Chapter 31
I choke when thick, coppery blood floods my mouth, and I nearly lose my nerve.
My teeth work to cut through the tissue of the human heart, and the taste is revolting enough that I want to gag.
But I manage to tear a strip of it off, chewing the tough sinew while holding Agatha’s gaze.
My shoulders heave with disgust, and I nearly spit it out before hastily swallowing.
But the feeling of the flesh sliding down my throat certainly isn’t any better. Another shudder goes through me, and I heave with a hand over my mouth. “H-how much do I—” I’m not sure I can do this.
“More than that,” Agatha tells me coolly, and watches as I force myself to bite into it again, and again. Moro senses my distress, whining and brushing against my leg. I’m sure this wouldn’t be at all difficult for her, but I don’t have sharp teeth or a taste for raw flesh.
“Oh, fuck—” I manage to swallow two more pieces before my body rebels, and I clap a hand over my mouth again, breathing through my nose and swallowing down nausea.
“I don’t know how you eat this,” I can’t help mumbling, and my eyes tear up as my body does whatever it can to convince me to expel the raw heart in my stomach.
Agatha chuckles and gently pulls the heart from my fingers.
“Easily,” she assures me, and as I watch, she bites into the heart with fangs that shear through the muscles.
She barely chews before swallowing, and looking at her face, I realize mine must be just as gory as she drops the heart between us onto the stairs, where it lands with a wet thud for Moro’s inspection.
“How long does it take?” I ask, still feeling like I’m going to puke while my hand hovers near my face, like that’s going to do anything to keep the bits of human heart in my stomach. “Do I just?—”
A streak of pain goes up my spine, and I gasp at the overwhelming, painful nausea that claws up my throat. I heave a little, lips still pressed together, my eyes watering, and I look up at Agatha again, who isn’t at all surprised by this turn of events.
“I told you it would hurt.” She watches impassively as I drop to my knees on the steps, the concrete hard and painful beneath my legs.
Moro is there instantly, whimpering and nosing my face, but I barely notice when Agatha gently guides her away by her collar, saying something to her I can’t hear over the pounding of my heart in my ears.
Every breath brings a new wave of pain. My mouth waters until I have to spit the excess saliva onto the ground, and when I lean over, I find I can’t straighten back up.
Every inch of me hurts. All my nerve endings, and every strand of hair screams at me, all too aware and begging for me to stop, to puke, to do anything except this.
Still, I force myself not to let what’s in my stomach creep up my throat.
I swallow once, then again. I groan around the coppery taste still in my mouth, but the pain just gets worse.
“How long—” I gasp again, trying to drag air into my contorted lungs.
“How long does it—” But I can’t finish any of my questions.
An intense shiver works its way up my throat; my body’s final attempt at aborting this terrible endeavor.
But when I clap a hand over my mouth and swallow back what’s coming up my throat, the feeling turns to pain that rises like a flame, searing every centimeter of my body and causing me to feel like I’m burning from the inside out.
When I black out from the pain moments later, it’s a relief, and I don’t even try to fight it. Nor do I mind that the last thing I feel is the soothingly cold concrete of the steps on my cheek, with Moro’s concerned whines in my ears.
Something isn’t right.
I follow the sound of voices further into the cave, whispers that I can’t understand, while my legs keep moving of their own accord. When I try to stop, I can’t.
I’m not in control.
Rounding the corner, I turn into a large chamber, hollowed out in a way that makes me think it’s manmade, rather than natural. Two women sit across from each other on either side of a low fire, and behind them are bodies, strewn this way and that.
They both look at me, their eyes shining unnaturally in the light from the flames.
“You’re starving,” one of them observes, poking at the fire with a stick. Her clothes look like something out of a history book, and both are wrapped in furs with red, streaking lines painted on their faces. “So were we.”
The other woman doesn’t speak. She just picks something up off of the ground and bites into it, filling the cave with wet, squelching noises and her loud chewing. I stare at them both in the light of their fire, unable to say anything.
Finally, the woman eating stands up with the remains of her meal in her hand.
Her fangs aren’t quite as refined as Cairo’s, and her eyes only barely reflect the light.
She’s cursed, I realize, but not the same.
Like an earlier sketch of what they are now, as if they somehow evolved over the centuries.
Their voices pick up again, though I can’t make out what they’re saying in the echoing space. The woman in front of me surveys my face and reaches out to trail her bloody fingers across my bottom lip. The liquid is still warm and drips down my chin even as she makes another pass over the top.
“You will never leave this place,” she whispers, her eyes wide, a touch of regret in her tone. “None of us will.”
“May your survival be worth the sacrifice,” adds the other, and their fire goes out.
I’m falling, sinking into blackness that’s both empty and thick, but when I open my mouth to scream, no sound comes out.
My body feels strange, and sound pounds against my ears, but just when I think the sound will overwhelm me, everything stops, and my fall ends with a jolt.
I open my eyes with a gasp, though my head is spinning so much that I can’t move. The first thing I realize is that I’m no longer outside, with my head on the concrete, and the second is that Agatha is here.
She trails her fingers over my face comfortingly while I search the ceiling above me, trying to figure out why it looks so familiar.
The bed under me creaks when she shifts slightly, and I take a breath only to choke on the myriad of scents in my nose ranging from old blood, to dog, and finally to the scent of pine and spice emanating from the figure sitting beside me.
