Page 37 of Insolence (Eisha’s Hidden Codices #1)

Itissa

I tumble out of the greenhouse and into a day that’s once again turned cold and gray.

“ Dammit ,” I hiss, my legs collapsing.

Agony bolts through me, bitter wind cutting in from the cliff. Bracing myself in the dirt, I pant, unable to catch my breath.

“That you, Tiss?” Sadrie peeks around the laundry. “ Tiss ? Gods!” The second she sees me, she runs.

For shit’s sake. The outside of my right forearm is rent gruesomely apart—red, wet muscle exposed like raw steak.

A vague, distant part of me is annoyed the sun decided to go away the second I got back outside. Shivering, I look down. Why the hell is my shirt open?

“Tiss.” Sadrie descends on me, squeaking when she registers the torn meat column that used to be my arm. “Gods, you’re ripped apart and bleeding !”

“Hadn’t noticed. Oh, gods,” I gurgle as the whole mountain seems to slew sideways.

My friend catches me before I hit the ground. Hands around my shoulders, she rights me. “Were you just in there with Elodie?”

The priestess’s attack raven hisses again.

“And Bibi,” I mutter, on edge.

“‘And Bibi.’ Of course,” Sadrie huffs. “Getting yourself mauled by a raven is a perfectly fine way to catch a disease.”

Nausea clenches my gut, my mouth filling with saliva. “Fair point.”

“What in gods’ names happened in there?”

“Mostly pruning from what I could tell.”

The door slams shut so hard, Elodie must have kicked it. I’m impressed the glass didn’t shatter.

It’s just as well; I’m stalling. Trying to patch together any amalgamation of events that might have led to my current condition.

“I can’t remember,” I say at last, although that’s not entirely accurate.

I remember my legs carrying me in there as if they had a mind of their own. Dropping into the chair, then feeling overheated and deliciously uninhibited.

The thought of Bibi’s talons piercing my flesh is enough to get my heart racing again.

Somehow, the stretch in between is blank. But I know the pain burning through my arm is what yanked me from the fugue state.

“And here you are, pale and sweating and going into shock without a cloak on, while it’s freezing!” Sadrie fusses over me. “Where is your cloak , you screwball?”

“Took it off when the sun came out,” I slur, glancing toward the cabbages.

She looks at the sky and gardens, then surveys me. “What sun ? It’s been overcast all day.”

“No. I don’t know how long I was in there, but—" But the way she’s looking at me, as if I’m speaking another language, silences the rest of it. Terrific . Evidently I’m hallucinating, on top of losing control of my body and blacking out. “Never mind.”

She stands and unfastens her own cloak, sweeping it around my shoulders.

“Mmm,” I moan into its warmth. “Smells like you.”

She drops to the ground again, shivering but reaching to rebutton my gaping shirt anyway. “Come on, songbird. Let’s get you inside and patched up. You’re going to need some stitches.”

“Oh, indisputably.”

I n total, I am given fifteen stitches and a tube of analgesic ointment that isn’t nearly strong enough and am bandaged dramatically from wrist to elbow, although the injury is only about ten inches long.

Managing to convince Fiona that I cut myself on a garden tool, I’m rewarded with an excruciating shot from an enormous needle.

I’m told to wash and rebandage the wound exactly once every day, informed I’m lucky I didn’t “lose my arm,” then paraded to the bathhouse where said arm is wrapped in a pillowcase and the rest of me is dunked in a tub and fussed over endlessly.

Early the next morning, Elodie pays me a visit.

“I won’t stay long,” she mumbles around a startlingly bruised and swollen lip.

Sitting up in bed, bleary-eyed, I draw the blankets up with my good arm, trying not to stare. My shift is plastered to my skin, and heat surges in my veins.

“You’re dismissed from your schedule today. Frankly, I don’t want to see you after this.” Her adroitness at sounding both flat and bitterly cold through her lisp is compelling—I’ll admit.

I barely slept last night, if you could call what I did “sleeping.” I wouldn’t classify it as restful by any stretch. Yesterday’s missing chunk of time is like an itch I can’t scratch. But I don’t get a headache when I try to remember, so whatever’s causing it has nothing to do with the ritual.

“From everything?” I ask. “Even prayers?”

Expressionless, she huffs a sigh and moves to peer out of the window.

Although I am many things, unobservant isn’t one of them. It’s clearly no coincidence that both of us are mangled and she’s irate. I realize I’m the guilty party, and that I should feel bad about it. Terrible, in fact.

