Hunted(58)

But the Beast’s words had stung her, touching a buried current she’d been ignoring for days. For weeks. Ever since he’d brought her a deer and, over its carcass, had called her Beauty.

“Beast,” she whispered, numb. “Did you kill my father?”

His eyes flickered, the ghost of something passing before them so that for a moment he wasn’t looking at her anymore, but at some memory, some thought she could not see. He didn’t answer, but rose unsteadily to his feet. Before she knew what she was doing, Yeva stood as well and crossed to his side.

The Beast froze. His gaze dropped from Yeva’s face to where her hand had come to press against his chest to keep him from leaving.

She swallowed, abruptly aware of how infrequently she touched him, and forced herself to fight the instinct to withdraw. He moved as if to brush past her, but Yeva didn’t take her hand from his chest, and dug her fingers into the soft fur.

“Let me go,” the Beast said quietly. Then, so soft she almost missed it: “Please.”

“He was already dead, wasn’t he?” Yeva said. “When I came upon him in that clearing. You were coming to find him, to track the hunter you needed for your task, and you came upon his body moments before I did. The scavengers had gotten to him. He was already dead, wasn’t he?”

The Beast shifted, the muscles stirring beneath her hand, reminding her that if the Beast truly wished to leave, he could brush her aside with an easy swat of his paw.

He did not answer. There was no need.

“Why take me?” Yeva asked.

The Beast’s eyes closed, as if it might be easier to speak without Yeva’s face before them. “Because I thought hunters like your father would come after you if you disappeared. I thought I could take one of them for my task. I knew I had to find someone else, someone younger, but still possessing his skill. I did not know then that you . . .”

The Beast’s breath hitched. Yeva could feel it under her hand, and the beat of his pulse, so very like the music she heard in the wood. For the first time she understood how the Beast could hear it as a heartbeat.

“I did not know,” he began again, “that you were the one I’d been searching for.”

Before she could respond he slipped past her. Yeva could hear his steps for once, halting as he continued to recover from the mortal wound she’d given him, fading down the long curved stair of the tower. She thought they sounded like the rhythm of two feet rather than the gallop of four.

Nothing in her body was working, not her lungs nor her legs, and Yeva dropped to the floor with a feeling like knives in her chest. She began to sob so violently her body felt as if it might shatter. The fury that had sustained her, the burning need for revenge that had kept her alive in the cell, that had driven her in the wood to hone her archery and her tracking—what did she have now? Her fire had gone, and she felt its loss as keenly as if she were mourning a death.

And she was. When her father’s death had been a murder, when he’d died because a savage Beast had ripped out his throat, she didn’t have to grieve. She could find his killer and destroy him, stand over him, watch him die. She could have shaken the very earth with her vengeance and filled the gaping hole in her heart with blood.

She could have killed death itself.

But all that was gone now. Instead her father had died an old man’s death, from a weakened heart and an unsound mind. He’d died cold and alone in a wood that he no longer knew. And there was no one who could pay for it, no one whose blood could dilute Yeva’s grief.

She lay there on the floor, weeping into the blood-soaked rug, surrounded by the books her father would never read to her, the castle he would never see, the approaching spring that, for him, would never come. And as if by the same magic that had transformed the Beast, she became nothing more than a little girl who’d lost her father.





BEAST


The sound of her weeping follows us to the farthest reaches of the castle, even into our den below, back, back into the earth and the deep. We curse our animal’s hearing and we curse our man’s knowledge of what grief is and we curse the unfamiliar ache of regret that creeps ever deeper, ever deeper.

We curse everything, for we are cursed, and we have no arms to shelter her and no lips to press to her hair and above all no words to tell her that we know loss and we know pain and if they were monsters we could fight we would have slain them in her name long ago like the heroes of old.

But we are not a hero. We are cursed.





SEVENTEEN


EVENTUALLY YEVA’S WEEPING SLOWED, for though the lancing pain in her heart remained, her eyes could produce no more tears. She could not bring herself to stand, feeling as weak as if she’d been in bed for weeks—instead she crawled to the divan and slumped into its velvet cushions.

She slept.

Later she woke to a tiny sound, no louder than a whisper, but a sound she knew so well. A single footstep, the slip of paw pads against stone. The Beast was on the other side of the door. She waited, but he did not speak, and did not enter. After a time, she heard his footsteps retreating again, and she rose shakily to her feet. When she opened the door, she found food and a water skin and, wrapped in a roll of faded linen, her arrow-making supplies—and Doe-Eyes, having grown anxious waiting for her below, hoping to be allowed inside.

And then she found she could still weep, for the Beast who knew she did not want company and gave her that solitude, for the Beast who could not know how badly she wanted him to speak with her, about anything other than her father, and nothing but her father. She wept because she did not know what she wanted, and because she wanted everything, and because her father was dead.