Epilogue
· CIRCE ·
Cutter?
The Bear Queen opened her eyes.
She heard Cutter’s voice, but her own throat allowed little but rasping breath past it to respond.
Where was she but in the dark? She’d touched enough of this room in the last however-long to find not a single forgiving surface.
Stone floors, mottled edges of unfinished marble, cold metal instruments.
Water.
It had been so long since she was fully flesh. Now every inch of her skin was puckered and damp as she sweat the last of her body’s water.
The sounds of war subsided, and she could now hear a steady gurgle. The increasingly loud rhythm of blood being pulsed outside its avenues became staccato as a heart hiccupped in a dying chest. She dragged herself hungrily to the pool forming beneath the door.
It was sticky, the nectar. Warm, metallic, intoxicating.
Her fingers trembled joyously as she tried to scoop the blood into her mouth.
A drop felt enough to sustain her, and yet she needed more.
She wondered how Cutter tasted. Before long, she found herself banging and scraping at the ironclad door, desperate to reach the meat promised on the other side.
Her sight adjusted, revealing the edges of things light couldn’t even touch in this room.
The masons’ storeroom. Heavy stone fragments of the statue she had been were collapsed against the door, blocking her exit.
She would never be strong enough to move them.
Somewhere beneath her skin’s screaming for flesh, the itch in her teeth, she found memories of pathways through walls—escape routes, during the war. Ah yes, the tunnels.
“Yemi?”
The name hung in the stale air before her, but tangled in other overwhelming thoughts. Whatever it meant, it spiked her desperation. She had to get out of this room.
She grabbed a chisel, for a moment awash in fleeting giddiness over the violence she could do with it.
Her steps were staggered at first but grew steady as she approached a spent hearth in the back of the room.
She stepped barefoot into the ash and let muscle memory guide her to the correct stone, and then locked herself behind the palace walls.
It had been so long since she’d had a proper hunt.