Hell, I should probably be worried that I don’t know what I did. And yet, I feel very little at the moment, other than the urge to break something.

Including her pretty neck.

“How’s Bibi?” I ask, letting my gaze travel down her form.

“Fine. She won’t forgive you any time soon.” Elodie’s left hand flexes and relaxes inside the pocket of her wool skirt. Her inky tresses are twisted into an updo on the back of her head, enhancing the graceful slope of her shoulders.

She’s achingly elegant, and despite everything, part of me is intrigued by her subtle, controlled quiet.

After all, I am so much the opposite.

“Right.” I shift in bed, waiting for more, but it doesn’t come. Somehow, the pain in my bad arm is worse than yesterday. “So, are we not going to talk about what happened in the greenhouse?”

“Fuck you, Tiss.” Her eyes drop closed. She hasn’t looked at me once since coming in here.

“ Please ?” The word strains past my lips. Behind my ribs the monster shifts. Something dangerously close to violence prods at me from every angle. “I think I’d really like to talk about it.”

Not only do I need her to say it—to fill me in—I realize, but I want her to show me her teeth. Then I can bring out my claws.

“Would you, now? Well.” Finally landing on me, her eyes blaze amber and emerald in the early morning light. “We had better do what you want. Goddess forbid you don’t get your way for once.”

“And yet, you’re the one constantly infantilizing me. Withholding from me. Handling me.”

She gives a dull snort that only rankles me further. “If you could handle yourself better, then I wouldn’t have to, now would I?”

With resentment rising to my eyeballs, I swallow the overwhelming urge to scream—to do something brutal that I can’t quite articulate. “Maybe I could if you weren’t so overprotective and fucking paranoid all the time.”

“Make better decisions,” she grinds out, “and I won’t have to be.”

That’s all it takes. Throwing the covers aside, I’m on my feet with the cold tiles stinging my naked soles before I know what I’m doing. Before I have a plan.

Startled, she watches me turn and snatch a gleaming letter opener from my nightstand. Whirling around with it, I crave pain and destruction. The predator inside of me is bristling, for once vexed to motion not with hunger, but with anger.

I want to slit myself open. I want to rip my intestines out.

“Goddess, Tiss.” Her swollen mouth twists, her eyes narrowing. “Calm. Down.”

But I’m beyond anything resembling calm . I yearn to shove my gore in her face—to spit, “Here. Look. This is what you do to me. This is the monster I’ve become because of you !”

Makeshift weapon outstretched, I’m in front of her with my other hand wrapped around her neck before I know how I got here, before I know how things escalated to this point.

“What are you doing ?”

With my bad arm screaming and my stitches tautening like every last one of my frayed nerves, I shove her against the adjacent wall with the blade’s dull point pressed to her neck.

“Something I don’t want to do, but I will if you don’t tell me why it feels like there’s a tether connecting us,” I grate through my teeth.

“Why it seems like we know each other, and you know that we know each other. What that business with the Screamer was all about. Because you sure as hell know more than you’ve been letting on, and you owe me something , priestess. ”

“I don’t ‘owe’ you anything , Itissa. Anything ,” she chokes out. “I’m still in the middle of the last fucking thing you told me to do.”

“What thing ?”

“Purple. Back the hell off. If you think you can manage.”

An animalistic shriek tears through my mind. Blinding, white-hot rage bubbles up through my skin. It bathes me in an ablution of power, thrumming through my blood sweeter than a symphony. It subsumes me entirely.

It’s the loveliest, most purifying thing I can imagine.

“No,” I say, “I don’t think I can manage.” The energy around us shifts, the air shimmering. Somehow, I start to rise above my own body, hovering near the ceiling and watching myself hold a letter opener to Elodie’s throat. My bad arm outstretched, my other hand grasps her by the neck.

This is the precise truth of me. This cleansing wrath, this need for pain and destruction, is woven into my essence; it’s the very root of me.

It is my purpose.

“You and your stupid colors can go to hell, Elodie.” From somewhere above my own body, I watch myself press the blade’s blunt point into her carotid until her pupils dilate.

A gurgled sound escapes her.

Her blood throbs beneath bronze skin, racing under my fingertips—telling me her anger has shifted to fear. The shift further fuels my lust for brutality.

I’m in two places at once, fixating on the gushing liquid warmth, aching to feel it oozing through my fingers and glazing my lips. Observing my body obeying no orders but its own.

I want to drink in every last drop of her. I want to consume her.

When next I speak, I don’t recognize my own voice: “Tell me what you’ve been keeping from me, damn it!”