“What’s that?” He responded. “I’ve done quite a lot.”
“You know what. Why did you remove the finger? I feel the curse is gone.”
“An accident,” he said, his body shrugging. He wasn’t shaped like a man at all tonight, just a black, tentacled thing in a vaguely human-sized shape.
“No, it wasn’t. You cured me. I know why you didn’t in the cave—”
“Do you?” He asked, cutting me off.
“Because you needed me,” I said, feeling less sure about it now.
“Ah, yes. That wasn’t the only reason though.”
“It wasn’t?”
“I didn’t have a knife,” he said flippantly.
“Makwa,” I huffed out in frustration, sitting on the bed.
“You needed to heal first,” he sighed. “The curse was thoroughly in your body. Cutting off your finger wouldn’t have helped in the cave. I’ve been in your body long enough to have condensed the curse back into the splinter.”
“You fixed me,” I said in confusion.
“Minus one finger, yes,” he said. Brandon started to get up and Makwa sent a tentacle at him, pushing him back down in the bed.
“Fucker,” Brandon hissed.
“Wait,” I insisted. This didn’t make sense. “Why risk me not needing you?”
“Because Ava, I made a promise. I’ll protect you. Even if sometimes you don’t like my style of protection.”
“At the risk of yourself?”
“Seems like it,” he said apathetically as if the conversation bored him. I knew he’d promised me these things. I knew how he felt about me, I could feel it. However, I had just assumed he’d only go so far as to not risk himself. Clearly, I’d misjudged him. It appeared this entire time he’d been planning to remove the curse entirely. He’d been healing me fully so he could rip the problem from the root.
“Am I a Wendigo?” Brandon asked Makwa.
“Hmm, not really. Wendigo are men and you aren’t all man. Not anymore, right? You are related though. A community sick with greed has a way of birthing cannibalistic monsters.”
“What am I?” Brandon growled.
“A hungry beast.” Makwa’s tentacle wrapped around his neck. “Aren’t you? Feeling hungry again already, aren’t you?”
“Shut up,” Brandon growled. Makwa laughed and I gasped as I felt a tentacle slide up my leg, twisting around it like a climbing vine.
“Good thing we have just the food you need,” Makwa purred as a tentacle slid between my legs, rubbing hard. A groan left my mouth as I leaned back on the bed. Brandon sucked in a breath. His arms were shaking as he gripped the blanket, twisting it with his fists.
“You’re teasing me,” Brandon whispered to Makwa. “Making itworse.”
Tentacles pushed into my loose pants, tugging them off quickly. Brandon groaned, his hands going to his hair, tugging on it. His tattooed forearms flexed, the veins prominent.
“The smell of you, Ava,” he said, his voice coming out gravelly, changing into something more beastly. He rolled over on his belly, groaning. When he lifted his head it was a deer skull again, saliva dripping from the jaw bone.
Makwa had warned me it wasn’t over but a part of me had thought he might be wrong. The skull’s reappearance dispelled that hope. I could help Brandon control it though. I wanted to—wanted to satiate that hunger dripping from his jaw bone.
I reached for the bottom of my borrowed tee-shirt and pulled it over my head before I climbed onto the bed fully naked. Brandon’s reaction to me was intense but did he actually want me or was it purely a need his beast gave him? Something he had to do?
“Brandon…” I said tentatively, sitting on my heels. He looked over his shoulder. He groaned when he saw me and quickly came closer. I layed down as he crawled over top of me, his antlers looming above him as his eyes peered from skeletal sockets. He gripped the bed on either side of my head and I realized his hands had changed—clawed and dark.
