by K. C. Cross
This is how the curse starts. The killing of Ostanes, the alchemist in charge of making monsters.
No one knows how the curse ends, obviously. Since it’s still in place.
I exhale loudly and look back up at Tarq. His horns are minotaur-like in appearance, with the dark color of the water buffalo, while mine are more corkscrew in nature and belong on the head of a kudu.
We are chimera. Half god, half monster with fur, horns, hooves, and, in the case of myself and Tarq, we are well-endowed because we were originally part of an ancient monster-breeding program of satyrs.
At least I have that going for me.
The smile that begins to creep up my face cannot be stopped and eventually it turns into a grin.
What do you get when you cross a nymph with a satyr-minotaur hybrid?
Some very tall, very strong, very handsome evil-looking motherfuckers.
Us. That’s what you get.
“Tarq.” I lean on him. “You’re not going to believe this fucking night. Grant is gone, some new woman is here. She looks pathetic. Any hope we had for a reunion seems…” I shake my head. “Well, very far away.”
He says nothing back, of course. So I wander over to his tomb, slide my back down a wide, weather-stained, Corinthian column, and stare up at his stone face.
It has been two thousand years since I’ve seen him in the flesh. And they have been long years. “You probably hate me by now, don’t you? I mean, I’m stuck in this place, just like you. But at least I can come and go from my tomb. You’re just… here. And if there was a way, brother, I’d fix that. I would get you out of there. I do not care that you carry the markings of Saturn on your flesh. We are blood.”
I would love to have my friend back. This life is so pointless without friends. And Tomas doesn’t count. He’s… not one of us. Not really. More of a lingering mistake than anything else.
Two thousand years. And none of the caretakers have been able to break our curse.
“It pains me to say this, friend. I have never given up hope, but losing Grant is a blow I do not think I can recover from. Grant was competent so I kept hoping that one day he would produce the words, and the potions, and the herbs to turn back time and get us out of this miserable existence.”
Was it stupid? That dream? That we could beat this if we just tried long enough? Worked hard enough? If we just kept going?
I don’t know. But I don’t like to depress Tarq. If he can hear me, then I want to lift his spirits, not crush them. So I continue with the update.
“He was making progress. He had that spell that would allow me to leave the sanctuary in the form of a man for a few hours at a time. And yes, I hated the fact that I had to be within an arm’s length of Grant to keep the glamour strong enough to disguise my true form, but it was better than nothing. Wasn’t it? I had a tiny taste of freedom. And maybe you’re not capable of being happy for me—hell, if I were you, I wouldn’t be happy for me—but I really thought that we’d get there, ya know? I really thought that we were just a decade or so away from the answer. From the cure. And Grant took all that progress with him.”
It’s coming out a little whiny. So I stop talking and try to work the rage back up.
I look back towards the cathedral and yep. There it is. My rage.
That girl.
That baby.
That good-for-nothing substitute.
I want to hunt Grant down and kill him for leaving me here to rot.
But then my mind wanders to the apothecary room with the hundreds upon hundreds of potions and herbs lining the floor to ceiling shelves. And the books. Grant kept notebooks. He was a meticulous record-keeper.
So maybe…
I get to my feet and start walking back towards the cathedral.
Maybe he wrote down his progress. He couldn’t take the books with him—they are magical. They are part of this curse. They belong to Saint Mark’s Sanctuary, not him.
Which means they now belong to the girl.
All of Grant’s progress now belongs to the girl.
There is no doubt she comes from Grant’s bloodline. That’s how she got in. That’s how he got out. So she has the magic inside her. And even if she has no idea it’s there, it can be coaxed out.
I’ve done it a few times before with ignorant slaves of the past. But it wasn’t very productive.
Still. I can only work with what I have.
I enter the cathedral, feeling like I’ve made more trips to this stupid building in the last hour of darkness than I have in the past decade, and once more climb the long staircase.
The apothecary door is slightly ajar—like I slammed it too hard and it didn’t quite close when I stormed off—so when I approach, I can hear talking inside.
“—but why?” the girl says.
“Because you can’t help him. No one can.”
What? I lean closer. The fake rage I had mustered up to stop my whining is becoming very real again.
I have never trusted Tomas but I never imagined he was working against me. And now that he has this new power—this new ability to touch my slave—he might need to be dealt with. He is not supposed to be able to touch them. He couldn’t touch Grant. He couldn’t touch any of them.
So why now?
Why this girl?
“These books,” the girl continues.
“Don’t even bother. Grant wrote everything in code.”
He did? No. That’s fucking bullshit. I’ve seen the books. I don’t understand the books, but I’ve seen them. They are written in the common language.
I push the door open and storm in. I reach out towards a table covered in dozens of vials and bottles with various levels of herbs, and salts, and liquids inside them, and I swipe them all onto the floor with a resounding crash to announce my arrival.
It’s all drama. I know that. But I’m feeling dramatic.
The girl stands up, screaming and fearful, while Tomas yells at me. “You fucking beast! What the hell is your problem!”
My problem? He wants to know my problem? “You,” I growl. “You were the reason Grant never broke the curse. You poisoned his mind, didn’t you? You are the one who told him to leave me tonight!”
