Page 85 of This Vicious Hunger
“My father never hurt anybody in pursuit of knowledge,” I spit. “And I’ve no dealings with slaves or robbed graves. Nor have you, I presume. That stuff all happened years ago, and you shouldn’t justify your behaviour by the immorality of the past. You can’t just start experimenting on people without their permission. It’s—”
“It’s wrong?” Petaccia lets out a coarse laugh. Olea says nothing, but I can see the fury burning in her face. I know if given the choice she would never want to see this vile woman—her mother—again. Though, of course,choiceis a tricky word. “You forget: I did not force you to do anything you didn’t want to. You made the antidote. You both consumed it. All I’m trying to do now is make your concoction safe for others, to give the world a chance at something new. Don’t you think that if I don’t do it somebody else will? And I can assure you they will be a damn sight less accommodating of your… shall we saylifestyle.”
Olea’s face is frozen marble, but her cheeks are bright with colour. The mortification shuts her down, but it only drives me on.
“But it isn’t safe! You said yourself. It’s unstable, it’s—”
“It is at the moment, yes. But, you see, once I have an idea of exactly how the breakdown plays out, I should be able to tinker with the mixture to stabilise it. And next time we’ll simply add a second dose of the cure and see how long that lasts.”
“Next time?” Olea asks.
“Yes,” she says simply. “Whichever of you handles the red blood cell count better will need another dose.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
What are we going to do?”
It is night once more, darkness closing in around the walls of the garden, and Olea and I have made the trek to sit amongst the grasses and stinging nettles of our fountain. The air has grown cold, though we don’t feel it as normal people do.
Neither of us slept after Petaccia’s visit last night, and we spent the day today doing anything but talking. I’m still sore from our vigorous lovemaking, which I know isn’t a good sign, but I’d rather have the pain than the lack of pleasure. We can’t go more than a few hours without food or wine or sex: almost as if our bodies are trying to plug the gaps where hunger, where satisfaction, lie.
“I know it seems like an obvious question,” I go on. “But what the fuck do we do?”
“If you want me to say that we can’t just ignore it and go on as we are, then…” Olea shrugs, popping a cherry in her mouth. She holds the punnet between the two of us reverently, like a cradle; it is some of the last fresh non-garden food we have until the doctor brings more. “Well, then you’re right,” she says. She tries to smirk but the gesture is tired and sad.
“We need the antidote.” I take a cherry and place it on my tongue. The skin is tough, the innards tart and watery. I chew around the pit and then swallow that whole too. I hate eating; it only makes me hungrier. “I have the exact ingredients we used last time.”
“With the exception of the human blood.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Well. We don’tknowthat it won’t work with your blood again,” Olea suggests hopefully. “There’s nothing to say we’re not human.”
I point at the blood, my blood, which still stains the fountain. We’ve had one small round of rain showers since I did that, but it wasn’t enough to remove the evidence. Just seeing it makes me want to do it again, rip my teeth into that hare too, taste the pulse of its blood—
“Thora.” Olea smacks my leg hard enough to make it sting.
“Thanks,” I murmur gruffly. “Why is it you don’t struggle like I do? Sometimes all I can think about is… it’s darkness. I don’t like it.”But, oh, I do.
Olea rests her chin in her hand, a ghost in white. “I don’t know,” she says genuinely. “It’s not like I was a sex-crazed maniac before I met you.” Even now, after the intimate places we have taken our bodies, she curls slightly inwards at the mention of sex. It’s not embarrassment, I don’t think, so much as the need to protect herself. She doesn’t want to admit how much she needs it—like me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I joke. “You did a pretty good job of seducing me.”
“Says you with your filthy pornography collection.” This would be a low blow from anybody but her. I know she doesn’t mean it harshly and I let out my first genuine guffaw in days.
“I believe the scholars call it erotic fiction,” I correct. She gives a gentle huff of laughter of her own. “Did you…” I trail off, but it seems silly to avoid the subject now. “Did you and Clara ever…?”
Olea starts to bristle, but I see the same realisation in her face as she softens. “No. She was—magnetic, though. I wanted to. Before her I never thought—that is…” She rubs her nose awkwardly. “Sorry.”
“I won’t be angry,” I say, realising as I say it that it’s true. “No more secrets.”
“She was the first time I’d ever feltseen,” Olea goes on carefully. “She was lonely, like me. She didn’t talk about it much, but I could tell. She never had anywhere else to rush off to, not like the other scholars who used to walk past—back when your building was used for accommodations.
“Florencia stopped that, of course. But Clara found me anyway. She told me once that she used to come and sit for hours on the grass outside the wall before she met me. Only… she didn’t ever get too close. She always used to smoke this little… these tiny little cigari—cigare…”
“Cigarillos?”
“Yes. She sat and smoked and read and smoked some more. And one day she was still there when I came to do my rounds.”
