Page 57 of The Library at Hellebore
“I just need someone to talk to.”
I looked over to the mass of fabric on her bed. Lately, Johanna seemed unable to get warm: she spent her days practically mummified in every article of clothing she could find, all pretense of aesthetic sloughed like old skin. Even then, she still shivered constantly, her fingers and lips blued, her skin dark with bruises. It was worse during the night. Worse still that early dawn. I could hear her teeth chatter and clack.
“What is it?” I said.
“Do you think.” She panted each word. “We’re actually bad people?”
I couldn’t help the laugh that rippled out of me. “Well, I certainly am.”
“You’re a kid, though,” Johanna said loftily, all of seven months my elder. “Kids aren’t good or bad.”
I jammed the heel of my right hand into an eye, tried toscrub the sleep from it. Johanna didn’t smell right either, hadn’t in days. Weeks. A sweet stench wept from her skin, like dying roses. “I don’t know about that. The things I did should have definitely gotten me a life sentence.”
She squirmed out of her blankets. Johanna had been beautiful once and you could argue that she’d become ethereal in recent days, like some artist’s rendition of a tortured saint, nothing but cheekbones and jawline and a smoldering pyrexic light that seemed to have burned her eyes into their sockets. But to me, she only looked unwell, eaten through by disease or despair.
“Do you ever think about why we’re here?”
“No. I got kidnapped.” I hadn’t forgiven Hellebore for that.
“Stefania and I—we.” She paused to cough. “Did we ever tell you about the Skinless Wolf?”
I shook my head.
“The Skinless Wolf,” said Johanna, nodding, tone didactic, distancing. Almost at once, I knew what she was doing: when you phrased a memory as a story, it became easier to pretend they didn’t gut you in the epilogue. “He—I don’t know what he is or was. He could have been a god, I suppose. A small one that history eventually forgot ever had an address in the heavens. Who knows? By the time Stefania and I were born, he was just a curse, one that our families fed with all their spare daughters. We became his mute of Hares. And he hunted us when he felt like it. When he caught us, we died horribly.”
I said nothing.
“We didn’t want… we wanted tolive.The death of the Hare isn’t, um, it’s not a good one. When one dies, they linger for a long time. Even if they’re carved up. Especially if they are. They spend eternities screaming, begging, even as a forest grows out of them. I didn’t want that.”
“Who would?” I said, thinking throughout I should reach for her shoulder, bare and white and cold in the dim light.
Johanna spoke the next words with neither contempt of her past nor shame. In fact, she said them without anything but a chilly factualness, her eyes as they held mine unweighted by regret. “But there were ways you could distract him from hunting you or killing you, though. He’d give you reprieve if you gave him an evening. Do you understand?”
I swallowed.
“I do.”
“I liked Rowan,” said Johanna quietly. I didn’t like that it was in the past tense, the decisive finality in her tone, its gauziness. Here was someone done fighting, beyond pain. And another person might have saidstay,might have saidlet me help.But I was sorry anyway we weren’t good enough friends for me to wrap my arms around her pain, hold her close, to tell her I understood morality and survival couldn’t always exist in the same room, and to beg forgiveness for being frankly a judgmental bitch. Because we weren’t, we sat awkwardly together instead, knees almost touching. And she was cold. I remember that still. “He’s not a bad guy.”
“I guess not.” This was goodbye, I could tell. I just didn’t know where she was going yet.
Johanna’s eyes blazed like a pulse, like flint struck over and over again, a white spark in the black of her pupils.
“Anyway, like I was saying, we didn’t want to end like that. We didn’t just want to be hallowed soil. Food for a new universe. And there’s only so long you can put off the Wolf. Eventually, you get too old for him.” She laughed, a tissue-paper noise tearing into a pained cough. Johanna daubed at her mouth with the back of a hand, wincing, and there was blood on her skin, the corner of her lips now so dried, theyweren’t much more than wounds. “So we told our keepers and they said to go, to come here, that if we think our lives are worth more than our cause, we could go. But they said it wouldn’t happen. They said everyone comes back, head bowed, arms out to embrace their fate.”
“Sounds like the Amish rumspringa except cosmically worse,” I said.
“Except none of the classes make sense. I tried to make them make sense. I did all my coursework. But it doesn’t teach anything. There’s nowhere to go, no way to advance. Unless you kill. It’s all about how many people you murder. That’s all it is. They want us to kill each other. I don’t know why. I don’t, I can’t.There’s something wrong with this place.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“I need you to keep Rowan safe.”
“We graduate tomorrow morning. It won’t matter.”
Johanna stared at the wall past my head, eyes unfocused. Whatever she was looking at, it wasn’t in this room or even this stratum of existence. “I don’t think we’re graduating. I’m not, anyway. The Wolf’s coming tonight and I’m done. I don’t want him to touch me. I don’t want that future. I don’t want what’s waiting for us out there either.”
“Johanna—” I broke, fingers reaching for her sleeve. She flinched from me, like I was a grasping flame, or teeth searching for her throat. But her expression remained unchanged, still that abstracted nothingness.
