Among Monsters

by Quinn Blackbird

  For a moment there, he offered me a bud of hope. And then he pulverised it in his strong grip. Now, the chances of me not being his mate have slimmed to the size of a calling card’s width.

  But his theory gives me pause for another thought—

  Is Silver drawn to me because of this false blood that runs through my veins?

  Now that I think on it, when I pleaded with him for his aid in the opium den’s basement, he denied me at first. It was only after I took my remedy—after he sniffed the phial—that he agreed to help me.

  The realisation is accompanied by a terrible ache in my chest.

  Silver isn’t drawn to me.

  He is drawn to the aniel whose blood was in my remedies.

  This explains it all. His hot and cold temperament with me, the sudden surges of lust that spark between us and brings his mouth to mine, the way he snuck into the tent to hold my body against his, and yet the way he so easily cuts down any hopes there might be of us becoming something, of him caring for me in time.

  He must know that he is drawn to the aniel blood within me. He is smart enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together, when he had all the pieces and I had none.

  “I did not expect you to look so crestfallen.” Koal misreads the horror slackening my face. “Should you not be squealing with joy, like any other silly vilas? You might have just escaped an eternity with me.”

  I have a horrible urge to explain myself to him, to tell someone—anyone—about the wretched hollowness that scoops into my chest and the watery feeling deep in my gut. But of course, that is ridiculous, and so I clamp my mouth shut instead.

  “I just had a thought, is all.”

  I shake my head and look down at my lap. In this dream, I wear the same dress as what adorns me in the Wild Woods. The once-lovely blue material is ragged now. Mud stains streak over it and it wears the tears and rips of the battle against the shape-shifting creature.

  Koal’s voice is like ice; “In your thoughts, do you consider those you left behind to run off with your aniel?”

  I lift a frown to him. “Of course I do. I am not a monster.” Unlike you.

  “Humour me,” he starts and shifts on the window sill to better face me. “What thoughts do you have of your dying mother?”

  My jaw clenches. “My mother is none of your concern.”

  “On the contrary,” he says, “your mother is all I have in my weaponry.”

  I lunge from the bed, eyes wild. “You so much as touch her and—”

  “Oh, I already have. This very morning, duty called me. Your mother awaited passage to the Underworld.”

  My heart stops.

  I stand there, gawking at him, at the severity of his face and black pools that he calls eyes.

  “Wh-what?” I can’t seem to catch my breath, it’s all whispers and hoarseness that cling to my tone.

  “She passed,” he tells me, his tone as tedious as the way he regards me. “If you were with me, I might have let you see her before I deposited her soul into the Eternal River.”

  I blink at him. Slowly, a shake starts to move my head. “No,” I whisper. “No, it’s not true. It’s a trick—you just want me to return, and this is your wicked way of luring me back.”

  He tilts his head to the side. Then, as slow as the moon rises up in the sky, a dark smile creeps onto his lips. “She died alone,” he says, twisting the knife he’s already plunged into my heart. “And when I escorted her to the Underworld, she asked of one person—she asked of you.”

  A grimace twists my face. “You’re lying.”

  Koal slides off the window sill. He advances on me lazily.

  I back up until my knees hit the edge of my bed and I’m forced to sink back onto the mattress. I glare up at him.

  Koal reaches a slender hand to my cheek. He touches my face with the ghost of tenderness. “Until you return, you might never know if I speak the truth or not. And that is the weight of your selfishness. Carry it with you.”

  His tanned skin starts to break away, like ash flittering on the breeze. The dream dismantles around me, chunk by chunk, until the entirety of my surroundings are drifting away from me and I’m left in total darkness.

  Alone.

  11.

  The flap of the tent wakes me.

  I stir on the blankets and, with sleep lowering my lashes over my sight, peer over the cross of my arms. Around me, the material of the tent flips up and starts to peel away.

  Silver is packing up the camp. And this is my wake-up call.

