Page 38 of Beau and the Beast

"It's your teeth," Beau said. "They're intimidating, is all. I barely noticed them the first time we met."

Wolfram frowned, forcing his lips down awkwardly as if to hide the enormous canines.

"You don't have to do that, Mr. Wolfram. I'll get used to it. They're just teeth."

The man's mouth went slack.

"You're a very well-reasoned young man, Mr. Blake."

"Please, just call me Beau."

Wolfram nodded. "You don't have to call me Mr. Wolfram," he said after a moment, raising an eyebrow.

"What should I call you then?"

He seemed to think that over, scratching his chin idly with the claw on his index finger.

"My first name is Isidore," he said, finally. "But my father went by Isidore—no one has ever called me that aside from my mother. Everyone just calls me Wolfram."

"Then I'll go with Wolfram, if you don't mind."

"No," he said. "I don't mind at all."

And for the first time since Beau had arrived, the man who was unlike anyone Beau had ever met allowed himself tosmile.

Chapter Eight

The nightmare wasthe same way that it had always been for Beau, a harrowing sensory memory of the night his parents died.

Choking smoke billowed and Beau’s lungs sucked in the evil scent of it until his body felt full of ash. He couldn't get to Noah's room fast enough, burning his hands on the knobs, burning his hands on every part of the blazing house—the childhood home that had turned into a trap of kindling and flames and heat, everything hot, singed, the things that were not yet on fire filled with that terrible potential to erupt and light up at any second.

Noah was shouting, whimpering, unrecognizable, and then unconscious. Beau slapped at his brother’s pajamas, his stomach churning at the sight of skin gone black, before pulling Noah’s tiny body back toward the hallway.

And then there were the big men in their gas masks and helmets, more frightening in that moment than they had been reassuring, picking Noah and Beau up like goblins out of a fairy tale, about to abscond with their precious prizes, to gobble up the two brothers.

He heard nothing from his parents that night. There were no cries. There was no memory of them even existing during the blaze.

It was as if the house fire had simply erased them and every part of their existence.

The fire took away all of the brothers' possessions, their security, their home, their parents.

Mom and Dad had been there every day of their lives.

And then they simply weren't.

Maybe things would've been different for Beau if he'd had some sort of closure—watched two grim body bags loaded into the back of an ambulance or heard them shouting for help.

But he doubted it.

There was nothing that would bring them back and nothing that would heal the wound of their absence. The memory would always be as swollen and scarred as his brother’s face.

Even as a child who craved mystery, fantasy, incredible worlds where even the most unlikely things could happen, Beau knew that their parents were gone and that he and Noah would be alone in the world for the rest of their lives.

* * *

Beau woke that morning thrashing, reaching for Noah, calling out for his brother. He was disoriented in that peculiar way that happened sometimes, when he woke out of sleep unsure of which part was a dream: the nightmare of the fire, or the thought that he was a 27-year-old man living in New Whitby.

The moment was made more complicated by his surroundings. He didn’t wake tucked into the low bed in his apartment, in a room so small that he could almost touch both ends of it at the same time. Beau was in a huge bed, too big, with wooden posters that looked like tree trunks. Sunlight illuminated the room, but the angle of it was all wrong.

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