Snap.Silas’s mask clattered to the ground, stopping him mid-sentence.
I froze, fixed on the long gouge marks visible. “Your mask.”
Silas’s hand raised to the left side of his face, tracing the deep scars etched into stone. He fumbled for the white mask that lay nearby, securing it flimsily to his head with the broken strap.
“I suggest you stop looking at me like that.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. Don’t lie,” he snarled, his fangs protruding. “I hate liars.”
I furrowed my brows. “Why would I show empathy to a monster? For one, you nearly took off my leg.” I shifted the fabric of my dress to show five small puncture holes, oozing blood and clotting. “Not to mention—bit my neck.” I pinned my hair back to show him the two faint puncture marks on my skin. “Tell me, Silas, what reason do I have to lie to you?”
His jaw clenched, glaring at me from across the room. If I had half a mind, I’d stop right there and not provoke him further. Instead, I turned away, turning over the brown bottles into the mortar grinding the herbs into dust. An anti-poison is hard to construct if you do not know what the poison is to begin with, but since I had the audacity to watch, I knew how to treat it. I added water to muddle down the mixture and mugwort to purge the rest of the toxins from his system.
“Yet, knowing all these facts, it is clear I’m a thoroughly confused woman who does not know what she wants in life, death, or anywhere in between. Perhaps it’s my confusion in which I have developed such a thing as empathy to a beast—to my captor,” I huffed,placing the contents of the mixture in a cup, carrying it to him.
Eyes wide, Silas handled the cup with shaky hands. The bluish hue of death still clung to his tan skin but had started to recede. He inhaled sharply, bringing the cup to his lips, and drank deeply, never once wincing at the taste.
Finished, he set the cup down. “You are by far the stupidest girl I have ever met. Reckless with your own health, your own wellbeing and happiness for others around you. You think of others before you think of yourself.” A half-hearted smirk graced his lips. “Even to be reckless enough to save an irredeemable man.”
I sat next to him, the warmth of the fire licking at the icy chill of bare skin. I drifted to a time not so long ago, when circumstances were not as they are. A time before Papa died, before Mama wanted to pawn me off for the betterment of Miriam. Before I carried hatred, jealousy, and regret while staring down at my own tombstone erected in secret, yearning for a small sliver of hope.
“When I was a girl, I was told that the world was mine to take—to do what I pleased with. I should have known it was a farce because Father died, leaving us debt and a good name and to top it all off, I was dying from a disease that had no cure. Mama’s only recourse was to find a suitable match for me without little question. I had to be selfless for the sake of my family and for Miriam who did not deserve the hatred that brewed. I had to be someone else for the sake of everyone.
“I hated who I was becoming. I hated the thought of my freedom being stripped away from a marriage I had no desire to enter but from a disease that limited who I was, what I could do. I was a doll to my mother, a pretty little doll who would do anything she asked, even if it meant killing to preserve our image to society.”
I tilted back. Every thought over the last year slammed against my skull. The night in the drawing room, a distant past where the stark realization was the reality I must live in. Miriam’s wild hunger for more as she called out to the men below to partake in the green faerie, talking nothing of dreams—of love.
Miriam’s sweet, innocent face was too kind to endure the life I was to hold. Mama’s pretentious lies to her so-called friends. The fake smiles, crude laughter, ridiculous lies. I balled my fist into my dress.
I took a sharp inhale, smoothing the fabric out, acutely aware of Silas’s tense expression.
He reached over, tracing my arm, stroking calmly. “The cemetery and even the night out on the balcony, I sensed your unhappiness—a flower desperate to bloom out of barren Earth. You looked so much like her.”
Silas pointed to the locket, to the woman whose face oddly looked like my own with the same dark-green eyes.
“I did not realize the extent of that unhappiness until I followed William to a brothel after the party. The man beat the life out of a woman, skipping into the darkness without any regret. I had been out of mymind picturing his smug face hovering over your lifeless body. I walked in that church to spite the gods. My only concern was hoping I was not too late.”
I laughed, short and bitter. “It must have been one hell of a curse for you to spit the gods in a house of worship like that.”
“You have no idea. I have been this way for a very long time, so long I’d forgotten everything that it means to be human, and I’ve grown weary. This”—he lifted the cup—“is how I repent for the sins that I committed in my past and my sins in this life.”
“The locket?” I held the locket out in my palm, the weight of it settling into my hand just as the heaviness of my heart began to ache. “You seemed upset when you awoke.”
Silas tenderly took the locket. “When I awoke to this life, this was all that I had left. A curse and a clue to who I was before to reclaim my name. Yet, year after year, my mind beats against the rock, withering away until I am nothing more than the beast many call out. Never to know what it was to be human, just a mindless monster needing to sate their thirst.”
He held the locket up to the light, the picture of the boy and the girls staring up at us.
“I have seen them,” I tentatively said. As I watched his reaction, the words came to me slowly, as I was unsure in how to respond. “Now and again, I see them in visions that never seem to make much sense other than I have seen that boy on many occasions and the girl”—I pointed to her—“she wasthe one that attacked me the other day. Before I—just now—she wanted to show me a scene from the past.”
Silas perked. “What did she show you?”
Cecilia was in the room with me, her worrying tone flooding my senses and dreams until there was nothing, gripping like an animal demanding I listen. Demanding I obey the disembodied voice. In the daylight or under the shadow of darkness, she urged me to follow her simple directions without offering up anything else.
Save him.
“How she died,” I said. Tears built the more I stared at the vivid faces of the dead. “How they both died.”
