“It is entirely too close to sunset for this sort of dalliance, Ms. Bellamy.” He ground his teeth together. “Now, I’ve already thrown you halfway to Jupiter. Should I plant you at the top of the nearest pine? Would that be enough to convince you that what I say is the truth? Or would you prefer this?”
His lips receded, revealing long hooked fangs where his teeth should be. They were huge and crowed out of his mouth. Suddenly, in the light of the setting sun, Abram looked less like a man and more like a monster…as if everything he had said was true.
Maybe there was a beast inside of him.
Whatever that meant.
I pulled away hard, stumbling over my feet and falling to the ground. The mace fell from my hand, not that it had done much good anyway.
“You’re…You’re…” I stammered.
He just stared at me with the saddest, scariest eyes I had ever seen.
It all came together. The missing girls, the glowing red eyes, the monster that chased me through the woods and into the strange house I had just ran away from.
There was a beast in him. He was the monster that had chased me.
But no, that wasn’t right. Those eyes, I recognized them. Monster or not, I knew them.
“You were…you were the one that saved me,” I said quietly. “Weren’t you?”
His fangs receded and he stepped toward me. “Yes.”
I flinched back. “What are you?”
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “There is magic in this world, Ms. Bellamy—things that can’t be explained by reason or logic.”
“You expect me to believe that?” I asked, although it wasn’t lost on me that he had just sent me soaring to the heavens.
He stood and looked around wearily. “I don’t expect you to believe me. I need you to. For your own safety.”
“And you—you are saying you used magic to throw me?”
“No.”
My brow furrowed. “Well, spit it out. You didn’t hunt me down just to keep it a secret, did you?”
He shook his head, but his lips moved wordlessly several times before he finally spoke. “Ms. Bellamy… What I mean to say is, there are those who can channel magic. They’re called Conduits. And in addition to being extremely powerful, they have also become exceedingly rare. But I am not one of them.”
“Why are you telling me this if it has nothing to do with you?”
“It has everything to do with me,” he answered.
I pressed my lips together, my legs trembling beneath me. “Then tell me what you are.”
“Something unlike anything else. Or at least I used to think so.” He looked away from me, deep into the woods. “I was something of a scamp in my younger days, Ms. Bellamy. To put it bluntly, I was crude, lazy, and worst of all, incredibly selfish. I used people, women chiefly. One day, a beautiful traveler named Satina wandered into our village.”
“Your village?” I asked, my nose crinkling.
“She was beautiful,” he said. “The most beautiful thing I had even seen.” He blinked hard. “Or she used to be.” He cleared his throat. “I was a handsome man even then, if a bit boyish. And my charms were quite effective when I wanted them to be. Nature took its course with us, and after that, I took mine. She thought we were in love, that we would be married. I, of course, never saw her as anything other than a conquest. That is, until she killed herself.”
My skin went cold. “What?”
“She was a Conduit. I didn’t know, but her bloodline was one of the most potent in recorded history. A few nights after I left her, she climbed to the top of the bell tower. She cursed me in front of the entire village, told them of all my shortcomings and that very soon the ugliness inside of me would be seen by everyone. Then she spouted some incantation to invoke the harvest moon.” An aching smile etched across his face. “You know, I actually scoffed when she jumped. All I could think, when she hit the ground, was how foolish she must have been and how lucky I was to be rid of her.” His eyes flickered back to me. “That’s the kind of person I was.”
His hands found their way into his pockets and his eyes moved away from me again. “I was already with another woman when it happened the first time. It was almost a month after Satina died. It came on me like a sickness. I was on top of her.” He bit his lip. “In the middle of it all. I felt myself heaving. It was so painful the first time that I couldn’t stop myself from screaming. And her eyes, if I live a thousand years, I’ll never forget those eyes. That poor girl was terrified, and with good reason. One look in the mirror showed that I was a monster; a horrific hairy thing that no one could ever love.”
Abram folded his arms as I lay there motionless on the ground, half terrified and half enthralled.
“What happened next?” I asked, too stunned and too curious to move.
“The girl tried to run,” Abram said softly, as if the memory had taken him by surprise and he was afraid he might drown in it.
“Tried?” I asked, hoping that didn’t mean what I thought it did.
“You have to understand, when the change happens, it doesn’t just affect my body. Everything is heightened. Every sensation is a thousand times stronger. Anger, grief, lust—even love; it’s all supercharged. I wasn’t equipped to handle it then, especially not on that first night.” He shook his head hard. “She called me a demon. She said she was going to tell her father what I was, that she was going to have me burned with all the other abominations.”
“Burned,” I muttered, thinking how long ago that must have been. “How old are you?”
“I didn’t want to kill her, but I was so afraid and so angry that I almost did. It took all I had in me to run.” He slid down the trunk of a nearby tree so that we were nearly level with each other. “Satina came to me after that, as an apparition of sorts. That’s when she told me what she had done. She’d cursed me, made it so that the monster I was on the inside would be what I was on the outside.”
“But you’re a man now,” I answered, waving my hand at him.
