“Cerulina! I don’t want to talk about that right now,” Glenda squealed, pushing her chair back as if she meant to leave.
Cerulina leaned forward, clasping her hands. “You promised you were going to quit.”
“I know, but . . . Without Passionweed, I feel nothing. And I can’t stand that. It’s suffocating.” Feeling the budding pressure of tears in her throat, Glenda turned her attention to the window and the gently waving branches outside.
Cerulina raised her brows. It had little effect on her unlined forehead. “You’re so traditional in other regards. It just surprises me, is all.”
“Oh, come on. I had a bad trip. One bad trip. And Cameron got the best of me. But I’d doubled up that morning anyway, so it wasn’t a normal situation.”
“You tookdouble?”
“Oh, close your mouth. Yes, I took double. Because I was going to put Cameron down that afternoon, and theemotions. It would have been next level.” Glenda glanced at her cup. “Is there any tea left?”
Cerulina lifted the pot and poured steaming amber into each of their cups. “And now?”
“I mean, I’m lowering my dose.”
“Glen! You aretotallyaddicted. And do not say ‘I’m in control,’ not while the back of your head is all scabbed. Can you go a week? Prove you don’t need it for one week, and then at theend I’ll do it with you.” Cerulina drank from her freshly filled cup and closed her eyes in satisfaction. The scent of ginger and honey filled the room.
“Are you serious?” Glenda curled her hands around the warmth of her own teacup.
“Yeah, totally, we can party like back in school. But only if you go clean for a week.”
Glenda groaned. “But I’m feeling so much good stuff right now. Like Cameron’s betrayal, it’ll feel way less sharp after a week. And I swear, right after everything happened, it felt amazing. So strong. I cried so hard it literally dehydrated me.”
“You see, that’s what worries me. Your health!”
“One week. Okay, I can do better than that.” Glenda blinked dreamily. “If I stop using until we find Cameron . . . If I take it right before cutting his throat in that field . . . the hit of all those neurochemicals at once, afterdaysof numbness, it’s going to be like nothing I’ve ever felt. It’s going to blow my mind.”
“Yeah girl, that’s the spirit. It’ll serve him right, too.” Cerulina drained the remains of her cup, smacking her lips. “Bigot, honestly. Who even talks like that?”
CHAPTER 7
In Which I Have Possibly Become an Atheist, because What Loving God Would Allow This to Be Done to a Man? I Mean I Remain Exceedingly Grateful Not to Be Dead, Not Meaning to Discount That, but This Is Otherwise a Completely Reprehensible and Fiendish Response to a Single Accidental Erection.
The sorcerer turned me into a fucking vulture.
“This is so mean,” I wanted to say, but birds can’t talk.
Bastard that he was, the sorcerer relished having a construct bring me my first rabbit, its head dangling loose on a broken neck. He brushed off a dusty seat, dragged it screeching across the floor for a prime viewing angle, then sat, pointed chin in his hands, with an open-toothed grin that would have delighted Benedict.
Considering my hunger, there wasn’t much inhibition to break through. If the sorcerer expected a show of ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly eat a bunny rabbit with all its skin and fur still on,’ he should have transmogrified an elf. Admittedly, using the beak took some practice, as did learning the entry points of the body where meat would prove most accessible—pro tip, it’s the soft, gummy organs of the face.
Merulo grew paler than usual watching me gore out the rabbit’s eyeballs, and for my subsequent feeding sessions, he was absent.
At least the sorcerer didn’t immediately boot me out of the castle. Not until I’d proven I could fly, on my admittedly majestic new wings. Now here I was, a bird in my prime, soaring over the sunken fog of the escarpment. From above, the sharp delineation between roiling white and normal forestry looked distinctly unnatural.
Past the fog line, the view became spectacular, a toy set of bushy treetops and the tiny black movements of animals. With the sun warming my back, the swelling of thermals beneath my wings, and the scent of a fresh carcass in my nostrils, life was good. It could almost be great, if not for that stupid, insidious question: What was the lifespan of a vulture in the wild?
A man could live seventy, maybe eighty years, if he had good teeth or someone to chew for him. My brother’s fancy-feathered hens, however, had been lucky to live half a decade. Foxes took them, or bad weather, or they simply collapsed into a feathered puddle, having succumbed to one of an endless assortment of chicken maladies.
This body had the mass and nobility of a grown bird, so I was what, already halfway through its lifespan? How many years did that leave me? The Fear that once lived politely in my periphery had more of a presence than ever before, churning my gut, spoiling my food, fattening into a tumour of such nauseating weight that sometimes I felt my wings might give.
A passing crow shot me a look as I hovered and trembled. ‘What, you’ve never seen a vulture with anxiety?’I wanted to shout back.
I had to get out of this body. Step one would be re-learning speech. Step two would be to find a magic-user willing and able to restore my humanity. Scrawny, slouching assholes like Merulo couldn’t hoardallthe power, now, could they?
Circling downward, my telescopic vision locked onto a suitable perch. Surely, a selfless and beautiful mage waited for me in the great beyond, someone with a heart of gold and a convenient fount of magic. I pictured her—with her kindly eyes, and her willingness to do a bird a solid—and I knew that she existed.
