When she was sure that her husband was not in the kitchen, she made another meal (to be eaten separately) for them. She ate, glancing over her shoulder every few seconds, searching for any movement, any sign that her hooded spouse was lurking in the shadows.
Afterwards, she bathed. There was a real shower rather than a bucket and jug, and she basked in it, allowing hot water to pound her back as she scrubbed her skin with a loofah and the scented soap she had brought from home.
That night, she slept fitfully.
In fact, every night after was spent fitfully.
Shya could hear her husband roaming the halls, could hear his howls from the bedroom, could hear his claws scratching at the walls. It kept her up for hours, and when she finally did drift off, her sleep was shallow, and she didn’t feel even the slightest bit well-rested in the morning.
Her dreams were still haunted by that man. During her waking hours, she painted him. She kept the finished canvases beneath her bed, away from her husband’s eyes should he decide to enter her room. It was already bad enough that she was avoiding contact with him but for her to be dreaming of and painting another man entirely—and the same man, at that, so there would be no question of the man being a random occurrence—was a whole new issue.
One night in particular was cold. Wind snuck into the room through microscopic cracks, and chills ran down Shya’s spine despite the multitude of blankets atop her.
Voices drifted through the halls. One was her husband’s, soft but gruff at the same time. The other was a woman’s, one that Shya didn’t recognise.
Curious, Shya slipped out of bed and followed the voices, leaving her door open in case she needed a quick getaway. She trod lightly and furtively, thankful for her socked feet and the tiles beneath them muffling her footsteps. She’d had wooden floorboards at home. Sneaking around had been a challenging endeavour; one wrong move and a creak louder than an explosion would wake the whole house.
She paused outside where the voices seemed loudest. The door was open a crack, just enough for Shya to peek inside.
Atop the bed was her husband and a woman. She was perhaps sixty. Her hair was brown and streaked with white, her skin pale. She wasn’t a local, wasn’t even from the country. Shya didn’t even think she was from Asia at all (unless she was from Asian Russia). Shya’s husband had his large, furry head in the woman’s lap, and she stroked his face with long, delicate fingers.
“Are you learning to love her, my son?” the woman asked. Her words were accented. European, just as Shya had suspected. “She’s a pretty thing. Headstrong, it seems. Should be a match!”
When Shya’s husband spoke, he was sorrowful and devoid of all hope. She could hear desperation clear and thick in the raspiness of his voice. “No, Mother,” he sighed, and Shya realised for the first time that he, too, had a European accent. “She is afraid. She should be afraid. Every day the bloodlust gets worse. I’m at the end. I will turn, soon, completely into a monster. I need to fall on a blade. It’s the only way to save us all.”
“No, son, not yet,” the woman pleaded. Shya supposed that, since she had heard them call each other mother and son, the woman was her mother-in-law. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t. There’s still time. Remember, a wolf isn’t all hunting and killing. A wolf mates. A wolf breeds pups to protect with its life. Even if you turn completely, I don’t believe you will hurt anyone. Not you. Not my happy boy.” The woman’s voice was strangled as though she was crying.
“I can’t make a promise,” Shya’s husband said. “There are children here. Women. Innocents. You should kill me.”
The woman bent, pressing her forehead to her son’s. “There’s still time,” she whispered.
Shya crept back to her room and waited for the woman to leave, straining her ears for the sound of light footsteps passing her door, going downstairs, and exiting the house.
The house was silent.
For a long while, Shya remained dumbfounded. But a thought struck her, and she snuck down to the kitchen and returned to her husband’s bedroom with a knife.
She waited outside for a few moments, regulating her breathing, steeling herself for what she was about to do. The man inside that bedroom was a werewolf—she was sure of it. Saying the man inside that bedroom was growing farther and farther away from the truth. He would turn, soon, turn completely away from humanity, adopt the temperament of a beast.
Gripping the knife tightly in her fist, she pushed open the door and enters.
Her husband’s breathing was steady and deep; he was asleep. She dropped to her knees at his bedside and held the knife to his throat, it’s blade glinting in the moonlight pouring in from the window that her husband had not drawn a curtain over.
Her hand was shaking, she noted, as she pressed the blade to her husband’s furry neck. She was afraid, but it had to be done. There were lives at risk. And it was evident from the man’s mother’s words that she dreaded to see him turn into what he was turning into.
Shya watched the face of the man she was about to kill. Just as she was about to dig the knife in, pull the blade across, her husband’s eyes cracked open, human and desperate. Shya grasped, jerking the blade away.
“Do it,” the man begged. “I heard you breathing while I spoke with Mother. You know what will happen soon. The bloodlust is growing. Do it and save yourself.”
