Page 18 of A Curse of Hope and Shadows: Part I
The men grabbed the dresser and spirited it away, clothes, broken splinters and all. Mrs Minton shut the door behind them, and a silence like frost settled in the room they’d left behind.
Adeline stared at the young boy, still on the floor, cowering in the dark like a wounded animal. She took a hesitant step towards him.
“I told you to go,” he said. There was a snarl there, but forced, a child throwing out anger because they were ashamed of being afraid.
“I will,” she said, crouching down beside him, “if you really want me to. But first... I need to know if you’re all right?”
He turned his face sharply towards her, both eyes blazing. “You... you just saw what I did... and you’re asking me ifI’mall right?”
“Yes. It looked like you were in pain.”
“I…”
“They say you break things because you have a temper, but that’s not what it looked like to me. It looked like something was happening to you.”
“I... the…”
She shuffled forward, closer, carefully.
“Are you still in pain?”
“It... it’s passed, mostly,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t entirely convincing.
She crept so close that there were only inches between them, and reached out to touch his furred hand. He tried to jerk away from her, as if her touch burned him.
“It’s all right,” she said, “you won’t hurt me.”
“How… how can you be sure?” Tears rimmed his eyes, red and blue alike.
“Well, I know you don’t want to, which in this case, counts for a great deal.”
She tugged his hand from the ground, examining it for any cuts or grazes. His muscles tensed. Underneath the claws and fur, it felt very human, bones and flesh and knuckles, all taut with tension.
“What happened?” she asked. “Explain it to me.”
“Sometimes... sometimes I get this pain, and it’s like my arm loses control of itself. I can’t stop it. It literally feels like it’s ripping me apart, pushing something out of me… it needs to go somewhere. This rage. The anger bursting out of me. I can’t stop it. I’m… I’m sharing my body with a monster.”
Adeline swallowed, a rawness in her chest. “I suppose you are,” she said, sliding a hand onto his cheek, “but I see no monster here right now.”
A tear slid from his left eye, down his furred cheek.
“Why did you let people think it was just your temper?”
“Because I didn’t want to hurt them. It was easier if… if they just got out of the way—” His throat bobbed.
“It’s all right,” said Adeline, cupping both sides of his face, “it’s all right now.”
Dimitri’s entire face collapsed, and the rest of him came crashing into her arms. Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t this, and yet she reacted instinctively, drawing him tightly against her chest and murmuring soft, silly words, running her hands through his silky hair.
“You need to tell me,” she said, “you need to tell me from now on, promise?”
“You can’t… you can’t fix me…”
“I’m not trying to,” she said, “I’m just trying to help you. I’m just letting you know you aren’t alone, all right? That’s all.”
He said nothing to this, curling further into her arms, a sob raking from his chest. She wondered how long it had been since someone had said that to him, how long it had been since someone had held him, with his mother four years dead and his father gone.
Say what you would about her own pain, but she was never quite alone in it, and there had been arms and embraces every day, even through the worst of it.
