by K. C. Cross
This time I don’t even bother laughing. I breathe out the word, “Ohhhhhh,” then suck in air through my teeth. “Here you go. Here’s what I’m gonna say. Are you ready? OK. Fine. No problem. I will pretend to read your books and learn how to break your curse. But if you honestly expect me to be of any help to you, you will be disappointed. So you should seriously consider getting yourself another… witch. Or whatever. Because the longer I stay here, the more behind you’ll be.”
He ignores my words. “You will put the ring on, you will—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Did you say ring?”
“You will put it on. You will do as you’re told. And as far as that pet goes? I don’t want to see it. And if it shits on my floors—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” And then it hits me. “Pia, you mean?” Can he see her?
“—you will clean it up immediately,” he continues like I’m not even talking. “If I see one speck of bird shit on anything I will—”
“Where is she?”
“—punish you,” he finishes.
I look up. Then at the door. “Where is she?” I throw my flannel down—my nose bleed under control now—and start walking for the door. Tomas is still pounding on it, still spewing threats at the beast. But when I try to open it up, it doesn’t budge.
“You do not walk away from me, girl. You are mine. I command you. And I’m in the process of commanding you to listen to me explain your role here.”
I turn, flip him off, and say, “Fuck you. Where is she? Pia?” I call, shouting up at the ceiling, even though it’s pretty clear she’s not in here. “Pia!” I shout it.
“She’s out there.”
I look over my shoulder at the beast and he’s pointing at the door. “Open the door right now so I can go find her.”
“You need to find the ring and put it on. Then you can find your pet.”
“She’s not a pet, you idiot. She’s me. And I already have the ring.” I walk over to my flannel, pull the ring out of my pocket, and hold it up in the light. “It’s right here. But I’m not putting it on. It’s got creepy writing on it.”
“It’s the charm that lets you leave.”
“What?” I blink at him. “Did you just say leave?”
“Yes.” My hope builds. “Temporarily,” he adds. “For a few hours at a time so you can run errands for me.”
I snort. Like, literally snort. “Run errands for you?”
“Put it on.”
“No. I’m not putting it on. This ring feels like a trap. Like once I put it on, that seals the deal. I’ve seen enough movies to understand how it works. You need to bind me here somehow and this ring is how you do that.”
“You will put it on.”
“I will not.”
“Trust me.” And for the first time since we met, the beast smiles at me. But it’s not a friendly smile, it’s a snarky one. And it comes with fangs. It would be easy to forget what this thing is if you’re only looking at his face. I mean, the shock of the horns has worn off and I’m not looking at his lower half ever again until he learns what pants are. But when he smiles, he shows me his teeth. They are the teeth of a beast and this smile says, I’ve got you. There is no way out now. “You will put that ring on,” he continues. “You will need to leave the sanctuary. We will run out of food in a matter of days. Grant’s weekly grocery trip is tomorrow.”
“Grocery trip? The fuck?”
“Put it on,” he snarls again.
I’m not going to put it on, but before I can object again, the door bursts open and Tomas comes tumbling through.
“Get out!” the beast immediately roars. “You are not allowed to break through my magic!”
Tomas gets to his feet, dusts off his hands, and then points to the beast. “Fuck you, Pell. In case you haven’t noticed, things have changed around here with the new girl. Looks like you’re losing control. Maybe there was a limit on the number of caretakers you were allotted? Or maybe the gods are just bored with you and have decided to hand things over to someone else.”
“Someone like you?”
“Yeah. Someone like me. Someone who can get shit done.”
The monster—Pell—scoffs.
“Come on,” Tomas says. He extends his hand to me. “Come with me. I’ll show you around.”
I hesitate. And I don’t really know why I do it because Tomas has a certain look to him. A look that says, I’ve seen things. I know things. I can do things. And I don’t know what that whole conversation was really about, but I’m pretty sure about one thing and one thing only.
Tomas is not the one in charge here. Has never been the one in charge here.
So even though I want to go with him—I would feel safer with him—I can’t.
Because this is a moment that will decide things and I need to think this through.
If I leave with Tomas, we will be split clearly into two camps. And I have a feeling that eventually Tomas will end up on the losing side. He’s big, and muscular, and he’s strong-willed and loud, but he’s up against a beast. A monster who is nearly seven feet tall. A monster who can freeze me in place and slam heavy wooden doors with the wave of his finger. A monster who just explained that we are cursed and our curses are tied together.
Is this curse thing real?
I don’t know.
Is Pia real?
To me, she is. And if my talking alter-ego is real, this curse thing might be too. I don’t know. I need time to process. And maybe I’m not all up on the whole Saint Mark’s curse and everything, but it doesn’t take a genius to understand that siding against the beast in charge isn’t in my best interest.
On the other hand, if I’m truly stuck here, I don’t want to alienate Tomas. So there is just one thing left to do. “No,” I tell Tomas.
“No?”
I look over my shoulder at Pell. “No to you as well. I don’t know what’s going on here. Perhaps I’m just dreaming and in a little bit I will wake up and laugh at the absurdity of it all. But then again, maybe not. It wouldn’t be the first time the gods have frowned upon me. All I know is…” I pause and look the beast straight in the eyes. “I don’t need you. You need me.”
