Granted by the Beast

by Hamilton, Rebecca; Kressley, Conner;

“I don’t want to argue with you Abram. I’m not the one who cares if you are a beast. You are. I’m trying to help you. Why won’t you just let me help you?”

  “If you want to help me, then be with me. Please, just be with me and let me do what I’m meant to do. I promised I would protect you, and I will.”

  Something rumbled in the room, and a voice echoed through the chamber. “I’m not sure how seriously I would take that promise.”

  I knew that voice. It was the same one that kept me up at night, and when it did allow me sleep, it was the same voice that haunted my dreams.

  But it couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. He was dead.

  And yet, the voice of my father continued. “Given that he gave the same promise to me. And we all know how well that turned out.”

  I jerked away from Abram’s touch and spun around. My father stood behind Abram, arms folded and staring at me with those eyes that I had come to both miss and vilify. My entire body went rigid. How was this happening?

  Well, that was a stupid question. I knew how it was happening. It was this magic, the one surrounding us, the one we were—even now—breathing in.

  My face must have been a horrible thing to behold, because Abram took my hand and squeezed it tightly.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  He knew. Somehow he knew the magic was showing me something.

  “My father,” I whispered, my voice sounding weak and small, the way it did when I was a child.

  My father moved around Abram, almost floating toward me with his lightness. It wasn’t like him, to move this way, to have a look on his face that screamed of mischievous glee. Or maybe it did. I hadn’t seen my father since I was a kid, and even the man I knew then was a lie. That much was obvious.

  Why was I even thinking this way? My father loved me. Abram being here was proof of that. Why was I forgetting everything I had learned about the man?

  “You need to run, Charisse. You can’t trust this thing.” My father looked Abram over with disgust darkening his eyes. “He’ll use you up, even more than he already has. He’ll destroy you. He lies. Everything he says is a lie.”

  My father moved closer, and my entire body trembled. “But that’s what you like, isn’t it? That’s what you want from your men.” He shook his head. “Is that what I did to you? Did I ruin my little girl?”

  “What?” I balked, backing away. “Of course not.”

  Abram’s hand squeezed mine. “It’s not real, Charisse. It comes from the curse, and the curse wants me to suffer. It doesn’t want to be broken.”

  Abram’s comforting grip did little to steady me. All I could see was my father’s eyes, weighing me, judging me, finding me lacking. And all of this to keep some curse going. But how would me suffering keep the century-old punishment that Satina leveled onto him running strong?

  “You need to run, Charisse!” My father’s voice was panicked now.

  No. Not my father. I leaned in toward the apparition.

  “Go away,” I said firmly. “You’re not gonna win this one.”

  “Get away from this monster!” my ‘father’ demanded, a cloud of anger storming across his face. His face twisted and darkened, and his eyes disappeared as he bent disgustingly into a dark shadowy creature. It was the magic. It was the curse. “I’ve healed your wounds so you can run, not so you could stand here staring like a fool! Now go away and leave him to suffer on his own!”

  It was greedy, this curse. It wanted to strip away all light from Abram’s life, as though it fed on the darkness, as though it needed it to survive.

  “It’s me, isn’t it?” I asked, turning to Abram and connecting the puzzle pieces. All the strange things Satina said, the way she looked at me…and now the way this room was attacking my devotion to Abram. It all made sense now. “I can break the curse, can’t I?”

  “Don’t ask me that,” Abram said, unable to see what had just transpired in front of me.

  “You have to tell me the truth.” I took his unshaven face in my hands. “You have to trust me, too, you know.”

  He stared at me, parting his lips and then closing them again.

  “Abram! I mean it!”

  “You can, in a sense…” he said, closing his eyes. “When Satina placed the curse on me, she did so because she realized I didn’t love her. She said I wasn’t capable of love. She said if I could love someone, really love someone, and have that love returned, then the curse would be broken.”

