Page 91 of Devoured

I almost—I almost killed him.

Pain shatters through me until I can hardly see, hardly hear. Still, I careen forward to grab him. “Calix,” I whisper, but he recoils from me, his gaze hot on the floor. He won’t look at me. He can only shudder, his muscles coiling and uncoiling as if peeling themselves apart. He curses, low and under his breath, and his pain fills the room with the sickly sweet stench of death.

His agony is my fault.

I clutch my head in my hands and press my fingers against the most tender parts of my skull. It doesn’t help. Nothing can help this kind of pain.

Cora steps between us then, releasing Calix from his binds before straightening with another terrible smile. “Vanessa, Calix—you’re dismissed.” She nudges me with her boot, as if I’m merely a carcass decomposing in the middle of a sidewalk. And maybe I am. “Remember what I said, however. If you tell anyone what happened in this room, I will kill you both.”

31

VANESSA

ONCE I’VE RECOVERED, CALIX AND I WALK DOWN THE corridor in silence. Past the Great Hall, past a few of Cora’s guards, past torchlight and windows that reveal a starless night sky. Neither of us looks at the other. We keep our heads down and our gazes at our feet.

Shame carves my path, slows my steps, as I try to think of an apology that Calix might accept. His emotions linger on my tongue and roil beneath my skin, as if I bathed in them for too long. As if they now stain my very soul, and I’ll never be rid of them. I twist a lock of brown and purple hair around my finger, blinking through the memories. With the bishop, there was heartbreak and loss. Birth and death. Creation and the very tip of existence that I pushed him over.

With Calix, however, there is Celeste, and Sin, and Sybil, and me. I can’t parse through his thoughts because I can’t examine them impartially. All I know is that he hates himself, and I wish he didn’t. I wish I hadn’t hurt him. I wish I could make this better. But I can’t.

If Cora hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed him. “Calix, I—”

“Don’t, Vanessa.”

“But we… we should talk about this.”

He lifts his head but trains his gaze on the darkened corridor. “No.”

Silence returns. It sinks claws in my brain and starts to tear through the memories. Calix being held down by a large man, a set of bloody knuckles breaking his nose and cracking his jaw. Calix with a knife held to his brow, fighting the grasp of three threatening adults, tears welling in his golden eyes. My steps falter, and my foot catches awkwardly beneath me. I trip forward, almost face-planting on the floor until Calix catches me.

He seizes my forearm and drags me to his side. Leaving one hand on the middle of my back, he guides me deeper down the corridor before making two sudden right turns. “Come on.”

Swallowing hard, I trail beside Calix, matching his every step until he stops in front of the smallest portal door. Embellished with seashells and mahogany filigree, the threshold emits a soft, pink light. The Realm of Superiority’s beach.

On either side of the door looms one of Cora’s hulking wolves. A golden-brown wolf and a greenish-gray wolf. They growl warnings at Calix and me, but Calix bares his fangs.

“Let us through,” he demands.

They snarl now. One snaps their jaws near Calix’s arm. I move to stand in front of him, to protect him, when Calix’s hand falls away from my spine. The next second happens in an impossible blur. Grabbing the massive gray wolf by the throat, Calix hauls them against the wall and presses an elbow into their neck. The wolf snaps, tries to bite him, but Calix glares into the golden wolf’s brown eyes. His voice darkens. “Let us through,” he compels the golden wolf.

The wolf stills. Then they incline their head.

He compels the gray wolf next, a Beta who collapses as soon as Calix releases them.

Calix grits his teeth, opening the door and guiding me through without bothering to glance behind him.

“What about Cora?” I whisper.

“She wanted us tortured, didn’t she?” he asks roughly. “Look at that. She got her wish.”

The beach is even smaller than the last time I saw it, as if the Realm of Superiority is closing in on all sides and Castle Severi is just months or weeks from exploding out of existence altogether.

Pink waters with foamy whitecap waves crash against a seawall, a full moon illuminating every ripple in the churning ocean. But the horizon seems hazy, like a layer of tulle stretched too far across the night sky, and I can’t make out much more than what’s directly in front of us. Calix helps me sit on the edge of the wall, beside a cluster of stark-white crabs the size of our thumbs. They dance in circles of twelve and twenty-four, snapping their claws in unison, throwing sand every so often above their heads.

“What are those?” I ask quietly, fixing my gaze on them, on the waters, on that blurry horizon. Anywhere but Calix’s face. If I meet his eyes now, the fragile dam inside my chest might break, and I don’t know what will come pouring out.

“Moon crabs.” Calix sets a hand on the wall near them, and a few wander over to his fingers. Their black eyes blink erratically, and a breath passes before they throw sand at him. His lips twitch as if he might smile. “They hibernate for three weeks every month, unless there’s a full or new moon. They celebrate those nights like this. Sin and I used to sneak out when we were young and antagonize them.” Another crab snaps a claw at his finger, but Calix pulls away just in time. “We wouldn’t hurt them. We would just throw sand back at them. Sin would try to steal neon lights from the mortal world, make a rave of sorts, but they never worked. So I’d light candles instead, and Sin would play these horrible songs on his recorder. It always sounded like a cat shrieking.” Calix’s shoulders hunch as if he might somehow fold himself small enough to disappear inside the memory. “It took a few months, but eventually we figured out that they liked it. They started leaving gifts for us. Seashells, shiny rocks, some dead fish. They wanted us to keep celebrating with them.”

Though I want to, I can’t bring myself to laugh. All Calix’s memories end the same. “What happened?”