“They used to live here too, though even I never saw them outside of that cave,” she murmurs, her voice softer than ever but still perfectly audible to my ears.
I reach one hand up to gaze at my splayed fingers, and I can’t stop staring at the claws tipping each finger before running the pad of my thumb across the razor-sharp edges.
“There was a woman who claimed to be one of their daughters when I was young. She told me about them. How they did terrible things to survive, and because of that, they slowly changed while they were trapped in that cave. It’s not exactly like us now.
But back then, the curse was a very new thing, or so she said. ”
Agatha moves to look down at me, and in the darkness I can see her perfectly.
“But I disagree. I think the curse has always been here, in these mountains. You know, I heard another story once. From a man I met on a trail. Once he learned what I was, he told me a story of others like me, though different in their own ways. Instead of being starved like us, they were overcome by thirst . He said the last one he saw was far from here, where there are fewer mountains, no pine trees, and the winters don’t come with six feet of snow. ”
She sits up on the bed and reaches out to grip my hand, pulling me into a seated position as well. “Not that you or I will ever go that far from the mountains,” she adds almost ruefully.
“Why?” My voice sounds strange to my ears, and I barely whisper the words. “Cairo leaves the mountains. Can’t we?”
“To an extent. You can go anywhere you want in these mountains, and around the bases of them. But at some point, things stop feeling right. You’ll start getting hungrier, and animals won’t be enough.
Here, we know what we are. We control it.
But out there? With humans surrounding us and the mountains far behind? ” She shakes her head.
It occurs to me that I should be bothered by the revelation I can never really leave.
It certainly wasn’t part of what I signed up for, not that I got a lot of say in exactly what this is.
Silently I get to my feet, turning at the sound of paw steps on the floor to see Moro in the doorway.
For a second, I worry that she’ll growl, or run from me.
I can smell her in ways I’ve never been able to before, the same with Agatha, but after Agatha’s comments, I’m relieved she doesn’t smell like food.
She just smells like the woods, and vaguely wet dog.
“Hi girl,” I murmur, holding my breath as she walks toward me.
Her tail wags, sending the soft swish-swish of the sound to my ears, which I’ve never been able to hear before.
She noses my hands and licks at the dried blood there, before her tail wags quicker.
She woofs, almost like she’s admonishing me, and my shoulders fall in relief.
I don’t know what I would’ve done if my dog hated me for what I’ve become.
“This is…the room I stayed in,” I observe, taking another breath.
It’s pitch black in here, though I can see nearly perfectly into the darkened corners.
I can smell Hattie, and Sam, and a million other scents, but I ignore them and walk into the small bathroom without a locking door, though even the door it had now hangs from its top hinge.
I can still smell the blood outside, along with scents similar to Agatha’s that I assume have to be the remnants of other cursed who came through here.
Leaning on the sink, I gaze at myself in the mirror, noting the new darkness in my once light blue eyes that now seem to glow back at me like sapphires.
I’m still the same, but I’m so, so different. Baring my teeth, I lick over them and wince when I cut myself on the edges. So I reach up to touch them with the pads of my clawed fingers instead.
Agatha appears in the doorway behind me, arms crossed as she observes me. “Any complaints?”
“I’m hungry.” The words are out before I can stop them, before I even realize it. I shouldn’t be hungry. Not when I was so close to vomiting up the sticky, tough gristle from the heart I managed to swallow pieces of. “Not starving, not really. Just…”
“Hungry,” Agatha agrees. “Get used to it, Fern. That’s our curse. You will always, for the rest of your hopefully very long life, be hungry.”
“Cairo.” I breathe his name while still meeting my gaze in the mirror. My fingers tighten on the porcelain sink, and it cracks under my hands, making me jerk back. “How?—”
“You know how strong we are. But you are also new.”
Pieces of her actions click together in my brain, finally understanding her motivation, and I turn to give her a sallow look. “That’s why you did this now. So I could save him.” It’s not a question, and she doesn’t give me an answer.
Agatha just steps away from the door, gesturing for me to follow through the asylum.
“You can find him if you look hard enough. The old logging camp is east of here.” She points through the courtyard, toward the sea of trees that used to look like a black mass.
Now I can see the details of the bark of every tree, and my vision penetrates the darkness easily.
“How do I search for him?” I look up at the sky and, judging by the moon, I was out for a few hours. “Can I even make it to him in time?”
“Yes,” Agatha tells me, linking her hands loosely behind her back. “But you have to run. You’ll catch his scent when you get close.”
My eyes drift to the remains of the body she brought, which now smells like the best food I could ever eat. My mouth waters, and for a moment my attention is caught between the two options. Agatha doesn’t say a word, but I can feel her watching, observing my fight with the temptation.
But Cairo is more important than a piece of meat.
I step away from it and smooth my hand over Moro’s fur as she circles me like she knows we’re about to do something exciting.
“I’m not going to thank you,” I tell Agatha, though now I can feel the dominance and foreboding aura she exudes, and everything in me whispers not to piss her off.
She only grins, unfriendly and cold. “Good. I haven’t done anything for you to thank me over. Fly away, little bird. Before it’s too late and you’re stuck starving for the rest of eternity without him.”