Page 58 of The Library at Hellebore

“I have a theory,” said Johanna. “That the Wolf needs us for power. That’s why it hunts us. But if I’m going to die, I don’t want it to be for him. I’m not going to be his kindling. I’m not going to be his soil. I won’t feed his belly. I won’t, I fucking won’t. I didn’t come all this way for it to end like this.”

With care, she took my hand in hers, twined our fingers,brought mine to her throat. I felt her pulse shiver against my palm. Then when I had so gripped, Johanna drew down her collar, exposing the lesioned skin.

“I don’t hate you, by the way,” said Johanna and it was her in her entirety, with that softness I’d so loathed in the beginning.

“Thanks? Also, that’s pretty hardcore. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you and Rowan are into that—”

“It’s the Wolf,” said Johanna, tracing a crescent of sores that trailed from her collarbone, abscessed. “Was always the Wolf. That’s how we know he’s coming. He leaves marks. Warnings. But I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

I released my grip on her. “Please don’t tell me you want to talk about Rowan.”

“I just need to clear the air here, okay?” She hesitated. Her cheeks went maroon, like something had ruptured under the surface. “I don’t hate that Rowan likes you. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.”

“You two were still hooking up, though. I’d assumed—”

She cocked her head. “That we had feelings for each other?”

“Not quite.” The topic of Rowan felt more intimate than the galaxy of wounds spread over her chest, the mess of us more abhorrent than whatever the alleged Wolf had visited on her. “I’d rather we not talk about this.”

“Oh, that I have feelings for him.” Johanna laughed again. It cost her. “Because I’ve got stars in my eyes and I can’t help falling in love with everything, being the manic pixie dream girl that I am?”

“Your words, not mine.” If I’d been a better person, I might have hated myself for my own flippancy, the malice razoring my words.

“I absolutely have feelings for him but I meant what I said all that time ago. I don’t care what he does with his time whenhe isn’t with me. He’s his own person. He’s allowed autonomy. Besides.” Johanna smiled, the expression small and luminous and unexpected in its beauty. “You seem to make him happy and I’m glad for that. Rowan’s not as bad as everyone seems to think he is, you know?”

The smile died to a memory. “He deserves more than the world’s given him.”

I was almost sorry when I said: “Sadly, I don’t like him that way.”

“Your loss.” She laughed again, that strangeness drawing over her once more like a shawl. “But yeah, I don’t mind at all. I like thinking that there’s going to be someone watching over him when I’m gone. I want there to be.”

Johanna slipped from my bed then, even more a wraith than I’d remembered somehow. What I could see of her body through the layers of winter wear were bone and skin gone dull, sallow. She looked rubbed-out, aged, like a stain someone had tried to erase but lingered still in the fabric, a god forgotten, a ghost. Gently, she struggled loose of whatever was left of her clothing. The light caught in her eyes, and they glowed white for an instant.

“Kill me.”

A part of me was surprised when I responded with, “What?”

“I need you to kill me.”

“I heard you the first time, but why the fuck?” I struggled out of my duvet, grabbing at the clothes she’d discarded. “Also, Jesus, put some clothes on.”

All of her was profaned with wounds, some deeper than others, some wide enough to bare bone like teeth; it was all putrid too, puddles of greenish shadow and yellow-veined gray. Her skin had thinned to near translucence and I could see the black rivers of her veins beneath the surface.

“Kill me. Please.”

“You know,” I said, “there was a time when I’d have given anything to hear you say that.”

“We don’t have time.”

“Put your clothes on.” I draped Johanna’s shirt over her like a pashmina, struck by a sudden aversion to her bare skin: it had a repellent shine to it in that near light. “And go to bed. I don’t know what fucking—”

“The Wolf is coming.”

I paused.

“When he’s here, I’m going to die,” said Johanna. “He’s going to eat me up. Unlessyoudo it.”

I didn’t watch to touch her but I palmed her shoulder nonetheless, trying to steer Johanna toward her bed. “Goddamnit, Johanna. Go the fuck to sleep.”

---