Daughter of Hounds by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Author:Caitlin R. Kiernan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

“Why do you have yellow eyes?” the boy asked, and Emmie told him she didn’t know why, that they’d just always been that way, and she didn’t have any idea why. She’d been asked the same question lots of times, and sometimes she’d been taunted and called names—yellow eyes, yellow eyes—lots more times than she could remember or cared to ever try. Sometimes, she made up elaborate stories to account for her yellow eyes, or told whoever was asking or bullying her that she had a contagious disease, like hepatitis or the plague, and they really shouldn’t come too close. That was usually enough to make them leave her alone. But the day that this boy asked—which was the last day she went to the public elementary school on Camp Street, the last time someone asked before Deacon and Sadie finally moved her to the Wheeler School where hardly anyone ever asks about her eyes—that day, she didn’t feel like lying, so she just told him the truth, that she didn’t know why her eyes were yellow.

“I used to have an old tomcat with yellow eyes,” the boy said. “Maybe you’re part cat.”

“I’m not part cat,” Emmie replied. She was waiting out front, sitting on the stone front steps of the school waiting for Deacon to show up and walk her home. “I have yellow eyes, but I’m not part cat.”

“Maybe your mama’s a cat,” the boy said.

“My mother’s dead. She was a paleontologist, not a cat,” Emmie told him, wishing that Deacon would hurry up or that the boy would get bored and find someone else to pick on.

“Maybe they just told you she was dead. Maybe they didn’t want to tell you she was really a cat. Maybe they’re ashamed to have half a cat for a daughter. Do they glow in the dark?”

“Do what glow in the dark?”

“Your eyes, dummy.”

“Leave me alone,” Emmie said, though she knew that he wasn’t going to stop until someone made him stop.

“That would make you a monster,” the boy said, “if your mama was a cat. Maybe they don’t want you to know you’re a monster. Maybe they think if you knew, you’d kill yourself or something.”

“Lots of animals have yellow eyes,” Emmie said. “Not just cats. Lots of animals have yellow eyes.”

The boy smiled and sat down on the step next to her. “Yeah? So maybe she wasn’t a cat. Maybe she was one of those other animals,” he said. “But you’d still be a monster, because normal people don’t have yellow eyes or animals for mothers.” The boy was fat, a year older than she was, and he had a short, piggy sort of a pug nose.

“Maybe your mother was a sow,” Emmie said, and the boy asked her what the hell a sow was. When Emmie told him it was a mama pig, he called her a freak and a retard and kicked her in the ankle.

By the time one of the teachers was able to pull her

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