Chapter Sixteen
Theodore
I love like a dying thing, slowly and wholly—
Lain beneath the open sky for the birds to take their fill—
Torn apart piece by piece until naught but my bones remain.
I love like a begging thing, desperate and soft—
I pray to the Lord for a moment longer, just a moment—
but it is the Devil who appears to shake my hand.
I love like a screaming thing, violent and thrashing—
Bones cracking, shifting, decaying—
The beasts in the wood bow their heads in reverence—
Come feast upon me, I tell them,
Feast upon me and find my teeth instead.
Ido not remember the trip from Sainte-Falaise to Echo's Peak.
It's a blur of dark trees and pockets of moonlight bursting through the canopy of leaves, a strange mockery of the night I ran away from the chateau rather than towards it.
My lungs burn by the time I burst through the door, my hands shaking—fierce and violent—at my sides.
I’m not sure if I want to tear my skin off or slam my knuckles into the wall until they break and crack beneath the pressure.
My chest is aching—it’s too heavy and too soft and too there—as I brace myself on the wall.
I dig my forehead into the wallpaper, imagining that if I press hard enough, the thorns might come to life and slice me open from head to toe.
Let me bleed out on the floor until I am nothing but the vague shape of what once might have been human and is now simply death.
The air grows cold around me, icy fingers dancing across the base of my skull, but my skin is hot and wet. Sweat drips down my throat from the run, tears coat my cheeks from the pain.
I don’t even know why it hurts. I don’t even know what hurts, only that it does.
Fitzwilliam’s threat tugs at me like a tight leash, biting into my throat, yanking out fears I have long since tried to ignore, but there is a part of me which wonders if it is truly Fitzwilliam’s words that hurt, or someone else’s.
"Leave Dora alone and let us go."
Dora. Dora. Dora.
Louis has only ever called me by my true name when we are alone or with our parents, and I have always accepted that.
I have never blamed him for it. So why does her name now echo like a gunshot as it pierces my chest?
Why do I want to carve it out of his mouth alongside his tongue so I might never hear it sully the air ever again?
Dora is a corpse, long ago buried and left to rot somewhere in the woods with her dresses and her hair and her disgusting, placid mask she wore for everyone else’s sake.
Why does the memory of her continue to haunt me so? Why do I continue to let it? Is this what my life is meant to be? A constant battle against my own mind? My own body? Never truly known, never truly seen?
I wonder if this is how Kolfina feels, trapped in a body she cannot control, left to float listless through the endless halls of her own tomb.
Long, dark fingers, freckled with droplets of fresh paint and cool from the evening chill, wrap around my wrist and gently ease my bleeding knuckles away from the innocent wall. Another hand wraps around my waist, pulls me back against the chest of the woman behind me.
“I will not stand for you hurting yourself in my home, Theodore. You are too precious. I cannot bear to see you causing harm to someone I care so deeply for.”
You are too precious…
I spin around in her arms to see her face, to search for the lies and the pity and that damn look of placation I know so well from all the others.
She does not turn away from me, just meets my gaze head on and watches me like I am some wild beast she wants to play with.
Not to tame, not to domesticate, but simply to know.
Kolfina stands just behind her, hovering so close to Azizi’s shoulder that I can feel the chill of her even here.
Worry is carved into the lovely panes of her face, and she wrings her hands against her chest as if she wishes to reach out for me—for us—but knows she cannot.
“I am not what you think I am,” I warn them. I don’t know why, but I need them to know. Need to tell them before I pitch my heart in their direction and risk the only happiness I have ever truly known.
Because that is what is different. That is what has changed.
Them. Azizi and Kolfina. Who do not look at me like some strange thing that haunts the village, trailing whispers and rumors behind it like a shroud. Who have accepted my hunger as if there is nothing wrong with it, as if it is natural.
Louis’ touch can never feel so warm again, because there is no warmth in willful ignorance and false acceptance. It is here I feel that warmth, even with the natural chill of Azizi’s hands and Kolfina’s gentle breeze.
Azizi hums, bringing my busted hands up to her lips and pressing a kiss to the knuckles.
The touch stings, and I cannot help the flinch I give, yet I do not pull away.
