Chapter Forty-Eight • Dinner • Lillith
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After a while, The Aberrant gets bored when I force myself to stop crying. I have to. I can’t stomach the sticky paths his saliva leaves on my face as he consumes each tear that falls. My skin crawls and my nails bite into my palms the tighter he holds onto me—the closer he moves me to his lap.
After what feels like forever, The Aberrant stands without warning, my wrist fettered in his enormous hand as he pulls me along behind him, taking me out of the study and into the corridor. The study turns out to be just one of many rooms in the labyrinthine structure The Aberrant calls home.
It’s embarrassing, humiliating, really, as I stumble behind him. Each of his long strides requires two of mine. He’s huge—taller and more solid than he was back in the hospital. Like he’s spent the last few hours decompressing from the form he shoved himself into to capture me.
He breathes hard, like a great moose lumbering through the forest. Like every movement requires effort and focus.
Great bellowing exhales through his nose that reverberate against the stone and wood hallways.
He finally stops before a door that looks no different from any of the others. He jerks it open and flings me inside.
I sprawl on the ground, hitting it hard again, feeling the same bruises on my elbow and hip bone cry out in protest.
“Dress for dinner,” he snarls before slamming the door shut.
I take a moment to collect myself, but I can already feel the slow tightening of my throat each moment that I don’t obey his order. I get myself back up to my feet and check the door, jiggling the handle to see if it’s locked.
It is. I expected nothing else, of course, but I did hope. I probably ought to learn to stop doing that. Hoping.
The chamber is just a bedroom, from what I can tell.
A four-post bed with red velvet curtains stands not too far away.
The furniture is tasteful and perfectly arranged, but the room doesn’t look touched or lived in.
I don’t know if this place gets dust, but I can sense the stagnant, miasmic energy in the room, nonetheless.
I find an armoire behind a long black curtain when I’m looking for a window.
There are no windows in the room, just curtains to give the illusion that there might be some.
This whole place feels like a bizarre facsimile of humanity.
Like The Aberrant is grasping at attempts to hold onto normalcy when he’s devoid of anything close to it.
I open the armoire to find it full of clothes that belong at a dinner table from maybe two or three centuries ago.
All of them are constructed of fabrics I’ve never even touched in all my years of thrifting and purchasing from online alternative stores.
Most of them are dyed in lush jewel tones—rubies and plums and ceruleans.
The last thing I want to do is get undressed in this strange place.
But The Aberrant has made it clear he’ll do what he wishes when it comes to my body.
It’s doubtful the polyester and cotton covering my body will do anything to protect me.
The best option is probably just to change as quickly as I possibly can, and hope to avoid his ire.
I wind up choosing a simple dress that looks like it might have been made in the 1500’s. It’s plum in color, with laces on the sides and sleeves that bell out around the elbow before tapering in toward the wrist. I quickly shuck my clothes off and pull the garment over my body.
I’m still fussing with my laces when the door explodes open. I flinch and back against the wall as he stalks inside the room and crowds me against it.
He peers at me with his strange eyes. Eyes that have changed since I last looked at them.
They were black as pitch, but now, in the center of his black scleras, right where irises should have been, is a sickle-shaped sliver that looks like a crescent moon. Just as pale and luminescent as the astral body herself.
He grins at me with those unnerving teeth before grasping the laces in his too large hands and pulling, hard, on each side.
The dress cinches so tight that I can’t breathe.
The structure of my ribcage and my organs shift uncomfortably until my body fits his ideal.
He ties a haphazard knot that there’s no way to undo without something sharp.
I’m going to have to cut myself out of this dress.
His hand goes to the back of my neck, encompassing its circumference as he forces me out of the room and down the hallway with him. Again, it’s all I can do to keep up with him. My breaths come out in tiny pants—the dress not allowing for a deep inhale while I almost run to keep up with him.
I can’t even look at my surroundings. I’m too focused on not falling and winding up choked by his grasp. It’s a long enough walk that I’m relieved when he deposits me in a chair at one end of a comically large dining table.
He stalks to the other end, sitting in a chair that looks almost identical, if not for its enormous size.
Food materializes in front of me. Fare that looks and smells real.
I salivate looking down at the plate. Roasted chicken.
Potatoes carved with rivers of butter and garlic.
Golden, steaming rolls, soft enough to sleep on.
My stomach makes a desirous sound, and I clench the new ache that joins the pangs from my restrictive corset laces.
“Eat it,” the creature demands.
Without any thought, my hand picks up a fork and spears some of the roast chicken.
It falls off the bone and burns my mouth as I chew and swallow.
My body acts on its own, per his instructions.
I wince as the potatoes and melted butter burn the surfaces of my tongue and the roof of my mouth.
As they scald my throat on the way down and sit like a rock in my stomach.
“Stop,” he says.
