Hunted(57)

She gasped again, the sound emerging hesitantly, like her body needed to confirm the Beast was really dead and she was really alive, despite the evidence before her eyes. Yeva could not look at the body and so stared at the bloodstained book until its image was burned into her eyes. She waited for a sense of victory. Triumph. Elation. Anything.

But she felt . . . nothing.

No, that was wrong. As the room quieted and her heart settled and her mind slowly, slowly began to uncurl itself and reinhabit her body, she did feel something. Hear something. Very faint, but growing with every breath.

Music. The song of magic.

The Beast opened his eyes.

Yeva cried out and scrambled backward until she hit the wall. The knife was out of reach, but she could not even think of it now. The Beast had been dead, she was sure of it, yet now she was staring at this impossible thing as it happened in front of her.

The Beast’s gaping throat knit itself together neatly, as though she was watching a seam ripping in reverse. His lungs filled in one great, wet, rattling breath, and he coughed more blood onto the rug, and then he breathed again, and this time coughed pink foam, and then he lifted his head and, reeling as from a great blow, rolled onto the floor and onto his feet.

He gave a muted roar, sounding almost more inconvenienced and befuddled than furious, and stumbled forward a step. Then his head, still moving haltingly as the bones and tendons in his neck repaired themselves, swung over until his eyes found Yeva.

She could not even brace herself. She’d known he was magic, but this was sorcery beyond anything she could have imagined. This was nothing she could fight. She’d never felt so utterly helpless. The Beast would leap upon her soon and end it, and her terror was so real and so complete that she found herself praying that he would, and now, so that she would not have to feel this all-consuming fear an instant longer.

“Do not be afraid,” he whispered, then fell over, sideways, and slumped to the floor.

Yeva sat gasping, staring at the Beast. She did not imagine him speaking to her instead of simply tearing her apart, and she certainly had not expected his words to be . . . kind.

She found her shoulder blades peeling from the wall. Her body seemed to move on its own, crawling on all fours closer to the Beast.

He groaned, and lifted his head. His mouth was half open, panting like an animal who’s been too long in the sun and must cool itself—but these gasps were for breath, and Yeva knew there was still blood in his lungs, and that he’d fallen over from lack of air. “Do you think . . . ,” he said haltingly, stopping to pant, “I had not tried . . . to end my life . . . already?”

Yeva could not speak, only stare at him numbly.

“I suppose . . . ,” he wheezed, “it never occurred . . . to you.” He let his great head drop onto his paws, exhaustion closing his eyes.

“What?” Yeva managed to whisper.

“That I am a prisoner too. And have been far longer than you.”

Yeva was suddenly, keenly, brutally aware of her body; of the muscles strained and screaming; of the pounding in her own head from too much air, hyperventilated; of the way blood stuck her fingers together, the way it had somehow gotten inside the leg of her trousers, and was sticking the back of her knee to itself when she crawled. Her eyes burned, and she didn’t know whether they held tears, or if some of the Beast’s blood had gotten into them.

The Beast drew several long breaths, and each one slid a little bit more smoothly into his chest than the one before. “For a time—I do not know how much time—I tried everything I could think of. I threw myself from my tower. I opened my veins. I walked out into the cold and lay down in the snow and waited for the winter to take me, but it never did. I stopped eating, starved for months and waited to sleep and sleep and never stir again, but I woke every morning the same, emptiness within me. I begged Lamya, and the others, to kill me. But they also failed.”

He stopped for another breath before opening his eyes to look at Yeva, a great sadness in them that cut through her shock, finally, and left her on the verge of weeping. “If I thought you would have succeeded I would have let you kill me that day in the forest, when you found your father, and followed me into my trap.”

“Why?” Yeva trembled, her voice as raspy as if it had been her throat slashed. “Why forbid me to try to kill you, why threaten my family . . .” She swallowed. “Why lie?”

“Because we know wanting. We know desire. We know need.”

“Need . . .”

“You needed to believe you had a purpose. You needed to believe that you could kill me. You needed . . . hope.” The Beast watched her, the great sad eyes empty of all that rage, all that bestial ferocity that she’d seen that first day in the wood. “Now you understand that there is none.”

They stared at each other across the bloodied rugs, the spattered pages of the book, the glinting, sticky knife. The coals in the hearth glowed steadily, and outside the winter wind sang through the mouths of the gargoyles and blew snow against the castle stones, and somewhere down below Doe-Eyes waited, ears pricked and eyes closed, for the sound of Yeva’s footsteps returning.

“Tell me,” the Beast said softly. “If you had known, from the start, that I could not be killed, that you would never have your vengeance . . . would you have stayed?”

Yeva didn’t answer. She could not answer. Her heart had emptied. Her desire for revenge had nowhere to go. Without it, what did she have? What was she? What had she become?