Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [36]
I understood. It was another mortal phenomenon, after all—the desire to understand something by retroactively assigning it a myth. I told him, “Sure. But you still haven’t told me exactly how you escaped. You’re avoiding that part.”
“Am I?” He sounded surprised. “I don’t mean to. It’s just that what I’ve told you so far is so difficult to discuss. The rest can be summed up quickly, if you like.”
“Tell it however you want,” I said. I liked to hear him talk, and now that I knew I could drag the whole story out of him, I didn’t mean to rush him.
“Hm. Well, as I said, I tried out this power in small ways at first, trying to find a rhythm for it. Imagine, if you will, pushing a merry-go-round. At first it’s difficult; it’s heavy, and slow. But soon you find the weight of it, and you learn how to keep it moving—and then all it takes is the occasional shove to keep it going at full tilt. That’s what this was like. At first, I was trying to move something huge and impossibly heavy, trying to make it spin.”
“Spin?”
“Yes. I wanted the world to turn, or at least the Gulf of Mexico.”
“So you … made a hurricane?”
“No.” He stopped me quickly with a wave of his free hand. “Nothing like that. More like a tornado, yet nothing like a tornado at all. Believe me, I was as shocked as you are.”
“How do you know how shocked I am? You can’t see me.”
“No, but I can imagine the look on your face,” he said with a smile. “My initial attempts yielded no definitive results, but then I was making the windows rattle, and shaking the doors, and I could hear the fencing outside uprooting itself.” He sat forward on the edge of his seat now, closing the space between us. “They didn’t know it was me. Even if I’d told them it was me, they wouldn’t have believed it. But one night I heard them coming. I heard the doors opening and smelled the tide, and I couldn’t bear the thought of them even one more hour. I called down the vortex—if I must call it anything, then that word will suffice—and the building …” He shook his hands, almost spilling a little of the wine. “It came apart.”
“That’s it? It came apart?”
He shrugged. “Blew apart. Exploded apart. I felt my way out of the rubble, and I went blindly into the woods where I hid for several nights, feeding on whatever I found or could coax into my hands.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Then …” More hand-waving. “I was found by the captain of a shrimp trawler who had ventured close to the island. I persuaded him to assist me. He took me off the island and over to St. Petersburg, where I threw myself upon the mercy of the Broad House.”
I couldn’t believe he’d taken the chance. “Seriously? And they didn’t kill you on the spot?”
“No. They’re ostracists,” he said, which meant that the House members were the equivalent of anarchists. They didn’t play nice with other Houses, and they tended to take in the freaks, geeks, and weirdos—the undead dregs. Few ostracist Houses (if they can loosely be called such) are very powerful, and they live on the fringes like the Hollywood stereotype of Gypsies.
“Still. Ballsy move, mister.”
“Thank you. Eh … Ms. Pendle, is your phone ringing?”
“What?” I didn’t hear it until he said it. “Oh. Well, it’s buzzing at me.” But I’d missed the call, and had to wait until the little blip told me I had a message. I pried it out of my purse and checked the number. It looked familiar but I didn’t recognize it outright. I sighed and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but so few people have