I loosen my fingers. The radio lands in the mud with a muffled thud.
17
We stare each other down. I hug myself against the cold. My feet are numb, my nose and ears well on their way. It would be so easy to give in to him. It wouldn’t take any effort at all.
‘Tell me to stop, and I will.’ As he speaks, he draws toward me, his shape shifting like smoke until he is no longer a beast but a man. ‘But first, tell me you’remine.’
He reaches for me with chill fingers, caressing my cheek. He says no more, but I feel it in his touch. I see it in his eyes, their flame-bright insistence – he’s uncontrollable; a monster; a rampaging beast. I am the only one who holds his tether, whose word he would obey no matter what.If I succumb.
I stand my ground.
With a rush of wind, he dissolves into smoke, swirling about my body like a storm. And then he is gone, roiling toward the next hut. I don’t know how many sisters are left, how many are barricaded in their homes, or how many might have fled to the forest or elsewhere in a desperate attempt to hide from their beloved deity.
Trapped in a nightmare, I stumble after him. I don’t know what I expect to achieve, as if my witnessing of these gruesome deaths will cleanse me of any complicity. A shard of guilt is lodged in my heart, and I fear it will never be extracted.
I would punish the sisters for their betrayal of you.
This is not my fault. But I could have saved them.
What Christian and Rory did to me wasn’t my fault. But I could have saved them too. Would it have been better to grit my teeth and bear it? To be changed forever in some other, worse way than I have already been changed since that day?
Or maybe I haven’t changed at all. Maybe I simply became the thing I was born to be.
Anguish bursts into the nearest hut, the door exploding inward with his ferocity. He’s still in the shape of a man, beautiful and terrifying, and I feel certain it’s for my sake. He’s putting on a diabolical show just for me.
He drags two sisters out of the hut by their ankles. They’re screaming, their agony and terror contorting their faces as his claws pierce their flesh. He drops them in the chill mud. He looms over them, then turns to me, his predatory smile angling upward. As if he’s daring me to watch. As if he enjoys this, forcing me to be a voyeur, a spectator of this pornographic slaughter.
Somewhere deep in the most abhorrent part of myself, I enjoy it too.
Then he becomes an animal. A shapeless, morphing beast. One moment he is a man, with impossibly long claws and dripping canines. In the next he is a puma, or a bear, or a creature of myth. Horns curve up from his skull. Wings beat the night air. He tears into the sisters as if spurred on by their strangled cries. He wrenches limb from body. Skin from bone. He makes a low, satisfied sound in his throat, almost a purr, before he cracks open their ribs and devours their hearts, one after the other.
I cannot drag my heavy gaze away.
The smell is a torment. The air is ripe with death, fear, blood, bowel. Anguish feeds and feeds, his shape still shifting until he becomes a wolf again, stained from snout to chest with fresh hot blood.
I fall to my knees, hard. The pain doesn’t register. An onslaught of feeling engulfs me, a horrible desire. My thighs press together, my core tightening. My mouth waters. My stomach clenches with hunger.
I remember Anguish’s words:I know who you truly are.
I see Christian, all over my cockpit. I see Rory, splashed across my viewscreen. I smell them as vividly as I did that day. I remember my hair was sticky with some bodily substance, wet and hot. And I remember kneeling on the floor before their bodies, burying my hands inside them. Running my fingers through displaced viscera. Hearing thedrip, drip, drip, of blood over and over like a metronome.
‘Tell me to stop, Midonia.’ Anguish’s voice is obscured by the gore that sloshes from his mouth, painting his chin bright red. His claws are buried in their chests, pulling out handfuls of wet meat. I can’t look away from his deep, agonizing gaze. Hewantsme to take his leash. He wants me to tighten it.
We were born under the same star. We’re connected by some impossible cosmic tether.
There is power in your blood, in your very cells, that sets you apart from any other creature in this universe. Except for me.
I push myself to my feet.
Every step I take is deliberate. Anguish straightens as I approach, his feral grin fading to something like awe. His chest heaves, his brows drawn together.
‘Midonia?’
I stop inches from him. In his current form he is tall, impossibly so, inhuman and ghastly. Black hair clings to his forehead, stuck there with the sisters’ blood. Even now he’s beautiful. I feel pulled to him, drawn to him like a moth to a flame. And as ever, I am unable to resist. I don’t want to.
I remember his words back in the citadel.Midonia. Are you hungry?
I’m back in my ship’s cockpit, six weeks ago.