  I push up from the blankets as the tent is fully lifted away from me in a cascading black billow. Silver, not looking at me, rests the material on the path and starts to fold it precisely.

  I turn away from him so that, in case he decides to throw me so much as a glance, he won’t see the crumpling of my face.

  Though it feels like morning, I see that not much—if anything—has changed in the Wild Woods.

  The light is still sparse, illuminated only by the stars and the moon, and the twilight hue clings to the air that surrounds us. The bushes still gleam with that inky darkness, interrupted by the white spots of flowers that grow on them.

  I stretch my arms above my head. A squeaky yawn shudders through me, as satisfying as peeling a wax seal off a letter.

  I let my arms drop to my sides.

  Silver finally speaks behind me; “If you have to relieve yourself, hold it,” he says, flattening the folded tent with his palms and knees. “We have no chamber pot, and you cannot leave the Never-ending Path.”

  I give a hmph of acknowledgement and, thankfully, my insides aren’t twisting with the need for relief. I think I can hold it for now, but certainly not all day long.

  Without the tent to cover me, I flop back down on the blankets, the urge to curl up and drift back to sleep gnawing at me.

  Silver doesn't allow it. I’m still on the blankets when he snatches the edges of them and tugs, hard. I jolt on them and throw a scathing look up at him. His gaze is like thunder clouds.

  “You have rested enough,” he decides for me.

  My face crumples with a moody scowl before I roll off the blankets. He swipes them clean away, then lies them out over the stone path, like he did with the tent.

  I watch with narrowed eyes as he starts to fold them.

  It doesn't feel as though I have been gone from home for very long, yet already I am missing it more and more. It’s the little things—the warmth of my bed that I don’t have to leave until after breakfast, the tarnished tray of teas and sandwiches that the servant brings me in the morning, the unspoken agreement that I can be extra lazy because of my sickness, with my duties entirely consisting of the balls, the temple, and sourcing out remedies.

  And then, it all floods back to me, like violent waves rolling in from the sea.

  The dream.

  Mother could be dead, though Koal quite possibly could be lying. I might not be his mate, and that could be my key to freedom. Silver doesn't want me—he wants the aniel whose blood runs through me.

  I am the shore, being pounded, wave after wave, and I don’t know which thought to wrestle first, they come in such tangled knots.

  I start with Mother. She should be my first thought, even if I doubt Koal’s honesty. It’s a perfect trap to set out for me. If I really believed she died, then I would want to race home for the ceremonies. I would want to be there as her body is laid to rest in the graveyard. But I know better than to trust a Daemon who thinks he has some claim to me.

  I twist around to face Silver. He packs up the folded tent and blankets into his suspiciously small satchel.

  “Koal was in my dream again,” I tell him.

  In answer, he buckles up his satchel.

  “He said my mother has died,” I add.

  He pauses, fingers lingering over the buckles. Then he looks over his shoulder at me, his face an impassive mask that is so unnerving that I even begin to doubt the truth of what happened last night. Surely he—this anie
l who regards me with so much distance and dispassion—wouldn’t sneak into the tent while I slept and hold my body to his, and whisper a kiss over my temple.

  “He could be lying, right?” I urge, desperately needing him to pacify me.

  His mouth thins into a thoughtful line. “Daemons usually have little need to lie,” he says, as though he’s pondering aloud. “But this isn't a usual situation. So few mates evade their Daemons that it’s quite likely he would resort to other measures.” He nods curtly. “Yes, I would decide he is being dishonest.”

  A breath ribbons out of me and, as it goes, I feel my muscles unwind throughout me.

  Silver adds, “He cannot sense or track you. That must be vexing for someone of his kind. He will do whatever it takes to have you return home. Daemons are not above dishonesty.”

  He pushes up from the path and strides to the glowing embers, the remains of the fire that burned there hours ago. With his mud-stained boot, he stomps out the embers.

