Temper: A Novel

by Nicky Drayden

  “This doesn’t make us friends either,” I say aloud to Icy Blue without a single care to who might overhear.

  Oh, we’re more than friends, Auben. Much more.

  I shudder, and hasten my pace to the library.

  Still no luck finding a book on exorcism, but after an hour, I narrow things down to a section on demons. I find Icy Blue among the pages of a dusty tome and trace my fingers along his varied forms. The caracal is the most common sighting attributed to him, and the most well-known, but he is said to take on other shapes—baboons, snakes, and oddly, penguins—but I guess they do enjoy the cold. He has also been known to take on the form of humans.

  I think of what happened last night in the dorm room, the smashing of glass as Icy Blue slipped us out of that window far too narrow for my torso to fit through. He had to have shifted into another form. And if he could shift my body, was it possible for me to do the same? It’s not safe to entertain such thoughts, but Kasim is already ten minutes late. With every second that ticks by, Daki’s words rile my temper. Twinemies. Not us. Not ever. As a desperate distraction, I look at my fingers, imagining them as caracal claws. Something knocks in my gut, followed by a sound like nails dragged along the surface of a scratchboard—only the sound is coming from inside me. I wince against the irritation as my fingertips lengthen and narrow into three-inch claws. Dried blood sits at their nail beds. My heart wrenches into a knot, and for a long moment, I forget how to breathe.

  “There he is,” I hear Kasim’s sharp whisper from the end of the stack.

  I shake my hands hard, and when I look again, they are my own. My lungs scream at me to take a breath, and I’m still panting when Kasim—and Sesay—reach me.

  “I haven’t seen someone flush this hard since I caught my baba reading a vice mag,” Sesay says to me with a smile. She’s trying to be coy and charming, but now isn’t a time for schoolyard antics, so she might as well go do it somewhere else.

  Kasim laughs so loud he gets shushed by an acrobatic librarian passing twenty feet above us. “Sorry we’re late,” he says earnestly. “Sesay and I got to chatting about comfy life, and lunch dragged on.” He’s doing it already. He’s making up excuses.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t bring me a doggie bag. I’m starting to get used to lapping up your seconds,” I say, burying myself back into my book. Perhaps I can figure out how to transform myself into a giant clue, so Kasim can take it.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Kasim asks.

  “It means that if we make plans to do something important, you show up on time, not twenty minutes late. And not with her . . .”

  “I just remembered,” Sesay says quietly, “that I hate being in the middle of awkward situations. Lunch tomorrow, Kasim?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he says, smile lit up like a bush during the narrow season. It fades the moment she turns the corner. “Seriously, Auben, it’s just like you to make a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe for once you can make an effort to care about something on this side of the mirror.”

  And here come the offhand comments. This can’t be happening. Not right now. “Are you throwing my vainglory in my face? Sorry I’m so self-obsessed about ridding myself of the demon holed up inside me—and you!”

  “That’s why I brought Sesay here. She had an idea of where we might look for books. But now she’s gone, thanks to you.”

  We’re definitely bickering. I grit my teeth. “You told her about us?”

  “Relax. I didn’t tell her tell her. I told her it was for a personal research project, which is kind of true. She’s nice, Auben. You should give her a chance. She says she’ll help us however she can.” Kasim blushes. “I think she’s crushing on me.”

  “Everyone on this whole damned campus is crushing on you, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “Shhhhhhh . . .” comes a cacophony of hushes from above.

  “You’re being ridiculous.” Kasim averts his eyes. Avoidance. Just like Daki said. “People have taken an interest in me for a change. So what? I can’t control anyone but myself, Auben. I suggest you learn how to do the same. If you need me, I’ll be over here.” We’ve fought hundreds of times before, and a lot worse than this, but the resignation in his voice chills me deeper than Icy Blue ever could.

  “Fine,” I rasp.

  “Fine.”

