Page 149 of Bewitched By the Sea Monster
“These aren’t gaps, they’re craters. If you’re not…If that story’s not true?—”
“Parts of it are true.”
“Which ones?”
“What happened to the people?”
I exhaled. “But youjustsaid?—”
“What. Happened. To. The. People?” His whiskers fluttered.
“I…They were cursed. They died?—”
“Scratch that second part?—”
“—and became beasts.”
“Take out the past tense.”
“Theybecomebeasts? I…That…” But then it clicked.
The long-limbed man I kept seeing—the one Iknewwas Alistair.
The way the creatures here were so tightly controlled. Branded with runes that dictated what they could and couldn’t do. What they could and couldn’t say.
The way this isle scrambled my emotions. Because the creatures living here were in turmoil.
Alistair. Always fighting so hardfor his words.
And the phrase that had tickled my brain on the night I first slept atop his head.
“I am human.”
“You’re cursed.” Shock hit my belly the way a slushy did, when I sucked it down too quickly on a sweltering day. “You’re people. From now? This time period?Living people, who are cursed.”
“I knew you’d get there.” Marvin’s tail twitched. “Took you long enough, though.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly wondering if I was going to upend my stomach over my feet. “But curses like that are illegal.They’ve been outlawed for centuries.”
“People can break laws and get away with it, if they’re crafty enough.”
A foul, lemony taste flooded my tongue.
Alistair washuman.
He hadn’t justbeenthe man I kept seeing in some once upon a distant time. Hewasthat man. Now. In the present. A man stuck in another body—imprisoned there by a curse.
All of them were.
Marvin.
The alicorns.
The kelpies.
All of them.
They werepeople.
