“You say the hag showed him the woman?” Jacques asks.
“For all I know, it was a hallucination.”
“But what if it wasn’t?” Jacques says eagerly. “Surely she wouldn’t have appeared without reason. It must mean something. She must be close by. If we could just—”
The Beast laughs. “It’s been almost three hundred years, Jacques. How much longer will you cling to your hope before you realize it’s nothing but an illusion? This is it. This is what our lives will be like for all of eternity.”
“There is always a way out of a difficult situation.”
“Absolutely,” he says. “And it’s quite easy. Go and fetch one of the villagers here and watch how quickly he’ll find something to skewer me with. Go on, what are you waiting for? Only someone unaffected by the curse can break it, so the solution should be obvious.” He shudders as he says the words. His death would break the curse, true, but it would also kill the woman. That surety is there whether he wants to believe it or not. Bastien believes it and that taints the Beast’s own perception.
“We don’t know what it would do to the rest of us. It might kill us all if you were to die.”
Apparently, this is something Jacques has considered before.
“Haven’t you lived long enough?” The Beast sounds weary saying it.
“I have existed far too long,” Jacques agrees. “But it is a state not to be confused with living.
None of us have been living these three centuries. We haven’t changed, aged, grown up, had children, or died. That, Master, is not life. And, while I would be most content to... cease, I would not presume to make that choice for the others. Would you?”
He leaves before the Beast can think of anything to say.
The library is in the middle of repairs, all the books neatly packed out of harm’s way. With nothing to do, the Beast strolls aimlessly through his castle. He knows each stone, each tapestry and every painting by heart. While the west wing where he resides is bursting with life, the east wing is dusty and abandoned; there is no one to use these rooms anymore. The Beast himself hardly ever has reason to venture here.
Some faint fragment of a memory takes him to one of the south-facing rooms. The door is stuck from disuse and everything inside is covered with white sheets. A balcony, easily twice as large as his own, opens off the south wall. Glass doors let in all the best light and frame a magnificent view of the forests and mountains.
This used to be Bastien’s studio. In the absence of his parents to oversee his education, Jacques hired tutors and prescribed a wide range of subjects for the young prince to study. Art used to be one of his favorites.
The Beast tugs on a white sheet and it slides off an easel. Another reveals a table laden with dried, cracked paints. In the corner is a stack of canvases, darkened with age, but still usable. The Beast mounts one on the easel. His paw is too big to hold a delicate brush, but he can just manage to grasp a piece of coal.
He draws a curve, then another, and another, until a shape begins to appear. It’s rough, clumsy. He knows he can do better. Setting the canvas aside, he takes another and starts over. A face appears, the curve of one shoulder, but the features elude him.
Another canvas replaces that one. He takes his time, conjures his subject in his thoughts as vividly as he can before he traces what he sees in his mind’s eye onto the canvas. Yes, that’s it.
The blank space fills with an outline, then shading. It’s imperfect. Black and gray could never hope to capture what he is trying to draw.
Frustrated, he reaches for the final canvas. There won’t be any more chances unless he sends his driver to the fairs. Eyeing the dried paints and rotted bushes, the Beast drops the piece of coal and bounds out of the east wing, shouting for Jacques. “Canvas,” he tells the startled butler. “As much of it as you can find. And paints and brushes, the best money can buy. Quickly! Before the merchants leave.”
He waits around only long enough to make certain his orders are being followed and then returns to the studio and the coal.
It’s harder now, he is unsure of his dexterity. Only the lightest of strokes will do, and his heavy paw almost crushes the coal to dust in an effort to keep the lines as delicate as possible.
His concentration is so absolute he almost doesn’t notice when Bastien rouses within him. His human side can see the subject on the square of canvas as easily as the Beast.
Bastien moves the Beast’s hand over the surface, slowly tracing her eyes and nose. The waves of her hair cascade in a graceful fall around her face, caressing the line of her throat. The mouth takes them the longest. It’s soft when the coal would have it appear hard. The lower lip is fuller than the upper, lush and enticing. She is smiling just a little, with just a hint of a secret tucked into the corners of her mouth as she looks over her bare shoulder at something to Beast’s left.
It’s her...
Chapter Twenty-four
The moment I awaken I root beneath my pillow for the hidden key. Sweet little Jocelyn. She hid it so well not even the Beast could find it. I’ve been saving this for something special.
Something well worth the punishment it will incur when I unlock these shackles.
The chains that bind me fall away and I am free for the first time in centuries. There is a pair of pants set out on the chair. I dress with haste and exit my chambers. The guards shout a warning, but I ignore them and run straight to the east wing. It’s still my goddamned castle and I can go wherever the hell I please.
They give chase and rouse half the damn staff with their yelling for no good reason. I let them catch me at the studio door. They are winded and out of sorts, easy to defeat, if I should decide to do so. I don’t, and after a few minutes of the three of us just standing there while a crowd of gawkers gathers, I shake them loose. “Stay outside,” I growl, thoroughly annoyed at how long it takes them to collect their jaws off the floor and release me. I close the door in their stunned faces.
