Page 66 of The Library at Hellebore

“Was it worth it?” It’d be so easy to retrieve the last cigarette from the carton, light it, let myself bask in the nicotine for as long as it was sustainable. Let a substance do the work of distracting me from my aches. “Giving it all up to her? Subservience instead of release?”

O u r s.

“I was trapped,” said Portia. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“I get that,” I said.

In her, we live again. In her, we grow again.

“Frightened,” said Portia so very piteously. Gone were the pith, the facade, the polish. Gone was the monster, gone was the girl, gone was everything but an emptiness that ate through me like a disease. “It hurt. It hurt for years. It hurt. She made me hurt.She hurt me.She took away the pain but it hurt still.”

She laughed then and the sound made me relieved to know I wouldn’t grow old with that echoing in my skull.

“Lonely,” said Portia like it mattered, and I guess in some strange terrible fashion, it did. “Don’t leave me.”

The words hiccupped out of me, a surprise.

“I won’t.”

So I gathered what might have been a god in utero to mychest, trembling as Portia folded herself around me, and I tucked my chin into the nook of her collarbone, felt eyelashes against my chin. A part of me wonders what might have happened if I had said no, if I had rebuked her, refused myself this sentimentality. Would Portia have been inoculated against what followed? I think about that and other regrets a lot.

Adam rose up behind her, unfolding like a fable, the flesh melted from his bone. He was skin and charred tissue, grinning skull and those blue eyes still shining improbably through the mess. The hole gaped in his chest still, right where a heart should have rested.

“Fuck you too,” said Adam, driving both hands into Portia’s back. I could feel him pull. I could feel Portia coming undone, and I ran what was left of my magic into her, taking apart whatever was left of her that was human, unraveling her, even as Adam’s fire blackened my vision. I must have screamed. I think I did. I’m certain Portia wailed, pinioned suddenly between the two of us, but at that point, it didn’t matter.

When Portia was nothing but ash and clumps of meat on the ground, Adam stretched again to his full height, hands outstretched to receive the world’s bounties. “And so the prophecy is fulfilled.”

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

“Actually…”

“What did you do?” said Adam.

And I smiled.

DAY TWO

“What did youdo?” Adam repeated, thundering.

“You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t know that already,” I said tiredly, daintily retrieving Rowan’s last cigarette and striking the final match from the box he’d kept, the pornographic label lost under a crust of gore. I lit the thing as Adam went down to a knee, slumping under the weight of his own death. His eyes were bluer than ever as the skin along his cheeks blackened, his bones hollowing.

Then he laughed, a sudden ripple of sound that had my skin crawling despite everything we’d seen. “Ah. So that’s why you kissed me.”

When he laughed, it was in Sullivan’s voice but when he smiled at me, it was Portia’s smile beaming out of his decaying jaw. His teeth shone unsettlingly white; I thought of Rowan standing over the pyre of my old roommate’s corpse and how pale Ford’s bones had looked when Minji flensed him.

I took a drag from the cigarette, sagging onto the floor, wincing. It was good. I hated that it was good. I didn’t like allowing myself vices. Too much risk. People have a habit of lionizing the human condition, describing us as exalted: creatures who can transcend our base instincts and ignore impulse in favor of community. I’ve always called bullshit on that. Even the best of us beg for our mothers when we’rebleeding out. Point is, though, I’ve never trusted my body not to betray me when it wanted something badly enough, and the thought of being compromised because I was craving a smoke, because I so badly needed to have a drink, or a person; the thought of being sublimated by petty desire outraged me. Still did.

But given everything, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

“What did youdo,Li?”

“Law of contagion,” I said after my third puff. “Once in contact, always in contact. Do you remember that?”

Adam said nothing but watched me with those celadon eyes of his, now lashless, like polished stones set in the sockets of a holy skeleton. His breathing was tectonically slow.

I ashed my cigarette on the floor, the once gorgeous tiles scummed with dried gore. I couldn’t tell any longer what had been blood, what was once organ: it was all the same reeking inkblot of clotted stringy black. “My saliva is in you now. I don’t really know how it works. But some of me is in you, that’s all I needed.”

“Hot.” Rowan’s irreverence, Rowan’s actual voice, coming out of Adam’s ruined mouth.

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