  Though he has assured one of my worries, there are others to contend with. Now that the concern of my mother can be pushed aside, I’m faced with the trouble of Silver and the foreign blood in my veins.

  There is so much spiralling around my mind that I can hardly make sense of one problem at a time. This remedy that still lingers inside of me has kept me alive, but at what cost? It very well could be the catalyst for a Daemon claiming me as his mate and trying to steal me off to the Underworld.

  And beyond that, it is the reason Silver decided to help me—it was only after he smelled the phial and I took my remedy that he chose to accept my pleas for help, even when it meant putting himself at risk. Now, he must face the dangers of the Wild Woods with me, and evade the Daemon who definitely strikes me as the type to seek out revenge.

  All of that, for what? Because Silver might feel something for the aniel whose blood I’ve borrowed?

  No, he wanted something in return for helping me. And I’ll bet that, whatever it is, it has something to do with the remedy-blood.

  With fresh suspicion narrowing my eyes, I watch Silver tug the straps over his shoulder and adjust the bags resting against his hip. The camp is packed up, fire doused, and the only thing that isn’t ready to go is me, all crumpled on the crimson path.

  He looks down at me, impatience glinting in his almond-shaped eyes. His mouth is pulled into a taut line, and I know it’s time to go.

  I snatch the water flask from the stones and hoist the cord over my head. It smacks against my hip as I push up and straighten out my wrinkled, dirty skirt.

  Silver says nothing as he turns and walks up the path. It climbs in a winding direction uphill, to a peak beyond the field of black bushes.

  I follow him in silence.

  No sounds break the still air that swallows us. No rustles of the trees or shivers of the bushes. Even our bootsteps on the flattened crimson stones are completely inaudible, as though the Wild Woods has decided we do not exist now that we are on the Never-ending Path, and it has chosen to vanish us.

  Silver pauses only when we reach the peak of the hill. He lights a cigarette that he fished from his shirt pocket, and an ashen cloud is quick to envelope him.

  Behind us, inky black bushes rain down the hill, the flowers mere white specks in the distance, and before us, a quiet waterfall runs down our right, and a line of tall, crooked trees to our left. These trees are unlike the willows. Their branches are stark white, like marble pillars in Worship Street, and their leafy hats silently sway with flickers of blue, the kind that adventurers dig out in sapphire stones from deep caverns around Scocie’s shore.

  Silver leads the way downhill, vapours of smoke billowing behind him like grey ribbons unwinding.

  As we go, I watch the silently falling waterfall some paces away to our right. We are close enough that a gentle mist swarms the air and dampens loose tendrils of hair to my temples, and wets my mouth with a glisten. The water glitters like pulverised diamonds raining down on the magickal wood.

  And as we come to the bottom of the hill, I can faintly make out through the spindled white-trunked trees that the grass there is a deep shade of red, so dark that it’s almost brown, and the pond that the waterfall rains down on glistens almost innocently at me from the path.

  Silver glances at me over his shoulder. Then, looking ahead, he tells me, “That’s the Hole of Health.”

  I shuffle to catch up with his pace. With his long legs, one stride to him is like two and a bit to me.

  “What’s that?” I probe, desperate to relieve my mind of the thoughts that have haunted me since we left camp.

  “It’s different to everyone,” he says. “To the old God, Syfon, it was his death. He fell into the pool, and it kept him there, his power preserved.”

  Baffled, I blink at his back.

  I’ve known all of my life that Syfon is a dead God. One of the three who ever dared to die, when the death of them is meant to be the only impossible in a world full of possibles.

  Now, it makes sense. How else could a God die if not by the very Woods that created the firsts of them?

  “If you were to ask Princess Monster,” Silver goes on, and flicks a chunk of ash off the path, “she would tell you that the Hole of Health is the place where all magick is born. It is where she found her true, full power and emerged as a God in her own right.”

  My heart hammers a little harder. “She wasn’t made by the Wild Woods? You said she found her power here, but she was alive before that?”

