Chapter 26
MY CHEST EXPLODES IN WET AGONY, AND THEN I’M different, pelvis twisting, knees cracking backward, fangs shearing through the soft flesh of my lower lip as I fight to not bite off my own tongue. Instinct blurs my thoughts to pinpricks of sensation.
I cling to my sanity and point my fury toward the flayed man.
I hit him like a car accident. My claws snap through his rotting tendons like guitar strings as I tear him off Veer. She lands limp on her back.
The flayed man laughs hoarse and harsh, like the whir of a garbage disposal. His blood-soaked arms snake out, and I hit the ground with enough whiplash to blur my vision. His hoof-foot digs into the cavernous remains of my torso, and reality goes blurry at the edges.
“This isn’t going to change anything,” he snarls. “Stop trying.”
I spit blood and saliva and wrath up at him.
It froths over my lips but goes no farther.
He shifts his weight, and my head spins with the sound of a thousand bowls shattering as the edges of my ruined rib cage slice black ribbons across the skinned soles of his feet.
Thick, heavy drops weep into the void of my chest, and I feel a twisting in my lungs, like his worms have slithered their way inside.
He steps back and I roll myself over, try to get back on all fours. My claws slip on the hard-packed ground. The flayed man laughs again.
“Have you ever eaten a heart?” he asks. Something’s broken in my pelvis. No, everything’s broken. My lips won’t close over my teeth. Instinct pilots my legs under me, and I try to hold on to a sliver of myself by reciting the names of bones. Ilium. Sacrum. Coccyx.
“Of course not.” He’s on all fours too now, thrusting his snout in close. Frontal bone. Nasal bone. Maxilla. Mandible. “You wouldn’t dare. But I’ve lived a thousand years and I’ve dared a thousand times, and for you I’ll make it a thousand and one.”
He leans over me, and worms emerge from his flesh like white threads. They land on me like raindrops, wriggling where they touch exposed skin. On my arm, one lifts a delicate head to expose a faceless abyss of teeth.
Scapula. Humerus. Radius. Ulna.
Those tiny teeth kiss me, and with the latch of its mouth my senses light up with countless other tiny pressure points, other worms. The flayed man crouches low, one taloned foot tracing the rupture in the center of my chest. I imagine my heart there on display, no longer protected by ribs or flesh or iron.
Cervical. Thoracic. Lumbar.
The worms carve cavities into my musculature. The flayed man’s touch shaves away the iron woven through my skeleton. I’m losing control and I can’t get away and I’m buckling, weakening.
Femur. Tibia. Fibula. Patella.
The flayed man’s hand catches behind the barbed wire of my broken ribs and I forget every name of every bone I ever learned in nursing school.
I’m going to die, and it’s my fault.
No. Not like this. I won’t be a sacrifice to something who only sees me as the next in a line of a thousand faceless sacrifices. I’m a monster and a ruin and a daughter without a mother and I’m going to kill him right fucking back.
I let go of the final shreds of control and my curse rears up with a scream so loud it burns my tongue.
His fingers scrape my lungs and then my claws are tearing through him, snapping bone as the worms infecting me squirm impotently.
Claws aren’t enough. I dive my snout into the ruin of his chest cavity and my dagger fangs close around the pulsing sac of blood and flesh and power inside.
I rip free, and the animal I am howls something ancient and unholy through my mouth as I bite down.
My mouth floods with a taste like stale breath and ancient magic.
Eventually, he stops fighting.
I blink, and all that’s left of him is a wet stain brushstroked across the dirt.
I watch it seep into the indifferent throat of the desert.
My stomach clenches, and I retch up a mouthful of white worms. All dead.
I dip my snout and wrench the rest of them out of me by their tails.
They burst under my claws, and the desert rushes to absorb their innards.
Brightness is starting to crest the mountains, but the sun isn’t up yet.
My curse is me and I am my curse, and I haven’t lost control.
I’m alive, I’m pure animal, I’m realer than I’ve ever been.
The air is iridescent with scent. Scarred metal and day-baked dirt, sick blood like iron filings and choked-up organs, and healthy blood like panic and pain.
And fear. Fear that clogs my nose and seeps into my brain, fogging my thoughts.
It’s coming from behind me.
Hunger scrapes my shins. I turn and there’s Veer, huddled against her busted-up car. The one surviving headlight illuminates her from below like a ghoul. Rusty spatters paint her shirt, a red welt works its way across her neck. Her eyes are dark as the mountains at night, and huge with terror.
She smells good. She’d taste so much better.
My lips curl back into a snarl. Veer twitches and tries to get her legs underneath her but can’t quite get her balance. Power coils in my hips.
“Ellis?” she rasps, and I remember the way she laughed as we flew through the desert, the way she brandished that tire iron like an apocalypse, and the way she’s already started to keep my secrets.
I could tear her throat out and bury the only person who could betray me.