“Fuck off, you goddamned freak!” Tomas exclaims.
I pick up the nearest potion bottle and throw it at his face.
Bright green liquid hits him and in that same instant he disappears.
So now… I turn to the girl.
CHAPTER FOUR - PIE
I am backing into a corner, hand over my face, mouth open in a scream of fright, when the monster throws the potion bottle at Tomas’s face. And when the bright green liquid hits Tomas, he just vanishes. Poof. Gone.
I panic and start stumbling towards the door, ready to make a run for it. Tomas told me a little bit about the monster of Saint Mark’s. He’s an angry beast. He is vengeful, and cruel, and petty.
And as far as I can tell, Tomas was right.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the beast growls at me.
My breath hitches in a gasp. That sinking feeling you get when something is about to go terribly wrong is real and heavy in my gut at the mere sound of his voice.
I turn to face him. Well, not really to face him. Just to try to ward him off as I take steps backwards. “Stay away from me!” I thrust my palms at him. “Do you hear me? Stay away!”
His eyes go from yellow to orange to red. And I make a run for it, acutely aware that I cannot outrun this thing. His legs—oh, God, those legs! Like a goat’s, or a bull’s, or a horse’s—I’m not sure, but they are powerful and long. And he has already demonstrated how quickly he can snatch me up when I bolt.
But I do it anyway. The only alternative is to just freeze and hope for the best and I’ve done that plenty of times in my life, so I know it never turns out well.
Better to die trying.
“Stop!” he commands.
And even though in my mind I have every intention of absolutely not sto
pping—I freeze. The exact thing I just said I would not do.
He laughs, amused at my sudden paralysis. “You slaves,” he grunts. “You always think you hold all the power here. But it’s not true. You hold power over Saint Mark’s, yes, but I’m the one who holds the power over you. And the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.”
And he’s right. Because my entire body feels like it’s been filled with cement. My feet are stuck to the floor, my arms reaching out in the direction of the door. Stiff. My eyes are motionless. I can’t even blink.
His steps are loud, his hooves clacking on the marble floors, but they are also slow. It takes an agonizingly long time for him to reach me. To be right up next to me. So close that I can feel the heat coming off his body. And he is so big—so utterly massive—that when he comes around to my front I am face to face with the middle of his bare human chest.
Which… I’m not gonna lie, it might even be better than Tomas’s chest. And if Pia were here, and I could talk, I would make a joke about being right. Hot men do hang out together. Even if they’re monsters.
The beast reaches out and takes a strand of my blonde hair in his fingertips as I concentrate on the hard, corded muscles of his body. I want to shudder at his touch. This is an invasion of my private space, but I cannot move.
He drops my hair and turns, walks a few paces forward before turning again.
I am still staring straight ahead, but his full body is now in view.
Half human, half beast. The lower half is covered in straw-colored fur, shaggy in some parts, but not shaggy enough to fully hide his genitals because he is not wearing clothes. His hooves are black with squiggly bands of cream running vertically. His face—while not fully in my view because I can’t look up—is serious and hard in my peripheral vision, a bit of a blond beard covering his chin and upper lip, and his hair is cropped too short to discern the color, but it’s probably blond too.
“Don’t worry.” His gruff voice is deep and penetrating. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of me from this point on, slave.”
I don’t know what he means by that, but I don’t like the sound of that word ‘slave.’ I’m one hundred percent sure the flyer said ‘caretaker.’ Not ‘slave.’
“You don’t need to get all your looks in now. Did he explain it to you?” His voice is softer now. But I can hear the lie in his milder tone. I can hear the malice lurking underneath. He nods his head in the direction where Tomas used to be. “Did he tell you what you stumbled into tonight?”
Tomas talked quite a bit, actually. His freaking mouth was moving like he had a million years to catch me up on. But almost none of it penetrated into my brain for comprehension. I mean, when someone starts explaining how you have been cursed and your life as you know it is now over, you tend to stop listening to the embellishments and just focus on the facts.
So that’s what I did. I shut down. I stopped listening. My mind was a whirlwind of confusion, trying to piece together the flyer, the gate, the boy who turned into an old man, the loss of Pia—where the hell is Pia?—and then the sudden appearance of the beast and my subsequent trip into unconsciousness.
“Let me explain it clearly,” the beast says. “So that we’re on the same page. You belong to me. You are my slave. You are part of my curse and you will remain here, with me, until such time that another one of your bloodline stumbles into our sanctuary.” He pauses to chuckle. “And I know what you’re thinking. ‘Well, if I stumbled into this curse, surely someone else will too.’ But it almost never happens. Grant was here for over fifty years.”
If I could gasp in this moment, I would. I don’t even know how I’m breathing. I don’t think I am breathing.
Focus, Pie.
Fifty. Years.
That’s why the caretaker—Grant—that’s why he looked like a young man when I met him, and then turned old and sickly when he left. All of those fifty-plus years he spent here caught up with him in an instant and he was suddenly old. And he must’ve known this was how it would end. He must’ve known that when he left, his life would be nearly over.
