Page 19 of The Library at Hellebore

Anyway, as a result of this disinterest in her heritage, our home never saw home-cooked meals, only an abundance of the nominally Asian takeouts that my stepfather had loved; it was an improvement, however, over when my actual father was alive, the latter disdaining anything but the blandest, beigest of meals. For the most part, I haven’t regretted leaving, but a part of me would always be sorry I never got to become the kind of middle-aged woman who could berate their mother for her choices in men.

“Don’t knock it until you try it,” I told him absently.

“The kung pao?” he said. “No, that I like. Talking about the weird carvings. They could at least make them sexy.”

I pretended I hadn’t taken any notice of the wooden friezes, the stark and frightened faces of the knights mouthing an exaggeratedoh,which earned me a throaty chuckle; Rowan was buying none of it. He winked.

“Gruesome stuff, huh?”

“More of Bella Khoury’s work, I imagine.”

“You know, I’ve always wondered why she was soobsessedwith carnivorous deer.”

“Probably a metaphor for how the poor dream of eating the rich,” I said, adding a token amount of broccoli. I thought of her portrait again, her sullen eyes. “Or something to that tune.”

“I think it could be for shock value,” said Rowan loftily, the eternal contrarian, heaping a bloody mass of chopped-upsteak onto his plate, the white ceramic pinking with the runoff. “Art exists because the artist doesn’t want to be forgotten. Because theartiste”—he stretched the word into its French counterpart, taking clear pleasure in the act—“wants to live forever in the minds of their audience.”

“Do you really think that?” I was amused despite myself. Rowan grinned at me from the other side of the steaming trays, ladling gravy and fries atop a throne of red meat to create what looked like an American’s idea of poutine. “Given everything I’ve heard, I somehow doubt it.”

Toward the north end of the hot food station, right under the tray holding the massive serving of badly stirred risotto, was a bas-relief of six fawns, identifiable by the speckled pelts and the softly drawn ears, with their muzzles buried in the unspooled mess of a hunter’s entrails, the man still alive despite being unraveled, his face a rictus of agony. There was a filmic quality to the whole hideous affair. I had to wonder if Khoury had carved this from imagination or if she’d used references, and if references had been used, had it been a collage of images or had she a specific muse?

“No,” said Rowan.

“What do you think then?”

Rowan waited until I met his eyes again to say: “I think she needed to do something with her rage at the world or she’d burn it all down.”

A shiver wormed through me. Before I could reply, he added, diffusing the moment, “Pity I was born too late to meet such a goth mommy. I bet she was a freak in the sack.”

I laughed. I was beginning to like him. It was hard not to. Rowan was caddish and crass but he was funny and self-deprecating about it which made all the difference. Here was a man who didn’t just disbelieve his own hype but took anactive pleasure in making himself a fool for the world’s entertainment.

“Maybe the curriculum will include necromancy,” I said. “That way you’ll be able to find out.”

“If I should be so lucky,” said Rowan, his shit-eating grin at odds with those eyes of his, blue like the bottom of a lake. They held a dangerous sincerity, an interest I couldn’t help but be flattered by: it felt like an invitation to share in a conspiracy, like a heart carved out and held up to me on a plate. Like I said: dangerous. In another life, I might have bitten down on that bloody bait but I wasn’t looking to stay at Hellebore and even if I was, it wouldn’t be for him.

I snuck a glance over Rowan’s shoulder, and saw Portia sitting beside Sullivan, reanimated, jovial, laughing. Any animosity that the two had possessed toward each other seemed to have since dissipated. As I stared at them, it occurred to me that Portia’s inconsistencies hadn’t killed my interest: they had deepened it, something I resented. Relationships were nooses and people deadweight: the romantics always ended up hanging from their hearts.

And I hadn’t survived this long to die for a pretty face.

“So, your name is Alice, huh?”

“Alessa.”

“Huh,” said Rowan. “Short for Alexandra?”

“Nope.”

“Alessandra?” said Rowan, overemphasizing the middle syllable.

“Nope,” I said, filling the last crescent of empty space on my plate with pickled radish, less because I had any craving for it and more because of the incongruence of their presence. An entire array of Americanized food and then for some reason, authenticdanmuji.“It’sjustAlessa.”

“Weird name but okay.”

“Glad you approve, I guess,” I said sourly. This was the second time today someone’d taken an unwholesome interest in my name, both of whom were white as cocaine. I was ready then to find a different table to nurse my lunch when a short, skinny boy rushed up to us, his heavily freckled face a rictus of badly suppressed terror.

“You don’t want that,” said the boy to Rowan. His Scottish accent was thick enough to slather on a piece of toast.

“Don’t want what?”

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