Page 65 of Lair

The smashing halts.

“Adrian, maybe Mrs. Colding is right.” I lay a hand on the door, as if taming a wild thing. “I’m sorry I asked this of you. Maybe—”

“Just a little longer,” comes his rough reply. “I think... it’s almost done.”

“Okay,” I say, nodding and blinking away tears. “Okay.”

The next day, the rages stop. The stateroom is silent as a tomb.

“It’s time,” says Mrs. Colding, and gives me a look. “I know you’ll do the right thing.”

This time, I crack the door slowly. Waiting. Listening. My whole body braced and ready.

No response from the darkness.

“Adrian?” Nothing. My heart is lodged up under my breastbone, against my ribs, pounding away. I edge the door wide enough for me to slip through, and leave Mrs. Colding waiting in the hallway.

There’s almost a mustiness in the room now, a faint sense of sickness and decay amongst the ruins of smashed furniture. The air is stale and close, making my brow perspire. I swallow. “Adrian?” I chance again. “Babe?” I can just make out his form on the bed, the faint gleam of sallow skin. The sheets are pulled down to his waist. “I’m going to turn the light on, okay?”

Still nothing.

I reach out a trembling hand, fingers skittering against the lampshade, and switch on the light.

I cannot bear to look at first. I keep my eyes shut and my body rigid, waiting for the spring of fangs, for the snarl of an Adrian I do not recognize—but nothing happens. And so I peek my eyes halfway open.

What I see makes me clap a hand to my mouth.

The transformation is shocking. His smooth ageless face has sucked against the skull, eyes squinted pinpricks in the glare of the light. His beautiful body—once so splendidly formed—has wasted away to a bundle of spindled limbs, parchment skin cloven to the laddered palings of his ribs and his hands hooked to display blackened talon-like nails imprinted into grayish flesh. If set on a scale, he wouldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds.

“Hi, baby,” he whispers, chapped lips splitting as he smiles weakly up at me.

There’s a sharp indrawn breath; Mrs. Colding has drifted up to my shoulder. She lifts her chin in a brittle gesture of renunciation. “I am done,” she declares in a hoarse voice. “Whatever this is, I will not support it any longer. You’re on your own.”

Footsteps, and the door slams, snapping my eyes shut and starting a tear streaking down my cheek.

So. This is real. This is happening.

“It’s okay,” Adrian husks with a faint smile, one of his withered hands reaching feebly for mine. “She’s never gone... for long.”

But it’s not okay, Adrian. Nothing about this is okay.

“You’re... you’re dying,” I manage, my lip beginning to tremble. “And I let you. I asked you...”

This is what it has come to. My entitlement, my need to be loved. This is what this new me can demand if I am not careful.

Or perhaps all along, all along, I have been this way.

“Hey.” Adrian’s voice, penetrating this suffocating vacuum. “Hey. Listen.”

How can I? How has the world not cracked wide at this moment?

Yet, somehow, I am sitting on the edge of the bed. Somehow, I am holding his hand as he speaks. “You’ve always pushed me... to change. To make me... better.”

I swallow down my rising gorge, to seal in that howling pain.

“This is merely... the last step. Freeing me... of this.” His lips quiver back in a papery smile, that smile that can ransack me top to bottom with happiness. And he says it, the words I never expected to hear: “I love you, Aurora.”

My eyes instantly fill, the words echoing in my head: I love you.

---