Shana Abe - The Deepest Night

“You’re a ruddy bitch, you know that?”

“And you’re a ruddy cad. I know you must know that. The only reason you’re in my room is because you think I’m Armand’s summer dalliance. That makes me fair game, eh?”

He leered at me, ugly. “Why should he have all the fun?”

“Because he’s your friend, you jackass.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you want to give it a go with a real man? I’m not some blighter too afraid to enlist. I’m an officer, Eleanore. I’m out there fighting for us.”

Some blighter too afraid to enlist. He meant Armand.

“Try it with me,” Laurence cajoled, sidling closer. “Try it with someone sane. I’ll make it ever so good for you, I swear.”

My body went to ice. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Or we can get as deranged as you want.” He kept inching toward me. “If that’s what you fancy. Howling mad, if that’s what—”

“You think he’s mad. You think Armand’s mad?”

“Can’t blame him if he’s off his onion. Look at his parents. Anyway, better mad than a coward.”

“You rotter,” I breathed. “You stinking, prissed-up, preening bastard. You don’t know anything about him!”

“I know what people say.”

“People like you. People who’ve never even been to the front, I’d bet, who’d piss themselves with fear in a real battle. You’re more someone’s secretary than an actual fighting man, am I right? Rich boy like you, no need to get your hands dirty.”

He surged toward me. “Shut up, bitch.”

Dragon reflexes, dragon strength—I hit him again. It was easy. He didn’t even have time to flinch as my arm came up.

He didn’t land on the floor this time. But there was a lot more blood.

“You’re going to leave this place,” I told him, very quiet. “You’re going to leave first thing in the morning, before breakfast. If you don’t, I’ll tell Armand everything. Let him realize what a great friend you are.”

“Like he’d believe a slut like you—”

Something happened then, something I didn’t understand at first. There was a flash of light, silvery purplish, very bright. It showed me Laurence’s face and the blood smeared down his nose and lips, the walls behind him and the furniture and curtains. Everything intensely sharp and clear.

And in that split second of light, I saw myself reflected in his pupils, shining there, frozen. I saw a radiant-eyed monster caged inside a girl.

A Thing within me shifted. A Thing that was huge and twisting and hungry, rippling beneath my skin.

“Go away,” I said. It came out strangled, hoarse. “Don’t ever come back.”

He backed up, one step, two, three—and then he was scrambling for the door. He ran down the hallway to the exact rhythm of Aunt Lottie’s snores.

I stood there, my hands still fisted, ready to strike again at something. Anything. The rippling, twisting Thing shuddered through me, growing stronger, eating into my marrow. My skin felt too tight and my heart was hammering, boom-boom-boomboomboomboom, wild and fast as a hummingbird’s.

I was panting. I was fever, I was ice. I was running to the closest window, shoving apart the heavy curtains. My fingers found the twin locks on the hinge and yanked, once, twice, until one released and the other broke apart in my hand.

I pushed at the glass. It opened just in time, air scented of night and mist bathing my face, and then I Turned to smoke and shot out into the dark like an arrow unloosed from the depths of hell.

Seconds later, the next Turn overtook me.

The one that uncaged the beast. The one that made me into a dragon.

I’ve mentioned that I wasn’t very good at the Turns, haven’t I?

I materialized upside down. Falling. My wings unfolded and began a frantic flapping. I rolled and managed a drunken veer that had me only just avoiding a collision with a corner of Tranquility’s roof. As it was, my right flank smacked into the leaden gutter, crumpling it like paper, and my tail whipped up and around and took out a row of slate tiles, sending them spinning like tops to the ground.

Better them than me. I flapped harder, gaining altitude. Soon I was flying straight, more or less, and Tranquility was a dollhouse beneath me, and the lawns and meadows and forests fell away, away, a map I no longer had to worry about or follow.

The rage that had driven me here, the feral anger and fear that had propelled me up into the sky, began to tear apart with the wind. Slivers, shards, blown into insignificance.

I thought, This is me. This is the most honest part of me, if not the very best part.

All those names flung at me recently, beast, bitch, thing, were true. If they were insults, then I would rip them inside out and make them my own. I was all of those words and a ferocious lot more, and right now—in this moment—I was glad for it.

I bared my teeth to the night. My talons clawed at the sky. The hummingbird hammer of my heart gradually calmed, becoming steady and strong, a constant guide.

I found a jet of air and let it snatch me south, opening my wings to it so widely they ached, but it was a good ache. I welcomed the pain.

I was a dragon of gold, by the way. Mostly gold, deep purple at my tips. My scales were glimmering, just as gorgeous as Jesse’s pinecone and flowers, and my tail was barbed and my wings—

My left wing had a hole it, I realized, craning my long neck to see. A bullet hole. Every beat of that wing brought a tiny whistle as the air rushed through. It didn’t hurt, curiously enough, though it looked as if it should.

war wound, sang the stars, watching me as they always did, glinting their rainbow colors, as they always did. war beast, dragon of war, fireheart. welcome back to us.

I faced ahead again. I stretched out my chin and climbed higher, higher, until all I could hear was my heart in my ears, and all I could fathom was the endless sapphire line between heaven and earth, ocean and night, and the slim golden thread of me tearing a path between them.

“This is most irregular.”

Aunt Lottie frowned at the note the butler had handed her, the black pudding and poached eggs she’d been served slowly congealing into a single, oozy glob on her plate. She adjusted her spectacles and held the note closer, perhaps hoping for less irregularity via a shorter distance from the paper to her nose.

