I turned toward her, but my hand stopped before I could pat her shoulder. Something told me she didn’t want to be touched. “I thought you might like to see the caravan tonight. We could put you in a cravat and gloves and go in with the audience together. My first night was so amazing. I swear there was glitter in the air, and—”
“Wait. Cravat and gloves?”
With a chuckle, I pointed to her hand, which had already turned a medium shade of gray as her transformation settled. Soon her hand would be covered in fine black scales and tipped with sharp white talons like a cat’s claws. It took some getting used to, but once I’d seen Criminy stalk and attack a deer five times his weight, I understood the usefulness of the Blud adaptation.
“Humans here tend to get riled up around Bludmen. If you’re going to join a crowd, it’s best to pretend you’re harmless.”
She jerked away and scooted back on the bench. I’d been close enough to lean my head on her shoulder, but now she was looking at me as if she’d bite me for trying. “Hide? Just to make some small-minded idiots feel safe? Sugar, that’s not how I’m going to live my life here. If this is what I am, and if this is what saved my life, then I’m damned well going to be proud of it.”
“Damn straight,” Catarrh said, and Quincy gave an embarrassingly bad salute.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t be proud. I’m just saying that you don’t need to go looking for trouble. If gloves and a tie allow you to have a wonderful night at the circus, I really don’t see a problem.”
My grandmother rolled her eyes to the ceiling as if asking Jesus for help, but when she turned her kohl-rimmed eyes on me, smoothed back her bob, and licked her fangs, she looked more like a creature straight out of hell.
“Look, sugar. If there’s one thing I learned in eighty-six years on Earth, it’s that you got to start standing up for what you believe early on, or else you get in the habit of doing what’s easy, of going along just to get along. I got a chance to start over from scratch. New person, new body, new world. You’re the only one from Earth who knows me here, and I find that I don’t so much care what you think anymore.”
My eyes burned. “What are you saying, Nana?”
She shook her head, hard. “I told you. Don’t call me that. Your grandfather came up with that because that’s what he called his grandmother, and I always hated it. I wanted to be Gigi or Mimi, something sweet and sassy. Nana just sounds like banana, like that dang dog from Peter Pan. What I’m saying here is that my name is Ruby, and I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be the same person I was. I’m going to be me. I’m going to be Ruby.” I must have looked pretty horrified, because she tried on her old, sweet smile and cupped my cheek. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, sugar. Tish. Honey. It just means that you’re going to have to accept that I’m not the world-weary, exhausted old lady you got used to bossing around and drugging at night.”
“Nana, I—”
She let go of my cheek, and I put my hand there as if hunting for something long gone. “It’s okay. I know it was for my own good—that’s why I never said anything. Seemed to make you feel better when I got me some sleep. I did have some peculiar dreams, though.” She shook her head. “Something about this place is so familiar. The way the air smells. Did you ever think we’re maybe just dreaming? Or that this is heaven?”
That set my lips tight together. “It’s not heaven. I’ve seen too many bad things here. It’s real. I used to go back and forth, but now I’m stuck here.”
“There! That right there.” She pointed at my mouth in triumph. “ ‘Stuck here.’ How can you say that? You got so much more than you ever had on Earth. All that history, all those mistakes—gone. Jeff never existed here, and you never let yourself give up your life for that bastard. You got your own caravan, a good man. I can’t figure out why you’d ever choose to go back there.”
There.
She was already thinking of it as . . . a bad dream. This thing that happened.
The tears came then, hot and fast. My chest was full, my jaw aching. “I went back for you, Nana,” I said softly. “No, that’s not right. You’re not my Nana. I went back for her. Not you. You’re Ruby. And I left all this to make sure the woman you used to be didn’t have to die alone. Do you know what that’s like? Never knowing when it’s going to happen, when another plate is going to fall? It killed me! But I did it, always hoping for some sort of miracle.”