Page 63 of The Library at Hellebore

“I know you think that the best way of getting out of this place is to run, but you’re going to get yourself killed,” said Portia. “There’s only one way out.”

“Guess I’m going to see if you’re wrong,” I said, withdrawing my hand, repelled by the clamminess of her skin. “Or die trying.”

“There’s another option.”

Dawn had begun to pink the sky along the mountain line, a curiously fleshlike color. She spoke the possibility very mildly, but there was a portentousness to it that belied the blasé delivery. Every time I saw her, she seemed more tired, more distant, and if I was going to be honest with myself, less human, though in ways I couldn’t easily index.

“I said no already.” A filler statement. I was trying to buy time although I didn’t know yet what for. Though I knew the air should be frigid, I was sweating profusely. The light now hung just outside Portia’s right shoulder.

“The Raw Grail,” said Portia like I hadn’t spoken andmaybe, she wasn’t speaking to me but to whatever was the reason for that sudden luminescence. “You could join us.”

Her smile was as gorgeous as it was empty, like glass, like some perfect sculpture: wholly, utterly without true emotion. Portia regarded me with a lidded gaze and what I could see of her irises was a surprising mauve, almost luminescent, the purple fractured somehow, like light shone through a cracked mirror

“Still as unappealing an idea as it was the first time.”

“You know, I was in your position once,” she said. “She saved me.”

My mouth was suddenly entirely arid. “Weird that you did not mention this even once before. I thought you were here because you wanted to be here. Not because you needed saving.”

Portia licked bloodless lips and it might have been a trick of the meager light, but her tongue looked black in the instant it flicked into view. “I thought that when I was done, they’d let me go. But they didn’t. They put me away. I was completely alone. I thought I’d have to die to ever get out. But she and I had a conversation. And she gave me a choice. She came to me and said there was another way, that it didn’t have to end there in that room.”

“What. Fucking. Room?” I said distantly.

Those freckled cheeks of hers grew dusted with rose. She wasshy,I realized. Like a debutante being plied with attention for the first time, Portia could barely get her next words out, oblivious to my own horror. “All I had to do was let her change me. Just a little. Enough that she too wouldn’t feel alone. Which seemed fair to me. Still does. She’s been here for a long, long time. Always alone. Always left behind. So many girls made her promises. But they always went away in the end. I couldn’t leave her like that. Now she’s in me, and in me she will remain.”

“I don’t like what’s being implied.” Weird how obviousthat metamorphosis was now that she’d confessed to it. I saw it in the way the light broke in her eyes, in the black of her tongue, the new brilliance of her skin, like a bright membrane silvering the tributaries of her veins.

“To be loved is to be changed.”

“I’ve heard that saying. I don’t think they meant it in a nonconsensual way.” I sank my nails into my palm. The light had begun to move again, bored perhaps with my obstinance. “I don’t want to be someone else’s stuffed animal.”

“She’s not like that,” said Portia in sad, sweet tones. Somewhere in the foliage, an animal screamed. “It’s different when they love you. It hurts less. It means more.”

Her voice softened.

“The Raw Mother doesn’t hurt anyone on purpose. She knows what it’s like to be trapped. All she wants is for us to be free,” Portia said like she was a lamb brought up to a sacrificial altar, blinking prettily as she waited for the knife. I swallowed hard, trying not to picture that sad history: that sullen, dark-eyed girl on her knees before something older than our species itself, begging for a way out. “She’ll keep you safe.”

“Once again, thanks, but no,” I said, wishing I had something more clever to riposte with. Later, I would tell myself it had been expedience, common sense that had me turning tail and running instead of coming up with a better repartee. But right then, I could admit that more than anything else, I was afraid.

When I returned to the dormitory, Johanna was awake and inconsolable, a towheaded wraith pacing in front of our shared room. She jolted a look up as my footsteps rang along the treacherous corridor, relief flooding her features. Her eyeswere the deep green of the summer, the whites splattered with red: she’d stayed up waiting, it seemed, although for whom was anyone’s guess.

“You’re safe,” she sighed with nearly theatrical relief, rushing up with arms spread. “I was so worried. I thought Portia would try to induct you, or—or worse.”

“That should be a happy thought,” I said, unable as always to help my own vitriol, resenting how this made us such a trope: she the sunshine-bright girl and I the unlikable grump who she’d win over with consistent attention and care. “You’d be able to move Stefania in like you wanted.”

Low and obvious as that blow was, Johanna still winced. “That was amistake,Alessa. You were gone. What was I supposed to do?”

“Wait for a body.”

“Here? In Hellebore?” Gone then was her usual Pollyanna disposition. In its place, a ruthless clarity I hadn’t expected of her, wouldn’t even have imagined her capable of. Sunrise poured through the serried line of windows, burnishing the corridor with pools of yolk-yellow and wine-colored light. “Anywhere else, I’d have been busy calling the authorities, trying to figure out where the hell you were. But in case you didn’t notice, we don’t really have the option here. People disappear all the time. What was I supposed to think?”

“You could have had more faith I’d come back,” I said, aware at this point I was simply being a bitch. “You could have gone looking for me.”

“I tried,” she snarled. “We tried. We didn’t sleep for two nights. Wewereout looking for you. Stefania was about to kill me for that.”

“You never told me.” I was staggered. I didn’t expect thefury in her voice, how her face looked now that it was husked of what I finally recognized as a front, the glutinous sweetness no more than an affectation. Most of all, I didn’t expect how much this made me like her.

“You didn’t ask. You never ask, do you? You just go straight to being an asshole,” Johanna hissed. Her anger receded with the next breath. She looked even worse for wear than before.

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