Free A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry Page B

a word was painful. My peripheral vision was filled with leaves, and they seemed to sway in slow motion, like the tentacles of a giant sea creature.
    The girl leaned over me, and the dark and wavy tips of her hair nearly grazed my face. “What was that you said earlier about a butcher?”
    “A butcher’s
son
,” I slurred.
    “A
what
?”
    “I . . . I’m sorry.” I dragged one of my palms across my eyes to try and push the pain out of my head. It didn’t work. “I thought you were a nun.”
    “You know,” she said after a pause, “I’ve never thought of it that way. You’re sort of right, though. I am a nun. And this is my convent. Welcome. Finally.”
    Slowly and with my head still spinning, I stood. I blinked—one, two, three times—and the girl finally came into focus. She didn’t have green skin and grass for hair. She was around my age, but bird-boned and short, dressed in jeans that were patched in places and rolled up to her ankles. The hood of the blue long-sleeved sweatshirt she was wearing was thrown over her head in a way that made her look fierce, like a cruiserweight primed for a boxing match.
    Prune-purple rings circled her near-black eyes; her brow was furrowed like someone who’d spent her entire life anticipating a fight.
    I wasn’t feeling like much of an opponent right then. Too much was still out of focus.
    My forearm itched like crazy, so I scratched it. This was, apparently, was not the right thing to do.
    “Don’t do that!” One of the girl’s hands flew in my direction.
    I kept scratching.
    “Those types of rashes have a tendency to spread,” she said, cringing. “Just leave it be. You’ll be fine in a few hours.”
    I stopped to hold my arms up to my eyes so I could study the tiny white dots on my skin by the light of the moon. The dots squirmed like maggots. I blinked; they stopped.
    “You landed in the plants,” the girl said. “I had to move you away from them.”
    I dropped my arms and peered at the girl in front of me who still seemed less like a solid person and more like a dark, nebulous mass.
    The only thing I could do was state the obvious: “They’re poisonous. They cause hallucinations. I heard they killed a kitten.”
    “My dad’s a scientist. He studies plants.” She smirked. “You have similar aspirations, yeah?”
    Her accent was strange: partially British or Irish like that of the scientist, but also suggesting that she’d spent a lot of time on the island. There were hints of Spanish in the rhythm of her words and the way she rounded her vowels.
    I ignored her dig and cast a glance through the open glass doors of the house that led to the lit dining room I’d stood in the previous day. My eyes moved to a corner of the courtyard, where a white hammock was strung up near a massive pile of water-logged hardback books and the remains of a single smashed terra-cotta pot. The gold lettering on the spines of the books shimmered; squinting, I tried to make out the author. Borges, probably. It wouldn’t have surprised me. It also wouldn’t have surprised me if a red and green macaw flew out of the plants, landed on my shoulder, and starting reciting poetry or some shit.
    A thin wisp of clarity filtered through my brain long enough for me to remember why I’d launched myself into this bizarre situation. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the notes.
    “What is this?” I asked, holding the slips of paper between us. “How do you know my name?”
    The girl tilted her head as if she’d misheard me. “Everyone knows your name.”
    “Not everyone knows what room I stay in.”
    “Yes, they do. It’s the haunted one.”
    I focused on the girl’s eyes, which now appeared so black that they reminded me of the shiny jet stones of a brooch my mother had worn to my grandmother’s—my dad’s mother’s—funeral. She’d referred to it as her “mourning jewelry.”
    The girl—Isabel, I now remembered the note had said—was examining me, too,