“Most irregular indeed,” she huffed.

It was breakfast, a glorious full English breakfast, and for all of the massive sideboard jam-packed with platters of food, there were only three of us to dine. At the head of the table sat Armand, with Lottie to his right and me to his left. The rest of the chairs were empty, but like everything else about Tranquility, the table was huge. I’d wager forty more people could easily tuck in.

Forty orphans from the Home. I looked down the table and imagined them there, in the high-backed, buffed wooden chairs that all had carved lions for the arms, fidgeting and blowing their noses in the napkins, destroying the careful code of flatware arranged around the china, smudging the wax on the table with grubby fingers and sweaty palms. All wide eyes and growling stomachs and out-and-out disbelief, because, like me, not a single one of them would have been able to fantasize themselves from Blisshaven into this room, before this feast of eggs and fresh fruit and pickled fish and toast and hash and meat, meat, meat.

For only three people.

I wondered if the servants would get to eat what we didn’t finish. Maybe they just tossed all the leftovers straight into the rubbish.

And it wasn’t merely the meal that was excessive. The dining room was filled with floor-to-ceiling windows, sky and glass everywhere, with Armand’s seat placed so that the biggest one loomed right behind his back. It made it seem as if he somehow sat suspended in midair.

But I guessed he was used to it. I hadn’t noticed him glance even once out the windows. Instead he’d paused, fork in hand, and was regarding Lottie with polite interest. He was obviously waiting to hear what Lieutenant Clayworth’s note said.

I, however, didn’t stop gobbling down my latest helping of fried potatoes and sausage. I had no need to wait; I already knew what the note said, since I’d written it myself.

TERRIBLY SORRY, AUNT LOTTIE AND ALL. MUST DASH OFF UNEXPECTEDLY. WAR BUSINESS. HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND AND WILL SEE YOU SOON, NO DOUBT.

—L.C.

Another good lesson for you: When forging missives or signatures, it’s always better to keep things short. The less there is to scrutinize, the less there will be to muck you up.

The lieutenant hadn’t actually left a note. After I’d come back down to earth last night, I’d searched his empty room to be sure. I’d even done a quick perusal of both Armand’s and Lottie’s chambers to check that he hadn’t slipped one under their doors before leaving, because I couldn’t risk him writing something about me, truth or lie or anything at all. Not if I wanted this summer to keep going forward.

But he hadn’t. He’d just fled.

Who, exactly, was the coward?

I had seen Armand Louis run into a hail of bullets for me. I’d seen him face mortal danger without recoiling, and I’d seen him weep for our dead. So to hell with sodding Lieutenant Laurence Clayworth.

During my hunt for the note, I’d come to the decision that I’d keep most of the facts of my encounter with Laurence to myself. I didn’t know how close the two of them truly were, but hearing that a person you thought a friend considered you unbalanced at best, craven at worst, could only hurt. Whatever else I felt about Armand, I had no desire to cause him hurt.

Lottie sighed and held out the folded paper to Armand, who scanned it and then passed it to me. I looked down at it, allowed myself a fresh measure of satisfaction at the handwriting (which definitely didn’t resemble mine), then looked back up.

“I trust everything is all right,” I said, with what I hoped was exactly the right touch of genteel concern.

Apparently I’d miscalculated. Armand’s focus went from his kippers to my face, instantly alert.

“ ‘War business’,” Lottie muttered, slicing into her eggs. “And the boy couldn’t be bothered to wait for a respectable goodbye.”

“You know how things are these days, my lady,” said Armand, still watching me. “It’s an unfortunate fact of the modern world. Matters change in the space of a breath.”

Lottie squinted at him. “What’s that you said?”

“Matters change.”

“Did he receive a telegram in the night? We must ask Foster.”

“I wouldn’t,” I warned Armand, low.

“Foster?” Lottie was looking around, annoyed that neither the footman by the sideboard nor the butler had come forward. “Foster? Where the devil is he?”

“Matthews,” said Armand, “I believe Lady Clayworth would enjoy some trifle, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Certainly, my lord.”

Armand gazed at me, silent, while the butler offered a heap of cream and cake to her ladyship.

“Well?” he said as Matthews moved away and Lottie happily dug in.

I glanced at my own plate, now nearly empty, then back up at the sideboard.

Armand’s tone went dangerously silky. “Lora.”

“Yes, yes.” I poked at a piece of potato with my knife. Now that the time had come, I found myself struggling with what to say. “We might have a problem.”

“What manner of problem?”

“Your friend. I imagine his nose is broken.”

“Oh? And why would that be?”

I gave up on the potato. I lifted my eyes and gazed back at Armand and let the silence balloon between us.

His face, already so pale, seemed to go even whiter.

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Were you—hurt?”

I smiled, mirthless. “No.”

He sat there without moving, staring at me. A cloud of small brown birds poured into view behind him, shrinking and swelling in unison, blurred wings and shrill chirrups. Pouring away again.

Armand had gone to stone. No, not stone, because I didn’t think stones could emanate the black sense of menace I felt from him now. He was as stiff and frightful as he’d been that moment in the duke’s asylum, when in the back of my mind I’d thought maybe, maybe I’d have to stop him from killing his own father.

I said, “I should have locked the door and I didn’t. No harm done but to him. In fact, I likely did him a favor. He can tell all the girlies now that a Hun clocked him in a fight.”