“”I will,” Shya tried, moving the blade closer to (but not quite touching) his neck. “I am.” It sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him. But he looked so terribly broken, and Shya could feel her resolve cracking in two. How could she harm something—someone—who is so clearly hurting and scared?
Shya’s husband sat up, pressing his neck into the blade. “You’ve come this far,” he spat. Though his voice was contemptuous, Shya knew he was simply masking his fear. “Put the town legend out of his misery.”
Shya pursed her lips and met his eyes, searching them. She withdrew her trembling hand. “Tell me how you got this way,” she demanded.
FIVE
Shya’s husband sighed. “My family claimed this land,” he explained. “Long ago. My mother was a queen, and I was a prince. This village was...the heart of our kingdom. The capital. Everything was good for a long time and then I...grew ill.” He laughed humorlessly. “At first, I wondered if my advisor was slipping poison into my drinks. It got so bad that eventually, I was confined to my bed. And then I was just...waiting. To die.
“And then one day, this man came into town. He visited me and he told me that he could cure me. Of course, I said yes. I didn’t have heirs which meant I needed to survive to keep the crown in the family. But he told me that the cure wasn’t...it wouldn’t come without consequence. That if I took the cure, this...stigma would follow me forever. He told me that all he could do was take my sickness and replace it with a new one unless…”
The werewolf reached up a furry, clawed hand and carded it through the brown fur atop his head. He sighed woefully, the sound so sad and tired that Shya could nearly feel her heart breaking.
He reminded her of a wounded animal she had found while walking home from school.
It had been years ago. She had been alone, and the ground had been slick from the rain that had come down in sheets earlier in the day. And there, in the middle of the street, had been a cat, limping, one of its hind legs dragging across the pavement as it struggled to move forwards.
Despite the threat of rabies or whatever other afflictions the cat may have had, Shya had stripped of her throat and wrapped the poor animal in it. It writhed for a moment, then seemed to realise that its attempts at escape were in vain. It lay still in Shya’s arms and allowed her to take it home.
For weeks, she kept it in her room, used her allowance to buy litter and food, snuck bits of chicken from her dinner and fed it to it. She wrapped and plastered the damaged leg, named the cat Elizabeth even though she wasn’t sure that it was a female, and used Febreze to mask the o
dor of Elizabeth’s urine and droppings.
It wasn’t as though her parents hadn’t known about the cat. Still, they allowed her to tend to it until it seemed well enough to release. Except that they hadn’t released Elizabeth, they had kept her, at least until she had grown old and died.
Somehow, this tired werewolf reminded her of her late cat.
“Unless?” Shya prompted gently.
“Unless, in twenty years, I could find someone who could see underneath the monster,” the man finished.
“See underneath the monster,” Shya repeated slowly.
“Yes. Someone who could see...me.”
“Oh.”
“It’s been twenty years, now,” he continued. “My best friends, the people I’ve known since childhood—they couldn’t stand the sight of me. Even though they knew who I was. They took one look at the fur and the claws and they were gone. The only one who ever stood by me was my mother. For some reason, she has this—this naive hope that I’ll find someone who can see beneath all this. Like she does. She’s always just seen me as her little boy.” He smiled gently. “Must be a mom thing.”
“Must be,” Shya agreed.
SIX
Shya pressed her lips together and stared into her husband’s eyes. There was something there. Something familiar. They were a soft hazel, tired and gentle. “Y’know what,” she said, “I want to show you something.”
She rose to her feet and took her husband by the hand, leading him to her bedroom. She dropped his hand and fell to her knees at her bed, a probing hand finally finding the finished paintings she had stashed underneath it.
Rising again, she handed the stack of canvases to her husband. She walked over to him, standing close enough to feel his furry shoulder against her cheek.She smiled, looking up at his wide eyes. “I knew I recognised you,” she told him, turning back to the painting at the top of the stack.
He shuffled through the rest of them. “These are me,” he said, astonished.
Shya nodded, her head falling against his shoulder and her arm winding through the crook of his elbows. “I’ve been dreaming about your face since I was little. I paint it all the time. And then when I was talking to you...I just knew it was you.” She reached her free arm up, stroking his cheek with the back of her hand. “You have pretty eyes.”
The werewolf smiled.
Shya unwound their arms and, using his broad shoulders as leverage, she pushed up onto her toes, and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to his lips.
He felt suddenly warm beneath her. Shya’s eyes felt shut, and when they opened again, the fur beneath her hands was gone, and the face against which hers was pressed was human. She stumbled back and gazed up at him.
Before Shya was a very human, very handsome prince, looking down in awe at his own hands. His eyes shot up to Shya’s, and there was nothing in them but gratitude and fondness. He grinned and moved forward so fast that he might have been mistaken for a werewolf.
