Page 64 of This Vicious Hunger
I check Petaccia’s icebox, filled to the gills with carefully labelled pig hearts and rat innards. The sight of it always makes me feel lightheaded, but tonight it makes me inexplicably hungry. I paw through her scientific stash, but there’s nothing I can use. No blood.
I growl in frustration. The vole will have to do. I swipe off my cloak, wiping the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. It must be near dawn. I don’t have the time to mess around if I want to finish this before Petaccia comes back. I peel off my gloves too; the vole is tiny and I’ll need as much dexterity as I can get.
I carry the vial carefully over to the cages and prepare to extract what blood I can from the vole. I always start with a little prayer, one my father always favoured in his rites.
Hush now, dear one
Let the cradle carry you to the everlasting end
These golden hands
The sweetest of earth’s honey
And the strongest bridle on Grief
It is only thanks to the hissing coming from the vial that I stop what I’m doing and finally pay attention to what is before my eyes.
My unwashed fingers, which have until now been beneath the gloves, are still stained with dried blood. I grip the vial of stinging toxin between my thumb and forefinger, both smeared red and pressed against the glass. The golden liquid thrashes wildly against the sides of the vial, near crawling towards the top like a storm, hissing and spitting all the while.
It takes everything in me not to throw the vial down and back away. Instead I grip it tighter, watching the stinging solution roil and bubble, clawing—if liquid can claw—at the sides. As if begging for my blood.
Immediately I abandon the idea of the vole. The stinging solution is—well, it’s crazy, but the liquid knows better than I do. I prop the vial in the closest empty rack, washing my hands in the trough with rough soap and scrubbing them dry before seeking out Petaccia’s sharpest knife.
I hesitate. If I do this, and it works, then there is no going back. In another life I would want more time, hours and minutes, days and weeks, to consider all the options before me: I have not, I realise faintly, any idea what this could do. If it works… If we release it… But it turns out I am selfish in this, and I have nothing to barter with except my potential success. I need the time to concoct it, and then touseit—to take Olea’s future out of the doctor’s hands.
There’s nothing for it.
The cut hurts less than I expect it to, the bite of the metal in the pad of my thumb spreading a slow heat through my skin. I could, perhaps, have chosen a more elegant method, but time is ticking and every minute is one precious moment of discovery slipping away. I say another quick prayer and hold my thumb over the vial—
The blood drips.
The mixture writhes.
The scent that arises from the hissing colloid is not at all what I expected. It is not blood and nectar, but bread and honey. The sweetest fresh loaves with golden tops and rich, dark honey butter spread between warm slices. It rises to my nostrils, the aroma nearly dragging my head down it is so good and pure and whole.
I brace myself against the counter, careless now of the blood dripping from my thumb. My body sings at the proximity. It would not be an exaggeration to say I hear angels, or the soft timbre of my mother’s voice calling me home. The fragrance envelops me and it takes all my strength not to pour the liquid straight into my mouth, drowning my tongue.
I force myself to step away. To inhale the clean, bland air of the Tombs. Every part of me strains for the antidote.This is good, it choruses.Drink, drink, drink it all.Instead I steady myself with another clean breath and another. There is a tray of unused pipettes in here somewhere, I know there is—whereisit?
I grab one. There. I am as careful as my shaking hands allow. The antidote has stopped its unnatural writhing now, though the scent is still as strong. I wrap my thumb in a strip of gauze and shove it into my glove, then hold my breath as I draw a pipette dose of the solution out of the vial.
It is no longer that golden colour, not like sunlight or wheat or any of those. Now the colour is darker, rusty with my blood. There is a wholeness to it now, an indescribable quality, like the thickness of good cream, the bite of salt through butter. A completeness. It is red, it is orange, it shimmers strangely in the pipette as I lift it.
I know I should wait. Regardless of my hurry, this is—it is insanity. I am not qualified for this, nor do I want to be. Allthoughts of bartering, of success, ofwinning, are gone, replaced with the knowledge that I should be afraid. I should wait. Yet Ican’twait. Its siren lure is too much. I am so tired of fighting…
Before I have the chance to process my own actions, the pipette is on my lips, the solution in my mouth. The taste of warm bread and honey fills my tongue, slowly replaced by something deeper, something more primal—a bitter concoction of stale earth, tree sap, the bite of a green leaf. My tongue goes instantly numb.
I start to panic, but the numbness lasts less than five seconds. The taste dissipates soon after and I’m left with nothing but a sharp metallic edge. I swallow once. Twice. Nothing happens. The vial sits in its rack, the liquid a ruddy orange-brown. I might begin to wonder if I’ve imagined the entire episode, except for one thing: I feel amazing. No tiredness, no dizziness, no cloying sickness in the pit of my belly.
I wait five minutes. Ten. The night is growing thin and I’m eager to leave La Vita, but I make myself wait. Half an hour, a little more. I pull my hand from its glove and check the wound on my thumb—but it is gone. Not only is it gone; there is no evidence it was ever there. No scar, nothing but the smear of blood left behind. The same is true of the wound on my leg, now completely invisible.
I let out a caw of victory, startling the tiny, lethargic vole in his cage so badly he flees under his bundle of hay. I don’t care.
“Olea, I’m coming.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Olea is not in the garden, but it seems nobody has been through the unlocked gate since I last left, and I’m grateful for past Thora’s carelessness. I let myself in silently, brushing through the overgrown tumble of weeds, the leathery green leaves of hassock breaking through in the red-brown earth where no marshy plant should live.
