Into the Tiger's Hour

Chapter Nine

The large blue eyes gazing at Spider were glassy. Iris blinked once. Twice. She coughed when a wisp of clove smoke wafted past her and waved a hand at the air before frowning at the Goth.

"...you mean Dad was... following her? Like really following her everywhere?"

Spider nodded once. "I know you haven't gotten much of an idea about the world, Iris, but even you can tell that's a frightening idea." She ground out another clove and drained her coffee cup, rose and walked to the buffet to tap the packed espresso grounds out into a red bin that had devil horns on the edge. "...but that's the Jonas I first knew. He was..." Spider paused, rinsing the coffee filter with a quick dash of bottled water. "Cold. Very detached. Jonas never showed any emotion at all. I didn't think he really had any for a long time."

Iris watched her make a fresh cup of coffee, finally picked up her own mug of long-since-cooled almond milk and sipped at it. Although the flavor was somewhat atrocious now that it had lost heat and the foam had thickened into a skin, Iris didn't put the cup down. Her hands felt cold and she couldn't quite stop frowning.

"Spider."

"Hm?"

Turning the cup around in her hands, Iris watched the liquid beneath pull at the edges of what was left of the skin that had formed. "...was Dad a bad person?"

The Goth didn't answer for a long moment; only the whistle of the milk steamer, the click of a mug on wood, the clink of a spoon against ceramic. When Spider sat down, she had a pack of Camels in her hand and opened that instead of reaching for another Djarum. Black lipstick marked the filter when she lowered it from her mouth, and Spider nodded slowly. "He was, Iris. I wouldn't call him evil, but Jonas was not the man he is today. He wasn't the man he became when he became a father." The Goth's mouth shifted as she tapped ash into the pewter bat. "You changed him."

Spider looked at the coffin's ash-dusted surface and brushed some of the grey powder off with her hand, her eyes distant. "So did Dia."

"...what did Dad do after he talked to you?" The almond milk was impossible to drink. Iris rose to her feet and took it back to the buffet, rinsing the cup out in the small, covered sink before she dug through the fridge and found a bottle of water.

"I know there was some altercation with an anomaly and Jonas stepped in, but to be honest, after that, I only knew what was going on because Bertram was calling me constantly, trying to find out more about him." She took a sip of her coffee, russet eyes tracking Iris. "He didn't trust him."

Iris curled up in another chair, closer to Spider, and twisted the water bottle in her hands. She felt vaguely dizzy; everything was so... contrary to what she'd grown up with, but after what she'd read in those letters, Iris couldn't believe that her father was, or ever had been, all bad. "But Bertram likes Dad now. They talk a lot and usually they have a drink together."

"A lot changed after... Dia died." The Goth let out a slow breath and looked at her cigarette. Leaned forward and tapped ash into the pewter bat before she took several quick drags, hardly exhaling one pull of smoke before she was drawing in the next.

"Spider, did Dad love her?"

With a slow nod, Spider ground her cigarette out, lit another immediately. "I think he did, yes," she said slowly. "But he didn't realize it in time."

"What happened?"

~~

When she picked up the phone, all she could hear was the sound of Andrew's hysterical sobbing. He wasn't coherent and Spider couldn't make out anything he was saying. The line went dead within thirty seconds and she stood there, hair dripping down her back, and stared at the receiver. It was obvious that something horrific had happened, and her first thought was that Bertram's heart had given out.