Page 65 of The Library at Hellebore

“Anyway, we’re on for a round two, right?” Rowan asked, a little too loudly.

“Good night.”

The biggest surprise of the night, as it turned out, was how quickly I could sink into a dead sleep even after all the nightmare fuel I had just lived through. I fluffed my pillow, and when unconsciousness arrived, it came without dreams.

DAY TWO

It is the nature of people to overcomplicate things: we want there to be nuance to evil and dimensions to good. The truth is often simpler than that. More often than not, it is about survival, making the pain stop. Looking at the wretched nightmare, the pieces finally together, I said:

“Were you that angry, Portia?”

I took in her ruin, her metamorphosis complete, and if there was any part of me that believed her capable of salvation, it was dead as the rest of our friends. I swallowed. Through the lattice of her ribs, I could see the line of her mouth, embedded in the torn walls of her abdominal cavity, flinch.

“Why didn’t you just leave?”

There was movement there under the surface of the muscle: something pressing, straining to get free. So much said about the Raw Mother and so little known. I wondered—wonder still, will always wonder—if there were any other sisters in the sorority, if it’d been Portia alone, walking through that burned-down house, nursing this change. If everything else that followed was the god growing in her belly, stretching through her skin, wanting more, wanting someone else to connect to. If Portia had ever even existed or if it was the Raw Mother wearing her face, using her tongue, reachingwith her hands for more, always more. Because if there’s one thing I knew, it was that this world was hungry.

Portia struck the ground hard with one leg and the translucent chitin fractured. Out from it emerged a fresh limb, this one banded in pewter and white, robed still in the leftover molt. She shuddered, another leg writhing out of its molt. I couldn’t tell how much of the girl remained, if it even mattered. After all, it wasn’t like she even had a head any longer.

“B o w.”

“Dad tried that. Didn’t work on me.” Adam rolled one shoulder backward, then the other, a smile tipping onto his mouth, the expression nearly obscured by the smoke boiling from his skin. I couldn’t tell which of the two sheened in the low and gilded light was the worse monster.

Portia let free a silken laugh and said, without any of its slurring lunacy, with such clarity and nonchalance that if I closed my eyes I could have believed it was Portia standing there, human and whole and unchanged.

“Then I’ll make you.”

If I had any illusions left of being either of their equals, they were gone the moment they moved: Portia blurring into motion, Adam erupting again into fire. Though she was the one to lunge, he was the one to strike first, bringing a hand scything forward. If Portia weren’t just as fast, if her anatomy hadn’t been so irrevocably changed, that might have been all she wrote, but she torqued midair to one side at the last second, and Adam’s hand speared through her collarbone, bursting an eye.

Portia screamed.

The mouth in her chest widened farther, the jaws of her ribs spreading, and from the hollow sprung a second set ofjaws, spearing into Adam’s chest. To my shock and his, the fire did nothing. His expression went from one of insouciance to surprise as the jaws sunk through his skin like he was a pat of warmed butter. Then the blood came, a mealy gush, entrails ribboning out, chunks pouring free.

Adam let out a noise, a gasp, really, and sank to his knees.

Portia stepped daintily over his smoldering form, her myriad eyes fixed on me. To my surprise, there was contrition in her posture as she inched forward, in how she held her limbs meekly to her chest, and the thing Portia had become felt irrevocably her again, for all that she was missing a head and sporting a mélange of new bodily accoutrements. Inexplicably, she seemed sorry, not just for what’d happened, but for all of it. The fact we were here instead of wherever she had imagined us to be.

“You don’t want to eat me, I promise,” I said.

“It was easier.” It was Portia as I remembered her, the words gorgeously enunciated. I couldn’t tell you how. She didn’t have the correct appendages for it, at least not as far as I could say. “It was good for both of us. She told me this.”

“Lots of abusive assholes say shit like that.” I laughed, blood fountaining from my lips. “Trust me.”

“Touch me?” said Portia, skittering closer, claws reaching for my hand, so much rasping hunger there that my breath snagged in my rotting lungs. “Touch me. Make it stop. H-h-hold me. It hurts.”

They promised we would be fed, and they gave us carrion.

“Please.” The word was moaned like a promise, like a portent. Portia crossed the distance between us and folded herself onto the ground beside me, her torso cocked so that she could flash puppy-dog eyes at me, so miserable I almost felt sorryfor her, would have if not for the memory of her spooning meat from Eoan’s severed torso like he was a soup bowl. Still, I almost reached a hand out for her.

“You’re dying,” said Portia.

But you will not; not you, not ever, wedded to us forever.

“No shit.” Trembling, I took the cigarette pack I’d stolen from Rowan’s pocket earlier, spun the battered cardboard in circles with a hand. “We all are. Well, some of us are doing it faster than others.”

“Hold me?”

She is ours.

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