Then I turn my head and look at Tomas. “And I like you, Tomas. I think you might be a good man and you’re kinda hot—but while I’d love to trust you, I’ve learned a thing or two about trusting attractive, charismatic men who take an instant interest in me. So I don’t need you, either. I don’t need either of you. I’ve been traveling through this life on my own, with just my pet at my side”—I sneer the word at the monster—“since I was nine. And that’s how it’s gonna stay. So you can tell me where Pia is”—I point at the beast—“or not. She is me, and I am her, and I will find her with or without you.”
The beast called Pell straightens. And this makes his absurdly large male appendage straighten as well. “For fuck’s sake,” I mutter, turning my head to the side. “Can you please put on some pants?”
I turn on my heel, push past Tomas, and walk out into the grand entrance hall. Unsure of where I’m going, just very sure I need to get out of that room and away from that beast.
“She’s up there,” the beast calls. And when I look back at him, he’s pushing past Tomas too. Then he points to the ceiling. “She’s up there. I saw her earlier.”
I eye him with suspicion. Because his tone has changed once again and this time, the softness doesn’t feel like a lie. But it still could be. He’s probably just being helpful to make Tomas mad. But right now, I’ll take any assistance I can get if it helps me find Pia.
So I squint up at the ceiling. It’s a very beautiful ceiling. Like the Sistine Chapel, almost. But with beasts and monsters instead of angels or whatever.
“Pia!” I call. Is she scared? Is that why she flew off? Why isn’t she calling for me? The last time I remember talking to her, we were outside that gate near the cottage. I picked up the ring and… oh, fuck. I wilt a little.
It’s the ring. I put in my pocket and she crawled in there and when the beast threw me up in the air, she flew out of my pocket and disappeared.
But the monster said he saw her and he said bird. But when she flew away, she was a moth, not a bird. I turn to the beast. “What did she look like?” He and Tomas are both staring at me. They are side by side, the monster towering over Tomas, who is well over six feet tall himself. “Hello? I asked you a question. What did the bird look like?”
The beast shrugs with his hands. “A bird.”
“That’s not helpful. Maybe it’s not my bird? Maybe it’s some other bird?”
“There are no birds here,” Tomas explains. “No animals at all.” Then he hooks a thumb towards the monster at his side. “Well, except for him.”
“Fuck you,” the beast snarls back.
A flutter of wings high up in the ceiling draws all our eyes upward.
“There,” the beast says. “That’s her.”
And maybe it is. I hope it is. But even if I squint, I cannot see that high up. “It’s too dark in here,” I say. “Where are the lights?”
“We don’t have lights in the cathedral,” the beast says. “We have sunshine.”
“And sconces,” Tomas adds, nodding to the sconces on the stone walls, which I hadn’t really noticed before this moment. “But we don’t have electricity in here. So. No lights. Everything runs on gas.”
“Everything?” This can’t be right. “Where does it come from? Who pays the bill?”
“None of that matters,” the beast says. “There is no electricity here, so if you are not used to cooking with fire, you should grab a book on it when you go to the store tomorrow.”
I don’t even know how to process that sentence. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Cooking,” Tomas explains.
“I don’t cook.” And did he just change sides? Because he’s acting like I will be cooking for them in the near future. And I don’t even cook for myself, I am certainly not cooking for these cursed people.
“You’re a woman,” Tomas says.
“Women cook,” the beast adds. Like this is a logical sequence of critical thinking.
I snort. So that’s where we are? Some monster version of the good woman at home? I snort again. “I am not the maid.”
“Technically…” Tomas holds up a finger of protest.
“Whose side are you on?” I blurt.
“There is only one side here,” Pell says. “Mine.”
For fuck’s sake. If there is a god, please, please, please wake me up from this nightmare. Soon. I turn away from them and mutter, “This isn’t real. This cannot be real.”
“It is real,” the beast says. “And I was explaining the facts of the curse to you for a reason. If you want out, you must get me out first. I wasn’t talking to hear myself. I was explaining—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tomas interrupts. He walks over to me. “Listen, your bird is fine. She probably can’t leave the sanctuary. Not without you, anyway. No one can leave without you.” He pauses. “Well, I can’t ever leave. But Pell can. You won’t mind the errands. It will get you out of the house. That’s what Grant used to say.”
“The rules,” the beast says. “I’m going to make this easy for you.” He turns to Tomas. “Where’s the rulebook?”
Tomas nods his head to a massive three-story bookshelf just inside the apothecary that has a precarious ladder attached to slide rails. Above the ladder is a small catwalk that lines the perimeter of the room with another, even more suspect, ladder, presumably so you can search for books on the second floor. This goes on for yet another level and if one were actually inclined to search for books three stories up using those deathtraps, they would find themselves a good forty feet in the air.
There are thousands of books and the thought of going through them all to find answers about a curse suddenly makes me weary.
The beast walks into the room and over to the bookshelf. He scans it for several long, silent moments, and then plucks a book off the shelf and turns back to me.
