Page 63 of This Vicious Hunger
Is that the dream? Or did it really happen? Either way, here is the story: I discovered my husband burning his collection of dirty books. Horror. He tripped. He banged his head. The fire grew. And I fled.
The end result is the same, in my life as in my dreams: the library is burning and my husband burns with it.
I wake with my hands slick with blood. I’ve scratched the scab on the back of my thigh in my dreams, the wound leaking all across my bedsheets, my hands, my nightgown. I give myself a few minutes to return to the land of the living—though it hardly feels like living. Is this what I wanted? Is this the future I always dreamt for myself?
Still, there’s nothing left to do but throw myself back into the research. Wallowing won’t do me any good. Sure, I could turn around and announce Petaccia’s plans to the world, could tell everybody who will listen about Olea’s dead “friends” and her poison touch, but who would they believe? Dr. Petaccia is a world-renowned scientist. As she’s told me herself, her research in plant-based healing has saved thousands of lives in Isliano alone. And who am I? An undertaker’s daughter with a dead husband and a marital family who couldn’t wait to wash their hands of me.
No. The only way out now is through.
Eventually I drag myself from my bed. I am tired to my core, my eyes are sticky with shed and unshed tears, and I’m fucking starving. When did I last eat? I wobble at the thought of Leo, waiting for me in the dining hall. I wonder if he hates me for what I said to him. Or if he’s somehow forgiven that and hates me for disappearing instead.Again.That’s all I’ve done, over and over, the entire time I’ve known him. I’ve taken him for granted. It isn’t what friends do, is it? Then I think I’m grateful that he won’t see me like this. I know I look a mess. He would only worry about me, and that isn’t fair either.
I boil water for tea, but I carry the hot water to the table beforerealising that I have no leaves left. There is nothing in this place to make it mine, not really. I have books, and notes, microscope slides I have stolen like lucky talismans from the lab. But even these things remind me of Olea. She has her tapestries and her trinkets, her whole life lived in that tower—it is all hers. Everything that is mine was either Aurelio’s or hers.
I sink to the desk. The shutters are open to the darkness. I half expect to see Olea wandering through her plants, tending to them as she always does, but of course she is not there. I wonder if Petaccia will have checked on her. Who will care for her if not me? Has sheeverhad anybody care for her when she was sick?
I know it’s half the tired sadness talking, but after everything Istillwant to be the one to care for her. I just don’t want to feel as though my hand has been forced—and of course, that’s exactly what has happened. Would things have been different if I had met Olea in another life? Or would she simply have been a different kind of danger to me?
I imagine what things might have been like if there was no garden, no poison. Just Olea appearing in the life I had before. What if we’d met when my father was alive? No amount of secrecy would have protected us from his lash. And if I’d met her at Aurelio’s…? Oh, I would have burned the world just for a taste.
What if Leo’s right and it’s the toxins that make me want her? What then? But it doesn’t matter how many times I ask myself this question; the answer is always the same: if the toxins make me want Olea, and make Olea want me back, then I would, and will, poison myself to death for her love.
The realisation does not, however, make any of this any easier.
“The only way out is through,” I say, hoping that repeating the thought aloud will help.
It doesn’t. I’m so hungry I can hardly think. It is too late for the dining hall. Could I beg food from one of the servers? I don’t know if there will be anybody around in the kitchens to ask. I know what would fill me, maybe. A big, bloody steak. I can almost taste the juices. It comes to something, doesn’t it, when even the offal I’ve used in my experiments seems like it might make a good midnight feast.
I absentmindedly lick my fingers, lost in my frenzied imaginings. The taste of blood brings me back to myself, iron-rich, like honey lubricating my tongue. The scent of it, too, is startling. I pause, bringing my palm beneath my nose so I can inhale it. There is something animal about it, something primal, both vital and somehow embarrassing. It isn’t tacky like menstrual blood, doesn’t have that same cloying smell. I close my eyes and I see the vermilion coating my skin.
And then the thought strikes.
