9. Ysu #2
When she finally rose, she was painted in crimson from mouth to waist. Gore dripped from her sharpened nails, and when she smiled, her teeth had elongated into fangs.
The transformation accelerated with each act of savagery, her body rushing to match the predator her spirit already was.
Her pupils were blown wide, nearly obscuring the soft honey brown. Perfection.
“Better?” I inquired.
She shook her head, and I watched the fangs recede. “I wanted to swallow him whole,” she admitted, voice rough with desire she didn’t fully understand. “I could feel my throat trying to... change.”
“Patience, neidr. Your body learns what your soul already knows.” I stepped over the boy’s scattered remains, noting with approval how thoroughly she had destroyed him. “The consumption will come when you’re ready.”
She looked down at her bloodied hands, flexing fingers that moved just slightly wrong now, joints bending at angles that human anatomy shouldn’t allow. “What’s happening to me? What did you do to me?”
I frown. “You’re becoming what you were meant to be,” I corrected, unable to resist running a finger along her jaw, feeling the subtle scaling beginning beneath her skin. “My venom can’t awaken what doesn’t already linger within your heart.”
The bloodlust faded, and I could see the human part of her balk as she tried to wipe the blood from her hands. “I’m becoming a monster.” Tears welled in her eyes.
I wrapped my hand around her face, forcing her to look at me. “What drew you into the wildwood under the blood moon of Samhain? Be honest, little human.”
She didn’t squirm in my grip. “You called me. When they held me down, I heard your voice in my ear, telling me to come find you.”
I studied her eyes. With the hunger gone, the golden flecks that swam in the soft brown of her irises shone like the sunlight she would never be comfortable in again. But in them, I saw no lie.
The wind rose, slamming the shutters of this cursed tomb to humanity, and I heard a laughter in it I had ignored for centuries.
“It was not I who called you, but that part of you they could not tame. The wildness that revels in darkness and death, the old magic that craves the taste of blood, for blood is always honest.”
Her eyes went wide, but I knew she felt the truth in it. Something in her expression shifted—a shadow of disappointment that she tried to hide but couldn’t quite manage.
“So you didn’t call to me? I thought,” her voice came out smaller than before, and she looked away from my gaze. “I thought you wanted me to fight back. But I was just another creature stumbling into your domain.”
The hurt in her tone caught me off guard. For three centuries, I had been content with solitude, with the endless cycle of hunt and feed that the curse demanded. Yet watching her withdraw, seeing that spark of connection dim in her eyes, stirred something I had thought long dead.
“You think yourself so unimportant?” I asked, forcing my voice to remain steady. “Do you believe coincidence brought you to my grove on the one night when the veil was thinnest? That chance alone made you the first in three hundred years to survive my venom?”
She looked back at me then, searching my face for deception, but I continued before she could speak.
“The forest may have called to the wildness in your blood, but I chose to answer when you bargained with me. I chose to keep you when I could have simply taken what I needed and left the rest for the insects.” My thumb traced along her bloodstained cheek. “I chose to keep you.”
Her lips parted slightly, and I saw hope warring with caution in her expression.
“Men have always fooled themselves,” I said, my voice growing rougher despite my efforts to control it.
“With riches, with gold, with their big homes, with conquests. They tell themselves they possess what they desire, that ownership brings satisfaction. But they are wrong about possession, just as you are wrong about your worth.”
I leaned closer, close enough that her warm breath ghosted against my cheek.
“Three hundred years of prey have passed through my woods. Desperate souls, broken creatures, those seeking death or power or escape. None of them made me want to see what they might become. None of them made me curious about tomorrow. None of them made me realize that perhaps the curse had not taken everything from me after all.”
The words escaped before I could stop them, more revelation than I had intended. But watching her eyes widen, seeing the way her breath caught, I found I did not regret the admission.
“The magic in you knows that in the end, we all return to the same earth. Even creatures like you and I. But until that end…” I paused, struggling with concepts I had not entertained for centuries. “Until then, perhaps we need not walk alone.”
“You and I…” she echoed my words, the corners of her eyes turning soft.
She leaned into my touch then—this fierce little thing who just reduced her tormentor to wet fragments—and I felt an unfamiliar sensation in my chest. Pride, perhaps. But deep down I knew the truth, and it was something much more dangerous.
“What about…him?” She gestured toward the lord’s chambers. “You saved him for me, too?”
My grin spread wide enough to show all my teeth. “Oh yes. Are you ready to end this, neidr?”