Hunted

by Meagan Spooner

  And then he rolled over, and she saw why.

  His form was human.

  Not entirely human—it was as if the aspect of the wolf was laid overtop him like a costume. And like a costume, it didn’t seem real. The ears and the teeth and the claws were but shadows. Yeva froze, staring down at his face with the knife clenched in her hand.

  She’d long known that the Beast had two natures, and that they fought within him. She’d seen him use his hands, seen him shift a little when she treated him with kindness, saw the humanity in his eyes when he was at his softest.

  He seemed to shift without thinking, without comment, and Yeva had wondered if it were possible he wasn’t aware of it, or if his outward appearance shifted as involuntarily as the beating of his own heart. The knife felt like lead in her hand.

  Do it, said the vengeful voice in her heart. Before he catches your scent and wakes. Now! He is your father’s murderer no matter what face he wears.

  Yeva lifted the knife.

  The Beast’s lips parted, his eyelids flickering. “Yeva,” he mumbled. “Beauty.”

  She froze. He was dreaming about her. She swallowed before she could stop herself, body flooding with every ounce of uncertainty she’d been pushing into the dark, unseen corners of her mind where she wouldn’t have to face it.

  She swallowed, and the Beast heard it, and his eyes opened.

  They met hers, still clouded with dreams, hazel-gold reflecting the firelight and holding no other hint of red. “Beauty,” he said again, more distinctly, and his mouth was human, and Yeva could not move. His mouth. She couldn’t look away.

  The Beast’s face cleared of sleep, and he blinked, and then he saw the knife. For an instant his eyes snapped back to Yeva’s, shock and confusion and hurt mixing together, and in that moment he was human, and Yeva saw it, that only his human aspect could register and respond to this kind of betrayal.

  She knew in another heartbeat he’d be the Beast again. And because she knew she’d die when he was, and because the animal instinct deep in her heart knew what to do, she struck.

  The knife stabbed deep into his throat, and hit bone, and Yeva gasped aloud as she jerked the knife sideways, trying to slice. It wasn’t quite sharp enough and it met with resistance, all the tissues and tendons in his neck fighting her. His gasp turned to a gurgle and to a whimper. And then the knife was out, and there was blood everywhere, blood on the rug and blood spattering the wardrobe. Blood spattered the pages of a book that had been left open by his bedside, as though he’d been reading just before he slept. Blood hissed and spat in the coals. Blood mixed with the tears Yeva suddenly found coursing down her cheeks and dripped, watery red and thin, onto her tunic.

  The Beast moaned again, and he was once more every inch the wolf, except that Yeva thought she heard a word in the horrible hissing gurgle: “Beauty.” Was it her name? Or was her heart searching for the word, somehow wanting to find it in that sighing death rattle?

  A final breath. And then he was still.

  Yeva dropped the knife, discovering that part of the moan echoing through the tower had been her own, and her voice petered out into a thin, reedy cry until she gulped for air. She staggered back and fell, landing on the plush carpet. The room spun as she lifted her hand to her face, and she inspected herself, because she could not be sure the Beast hadn’t struck her before he died.

  But she was whole.

  She gasped again, the sound emerging hesitantly, like her body needed to confirm the Beast was really dead and she was really alive, despite the evidence before her eyes. Yeva could not look at the body and so stared at the bloodstained book until its image was burned into her eyes. She waited for a sense of victory. Triumph. Elation. Anything.

  But she felt . . . nothing.

  No, that was wrong. As the room quieted and her heart settled and her mind slowly, slowly began to uncurl itself and reinhabit her body, she did feel something. Hear something. Very faint, but growing with every breath.

  Music. The song of magic.

  The Beast opened his eyes.

  Yeva cried out and scrambled backward until she hit the wall. The knife was out of reach, but she could not even think of it now. The Beast had been dead, she was sure of it, yet now she was staring at this impossible thing as it happened in front of her.

