Honey in Her Veins

Prologue

There was blood on my shirt.

Sickened, I yanked the damp collar wide, desperate to get it off my skin. Buttons popped free and skittered across the parlor floor. I swallowed the slug of panic in my throat and hit my knees on the hearth’s roughened bricks. The tang of iron filled my nose.

“Hurry.” The monster in my head uncoiled itself and slipped into my hollows like a hand donning a glove. Nausea rolled up my gullet, but I couldn’t fight its invasion. I didn’t know how.

The monster had played puppeteer before, but never with so much abandon.

So much violence.

“We need to burn the clothes.” The monster steadied my hand, and together we stripped the bark off a log in quick, blunt strokes, then struck a match. A flame glowed at the tip, lighting the fibers orange.

“Take off your shirt.”

Numbly, I obeyed, shucking it off and laying it on the log. Soon, the fabric caught. The monster’s relief left me lightheaded. “There,” it said, shivering in buried delight at the stretch of my limbs. It brought our hand in front of our face and turned it this way and that.

“Stop it,” I said with a shudder.

“You feel everything so deeply,” it murmured. “Sometimes I forget.”

I tightened my hand into a fist, wishing I could shove the voice out of my head.

“And go where?” it murmured. “We are skin and soul. Bone and blood. You could no sooner suck out your own marrow than rip me from your head.”

Something in me caved inward, too exhausted to argue.

The monster had always had a cooling, almost numbing effect on me when I got upset.

Even this near to the hearth, with the flames crackling up the bricks, I felt only a heavy chill weighing on my chest. If I let it in, the cold would spread until it reached my fingertips, stealing all the bad away.

But the bad always came back, in the end.

With shaking hands, I snatched up the paper I’d left crumpled on the mantel, smoothing back its creases to reveal a phone number scrawled in hasty loops.

Before tonight, I’d all but decided not to use it.

“She is not your home, little death-touch,” the monster said with a touch of bitterness in its sweet, caressing tone. Then, more softly: “I could be, though.”

Every tired muscle in my body yearned to yield to its siren song. It was always the same.

Let go.

Let me help.

Let me try.

But when I closed my eyes, all I saw was the blood sprayed over the chapel wall. The monster really had some nerve to pretend at gentleness after what we’d seen and done tonight.

I stripped off the rest of my clothes to burn.

The wedding slacks Jack had given me reeked of iron, too ruined to save.

At the snick of a lock behind me, my heart jumped into my throat.

I snatched an oversized coat off the back of the couch and slipped my arms into it as the front door burst open and a large, broad-shouldered man stumbled inside.

He slammed the door, hastily spinning the lock behind him, a groan releasing from deep in his chest.

“Jack,” I whispered.

The towering giant of a man lurched toward the sink, where he downed a jug of water in one long gulp. His massive shoulders hunched as he bent at the waist and retched into the porcelain basin.

Then he raised his head, wiping his chin with the back of his hand and found me frozen in the doorway to the kitchen. The weight on my chest grew heavier under his stare. “Arthur.” His eyes flicked to the hallway. “Where is she?”

“Sleeping,” I said softly.

Jack jerked a nod and turned back to the cupboards, fumbling through home-labeled jars of herbs and loose-leaf teas inside. Agony stretched his features taut as he braced one hand on the wall.

“There’s something inside him.”

The monster’s preternatural awareness of any and all signs of life in its proximity sometimes gave me a heightened ability to sense things beyond my natural limitations, such as the whisper of chlorophyll in the window-box plants or the slow chug of a heartbeat upstairs.

And there. I squinted, trying to make sense of the squirming mass that twisted between Jack Moreau’s ribs, high up where the heart should be.

I sucked in a hard breath. Is that… rot?

“No.” Wonder crept into the monster’s voice. “Look again.”

I squinted.

“Damn it.” Jack rocked back, a sickly pallor to his face. I’d never seen him like this, bowed from pain as the something in his chest wriggled like a worm.

I blanched, instinctively stepping forward, only for the monster to tug me back.

“Don’t.”

It was right. I couldn’t touch him, or any living thing. Tonight had made perfectly clear that there should be no exceptions, not even—no, especially not for Jack’s family.

Jack’s hand clenched the tea towel draped over the oven’s door handle. “Leave me.”

“You’re hurt,” I protested.

“I’m fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “Check on Eva.” When I didn’t move, his eyes snapped to me. “Go.”

“But—”

“Now!”

The force of his censure sent me stumbling back into the shadows, shame sickening in my gut. I shoved a fist into my mouth, biting down on my knuckles to hide the sound of a sob. My skin tasted of soap and woodsmoke.

Jack had never spoken to me like that before tonight.

At the sound of heavy feet shuffling, I peered through the open kitchen door, watching silently as Jack pried back the grill of the heater vent over the fridge. The grind of metal fell heavy in the quiet space.

When Jack pulled out a jar of honey, I sensed the something in his chest stretching. He buried a groan of pain.

My heart tithed a beat.

The monster was right. I knew decay like I knew my own name, and the pulsing, dark knot inside him may have been distinctly wrong, but it wasn’t rot.

With heavy, labored breaths, Jack unscrewed the cap with a loud pop and fished out a bit of honeycomb. The moment it slipped between his teeth, the wriggling thing inside him slowed.

I stepped back, heart in my throat as my fingers tap-tap-tapped against the side of my leg. The usually soothing rhythm did nothing to stall the catch of my breath.

What had I just witnessed?

My mind flipped through the night’s events in a nightmarish zoetrope. Oil-slick feathers exploding from the rafters. Wildflowers bursting through the cracks between the chapel’s floorboards. Blood seeping under the body of the man I’d—

“Stop,” the voice inside me whispered.

But I couldn’t. The monster was right: We were one, and so were our sins.

Jack opened the kitchen door and slipped out into the yard, the lumbering weight of his boots on gravel my only clue to his direction. When I turned, my elbow bumped the landline, nearly knocking the handset off its cradle.

A decision settled inside me. I lifted the handset, unwrinkling the slip of paper still clutched in my fist. I knew the numbers by heart, just as I knew how much I had to lose by making this call.

When I reached for the handset, the monster stiffened. “What are we doing?”

I punched the numbers in. My breath caught on the first ring, and I squeezed my eyes shut. If I didn’t do this now, I never would.

“We’re leaving.”