  “Oh, God,” I murmured, stroking his face. “I do,” I said, shaking my head. My eyes welled up with tears. “I do love you.” And it was the truth. I knew it as clearly as I knew Betsy Johnson’s Spring 2002 Collection. “I love you, Abram.”

  But then a sickening realization came to me. I did love him. I had loved him for a long time now. But he was still this monster, still this beast. And that could only mean one thing.

  “You don’t love me…” I muttered.

  It wasn’t a question. My heart sank so hard and fast I felt it slam into my toes. I stepped back, almost stumbling. It couldn’t be. The rules of the curse only left room for one answer.

  “Charisse…” He stared at me apologetically. “I can’t—”

  But I didn’t want an apology. What good would it do? What he’d said leveled more pain than all the punches Dalton had thrown at me.

  “Charisse, you don’t under—”

  “Don’t bother,” the shadow magic said. Judging from Abram’s reaction, the way he stiffened and clenched, he could now see it, too. “I’ve tired of you, and I’ve tired of this.” The magic raised something that looked like a misshapen hand. “And this is what I’m doing about it.”

  Chapter 29

  Within moments, we found out exactly what the shadow magic intended to do. The light in the room burst in a thousand little echoes of darkness, and the cool of the room was replaced with immediate intense heat.

  We were no longer untouchable. The fire was coming for us, and so was the mob. I could hear it in the screams and bangs that were now evident outside the club’s entrance.

  The door to the room that had once been a force now lay in shambles on the floor, a victim of the curse’s fickle temperament.

  “Get behind me,” Abram growled, but before I could move, he thrust me against his back. His skin was warm and, even pressed against the wrong end, I could feel his heart racing like a jackhammer.

  The stomping and banging and chanting of the mob grew louder. Could I even blame them at this point? They thought they were putting an end to the danger that had been tormenting their town for months now. They were out to a kill a murderer, a monster.

  “We need to run,” I murmured.

  Abram nodded, but he didn’t move. His gaze swept down the hall, and I knew he could see the same thing I could. We needed to run, yes. But there was no place to run to. We were cornered. And the club’s front door was splintering inward. It wouldn’t be long before—

  The door caved, and the first of the mob poured in. Five, ten, twenty. It seemed the entire town was after us, all rushing in toward this small, sacred, and (until now) secret room. Everyone but Dalton. He was mysteriously absent in the midst of the fervor he had been so busy whipping up.

  Abram held one arm out in front of him while the other circled my bicep. He stepped back, leading me into the doorless room, then turned to me and held his finger to his lips. I chewed on the inside of my cheek, shaking my head and holding back a whimper. What good was this? It wouldn’t be long before they found us. All he was doing was buying time.

  As though sensing my distress, he slipped his hand down to mine, wrapping his fingers around my palm possessively. His touch steadied me. The even nature his breathing brought an ounce of comfort to an otherwise unbearable situation, though I still couldn’t explain why. He didn’t love me. It had been magically incontestable, deemed truth by the highest and most unexplainable of vouchers.

  And yet, I still sensed something was wrong about that. Looking a
t his hand, still human as it entwined with mine, I could not help but wonder how he was resisting the pull of the moon that should have changed him into a beast by now. If love wasn’t the driving force for his resistance, then what was?

  “Hey,” a young man yelled. “There’s some rooms down here!”

  My whole body stiffened, bracing for the inevitable—not even sure what the inevitable was. Soon the young man was in the doorway, staring us down. He trembled, though, not so brave when faced with Abram…not until the others were at his back.

  Dozens of people clogged the hallway, and some of the bigger men of the town forced their way to the front. My heart dropped as I recognized some of the faces in the crowd. Faces I grew up with.

  Mrs. Adler, who had tended my cut that time I scraped my knee following Lulu on our brand new roller blades, was nearly foaming at the mouth with a pick axe in her hand. She had been so gentle then, so kind as she washed and bandaged my leg. Seeing the fear and anger in her eyes now was almost surreal.

