Page 23 of Sonnets and Serpents
“He—he’s a sh—he’s ashapeshifter!” Eliza cried, barely choking out words past her obvious terror. She pointed at Silas in condemnation.
Silas glared up at a spoiled princess.
The three librarians looked helplessly between the two of them. Seeing no real emergency, the others retreated, leaving only the one who spoke broken Loegrian—although he did not address Eliza. He addressed Silas in Pravish.
“Mr. Bennett, is this girl harassing you? Did she harm you?”
Despite everything, Silas almost managed a smile, the librarian’s concern helping him regain his composure.
“I’m fine,” he said in Pravish.
Hebelongedto campus and was such a frequent visitor at the library, most of the workers knew him by name. Eliza was the stranger.
“He’s an animal!” Eliza gasped out again, her skin deathly pale.
“Please calm,” the librarian said in accented Loegrian.
“Affiliate,” Silas corrected, finally standing. He narrowed his eyes on the princess. “Animal Affiliate. Not animal. Not shapeshifter. But I don’t suppose there’s any purpose in educating you on proper terms when you’re the most selfish, unmannered creature I’ve ever encountered. Now tell me what you’ve done to me.”
Eliza tried to run, but she hit some kind of unseen barrier. An invisible cord yanked her back a step at the same time it pulled on Silas’s arm. In horror, she stared down at her own bracelet, identical to Silas’s. Apparently she’d purchased some kind of Cast in an attempt to control him, tangling with magic she didn’t understand.
Silas regarded her coldly. “You were so eager to seek me out, Highness. To gloat. To attack. Now you realize being royalty doesn’t make you the biggest threat in the room.” He tilted his head, and with his emotions still churning, a faint scale pattern rippled across his skin, evident in the way his cheeks itched. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid I’ll bite?”
Through the worst misunderstanding imaginable, Eliza had bound herself to a living deception, to a creature who wasn’t even human. Just a snake in human clothing.
She grabbed the librarian’s arm. “Help me, please!”
But the librarian only gave her a disapproving frown. Then he said something about campus rules and Animal Affiliates while Silas just watched with cold eyes. Cold, dark eyes. Eliza remembered how they’d turned solid red with just a slit for a pupil. She’d thought he was selfish and uncaring, but it was so much worse.
He was a monster.
Eliza’s limbs shook, and she tried to lock her knees, tried to put on a brave face when she didn’t feel it because she knew the adage about fear and animals. The python finally slithered away, but that gave no comfort, because the remaining snake was far, far worse.
Silas reassured the librarian, the two of them exchanging quick, casual words in Pravish, and with a final glance, the other man moved off.
Leaving Eliza at the mercy of a demon.
She thought of torches in the dark, of a man transforming into an eagle and tearing through innocent people with deadly talons. She thought of his gleeful, unhinged grin.
“Will you kill me?” The question squeaked from her without permission, and her voice broke. She gripped a bookshelf to remain standing.
If anything, Silas looked even angrier. For an instant, his eyes flashed red again, like a window catching a glaze from the setting sun.
“No, Your Highness,” he said. “I’m an academic, not a rampant murderer.”
Did he really believe that? Maybe he was a skillful liar, or maybe the creature side of him wasn’t even in his control. Maybeit overtook his consciousness like a nightmare, wreaking havoc he didn’t remember come morning. Was that how shapeshifters managed to stay hidden so well? Hiding even from themselves?
Eliza knew something about losing control, and she could feel herself on the precipice of that now, hanging above a steep drop she wouldn’t know how to survive—because worse than any reckless action or angry outburst was the feeling of drowning. The feeling she’d kept at bay thus far by focusing on her search for Henry.
The storm inside rumbled with growing thunder.
Don’t fall, she begged silently.
She wished she’d never met magic of any kind, shapeshifter or Caster. She wished she’d never been cursed. She wished she could be back in that ballroom on her seventeenth birthday, cradled in Henry’s arms.
Though it betrayed her desperation, she pried at the bracelet with everything she had, cutting bloodless lines into her fingers, breaking a nail. But the band around her wrist did not budge.
All she’d managed to accomplish was binding herself to a shapeshifter, offering herself up as prey to be consumed at any time. Henry was still lost. She’d chased her whims and wound up here. Useless. Foolish.