“She’d called on the moon to perform her curse, so it’s only in effect at night.”
“That’s why you could never be in The Castle after sunset,” I said quietly, realizing how close to sunset we were right now.
“I am this thing,” he answered. “I will always be this thing. But I thought I was the only one.” His back straightened. “Something is here, though, in New Haven. Someone else like me. He’s taking women and hurting them, including the girl currently chained up in my family home.”
“But you have her,” I challenged him, doubt creeping back in. “Not someone else.”
“I found her in the woods. She was near death, and though I figured it was a lost cause, I took her home hoping I might be able to save her. At the very least, I thought I would be able to make her final moments more comfortable. But then something strange happened.”
When he didn’t continue, I waved him on. “What happened, Abram.”
“Long story short, the body reanimated. It was hijacked…by Satina.”
I gasped, reacting more as though what I was hearing was a telenovela than my actual reality.
“It was the first time I had seen her since the first time I changed. I didn’t know until then that she’s always been with me, always following me. Because she cursed me with her death, her spirit is connected to mine either until I die or until the curse is broken.” He scoffed, ticking his head to the side. “She said it was time to break it.”
“Break it how?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter!” He growled. “She’s a liar. She wants nothing more than to torment me. Besides, this isn’t about me,” he said, lowering his brow again. “It’s about you.”
“Me?” I asked, scrambling to my feet. “How could any of this be about me?”
“Because of what you are.”
“I’m nothing like you!” I yelled, blinking away whatever momentary crazy allowed me to listen to that story and actually take any of i
t seriously. Calling himself a monster was one thing, but pulling me into it, that was something else entirely.
“If you would calm down, Ms. Bell—”
“Oh, for God’s sake. You’ve been inside me. I think you can call me by my goddamn name.” I gritted my teeth. “Or better yet, don’t call me anything. Don’t call me anything at all.”
“Get mad if you like, but I’m not the reason this is happening. You are. And until you accept that, it won’t stop. If you would just let me explain—”
“Why? Because those girls look like me? That’s why I’m in danger, right? That has nothing to do with what I am.”
“You’ve got it half right,” he muttered. “You’re not in danger because you look like those girls.” His gaze traveled from my toes up to my eyes. “Those girls were in danger because they looked like you.”
Now he moved closer to me. “You’re a Supplicant, Ms. Bell—Charisse. Your blood has magical properties—the magical properties that a Conduit needs to perform their magic. And there is someone out there like me looking for you, to use you for just that. And it’s obvious he’ll stop at nothing to get to you.”
“How do you know I’m a…whatever it is?” I asked, backing away. “How do you know that beast is after me?”
“Because I knew your father,” he said evenly. “He was a Supplicant, too. You have his eyes.”
My mind flickered back to the first time I ever saw Abram and to the first thing he said to me.
You have a freckle in your eye.
Just like my father.
“You’re insane!” I said, my mind spinning. Maybe magic was real, and he certainly was a beast, but I had nothing to do with this. And to bring my father into it—I refused to hear another thing he had to say.
“You stay the hell away from me. Do you understand?”
I turned and ran, bolting through the woods. When I glanced back, he was just staring after me. As promised, he was letting me leave now that he had said all he had to say.
I swallowed hard, resisting the tug in my heart and stomach that made me want to erase all I had learned.
“Don’t ever talk to me again!” I screamed, more to cement my resolve than to rebuke him. “Not ever again!”
This time when I ran, I didn’t look back. And I swore to myself, right then and there, this would be the last time I ever laid eyes on him.
Chapter 15
It was strange how easily I found my way out of the woods that night. Maybe I had been up and down this path enough to know my way around. But, given my astonishingly bad sense of direction, it probably had more to do with the way my thoughts were racing.
Monsters and witches, curses and fangs—all these things filled my mind. Conduits, whatever they were, and all that other garbage Abram expected me to believe mentally batted me around like one of those beanbags Lulu and I used to kick back and forth in grade school.
While my subconscious guided me to the main street of New Haven, my actual conscious was trying to make sense of all the senselessness that was now my life.
If he expected me to believe him—that magic was real and he was a douchey product of some Conduit witch’s temper tantrum—then he had another thing coming. It was too farfetched. Well, except for the douchey part. Abram definitely fit the bill where that was concerned.
But what about all the crazy things I had seen? I couldn’t ignore them. Like it or not, I couldn’t explain half of the things that had happened to me since I returned to New Haven. But magic? Could that really be the answer?
My head was still swimming when I made it up Lulu’s walkway. It was after dark now, which technically made me a fugitive thanks to the town’s ridiculous ‘women only’ curfew.
Screw that. If I could deal with strange woods monsters, possessed witch prisoners, and a boyfriend who could throw me around in all the wrong (and right) ways, then this one-horse-town’s Barney Fife patrol was the least of my worries.
I heard the baby crying before I even settled in front of the doorway. The sound of his wails, haggard and tired as though they had been going on awhile, sent shivers down my spine. Something wasn’t right. When Jack cried, his mother dealt with it. She was freaking Super Woman.
