“I’m a terrible person. I’ll be a terrible wife.”
“Sybil!” Anne grips my shoulder, her fingers hard with panicked tension.
I lift my head, then turn to look in the direction she’s staring.
Beside the bureau across the room stands a figure. It’s the height of a man, and yet nothing about its outline is human. Two bent legs, like those of a mantis, arch upward from its shoulders. The rest of its body is indistinct, shrouded in darkness.
“Did you summon that?” whispers Anne.
“I don’t know.”
This figure looks and behaves differently than any of the other creatures. The closest thing it resembles is the stalky shadow-thing that I summoned during the winter, the one that might have grown into the towering, two-faced wolf.
“Light,” I whisper to Anne. “We need light.”
She fumbles with the matches on her bedside table, and the wick of a candle flares bright, illuminating the figure.
I’ve never seen anything like the monster standing in her room. It looks as if it’s composed of pieces of every creature I’ve ever summoned. Dragonfly wings sprout from a furry breast, antlers poke from a shoulder joint, a tail writhes from the knee of a huge, scale-plated leg, and eyes wink from the creature’s throat. It’s wheezing while it stands there, its breath labored as if it’s in pain.
I crawl out of the bed, wobbling a little because of the rum, ignoring Anne when she hisses my name in warning. Slowly I pace toward the monster.
“What are you?” I ask.
The creature attempts a rasp from an oral cavity that’s half insectoid mouthparts, half lopsided jaws. It’s been fused together somehow. Maybe with real witchcraft.
“Should we take it outside?” Anne’s voice is faint, shaken.
I survey the creature’s body, the way each limb is clumsily forged to the central mass. “I don’t think it can move much.” Closer I step, extending one hand and speaking to the monster. “Were you always like this?”
“It can’t talk, Sybil,” Anne says. “They never talk.”
The creature is struggling, its half-jaws and mouthparts quivering and clicking. A grating sound issues from its throat.
“Did someone do this to you?” I ask.
This time, the monster releases a gasp that I could swear sounds likeyes.
“I don’t know how to help you.” Tears pool in my eyes, incited by the sleepless night, the rum, and the pain I can sense from this creature.
The monster chokes, and black fluid gushes from its throat, spattering Anne’s bedroom rug and nearly missing my toes. Its body crumples heavily to the floor, where it lies on its side, still wheezing.
I sink to my knees. “It’s dying.”
A shell-like covering along the side of the monster’s body lifts, and from beneath it emerges an arm. A human arm, except it’s too small to have belonged to an adult, and one of the fingers looks like the toe of a lizard. The hand moves toward me, and the fingers unclasp. A piece of crumpled paper falls to the floor.
The monster’s breath rattles harder. It hurts me to hear it, to be incapable of helping the creature. Clearly it wants me to have the bit of paper, so I pick it up and smooth it out.
It’s the corner of a yellowed page, ripped from a book of some kind—maybe a notebook, judging by the scrawled bits of handwriting along the edge. Most of them are partial words, but one word stands out—Alchelinore. Beside it is a symbol, crudely scratched in what looks like blood. It’s a half-circle with three crooked lines through it, and a tiny triangle on the left.
“How odd.” I hold it up, turning the paper from side to side.
“Let me see it.” Anne scrambles off the bed and peers at the symbol over my shoulder. “I’ve seen that mark before.”
“Where?”
She winces. “Don’t be angry.”
“I might be, but tell me anyway.”
