Twenty-Three
IN THE SILENCE after Adair’s departure, Kovit, Nita, and Diana all stared at the door.
The air hung heavy in the room, but the danger had passed, and Nita’s shoulders slumped. Her hands shook a little, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d narrowly avoided having her face literally ripped off by Adair.
She thought of the teeth she sometimes glimpsed through his human disguise and shivered.
She should have anticipated that he’d figure out what she’d done. But she’d just blithely assumed he wouldn’t care if she killed people. And she was pretty sure that was true—she just hadn’t thought she’d ever get this much press. That he definitely cared about.
She closed her eyes, still trying to reconcile the idea that the police were after her. She was so screwed. She needed to get rid of that wanted notice. Somehow.
Kovit leaned forward, his breath soft against the nape of Nita’s neck as he whispered, “I’m going to follow him and make sure he isn’t going back on his word. I don’t trust him. Pack our stuff in case we need to leave quickly.”
Nita nodded, and Kovit slipped past Diana and out the door. He closed the door softly after himself, and his feet were almost silent on the creaky stairs.
Diana shifted from one foot to another. Her long dark brown hair had mostly come out of its ponytail, tumbling in messy strands around her face.
“Why did you help me?” Nita asked.
Did Diana have some other plan for Nita? She was a ghoul. Maybe she wanted to kill and eat Nita herself? Nita discarded that thought a moment later. She didn’t think Diana was the type—but she’d been wrong about people before.
Diana shrugged. “I didn’t think Adair should throw you out.”
Nita’s eyes narrowed. What was this girl’s game?
“You don’t mind I killed those hunters?” Nita asked, trying to feel her out.
Diana flinched. “I mind.”
“Why? They were trying to kill me and sell my body parts online,” Nita pressed.
“I don’t like to see people get hurt.”
“Strange company you keep, then.”
“You know nothing about Adair,” Diana snapped.
“Do you?” Nita leaned forward.
She was silent for a long moment. “I know enough.”
“Do you trust him?”
She hesitated. “Yeah.”
Nita tilted her head to the side. “Would you swim with him?”
“Hell, no!” Diana’s eyes were huge.
“So you don’t trust him.”
“I trust him to an extent.” Diana’s mouth turned down. “And I trust his instincts. If he says killing dealers won’t help you, I don’t think it will.”
Nita remained silent. As much as she mistrusted Adair, she had a terrible feeling that he was right. That everything she’d done was for absolutely nothing.
She let out a breath, shoulders slumping. She wouldn’t know if it had made a difference immediately. Time would tell.
Diana was staring at Nita with pitying, almost judging eyes, and Nita bristled. Who was Diana to judge Nita’s choices?
“Whether it makes a difference in the long term or not, you’re not going to make me feel bad about the deaths of people who kill innocent unnaturals for money,” Nita snapped, trying to project a confidence she didn’t feel, just to get that look out of Diana’s eye.
Technically, that was what Nita had spent her whole life doing. But Diana didn’t need to know that.
Diana shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “I don’t know. People are made of multitudes. I want to believe that even monsters have good sides.”
Nita snorted. “That’s why you get along with Adair.”
She quirked a smile. “Maybe.” She looked up at Nita and raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe he’s not a monster.”
Nita snorted. “Who was just telling me they wouldn’t swim with him?”
Diana laughed, leaning back so her head was brushing the wall and her eyes were on the ceiling. “Fair point.”
They were quiet for a moment before Diana said, “You shouldn’t use that word. Unnatural.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “It’s demeaning. Non-human. Unnatural. They’re all words that make us other. Make us different. Labels assigned to us.”
“So?”
“So, we make our own labels.”
Nita shrugged. She knew there were movements online, people who were trying to change the language, but it never really concerned her. Just because other people said unnatural like a slur didn’t mean Nita had to stop using it. Why should she let other people change the way she referred to herself?
“You should use the word legends instead,” Diana was saying, oblivious to Nita’s meandering thoughts.
Nita groaned. “Is that what they’re using now? Is there a more corny name in existence? It sounds like a video game.”
Diana blushed, but her voice was firm. “I think it’s a good name! Because we’ve always been here, like legends. And many of us are part of legends—”
“But legends aren’t real.”
“Some of them are.”
Nita sighed, rubbing her temple. What about people like Nita, who couldn’t really be connected to any one legend? Or Kovit, who wasn’t actually sure whether or not zannies were connected to the Thai krasue legend? Whoever had picked this name really hadn’t thought it through properly.
“You never answered my question.” Nita shifted the conversation away before she could devote any more brain time to thinking of that awful name. “Why did you help me?”
“I guess I know what it’s like.”
“To get caught murdering black market dealers?”
“To be on the run.” Diana’s voice was cold. Then she sighed again and slumped against the faded lime green wall, her hand running through her hair and clenching in it.
Nita tilted her head. “What are you on the run from? Ghouls aren’t on the Dangerous Unnaturals List.” Though they should be, Nita thought, but didn’t say aloud. “And ghoul body parts do absolutely nothing, so it’s not like the black market has any interest in you.”
