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Taking someone’s life is pretty easy. Taking over someone’s life is a bit harder.
The man that was Cornelius Hickey doesn’t have a family that have to be somehow fooled so that’s nice. And his daemon was a small, dull sort of thing that nobody will ever have noticed when he signed up, much less bothered to remember. Luckily, the days are past when a man had to register his daemon’s form on a list whenever he wanted to take a job. A name though, a name is always written down and that can’t be avoided. Luckily, the body that is now sunk in the canal was an enthusiastic drunk who was quite happy to call his daemon by name where they could hear and it take it.
Not that it’s a wonderful name to have taken.
“Dahlia.” His daemon’s voice is utterly disgusted and her whiskers twitch with it too. “What kind of people name their child’s daemon Dahlia?”
“The same that saddle their brat with a Cornelius,” he says. “Ideas above their station, probably. Now stay still. I need to paint you.”
She bites his finger irritably but he’s quite used to that and it doesn’t hurt. She knows full well she needs to be painted – black rats are seen as unlucky at sea and they want to start off looking good. You need to be careful with a rat daemon. People get the wrong idea – or sometimes the right, he supposes. She’s quick and clever and sharp and people can see that as positive sometimes but others see it as a negative. Nasty, cunning rats that sneak into places and they hate you straight off. You have to be careful. He will just make her a faded brown and then stop bothering when they like him. Give people what they want to see at first and they don’t mind so much when the colour rubs off later on.
“Dahlia,” she says, lying on his lap as he applies the agent to her fur. “It’s disgusting. How can anybody take you seriously with me named that?”
“Doubt there’ll be much in the way of scrapping, love. We’re going up in the world, remember? Besides, most of them will be sailors and it’ll be all seagulls.”
“Seagulls,” she scoffs. “Might as well have a dog.”
“True enough but that means you’ll be a step up on most anyway. They might laugh a little at your pretty new name but we can teach them better, can’t we?”
She laughs. They understand each other, she and he. He loves her in a way that he isn’t sure everybody else loves their daemons. He loves her in a way that he has never managed to love anyone else. She is his soul, she is everything he is and she knows what he feels without words. Some men seem to dismiss the creatures at their sides almost as baubles, not as partners and he thinks those men are fools.
“You always deserved a prettier name though,” he says. “A pretty name for my pretty girl.”
She bites him again to show her contempt but her tail curls protectively over his wrist as she does. She shudders at the smell and burn of the agent and he shudders too, feeling her pain. He strokes her battered ears tenderly. Nothing they can do about that but it don’t matter too much. Sailors and volunteers aren’t expected to have lived squeaky clean lives. The evidence of a fight or two won’t do them any harm – maybe even some good.
“Think about the sun though,” he says. “Somewhere new and different. We won’t have to be afraid any more, will we? Leave all this behind.”
“Nothing to miss,” she agrees, twitching her whiskers. “I can always change my name back when we leave.”
“Or a better one. We might learn a bit on a trip like this. Take a step up. Give you something in Latin.”
“Better than Dahlia. You might get used to Cornelius though. A bit fancier. If you can be good with it, that is.”
“Oh, but when have I ever been good, my love? All those men? I think I’ll find some wonderful games to play.”
She jumps suddenly, shoots up his arm and nuzzles his ear lovingly. He reaches up to stroke her, feeling her currently sticky fur. He’s touched her covered in worse, just as she has him. He’s tired of the filth and the struggle. Why shouldn’t they have something better? Just a year being bossed around on a boat and then they’ll be somewhere hot and free where nobody knows them and nobody cares.
There’s a new life waiting for Cornelius Hickey and Dahlia and they both know that they deserve it.