  “She was born a God.” His tone is clipped. “But she truly became one—with fearsome power—in that waterfall. When the water there preserved Syfon, it was keeping him for her.”

  I frown and catch up to his side. I look up at his profile, all stony masks and unreadable eyes. “What, the waterfall knew she would come to it one day?”

  “Of course.” He cuts an icy glance at me. “The Wild Woods always know.”

  My voice is small; “Everything?”

  He stares ahead and takes a long, dawn-out inhale of his black cigarette. The thin paper burns. “It knows all—past, present, future, and paths not taken. This, Kee, is the heart of our world and everything that lies beyond it.”

  “Oh,” is all I manage, a whispered sound of wonder.

  We pass the Hole of Health as the path winds far left and leads us through the thicket of the trees with gleaming blue overheads. He flicks the cigarette into a puddle off-path where it fizzles out.

  Silence drapes back over us, but at least now, our boots can be heard flattening over the path. Well, Silver’s pad a quiet sound, like the whisper of an assassin sweeping up behind a target, whereas mine shuffle and scuff more than anything.

  Deep in the trees, with nothing else in sight but white trunks and grass, Silver stops to feed me some of his blood. Just like last time, he bites into the meat of his palm, then I force myself to glug down as much of the foul stuff as I can before queasy waves start to roll over me.

  I push through the nausea and shadow him along the path for hours.

  And nothing happens.

  No Sisters to spring out at us, no more deadly shape-shifting creatures or magickal waterfalls or even clearings to break through the thicket of the trees. And I start to wonder that, if the Wild Woods knows all, perhaps it’s already decided that my quest is a foolish one that will fail, and there is no point in even humouring me in my mission for freedom. Perhaps Koal will find me here, and the Woods have foreseen that, or my sickness won’t be subdued by Silver’s blood and I’ll collapse, dead, on the cobblestone before I can reach the Originals.

  It’s just when the worry starts to tighten my muscles and freeze my bones to icicles that I spot something beyond the trees. A cabin, it seems, built from white wood and surrounded by ivory blades of luscious grass. A white-picket fence circles it and, the farther we trek up the path, the clearer I can make out the shadow moving out front of the cabin.

  The sight of her stops me dead in my tracks.

  Silver pau
ses ahead and, with a glance back at me, wears the creases of a frown. He traces my gaze to between the thin, twisted trees, then looks back at me again.

  “What do you see?” His voice is a low, deadly sound.

  Slowly, I raise my hand and point with a trembling finger ahead. Right between the trees that seem to twist away from a small clearing. Where she is.

  My heart crawls up into my throat with a sickly, bile feeling. I watch her bend over a raised bed of vegetables. With a serene look slackening her familiar heart-shaped face, she rains water over a bundle of cabbage-flowers with a tin can.

  At first, I thought I was seeing Olivia through the trees. But the woman’s loose hair falls in lazy waves, and the pallor of her skin speaks to never having seen the sunlight; and where Olivia’s eyes are raw emeralds carved out from caves, this woman wears amber-flecked irises that gleam bright enough to cut through the distance between us.

  The woman in the garden of the cabin is not Olivia. It’s me.

  Well, almost me. But not quite. There are no dark circles around her vibrant eyes, her cheeks wear a healthy flush to them. As though she keeps well-fed and carries no sickness in her, the ordinary beige dress she wears hugs full hips and her bosom practically spills over the loosely-fastened corset.

  Silver comes to my side in two swift strides. He stands from my angle and looks through the trees. The frown is still etched into his marble-like face.

  “You don’t see her?” The whisper of my voice is all caught in my rapid, throbbing heartbeat and the trembles that cling to my body. “Over there, at the cabin.”

  Silver is quiet for a moment. “I see no cabin.”

  The other me looks up from the vegetable bed. Her gaze catches mine and, slowly, a small smile sweeps over her face. She straightens up, sets the watering can down, and waves at me.