Free Fiendish by Brenna Yovanoff Page B

drying. In my hand, his skin felt rough and warm and I let him go so fast it was like I was flinging him away. “How did you
do
that?”
    “What?”
    I stared up at him. “You must be out of your mind, saying
what
at me! You just cut yourself open and now there’s nothing.”
    The power to heal was a power of the dirt, and I thought of Rae saying in her prim, clever way,
He has a particular skill with living things
.
What I had just seen was a lot more than that, though. This was no run-of-the-mill dirt-work like Myloria and my mama had liked to do, but pure, undiluted craft. This was the living, breathing body of the world.
    For maybe five seconds, neither of us spoke. Then I moved closer. “What
are
you?”
    Fisher didn’t answer right away. In the light from the moon, his face looked ghostly and far away. After a minute, he laughed, but it wasn’t a good sound. “That’s a pretty personal question.”
    “Well as that may be, I think it’s one worth asking. Are you trying to tell me that that what just happened is
normal
?”
    “Let me put it another way. That’s a pretty personal question coming from a girl who survived being buried alive. What are
you
?”
    At our feet, the birds were marching out of their ruined coop in a wobbly line—quail and pheasants and doves. They trooped past like they barely minded that we were there, and waddled off toward the middle of the yard, too stupid to know that they were free. The white peacock came last of all, pecking along the ground.
    “I’m Clementine,” I said, watching the birds scratch aimlessly in the dirt.
    But I said it to the darkness. To no one.
    Fisher was already walking away, heading deeper into the zoo. After a second, I kicked the screen out of my way and followed him.
    We wound between coops and hutches built from wire and the rotting salvage boards that used to be my house. There was something wholly satisfying about watching Fisher break them all to pieces.
    The badger was at the corner of the yard closest to the road, locked inside its small scrap-wood cage.
    Fisher stopped in front of it. “This is who you wanted, right?”
    I nodded, peering in at it, just a white stripe in the dark.
    “Well, let it out, then,” he said.
    When I tried the padlocked door, though, it wouldn’t budge. I got down on my knees and started pulling at the latch. The ground under me was rocky and shot through with tree roots.
    “Hurry up,” said Fisher, glancing toward the house. “They’re not going to stay gone forever.”
    I held the lock with both hands and closed my eyes. The inside was complicated, all little pieces of metal. I stared into the heart of it, looking for the part that would make it open.
    The way I felt when my eyelids came down was like every dream and vision I’d had in the caved-in cellar, like I was crawling outside myself and into something greater. Shiny might be fierce and forthright, and Rae might know the delicate truth in objects, but I had a trick or two myself, and I knew how things worked.
    “Can you break it?” Fisher asked in a voice so low it was barely louder than the sound of his breathing.
    “No,” I whispered back. “But I see how it opens, sort of. It has these . . . things—they go up and down and let another thing turn. Do you have something skinny, like a wire or anything?”
    “No. But we don’t need one. Move.”
    It took less than a second to see what he was going to do, and then I scooted away on my butt so fast the backs of my legs scraped the gravel.
    His boot swung right past my face, leaving a long, glowing afterimage. He hit the frame with his heel and the hinges tore away from the wood as easily as the staples on the bird coop had done.
    The door clattered into the yard.
    The badger trundled up to the edge of the cage and sniffed curiously at the opening before stepping out into the night. It stood over me where I sat in the dirt, a hulking shape against the starry sky.
    “Leave,” I whispered, but