  What nerve. A rhythmic swak snick swak snick distracts me from my brooding, like the sound of a switchblade opening and closing. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m flexing my claws, in and out, in and out like it’s second nature. Or first nature. I sigh. Maybe I ought to be making the most of a bad situation. I’ve got a couple of cool powers. Enough to make myself into someone that could rival Kasim’s popularity on campus. I could grow a few inches taller, if I wanted. I could change my eyes, my hair, my chimeral stripes, my scars. Whatever I wanted to see in the mirror, I could be. Yes, the price is dear, but with popularity, I would gain the power needed to mold this world into one that gives everyone a fair shake. I could bring the whole system of lesser twinhood down, and see to it that all people—male, female, and kigen, vice and virtue heavy, singleton and twin—are treated as equals, socially and economically. Except me of course. I would be treated as a god. My mind starts down an endless spiral of plotting. I’m three decades deep when Kasim taps me on my shoulder.

  “I think I’ve found something,” he says, holding a book open to a detailed diagram. He sits down beside me and explains the exorcism process. The supplies we’ll need seem simple enough to come by. The celestial alignments are in our favor. The incantations are difficult, but we’re both quick learners. But there’s one last hitch.

  “We’ll need a third person,” Kasim tells me. “I think it should be Sesay. She already knows the Sylla, so that’s one less thing we have to worry about. She really is good people, Auben.”

  “She’s hiding something,” I say, shaking my head. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about her doesn’t add up, and it’s not just my jealousy clouding up my thoughts. “She may seem polished and poised with all those virtues dangling from her gold chain, but she’s got comfy wiles in her eyes. When you did that thing with the defting sticks, you should have seen the look on her face. She was the prodigy on campus before you came along. She’s worked a slaughterhouse floor, Kasim. Sesay’s not afraid of blood, and she could be coming after you.”

  Kasim swallows back a laugh. “I highly doubt it.”

  I nod. “That’s her vice, you know. Doubt. It’s the worst one.”

  “Really? Worse than temper?”

  “Tempers flare. Maybe there’s some cussing. Maybe even a fight. But tempers fade eventually. Doubt lingers. Burrows through your heart, steals away your happiness. Slowly consumes you from within.”

  “Okay, Auben,” Kasim says with an exasperated sigh. “Who do you have in mind for a third?”

  I chew my lip, and one name springs immediately to mind. “Munashe.”

  “Right. Let’s bring school staff into this. Then we’ll have expulsions on our records as well as demons in our heads.”

  “Munashe wouldn’t turn us in,” I say. “She said we could trust her with anything.”

  “I think she meant more like getting an extra copy of our transcripts or finding a good math tutor.” Kasim gets up and begins to pace the aisle like a caged animal. I stand in his tracks, ready to defend my selection. I have to be convincing, or risk putting our fates in Sesay’s conniving little hands.

  “She said anything,” I growl.

  “You’re sure about this?” he asks. “Because there’s no going back once the caracal is out of the bag.”

  “We can trust her. We can do this. The three of us,” I declare, hoping to infect him with my conviction.

  Kasim stares at me. Looking for what? Signs of weakness? I won’t back down. Not on something this important. “Okay,” he finally says. Then his brows cinch. His mouth screws up into a sour twist. “Have you grown?”

  “I�
��m not quite sure I understand what you’re asking of me,” Munashe says later that afternoon, inside the privacy of her office/broom closet.

  It smells of bleach and old mop water in here, but she’s gone through lengths to make it cozy. Kasim sits in an undersized leather chair and Munashe sits behind an antique desk lopped off on one end to make it fit inside the room. A faux window featuring an expertly painted campus scene keeps the place from being completely claustrophobic, and next to it she displays her Gabadamosi certificate. She graduated only a few years ago, and yet in that time, piles upon piles of embossed folders have accumulated haphazardly on every flat surface. I stand near the door, next to the cleaning supplies, since there is nowhere else left for me to fit.

  Munashe tips the lid of the miniature smokestack sitting on her desk, pushes around the pile of half-djang coins, then frowns at the rather phallic-looking candle. “You know that it’s against regulations to burn this on campus?” she says, picking the candle up, turning it around, probably trying to convince herself that it’s an oddly shaped mushroom, but no. It’s a wax dick with a wick. Cinnamon scented. She flushes with embarrassment as she sets it down.

