Chapter 13 #3
In a fit of rage, I lifted the trencher and slammed it down again.
I only intended to clatter the bones inside, but the impact as it hit the ground shook the entire thicket, rattled me down to my core.
The ground quivered and split, the floor of the thicket cracking like plaster and swallowing the trencher whole, bones and all.
I gasped and pulled back, and suddenly it felt like the ground I was sitting on was thinner than spring ice; one false move and I too would disappear into the void beneath.
“Tess?”
I blinked hard. When I opened my eyes again, the ground was whole in front of me. The trencher was not, broken in the middle with its contents spilled on the ground. I looked up and saw the devil sitting on the other side of the fire.
“You’re not real,” I said immediately, although a second ago I had been ready to accept that the trencher had fallen to the center of the earth. “You’re not actually here.”
“Why not?”
I expected defiance, insistence, not a question, and it caught me off balance. It took me minutes or perhaps hours to work out my reasoning. “Because I wanted protection. That’s why I came here. It should’ve kept you out.”
“Liar. You wanted knowledge and power, and you know I can give you both.”
He melted into the darkness outside the circle of firelight, drifting like the smoke itself until he was suddenly solid and whole at my side.
He looked more human in this light, the startling silver of his eyes reduced to an indeterminate grayish hue, but he still smelled as he always did—the way I imagined the ocean to smell.
I breathed deeply despite myself, even though it meant taking in more of the poisonous vapor of the belladonna.
He laid a six-fingered hand on my knee, and the touch grounded me.
I knew I should knock it away, but for the first time since I sat down in the thicket, I felt the comforting cocoon of reality. I was loathe to reject it.
“Tess,” he said, quiet and cajoling, “I know what you saw. I know the future the bones showed you. I can’t stand the thought of it.”
In this light, with every devilish angle of his face made soft by shadow, it was easy to believe him. I wanted to believe him; I was tired of searching out the lie in every turn of phrase. His hand slid higher up my leg, and a sudden flush climbed my neck, chasing away the chill of fear.
“I think, in your heart of hearts, you know the truth.” His voice was so low, just a rumble in his chest, and I found my hand straying there to feel it.
“You know I only want to help you. You know your grandmother and mother warned you against me out of fear. They were afraid of what I offered, afraid of true power.”
That I did know to be true. They would’ve quaked at the sight of me now, mouth and eyes stained black, already so far fallen. The worst thing they could’ve imagined happened to me before my mother even died, and for a moment I struggled to remember why I still shared their fear.
“I don’t want to take anything from you, Tess,” he said. “I’m not trying to steal from you. I just want a home.”
“You want my home,” I said. “You want a foothold in the world.”
“To share your home. And do you care so much about the world?”
I did care about the world, as hopeless as it was.
It was already so wildly out of balance, and I didn’t know what would happen if the devil was set loose into it; we killed each other by the hundreds of thousands over our gods, not our devils, but I would’ve been introducing an apex predator into a collapsing system all the same.
And no matter what happened to the world, there was no place for me in it but here. If Burrsville formed my boundaries, the sanctuary was my heart. No one else could be trusted with them.
The devil moved closer. My arm, which should’ve braced and stopped him, bent. My hand slid up from his chest to around the back of his neck. I wasn’t sure when I turned to face him, but I was open to him now, his body filling the space between my knees.
“I didn’t blame your mother.” His breath was a whisper against my lips, our noses brushing. “She did what was right for her. All she needed was peace and obscurity. But you’re different, Tess. You want.”
He surged forward, his mouth capturing mine.
The first press of his lips was the sweetness of apples, and the first lick of my tongue brought the bitterness of ash.
My arms locked around his neck and pulled him down with me to the ground.
I drank him in as if he were mine to drink, mine to devour, and the fear and fury of the bone reading disappeared in a building wave of desperation.
It had been years—decades—longer—since I allowed myself to want, and now I found I could not stop.
The muscles beneath my hands flexed and his hips rocked, and although both heat and hardness were muffled by the clothes between us, I couldn’t stop my throat from closing around a gasp.
“I knew it,” he murmured between wet, open-mouthed kisses. “I knew you wanted me.”
