Shay pulls it open and takes in Deebi's pleading eyes, the pout that carves hollow gouges and long puddles onto his ruinous face. A face meant to scare little children. But the thought that she herself was once afraid of him seems silly now.
She squares her shoulders. “You can't change my mind.”
“We need you.” Deebi lets out a long breath, releasing a stench like rotten onions.
Shay won't be deterred. “I'm sure you and your brothers survived well enough before I arrived.”
“Well, yes,” Deebi admits. “But it wasn't the same. You bring a warmth to our dwelling, a brightness we didn't know before and have since become accustomed to.”
“What I hear you saying is, if I leave, you'll have to cook your own meals and wash your own clothes.”
Deebi coughs into his mangled hand. “Is that what you think matters to me?”
“Maybe not to you, specifically. But what about the rest of them?” She gestures toward the banister at the head of the stairs.
“We all care for you, even if not all of us know how to show it.” He holds up his leathery palms, imploring. “Even Aidi.”
“Just because someone's intentions are good, doesn't make their actions right,” Shay says, her shoulders dipping. Even if she has her doubts about Aidi's intentions, she can't pretend any of this is Deebi's fault. She came here hoping to rest and process all this, but even if that had worked out, she could not have stayed for long. Not while the circumstances of Ghita's death remain a mystery. “Besides, something horrible happened to the midwife, and I can't find out what if I am here.”
“What if we could help with that?” Deebi looks down as he asks the question, suddenly captivated by his blackened nails.
Shay glances at Khawla, who has paused shoving her clothes along with more notebooks than Shay was aware she owned into the sack—notebooks filled with sketches, Shay realizes. Putting aside her curiosity, she turns back to Deebi. “How?”
Deebi mumbles incoherently a few times, as though unsure how to word whatever he's trying to say. Twisting the tip of one horn, he sighs. “Are you aware of what my brothers and I do on our nightly haunts?”
Shay makes a stern face. “You frighten children and eat corpses. Neither of which are acceptable activities, I'll have you know.”
Deebi straightens his spine. “I'm sure our lifestyle seems unconventional to you, but you must try to understand that humans need someone to fear, as surely as they need love. Better for them to vilify us, than turn on one another.”
Shay thinks of how people needlessly fear hizouras, the songs children would sing in the schoolyard that gave her nightmares of being snatched off the streets for years. The way Hind's family refused to accept her Hazmaggi husband, and even Ghita, perhaps unknowingly, perpetuated misconceptions about the tribe. The way certain women take issue sharing spaces like the bathhouse with mutahawils. “We do that anyway.”
“Trust me, it would be worse without us,” Deebi says. “And, in order to be good at haunting, we need to understand as much as we can about how the human mind works. That's where our graveyard activities come in.”
Shay is quite sure the bone-eaters have a very limited understanding of the human thought process, but then, she cannot claim to understand it any better. “What do you mean?”
“When we eat a corpse, we absorb that person's memories. We learn more about what people fear and use that knowledge to improve our scare tactics. But, believe me, lallati, humans are bigger monsters than bone-eaters could ever be. The things I see in those memories, things humans have done to one another, those are what keep me awake. The murders aren't even the worst of it.”
Shay blinks. Then she blinks again, and a few times more as her mind skips from one thought to another across a river of logic. “Are you saying that when you eat a corpse, you gain knowledge of how that person died? And if someone killed them, you would know who it was?”
“Yes, that's right.” Deebi wipes his forehead with his sleeve.
Shay glances again at Khawla. Her face, as usual, betrays no clue as to her opinion. Shay contemplates this most terrible of ideas, and in the end, her need to know the truth prevails. She smiles as sweetly as the thing she's about to ask is bitter and says, “And you would do that, for me?”
Deebi nods, then pauses. “Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, do you wish for us to consume the midwife's corpse?”
Shay screws her eyes, shutting out the graphic description, although that is precisely what she means. “I'm asking you. It would mean a lot to me, to know the truth.”
“I know you're asking me, but I'll have to convince my brothers. Grave foraging is not a solitary act, you understand.”
“Oh.” Shay swallows, the recent memory of Aidi's face when she said she was leaving turning the saliva in her mouth to dust. “Do you think they will agree?”
“I think they'll listen to me.” Deebi peers back over his shoulder, his mottled tongue darting over his gray lips. It is awfully quiet down below, andShay suddenly imagines the brothers huddled at the bottom of the stairs, eavesdropping. “But if I'm able to convince them, will you stay with us? Forever?”
“Deebi,” Shay says, taken aback, but also strangely touched. One thing's sure: Khawla was right about setting better boundaries. “It's sweet that my presence means so much to you. But I can't stay here forever. Surely you understand that?”
“Why not?” Deebi sulks. “As a bone-eater, I'm intimately aware of what horrors occur in the human world. If there's one certainty of human life, it's suffering. And you, lallati, you are too tender and soft to make it in that world. You do not deserve to suffer so.”
Tender and soft. Isn't that what Shay has always tried to be? The opposite of a thorn. And yet, hearing herself described that way is just plain annoying.
