Chapter 11 #2
Fear kicks in—irrational and untimely. I try to remind myself this is Genevieve, but instinct is screaming at me to run. It feels like I’m back in that nightmare, the creature chasing me, Genevieve’s voice loud and mocking in my ear.
Chest heaving, I take one aborted step backward.
“Don’t.” I freeze. It barely sounds like her. I can’t stop how hard I’m breathing, how hard and fast my heart is racing. “Don’t move.”
“It’s time, isn’t it?” I ask just to convince myself that it’s really her, my raspy voice lower than a whisper. “For … for the sacrifice?”
She doesn’t answer.
Wait.
For a moment, my fear is forgotten, my eyebrows furrowing with a frown.
“What did you do when you were twenty?”
It takes her a moment to speak, like she’s forgotten how. “What?” The word comes out thick, low, almost slurred.
“When you were twenty,” I repeat, feeling strangely calm, though my pulse hasn’t stopped thundering.
I think back quickly. “It was close to the end of term. You left school for a while, remember? Your mother had come to get you. You told me you were going to see your grandmother that weekend. That it was a family thing.”
The memory is sharp and clear. She hadn’t wanted to go. She’d told me all the things her mother had said about her grandmother, how she was too old-fashioned—how she was mean and a bully, and hated when things didn’t go her way; that was why they never visited her anymore.
The apple unfortunately didn’t fall too far from the tree, Genevieve had muttered bitterly, and I’d pretended not to hear. She never spoke about her upbringing; her mum hadn’t even known I existed. Everything I’ve suspected about how she’d been raised has always remained that—a suspicion.
The shadow ripples. My pulse jumps. “I-I … I don’t—” Something that looks like a hand lifts up to the shape of her head, by her temple. “No. I don’t think I left school. I don’t remember.” Her voice is sounding less hoarse and gravelly with every word.
“The dagbato demands a sacrifice every ten years to every child born,” I quote. It hadn’t been long after her twentieth birthday back then. She must’ve gone to complete the ritual. To give the dagbato the sacrifice.
What had she done when she’d been ten?
What had she been forced to do?
She’s shaking her head, both hands clutching her temples.
None of that matters right now.
“What are the details of the ritual?” I ask, needing us to move fast. “Lights, please,” I say desperately, though a part of me thinks its futile. It’s been so responsive to my needs without me having to ask, after all.
Which is why I jolt and cry out when the lights abruptly come on, nearly blinding me. Thanks to my wards, they’re as bright as they’re supposed to be.
My eyes immediately fly to Genevieve when they adjust. I suck in a sharp, painful breath.
She’s at least a foot taller. Her arms are so long her curled fingers are brushing against the ground. Multiple, beady black eyes bulge on her face like a multitude of dark boils, her mouth now a raw, red slit, her nose missing.
My gorge rises. I swallow it right back down.
“The ritual, Genevieve,” I say, pretending I’m in control, pretending my hands aren’t shaking.
They clench into fists when Genevieve’s hands move. Powerful dark claws extend from her fingers, scraping against the marble with hair-raising screeches.
Those beady black eyes stare almost unseeingly at me.
“Genevieve!” I gasp frantically. “The ritual! We need to hurry.”
Her shoulders shift. Feathers sprout all over her arms and her back, tearing through her tank top. Her legs bend at the knee, like she’s preparing to run.
It hits me like a boulder to the face.
At some point while I’d been performing the cleansing ritual—perhaps even before then—Genevieve had already made a choice.
She notices the slowly dawning horror in my expression, and suddenly, she’s back to her human self, no anomalies in sight, her ripped tank top the only evidence there ever was. Her beautiful brown eyes are defiant and sad, but without a hint of remorse.
“No,” I whisper.
“Rosemary—” Her voice still holds a hint of animal. A hint of danger.
“No,” I repeat. Oh God. Oh God. I can’t breathe. I can’t believe—“No. I’m not letting you.”