I watch as she licks a long stripe up my fingers, gathering the blood there on her tongue and breathing heavy through her nose when she swallows it down.
Her eyes flutter; her grip tightens.
“You are exactly what we think you are,” she says in response. Another lick, another breath. It’s not until she’s cleaned my knuckles completely that she looks back up at me, a small smudge of crimson left on the corner of her wet lips. “Delicious.”
I have never considered myself an intelligent man. A decently learned one, for sure—compared to others in my village—and a well-read one, of course. But an intelligent one, no. For it is only a fool who throws caution and safety to the wind in the face of the truly divine.
And oh, how I ache to be foolish for once.
I press my lips to Azizi’s before I have a chance to convince myself how terrible a plan it is. It’s not the first time we have kissed—I will never forget the night I licked the dying man’s blood from between her lips—but this time is different.
That night, I kissed her with a hunger for the life she’d consumed.
Tonight, I kiss with a hunger for the woman herself.
I want to know the shape of her beneath my hands.
Want to know the sound of her moans and the pitch of her gasps.
I want to bring her to pleasure over and over and over again, and then I want to drink from her core until my belly is too full to know hunger.
Azizi doesn’t make me wait. She kisses back with matched eagerness, if not with more skill and grace. She lets me ravage her mouth like a fresh youth behind a barn, lets me tear my bottom lip on her sharpened teeth and grasp at her hair with my still bleeding hands.
But there is a primal beast in Azizi that is only tolerant for so long.
She allows me my moment of weakness, of desperation, then strikes with a hand on my jaw and a tilt of her head to gain control.
She deepens the kiss until my legs quake, until I have to lean on the wall behind me for fear of collapsing to my knees.
A part of me wants to do just that—to supplicate myself at her feet, to tuck myself beneath the soft fabric of her nightgown and bring her to pleasure until I can feel her legs shaking around my head.
Her grip tightens on my jaw, her fingertips digging into my cheeks as she pulls away. I try to chase after her, but she holds me still, my head tilted back against the wall to look up at her.
I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before me.
It feels blasphemous to even look upon her, this goddess that I wish to devote myself to. She stands only a few inches taller than me, but it is enough, coupled with my weak knees, to make the chandelier above us surround her head like a halo of blessed, heavenly light.
To think I once thought her a devil, a temptress.
If the Devil looked half as resplendent, I would close my eyes and fall back into Hell for the chance that he might catch me.
“Look at you, little beastie,” Azizi croons, drawing close enough to catch a drop of blood from my lip. She presses her thumb on the wound, her eyes sparkling with my slight flinch. “Are you so gone already from just a bit of kissing?”
Yes, I wish to say. I might have, if her grip wasn’t so bruisingly tight on my jaw. If she didn’t dig her fingers so hard into my cheeks to force my mouth open wider and wider.
“You are such a curious thing, you know. A little wolf so hungry for the very thing it is made of, yet you have these blunt little teeth, no sharper than a pup’s.”
My heart thumps in my chest as she reaches up with her free hand to poke at my canines. I have always thought them sharp compared to others in the village, but when Azizi grins, wide and teasing, I know that I am wrong.
I have never gotten such a close look at her teeth before this, her fangs.
I caught glimpses that day when she dug them into the neck of the man in her parlor.
I have seen the light flicker off them as she speaks and have felt them on my tongue when we kiss.
But they look so impossibly long now, like daggers I wish for her to plunge into my heart and suck me dry.
"Please," I gasp, the word muffled and distorted from the hold on my face. "My lady—"
She surges forward again to kiss me, and I whine at the taste of her, the feel of her. She is more wild now, chasing something in me, digging into my lips again and again as if I am but an appetizer to a much larger meal she is impatient to get to.
"I want to taste you," she tells me, speaks the words directly into my mouth, and I am nodding before she's even finished the sentence.
To my dismay, however, she pulls away completely, her fingertips lingering beneath my aching jaw and drawing me forward in a few stumbling steps before releasing me entirely.
I barely manage to stop myself from falling, and she laughs as she retreats a few steps. The sound is a little mean, a little patronizing. It makes my chest tighten in a way I am not familiar with, sends heat straight between my legs where I am desperate for her attention.