  “We know,” I say, testing the waters. “That’s why we came to you. We were hoping that you could help us bend a few rules. The candles are a part of an experiment my brother and I are conducting. We were hoping that if you oversaw their use, we could trust you to keep this little secret of ours.”

  “Okay,” Munashe says without hesitation. “If it’s really that important to you.” She touches the head of the candle with her index finger, then as she assesses the seemingly random collection of objects, something clicks. “These represent vices, don’t they? Like in Discernment? The candle for lechery. The mirror for vainglory. The coins for greed. A false eye for envy.” She leans over the glass jar, eye bobbing in fluid—brown iris, with flecks of green. “Please tell me this is a false eye.”

  Kasim looks back at me. The lie is mine to tell. Agreeing to break a minor policy is one thing, but this is where we will know if Munashe is truly on our side. “We got it from the mortuary down the road.”

  Munashe gasps. “Buying human body parts is against the law!”

  “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we stole it,” I say.

  “Boys!” Munashe looks at us, exasperated.

  “We’ll return it when we’re done,” Kasim offers. “Nobody’s going to miss it.”

  “We came to you, Munashe, because we’re desperate for your help. This is a lot to ask, and we know that. We won’t blame you if you want to turn us in. But you said we could come to you for anything. This is our anything. It’s big. Bigger than stolen eyes even. And it’s incredibly important to us.” Truer words have never fallen from my lips, and I think Munashe hears that in the cadence of my pleas. At least I hope she does. I pass Munashe a roll of aged parchment. She opens it, and sees the diagram torn from the book. She slowly rolls it back up, and looks at us.

  “Which one of you is possessed?” she says quietly, flatly.

  “The both of us,” Kasim says. He looks so damned pitiful right now.

  “This is way above my pay grade, but it’s always been my goal to help nontraditional students.” Munashe pulls a smile through the sheer terror on her face. “I think you guys certainly fall under that category.”

  “Thank you so much, Munashe,” I say. “If there was room, I’d go over there and hug you right now.”

  “Your gratitude is enough,” she says.

  Kasim and I beam at each other. “Perfect,” he says. “So we’ll meet up tomorrow night and—”

  “Tomorrow?” I say. I can’t go another night with Icy Blue inside me. I can still taste the blood in the back of my throat. “Can’t we do it now?”

  “It has to be by the light of the full moon. The full moon is tomorrow night.”

  I feel my eyes running down the curves of Munashe’s body.

  Mmm. It’s been so long since I’ve tasted the flesh of a singleton.

  You promised to leave Gabadamosi alone. Find your prey elsewhere.

  I promised to leave the students of Gabadamosi alone.

  “You know that’s not what I meant!” I yell. Munashe and Kasim stare at me blankly.

  “What did you mean?” Kasim asks. “Are you okay?”

  I give him a look that I am definitely not okay. I have to tell him about Icy Blue and what happened last night. He can tie me up, lock me in a closet so the world would be safe from me for one more night.

  Excellent idea, Icy Blue says hungrily.

  What am I thinking? He’d just transform us into a long, slithering snake and crawl us right out the crack at the bottom of the door.

  We could always make another deal . . . Icy Blue tempts me.

  That would only make things worse. I think carefully around the promise . . . that Icy Blue would not harm any of the students at Gabadamosi. Then I look at the chicken scratch notes covering the writing pad on Munashe’s desk.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Tomorrow night is fine. Say, Munashe, remember how you told us that you always wanted to learn calligraphy?”

  “I said that?”

  “Well, you said you admired my writing. Why don’t I teach you? It’s easy really, just takes a bit of practice. We could start right now, in fact. I’d bet you’d be a good student.”

  “I don’t know, Auben. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the possession thing.”

