Page 16 of Monster's Obsessive Hunger
Her need to defend him, the fierce loyalty of a creature who has found her protector, is so achingly familiar it makes my own old scars throb in sympathy. I remember making the same excuses for Kaerith, whispering the same desperate reassurances to myself in the dark. I pause, looking down at her, at the mix of pain and fierce love in her eyes. She does not need my pity. She needs the truth.
“That doesn’t mean he won’t again.”
The words are cold, brutal, and I see them land. Her expression flickers, a shadow of doubt crossing her features before the loyalty reasserts itself. I press on, my voice low, relentless. “Listen to me. You need to understand what you have bound yourself to. They are not men. They are predators. Their strength, the very thing that makes you feel safe, is a weapon that is always loaded and always pointed at you. They don’t know how to be gentle. They have to learn, and their lessons will be written in your bruises and your broken bones.”
I lean closer, forcing her to meet my gaze. “What you have with him, what I have with Kaerith—it is not a gentle thing. It is a constant negotiation with a beautiful, deadly storm. His love will not tame the monster inside him. It will only give that monster a new and more terrible focus. The hunger doesn’t go away. It just… redirects.”
Tears well in her eyes, whether from pain or the cruelty of my words, I cannot tell. She is so young, so full of a romantic hope that I have long since burned out of my own soul. I am not tryingto break her spirit. I am trying to forge it into something that can survive.
“If you choose to go back to him, you have to do it with your eyes open. You have to understand that this will be the rest of your life. A constant dance on the edge of a blade.” I stand up, my work here done. She needs to rest. And I need to go outside and make sure our monsters haven't killed each other in the snow.
25
THORRIN
Iam a caged thing. The elven outpost is a fortress of stone and silence, and I am trapped on the wrong side of its walls. I pace a frantic, desperate trench in the snow before the barred gate, every instinct screaming at me to tear it from its hinges, to rip my way through stone and steel to get to her. But I am bound by a helplessness more absolute than any physical chain. The elves within are the only ones who can save her. My monstrous strength, the very thing that broke her, is now useless.
The silence is a new and profound kind of torture. I strain my senses, trying to catch any sound from within—a cry of pain, a word from Elira, anything to tell me if Lyssa is still alive. But the thick stone walls and the muffling blanket of falling snow swallow all sound, leaving me in an agony of ignorance. I am a creature of the wild, accustomed to the clear, honest language of the forest. The civilized world, with its walls and its secrets, is a torment.
Apavobegins to sing from the high branches of a fir tree near the wall, its song a series of bright, melodic trills. It should mean nothing to me, the simple background noise of a world I do not inhabit. But tonight, it is an irritant, a cheerful, oblivioussound in a world that is ending. It is a sound from her world, a world of sunlight and simple beauty, a world I have just stolen her from and may have prevented her from ever returning to. The bird’s song feels like a mockery, a reminder of the life that is even now slipping through my claws. My heart-light, a miserable, sick green, pulses with a fresh wave of guilt. I want to roar at the bird to silence its beautiful, terrible song, but I choke the sound down. I am a beggar at this gate. I have no right to make a sound.
A presence detaches itself from the deeper shadows near the wall. Kaerith. He moves with a silent, deliberate grace that is a stark contrast to my own agitated pacing. He does not approach me with the territorial fury he showed before. His rage has cooled, settled into something heavier, colder. A kind of judgment. He comes to a stop beside me, and we both stare at the unyielding stone of the outpost, two ancient monsters waiting on the fate of a single human girl.
The silence between us is a heavy, weighted thing, thick with the unspoken history of our kind. I look at him, truly look at him, for the first time not as a rival to be challenged, but as a phenomenon to be understood. He is a king in his domain. It is in his stillness. Where I am a storm of chaotic, leaking emotion, he is the mountain that endures the storm. His power is a contained, compressed thing, held within his massive frame with an ease that speaks of centuries of mastery.
His heart-light is the most telling difference. Mine is a frantic, flickering thing, its colors shifting with every gust of my own guilt and fear. His is a steady, unwavering crimson. It is the light of a predator, yes, but it is a cold, controlled fire, a hearth that has been banked and tended, not a wildfire consuming everything in its path. He is not fighting his hunger; he is living with it, a master of the beast within.
In him, I see a future I did not know was possible. I see a monster who has learned to be a protector. I see a creature of immense power who has built a home, who has claimed a mate not just with passion but with a strength that does not break her. His very existence is a condemnation of my own failure. He is what I should be, what Lyssa deserves. When he finally speaks, his voice is a low rumble, not of anger, but of cold, immutable fact.
“You don’t deserve her.”
The words are not an insult. They are a simple, brutal assessment of the truth I see reflected in his steady, crimson light. I don’t flinch. I don’t growl. There is no defense against a truth so absolute. “I know,” I rasp, the admission a stone in my throat.
My gaze remains fixed on the gate, on the wall that separates me from Lyssa. To hear the truth spoken by another, especially by him, gives it a new and terrible weight. I have failed her. I have failed the first creature in centuries to show me anything other than fear. I am unworthy of the gift she tried to give me.
Kaerith is silent for another long moment. I can feel his gaze on me, the weight of his judgment. I expect a threat to follow, a promise of the violence that will befall me if I ever cross his path again. But he does not threaten. His ultimatum is something far colder, far more absolute.
“If she lives,” he says, “you fix this.”
I turn my skull-face to him, my hollow eyes meeting his blazing white gaze.
“You learn control,” he continues, his words a series of hard, unyielding commands. “You dedicate every moment of your cursed existence to ensuring that what happened tonight never happens again. You become her shield, not her destroyer. You honor the gift she has given you, or I will teach you the meaning of regret.”
His words are a sentence, a life’s work I must undertake if I am to be worthy of breathing the same air as her. And if I fail?
“If she dies,” Kaerith finishes, and his voice is now devoid of all emotion, a flat, dead thing more terrifying than any roar, “you disappear.”
The command is not a threat of a fight. It is an order of exile. A decree of erasure. If Lyssa dies, I am to vanish from these mountains, from this world, to become a ghost, a forgotten nightmare. To return to the absolute, crushing solitude I knew before her, but this time, it will be worse. This time, it will be a silence filled with the memory of her.
I accept the terms without hesitation. His judgment is just. It is the only sentence that fits the crime. I turn my gaze back to the cold stone wall that separates me from Lysa, from my own fate.
“If she dies,” I say, and My voice is a hollow, broken thing, an echo of my own despair, “I already have.”
26
LYSSA
Iwake to silence and a strange, magical numbness. The sharp, white-hot agony that consumed me in the forest has receded, leaving behind a deep, dull ache in my side that feels like a memory of pain rather than the thing itself. I am lying on a bed, not a pile of furs, and the sheets beneath my cheek are impossibly smooth, cool as river water. My eyes flutter open. The ceiling above me is not the rough, familiar stone of Thorrin’s lair, but a vault of polished black obsidian that seems to drink the light.