He gathered Shya’s slight frame in his arms and kissed her, pouring in his thanks, and, perhaps, a bit of love. Gently, he pushed her towards the bed and stripped away their clothes, and together, they tangled in the sheets until they were too exhausted to go on. Afterwards, Shya lay upon the prince’s chest, a thin sheen of sweat covering her body.
The prince laughed, his chest rumbling under Shya’s ear.
“What?” she asked, turning her head so that her chin dug into his pectoral.
The prince’s arm was around her back, his thumb rubbing small circles. “I just feel so...free.”
Shya sighed contentedly, only finding the time to entwine her fingers with the prince’s free ones before slipping into a deep sleep.
***
The following morning, the prince was not in Shya’s bed, and she nearly dismissed the night’s occurrences as a dream. Except she didn’t, because she could smell him on her sheets. Another thing she could smell was a delightful aroma wafting in through her open door.
Shya brushed her teeth and plodded to the kitchen.
The prince stood in front of the stove. He wore pants, but his back was bare, his front covered by a white apron.
Shya chuckled, quietly moving towards him. She wrapped her arms around him and planted a kiss on his bare shoulder, and the prince jumped. Shya giggled.
“I didn’t hear you,” the prince told her.
“Must be weird,” Shya replied, still laughing.
“A bit,” he admitted. “I’ll get used to it.”
Shya slid her hand over his back. “Smells good.”
“Thanks.”
When it was ready, the prince set out two plates on the table. Shya, who had been eating nothing other than her quite frankly dismal cooking for her entire stay here, thought it was the most heavenly thing that had ever touched her tongue.
After they finished, the prince spoke up. “I was thinking we could go out today,” he said. “Maybe go into the city? Buy some stuff?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice,” Shya responded. “Okay.”
The prince beamed. “Get dressed, then.”
Thirty minutes later, showered and in fresh clothes, Shya and the prince left their house, hands clasped together.
The ground was wet from rainfall—Shya had likened monsoon season to an extreme version of spring—and her shoes sunk into the mud like it was quicksand. It was windy, too, and her light jacket flapped behind her like a cape.
The prince was not dressed to accommodate the weather, but the chill and the damp didn’t seem to be bothering him. His shoes, once white and pristine, were coated in wet dirt. His shirt was thin, and wind forced itself underneath it, the fabric billowing. Where Shya’s hair was pulled back, the prince’s was ungelled and loose, strands flying into his eyes.
Shya noticed a figure lingering just outside their fence. As they approached, however, she realised that it was Berht, this time clad in a Queen shirt.
“Nice shirt,” she noted once they passed the fence, pulling Berht into a one-armed hug.
“Thanks,” Berht replied. “So I’m your driver, at least until His Highness learns to drive again.”
Shya turned to the prince. “Did you call him?”
The prince shrugged, a gentle smile gracing his features.
Together, the three of them made their way to Berht’s car. Instead of the beater, however, was a sleek, black vehicle, free of dirt and rust and chipping paint.
Berht jokingly helped the prince into the back seat and, just before he shut Shya in with him, he leaned down and whispered, “I knew you could do it.”
Shya smiled, and the door shut.
Berht got into the front and started the car. Shya buckled herself in then reached out, her hand finding the prince’s and grasping it, resting their joint fingers on the plush leather upholstery.
As they got onto the main road and drove towards the nearest big town, Shya watched fondly as her husband gazed in amazement out the window, wondering at the developments of the modern world. He must not have left Amalpur in his twenty years under the curse.
Shya squeezed the prince’s hand, and his head whipped around to face her.
He smiled, and squeezed her hand back.
Sold As Livestock
~ Bonus Story ~
An Alien Abduction Romance
I’m given to an alien, and called livestock. Worse – I made him choose me.
I’m a pilot. I’m supposed to be up in space, flying past the stars. Instead, my ship’s locked up and I’m dragged onto the planet of the urtok – a race not known for being nice or particularly friendly.
I’m imprisoned, and I don’t intend to be a slave. I hate that they call me livestock. I hate the powers they hold, making it impossible for a human to escape. And I hate that lordly one who comes onto the truck, intending to scoop one human for himself before we’re taken to market.
He’s looking for someone smart, strong, and brave. I don’t think I’m any of these things. But I make him come for me, and tak
e me.
Now I just need to know how to turn this into something beneficial. And not get lured in by him…
* * *
Chapter One
I didn’t mean to lose control of the ship. I have no idea what happened though, or how it even came to pass. One moment, the crew and I were happily sailing through the galaxy, returning home from a successful trip smuggling brainsuckers – a type of drug that’s pretty much what it says on the tin. The next moment, something interfered with the communications of our spaceship.
I’m the pilot, so I have a certain amount of responsibility of getting us from one place to the next in one piece. People rely on me, and I like being the one they rely on. It makes me feel powerful.
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