She seems to digest this information, and I can see the wheels turning behind her eyes. I was right. She hasn’t planned for this. She and her sisters could not have begun to fathom that I, their helpless sacrifice, might have tamed the beast just long enough to get away. Or that the beast might not have been a beast at all, but a trapped creature.
‘Irena, the power coil.’
She sets her jaw. ‘Do you know how long we’ve been looking for someone like you, someone who cansatisfyhim? Someone who can keep him fed for centuries, instead of just months? Do you know how much work it took to bring you here? The payoff for your boss alone …’
A flash of realization; another gut-wrenching betrayal. My boss. My own fuckingboss.
A sudden wind howls outside the hut. It sounds unearthly, a horrible growling wail, and I realize it isn’t the wind at all, but Anguish. He sweeps past the windows, darker than the night, and heavy with a promise I know he’ll do his best to keep. He needs me. He needs me, because without me, he’ll die.
I have been here before. I have been on the other side of a door, waiting for him to come for me. I’ve been held helpless by the whims of men. I’ve known deeply in myheart that I will never walk out that door as the same person again.
There are two versions of me. There is the version of me who picked up two passengers. And there is the version who landed my ship with two broken corpses on board.
But I, too, was broken that day. An insidious break, the hairline fracture of a bone that refuses to heal. Too often I wake in the night, sweating and crying, the sound of Rory unbuckling his belt ringing in my ears. In those moments his voice is too real, too vivid.This will be so easy, baby. And in those moments, wracked with impotent fear and rage, Iyearn. I crave sustenance I can’t find, tortured by an impossible ache, this insatiable hunger.
Anguish’s words scrape across my mind.
You and I are the same. We share the same urges.
Outside, a rush of sound: Anguish’s bellow, murderous and far too close. Then a scream, bloodcurdling in its terror, suddenly cut short. Then more screams, and shouts. The bell begins to clang. A warning? An attempt to frighten him away, their god who they unwittingly strengthened with my presence? Their god, who has finally turned on them?
But he didn’t turn onme. Not yet.
I step toward Irena. ‘Give me the power coil.’ I want her to admit to what she’s done. I want to see the shame written on her face.
She hesitates, then wilts. She hears the chaos of the village; it’s reflected in her eyes, the sheer terror. The surrender. The despair. Her shoulders slump. She points to her bed in the corner. I go to it, fishing around under the mattress until my fingers close around cold metal. There. Even without the right tools, I’m determined to find a way to repair my ship. I have to.You won’t keep me here like an animal in a cage.
I cradle the ship part to my chest, and turn to face Irena. She won’t stop me. She knows that she stands between me and Anguish. That he and I have a connection, a bond. And whether one or both of us ends up lost in the end, that’s for us to decide. Irena is no longer necessary.
As I go to the door, as I turn the handle and wrench it open to the night, I wonder: What version of Midonia will be left when this is all over?
16
The night welcomes me with a familiar smell. The iron tang of blood. I stumble over something on the ground, and my heart stops.
At my feet is a body dressed in white. I don’t know which of the sisters lies before me, limbs spread under the night sky. She’s hardly a body at all. She is the vague shape of a human; she is wet and slick remains. My eyes go to the place where her face should have been. Her skull has been crushed to near oblivion, all identifying features messily chewed off the bone. Her brains, from what I can tell, are gone. Her scalp hangs loosely from a shard of bone, still connected by a few strings of glistening tissue.
The rest of her body is much the same. Her breasts, stomach, fatty upper arms, all gone. Bones remain, shards of white, chewed and sucked on and spit out. Her internal organs are all consumed, or strewn about in glistening wet mounds.
Three other bodies lie nearby, all ripped apart, all unidentifiable, and all partially eaten.
These are the screams I heard, cut off by Anguish. Were they alive, then, while he did this? Was each sister all too aware of what was happening as his teeth pierced her belly and pulled her entrails out through a gash in her skin?
I hope he killed them first, before he fed.
But where is he now?
The night, I realize, has gone abruptly quiet. The bell is no longer ringing. The bell I suspect was designed to be a warning, if he ever grew too strong to be contained. If only the sisters had known they handed him their own demise, thinking I was a salvation.
I squint into the night and see other bodies, pale and still in the night. I hear sobbing, somewhere distant. But the shouts, the sounds of frightened chaos, are already gone. Anguish has extinguished either their lives or their hope, and no doubt soon it will be both.
Is this, finally, a dire emergency?
I hear a small sound behind me. I spin to see Irena, leaning weakly against the door of her hut. Her face is white as death. Tears stream silently down her face.
‘This is your fault.’ I make sure she hears it. I say it again, so that I know she understands. ‘This isyourfault, Irena.’
I don’t wait to see how she reacts. I turn from her and plunge into the dark, into the nightmare that he hascreated for me, this labyrinth of dread that bleeds and weeps and draws me in, in, in.
