Obsidian: Retribution (Book 2)

Thirty-Nine: Blood, Rain, and Superstitions

Zahara jolted at the sound of thunder that shook the room, puncturing her hand with the needle she had been mending her dress with as she did. Ghaul turned to look and stopped her before she licked the blood.

"Don't do that," he grunted. "It's bad luck."

Samarrans and their superstitions, Zahara thought wearily, would have said it out loud only she knew now was not the time to insult his lineage. Being left behind by Muradi to look after her while his master was out to fight had given him an agitation to match a starving beast caged in the middle of a group hunt and being made to watch. For the past hour, Ghual had been pacing the room furiously looking for somewhere to dump that frustration.

But she, too, needed to dump her own frustrations somewhere. "I'm not from here," she said instead, and proceeded to lick the blood clean.

Ghaul stilled––a reaction that made her uneasy for how much it didn't suit him. On his face was an oddly rigid expression unknown to her given all the years they'd been forced to share a space without killing each other. On a normal day, the need to bring that axe down on her head would have been heard from the room next door the moment she decided to pick a fight. Tonight, the man seemed awkwardly tired, and the axe a burden. There was, she thought with no more than a woman's intuition to back her conclusions, a strange weight Ghaul had been carrying since his return from Rasharwi.

"How hard is it," he said, quietly, uncharacteristically, "for you to respect other people and what they do for once? When is it not about you and your vengeance or what is important to you?"

Since when, the thought sprang up in her mind like self-defense, like instinct, am I the monster here?

She dragged it back by the hair, placed a foot on it. "When your people respect ours," she said, felt the sharp end of that statement on her tongue, and decided now was not the time to address it. "Where I come from we drink blood to survive. Nothing happens."

The sky flashed again, lighting up the side of Ghaul's face where long, numerous scars resided. "You are in Samarra," said Ghaul, a mouthful of judgement queuing impatiently for release behind that add restraint. "There are different forces in play here. What you just did brings bad luck to your kin, your––"

"My kins are all dead." It came out of her like a whip, triggered by a mixture of old rage and the unexplained anxiety that had been bothering her all night. "They have been dead for decades, thanks to your master."

"Are they?" Ghaul's voice was always rocks and stones in texture, but now it grated like a dull, serrated knife. "I understand the hate for the father, but never how far you hate your son. Do you still want him dead, woman? Or have you decided he's dead already? Is that why you insisted on licking that blood?"

Still, he'd said, still want him dead. "You understand nothing about me or my son." She paused to breathe. It was the heat, the humidity that seemed to have tripled in this small room. Nothing more. "And since when do you care?"

The sky flashed again. A rumble followed in swift succession, as if to feed the hammer in Ghaul's voice. "He is a son of my master, a man who is out there fighting to protect what he's lost, what you and your hatred have taken from him, from the Salasar, while you sit here a burden and a risk to us all with no care whatsoever whether he lives or dies. Whether your son lives or dies. Why," he said, raising the hammer to a deadly height, to accommodate a killing blow, "are you still here?"

The rain came down all at once, like someone had punctured a hole in a sky filled past its capacity with angry, dirty rain. It drowned out all the sounds in the room, locking the two of them in a heavy silence that nailed them in place while their demons came out of hiding.