Authors: Merrie Destefano
Feast (12 page)
Elspeth:
I woke and shook off a wintry nightmare, bits of it still glowing around me as I opened my eyes. In my dream, light had spattered through silver trees and fragrant blue snow filled the fields—I had been standing barefoot in a snowdrift, toes burning and tingling from unbearable cold. But now, the dream melted and changed back into my father’s room. Armoire in the corner, carved chest against the wall, a massive four-poster bed where I now stretched.
It felt strange to be on this side of a dream. Disoriented, groggy, still remembering snippets of another landscape and the disjointed story that went with it.
I shivered, then realized that a stiff, cold wind was blowing in from the open door to the widow’s walk. My mouth was dry and my limbs stiff. I sat up slowly, then glanced down at the bandage on my arm, remembering the previous evening and my encounter with that dog. With a flick of my thumb, I peeled off the gauze.
The wound had healed, completely.
I flexed my muscles, felt a slight twinge.
Voices outside, laughing and joking, stole my attention. I crossed the room, padded out onto the small balcony, then peered down. Just across the road stood a small herd of humans—young boys. Most of them were younger than me, but at least two looked like they could be my age.
Just then one of them turned, glanced up in my direction.
I immediately shrank back into the shadows. But in my mind, I studied what I had seen—their clothes, their hairstyles, the shade of their skin—and then within a few moments, I made a new skin for myself. I didn’t look exactly like they did; I knew I had to change a few details or they would grow suspicious.
You can’t show up at a party looking exactly like the host.
I kept my long black hair, but lightened my skin, rimmed my eyes with black, put on tight blue pants, red plaid sneakers, a black sweater and a short black leather jacket. For a finishing touch, I added a tattoo on my left hand.
Then I retreated back inside the mansion, opened the door to the hallway and peeked out. A heavy silence claimed the house. Head cocked, I picked up on a heartbeat—in the room down the hallway, Driscoll’s room. I could feel him, crouched and silent, hiding, probably hoping that we would all leave soon.
The door swung closed behind me with a soft whoosh as I crept down the stairs toward the foyer. All the adults were gone. They had left for the Hunt without me. For a moment, I felt a pang of regret, I had really wanted to hunt at my father’s side this year. Maybe I could still catch up with him later tonight.
But right now, more than anything I wanted to go outside and play.
With the humans.
Driscoll:
The sky darkened, the air sizzled with electricity and carried a stench like burned hair. They were folding reality. Breaking reality was probably more accurate. I huddled in the bed, my back to the wall, a pillow on my lap. Sometimes I buried my face, trying to block out the sounds and the images in my head. From where I sat I could see both the door and the window, so none of them would be able to sneak up on me.
Not this time.
Compared to the rest of the house, this room was stark, with bare wooden floors, an iron bed and one chair in the corner. The only indulgences I had allowed myself were the paintings that covered the walls—oils done by my father, watercolors of my own, most mounted in gilt-edged frames, although a few simply hung by tacks. I followed the paintings around the room, my gaze lingering on each for a few moments, allowing myself to remember.
The most beautiful one hung directly across from me. Done by my father at the age of fifteen, it didn’t have the execution he would achieve later in life, but the subject matter was unique.
It was Lily. In the forest, pretending to be a faery.
She hovered over a patch of northern shooting star, their slender stems bending beneath the weight of delicate lavender flowers. The background deepened to a wall of coulter pine and incense cedar, sprinkled with weathered rocks and juniper moss. But the most lovely part of the painting was Lily, herself. Pale skin, a halo around her face, her wings iridescent and translucent. If you stared at the picture long enough, you could almost see her wings move, blurring in the afternoon shadows.
Whenever I looked at this image, I could understand how my father had been so easily enchanted. I found myself wishing that she had been the one to keep me here, that hers was the curse.
It was my own private faery tale, the one that kept me grappling at the edge of sanity.
