by Alice Wilde
“I don’t know. I can’t tell if she’s still breathing.”
Li dips his head low, close to Annalise’s mouth. We watch carefully and sigh as a collective when we see a trickle of air move Li’s whiskers.
“Okay, so she’s breathing. What now?” asks Ero.
“I have to close the gash,” Li replies.
“There’s too much blood,” Ero says. “If your beast takes over, you will kill her. It’s too dangerous.”
“That’s why I’m telling you now. I need you to take me down if I can’t control it. Do whatever it takes. She’ll die if I don’t try.”
“Fine.”
“Well, hurry up!” I say, already positioning myself into a crouch. “I’ve always wanted a good reason to take you down.”
Li snorts but ignores me as he turns back to Annalise.
“Don’t die on us now, lass,” I mutter quietly to myself.
Li licks the gash as gently as possible. His eyes glaze over slightly with the taste of her blood. He makes a second pass at the wound, and I can see it has started to close, the blood no longer spilling out. Li’s growl is taking on a more primal sound.
Ero and I are both poised, ready to attack at a moment’s notice, watching for even the smallest change in behavior. I don’t know how Li is keeping himself together, but the wound has closed up nicely, I’m beginning to think he might just make it through when I see his eyes glaze over, and the next instant, both Ero and I are screeching as we lunge at him, barely managing to get him off Annalise before he kills her.
Li let it go too far, her blood too powerful even for him. His beast has taken over and is showing no signs of letting go. Ero has latched on to Li’s back, digging his claws in hard. The screams and roars are deafening as beast tears into beast. I take my chances and go for Li’s neck, tearing at the collar around his neck.
“Sorry,” I say jumping back as he collapses to the ground. His collar tightens relentlessly around his neck, the spikes burrowing into his flesh. Ero and I flinch, knowing full well the terrible pain we’ve just caused him.
“We had to,” Ero sighs.
The door crashes open and the room is quickly filled with guards. Damien storms in, barely glancing over at us, before he has Annalise in his arms. The room empties just as quickly, and we’re left to wait.
“If she doesn’t survive…”
“She’ll survive. She has to.”
Twenty-Four
Annalise
There’s a certain amount of terror in waking up and not being able to open your eyes. It takes me a minute to remember where I am. I quiet myself and listen, trying to decipher what time of day it might be.
I hear a snore from somewhere in the room, perhaps my father sleeping in his bed. I try to lift myself into a sitting position, but another noise stops me.
An almost inaudible tinkling of glass is coming from the far side of the room, but then the person moves quietly, shuffling across the room toward the snoring.
“Your Majesty?”
It’s the physician. I let out a small sigh of relief.
A grunt, but there is no answer from my father.
Again, the tiny sounds of glass on glass clink, and a moment later, the snoring stops. Then the feet start shuffling toward me. I slow my breathing to appear as if I’m still asleep. I can feel him standing over me and I wonder why I’ve never felt so uncomfortable around him before. Now, alone and with my focus uninterrupted, I feel the same twist of unrest in my stomach as I do with Damien. A darkness.
Long bony fingers brush against my face and I flinch. I hear glass placed on a surface near my head and then both his hands press against my cheeks.
My heartbeat speeds as the physician begins to murmur quietly. By the time I realize it’s an incantation, my body is frozen in place. He continues to speak strange words over me as he unwinds the bandages from around my eyes.
He jumps as he pulls the last strip of bandage from my eyes.
“Dark mercies, you’re awake,” he gasps sharply.
I try to speak, but can’t.
“Relax, my dear,” he says, the words slippery. “This will help you heal faster.”
He places his thumbs over my eyes and forces them shut. The ache of my injured eye intensifies as he presses on it, continuing his spell. I feel the discomfort start to diminish, but not in the same way as when Li healed the mark on my neck. Everything about this feels wrong. The words are dark and sit heavy in my soul, the energy from his fingers spreading through me like worms wriggling through my skin.
When he finally removes his hands, I’m even further repulsed. As each finger leaves my skin, it feels like a long thread is pulled up and out with it, tugging slightly at my skin as it exits.
I want to demand an explanation, but I still cannot move or speak.
“Now, rest. We don’t want to disappoint Lord Godfrey, do we?” he says, picking up the glass vial he placed by my head earlier and leans over me as he pours several drops into my open mouth.
I want to scream, to fight, but the liquid trickles down my throat and almost as quickly darkness fills my mind and I descend into a thick fog.
“Lass?”
I claw at my darkness, the familiar voice cutting through the fog.
“Anything?”
A second familiar voice. Ero? I try but fail to hold onto it, again sinking back into the gloom.
“Not yet, but there’s a heartbeat. It’s weak.”
“I killed her,” a third voice says. Li. Pain saturating his words.
“Shut up,” Ero snaps. “She’s the one who tripped on her skirt. You had no way of knowing she’d crack her head open walking around her own room.”
“I should have acted faster.”
“Stop being a moody arse, Li. You’re not helping matters. We don’t have much time,” Roan says.
I scream without sound. This is by far the most terrifying of my dreams. I can see nothing but the oblivion of my mind, their voices the only thing keeping me from slipping entirely into the dark mists.
