Black Beast (21 page)

“Nobody comes up here anymore,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Not since She died.”

Catherine avoided a cobweb trailing down from the low ceiling. Something wet and putrescent on the floor soaked through her thin slippers and she flinched. “Who's 'She'? And how did She die?”

But either the witch didn't hear her, or he was pretending not to, because he didn't answer her questions.

But either the witch didn't hear her, or he was pretending not to, because he didn't answer her questions.

She was pretty sure he'd heard her.

“Here we are.”

He gestured around with a grand sweep of his arm. Her eyes followed the limb as it extended, trailing from the tips of his fingers to the room around them. It was small. Small and drab and empty. There was a bare mattress pushed up against the far wall, stained and filthy looking, sheeted in dust instead of duvets. Papers were tacked to the walls, filled with runes that swirled and capered across their grainy surfaces. Spells, Catherine thought, running her fingers across the words to trace the strokes of the paintbrush that had drawn them. Witchtongue.

Slowly, she turned around to regard the other half of the room. Piles of books were scattered about haphazardly. Some of the piles reached up to her waist. All of them were old. Ancient, even. A window looked out on the garden below, with a bird's-eye-view of the phoenix roses, which glowed with a steady, ethereal burn that pulsed softly in the gloaming of encroaching night.

There was a telescope, but it was aimed down at the ground, not up towards the sky. Catherine thought that was odd. Up this high, with such an unhindered view, it was most opportune for stargazing. Or…perhaps not. She didn't look through the lens. Something inside her shriveled up at the thought of putting her eye up against that cold, dark glass.

And then, when she reached the last corner of the room, she gasped in horror.

Hawks and sparrows, frozen behind glass cases, lynxes and leopards caught in mid-prowl. Boars and wolves with their maws open, snarling at an unseen enemy, all of them heavy with the rot of death. She could smell their lingering terror, too, and knew that each one of them had suffered.

She backed swiftly away from the grotesque sight, unable to get their glassy eyes out of her head, which, despite being lifeless, somehow managed to plead for a mercy far too late in coming.

“You can't collect them if they're still alive,” said the witch. His eyes swept over their inert forms, and his lips curved into an odd sort of smile at the sight of the hawk. “That one reminds me of you.”

The comparison made her feel wildly ill. “You killed them—for sport?”

“I would have thought that a hunter such as yourself would understand.”

“If we kill, it's because we're forced to. Not for fun.”

“I disagree. People idealize nature, shifter mine. In the distance, it's picturesque, quaint. One takes a snapshot, slaps it on a postcard, sticks it in a photo album. Yes?” He glanced at her; she didn't respond. Shrugging, he continued, “But nature isn't so pleasant up close. It's full of things that bite and scratch, and creep and crawl; it is a killing force as deadly as any armament.”

“So you destroy it?”

“No. I subdue it. Capture it.” He grabbed her by the shoulders from behind, forcing her to look at the display. “I turn life…into art. Into still life.” He shook a little as he said it, and she realized that he was laughing.

“That isn't funny!” Catherine was shaking too, and not just from rage. “You think nature is so horrible? Where do you think your powers come from?”

“The Sky.” That threw her for a moment until he added, “if you were at all familiar with mythology, you would know that witches got their powers from the sky god, and shifters got theirs from the earth goddess. We,” he concluded, with arrogance, “are ethereal, whereas you are quite literally bound to the wastelands from whence you sprang.”

“Nature might be a bit savage but at least there are rules. What you're creating is chaos.”

“But chaos is a part of nature. The opposite of order, of rules. Just as death counteracts life. As dark counteracts light.” That seemed to strike him as funny, because just then, he began to laugh.

He headed towards the telescope.

“The woods really are lovely from a distance, though. Especially at night.”

Catherine's stomach clenched as though in a vise. “No,” she gasped. “Don't.”

The menacing eye of the telescope leered at her, and for a moment, she swore it winked.

The witch bent to look through the scope. He whirled it around, pointing it at her in jest.