But then my gaze drifted, as it always did, and I saw the rest of the paintings. All induced by the Darklings: that odd muse-like quality they had, leaving traces of inspiration behind like dusty fingerprints after they had stolen your dreams. I had counted the paintings once. Not including the one of Lily, there were somewhere around forty total—all of the same subject and yet all different.
They were all of Ash, the Great Beast, wearing a variety of skins throughout the past century. Most showed the Darkling with spine erect, shoulders back, chin tilted with an arrogant gaze—as if he dared the viewer to see past his façade. But a few of the paintings captured his torment, bowed stance, gaze lowered, expression unreadable, as if he were trying to remember exactly what he had lost, where it might be, so he could recover it somehow. All the skin tones were different, and the hair as well, sometimes curly, sometimes straight. Still, the look in his eyes always remained the same.
A guarded expression.
And an unquenchable hunger.
I wondered if he looked at everyone that way, or if he saved that particular gaze for his prey.
I walked to the window and glanced down. A small crowd of teenagers huddled at the end of that woman’s driveway, that Madeline MacFaddin. Like they were waiting for her. I wondered why.
She was going to be my distraction. I knew it already, could feel it thumping through the floor when I saw how Ash had stared at her when she returned for her credit card earlier.
It was the same look he’d had when he gazed at Elspeth’s mother.
I should have warned her. I sighed. But whenever I had tried to say anything, Ash would freeze my vocal cords. Still there might have been a way. Too late now.
Too late for her.
Not too late for me.
I lifted the bedspread, peeked beneath the bed, just to make sure it was still there, that I hadn’t imagined it. Another long sigh, then I sank back and sat on the floor.
My suitcase, all packed. Ready and waiting. Gas in the car. A pocketful of cash.
As soon as they were all distracted, I was going to escape.
Thane:
The Driscoll mansion grew larger as I approached, until it consumed the horizon, six gables and towering turret, mullioned windows and wraparound porch. It was a dark, faceless silhouette, all features erased by the fast-approaching night—all save the yellow glow, warm as a fire on a winter night, that came from an open window upstairs, Ash’s bedroom.
The room where Elspeth slept.
Anger and humiliation shivered across my skin as I crossed the threshold, as I shook the short flight out of my wings with a hasty snap. River at my side, we both paused in the lobby, lifted our heads to sniff the air.
I was supposed to leave—some swaggering threat of banishment that my father would fight and lose in the twisted Darkling court, another dark stain on my family crest that would be traced back to me. We were all supposed to leave, but I couldn’t—not when the Hunt was so near, when the moon hung in the sky like a temptress, demanding obeisance. I glanced out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the cavernous room.
At that moment, the moon wooed me with a dark song of harvest, wrapped about me with smoky tendrils, enveloped me with an ache that sank all the way to my marrow.
As always, she was perfect, mesmerizing, demanding.
“Sienna!” I called. The syllables of her name echoed, touched every corner of the massive Queen Anne like probing fingers. A soft sound, almost like a kiss, answered, followed by heavy silence.
My sister was here, feeding, trying to mask herself.
With a thunderous flap of wings, I soared to the upper stair landing, then pulled my wings tight against my back as I stalked down the hallway. Head tilted back, nostrils flared, I drank in the scents that drifted through the massive house. Coffee from this morning, shoe polish in a cupboard, wild peony on the dining-room table, starch on a laundered shirt, sweat dripping from a brow, lavender soap on the kitchen counter—
I stopped.
Sweat. Human sweat.
A nearby door stood almost closed, open a mere hand’s breadth. I peered inside. Something moved, a flash of arm and legs and then I caught the sweet fragrance of harvest, of fresh dreams. For half a second I closed my eyes, analyzed the flavor.
“Bad dreams,” River whispered at my side.
“Aye,” I answered.
We could both see her then, standing in the slivered opening—Sienna, almost drunk from harvest, her mouth still wet.
“Go away,” she said, her voice low as a growl, a territorial glimmer turning her golden eyes dark.
“We’ve been banished,” I told her.
“Because of what you and River did,” she answered. “I’m
not
leaving.” Without moving, with just a whispered chant, the door slammed shut.