  And there was Douglas Feathersby—my first kiss. He gave me a nickel under Hopkin’s Bridge and planted a wet one right on my lips. He told me he would always love me. I probably shouldn’t have expected him to keep his word, given that we were seven and all. Of course, I also never would have imaged a reality where he was running toward me with a pitchfork.

  But now that they had us cornered, it seemed everything slowed down. Each man and woman assessing the best way to kill the beast—or rather, the man with the beast within him.

  “Char,” Douglas said, “get away from him.” He reached his hand out to me, as though I would go running to his protection, as if the mob were here to save me. Maybe they were. “Hurry, before it’s too late!”

  I took a step back, shaking my head. If I left Abram’s side, he was as good as dead. If I stayed here, eventually they would go after Abram anyway, and they would kill us both. But this was buying us time.

  “I don’t want to kill them,” Abram said to me quietly. He hadn’t so much as flinched this entire time.

  “Then don’t,” I said.

  And I meant it. These people didn’t know what they were doing. They were pawns, just like me—chess pieces in a game none of us understood. Killing them would be as useless as wearing socks with designer heels.

  But as the first man lunged at Abram, swiping a torch in a large arc meant to set him on fire, I didn’t know what to want anymore. If Abram didn’t fight back, they would kill him. If he did, these men and women would die—none of them bad people, just misled and afraid.

  Abram pounced, even in his human form so clearly animalistic with his grace and fluidity. But before he landed, the pull of the moon finally had its way with him. His hands twisted into something sharper as he reared back.

  I flinched for what would be bloody impact. But instead of shredding the townsfolk, Abram’s claw drug across the light fixture, blanketing the room in darkness.

  I felt hands grab at me hard. I struggled against them, sure that Douglas Feathersby was either going to drag me away or demand his nickel back. But then I felt a breath on my neck, and I knew it was Abram.

  His now much hairier, beastly arms pushed me westward and the last thing I saw was the glint of shattering glass against my face.

  I spun around to throw my arms around Abram’s neck as a rush of cool invaded my nostrils and filled my lungs. He swept me around onto his back as we flew through the air, falling toward the hard concrete of Main Street.

  But I wasn’t afraid. Abram was with me and, our current predicament aside, I knew enough to know that my best shot was in his arms—or in this case, on his back.

  “I’ve got you,” he called over his shoulder to me as the ground rushed up to greet us. “I’ve always got you.”

  His feet hit hard against the ground, but he didn’t falter. I slid down from his back, and he turned to face me, once again a man. He was really fighting the beast thing, and while he wasn’t entirely successful, I was impressed.

  “Are you all right, Charisse?” he murmured, brushing the stray hairs from my face.

  “We have to hurry,” I said breathlessly. Of course I wasn’t all right. I was running for my life—running away from people I grew up with. “They’re still coming.”

  Looking behind us, I saw that the moon window, the window he had just jumped through, was still intact. But how could that be? I felt it shatter against my skin. I heard the crunch as Abram’s boot landed against shards of it. Now it was there again, the red moon almost completely colored in.

  “The window…” I said.

  “I know,” Abram answered, already a man again. In one swift motion, he threw me over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t be much of a curse if all it took was a couple of warm bodies to break it.”

  As he sprinted forward, a cold gust of wind cascaded over my back. He was moving too fast for me to tell where we were heading. All I knew was that the sounds of the mob, as well as the lights of Main Street, were fading away quickly.

  He skidded to a stop. Leaves rustled around us. After he helped me slide off of his back again, I saw we were back in the woods, only feet away from the old house.

  It was strange how much time we had spent in these woods together. Along with the Castle, it sort of felt like ‘our place’…aside from how we almost got ourselves killed every time we came here.

  “What is it?” I asked, spying the way he grabbed his shoulder.

  “It’s nothing,” he answered. “I just need a moment.”