“You said it yourself,” she rasps, “That I should accept it. This is me accepting it.”
“No. This isn’t—”
“Keep her there,” Genevieve whispers, then she disappears.
Something in my chest snaps when I feel her leave the boundary of the wards.
“No!” I try to move but the floor rapidly sinks, pooling like liquid over my feet and wrapping around my ankles, threatening to solidify. “Don’t you dare,” I hiss viciously.
Shockingly, the house obeys. I nearly fall trying to free my legs, then I’m running into the foyer. The stairs are completely gone. The floor moves underneath my feet, tugging me in the right direction.
I race into the study.
“Come on!” Genevieve is yelling at the ceiling. “Where the fuck are you? I’m not doing it! I’m not upholding my end of the bargain! Where the fuck are you? Come and kill me!”
“NO!” I hold my trembling hands up but it’ll be useless. I don’t know if I can adequately protect us both outside of my wards.
Genevieve … is … she’s changing, morphing through every shape she—her ancestors?—have taken, growing feathers, scales, beaks, claws, and fangs—numerous living beings, both real and fabled, blurring, melting together, her anchor to her human form rapidly fading.
Even through the mess of rapidly shifting, unrecognisable flesh, I can feel her anguish. Her desperation and exhaustion.
My eyes burn. “Genevieve.”
“Where are you, you bastard!”
The longer she begs without a response, the more my suspicions from earlier are confirmed.
“Genevieve,” I try again, quietly. “I don’t think the dagbato is here.”
The thing in front of me stops morphing. She’s towering nearly as high as the ceiling, her entire body covered in dark fur. Her eyes are that of a cat’s, while a snake’s fangs poke dangerously out of her mouth. Her body language screams confusion.
“There is something wrong with the house, but it’s not because of the dagbato,” I explain, my voice calmer than I feel.
“I don’t think it’s here. It’s not tangled with the house’s eshé at all.
” Her grandmother must’ve either lied, or been mistaken.
The dagbato can’t be powerful enough to not only hide its aura from me, but also sink deeper into the eshé of the house every time I tried to yank it out.
If it had that much power, it would have freed itself by now, and Genevieve would be dead.
I’d probably become a buffet, trapped in this house until it either got its fill, or grew bored and left, ready to ravage the rest of the world.
She falls abruptly, nearly making me cry out, except, no, it’s just her height dropping back to her normal six feet. She’s gripping her skull, moaning, her form never completely settling.
She twists away, her back to me. “Get away from me. Please.”
It’s the rawness in her voice that does it—the sudden realisation that she doesn’t want me to see.
I’m stalking up to her and yanking her down by the neck, squeezing the back of her throat hard, then harder, pressing our foreheads together.
She tries weakly to squirm away, but I don’t let her. Her heaving chest is already slowing to match mine, even though I’m breathing almost as hard as she is.
“Genevieve.” My voice is too thick. I swallow. “You can. I promise you can. Just do what you need to do to me. I’ve taken worse, I promise.”
“What’s that supposed mean?” she snarls.
“Nothing,” I say, a little too quickly. “Just—I can take it, Genevieve. I’ll be fine.”
“I’m not going to kill you just because you can’t actually be killed.” Talking seems to help anchor her, her body shifting back into the form I know and love. Her eyes are completely black, all her teeth sharp and pointed.
“That’s exactly why I want you to do it.”
“I’m not going to let you treat your life like it doesn’t fucking matter, like killing you is just some easy, frivolous thing just because—”
“It’s not about that!”
Her mouth clamps shut.
“It’s not about that,” I repeat, quieter.
Heat spreads through my limbs, burning me from the inside out.
With our foreheads pressed like this, I feel just as exposed as she is, my ugly, desperate yearning yanked right into the light.
“It’s … it’s about—” I inhale deeply and let it out in a rush.
“For the first time in my life, it feels like I get to choose. For the first time in my life, my gift feels like a gift. Choosing to die—by your hand, to me, feels like freedom.”