I’m already shaking my head. “Nut-uh. Nope. That is not the rulebook. It’s like two thousand pages long. There cannot possibly be that many rules.”
The beast is not deterred. He walks over to me, thrusts the book at me, and waits. Expecting me to take it.
I salute him with my middle finger. Then I turn on my heel, walk down the staircase, through the doors, outside into the night, down the hill and past his stupid cemetery, and go inside my cursed cottage.
CHAPTER FIVE - PELL
“I don’t think I like her.” I pace back and forth across the room, trying to force this night to make sense. I am not prepared for this change. Fifty years is a long time for Grant to be stuck here with me, but if he’d just held on for another ten, he wouldn’t have been able to walk out. There would be no escape because there would be no life waiting for him beyond the walls of Saint Mark’s.
“That feeling seems to be mutual.” Tomas says this absently. He’s stretched out on the lounger flipping through one of Grant’s notebooks. “I like Pie though. And I’m pretty sure she likes me too.”
“Pie?”
“That’s her name.”
“Meat pie? Shepherd’s pie? Fruit pie? What kind of pie is she? And why is she named after pie when she refuses to cook?”
Tomas ignores all of my questions. “How far do you think Grant got?”
“What?”
“I bet we could find him.”
I’m failing to see the logic here. “Why would we want to find Grant? He left. He’s not coming back. Why the hell would he?”
Tomas thinks about this for a moment. “I think he will want to talk to me. He didn’t get to say goodbye.”
“Hold on a moment.” I put up one clawed hand to halt this train of thought. Because Tomas needs to be set straight. His kind are dangerous when you let them run with a delusion too long. “Where were you when he left?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you missing? Were you lost in the forest? Were you locked in a tower?”
“What the hell are you going on about? I was here. Working out on the second-story balcony.” He flexes his biceps at me. “I got a little lost in the hallways coming downstairs so he left before he could say goodbye.”
“Where did the girl come from? The back gate?”
“No. She came in the front gate. Grant met her out in the hall.”
“So he was here, she was here, you were here. But he didn’t say goodbye to you?”
“I just told you. I got lost. I was late.”
“Did he leave you a note?”
“No.” Tomas hesitates. His delusion falters for a moment. I can see it on his face. But he rallies—he always rallies—and then he smiles. And poof. That delusion is firmly back in place.
Grant hated Tomas. He hated me more, so there’s that. But Grant gives no fucks about Tomas.
I consider how far I want to push this line of questioning. It’s been a while since Tomas and I talked this much. We don’t usually cross paths here on the grounds of Saint Mark’s. He stays here in the main cathedral and I prefer my own space out in the cemetery. And I would not call my feelings towards Tomas caring or anything close to that. But I don’t want him focused on some goodbye he never got from Grant.
Tomas has gone quiet though, so there is no need to prolong this conversation.
I turn my back to him and walk out.
I leave the cathedral and begin walking in the direction of Tarq’s tomb with the idea that I might continue our one-way conversation. But when I get to the top of the hill, I catch a glimpse of the little cottage house down below, near the back wall. Gas lamps glowing on both floors.
Grant didn’t like that place. So it has not been occupied for all these decades. But she is down there now. Her scent trail leads right to the door.
I sit down on a nearby tomb base, wondering just how much life will change now that there is a g
irl here.
It has been a long time since I had the opportunity to be around a woman. And while she is not my type—I have my own preferences and she is not it—she is… here.
I won’t be able to compel her to like me, but I can compel her to do lots of other things.
I shake my head, pushing thoughts of that out of my mind so I can concentrate on what’s really important.
The curse.
I struggle with it now. Have been struggling with it for about a hundred and fifty years, actually. That’s when things really started to change in the outside world. I haven’t left the sanctuary for nearly three years, but Grant would bring things back. Phones, for one. The kind that fit in your pocket. They didn’t work here, of course. Not for calling people. But about a decade ago, these phones were no longer just phones. And Grant did a lot of other things with them.
The slave before Grant was into science and he actually hooked up a bunch of wires about eighty years ago. He strung them everywhere and then he hooked up a phone. The old-fashioned kind. He even got a connection once. Just once though. It was like the curse didn’t understand what he was doing and it took a moment to figure out this phone line—like electricity—was unacceptable. He did manage to get the gas lights working though. So there’s that.
But the outside world is not something I understand.
Everything about it feels like magic and magic is always a trap.
Then, now, and always.
I go back to Tarq’s tomb and stop at the front. There is a door, but there is no door. Not for me. I have been banished from the tombs since the beginning. Every single tomb door has been glamoured with ancient spells. I know they’re there and I have the key to open them, which is me. But I can’t see them. And the caretaker slave can see them, but not open them.
If you’re going to be cursed it’s actually quite nice to have a partner. That’s what my slave caretaker is supposed to be. They get the sight, I get the key. It should be a simple thing. But when we’re together, the slave caretaker cannot see the tomb doors.
When the great alchemist Ostanes made this place to keep her secrets safe, the gods panicked. The entire curse was created through a flurry of magical moves and countermoves by Saturn and Juno. But in a way that made everything more complicated, not less. So not much about Saint Mark’s makes sense. Especially the magic that governs it.