Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Six

Zia came over Friday morning after taking Rosette to school, her dark brown hair combed back into its usual sleek, tame ponytail with not a single strand of frizz out of place. We saw her frequently, especially since she liked to take every opportunity she could to get away from her hunter refuge house. Apparently Charis encouraged her to visit, or, as Zia put it in her trademark stoic voice, 'She wants me to have friends, or something equally heinous.'

She joined us at the kitchen table for breakfast, gabbing my ear off over tofu and onion scallion pancakes with spinach and tomatoes and a power shake. "I think Rosette tries to use a less annoying voice around me," she said as she inhaled the blended nuts and seeds and figs. "But that just pisses me off more, like she's climbing into a role to appeal to me. She's just annoying to me, why can't she get over it?"

I stirred my own gritty shake with a spoon. "Maybe she doesn't want to annoy you because you're doing her a favor by taking her to school every morning? So that she doesn't have to sit at the bus stop with crutches?"

"So? I annoy everyone at this table and I'm over it. You're the gourds who have to deal with it, not me."

Carmi choked on his last bite of pancake. "Did you just call us gourds?"

"Yeah." Her mossy eyes pierced him and she scratched at the freckles of her lightly tanned nose. I knew that the color of her skin, and consequently her freckles, had been caused by days of physical training in sunlight—without sunscreen. "Like squash, as in I could sit on you and you'd be squashed."

Yuuhi, occupying the chair beside me, tried to catch a snort in his hand, but it was futile. He couldn't cover it up. Toivo, on the other side of the table, gave him a flat look of, 'Really? Did you really just laugh at that?'

As Carmi yammered in defense, I noticed Nekane. She was still in her silky nightgown with her fleece robe, her abundant bleached hair wrapped in a loose bun. Her dark blue eyes, still tired from a late night working at her boutique, had been flickering to the silent Jason periodically. She reached over and touched his hand, which was curled around the library book in his lap. "Jason, dear, you haven't finished."

His eyes jerked away from setting the page on fire, landing on the half emptied bottle of syrupy synthetic. I'd been watching him out of the corner of my eye as well, and I'd made note of how he hadn't turned the page in the last twenty minutes. He was thinking about something, and whatever that something was, it stole him from the table and the kitchen and our big house in the woods and put him far away from us.

I didn't like it.

"Oh," he said. "It's cold. I'll go reheat it." He shut the book, the spine cracking, and grabbed the bottle. I knew he was only borrowing the excuse to remove himself from the table again. The microwave was miles away on the other side of the kitchen, after all.

Zia turned back to me. "Hey, Kal. So I have a problem, right? A couple more of my hunters decided to leave at the end of October, so I posted some room rentals online and did a few interviews, but these fucklings, man. They're all like grade A students during the interview, but then they turn into real shit stickers once they move in. Leaving dishes in the sink, tracking mud into the house, hocking huge loogies on the ground outside—smoking. Though, really, I'm glad they turned out to be smokers, gave me official reason to kick their bubble butts out."

Guilt stung my insides. She was looking for new tenants because her previous hunters had chosen to leave when Zia refused to disassociate herself with us. While she had managed to reclaim ownership of her house, many of her tenants had decided it wisest to leave. I couldn't blame them.