Infidel (42 page)

“Come, sit with us. Have tea,” Saman said.
 

“Thank you,” Rhys said, “but I am here for my wife.”
 

“Of course.” Saman saw his hands, then. Shook his head. Rhys had not gone up when he dropped Elahyiah off. “Come, sit, have tea.”
 

“Elahyiah?” Rhys said, loud enough to be heard beyond the curtain.
 

“Come, tea,” Saman said.
 

“I don’t want to come back there, Elahyiah,” Rhys said. “I do not wish to be rude.”
 

She emerged from behind the curtain. She wore a clean abaya and hijab—both too big—likely her mother’s.
 

“Let’s go to the roof,” Rhys said. “Do you permit me, Saman?”

“Of course, my son,” Saman said. “Come up, come up.”
 

Elahyiah whispered something fiercely to someone behind the curtain. Her mother? Perhaps one of her cousins?

Rhys followed Saman up onto the cool, flat roof. There was a garden there, mostly succulents in pots as big around as Rhys could reach, protected from the worst of the sun by a broad awning that stretched across the roof. The marijuana grew up here, too, and the long, red flowering stalks of sen.
 

Saman went downstairs to get Elahyiah. Rhys took off his hat in the blue dusk and waited. He waited a long time.
 

She came up, eventually. In the blue light she looked even more like a lizard, some fragile thing.
 

She hesitated a few steps away. Lowered her eyes, clasped her hands.
 

“Elahyiah?”

“I will do as you wish. You know that,” she said.
 

“Don’t,” he said. He reached toward her with his hand. She flinched. Not my hand, he amended. Someone else’s—some other man’s hand. Another man’s hand, touching my wife. He pulled the hand away.
 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know how to make it right.”
 

She shook her head.
 

“I know this place is safe,” he said. “You should stay here until the danger’s over. But… I want to rebuild, Elahyiah. You’re my life.”
 

She began to cry.
 

“Elahyiah?”

She threw her arms around him and wept. Rhys let his arms rest at his sides, uncertain of what to do with his hands. Would she pull away again?

“I love you,” she said. “I love you. They took everything. Oh, God is great but so cruel. God is so cruel.”
 

“Hush,” Rhys said. He reached a hand tentatively up and cupped the back of her head. “Hush.” Something inside of him loosened, some terrible fear. “We’ll rebuild our life. You know that?”

“No,” she said. She pulled away from him and wiped at her eyes.
 

“Elahyiah?”

“No,” she said. “You did not see your daughter’s broken skull. I saw it, Rhys. I saw what… I saw. The things I saw!”
 

“Forget that. It happened to someone else.”
 

“No.”

“What can I do?”
 

She bunched her hands into fists and met his gaze for the first time. Her eyes were hard and bright. He had never seen her look so fierce.
 

“Kill them,” she said. “Kill all of them.”
 

34.

T
hey jumped Behdis four blocks from the gym. Suha stepped neatly out of the bakkie and shoved a beetle down her throat. Nyx opened the bakkie door to shield what she was doing and dragged Behdis into the back.
 

Behdis put up a lot of fight for an old woman.
 

Suha locked and closed the door, then casually walked over to the other side of the bakkie. She slipped into the driver’s seat, took the wheel, and pulled away from the curb.
 

Nyx hadn’t bothered finding a rental. Rentals, even in the shittiest parts of town, wouldn’t allow her to do what needed to be done. Instead, she had Eshe scout out places while they cleaned Behdis’s ruined hovel of drugs, weapons, and food. He found an old abandoned warehouse along the far bank of the viscous inland sea. Nyx left Khos at the house to wait for Inaya.
 

“You want in, you share the safe house. You want out, get the fuck out of my face,” she’d told him. “I’ll send Eshe back for you in an hour.”
 

It was just posturing. He had a good nose in shifter form, and he could sniff them out pretty quick if he had a mind to. Of course, if it came down to that, she had no trouble killing him.
 

Nyx and Suha hauled Behdis downstairs to a former ice room, tied her to a support beam, and beat the shit out of her.
 

When they came upstairs, they were splattered in blood and vomit, and about all Nyx knew was what Behdis had had for breakfast.
 

“She’s old,” Suha said. “I told you she ain’t gonna talk. The bel dames can do worse to her.
 

“Then we starve her out,” Nyx said.
 

Suha pursed her mouth.
 

“Cut her loose and lock her up. Let her dry out. We’ll have a name in thirty or forty hours.”

“Nyx—”
 

“Give me a better idea.”
 

They sat upstairs and played cards for an hour, then sparred, barehanded, for an hour more.
 

Nyx felt faster and stronger, but it wasn’t until she really started moving that she realized how slow and sick she’d been. Suha blocked her first three punches, but the next two landed, and she forced Suha back across the grimy warehouse floor. And though they were both pulling their punches, Suha had the ghost of a bruised eye and Nyx’s nose was bloody by the end of it.
 

Suha bent over, breathing heavy. “Fuck, woman, what did that magician do to you?”
 

Sweat dripped from Nyx’s chin. She wiped her face with her discarded coat. She needed a wash. “Don’t know,” she said. “Still don’t have the power, though. No muscle behind it.”
 

“It’ll get there,” Suha said.
 

A black raven cawed and swooped in through the warehouse door. Suha straightened, and Nyx finished wiping herself down while Eshe shifted.
 

She tossed him her coat to clean himself off.
 