It is so simple I can’t believe I’ve never considered the possibility before. For all Petaccia’s research, her theorising, her damnable hypotheses, I wonder if she’s perhaps been too blinkered to notice what’s right in front of her. The experimental antidotes with the highest success rates have been those using offal. Petaccia’s theory about the success is to do with the body’s ability to read and absorb these organs—and her theory of the failure is that rejection of an organ by the host body is equally common. It happens all the time in humans and animals alike, the body attacking even its own internal parts.
I stare down at my hand. How often does the human body reject its own blood? It’s not unheard of, I’m sure—but truly, how common is it? The same goes for animals. A thrill of discovery trembles through me. Perhaps the carrier is not protein, not themeat itself. What of the haemoglobin found in blood? Low levels of haemoglobin, otherwise known as iron deficiency, cause—and I know this from my lectures in the halls of La Scienza—dizziness, shortness of breath, and muscle weakness or exhaustion. The exact same symptoms I’ve been suffering since I became a regular in Olea’s garden, almost as if my body is trying to tell me what I’m lacking. This may be a coincidence, but it feels too fated not to try.
Haemoglobin.Blood.The perfect colloid.
I act without thinking. I change from my stained nightgown into a pair of dark trousers and a simple short-sleeved shirt, pushing my hair back off my forehead with a ribbon tied at my nape. I pull on my gloves and my mask, a hooded cloak over my outfit despite the heat. It is the middle of the night, but still the temperature soars, my clothing instantly sticking to me with the briskness of movement.
The last thing I grab is Olea’s stinging tree leaf, now very badly wilted—near dried—from its empty vase. I remember what she said when she first introduced me to the tree in the garden, how the neurotoxin contained within its tiny hairs is so virulent it can be reactivated long after a sting by something as accidental as a little heat. I’m careful to pick the leaf from its vase with the tips of my gloves, wrapping it in a silk hair scarf and carrying it like a parcel instead of in my pocket. It will be perfect.
St. Elianto is always deserted at this time of night, though I have rarely crossed the square with such purpose after sunset. I am usually in the garden with Olea, or wallowing in despair in my rooms. Not tonight. And hopefully never again for either. I am going to help Olea, I’m going to hand Petaccia her damned cure, and then I am going to leave this fucking place—in that order.
I enter La Vita as silently as I can. I am not in the mood to dealwith Petaccia after our last conversation. In fact, right now I’d be happy if I never had to speak to her again. I breathe another sigh of relief when I find the door to the Cave locked, the remaining salamanders left to their own devices for the time being.
The Tombs, too, is entirely silent. There are more empty cages than the last time I was here, and two more failed antidote vials on the shelf, both a thick green soup infused with what looks like some kind of algae. I scoff silently. For all her intelligence and perseverance, Petaccia’s research is like a game.
I’m not one to boast, to crow loudly about any sort of achievement, but tonight could very well change that. I am filled with fresh zest, excited for the first time in days—weeks. I know that this discovery potentially has scope for the betterment of humanity, but it is Olea I think of first.
“I’m coming,” I say aloud, and then laugh quietly to myself in the silence of the lab.
I work like a woman possessed, extracting what I need from the stinging tree with practised ease, cooling and distilling until I’m left with a neurotoxin so potent it would drive most people mad. Or to suicide, if Olea’s tales of the tree are to be believed.
It pools at the bottom of the vial, the colour of saffron and texture of honey. Liquid gold. Weeks ago this might have surprised me, but now I only make notes as I swirl the liquid in the tube; the way it catches the lamplight reminds me of summer sunlight filtering through the high window over the golden cradle in our sepulchre—or, I realise, the bold yellow of the sun-kissed clouds in Olea’s tapestries.
This is right.I know it the way I knew every other attempt I made wasn’t quite there. But close, so close. All avenues have been leading me to this.
I have, however, got a problem. There are no more animals in Petaccia’s cages aside from one anaemic-looking vole. The big brown hare I was hoping to use for blood is nowhere to be seen—I suspect the victim of one of Petaccia’s failures. I curse inwardly. If I’d thought ahead I could have… I could have what? Caught a bird with my bare hands? The thought sickens me. The vole won’t do: it barely looks like it will have enough blood to fill my vial.