  The Beast’s gaping throat knit itself together neatly, as though she was watching a seam ripping in reverse. His lungs filled in one great, wet, rattling breath, and he coughed more blood onto the rug, and then he breathed again, and this time coughed pink foam, and then he lifted his head and, reeling as from a great blow, rolled onto the floor and onto his feet.

  He gave a muted roar, sounding almost more inconvenienced and befuddled than furious, and stumbled forward a step. Then his head, still moving haltingly as the bones and tendons in his neck repaired themselves, swung over until his eyes found Yeva.

  She could not even brace herself. She’d known he was magic, but this was sorcery beyond anything she could have imagined. This was nothing she could fight. She’d never felt so utterly helpless. The Beast would leap upon her soon and end it, and her terror was so real and so complete that she found herself praying that he would, and now, so that she would not have to feel this all-consuming fear an instant longer.

  “Do not be afraid,” he whispered, then fell over, sideways, and slumped to the floor.

  Yeva sat gasping, staring at the Beast. She did not imagine him speaking to her instead of simply tearing her apart, and she certainly had not expected his words to be . . . kind.

  She found her shoulder blades peeling from the wall. Her body seemed to move on its own, crawling on all fours closer to the Beast.

  He groaned, and lifted his head. His mouth was half open, panting like an animal who’s been too long in the sun and must cool itself—but these gasps were for breath, and Yeva knew there was still blood in his lungs, and that he’d fallen over from lack of air. “Do you think . . . ,” he said haltingly, stopping to pant, “I had not tried . . . to end my life . . . already?”

  Yeva could not speak, only stare at him numbly.

  “I suppose . . . ,” he wheezed, “it never occurred . . . to you.” He let his great head drop onto his paws, exhaustion closing his eyes.

  “What?” Yeva managed to whisper.

  “That I am a prisoner too. And have been far longer than you.”

  Yeva was suddenly, keenly, brutally aware of her body; of the muscles strained and screaming; of the pounding in her own head from too much air, hyperventilated; of the way blood stuck her fingers together, the way it had somehow gotten inside the leg of her trousers, and was sticking the back of her knee to itself when she crawled. Her eyes burned, and she didn’t know whether they held tears, or if some of the Beast’s blood had gotten into them.

  The Beast drew several long breaths, and each one slid a little bit more smoothly into his chest than the one before. “For a time—I do not know how much time—I tried everything I could think of. I threw myself from my tower. I opened my veins. I walked out into the cold and lay down in the snow and waited for the winter to take me, but it never did. I stopped eating, starved for months and waited to sleep and sleep and never stir again, but I woke every morning the same, emptiness within me. I begged Lamya, and the others, to kill me. But they also failed.”

  He stopped for another breath before opening his eyes to look at Yeva, a great sadness in them that cut through her shock, finally, and left her on the verge of weeping. “If I thought you would have succeeded I would have let you kill me that day in the forest, when you found your father, and followed me into my trap.”

  “Why?” Yeva trembled, her voice as raspy as if it had been her throat slashed. “Why forbid me to try to kill you, why threaten my family . . .” She swallowed. “Why lie?”

  “Because we know wanting. We know desire. We know need.”

  “Need . . .”

  “You needed to believe you had a purpose. You needed to believe t
hat you could kill me. You needed . . . hope.” The Beast watched her, the great sad eyes empty of all that rage, all that bestial ferocity that she’d seen that first day in the wood. “Now you understand that there is none.”

  They stared at each other across the bloodied rugs, the spattered pages of the book, the glinting, sticky knife. The coals in the hearth glowed steadily, and outside the winter wind sang through the mouths of the gargoyles and blew snow against the castle stones, and somewhere down below Doe-Eyes waited, ears pricked and eyes closed, for the sound of Yeva’s footsteps returning.

  “Tell me,” the Beast said softly. “If you had known, from the start, that I could not be killed, that you would never have your vengeance . . . would you have stayed?”

  Yeva didn’t answer. She could not answer. Her heart had emptied. Her desire for revenge had nowhere to go. Without it, what did she have? What was she? What had she become?