“You are lovely from a distance, just like your precious woods. But you're stuck in the twilight.”

“Please.” She wet her lips. “P-put that down. I—I want to get out of here.”

“Out?” he lifted his head. “There's no way out.”

An animal scream cut through the silence. She thought it was from the mounted beasts, and as the sound grew in volume and urgency, and she became aware of the rasping burn in her throat, she realized the scream came from her. But that awareness was delayed because—because there was something sticking out of his eye. Frosted and pale blue in the gray misty light, it looked like a splinter of glass. It stuck out of his pupil, an iceberg in a pitch-dark sea.

She swallowed hard as he blinked, his lid somehow passing through it, and the thing—vanished.

No. Not vanished. It was still there, inside him, corrupting him from within. It was breaking down, fragmenting into pieces, traveling through his veins, en route for his heart. She lurched towards him, and her fingers pushed through his vest and shirt, deep into his chest. She could feel his beating heart, shockingly cold beneath her hands, and the sharpness of the splinter buried inside it like a dagger, as the pieces of ice reconvened and hardened.

“Almost got it.”

But he tugged her hands away.

“What are you doing?” She struggled futilely. “Let me go! I almost had it and you just—no.”

He cupped her face in his cold, cold hands, touching his forehead to hers. Her words evaporated at the unexpectedness of the contact, and the horror of his next words, “Let me keep you.” His breath was like rime against her lips. “Let me tame you.”

“No,” she choked.

And the world exploded into thousands of shards of glass, leaving behind a terrifying blankness as they stood alone and isolate, adrift in a sea of white. The man standing before her was no longer the witch, was no longer anything that Catherine had words for, except, perhaps, fear.

His hair was dark black, dripping into his crimson eyes like strands of oil. His alabaster skin was pale and unwrinkled, but there was something in those empty eyes that said he'd been around the world a couple of times or more, and had found it rather dull, all the same.

“A beast of shadows touched with sight, will claim a Dark One as her knight.”

His voice had a dreadful sing-song quality.

“Stop it.” She took a step backwards. Tried to take another, but there was nowhere to go. The whiteness shifted into tangibility with nary a seam, and appeared to be holding her prisoner.

“You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?” He walked around her, describing a half circle, navigating easily through the space that kept her hopelessly immobile. “You don't even know why I'm here.”

“It's a dream. It's just a gods-damn dream, and when I open my eyes, I am going to wake up, and this whole fucking mess will all be gone!”

When she opened her eyes again, he was inches away. He bared fangs. “Boo,” he hissed.

Her scream, rather than echoing, was sucked into an unseen void. It made her feel quite small.

“I suppose there's really no use trying to persuade you…” he said sadly. “You're from the lighter side of Twilight. I can see that now.”

And he smiled, a genteel smile that was so out of place in this context that it seemed almost obscene.

“I'm afraid I'm going to have destroy you.”

She instinctively covered her face with her hands as he rushed her, and something speared into her gut, and made it impossible to scream, or breathe, or even bleed—

And then, everything faded to black.

Chapter Eight

Rain was pouring outside, hitting the window with a sound like a snare drum. It wasn't nearly as bad as the tempest from several days ago, but it was still formidable. Water dripped from the trees, pooled in the streets, and coursed into the gutter in white-capped rivulets.

Catherine reached up to touch her throat, and found only smooth, unbroken skin.

Just a dream.

And yet…

And
yet…

That dream. That
dream
. Half-faerie tale, half-horror story. What had it been trying to tell her?

Run
, Prey supplied, scrabbling around her amygdala with tiny rodent feet.
Run! Run! Run!

You're not helping!
She snapped at it.

Beyond the glass, set against the dreary gray of the moody sky, the rolling hills on the horizon looked fantastically green. Catherine could imagine the fertile sanctuary that lay just beyond the secure fortress of the hills, curtained in trees, with only the sky as a ceiling. Her heart ached with loss, but remembering what had happened in the woods before dispersed some of the longing.