“Don’t worry.” His gruff voice is deep and penetrating. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of me from this point on, slave.”
I don’t know what he means by that, but I don’t like the sound of that word ‘slave.’ I’m one hundred percent sure the flyer said ‘caretaker.’ Not ‘slave.’
“You don’t need to get all your looks in now. Did he explain it to you?” His voice is softer now. But I can hear the lie in his milder tone. I can hear the malice lurking underneath. He nods his head in the direction where Tomas used to be. “Did he tell you what you stumbled into tonight?”
Tomas talked quite a bit, actually. His freaking mouth was moving like he had a million years to catch me up on. But almost none of it penetrated into my brain for comprehension. I mean, when someone starts explaining how you have been cursed and your life as you know it is now over, you tend to stop listening to the embellishments and just focus on the facts.
So that’s what I did. I shut down. I stopped listening. My mind was a whirlwind of confusion, trying to piece together the flyer, the gate, the boy who turned into an old man, the loss of Pia—where the hell is Pia?—and then the sudden appearance of the beast and my subsequent trip into unconsciousness.
“Let me explain it clearly,” the beast says. “So that we’re on the same page. You belong to me. You are my slave. You are part of my curse and you will remain here, with me, until such time that another one of your bloodline stumbles into our sanctuary.” He pauses to chuckle. “And I know what you’re thinking. ‘Well, if I stumbled into this curse, surely someone else will too.’ But it almost never happens. Grant was here for over fifty years.”
If I could gasp in this moment, I would. I don’t even know how I’m breathing. I don’t think I am breathing.
Focus, Pie.
Fifty. Years.
That’s why the caretaker—Grant—that’s why he looked like a young man when I met him, and then turned old and sickly when he left. All of those fifty-plus years he spent here caught up with him in an instant and he was suddenly old. And he must’ve known this was how it would end. He must’ve known that when he left, his life would be nearly over.
And yet he left anyway.
“And the one before him?” the beast continues. “He was here for two hundred.”
I am so fucked.
“But listen carefully, slave girl. I do not care what Tomas told you, there is a way out of this. If you break my curse, you break your curse as well. So it would behoove you to work diligently on that task from this moment forward.”
I, of course, am unable to answer him. But if I could, I would protest mightily.
I do not break curses. I don’t know anything about this place. And I am not from Grant’s bloodline. That’s not possible. My mother was an only child. I am an only child. And even though I don’t know who my father was, I doubt he has any relation to the boy who was here before me.
I mean, how could I be related to these caretaker people?
Grant was younger than me when we met. Surely, there was no way for him to already have had children before he got stuck in his curse.
“Now,” the beast says, “I’m going to let you go, but you will stand still.” He doesn’t wait for me to answer him or agree to his command, of course, but says, “Proceed.”
In that moment, my body is no longer cement, my feet no longer heavy. I fall forward and the marble floor is rushing up to meet me when his powerful, clawed hands grab my flannel. I stop—just for a moment—but then the flannel rips and I crash the rest of the way to the floor.
Luckily, it was only a few inches, so while my nose does hit hard enough to make it bleed, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been.
I breathe hard and heavy for a few moments, trying to catch my breath as I study the thin gray veins in the black marble slabs.
I don’t know that I was really expecting the beast to help me up, but it doesn’t matter. He does not. He stands in front of me and I stare at his hooves for a moment, just blinking. Trying to force myself to make sense of my new reality.
When he moves away my view changes to the open doorway where I can see Tomas walking quickly towards us. He’s not even halfway across the grand entrance hall when the apothecary door slams shut of its own accord.
I roll over in time to find the beast with a hand raised, like he just commanded the door to close with his fingers.