around here,” Jewel said sweetly. “I don’t know what we’d do without them.”

  “Oh, is that what — I mean, if you’re worried about Damon not — that is, Damon’s not going to neglect his responsibilities here, if that’s what you’re worried about. I couldn’t stop him if I tried.”

  “Oh, but you can, honey. That’s what Lumi means.”

  “It’s your move, Jewel,” Galatea muttered.

  Jewel turned docilely to the gameboard.

  “I don’t intend to curtail any of Damon’s activities,” I continued, somewhat desperately. “He can do what he likes.”

  “Well, that is interesting,” Jewel said, with an odd glee in her voice. “Isn’t there anything you’d object to?”

  “Stop it, Jewel.” Galatea sounded not just angry, but disgusted. I got the intense feeling that I’d missed a memo somewhere.

  “And what are you going to do about it, Teya? Call Westley in here to shut me up?” Jewel’s voice was still so soft and sweet that I felt sure I had misunderstood her somehow.

  Until Galatea upended the board, dumping a rain of marbles into Jewel’s lap. “Shut up, you miserable little rat, and keep your forked tongue in your face! Or so help me I will—”