Page 1 of Barons of Decay

PROLOGUE

Arianette

September

They sayI was dead for three minutes.

Three whole minutes where my heart forgot me.

Where I drifted, weightless, under the water, lungs full of ghosts and river rot.

When I started to decay.

I remember none of it, not the cold or the pull of the river or the boys when they found me washed up against the stones like a bloated bride.

But my skin remembers. My wrists do too. The raw bite of the ropes, the way they burned when I twisted and screamed inside my head, waiting for the rules to change. I don’t break rules. Not that one. Never that one.

But someone did.

There’s a man. Or a shape. Or a mask.

Abeast.

Sometimes it looks like an animal, only wrong. Bigger. Wetter. Hungrier.

Other times, it’s faceless–just breath and commands and hands that don’t feel human.

I hear it in dreams I can’t wake from.

I hear him now, whispering from the fluorescent buzz of the hospital lights overhead.

‘Chosen,’he says. ‘You were already chosen.’

They ask me questions. A woman with soft hands and a man who doesn't know how to hide his rage. They say he’s with the Bureau. I don’t know them. I don’t trust them. I want to.

I just want someone to be real.

My feet ache from the run. The forest shredded me. My body, my memory, my name. I pick at the scab on my knee until I see red.

They stop me.

They call meArianette. Like it’s a spell. Like if they say it enough, I’ll return to myself. But I don’t know whoArianetteis anymore. She drowned. She bled. She saw too much. She heard the rules–and obeyed. But that didn’t stop the Beast from finding me. Catching me. Hurting me…

So I nod and I shake and I say what I must. I give them nothing, because if I speak, I’ll start to remember. And if I remember, he’ll come back.

He always does.

Even now, I smell the iron. The salt.

I feel the dirt closing in around me.

And I wonder if I ever really made it out.

1

Arianette

October

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