American Hippo by Sarah Gailey

Author:Sarah Gailey [Gailey, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250176431
Publisher: Tor.com
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

The unconscious man looked small and soft without the bandana tied over his face.

Adelia squatted beside the man and studied him. He was a stubbly, tan, nose-broken type. His mouth hung slack, and Adelia could see his little pink tongue in there, flopped over to one side.

She had always been struck by how soft people were. They could throw punches, sure, but at the end of the day, they were a mess of vulnerabilities. This man’s face had been covered in an attempt to protect himself from Adelia’s inevitable retribution—and yet he’d yielded to Hero’s clumsy jab. Hero was bad at fighting; Adelia had been astonished that they had managed to land a blow.

But then, Adelia reminded herself, people could be surprising.

Ysabel had been surprising. Adelia had expected to love the baby, to cherish and nurture her—but she could never have anticipated how much she liked Ysabel. It usually took Adelia months to warm up to people, and yet the moment that Ysabel was born, Adelia had felt as if they’d been best friends for years.

Go figure.

Adelia felt a faint smile shade her lips at the thought of her daughter’s eyes staring up at her, wide and dark and just like her own. She smiled that little smile in spite of the gut-clenching terror: Those men have Ysabel. She smiled because she knew what to do with this man, this man who had helped to steal her baby.

She drew back her hand, and she slapped the unmasked man across the face, with approximately one-tenth of the force that her rage demanded.

He came to, spitting blood. He coughed, gagged, started to choke. Hero shoved him upright and slapped him on the back, and he coughed again, then spat something white. Adelia picked it up.

“You lost this,” she said, showing the man his tooth. He breathed hard through his nose as he poked at his gum with his tongue. He spat blood again, then looked from Hero to Adelia with wide, spooked eyes.

“What’s your name?” Adelia asked softly. Hero stood behind the man, fidgeting with their shirttails. Adelia smiled at them. They winced. Adelia supposed that her smile was not very reassuring at the moment—not while she was holding a bleeding man’s tooth.

Oh, well. If he had wanted to keep all of his teeth, he would not have helped those men steal Ysabel.

“You—you bitch, my tooth, you—”

Adelia dropped the man’s tooth on the ground and grabbed him by the chin. In one hand, she gripped his lower jaw, prying it open. With the other, she reached into his mouth and grasped the tooth just behind his right canine—the companion to the one he’d already lost. She gripped it between her thumb and forefinger and gave an experimental tug. The man made a throaty howling sound, and she extracted her hand from his mouth.

“Qué?” she asked pleasantly. “I didn’t catch that.”

“My name’s Feeney,” the man panted. “Doug Feeney.”

“Ah, excellent! It is nice to make your acquaintance, Doug Feeney,” Adelia said. Then, before he could sag with relief, she grabbed his jaw again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.