Page 26 of Kill the Beast
“You’re going to sleep out here? On the ground?” They both looked around at the clusters of gnats hovering over the long grass, and Alderic sighed.
“The ground and I are well acquainted,” he said. Lyssa recalled the sheer volume of beer he had consumed at the Morningstar, and wondered if he ever simply passed out in the forest before making it back to his manor. Good metabolism and watered-down pints could only go so far.
“Why don’t you just sleep on the porch? There’s a swing big enough to lie down on, and fewer bugs. I think Rags put spells up or something.”
“Ragnhild does not want me in or around the house. In fact, she suggested that I sleep in the smithy, with you.”
“Let me guess,” Lyssa said flatly. “The bones told her that?”
Alderic shrugged. “She just said that we should stick together—and that I’m your problem, not hers.”
“And you’d rather sleep in the grass than the smithy?”
“I’d rather sleep in the grass than force you to share your living quarters with me,” he said. “I am an intruder in your liminal wood, an intruder on your quest to forge the magic sword. The least I can do is refuse to intrude upon your bedroom, on your last night of freedom before you’re stuck with me for the next couple of months.” He gave her a wry smile. “I really am sorry, by the way. All I wanted was to pay you and be done with it. I never intended to have any part in this beyond that. But I suppose I should know by now that nothing in my life will ever be as easy as I want it to be. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my bed of leaves awaits.”
Before she could reply, he bade her good night and strode toward the tree line, where the clouds of gnats weren’t as thick. She watched him flop down in the grass, wrap himself up in the quilt, and turn his back to her.
“He’s odd, isn’t he?” Lyssa said as she and Brandy made their way back to the smithy, and the bullmastiff yowled in assent.
Still, there was something about him that Lyssa found sort of charming. She looked over her shoulder—Alderic was batting wildly at the air, the gnats undoubtedly having discovered his existence. She had half a mind to invite him to sleep on the floor in front of the forge, but decided against it. A few gnats might toughen him up a little, and the Lady knew he needed a little toughening up before they set out.
Lyssa couldn’t sleep. The knot of anxiety had become a net, tangling her up in what-ifs, most of them to do with Alderic. What if he got himself killed before they gathered all the items they needed, and the sword was too weak to kill the Beast? What if he got himself killed before he showed her where, exactly, the Beast’s den was located? What if hedidn’tget himself killed, just horrifically injured, and they had to stop altogether until he had recovered? If anything happened to him, it would mean her failure.
“This is why I like working alone,” she muttered. Brandy gave her a look of reproach. “Why I don’t like working with other people,” she amended, and he closed his eyes again, seemingly satisfied.
Eventually, she wrote off sleep as a lost cause and got up, leaving Brandy to hog the bed. She sat down at her little desk and found a piece of scrap paper—the back of an advertisement for camping gear that someone had mailed to her—and a pencil. She started by jotting down the categories that their usual ingredients fell into:
faerie repellant
elemental/banishing items
• water:
• earth:
• botanical:
personal concerns
piece of the Hound
She wroteBeast’s clawbesidepiece of the Hound.One item down, five to go.
Next she wrotegrave dirt, black moonbesideearthunder the elemental banishing items. She always used grave dirt from a Hound’s victim for her weapons, and Eddie’s would be all the more powerful because his death was so personal to her. It had to be gathered on a moonless night, but that wouldn’t be a problem—they would just have to time things correctly.
She wrotecoffin nails?besidefaerie repellant.They were another powerful tool—made of iron, which was poisonous to faeries, and often used in “destructive magic,” as Ragnhild called it. Unraveling spells, breaking curses, that sort of thing. But they were hard to come by, these days. Digging up a coffin was a hangable offense now, in order to combat the rise of the Resurrectionists—grave robbers who stole bodies and sold them to anatomists for dissection. Sometimes Lyssa found old nails in cemetery grass, so it was always worth listing them as a potential item, but given that they had to use something of personal significance for the sword, she doubted they were a viable option. She had no plans to exhume Eddie for a handful of nails, even if she knew she wouldn’t get caught, and Aldericdefinitelyseemed too delicate to dig up whoever he had lost to the Beast.
Salt was another powerful faerie repellant, but she had no idea how to make it personal. She wrote it down anyway, though, just in case Alderic had a salt shaker with sentimental value in that parlor of his.The parlor that is probably filled with Hound-wardens right now,she thought grimly.
After that, her mind went blank again. “Emotional connection, emotional connection,” she muttered to herself, chewing her pencil and trying to think of something that might work. “Fuck, why is this sohard?” She resisted the urge to snap her pencil in half, throwing it down onto her desk instead.
The Beast, Eddie… it was all so personal, and yet she had nothing she coulduse,no tangible items that represented her love for her brother, or how much he had meant to her. The realization chafed her heart raw and left her aching.
Eventually she just started making notes, in case the act of jotting them down helped jog something loose in her mind.
Waning moon,she wrote next towater.Waning was a time of banishing, Rags had taught her, and good for removing spells, hexes, and curses. She didn’t have any happy memories of ponds or pools, though. She had grown up in Warham, where the only pond had been in the Hagswood, and was far too brackish for swimming. It was gone now, anyway, filled in when they created the Buxton Fields Memorial Park. There was the ocean, of course, and the river, but no one in their right mind would swim in either of those. The ocean off Warham was for cargo ships and commercial fishing, and the river stank of shit half the time. The upper class all fled to various quaint coastal villages in the summer months, but even before Lyssa’s family had fallen apart, they hadn’t had enough money to flee to the countryside when it got too hot in the city.
Alderic would have a personal connection to some body of water or another, though. She was sure of it. Rich boys always had boats.