  “It won’t take long. A few minutes today, a few minutes tomorrow . . .” And so on until I can get this demon out of me. I force my way across the room, knocking over empty mop buckets and a wet floor sign. She stiffens as I squeeze next to her, but I stick a pen into her hand anyway, and press mine around it as we draw a letter, slowly and legibly on one of the few spots on her notepad that isn’t covered in illegible scratch. “There. That was your first lesson.”

  My stomach quakes with Icy’s growl. She is not a Gabadamosi student.

  But I didn’t say Gabadamosi students. I said students at Gabadamosi. She’s my student now. And she’s at Gabadamosi.

  This is going to cost you, Icy Blue says before sulking off into silence.

  Like it hasn’t cost me enough already.

  I study the Sylla incantations deep into the night, then wake up with a dozen hearts upon my pillow, arranged like a bouquet of roses. My sheets are saturated with blood, and as I tug those off, I see that my mattress is as well. I keep my heart stone cold as I somehow flip the mattress without screaming, then strip down out of my sleep clothes and bundle the whole gory mess into a tight ball. They could be pig hearts, for all I know . . . yet somehow I know they’re not. I press a finger to the lock of the boiler room and concentrate on extending a claw. With a nerve-curling screeeech, metal stretches, then snaps, and the lock falls to the floor. I step inside, and place the evidence in a dark corner in the back of the room. It’s a joke, that’s all. Icy Blue’s twisted sense of humor.

  But soon after the first class period, the rumors are running wild. There’d been killings, twelve of them, in the comfy down the road from Gabadamosi. Streetwalkers mostly, three wu mystics, and two homeless men. Their hearts were ripped out of their chests while they were still alive. Evidence points to a large prey animal—fang and claw marks—but the sophisticated nature of the attacks points to something more human. They are searching for more victims, but I suspect they won’t find any.

  Kasim and I pay special attention in Sylla class, and when it comes time for our partnered exercises, we continue to speak our incantations to each other. He looks at me differently and has canceled lunch with Sesay so that we can practice. He knows. Or at least he suspects. I will not confirm it, though. It pains him so to hold back truths, and if the truth got out, any punishment would affect him, too. There is only one way out of this, and it’s happening tonight.

  We make the climb up Grace Mountain while there is still daylight. This gives us the illusion that what we’re doing isn’t complete
ly suicidal. Civilization recedes the higher we climb, and soon the city bowl stretches out below us—so distant, it seems more like an insect colony than home. Tiny commuters navigate a weave of streets thin as twigs, rounding stoic buildings no more significant than pebbles. For a moment, my problems seem insignificant, too. It’s so peaceful up here, watching the sun set into the ocean, billowy clouds turning shades of pink and red and orange against the too-wide, too-blue sky. A fire keeps the remnants of the narrow season at bay, as we await the moon’s rise. I pull my attention away from the beauty to see if my companions are as in awe as I am.

  Munashe is nervous and quiet, concentrating all her effort on scraping her knife along the walking stick she’d found during the last part of our climb. She claims she’d brought the knife for whittling as a way to pass the time, but Kasim and I know it is for protection, and we all know that it will not be enough if things go wrong. With each scrape of her blade, I feel her mind churning. She starts at the scurry of dassie rats in the underbrush, at the call of wild dogs in the distance, the melodic screech of a bird of prey overhead. Her edginess is getting worse, not better, and I’m afraid she’s going to back out and leave us up here alone.

  Kasim’s busy mumbling incantations, rocking back and forth with his arms hugged around his knees. It’s not helping matters any. When he screams the final words of the chant, Munashe jumps, her knife making a jagged gouge in her stick. I’m struck to full alertness with the smell of life. Munashe hadn’t made so much as a whimper, but her knife had taken a lick at her thumb as well. She wraps her other hand around it as blood runs down her arm. She trembles.

  “Kasim!” I say sharply, and once more until I break him from his trance. “Help her.”

  Kasim nods, and rips a strip of fabric from the bottom of his ciki. The cloth is saturated in seconds. He tosses it, then applies another. This one stays pristine, and when he removes it, there’s nothing but an inflamed paper cut an inch long.