I put the fork down, my body trembling with fear and pain.
He lets out a soft sigh, like he’s a heroin addict, and he just plunged his drug of choice into his veins. “It’s settled in,” he says. “Finally. I’ve been waiting so long for this. I can’t wait to devour every morsel of you like I did your mother. But conversation first, hm? Little Bird?”
My stomach heaves. “Don’t,” I force myself to bite out.
“I recommend saving that little bit of will for later. It won’t do you any good, of course, but you’re going to want it when I start draining you. And I’ll enjoy breaking you far more if you’re fighting me. There’s a sort of thrill in that chase. Perhaps because of His proclivities. Who knows.”
I wish Aemon were here. I wish Bastion were here. Anyone. Even if they can’t do anything, I just wish I wasn’t alone with this thing.
“Ah, yes. Aemon,” he says, the tail end of the familiar’s name rumbling in his throat like a growl.
“That little vermin has proven to be quite the problem for me. I was a fool when I struck our bargain. A weaker version of myself that feared his own power and thought he could rid himself of it—thought he could find some humanity to salvage if he gave some of it away. Of course, there’s nothing clearer than hindsight.
With any luck, though, he’s doing exactly what I think he’s doing right this moment. ”
He stares at me, as if waiting for me to talk, but I have nothing to say. Everything he’s saying sounds like obscure, insane babbling.
“Come now, be a better conversation partner, Lillith,” he commands. “Be polite.”
“What do you mean?” falls out of my mouth, my voice bright and warm, like I’m some kind of fucked up ventriloquist dummy.
“I fear it’s a long and convoluted story,” he sighs, capturing his jaw in the palm of his hand, playacting reticence. “But I will tell it to you, if you really insist.”
“Oh, but I do insist!” I hear myself cheer. “Please tell me. You always tell the best stories.”
Gods, is this the kind of sycophantic bullshit he desires? It makes my skin crawl.
He lets out an indulgent laugh and darkness spills out from behind his huge chair.
“Well, think, Little Bird. If we’re both bound to one another, and he frees us of that bond, what does it mean?
It means we’re both free, of course. And I will be able to wind my power back into myself with ease, when it’s under the guardianship of such a weak child. ”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I say, this time of my own volition.
“You wouldn’t,” he says, bored. “Because you are a weak child as well. And yet the power in you leaves me bereft of what I need. Such a frustrating hive of pests you humans have turned out to be. Tucking yourselves away in that pocket dimension all for what? A few burned witches? Ridiculous.
“But it doesn’t matter. Because once I devour all the powers of the chosen three, the gates to that place will be wide open, and I will devour every last scrap of magic found there like a man starved.”
He blinks at me, his irises half-moons now. Are they marking the passage of hours?
Something terrifying settles into my bones. A familiar sense of knowing that only comes with years of practice listening to that little intuitive voice in the back of one’s mind.
I stare at his still-gory antlers, the velvet looking almost necrotic where it has sloughed off. My stomach sinks.
The Stag God... and The Lady Moon.
It’s like he’s some perverted version of them combined.
As soon as I think it, he slams his fists down on the table, his face contorting with rage.
“You quiet those blasphemous thoughts, whore,” he snarls, sounding more animal than man. “What you call a perversion is a correction. It’s discernment. It’s BIRTHRIGHT.”
He slams his hands down on the table again, and its vast length shrinks.
Or the room shrinks. I can’t tell. He gets closer and closer, but I can’t move.
I can’t unglue myself from the chair, because he’s commanded me to stay in it.
Before long, the table is gone, and he looms over me, huge hands braced on the wingbacks of my chair as he tilts it back and leans in, mere inches away from my face.
He smells of carrion and rot. I’ve never felt terror so complete in my life, but something prevents me from sliding into a seizure. Like he wants me terrified and aware for every moment of that fear.
“I’m tired of you,” he hisses in my face. “Such a boring and insolent child. You won’t even cry. And I am ravenous.”
Dread stills my blood in my veins for just a moment, then the pain begins.
I know what it feels like to have my magic depleted. I know what it feels like to be exhausted and spent. But when he says that he will devour my magic, when he begins actually doing it, it feels like being unwoven.
He’s peeling the skin off of my soul, splitting the helixes of my DNA. My magic is as much a part of me as my mind is, and he’s tearing it out of me with brutal violence.
The veins around his eyes pulse black and blue, the chair creeks with the force of his hands tightening. There’s the terrible sound of screaming. My screaming, I realize. Like something I’ve never heard before. My blood goes so cold that I feel like I’m being burned from the inside out.
I want to beg him to stop. But my voice won’t actually form words. It’s everything I can do to steal a shallow breath to scream again.
Eventually, I can’t even inhale anymore.
I’m lost in a void that stretches for eons.
And I know that I’ve died.