Diana hesitated. “Several years ago, there was a news story about a kid who murdered a family of ghouls. Do you remember it?”
Nita did, actually. “The crematorium one? Ghouls stealing bodies from crematoriums, and some kid found out they’d stolen his father’s body. Then he murdered them all with a machine gun?”
“Yeah.” Diana wrapped her arms around her legs. “That one.”
“It was a huge story, in the media for months.” Nita shrugged. “I doubt anyone will forget it anytime soon.”
Diana swallowed. “I know.”
Then it clicked. Nita had been being dense. “You were part of that?”
Diana hesitated, then pulled up her sleeve. A shiny white scar, about the size of a coin, crossed her arm. She pulled up the bottom of her shirt, and there was a longer, wider scar on her stomach.
“That was my family. I was the only one who survived.” Her voice cracked a little. “I was twelve.”
Nita stared at the bullet scars a moment before sitting down beside Diana, sliding down the wall and landing with a creak and a thump on the wooden floor. “I wasn’t aware there were any survivors.”
“INHUP kept it a secret for my own safety. I wasn’t even allowed to testify at the trial. They were scared the media would find out.”
Nita understood. If the media found out Diana was alive, her life would never be her own again. She’d constantly have to worry about paparazzi, hate groups, murderers, the family of the deceased she’d eaten, and who knew who else.
Nita frowned. “I was pretty sure that happened in the States.”
“It did. I’m from Seattle originally.” Her hands shook a little, and she clasped them to her sides. “INHUP put me in protective custody, and I was moved to a foster home in Maryland. But . . .” Her hand rose unconsciously to her mouth guard. �
�They’d never had a ghoul before. The foster family, INHUP. They were trying to find legal ways to feed me. Sometimes there’d be an organ donor at the local hospital, and I’d get the parts that couldn’t be transplanted into other people. But sometimes there was nothing. And everything was old, and not fresh. I was sick so often.”
Her voice trembled slightly, and she turned to Nita. “My whole time there, there was this big public debate about whether ghouls should be added to the Dangerous Unnaturals List. I started getting nightmares.”
Diana paused. “Well, I’d had nightmares since the shooting. I don’t think I’ll ever not have nightmares.” She shivered. “But these ones were different. In them, I would wake up one morning to find that INHUP made a law that ghouls were on the list now. My foster mother would be waiting with the boy who killed my family, and she’d tell me he’d been acquitted of all charges, because murdering my family wasn’t a crime anymore. Then she’d shoot me.”
Diana’s voice had gone watery and soft, and she clenched her eyes tightly shut, but the tears still leaked at their corners.
Nita sat with her hands awkwardly in her lap for a moment, wondering if she ought to pat Diana’s shoulder. But she didn’t move.
Diana swallowed hard, and continued. “It was my biggest fear, that in the space of a minute the people taking care of me would hear the news and switch tactics and murder me.”
Nita believed it. Not just that Diana was afraid, but that the people would very well do that. It had happened before. There was a small genocide every time a species was added to the list.
“I’d seen it before too,” Diana continued, her voice soft. “How fast people change. I’d never really had trouble at my school. But when I was fourteen, there was this guy, the janitor. I didn’t even know him. I guess his brother had died in combat, though. And the next day he came in and he started screaming at me and the only other brown kid in school like it was our fault. He kept saying we needed to go back to our own country. Stuff like that.” Her jaw tightened, fists clenching at her sides. “My great-grandparents emigrated from Iran in the thirties. I don’t speak Farsi. I’ve never even been out of North America. Where the hell would I go back to?”
She sighed, twisting a stray hair in her fingers. “The worst part was that everyone just . . . They just stood there and did nothing. I went home early that day and the school called my foster parents to tell them I was cutting class.”
Nita blinked. “Wait, you got in trouble for it?”
She nodded. “Yeah.” A sharp laugh. “Stupid, right? But I think that was the moment I realized how quickly people can turn. The janitor was awful, but I didn’t really know him. It was all those people in the cafeteria who did nothing. The teachers. My friends. They all just stood there and let him scream at me.”
Diana’s voice went shaky. “If they were like that when they were fighting someone on the other side of the world who looked like me, what would happen if I was actually put on the list and considered a threat?”
Nothing good, of that Nita was sure.
Diana took a shaky breath. “So one day I ran away.”
“And you ended up here?”
“Eventually.”
Nita wondered what stories were contained in that “eventually.” How a runaway American kid even crossed the border into Canada. How she met a murderous, manipulative kelpie.
“Why Canada?” Nita asked.
Diana shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I thought it would be better? Everything just seemed better in Canada.”
“And is it?” Nita asked.
Diana considered. “I’m not sure that it’s better or worse so much as . . . different. Canadians love to feel superior to Americans by talking about how much better things are here. But it’s less that things are better and more that they don’t have the same issues. Problems that run rampant in the US don’t exist here. But at the same time, Canada has a whole lot of problems the States doesn’t.”
