oh, a man ain't a man unless he has desire )
Truth be told, he hadn’t been expecting such a strong reaction.
She spins around to face him and he takes one stumbling step backward, away from her.
It has not been lost on him that the magic in Beqanna has taken a stronger hold on its inhabitants and he’s seen more than a few horses wandering around with a predator’s teeth in their mouths. He has no way of knowing that she doesn’t have venomous fangs that she could easily plunge into the meat of his throat. (Strange that he should have any shred of self-preservation left in him when all he really wants to do is go back to being dead – and what better way to get back to the afterlife than by being attacked by someone else? Cuerva Lista couldn’t give him shit about that, could she?)
“Son of a bitch,” he yelps, more at himself than at her, because he’d spooked her and she had, in turn, spooked him right back.
He drags in a ragged breath, trying in vain to tame the wild beating of his heart.
The good news was that she didn’t sink her teeth into his throat. For all intents and purposes, she seemed just as regular as him.
But the fear in her eyes is not lost on him and it feels bigger than him simply catching her off-guard. It’s a real fear he sees, not the temporary kind that comes from being startled. Not the kind of fear she undoubtedly saw in his eyes when she’d spun around to face him and he’d awkwardly stumbled out of her reach.
She says, ‘excuse me’, but she says it in a way that suggests she has no interest in hearing him repeat what he’d say. She says it more in a way that suggests she’s offended that he’d said it at all. But he’s never been very good at apologies, so he doesn’t immediately say anything. She guesses so. Which is not her disagreeing with him, so he considers it a victory.
“Did you come here on purpose?” he asks without bothering to clarify whether or not she’d been dead before she arrived here. “Were you in the river?” he plunges on without giving her a chance to answer his first question. The river, of course, being the place where he’d been reunited with Cuerva Lista, where a roan mare had cloned herself for a reason he hadn’t totally figured out yet, where they’d been tasked with helping… with something.
Anonya, she says, and he doesn’t recognize the name but he supposes it doesn’t matter. He’d been dead a remarkably long time. “Antidote,” he says, pauses and then adds, “I think.” He rolls one shoulder in a kind of shrug before he says, “my name was Antidote when I died. I don’t know if you get a new one when you come back from the dead.”