His hands were on me, pulling, pushing, seeking. There was bare skin on bare skin, his thumbs finding the hollows of my ribs, fingertips questing into the divots of my spine. His mouth left mine and descended to my neck. His teeth grazed my pulse point, and I froze.
You are just prey to him.
A wolf could not love a deer. A fox could not love a rabbit. A predator could not love what he hunted, and foolish and desperate as I was, I wandered directly into his sights, longing to be treated as an equal.
“Stop,” I said, but my throat was parched from the shadow herb, my tongue thick with it, and all that came out was a strangled gasp indistinguishable from the rest. The devil’s hand skated up my ribs to my breast, and though a moment ago it would’ve thrilled me, now it felt like the tickle of barbed wire.
“Stop,” I said again, and he froze.
I pushed and slapped at him, scrambled out from beneath him. My skin was going hot and cold by turns. “I didn’t come here for power. I came to learn how to save my sanctuary.”
My stomach pitched, bile crawling up the back of my throat. Saliva flooded my mouth and panic filled my mind; it felt like there was a fist wrapped around the back of my tongue, choking me. I dug my fingers convulsively into the soil, finding only the gnarled roots of the thicket.
“Tess, breathe.”
I retched up a pool of black, my entire body heaving with the effort. Rather than sinking into the dry dirt, it puddled there, still and dark and shining as the pond. A last drop fell from my lips and rippled the surface, and I saw.
The fawn. A hand under her chin, her head wrenched back. Her neck pulled tight and tense as a bowstring. Firelight and terror gleaming in her eyes.
And then the knife. Quick, but not quick enough. Clean, but not merciful. There was no mercy in cutting a throat. The hand under her chin tightening as she choked and struggled. The blood pouring forth, soaking her chest. So much blood.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but I had already recognized the hand, the knife. Why would you show me this? I thought. It will never, never come to pass.
“Tess?” A finger brushed my cheek, pulling hair away from my stained and dripping lips.
“Go away,” I said, keeping my eyes closed. “Please, just go away.”
I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes again, the fire had burned down to embers, and the devil was gone.
More time had passed in the thicket than I realized.
By the time I could make my way home, leaving the broken trencher and my mother’s teeth and bones to the creeping roots, the sun was high in the sky.
The light was blinding to my still-dilated eyes, my mouth was parched to blistering, and I kept losing what I hoped were only moments of time.
When I reached the house, the youngest animals had already missed two feedings, and I prepared their milk replacer and filled the eyedroppers with shaking hands.
They were squalling and desperate for food, and high as I was, the sensation of their bones and tendons undulating beneath their velveteen skin was almost more than I could take.
The fawn was starving too, tearing the slick bottle from my hands the first time she latched on.
I retrieved it clumsily, mumbling apologies and trying to pretend I didn’t see the roadkill doe in the corner of the stall, her guts dragging in the sawdust. I knew it was only the belladonna, but the fawn seemed on edge as well, her eyes rolling white toward the same corner.
I told myself she was unsettled because she was hungry, but as I went to leave, she bleated at me softly.
The vision flashed before my eyes again—the painful arch in her neck, the blood pouring out over the blade of the knife. Against my better judgment, I dropped to my knees in front of her, catching her small face in my hands.
“I wouldn’t ever do that,” I said. “Not ever.”
I had killed my fair share of animals, rabid and possibly rabid, injured beyond hope of repair, suffering. I had never cut a throat, and I felt desperate to prove I wouldn’t, whether to her or to the universe or to myself, I didn’t know. My resolve to keep her at arm’s length crumbled.
“You can come with me for the rest of my rounds,” I told her, pushing myself shakily to my feet. “You have to stick close, though.”
She did, staying so near my leg that I bumped her several times.
One by one, I shut the other animals outside to give their stalls a thorough cleaning, hoping that a few hours of work would sweat out the remaining belladonna, and the fawn showed the other animals only the most cursory interest. She sniffed their water bowls and food dishes and toys, and once she picked up the stuffed bed I left for one of the raccoons and flapped it about, but there was no sign of the flat, predatory glare I saw the night she bit me.
Of course, I had bigger things to worry about now, but I was doing everything I could to distract myself.