“You never listen, do you?” I muttered, glaring at her toothy grin.
I slowed, motioning for her to keep quiet. The thick bark of the trees was veined with purple, as if they were bleeding. I pressed myself against a trunk.
A colossal creature rose above the forest. Its body was nothing but shifting darkness, writhing like a nest of snakes, its skin pierced with countless yellow eyes. Facing it, the sorcerer did not move. His hands buried in his pockets, he regarded the monster with a disturbing calm.
“Zelda didn’t waste any time,” he said. “So this is what she’s sending now? A Cursed of Category Eight, perhaps?”
Zelda. So the Wish Witch had a name. And he pronounced it as one spits poison. My heart hammered so hard I was sure the thing could hear it. Why was he so calm in front of such a horror? The Cursed let out a growl, a cavernous rattle that tore through the air. Then it opened its gaping maw and spoke, in a voice thick with bile.
“Kill… the confectioner… and the traitor…”
I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. A mass of writhing, serpentine shapes tore free from its own body, lunging to engulf the sorcerer. But he pivoted with an unrealease, hands still in his pockets, slipping out of reach with a mere shift of his body.
“If she thinks that’s enough to make me bend.”
He laughed. A laugh without joy, without warmth. Antlers grew from his back, and the fabric of his cloak transformed into silver swirls of mist, taking the shape of a moth’s wings. Spikes pierced through his shoulders, shifting into black thorns. I gasped. I hadn’t imagined it, that day in my shop.
“I’ll put an end to your suffering,” he said, his tone almost gentle.
The Cursed hissed—a thick, wet sound, like the death rattle of a hollow beast—and lunged at him. So did the sorcerer. It was madness. He couldn’t possibly win.
“Wait!” I shouted, bursting from my hiding place.
But I froze.
The sorcerer was no longer human.
His long and sinuous body was like that of a celestial dragon, covered in thorns and threaded with strands of shadow. Wings spread from his back, each beat scattering wisps of mist. His massive tail coiled around the Cursed, strangling its serpentine forms as they thrashed, trying to reform.
But it was his head that turned my blood to ice.
A majestic stag’s skull. Skeletal. Its long antlers curled like frozen roots. Then, with a disjointed snap of his jaw, he sank his fangs into the writhing flesh of the monster.
His gaze locked onto mine. I stepped back. His eyes were no longer violet, but two golden-amber furnaces, inhuman, hollow, pulsing slowly.
One beat of his wings. A whirlwind of wind and earth. Then the sorcerer rose, carrying the Cursed into a sky choked with mist. Branches snapped, and howls split the night, then abruptly fell silent.
I looked up just in time to see the Cursed fall. Serpentine appendages slammed into the ground around me, still writhing in a desperate, useless attempt to find their master. Its gaping maw opened in one last surge, ready to swallow me whole.
Chouquette leaped in front of me. Her tails spread wide, but against a Cursed of this magnitude, she stood no chance.
“Chouquette, no!”
A cavernous roar split the night. The sorcerer dove, fangs plunging into the Cursed’s chest, ripping out its heart like bones snapping. A rain of silver ash spilled from the monster as it collapsed at my feet in its final spasm. Its serpentine forms stilled, petrifying little by little into chunks of black stone. A single tear slid from its empty sockets before it cracked apart into an inert mass of rock.
I panted. The stag dragon turned toward me. His breath made the air shiver. Wisps of shadow peeled off him. Tiny translucent moths fluttered at the tips of his bone antlers, winking out one by one into the darkness.
So that was it. His curse.
I took a step forward and raised my hand, as if it could bridge the distance between us. “You’re…”
The words stuck in my throat. I wanted to tell him I understood. But he dissolved into the night, melting into the darkness.
“Mademoiselle Lempicka!” Yeun’s breathless voice cut through the silence. He ran up, collapsing at my side.
“His curse,” I murmured. “It’s different from mine.”
“That’s because the master sacrificed his heart and most of his soul. He wanted to become more than human, but became less.”
