Page 60 of The Library at Hellebore

Mine. My body to use. My body to bury in the orchard. Mine.

I saw again the wolf’s forests and the bodies beneath its branches; the wolf as a long-legged man, sitting on the soil, teeth digging into the white flesh of a girl’s leg as she kicked,screamed.We were meat to them, I remember thinking. Just meat. To the wolf, to you, to everyone else.

“Hope you have a bucket then.”

While I had no idea if I could stop the Wolf from doing what he wanted, I certainly could keep it from being easy.

DAY TWO

I tried to ignore the noises emanating from the Librarian’s coils, tried to ignore the ache that was beginning to spread from my throat across the length of my torso; a sensation like ice and heat both, like a sentient fever traveling into the bones so every joint twinged. I tried to ignore all of that and rise to my feet instead, wincing.

Because there was Adam, smiling like it was Christmas and naked as his namesake, dragging Gracelynn along the ground by an ankle, their hair so matted with gore that it trailed red over the floor like a paintbrush.

“My father,” he said in wondering tones, “he once appeared to me in a dream. And in the dream, he showed me my inheritance should I prove myself worthy: a hell of mewling sinners. It was the most beautiful thing I’d heard.”

“And?”

“And I’m looking forward to hearing Gracelynn do an encore.”

“Not to be that person, but that isn’t how you use the word,” I said in lieu of anything useful, preoccupied with maintaining focus, wondering the whole while if this was the root of Rowan’s irreverence: easier to act like everything is okay if you’re focused on something else. I forced a smile to my mouth. “Did he tell you he loved you at the end of it?”

Adam cocked a sympathetic look at me, guileless and compassionate; it made my skin want to writhe off the muscle. Where was Portia when you needed a fucking spider monster?

“Were you two friends?” he asked as if he hadn’t seen Gracelynn give it all up for us, hadn’t heard them scream for me to run, hadn’t seen me come back, desperate. As if he hadn’t been witness to their kindness and my refusal of such. The absolute sincerity in his voice suggested two things: either this was a trap, or he hadn’t cared to pay any attention up until this moment.

“If I’d been a better person, we would have been,” I said after a moment, a eulogy of a kind in the declaration. An odd epitaph, I guess, but a better one than I was liable to receive, which was to say when I was gone, there’d be no one to say I was here and that I mattered.

I ran my tongue over my teeth. One of my molars had loosened unexpectedly. I wiggled it, abruptly fascinated by how I could feel the tether of its root.

“Let them go. Please. You can have me instead,” I said impulsively, my mouth filmed with a fresh wash of blood. “Let them go. Please. You can have me instead.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you’ll have way more fun with me. Let them go.”

He laughed. Adam remained offensively attractive despite our shared deprivations, his hair tousled as opposed to ruined. I wanted him to touch me, wanted him, wanted to nuzzle into his shoulder, let him lie to me about whatever he wanted.

“No,” he said. “No, we can’t do that—”

“Adam, please.”

Years spent around men who believed that their dicks were reliquaries taught me how to smile despite the wave of nausearolling through me. I sweetened my expression as best as I could even as the world swam, every object becoming haloed by a soft light of its own. I blinked hard, salt stinging my eyes, nails cutting crescent wounds into my palms. My own stigmata, my own punishment for this weakness, this greed for life.

“Maybe,” he said, raising Gracelynn’s limp form so he had them suspended by the hair, their legs swaying. There was so much blood on them, I couldn’t see the patterns on their skirts any longer. Their head hung slack, chin brushing their chest.

At the wordmaybe,I couldn’t help the surge of hope. Adam’s smile told me he saw it too, that misguided optimism of mine, and the smile widened like a slit throat as he said, “Maybe. If you’d been kinder to me, if you’d cooperated, I might have considered it. But none of these things are true and I need you more than I need her,so…”

He gave a philosophical little shrug, lifting Gracelynn so their face was level with his. “No hard feelings.”

I was on my feet.

“I won’t let you,” I said. Blood shone down my chin, my hands, through the beds of my nails; I felt it trickle from my nostrils, thickening. My mouth tasted hot and coppery and rank. It might have felt less like a nightmare if Adam wasn’t still fucking naked and utterly unselfconscious of his bobbing erection.

He was enjoying this.I might have felt rage if I wasn’t dying too.

“How are you going to stop me?”

“Not sure,” I said, reaching out with what little of me wasn’t consumed by the work of staying alive, fighting against Rowan’s deathworker magic coursing through my body. I traced Adam’s bones, the line of his spine like a subtlequestion mark; there was his heart, his liver, that corrupted fire he’d inherited from his father, burning like a star. “But even if it kills me, I’ll do it.”

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