The Beast has been busy in my absence. The studio is a mess of splattered paints and canvases ruined by his heavy paw. He’s kept all of them, carefully stacked all around like the makings of some holy shrine to his talent—or lack thereof. I root around in the stacks for the one I want. There are three relatively salvageable scrawls among these. In one, she is seated regal as a queen on the settee in the library. In another, she is standing in the garden, her eyes closed as she smells a rose bloom. In the third, she is asleep in my bed, her hair spread out on my pillow, her hand slightly curled by her face.
I want none of them. These are the Beast’s fantasies, not mine.
The one I seek is just by the door, half hidden by a drawing of a rag doll and a canvas accidentally punched out of its frame. I pull it out carefully and set it on the easel. It took more concentration than I thought possible to make the Beast set this one aside before he ruined it.
This is her, my Strength, the way she ought to look always. The Beast traced her hair adequately, the long waves flowing over her back, baring one shoulder. I trace the line of her lips with my fingertips, brush the rise of her cheek, her temple. She is perfect. Sensual and innocent, strong yet delicate.
I stare at her for a long time, not trusting myself to pick up a paint brush and ruin the near divinity of her face. Eventually I realize the night is passing me by and soon the Beast will rise again to take her away from me. I could hate him just for that. His drawings are stick figures compared to the masterpiece I intend to finish. I can see her coming alive for me and my hand reaches for a brush.
I paint with measured haste, conscious of the time and what little I have left, as well as the delicacy of the task before me. A single careless stroke could ruin her. Very soon her skin begins to take on the tone of warmth and seduction. I paint her lips a teasing pink, and her eyes the purest blue I can emulate.
There’s not enough time. All too soon the sun is rising and I’ve just enough time to hide her out of harm’s way before I disappear.
> The Beast is too busy butchering his own sketches to notice the time and I awake directly in the studio. My pants are in shreds, but I don’t care, just as he didn’t when he tore them. I set my Beauty on the easel at once. Her hair is tricky. It takes careful alchemy to mix just the right amount of each shade to create the rich hue of auburn and even when I think I have achieved it, the minutest of faults make me return to her again and again to get everything just... perfect.
The servants stop bothering to restrain me. Since both the Beast and I spend most of our time in the studio we are rarely in my chambers to be chained. But as long as I don’t stray outside of it, the guards don’t seem to care what I do. It suits my purposes.
For years this goes on, the Beast drawing his scenes as I paint my Strength three nights at a time and hide the progress where I know he will never look if he has something of his own to focus on. My obsession is absolute. Perhaps it’s why I never feel him rise inside me to look at her through my eyes; why he doesn’t seem to remember my mind when I’m gone, nor I his when I wake. We don’t want to. We have her now and neither of us is willing to share.
Little by little, my Strength comes to life beneath my brush. Her long lashes cast a soft shadow against her cheek, minuscule flecks of green light up her eyes, her face glows with some inner light I know I will never feel, and her lips glisten enticingly, until all I can think of is kissing them.
She is naked in my vision, but positioned in such a way that only her bare shoulder hints at her nudity—turned sideways, her arms crossed to cover her breasts, one delicate hand resting against her shoulder. The curvature of her silhouette is only hinted at with a play of shadow and shading, and the canvas cuts her off at the hip. It is just large enough to make her appear lifelike, as if she could step out of the portrait at any moment.
But she is not finished.
In the fifth year since I beheld her outline, I add the final detail, one that, thinking back, never should have marred her effortless grace. I cannot help myself. My hand moves of its own accord, tracing the outline of an object that ought to be alien to her. Somehow, it is not. It’s as much part of her as it is of me—the symbol of my curse and my redemption alike.
Petal after petal, a blood red rose appears in her hand. The bloom is so large that even resting against her shoulder it just brushes the line of her jaw. A foreign, heavy layer of paint added to an already magnificent work of art and still the cursed thing seem so natural I don’t know why it wasn’t there from the beginning.
On the third and final night of another full moon, I am finished. The brush drops from my numb fingers as I step back to behold the most beautiful creature I have ever dared to dream. I reach out a hand, half expecting her skin to warm to my touch. My torment is complete.
And I realize I will never see her.
If she did not appear in the three hundred years of my imprisonment, she never will. And even if she somehow does, as the hag foretold, the Beast will never let her near me. The selfish bastard will keep her all to himself to shield her from my wicked ways. He will chain me again, high up in that goddamned tower, far away where no one will hear my cries. She will never even know I exist, and with the Beast playing the gentleman, the tormented victim, she will never even wonder at his other side.
In that moment, I despise the Beast with every fiber of my cursed being.
But he is part of me and there is only so much hate I can stomach before it turns outward and then I hate her. That teasing little smile, the mischievous glint in her eyes, the way she is completely bare, yet I still can’t see more than the merest hint of her flesh.
I hurl the palette against the wall and pick up a knife just as the sun is about to rise. I manage to cut a long, satisfyingly jagged line across the canvas before the bastard takes me over.
The Beast awakens to a knife in his paw, lying on the floor of the studio. He groans in residual pain and confusion as he throws the blade away and rises. His claws scratch into paint and he immediately raises that paw off a finished portrait.
