Before my staring eyes, as she turned from me, the marking upon her shank gained the form of a fantastical beast—the hindquarters and tail of a dragon. In the strike of my heart, she leapt from ember to flame.
“Scarred like a pagan,” Hildegard said.
“Like a pagan priestess.” Gawen was right, for there was power in such graving.
In the bath, I opened the spigot and chastised myself for the heat in my blood. Hildegard lashed me, saying, “Art thou ashamed for thine eyes’ offense?”
“I averted my gaze,” I said.
“Wert thou pure of heart, thou wouldst not need to avert thine eyes. Thou couldst look upon her naked without shame.”
I protested not, tho ’twas untrue. I might do no such thing with a pure heart.
“She is thine to protect and no further,” Hildegard said, but the Witch said naught.
Gawen laughed and said, “The lady inflameth thy liver. Thou shalt have no relief but by thine own hand.”
Sooth, he was right.
CHAPTER 11
Zee
People say, “Stay as long as you need,” but they don’t mean that literally. Most people don’t even mean it past a week. No matter how good a guest you are, how cheerfully you help out around the house, eventually, your host starts to frown at the pile of blankets you try to keep out of sight when you’re not actually sleeping on the couch.
Even with LaReigne, I sometimes felt like she was giving me that look: Oh, you’re still here, sitting on the couch, waiting for me to go to bed so you can go to bed, even though I’d like to finish watching this movie.
Except for the year I was with Nicholas, I’d been living like that since I left home. Even before that, I felt like an invisible guest in Mom’s house. Our house had always been cluttered with her stuff, but it got a lot worse after Dad went to prison. By the time LaReigne graduated from high school, Mom was off the deep end into hoarding. Like if she couldn’t keep LaReigne at home, she was going to collect stuff that couldn’t leave her.
LaReigne went off to Seward County Community College on a cheerleading scholarship, while I stayed at home trying to keep Mom’s stuff at bay. My living space was a twin bed, while the rest of my room got taken over by boxes of collectibles and books and craft projects. I had to start keeping my clothes in a canvas bag hung on a hook from the ceiling above my bed. Otherwise, I’d come home from school and have to dig it out from under whatever new treasures Mom was “just storing” in my bedroom.
When the sink faucet stopped working, Mom wouldn’t let a plumber in the house, and we couldn’t take showers, because of the stuff stacked in one end of the tub. I’d fill up a bucket from the kitchen sink to brush my teeth and take what Mom called a whore’s bath with a washrag.
Then one day at the beginning of my junior year, I came home from school and, after squeezing through the gap in my bedroom door and crawling over the beaver dam of clothes and magazines, I found that my bed had been taken over by three plastic bins of old bridesmaids dresses and half a dozen cardboard shipping boxes. Mom had put them there because my bed was one of the last empty spaces in the house.
At first my friend Mindy and her family were cool with the fact that I was “having trouble at home,” but that only lasted a week. Then I was out on my ass, toting my sleeping bag back to my mother’s house, where I slept one night in the hallway, wedged in between the wall and stacks of magazines all the way up to the ceiling. I couldn’t even turn over, so I laid there all night like a mummy with my arms tucked across my chest, listening to mice scurry around.
I burned through eleven friendships in high school. Eight my junior year. Three my senior year. Those were the early days, before I figured out that people didn’t mean I could stay as long as I needed. Before I figured out that sex made a difference. It’s harder for people to kick you out when you’re having sex with them. Or their dad. Or whatever.
One of the first things you learn from sleeping over at people’s houses is that everybody’s family is weird. Maybe not your family’s kind of weird, but weird.
So Gentry’s family was super nice, and it was great to have my own bed, and for Marcus and me to have our own room, but I knew Charlene didn’t really mean we could stay as long as we needed. Plus, living with LaReigne for the past two years, I’d forgotten how much hard work it was being a guest.
I missed having the option of going back to sleep. That was the trade-off to being a perpetual guest. You got to eat and not worry about where it came from, but you didn’t get to lie in somebody’s guest bed all day and cry. You had to get up.
I had to get up.
I guessed Gentry had just come home from work, because he was wearing steel-toed work boots and jeans instead of cargo shorts. I was wearing the T-shirt and panties I slept in. So that was awkward. After he finished in the bathroom, I took a shower and put on the last pair of clean clothes I had. That was the first thing I needed to do: go by the apartment to get clean clothes for me and Marcus. Before that, I had to get Marcus up, which, considering he’d been up half the night crying and having bad dreams, was almost impossible. It was only eight o’clock, though, so I had a couple hours before work. If I could get him up and take him to Mom’s house by then, it would be okay.
When I went out to the front room, Elana was there watching some kind of educational video, and Charlene was in the kitchen.
“Good morning, hon. How do you feel about French toast for breakfast?” she said.
“Oh, you don’t need to fix me anything.”
“Well, it’s already cooking, so you might as well have some. Does Marcus like French toast?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s just having a hard time getting up this morning.”
“That’s all right. I’ll fix him some breakfast when he gets up. Go on, sit down, and I’ll bring it to you.”
In the dining room, Gentry was reading the newspaper, but he folded it up when I sat down.
“How slept thou, Lady Zhorzha?” he said.
“Oh, okay.”
“My mother said thou passed the night ill, that thy nephew was much distressed, and for that I am sorry.”
I don’t think Gentry understood I was trying to tell a polite lie. “Well, he had to find out eventually, I guess.” That was what I said, but then I spent a whole minute trying not to cry.
Charlene carried in a baking pan with these huge, fluffy slabs of French toast on it. It was the most beautiful French toast I had ever seen. Golden brown and bubbly and dusted with powdered sugar. After the first bite, I cut a second one, but didn’t eat it. I stuck the syrupy mess in the middle of my palm and stood up.