Page 80 of Kill the Beast
“What’s the catch?” one of the few adults in the crowd shouted.
“There is no catch,” the man in the stripes said. “You ever heard of Cindy-rella? The scullery maid who lost her shoe at the royal ball? The prince asked all the girls in the land to try on that shoe to see if it fit, so that he could find his lady love. Think of it like that. I am the prince”—the crowd snickered—“and this spear is the shoe, and I’d like all of you to try it on for size and see what happens. If any of you are ‘the one,’ you’ll be a princess by morning.” He whipped off the cover from the cage, shouting, “Now, who wants to go first?”
The crowd gasped.
It wasn’t a bear or a wildcat, like Lyssa had been expecting—it was a creature she had never seen before.
The monster was roughly lion-shaped, but enormous, its slitted eyes as big as Lyssa’s head. When it opened its mouth to roar, she saw fangs as long as daggers, in addition to the pair of sharp tusks protruding from its upper jaw on either side of its snout, curved outward as if for goring. Each of its four massive paws was equipped with a set of wicked claws, and its spiked tail whipped back and forth behind it, clanging against the bars of its cage. Strangest of all, there was a symbol on its chest that glowed blue through its shaggy white fur, so bright it was hard to look at for long.
“We don’t have all night, folks!” the man in the stripes called. “Who’s first?”
Frightened murmurs rippled through the crowd. No one rose to the challenge.
Lyssa swallowed her fear and shoved the bucket of popcorn into Eddie’s hands, stepping forward. “I’ll do it.”
“Lyssa, no!” Eddie hissed, but the man in the stripes beamed.
“This little girl puts the rest of you to shame! Here you go, sweetling.” He shoved the spear into her hands. She faced the cage, tightening her grip on the rough wooden shaft. “All right, now, just stick the spear through the bars and see if you can hurt it,” the man in the stripes told her. “Aim for that mark over its heart.”
The Beast snarled, its eyes glowing in the reflection of that symbol on its chest. It threw itself against its cage—once, twice, three times. The whole thing shook as the monster battered the bars with its massive weight.
Lyssa hesitated, adrenaline numbing her tongue and making her shiver.
“Let’s go,” Eddie said, but she wrenched away from him when he grabbed her arm.
“I can do it,” she insisted.
The creature threw itself against the bars again, and there was a crunch as something gave way.
The crowd seemed to draw in a collective breath as one whole side of the cage teetered and fell with a metallic screech and a clang that reverberated in Lyssa’s bones.
The Beast stumbled out into the crowd, shaking itself. Still the people stood transfixed, like rabbits frozen by a wolf’s stare.
And then the monster attacked the man in the stripes. Bit his head clean off, right in front of Lyssa. Blood spattered her face as the crowd began to scream, began to flee. But they were all packed in so tightly around the cage, and the Beast was right there, and…
“It was a massacre,” Lyssa told Alderic and her father, closing her eyes, the smell of popcorn coming back to her so violently in her memory that she gagged. “Eddie tried to protect me. He shoved me out of the way, out of the Beast’s path.” Her teeth were chattering as she spoke, now, and she looked up to see a tear roll down Alderic’s cheek. “It killed him, instead of me, with one swipe of those claws. Killed dozens of other people, too, before running off into the Hagswood.”
Her father was crying, and it was an effort for Lyssa to holdback her own tears. She clenched her teeth and watched him wipe his eyes with the back of a trembling hand.
“Why was it there?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “At a fucking circus, for the Lady’s sake?”
“Nobody knows,” Lyssa told him. “The circus denied responsibility, claiming that the man in the stripes was not associated with them in any way.” Lyssa had searched obsessively for information about him, and had come up empty. If he hadn’t died along with everyone else, she would have thought he was a faerie, one somehow resistant to Warham’s iron. It was possible he was some vagrant the faeries had tricked into helping them, as expendable as any human. She would likely never know.
Her father took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I told Eddie to look after you, until I got back. He swore on his life he’d keep you safe. He… he always did keep his promises, didn’t he?”
“He did.” A few tears escaped down Lyssa’s cheeks, and she knuckled them away quickly. “And I will keep mine,” she told him. “I will kill it. I will avenge him.”
“I have no doubt about that,” her father replied, a touch of pride in his voice. “I look forward to reading about it in the paper.”
He stared at her for another moment, as if she were someone completely foreign to him, and then, without another word, he stood up. Settled his crutches into his armpits, nodded to her and then to Alderic, and hobbled out the door.
He had gotten what he wanted—the truth—and had given her what she needed.
They had no more use for each other.
Lyssa let out a long breath when the door snicked shut behind him. Let herself glance at the photograph of her family for only a moment before tucking it into her pack. Her teeth were still chattering. “I can’t believe that worked.”
Alderic squeezed her shoulder. “I find that—generally speaking—a nice conversation yields better results than stabbing someone.”