Breath leaves him at the sight. It’s her, far more lifelike than his clumsy drawings could ever make her, and she is magnificent. Stunning.
And Bastien has wrecked her.
His heart breaks at the cut that rips across her face. What sort of monster would do such a thing, destroy something so beautiful?
Bastien would.
The Beast gently picks up the painting. He will not set it on the easel; won’t leave it in this dusty place. He carries his Beauty back to his chambers and hangs her portrait on the wall facing the window. A place of honor, where he can look upon her each morning.
It is there, gazing into her bright blue eyes, that he realizes that if, by some miracle of mercy, she is real and finds her way to the Beast, he can never trust her safety to Bastien.
He will never risk her around his human half.
If she is real, he vows, she will never know the monster in a human skin exists.
Chapter Twenty-five
My prison becomes inescapable. The Beast, having caught on to my subtle subconscious manipulations, shuts me out of his thoughts so thoroughly I can’t even see or hear what he does.
But it takes effort and wearies him, and when he sleeps, I make certain to exact my revenge, invading his dreams and twisting them my way—any way, really, as long as he doesn’t enjoy them.
When I am awake each month, my chains are unbreakable and the key is gone. The bastard even locks balcony door and all windows so I can’t smell the night air. On the nights it rains, my rage at this knows no bounds. I can almost scent the rain in my chambers, but never quite enough. My lungs burn with the need to inhale that fresh, cold wind. I am denied.
I lash out again and again at anything I can get my hands on, more of a wild animal than the Beast ever allows himself to be. Only once do I reach for the painting. The Beast set it where it might best mock me from its high perch on the wall. It’s not quite high enough. I tear it down and rip into it until it’s in strips and tatters.
The Beast’s agonized wail when he discovers it the next morning crushes me. He doesn’t want me to, but I feel what he feels—utter, terrible loss. And I realize I just destroyed the only solace I will ever have, the only likeness of her I will ever behold with my own eyes.
That is why, when the sun goes down again, I try to pick up where the Beast left off; try to salvage what I can. His clumsiness in gluing pieces of canvas onto the backing all but ensures it will never be whole again. Whatever I can do is too little too late.
With a heavy heart, I hang the ruined portrait back in its place of honor and do not go near it again. I become my own jailer, silently seething night and day. I fight my own quiet battle, let the Beast think he got the best of me.
He’ll never be rid of me. I am Lord Bastien Sauvage III, Duke of Colline, forgotten cousin to a long dead king. I am a prince of this kingdom, and the true master of this castle.
I wear the curse of the Beast, not him, and no matter how hard he tries to keep me from the world, he cannot keep me from his memories of it. I know how he broods day and night, closed away in his library, with all his precious books. I see the way the servants look upon him, with less pity and more impatience every day. I feel the seasons change, the rain in his fur and the snow beneath his paws.
And I feel when things begin to change.
I feel the wicked Faery wind behind the gathering clouds, the sting of Lilith’s spell in its lightning and frigid rain.
I sense the lost merchant stumble into my home.
That this pathetic looking human would be the first in over three centuries to brave trespassing on my lands is baffling, yet I know it was desperation which drove him to it—there is nowhere else for him to take shelter from the wretched storm. He has nothing but the clothes on his back, drenched through and half frozen as they are, and a near empty wagon pulled by an aging, limping pony.
His fear is sickening. The way the servants pander to his favor as i
f he is an honored guest they fear will depart too soon makes me glad I am not in possession of my body to wring all their necks. The Beast finds it more than irksome, too. He growls when the hostlers take charge of the pony, snarls when the cook stokes the fire for a midnight meal for the “poor lost soul,” and terrifies the merchant nearly to death when he roars from the shadows to see Aimee show him to a guest room.
But he never shows his monstrous face.
Through the Beast’s glowing eyes I watch the merchant shiver during the relentless storm and sleep fitfully through the night to awake the next morning. More is the pity. I see him wander into the garden as if it belongs to him and cut a single blood red rose. It is the one the Beast holds closest to his heart, for it looks like the rose in the portrait.
I amuse myself by spurring my jailer forward. I would happily see the merchant torn to ragged shreds, but the Beast pulls back before his claws cut more than the dirty linen of the merchant’s shirt.
More terror saturates the air we breathe until even I am sick with it.
“Please,” the man cries. “I meant no harm! I-I lost my way in the storm. Have mercy, my Lord Beast.”
I laugh as the Beast roars furiously. “You dare mock me, human!”
“No, please! Please, I beg you…”
“This is how you repay your host’s generosity? I spared your life in the night, gave you shelter through the storm, and this is my thanks! I should toss you in the dungeon!”
The merchant is shaking so much it takes him three tries to turn to his belly and prostrate himself before the Beast. “I beg forgiveness. I only… it’s for my daughter. Please, let me pay you for the rose. I meant no offense, only a gift for my daughter…”
The man’s heartfelt pleas don’t move either of us. It’s the way he desperately, foolishly, starts on a litany about his offspring’s charms that makes us both quiet. He describes a great, selfless beauty, a strong, brave heart, and a quick mind. The youngest of three, a girl with a kind soul forever seeking goodness between the pages of books.
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