  But the Beast’s words had stung her, touching a buried current she’d been ignoring for days. For weeks. Ever since he’d brought her a deer and, over its carcass, had called her Beauty.

  “Beast,” she whispered, numb. “Did you kill my father?”

  His eyes flickered, the ghost of something passing before them so that for a moment he wasn’t looking at her anymore, but at some memory, some thought she could not see. He didn’t answer, but rose unsteadily to his feet. Before she knew what she was doing, Yeva stood as well and crossed to his side.

  The Beast froze. His gaze dropped from Yeva’s face to where her hand had come to press against his chest to keep him from leaving.

  She swallowed, abruptly aware of how infrequently she touched him, and forced herself to fight the instinct to withdraw. He moved as if to brush past her, but Yeva didn’t take her hand from his chest, and dug her fingers into the soft fur.

  “Let me go,” the Beast said quietly. Then, so soft she almost missed it: “Please.”

  “He was already dead, wasn’t he?” Yeva said. “When I came upon him in that clearing. You were coming to find him, to track the hunter you needed for your task, and you came upon his body moments before I did. The scavengers had gotten to him. He was already dead, wasn’t he?”

  The Beast shifted, the muscles stirring beneath her hand, reminding her that if the Beast truly wished to leave, he could brush her aside with an easy swat of his paw.

  He did not answer. There was no need.

  “Why take me?” Yeva asked.

  The Beast’s eyes closed, as if it might be easier to speak without Yeva’s face before them. “Because I thought hunters like your father would come after you if you disappeared. I thought I could take one of them for my task. I knew I had to find someone else, someone younger, but still possessing his skill. I did not know then that you . . .”

  The Beast’s breath hitched. Yeva could feel it under her hand, and the beat of his pulse, so very like the music she heard in the wood. For the first time she understood how the Beast could hear it as a heartbeat.

  “I did not know,” he began again, “that you were the one I’d been searching for.”

  Before she could respond he slipped past her. Yeva could hear his steps for once, halting as he continued to recover from the mortal wound she’d given him, fading down the long curved stair of the tower. She thought they sounded like the rhythm of two feet rather than the gallop of four.

  Nothing in her body was working, not her lungs nor her legs, and Yeva dropped to the floor with a feeling like knives in her chest. She began to sob so violently her body felt as if it might shatter. The fury that had sustained her, the burning need for revenge that had kept her alive in the cell, that had driven her in the wood to hone her archery and her tracking—what did she have now? Her fire had gone, and she felt its loss as keenly as if she were mourning a death.

  And she was. When her father’s death had been a murder, when he’d died because a savage Beast had ripped out his throat, she didn’t have to grieve. She could find his killer and destroy him, stand over him, watch him die. She could have shaken the very earth with her vengeance and filled the gaping hole in her heart with blood.

  She could have killed death itself.

  But all that was gone now. Instead her father had died an old man’s death, from a weakened heart and an unsound mind. He’d died cold and alone in a wood that he no longer knew. And there was no one who could pay for it, no one whose blood could dilute Yeva’s grief.

  She lay there on the floor, weeping into the blood-soaked rug, surrounded by the books her father would never read to her, the castle he would never see, the approaching spring that, for him, would never come. And as if by the same magic that had transformed the Beast, she became nothing more than a little girl who’d lost her father.

  BEAST

  The sound of her weeping follows us to the farthest reaches of the castle, even into our den below, back, back into the earth and the deep. We curse our animal’s hearing and we curse our man’s knowledge of what grief is and we curse the unfamiliar ache of regret that creeps ever deeper, ever deeper.

  We curse everything, for we are cursed, and we have no arms to shelter her and no lips to press to her hair and above all no words to tell her that we know loss and we know pain and if they were monsters we could fight we would have slain them in her name long ago like the heroes of old.

  But we are not a hero. We are cursed.

  SEVENTEEN

  EVENTUALLY YEVA’S WEEPING SLOWED, for though the lancing pain in her heart remained, her eyes could produce no more tears. She could not bring herself to stand, feeling as weak as if she’d been in bed for weeks—instead she crawled to the divan and slumped into its velvet cushions.

