Page 88 of Beau and the Beast

* * *

At the beginningof her captivity, Violet had wiled away the monotonous days doing research.

She’d tried to find information about curses, about witches, about any sort of magic—and she’d been dismayed to find nothing that even began to resemble valuable information.

They’d all been trying to figure out what the rules were, now that their universe had been upended. But certainly the person among them who had the most to learn was Wolfram.

He’d had to re-learn how to eat, how to interact with his environment, how to move his body around the penthouse without knocking things to the ground with his tail or his bulk, without clipping doorways with his horns.

Maybe she’d started learning about wild animals out of some sense of duty to help Wolfram. Or maybe she’d done it to understand just what she’d be up against if he ever lost his mind and turned against them.

She’d started with rams, learning that a ram’s horn consists of a keratinous sheath over a bony core that attaches to the skull. They grow throughout the lifetime of a ram.

Wolfram had talked about sawing his horns off, in the beginning, and she’d been glad that she’d done the research. If broken deeply, they can bleed—and in the end, they would’ve grown back anyway.

After that, she’d moved on to big cats. Feeling absurd, she’d managed to find a handbook online for how to care for captive lions and she’d pored over it, noting what they were fed, what vitamins needed to be supplemented, and how often. She’d been the first to suggest that Wolfram may feel better if he fasted a few days a week—and she’d been right.

She’s also learned plenty of facts that frightened her. Lions’ canine teeth can grow to be more than three inches long. They can run as fast as fifty miles an hour at a sprint. They can jump over ten meters. They have vomeronasal organs in the roofs of their mouths that makes their sense of smell remarkable, the same organ that allowed snakes to taste the air.

But one fact she’d learned and then quickly forgotten was that a lion’s roar could be heard by the human ear from a distance of five miles—the loudest roar of any big cat.

It hadn’t been relevant. Wolfram may share some physical attributes with lions, but he’d neverroared.

When she heard the sound that morning, she thought the building was collapsing. Violet rushed into the hall in time to see the others emerging from their rooms.

“Are you alright?” James asked.

“The hell is that?”

“It just started—“

“It’sWolfram,dipshits,” Geoffrey said, gripping the doorframe to his room, white-knuckled.

“He doesn’t—“ Violet started, “I mean he’s never—“

“Well hedoesnow,” Alfie said.

“Guys,” James said, fear edging into his voice. “Where’s Beau?”

The door to Beau’s room was half open but he hadn’t come out to the hall with the others.

“Jesus Christ,” Geoffrey said stepping back.

Violet pushed Beau’s door open and stepped inside. The drawing room was empty and so was his bedroom. She turned to find that James and Song had followed her into the room.

“I’ll find him,” she said, striding back to the hallway.

The other two were at her heels. The bellowing roars had stopped as they crossed the penthouse. When they reached the door to Wolfram’s study, she paused.

“Just stay at the door,” she said.

“You can’t go in there by yourself—“

“If there’s something going on—“

“If Wolfram’s lost his mind, there’s nothing you’ll do by coming in with me except get yourselves killed,” she said, cutting them off. “And if he hasn’t, I need to go see what the problem is.”

They nodded but looked no less frightened.

---