Page 76 of Starve
“Could I really save him?”
“Yes.”
She pushes the heart toward me, as her other hand lifts one of mine until my fingers meet the slightly warm, slick surface.
“Will it hurt?”
“Yes.”
With her urging, I gently grip the cooling organ between my hands, cradling it like I could somehow damage it, even though it has no purpose now except as a piece of meat.
“Do you love him?” Agatha asks, her voice a chorus of so many others.
I look up at her, the desperation bubbling free of the doubt in my chest. “Yes,”I whisper, and I watch her lips curl into a satisfied, victorious smile as I lift the heart to my mouth and sink my teeth into the tough, grisly muscle.
Chapter 31
I choke when thick,coppery blood floods my mouth, and I nearly lose my nerve. My teeth work to cut through the tissue of the human heart, and the taste is revolting enough that I want to gag. But I manage to tear a strip of it off, chewing the tough sinew while holding Agatha’s gaze. My shoulders heave with disgust, and I nearly spit it out before hastily swallowing.
But the feeling of the flesh sliding down my throat certainly isn’t any better. Another shudder goes through me, and I heave with a hand over my mouth. “H-how much do I—” I’m not sure I can do this.
“More than that,” Agatha tells me coolly, and watches as I force myself to bite into it again, and again. Moro senses my distress, whining and brushing against my leg. I’m sure this wouldn’t be at all difficult for her, but I don’t have sharp teeth or a taste for raw flesh.
“Oh,fuck—”I manage to swallow two more pieces before my body rebels, and I clap a hand over my mouth again, breathing through my nose and swallowing down nausea. “I don’t know how you eat this,” I can’t help mumbling, and my eyes tear up as my body does whatever it can to convince me to expel the raw heart in my stomach.
Agatha chuckles and gently pulls the heart from my fingers. “Easily,” she assures me, and as I watch, she bites into the heart with fangs that shear through the muscles. She barely chews before swallowing, and looking at her face, I realize mine must be just as gory as she drops the heart between us onto the stairs, where it lands with a wet thud for Moro’s inspection.
“How long does it take?” I ask, still feeling like I’m going to puke while my hand hovers near my face, like that’s going to do anything to keep the bits of human heart in my stomach. “Do I just?—”
A streak of pain goes up my spine, and I gasp at the overwhelming, painful nausea that claws up my throat. I heave a little, lips still pressed together, my eyes watering, and I look up at Agatha again, who isn’t at all surprised by this turn of events.
“I told you it would hurt.” She watches impassively as I drop to my knees on the steps, the concrete hard and painful beneath my legs. Moro is there instantly, whimpering and nosing my face, but I barely notice when Agatha gently guides her away by her collar, saying something to her I can’t hear over the pounding of my heart in my ears.
Every breath brings a new wave of pain. My mouth waters until I have to spit the excess saliva onto the ground, and when I lean over, I find I can’t straighten back up. Every inch of me hurts. All my nerve endings, and every strand of hair screams at me, all too aware and begging for me to stop, to puke, to do anything except this.
Still, I force myself not to let what’s in my stomach creep up my throat. I swallow once, then again. I groan around the coppery taste still in my mouth, but the pain just gets worse. “How long—” I gasp again, trying to drag air into my contorted lungs. “How long does it—” But I can’t finish any of my questions. An intense shiver works its way up my throat; my body’s final attempt at aborting this terrible endeavor. But whenI clap a hand over my mouth and swallow back what’s coming up my throat, the feeling turns to pain that rises like a flame, searing every centimeter of my body and causing me to feel like I’m burning from the inside out.
When I black out from the pain moments later, it’s a relief, and I don’t even try to fight it. Nor do I mind that the last thing I feel is the soothingly cold concrete of the steps on my cheek, with Moro’s concerned whines in my ears.
Something isn’t right.
I follow the sound of voices further into the cave, whispers that I can’t understand, while my legs keep moving of their own accord. When I try to stop, I can’t.
I’m not in control.
Rounding the corner, I turn into a large chamber, hollowed out in a way that makes me think it’s manmade, rather than natural. Two women sit across from each other on either side of a low fire, and behind them are bodies, strewn this way and that.
They both look at me, their eyes shining unnaturally in the light from the flames.
“You’re starving,” one of them observes, poking at the fire with a stick. Her clothes look like something out of a history book, and both are wrapped in furs with red, streaking lines painted on their faces. “So were we.”
The other woman doesn’t speak. She just picks something up off of the ground and bites into it, filling the cave with wet, squelching noises and her loud chewing. I stare at them both in the light of their fire, unable to say anything.
Finally, the woman eating stands up with the remains of her meal in her hand. Her fangs aren’t quite as refined as Cairo’s, and her eyes only barely reflect the light. She’s cursed, I realize, but not the same. Like an earlier sketch of what they are now, as if they somehow evolved over the centuries.
Their voices pick up again, though I can’t make out what they’re saying in the echoing space. The woman in front of me surveys my face and reaches out to trail her bloody fingers across my bottom lip. The liquid is still warm and drips down my chin even as she makes another pass over the top.
“You will never leave this place,” she whispers, her eyes wide, a touch of regret in her tone. “None of us will.”
