Page 14 of Kill the Beast
Lyssa’s throat tightened in sympathy, but she had no idea what to say in the awkward silence that followed. Talking to people,offering comfort… those weren’t exactly her strengths. Eddie had always been the charmer, the chatterbox, the one who knew the right words to use. She was just the muscle. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered her, but she knew what it was like, to have someone stolen from her by this monster, and that connection between them gave her a sudden, intense urge to ease Alderic’s pain. Or, barring that, to at least draw him out of the misery that had descended on him like a pall.
“Hear, hear,” she said, raising an imaginary glass. Alderic glanced at her uplifted hand, his eyebrows drawn together, but after a moment’s hesitation he pretended to clink a second glass against hers.
“To the Beast,” she said. “May it get the end that it deserves.”
“Why the fuck are we going into thewoods?” Lyssa hissed, resting a hand on her pistol. Brandy’s low growl was a constant rumble at her side as the two of them followed the glow of Alderic’s lantern. The cab had let them out where the paved road turned into a dirt track leading into the forest, the driver tipping his hat to Alderic with a promise ofsame time tomorrow.“If this is some kind of con, I swear I will shoot you through the throat.”
The light swayed wildly as Alderic stumbled over the uneven ground. “I’m not going to rob you,” he said, and swept a hand out to indicate a graveled road branching off the dirt path. “My manor lies at the end of this.”
Lyssa looked around; most of the trees here were some kind she had never seen before, their trunks riddled with massive thorns almost as long as her forearm. “Why do you live in a forest that looks like it crawled out of a nightmare?”
“Do you like it?” Alderic asked, as if he were talking about an expensive wine he had allowed her to sample. “Bleakhaven is one of the only places these trees can still be found in all of Ibyrnika, apparently. I have heard it told that those nasty thorns are a defense mechanism they developed in order to protect themselves from some rather enormous ancient herbivores that used to roamthe island. I have found them to be a wonderful deterrent for trespassers.”
He had a point. Even the most motivated of burglars bent on robbing a rich drunk’s isolated manor would think twice at the sight of these woods. “My question still stands: Why, exactly, have you taken up residence amongst the murder-trees?”
“I told you, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Beast,” he said, his fancy shoes crunching on the gravel as he started up the road. “And since the Beast is in the woods, so am I.”
“Is it close by?”
“The monster, or my manor?”
“The monster.”
“Very close,” he said, and her skin prickled.
“Where?” It was almost a whisper, her breath billowing out in a foggy plume.
Alderic waved his hand impatiently, a ripple of lace at his wrist. “I have its den marked down on a map somewhere in the parlor. I will give it to you when the time comes. You’ll never find the creature otherwise. Ah, here we are—my humble abode.”
There was indeed a structure at the end of the gravel drive, but Lyssa would never have thought to call it a “manor.” Its outer walls stretched up into the forest canopy above, and there were iron spikes set into the stones at the top as if to spear anything attempting to leap over them, though there wasn’t a thing alive—faerie-made or otherwise—that could have jumped that high.
“It looks like a prison,” Lyssa said as they approached the iron gates set into the outer walls, the bars too close together for anything but an emaciated mouse to squeeze through them.
“It even has a dungeon,” Alderic said brightly as he fumbled with an enormous ring of keys, “complete with shackles on the walls and drains in the floor.”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“Don’t you have a servant for that?” she snapped after a few minutes of watching him struggle to find the right key. It was evencolder in the forest than it had been in Bleakhaven, and if he took any longer opening the gate, she was going to freeze to death.
“I don’t have servants anymore.”
“You do seem a touch melodramatic,” she said, wrapping her pathetic excuse for a coat more tightly around herself, “but I didn’t peg you for the ‘scare away all the servants with his rages’ type.”
“I didn’t scare them away,” he said, holding a key up for closer inspection. “They died.”
If Lyssa had fur, it would have tufted up in a ridge along her spine, the way Brandy’s was doing now. She drew one of her knives and pressed the tip against the side of Alderic’s neck; it vanished in the layers of ruffles.
“I would again like to remind you,” she said as he stiffened and looked sidelong at her, “that I have a plethora of weapons on my person, and would not hesitate to kill you with any of them.”
His eyes widened, but what came out of his mouth was not the stammering reassurances or shrill scream she had been expecting. “That is anexquisiteknife,” he said instead. “The craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the absolutely sinister edge… my goodness, it must have cost a fortune!”
She blinked at him, baffled. For all the men she had threatened with a knife—and there had been many—Alderic was the first to admire the blade pointed at his throat. “Um, not really. I got a good price for the materials.”
He gasped. “Youmadethat?”
“I… well, yes, I did,” Lyssa said, then shook her head, reeling at how effortlessly he had derailed her attempt to intimidate him. “I am threatening your life. You… do understand that, don’t you?”
Alderic flapped one of his hands, as if waving her away. “Yes, yes, you’ll kill me in an instant, I heard you. But truly, you have a gift. If you ever run out of creatures to kill, you could make a fine living selling your wares, I assure you.”