“Lassie? I don’t ken if you can hear us or not, but you need to fight. Don’t give up on yourself. Don’t give up on us.”
“Yeah, we haven’t even made out yet.”
“You idiot, can you please just shut up, Ero?”
“Hey, you can’t discount the power of desire. For all we know, it might just be what saves her life.”
“You’re both arses, thinking only of yourselves.”
“And you’re not?” Li says.
I hear growling.
“Fine, we’re all arses,” Roan says. “Frankly, lass, we need you. We’re selfish, and without you, I’ll be miserable. You don’t want to be the death of me, do you?”
“Roan!” Li and Ero voice in unison before all three voices fade from my mind.
I have to fight. Whatever is happening to me, I can’t give up. I can’t give in.
If not for me, for them.
My leopards.
I can feel icy tendrils spreading through my body, my veins their pathway, my blood their power. My soul.
My soul is mine. But even as I challenge it, the darkness seeps in, lapping at the edges of my spirit, inky stains rippling through me.
My heart.
The crushing gloom weighs heavily on me.
My heart, I say, my inner voice rigid. My heart…is theirs.
A white light explodes in my mind and a fire ignites in my heart, burning at the darkness with a great vengeance.
No, my inner voice says forcibly. You can ravage my body, even take my soul captive, but my heart is already spoken for.
Numbness takes over, and I sink deep into my only remaining safe haven.
I enter my beasts’ heart.
Twenty-Five
Roan
It’s been at least eight hours since Annalise was taken from us. Li is back to his old self, but it took several hours to free him from his beast heart. I think it’s the longest I’ve ever seen him gone. Whe
n he finally surfaced again, the last thing he could remember was his teeth at Annalise’s neck, certain he had killed her.
The blood still staining the floor didn’t help. No one has come to Annalise’s room since the incident. Not to clean the blood, not to feed us, nothing.
Ero and I have tried to reassure Li as much as we can, but none of us are sure what kind of state she’s in, or if she’s even still alive. I tried linking with her several hours after the accident, but she must have still been unconscious.
We’ve been waiting, rather impatiently, for the dead of night to try again. Li is in a state of self-loathing, which is making the time pass even more slowly. Ero is by the door trying to sleep, but it’s easy to see that that’s not going to happen.
I occupy my time by tearing up random things in the room to help calm the rising storm in my own heart. Feather pillows are highly satisfying to destroy. In human form, I’d be ashamed to be caught destroying anything out of anger, but as a beast, I relish it.
It doesn’t take long for me to rip them all apart, feathers littering the floor. Small feather fluff still hanging in the air. I sneeze. Okay, that was a bad idea. I sneeze again, and again.
I run to the other side of the room to escape the chaos I’ve just created, rubbing my nose in my paws as I try to extract the small bits of feather dust from my nose.
A bell sounds somewhere in the distance and our ears prick up to listen.
One…two…three…
The bell rings midnight.
It’s the witching hour. Everyone should be asleep by now, or at least in bed.
“All right, let’s try again,” I say.
Li and Ero are instantly alert and focused. We link our minds and search for Annalise.
It’s harder than I thought it would be. Even if she’s sleeping, as long as she’s no longer unconscious from the accident, her mind shouldn’t be this hard to find. We’ve linked with her before, and our bond to her, however much we’ve tried not to allow it, has grown since.
I can sense Li getting anxious, and I growl at him.
“Keep calm, we need to have an unwavering focus,” Ero says.
He’s right. I clear my mind of everything except Annalise.
“Lass?”
I’ve found her. Li and Ero focus in on the link I’ve created, her scent filling my mind. She doesn’t respond, but there’s a heartbeat. She’s not dead. Not yet. Then I sense something else…
A darkness. The mists of oblivion. I’ve seen its work once before, on Ero’s predecessor.
It’s part of the Book of Lethe, a dark magic used to overwhelm a non-compliant being, body and soul. On normal people, there are two outcomes. You either succumb to the will of the binder, becoming a prisoner in your own body, or you go insane, lost forever in the mists of oblivion. On humans, you can’t really tell one from the other except that those who go insane often die within a few weeks’ time.
Damien found out the hard way not to use the curse on shifters. For whatever reason the magic doesn’t work on beasts. Somehow, the boy must have entered his beast heart just before the spell was cast. He went mad, permanently imprisoned in his beast heart, and his beast lashed out and ran. The boy was found dead in the forest not long after, no longer a beast.
Either way, Annalise is in grave danger, but if she can fight long enough to keep her sanity, at least we’ll have a chance.
She has to fight.
Twenty-Six
Annalise
“Is it done?”
“Yes, My Lord.”
Damien and the physician.
“Very good. It’s about time she was brought under control. I can’t have her tearing apart my plans, not when we’re this close.”
“Of course, My Lord.”
“And her father?”
“I’m afraid the effects of the poison cannot be reversed, I’m not sure how much longer the king will survive. My best guess is at most a week.”
Damien growls. “Then the wedding ceremony will have to be performed immediately. Time is of the essence. If we’re not married before her father shoves off, it’ll all be for nothing. Not that I won’t leave my mark either way,” Damien says, and I feel his finger brush across the mark he’s left on my neck.