“She’s got the human that belongs to Ash in there, that doctor with the nightmares,” River said.
“Aye, she does.”
River flinched when I started to laugh, a thick booming sound that ricocheted down the hallway, that bled down the stairs and made the windows rattle. Then I cast a ravenous glare at him. “I’m not leaving either! What do you say we have a light meal?”
River answered with a snicker and an eager nod.
Then the two of us headed down the hallway, toward Driscoll’s room.
Ash:
There in a grotto laced with the song of black-chinned sparrows, we placed the body. I sang the funeral poems, head bowed, hands crossed on my chest, wings tight against my back, my voice in braided harmony with the voice of my sister. But even as I sang I could hear the empty melody, the missing notes.
The harmony that belonged to Lily.
Death always brought her back. The days after her murder had been the worst. Once the sun rose, it had baked the sky, sent white-hot shards of light to sizzle the ground. It was never the fact that I couldn’t walk in the light.
It was that I was alone.
Measured in meaningless hours, this human eternity had dripped past, heartbeat by heartbeat, and the green shelter of the forest always seemed too far away. There in the dark spaces between the tree trunks, I could sometimes find peace—though not often. I would stand on the craggy hill, always leaving space for her beside me; I would speak as if waiting for her to finish my sentences, would wait longing for the full moon. And then when it finally came, I would realize that even the perfect, magic night would not bring her back.
My own curse held me here.
My revenge.
Not sweet, not even bittersweet.
And then one night of blinding moon promise, I had stumbled into another bedroom, discovered a human woman with dreams like milk and honey. This one could not see the world—her eyes had never looked upon green fields or blue skies—so she never really saw me as the beast I was. I would kneel beside her bed while she slept, clinging to the visions she brought, harvesting each of them with gentle care, never taking too much, always leaving enough for her.
So we could both have hope.
But then, like a moth, I had flown too close to the flame.
A year after I began visiting this woman, Elspeth was born, a child of two worlds, a child with wings singed by my sin. I couldn’t leave my babe to be discovered by the other humans. She was too young to mask her Darkling features. The humans would have killed the child and persecuted the mother.
So I stole the babe and gave it to my sister, Sage.
Then the mother had withdrawn from me, barring her windows and doors. I didn’t know how the loss of the child had tormented her, or I would have broken every rule, would have forced my way inside. I never expected that she would take her own life a few weeks later.
I would have found a way to rescue her—that is the story that I tell myself, over and over.
After that, I vowed that I would never let a closed door or window stand in my way again.
Chapter 43
The Boy with the Music
Elspeth:
Wearing blue jeans, black leather and human skin, I sauntered up the road toward the herd of boys. A slight apprehension slipped across my shoulders and down my neck. I felt naked and exposed without my wings, like I wouldn’t be able to get away quick enough if I had to. Out of instinct, I tried to sort out their hierarchy, tried to figure out which one was the pack leader—that was the one I needed to be wary of.
Pack leaders often made wrong decisions. But it didn’t matter. Followers would still follow.
Two of them stood almost a head taller than the others. One slouched against a tree and his clothes carried the stench of smoke and alcohol. The other stood a little apart from the group, quiet. I could almost hear poetry in the rhythm of his breathing. As I drew nearer I noticed that he tapped the side of his leg with his fingers. A song. He could hear a song in his mind.
Just then they all swiveled and turned to look at me. One of them must have said something.
I stopped, cautious.
The one with the song in his fingers gave me a shy grin. “Hey,” he said. Pale eyes the color of the sky after a storm, bronze skin, hair bleached almost white blond.
“Why are you all standing here?” I asked.
The leader moved, catlike, away from his position by the tree. Dark hair and dark eyes and skin the color of milk. He was lovely and dangerous. And I was sure that most of his dreams would be about himself. “We’re waitin’ for Mad Mac,” he said, his words slurring a bit.
The taint of alcohol grew stronger as he approached.
“Who?” I asked.
One of the younger boys sidled up next to me, russet hair and sandy-brown eyes. “She wrote the Nemesis series.”