And yet he left anyway.
“And the one before him?” the beast continues. “He was here for two hundred.”
I am so fucked.
“But listen carefully, slave girl. I do not care what Tomas told you, there is a way out of this. If you break my curse, you break your curse as well. So it would behoove you to work diligently on that task from this moment forward.”
I, of course, am unable to answer him. But if I could, I would protest mightily.
I do not break curses. I don’t know anything about this place. And I am not from Grant’s bloodline. That’s not possible. My mother was an only child. I am an only child. And even though I don’t know who my father was, I doubt he has any relation to the boy who was here before me.
I mean, how could I be related to these caretaker people?
Grant was younger than me when we met. Surely, there was no way for him to already have had children before he got stuck in his curse.
“Now,” the beast says, “I’m going to let you go, but you will stand still.” He doesn’t wait for me to answer him or agree to his command, of course, but says, “Proceed.”
In that moment, my body is no longer cement, my feet no longer heavy. I fall forward and the marble floor is rushing up to meet me when his powerful, clawed hands grab my flannel. I stop—just for a moment—but then the flannel rips and I crash the rest of the way to the floor.
Luckily, it was only a few inches, so while my nose does hit hard enough to make it bleed, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been.
I breathe hard and heavy for a few moments, trying to catch my breath as I study the thin gray veins in the black marble slabs.
I don’t know that I was really expecting the beast to help me up, but it doesn’t matter. He does not. He stands in front of me and I stare at his hooves for a moment, just blinking. Trying to force myself to make sense of my new reality.
When he moves away my view changes to the open doorway where I can see Tomas walking quickly towards us. He’s not even halfway across the grand entrance hall when the apothecary door slams shut of its own accord.
I roll over in time to find the beast with a hand raised, like he just commanded the door to close with his fingers.
Tomas pounds on the door, yelling to be let in. But his voice is muffled and his exact words unclear.
The beast snorts, but it’s a sound of satisfaction. Presumably he is happy about Tomas’s banishment. His attention abruptly turns to me. “Get up.” Then he crosses the room to a very messy desk near a tall, stained-glass window and picks up a notebook. He spends a moment thumbing through it, then, apparently satisfied that this was what he was looking for, he tosses it onto the floor in front of me. It lands with a loud thump. “I said get up.”
I get my feet underneath me and rise, one hand covering my bloody nose, the other grabbing for the book. But this is not a one-handed kind of book. It’s thick, and wide, and feels like it contains a million years of information within those pages. I have to use both hands to pick it up, so my nose drips blood onto the cover until I can shuffle it around and hold it tight to my chest and use my other hand to cover my face.
The beast points at the book. “That is where Grant left off. You will pick up there.”
I put the book down on a black stone counter, take off my flannel, and bunch it up so I can use it to stop my nosebleed.
When I look over at the beast, he’s staring at my perky breasts because I am wearing a scarlet-red bustier that looked very sexy and cool last night, on Halloween, but is getting more and more ridiculous as this day progresses. I glance over at the beast and when I look down, I find him…
“Oh. My God.” I cover my eyeballs, then nod at his semi-hard, male appendage and glance up at his face. “That’s gross. Put on some pants, for fuck’s sake.”
He doesn’t even blink. But his eyes do migrate upward from my b
reasts and meet my gaze. “Do you understand me, witch?”
I close my eyes and shake my head, trying to banish the image of his beastly dick from my brain, and turn back to the notebook. Again, it is a very hefty book bound with glue, and cloth, and leather with studs pounded into it. And when I open it, the paper is thick and has a coarse texture. One quick glance at the pages is all I need. I will be disappointing the beast tonight, because… “I do not speak Latin.”
“What?” I look over my shoulder and find him sneering. “You’re speaking Latin right now. It’s the common tongue.”
I turn all the way around to face the monster. He is intimidating. But facts are facts. And I don’t have very many to work with at the moment, so I feel like taking a stand on the language we’re both speaking. “It is not the common tongue. It is a dead language. Even I know that, and I failed three history classes in my high-school career. And no, sir, I’m not speaking Latin right now, I’m speaking English and so are you. This?” I pick up the notebook and drop it onto the counter with a dramatic thump. “Is not something I can help you with, even if I did speak Latin. Which, once again, I do not. I am not a…” I pause to choose the correct word. “I am not a witch. So I won’t be breaking any curses, or conjuring up any spells, or whatever. I live in reality, thank you. And these are the facts.”
He blinks at me.
And for some unknown reason, I burst out laughing. A proper guffaw. Because I don’t live in reality. I have never lived in reality. Because my one and only friend in this world is a talking bird. And she’s not a parrot, or a mynah bird, or a starling, or any other kind of bird that mimics talking.
She is an invisible sparrow.
The beast scowls at me and I just laugh harder. He ignores my outburst and continues to boss me around. “You will stay out of the cemetery, do you understand?”
I laugh again. Not as loud. It’s more like… one of those stifled giggles you see people do in public places at the most inappropriate times.
“You will spend your days in here. In this room. Reading those books—because you can read them, and you can speak and understand Latin, and you will find the cure.”