“I should warn you, My Lord, there’s always the chance the oblivion has taken over her mind. She may no longer be…there…”
“No matter. All as long as she is seen alive at the wedding, I have no concern for whether or not her mind is functioning. After the wedding, all I need is her body.”
“Of course, My Lord.”
“Once I am crowned king, we will be in the perfect position for conquest. The situation couldn’t be more perfect. No one worries about the smaller gateway kingdoms. Once I have taken her magic and the kingdom is under my control, it shouldn’t take long.”
“Indeed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, My Lord, I will prepare the waking potions for the king.”
“Is that really necessary anymore?”
“No, but I enjoy making a king drink my piss. For health’s sake, of course,” the physician snickers.
“Certainly.”
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to discover the two have been working together. If only I had seen it the first time Papa called me to his room. I hadn’t recognized him then, but I hadn’t given to moments thought to it. Everything is far worse than I already believed.
“Annalise.”
I hear my name and I struggle to push through the fog in my mind, finally managing to open my eyes wearily.
“Mmm, good morning, Annalise,” Damien says silkily. “Your eye has improved immensely. I believe we can move forward with the wedding. How does tomorrow sound?”
“Good morning, My Lord. Yes, as you wish.”
I can't believe the words coming out of my mouth. These are not my words. It’s my voice, but never in a thousand hells would that be my answer.
“Excellent,” the physician says, scurrying over from his alchemy set, tying his breeches back in place. “It seems she’s been able to retain sanity, but with a much-improved attitude!”
“Yes, much improved. Get up, Annalise, you need a bath.”
I instantly rise without telling myself to move, I am fully conscious now, even if my mind feels like it’s slogging through mud, but I no longer have control over my body.
“Miriam will take you to your room. You are to bathe and drink your tea. I will make sure food is sent up promptly. We must keep your energy up. I won’t have you passing out before I’ve finished with you tomorrow night.”
I giggle, or at least my body does. I am seething.
“I’m almost disappointed,” Damien says. “I was looking forward to breaking your will on our wedding night, but you just had to go and do something stupid and nearly break your head. At least you shouldn’t be able to cause yourself any more bodily harm. Leave that to me.”
I want to launch at him, tear into his flesh with every ounce of my strength. I want him dead, but instead, I curtsey.
“Yes, My Lord.”
“You’ll call me beloved.”
“Yes, my beloved.”
“Mmm, yes. This will be fun. Now, go to your room.”
I curtsey for the second time and leave.
Miriam is waiting in the hall, and together we walk back to my room. I’ve never walked this slowly through the castle in all my life. As we’re walking, I am suddenly overwhelmed by a thought. How many of Damien’s servants are in the same state as me? What if Miriam isn’t as horrific as she seems, but trapped inside, barely surviving each day as a walking corpse bound to Damien’s will?
I’m mortified by the thought of it. If I can’t find a way out of this before tomorrow evening, I’ll be wed to Damien. My body will give itself over while I watch on in torment for as long as Damien sees fit to keep me alive.
We finally reach my bedroom. Miriam unlocks and opens the door. We step inside.
My body immediately takes m
e over to the tub. I shed my clothing and step inside the empty basin where I wait for Miriam to bathe me. Milk is brought and heated the same as before, but this time each pail is poured one by one over my body as it is warmed.
The heat causes the fog in my mind to thicken, my eyes don’t close, but I feel my consciousness trying to slip away.
No, I command myself. If all I have left of myself is my thoughts, then I have to fight for them. He may have taken control of my body, my voice, but I will not give him the satisfaction of my thoughts. Every day for the rest of my life, I will use my thoughts to make him feel my hate, to know my deep and unrelenting disobedience to his will. He can take my body, but he will never take me.
I no longer have any concept of time, but I soon find myself cleaned and dressed, waiting as Miriam makes my bed. Again, not the bed I prefer with my leopards, but my human bed. This time, when she’s finished, I don’t remove the bedding, but climb into it and wait for sleep to come. Or, at least my body does. I manage to keep my eyes open.
Two of the leopards, Ero and Roan, try to squeeze onto the bed but end up settling for space on the floor on either side of the bed, their large front paws and heads resting on the mattress next to me. I feel my heart skip ever so slightly in my chest. With the state my mind is in, I had nearly forgotten about them, but deep down I know they are an integral part of why I haven’t given up. I’m not the only one I have to save. I struggle to let them know I’m still here, I'm fighting to hold on, I still care. There’s so much more at stake here than just my body.
Their lives depend on me.
Twenty-Seven
The Leopards
Ero
Annalise didn’t come back. Her body is in the room with us, but it’s not Annalise. I’ve tried to find a sign, some way of knowing if she’s still with us, but so far there’s been nothing.
Roan has attempted to link with her several times, but he’s only found darkness. Li has been completely useless. He won’t take his eyes off her, except when she undresses, but otherwise keeps his distance. I know he blames himself, but we all knew that sooner or later Damien was going to take her. In some ways perhaps, it’s better this way.