Diana sighed softly, resting her chin in her hand. “I think, more than anything, people like to feel superior to others. Canadians like to feel that they’re better than Americans. Americans love to feel they’re better than the whole world. And when people feel superior, it makes it harder for them to see the problems just beneath the surface. They don’t want to believe them, to face them, because if they did, can they really claim to be superior anymore?”
Nita nodded slowly. She thought of her past self, feeling so superior, so much better a person for not being a killer like her mom. It didn’t matter that she enabled her mother’s work, helped her sell the bodies. The fact that Nita wasn’t a killer made her a better person and let her excuse her own hypocrisy to herself.
“So none of the problems in the US exist here?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that.” Diana shrugged. “There’s still racism here—anti-Muslim sentiment has been an issue lately. That was never limited to the US.”
“No.” Nita snorted, thinking about all the different places she’d lived. “It really isn’t.”
She thought about the old woman in the grocery store in Japan who assumed Nita wouldn’t understand her, so instead of asking if she wanted chopsticks, hit Nita with them. She thought of how often people would come up to her on the street in Germany, either to speak to her in Turkish—which she didn’t speak at all—or to gently tell her that the Turkish part of town was over there, and was she lost?
Everywhere she went, there were problems, even if they manifested differently.
“Do you like it here, though?” Nita asked.
Diana ran her hand through her hair and smiled faintly. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m . . . I’m a lot happier here.”
Nita raised her eyebrows. She wondered if it was because of or in spite of Adair. She thought it might be the first one. She didn’t understand their relationship, but there was a relaxed familiarity, even when Diana was irritated, that made them seem close.
Diana shrugged. “Life here is a lot less complicated. Adair gives me food and promises he didn’t kill anyone for it. And in exchange for not having to steal the bodies from morgues myself, I do all the computer things for him.”
“You mean hacking.”
“Yeah.”
Nita blinked slowly. “You do realize he hides murders and you’re probably eating someone else’s victims.”
Diana shook her head. “No, I’m not. He eats those. Kelpies only eat rotting bodies. They need to be under the water two, three weeks before a kelpie will touch it. But ghouls, we need our meat fresher than that. By the time someone calls him for a cleanup, he gets to a murder site, and gets the body to me, it’s been out too long. Morgues and such refrigerate bodies—and if it was someone who died in a hospital, they go to the refrigerator really fast, so they last longer. That’s what my family always ate.” She swallowed. “I know Adair has people he pays to freeze bodies right after they die in the hospital.”
Nita thought it was far more likely he went out and just murdered people if Diana needed them that fresh, but she didn’t say so. It would be cruel to shatter her delusions, and Diana had just prevented them from getting thrown out.
“Anyways.” Diana wiped her eyes and got to her feet. “I don’t know a lot about your situation, but I know you’re wanted for sale on the black market, and I know sometimes we have to do shitty things to keep ourselves safe. I don’t approve of murdering people, but I won’t let Adair kick you out to be arrested or kidnapped or sold.”
Nita rose too. Hesitantly, she said, “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
Diana nodded. “Anytime.” She smiled, cleared her throat, then looked away. “I should go back downstairs and keep trying to crack that encryption. Maybe it’ll put Adair in a better mood.”
Nita nodded. “Okay.”
Diana gave her a tentative smile. “If you ever want to talk . . . I’m here.”
“Thanks,” Nita said, and didn’t mention that she’d never be taking Diana up on that chat. Nita valued her secrets far
too much to give them away so freely.
Diana nodded once and slipped out the door and down the stairs.
Nita sat back on the bed, and looked down at her phone, still glowing and open to the police wanted poster featuring her face.
She was going to have to do something about that.
Twenty-Four
NITA WAS FINALLY ALONE, and she sank down on the bed for a moment, just to process. She closed her eyes, but the lights from the ceiling made the back of her eyelids pink. She opened them after a moment and pulled out her phone. She needed to know more about the wanted poster on her.
Nita scrolled through the information, but instead of finding more details about herself, she found three stories about girls who’d been murdered or kidnapped today.
They all looked like her.
Her stomach bubbled with nausea, and her hands shook as she tabbed through the stories. Everyone had a doppelgänger, or more than one. In a city as big and diverse as Toronto, there was bound to be a twin or two of Nita’s.
There were. And they were disappearing.
According to the story, the wave of disappearances had started yesterday, shortly after Nita had come to Toronto. One girl was getting off the streetcar when her friends saw a dark sedan pull up and yank her in. One was a college girl who vanished from the bathroom of a coffee shop. And the last was only fourteen, stolen on her way to school.
The last two were taken after Nita had made her statement to the black market.
The hunters hadn’t been discouraged at all. Adair was right.
They might not be able to track her by phone, but they had something better.
The internet.
The whole city was looking for Nita and Gold, tweeting, talking, texting. And the hunters were jumping onto the police search to mount their own.
She hadn’t fixed anything. She’d made everything ten times worse.
She looked down at the pictures of the missing girls, wondering if they’d already been chopped up and dissected for the market, sold as pieces of Nita.
She should have expected this. Any high-end product on the market was bound to attract lower-quality forgeries.
Only Ashes Remain Page 16