Another child frowned. “And the Shadowland series. You always forget that. Nick and Pinch used to drag children into the Land of Nightmares—”
“Dude, I didn’t forget. That series gave me the creeps when I was little.”
The boy with the music stared at me with a pensive gaze. I wanted to know his name. Almost immediately he held out his hand. “I’m Jake.”
I glanced at his hand, not sure what to do. “I—my name is Elspeth.”
Jake shrugged, put his hand back in his pocket.
The leader laughed, then pushed his way closer. “You can call me Hunter. Hey, I like your accent, where you from?”
I shuffled, uncomfortable.
“Don’t hassle her—” Jake said.
“It’s okay.” I tossed him a smile and heard the soft drumming of his heart speed up. “My family’s from Western Europe, someplace in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania or Hungary.”
“Wicked! Vampire country,” Hunter said, laughing again. This time the three younger boys laughed too, a bit nervously.
My gaze focused on Jake. He hadn’t joined in the laughter. With a quiet rebellion, he was challenging the leader. I could smell the stain of the forest on his skin, like he had been lying in the grass. “Do you all live in Ticonderoga Falls?” I asked.
“Unfortunately,” Hunter answered.
Then the three younger boys chimed in, words tumbling over each other.
“The Falls. It’s the edge of the universe.”
“Yeah, nothin’ ever happens here.”
“Except fires and mud slides and global warming.”
“What’s global warming?” I asked.
They all stared at me with blank expressions. Finally Jake said, “My dad says it’s all a myth. That everybody’s reading all the data wrong and makin’ a big deal out of nothin’.”
“But what do you think?” I asked.
At that moment, everything and everyone around us seemed to fade away. All I could smell was his breath, all I could hear was the music of his heartbeat. I wanted to peel him back, layer by layer, and find out what was underneath.
“I think it’s like every other myth. Based on truth, when you look deep enough.” He paused. “Like the Legend of Ticonderoga Falls, ’bout the shape-shifters that come here once a year to harvest.”
I froze. Unable to speak.
The humans know about our clan?
“You’re scaring her,” one of the younger boys said.
“No, I—it’s just—where I come from, we have legends about shape-shifters too.” I stammered my way through what I hoped was a plausible explanation. “But I’ve never heard of a harvest. Who—what do they eat?”
“You’re shivering,” Jake said. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about—”
Hunter moved closer, slid an arm around my shoulder. “Honey, our shape-shifters eat humans,” he said in a low dramatic voice.
“And goats,” the little boy with sandy-brown eyes said.
“And babies—”
“Stupid, babies is the same as humans,” Hunter chided the kid with a swipe on the arm.
I pulled away from him. “Your shape-shifters eat people?”
“I told you guys, drop the subject.” Jake’s voice was firmer now. Ice crystals shimmered in the air around him. Like magic. Everybody held still for a moment and I almost thought that he had cast a Veil.
Then I realized what it really was.
The first snow of the year. Tiny perfect flakes drifted down, swirled in patterns around him. A few of them landed on his shoulders and clung for a second before his body heat melted them. For now, the subject of carnivorous shape-shifters was gone.
Everyone was captivated by the bewitching snow. Even me.
Until someone finally broke the spell.
“Hey, we can’t all stand around and freeze to death,” Hunter said, stamping his feet in the cold. I wished Jake had spoken first, that he would have proven that he truly was the leader of this pack. “It’s time to go trick-or-treating!”
“Come with us, Elspeth,” one of the younger boys pleaded.
“Yeah, come with.”
Jake didn’t say anything, but I could see it in his eyes. He wanted me to come too. I had no idea what trick-or-treating was, but I wanted to spend more time with him. Maybe if I could get him alone, I’d be able to harvest his dreams. I’d be more careful this time, keep my scent under control. I stole a quick glance at him again, hunger in my eyes this time. I couldn’t hide it anymore.
And then I saw something almost as magical as the snow that continued to drift down.
When his eyes met mine, I realized that he carried a secret hunger too.