  She slept.

  Later she woke to a tiny sound, no louder than a whisper, but a sound she knew so well. A single footstep, the slip of paw pads against stone. The Beast was on the other side of the door. She waited, but he did not speak, and did not enter. After a time, she heard his footsteps retreating again, and she rose shakily to her feet. When she opened the door, she found food and a water skin and, wrapped in a roll of faded linen, her arrow-making supplies—and Doe-Eyes, having grown anxious waiting for her below, hoping to be allowed inside.

  And then she found she could still weep, for the Beast who knew she did not want company and gave her that solitude, for the Beast who could not know how badly she wanted him to speak with her, about anything other than her father, and nothing but her father. She wept because she did not know what she wanted, and because she wanted everything, and because her father was dead.

  She could not eat, so in time she slept again. This time hunger woke her, and Doe-Eyes’s nosing at her elbow. Yeva stumbled toward the bowl of stew the Beast had left for her. It was cold now when she uncovered it, but she ate it anyway, ate until she forced herself to stop so she could offer the rest of it to Doe-Eyes, who sat at her feet trying not to stare longingly at the food in Yeva’s hands.

  Yeva sank back down onto the divan to the sounds of Doe-Eyes noisily cleaning out the rest of the bowl. Her eyes fell once more upon that book, the one the Beast had been reading where he slept, the one whose pages were stained with his blood. Her mind felt numb with the truth.

  The Beast had not killed her father.

  She had no more reason to stay, for each time the Beast had repeated his threat to punish her family if she escaped, she had believed it less and less. Now, as she thought of the pain in his eyes as he finally told her the truth, she knew he would not harm them, as surely as she knew the rhythm of her own heartbeat. She could leave. She could walk now out the door and down the bridge and out of the valley and never look back. She could go home.

  As if the thought of them had summoned their spirits, Yeva felt the absence of her family so keenly, so abruptly, that she bent over at the waist and rested her head on her balled fists. She wanted Asenka, and her warm smile, and the feel of the wool between Yeva’s fingers as Asenka knit. She wanted Lena’s energy and spirit, and even her scold
ing, and could not help but imagine what she would say of Yeva’s appearance if she could see her now, bloodstained and thin. She wanted Albe’s fumbling attempts at kindness, his endearing grin, his devotion to the family that had raised him from childhood. She even wanted Solmir—the simplicity of him, how easy it would be to go with him back to the town to be his wife and ride horses through the trees and have servants to draw her baths, and books, and her sisters, and her dogs, and a life without magic and mysteries, and in that instant she knew she could do it. She could live that life. And just now she wanted it more than anything else.

  She left the high tower room. She descended the twisting spiral turret, and walked through the master bedroom suite and into the long corridor, and down the next staircase and into the foyer and down the wide marble steps onto the wide marble floor. She pushed against the broad doors until they opened enough to send her stumbling and gasping and blinking into the harsh glare of the sun and the snow. She went sliding and stumbling down the snow-covered slope until she stood at the mouth of the Beast’s cave, breathing hard, breath steaming the air, and sun-dazzled eyes conjuring wraiths out of the gloom to swim and twist beyond the edges of her vision.

  “Beauty.” The voice came from the depths of the cave, low and soft, velvet bass that echoed in the same place deep within her that heard the music of the magic wood.

  “Beast,” she answered, still breathing hard. “I must go.”

  Silence. She could not see him, only darkness, but she knew he could see her silhouette against the daylight at the mouth of the cave. Then, softly, his voice came again. “I know.”

  Yeva’s heart shrank. It would have been easier if he’d roared at her, if he’d knocked her to the ground, locked her up, given her reason to hate him again. It would have been easier if he’d been the Beast. She swallowed. “My family. They’re all alone. I have to go to them.”

  “You do not have to explain.”

  But I want to. Yeva stood, hands twisting in the fabric of her cloak, listening to Doe-Eyes pace around behind her, uncomfortable so close to the Beast’s den.