“They coming?” Nyx asked.
 

Eshe shook his head. Long strings of mucus dripped from his arms. She wished he’d shifted downstairs. Raven feathers stuck to her sweaty legs.
 

“Khos says he’s going home to his kids. Not like I begged him or nothing,” Eshe said.
 

Nyx thumped him on the shoulder. “Come on and get something to eat, then. It’s just us.”
 

“That white bitch says she trailed the bel dames to the train station,” Eshe said. He bent over the hoard of supplies they’d gotten from Behdis’s house and then pulled on a pair of dirty, too-big trousers. “They got tickets to Beh Ayin.”

Beh Ayin again. But why?

“Rhys still not back?”

“No.”
 

Suha stretched out on the floor. “He’s likely making up with his wife. Don’t expect him.”
 

“We don’t need him,” Eshe said.
 

“Don’t know if you knew, but I’m not good at pulling magicians out of my ass,” Nyx said, “and we’ll need one.”

“He’s a shitty magician anyway,” Eshe said. “I don’t know why you ever signed with him.”

“I do,” Suha said. She put her hands behind her head and grinned.
 

“Thought your tastes ran different,” Nyx said.
 

“Doesn’t mean I don’t know a pretty thing when I see it.”
 

“Let’s eat,” Nyx said, searching for an easier subject.
 

They ate on the floor.
 

“You think you can open a line to Anneke?” Nyx asked Suha.

“Anneke? That mercenary you used to run with back in Nasheen? The one with all the kids?”
 

“The same.”
 

Suha shook her head. “Can’t get you a secure line.”

“Doesn’t need to be secure.”

“What the hell you want to talk to some old mercenary in Nasheen for? Can’t help us out here,” Suha said.
 

 
“Remember the guy who built the boat?”

“The guy…?” Suha said.

“You know, that story. With all the animals.”

“Noah?” Eshe suggested, using the Ras Tiegan name.
 

“Close enough. When did God tell him to build a boat?”

“Um. Before the flood?” Eshe said.
 

“Exactly,” Nyx said.
 

+

Nyx sat on the loading dock and watched the blue dawn come up. Somebody was playing a call to prayer on a radio, pumping it out over the sea. It carried with the wind. Nyx was finishing her second whiskey. Eshe had bought it from a Nasheenian merchant in the Ras Tiegan district. She watched the boats out on the sea, shuttling goods between Shirhazi and the southern cities. Suha came up, hollow-eyed and stiff in the shoulders.
 

“She’s yelling,” Suha said.
 

“Just yelling? Or asking to talk to me?”

“Just yelling. Cursing Shadha so Murshida, mostly.”
 

“Then let her be. Wait until she asks for me.”

Suha sat down. Eshe slept inside, curled up on a dog-hair mattress they’d pulled out of a nearby trash heap. “What if she’s telling the truth? What if it’s just Shadha behind it? Just Shadha and those thugs?”

“If it was just Shadha, she would have killed me. No, somebody else wanted me alive. The same person who’s been playing cat and roach with me from the beginning.”

“Is that who Leveh is?”

“No. It’s whoever Leveh and Shadha work for. I want the name. I think she has it.”
 

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Then we killed some old bitch for no reason,” Nyx said. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Want a drink?”

Suha drank.
 

Behdis started crying for Nyx ten hours later.
 

Behdis was crammed into the far corner of the room, hugging herself with her skinny arms. A long trail of blood oozed from beneath her ass, pooled into the drain at the center of the floor.
 

As Nyx stepped inside the old ice room, she saw the glistening stir of maggoty venom worms thrashing in the blood, fine as silver thread, drunk on their own death.

Behdis was shivering so hard she knocked her head against the wall.
 

Nyx crouched next to her. The old woman’s eyes were glazed over.
 

“I want to know where they are.” Nyx held out a phial of venom. Just the phial. No needle.
 

Behdis’s eyes focused. Her gaze rolled toward the phial. Hungry, terrified gaze.
 

“Who’s leading this, Behdis? I know it’s not Shadha’s idea. Who got her started? Was it Fatima?”

“Kill me,” Behdis said. “Kill me.”
 

“You’re dying now. A lot slower than anything she’ll do to you. And a lot messier. You know how this works? That venom feeds the worms that keep you high, the buzz that burns out your senses. Now the worms are dying, bleeding black pus and shit into your body and starting to claw their way out your ass. Ten more hours and they’ll be crawling out your mouth and nose, too, pouring out every orifice looking for food. If you don’t bleed to death, you’ll die from the toxins they’re excreting in your blood. Good stuff, yeah? Is that how you wanna die?”
 

“Please kill me,” Behdis sobbed.
 

“I can do better. I can bring you back. But I want to know who wanted me alive.”
 

“Shadha wanted you dead,” Behdis spat, and her eyes were wild and yellow. Nyx held her ground. “She should have killed you. I told them! I told them!”
 

“Why didn’t she kill me, Behdis?”
 

Behdis whimpered. “Please kill me.”
 

Nyx stood, turned away. “Another ten hours,” she said.
 

Suha looked away.
 

“No!” Behdis shrieked. “No! She’ll kill me!”
 

Nyx kept walking.
 

And then:
 

“Alharazad! Alharazad! She wants you alive! Oh God, kill me! Please kill me!”
 

Nyx felt her gut go icy. She turned. Saw Behdis spitting and slobbering.
 

“Kill me! Kill me!”