Death In The Family

Chapter 14

Sunlight glinted brightly on the quivering water in the large marble fountain. Koi meandered through the shadows of waterlilies, their shimmering scales catching and reflecting the light to show off their brilliant oranges, metallic whites, and obsidian blacks. The songbirds in the courtyard whistled and trilled in seeming celebration of the sun, occasionally drowned out by the wails of the peacocks that strutted the grounds. Leif watched as a visiting crow pecked at the ruined corpse of one of those elegant koi, a victim of some trespassing predator that had made good use of this wealth of defenseless prey in the night. The sound of footsteps echoing from the bricks of the surrounding loggia caused the crow to take flight, a thing that these songbirds could not do with their clipped wings in their steel cages. He wondered if they still longed to fly and he imagined that they did. To have an instinct and not be able to engage it was one of the cruelest denials a life could endure. It was a thing that, if bore long enough, could clog the mind with madness.

"Mr. Valstad," the young man spoke, standing at a safe three meters from him, "you are requested in the conservatory."

One of the trapped and crippled songbirds beat its useless wings against the bars of its cage and trilled out an angry cry, but its selectively bred voice still sounded sweet even through its agony. The bird rattled and screamed for the freedom of flight that it might have never experienced, but knew by its own shape to be its birthright.

"Sir?... Mr. Valstad?"

Leif dipped his hand in the fountain and a large dark fish swam over to tentatively mouth at his fingertips, searching for treats. This unguarded behavior was undoubtedly what had made these decorative fish so easy to catch and so endearing to feed. The survival instinct to flee from threats had been conditioned out of it by the benefit of appealing to visitors for food. The koi's long black fins swayed in a flourish as it turned away from his empty hand, reminding him of how his daughter's hair had swirled around her in the bathwater. That night he and his darling girl had bathed together in that psilocybin dream world was not long ago, though for him, it had been a lifetime since. He could even still taste the spice of her blood on his lips and he yearned to wet his tongue on the life he'd created once more. A grin twitched into place on his placid face as he turned it toward the sun. His appetites were returning.

"Mr. Valstad, the-"

Leif grabbed the majestic black fish, its slippery body wriggling uselessly in his clawed grip as he threw it at the young man's face. The messenger boy didn't recover quickly enough from the unexpected distraction to unholster his sidearm before Leif lunged upon him. He had only roughly eight seconds before the guards that were positioned to monitor him would react and come with their tasers, but he didn't need more than two to latch his mouth over the messenger's cry of pain and suck his tongue into his mouth. The spongey, slick flesh snapped and tore easily under Leif's sharp teeth and he spat it onto the grass next to the thrashing fish.

"I'm not someone to be sent for like a scullery maid," he patiently let the screaming man know.

The cell phone store in the shopping mall was as similar and as different as any Simone had encountered in her smattering of experiences across the United States, meaning that her interest in these new environments waned quickly and she struggled to find things to distract her mind from the reoccurring fever that agitated her crazy. She'd hate to be a bad guest- or whatever she was- to Anders by having an anxiety attack in the middle of his deliberation between an iPhone and a Samsung. However, she also considered that it might be wise to establish realistic expectations early on. She just had to attract as little attention to herself as possible while maintaining her attention away from the nauseating tremor in her entire body and the paranoia the fever cooked in her bad brain.