  I brushed his hand away, revealing his shoulder as a mess of red gashes, and I gasped. “My God! Look at all that blood!”

  “One of them nicked me with something. I’ll be fine. Self-healing, remember?” His face shifted, nearly changing back into that of the beast. His mouth closed hard, and he reverted to his old (and quite stunning) features. “We need to move.”

  “To where?”

  “Inside,” he said, nodding toward the house, the hand of his good arm clutching his wound once more. “I’ve set up some fail safes, just in case something like this happened.

  “But you won’t be you,” I answered, grazing his arm with my fingers. “How much longer can you keep the beast at bay?”

  “Not as long as I need to.” He grimaced. “I think I’m out of time.”

  And the way he said that, the finality of it, sparked something inside of me. I narrowed my eyes at him. “What do you mean by that?”

  He brushed past me to head toward the house, growling under his breath. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

  “Hell no!” I said, grabbing his arm and spinning him back toward me. “I’m about ten miles past ready to hear that, Abram.” My hand tightened around his arm. “You’re gonna be straight with me. You’re gonna stop treating me with kid gloves. Or this is where you and me part ways. Got it?”

  He glared at me. “That would be a death sentence for you, Char.”

  I tilted my chin up. “Like you care.”

  The expression in his face was so pained it felt like razors in my own heart. “I do,” he said, his voice shifting lower. “Damn it, Charisse. You’re making this harder than it already is.”

  “It’s the damn moon,” he said finally. “And what I did to it.”

  “What did you do to it, Abram?” I asked.

  “Magic is about balance and energy. When Satina was on the other side, keeping the curse fed wasn’t an issue. There’s unlimited energy in the afterlife. But when I brought her back, all that changed. The curse began to sputter out. With Satina cut off from the energy that powered it, the curse began a sort of countdown. And, because that’s what she tied it to, the next full moon became the anchor for it.”

  “Speak English,” I said with a growl of my own. “And do it quickly. I doubt Dalton and his mob are going to take long to figure out we came back here.”

  “The reason the moon on the window phased into waxing is because I brought Satina back. With every moon, we took one step closer
to stripping all the magic from the curse.”

  “That’s a good thing,” I said. “It’s almost colored in now. Your curse will end. So what’s the issue?”

  “Yes, the moon is almost colored in now,” Abram conceded, but he didn’t have the same joy I had. “This is the last night. This is the last moon of the curse that’s plagued me for over a hundred years.”

  “That’s great,” I answered. What was his problem? Was this like Stockholm syndrome? “You can be a man again. You can have another chance. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “More than anything,” he answered. “Well, more than almost anything. But I don’t think you understand, Char. I never broke the curse. The curse isn’t breaking…its ending.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, my eyebrows pulling together. “What’s the difference? What does that mean?”

  He looked past me, to the sky above, to the moon with only but a sliver away from complete. “When the moon is full, Charisse, I will remain a beast. Forever.”

  Chapter 30

  Abram’s words literally clanged against my ears, screeching like nails against a chalkboard. Instantly, they exhausted me. It seemed it would never end, the constant twists and turns of fate. Every revelation seemed to dig us deeper into this hopeless pit. And this was no different.

  We were hours away from sunrise, hours away from his curse becoming a permanent, unbreakable thing. And I could do nothing to save him.

  He had to love and be loved in return. How does one accomplish that in the span of a single night?

  Hurt engraved itself into my heart. The truth was, I did love Abram. I loved him more than I had every loved anyone in that way. And he…just didn’t feel the same way.

  It was then that a sickening truth leveled itself onto me. Is that why Abram had gotten so close to me? Had he wormed his way into my heart hoping that I might be the person he could fall in love with? Had he used me in some halfhearted attempt to break an age-old curse? And, worse than that, had he found me lacking?

  Still, it wasn’t as though I could fault him for his feelings, or for trying to love me, or for wanting to break his curse.