Instantly, I thought of the fence, of the way Lulu freaked when she saw it was broken. It made sense now. If there were creepy kooky monsters doing creepy kooky things one hundred feet from where my kid slept at night, I would want to keep the fence up, too.
My entire body went cold as I fumbled through my purse for the key to the house.
“It’s okay, Jack. It’s gonna be okay,” I said, my hand shaking as the key found its way into the doorknob.
Of course, I couldn’t back that up. For all I knew, there could be an army of Conduits or weird wolf-monsters or hell, leprechauns, waiting to hijack me as soon as I walked through the door. And what could I do? I was a plus-sized model whose only knowledge of self-defense came from last winter’s ill-fated trend of designer combat boots.
Oh, that’s right. What was it Abram said? I had magic blood that could do spells or something. And apparently that meant my blood was in high demand. How refreshing. Whether it was true or not, it didn’t speak well for my safety, let alone my ability to save others.
God, please tell me I’m not considering it’s true.
As the door swung open, I saw the reality in Lulu’s home was a bit more ordinary in origin, though no less horrifying.
My friend lay on the floor of the foyer, her face pained and tense, a puddle circling her body. Her water had broken. She was in labor.
I ran to her, forgetting all my worries as I knelt beside her on the floor.
“Are you all right?” I asked as she did her breathing exercises. “How long have you been like this?”
“The phone,” she said through grunting breaths. “Get the phone.”
She was calmer than she had any right to be—definitely calmer than I would have been if my glorious ass was in the same position. Looking over, I saw her cell phone was out of reach. She mustn’t have been able to get Jack to bring it to her.
I lunged for it and was already dialing 9-1-1 before I realized I could have used my own phone without the dramatic dive into the living room.
I didn’t even let the operator finish her intro before I cut in. “My friend is in labor. I need you to get somebody to—”
This time she interrupted me, reciting the address.
“Yeah, that’s it. Hurry. I think she’s about to blow!”
Lulu crinkled her eyebrows. “About to blow? I’m not a whale, Charisse.”
“Forgive my lack of etiquette. I’m trying to get the morons to hurry,” I answered. Then, realizing I was still on the phone, I said, “Not you, 9-1-1 lady. You’re awesome. Just send someone.”
Ending the call, I flung the phone back onto the couch and joined Lulu at her side.
“Relax, please, Charisse,” she said, wincing. “People give birth at home all the time. It’s not—” She moaned, keeling over farther where she lay on the floor. “—life or death.”
“You look like you’re dying to me,” I said half-heartedly. Truth was, her pain terrified me, no matter how normal the Discovery Channel said this life event was.
“Thanks,” she muttered. Somehow, she was smiling between the bouts of pain, but it never lasted long. She seemed to only get a few seconds break between each of her moaning fits.
I think I was squeezing her hand tighter than she was squeezing mine. Man, those birth shows she was always watching had it all wrong!
“Do I need grab the sheets or boil some water or something?”
“That depends on if you’re trying to get stains out of my bedspread.” Lulu grunted. Obviously she was in pain, and obviously I wasn’t the type of person you wanted to bring with you to a medical emergency.
“I’ll be fine,” Lulu said, sweat forming on her brow. “Just try to calm Jack down until the paramedics arrive.”
Trying to calm Jack down
sounded much easier than it actually was. I was bitten, I was scratched, I was punched, and I was called the only word he knew how to say—which wasn’t really a word at all, but more like a sound I could not replicate. But the kid was scared, and since I was basically peeing my pants myself, I couldn’t blame him.
When the paramedics finally arrived, they were quick, guiding Lulu onto a stretcher and assuring her (and Jack and I) that everything would be just fine. For Lulu, that might be true, but for me it was anything but.
After his mother left, Jack went from simmering to full-blown nuclear. It took every rabbit I could pull from my hat to keep him quiet for even a minute. I did my best baby voice. I tried pirate cartoons. I attempted to feed him cookies (which were thrown back at me). I even tried to pay the stupid kid, but it turned out twenty bucks wasn’t as big an incentive to a toddler as I imagined it might be.
It may have been for the best, though. The more Jack screamed (and there was a lot of screaming) the longer my mind stayed occupied. It was when he was actually quiet, in those moments of silence, when my own internal monologue got noisy.
I started to worry about Lulu, and not just for the obvious reasons. Sure, she was in labor, and yes the hospital in New Haven was about as big as a Quizno’s (with all the technical advancement). But what was really pulling at my mind was what Abram had told me.
The dead girls…they all looked like me. And, according to Abram, that was the reason they were all dead. Someone was looking for me, because my blood was magic and they could use it to take over the world or make some supermodel fall in love with them or something.
You know, that old chestnut.
But as crazy as all of that sounded, I was actually beginning to believe it. And that was what was upsetting me so much.
Because as much as all those dead girls resembled me, none of them looked as much like me as Lulu did. For our entire lives, people confused us for sisters. We had the same dark hair, the same light eyes. Of course, Lulu was missing my father’s eye freckle, but that distinction hadn’t saved any of the other girls.
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