And where would that leave me? Alone. Is that what I want?
I don’t want to be like the flayed man, skinless and desert born and scheming. I don’t want to be like my mom, grasping for love and ending up only pitied or owed. I want to sweep Veer into my arms, to fall to my knees, to explain everything. I want to try.
I can have that, still. I can fold myself back into human form before the sun is bright enough to burn me. I can fix this.
“Don’t be scared,” I try to say, but it comes out a clatter of jaws and saliva.
I try to step back. Nausea hits me like the aftermath of bones breaking.
The animal rushes in, forcing my feet back to the ground, and suddenly we’re in a tug-of-war in the muscles of my legs and I’m dizzy and it’s so strong, stronger than it’s ever been and it’ll do anything to stay free from its cage.
I try again. Step back. My curse rears, defiant, and my vision blurs and I careen forward. Veer flinches back into the wrecked car’s embrace, mouth half-open, breathing fast.
“Okay,” she repeats, more to herself than me. “Okay, okay, okay…”
She smells like polyester and panic and the raw scrape of a split lip. One more leap, and I won’t be hungry anymore.
Desperation pushes and I pull, and we reel drunkenly onto all fours and there’s a slam and a scramble and Veer’s inside the car now. Relief. Rage. My animal turns dinner-plate eyes on me, as if I’ve betrayed it.
She’s going to drive away. That’s what she was supposed to do in the beginning.
The passenger door flies open. She comes back. My hunger-addled limbs are too surprised to lunge. I am too, until I see the camping knife in her hand. Green handle, silver blade. Veer’s face is blank now, the grim mask of detachment she wears at work.
So that’s what it’s come to.
My mind smears with something like This is what it always comes to and I’m not going to die, I’m not, my mouth is full of blades and I’ll do whatever it takes, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling like someone’s plunged their claws into the weeping wound of my chest and separated the pieces of my heart.
Veer blows out a sharp breath and cradles the knife in the crook of her elbow.
“Hey,” she mumbles. “This’ll help, right?”
I don’t understand, until she breathes out sharp and fast and her arm bends, and I smell blood like distrust and devotion. Still, I half expect her to attack me. She offers me her arm, and I smell her fierce, well-guarded tenderness, and still I half expect.
Go slow, I beg, but I’m pistoned forward and my snout is on her skin and Veer yelps a little as her blood wells into my mouth.
I close my eyes and taste bruised fruit and the golden of sunset, and the creature in my bones recedes until it’s just me and the faint whispering clank of metal and my furious certainty that both of us have to survive this, because what else has it all been for?
I reach back inside myself, and my palms brush twisted iron. There’s no cage left anymore. No chain.
What if I was everything my curse made me? What if I could be hungry, dangerous, a portent of evil, and all the other things my family made me, what if I could be all that and still, too, be myself?
I squeeze her arm gently between my teeth, wanting more. The desert is broad and harsh and filled with wonders, and so is the world. And so am I.
A soft growl. I reach for it, find fur and longing.
Touch the places where its claws left long hungry grooves in my rib cage.
The growl trails into a whine, long and thin and plaintive, and I realize that it’s tired too.
A lifetime of denial and iron, of a chain fused to its spine and the promise of agony at the end of freedom, made it something that leapt and fought and dragged its tired, shivering body back to the loneliness of captivity.
Maybe now we can try something different.
Pain grabs hold of my larynx. My marrow goes wobbly, my joints grind back into position, my knees unbreak and my fangs recede and my ribs creep back into the crimson hollow of my chest. I’m still bent over Veer’s arm, kissing the fragrant pink-red line she’s made for me.
She shifts and I try to follow but I’m gelatinous inside, pain splintering up my shins and vibrating through my spine, and suddenly I’m doubled over and vomiting a mix of acidic foam and decomposing worms into the dirt.
My hands are too small. I touch my face with my fingers. Nose cheeks lips chin. Blood everywhere, sticking my shirt to my neck, soaking my hair dark and stringy.
Don’t look at Veer. She’s seen too much, she’ll never stop seeing it.
Of course I look at her. She’s a wreck and she’s radiant and she’s the only real thing in the world.
I want to wrap my arms around her and bury my face in the soft skin behind her ears.
I want to tell her I’ll never hurt her, unless she wants me to, unless she’ll hurt me back. I want, I want, I want.
Her eyes flutter. She coughs, dry and embarrassed, and snaps the knife shut, and I remember that I’m lying in a pool of my own vomit.
“Well, shit,” she says. “You scared me for a second.”
I hack up a laugh. It feels good. She helps me to my feet and her fingers linger, just for a moment, to trace the wreckage of my chest. The wound’s still weeping through my shirt. It’ll close soon. My bones are already fusing back to rightness.
We limp back to her car, her hand stroking my blood-soaked hair, my fingers counting her ribs through her shirt, and every part of the world turns to dust except where her skin meets mine.