He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “There is magic in this world, Ms. Bellamy—things that can’t be explained by reason or logic.”
“You expect me to believe that?” I asked, although it wasn’t lost on me that he had just sent me soaring to the heavens.
He stood and looked around wearily. “I don’t expect you to believe me. I need you to. For your own safety.”
“And you—you are saying you used magic to throw me?”
“No.”
My brow furrowed. “Well, spit it out. You didn’t hunt me down just to keep it a secret, did you?”
He shook his head, but his lips moved wordlessly several times before he finally spoke. “Ms. Bellamy … What I mean to say is, there are those who can channel magic. They’re called Conduits. And in addition to being extremely powerful, they have also become exceedingly rare. But I am not one of them.”
“Why are you telling me this if it has nothing to do with you?”
“It has everything to do with me,” he answered.
I pressed my lips together, my legs trembling beneath me. “Then tell me what you are.”
“Something unlike anything else. Or at least I used to think so.” He looked away from me, deep into the woods. “I was something of a scamp in my younger days, Ms. Bellamy. To put it bluntly, I was crude, lazy, and worst of all, incredibly selfish. I used people, women chiefly. One day, a beautiful traveler named Satina wandered into our village.”
“Your village?” I asked, my nose crinkling.
“She was beautiful,” he said. “The most beautiful thing I had even seen.” He blinked hard. “Or she used to be.” He cleared his throat. “I was a handsome man even then, if a bit boyish. And my charms were quite effective when I wanted them to be. Nature took its course with us, and after that, I took mine. She thought we were in love, that we would be married. I, of course, never saw her as anything other than a conquest. That is, until she killed herself.”
My skin went cold. “What?”
“She was a Conduit. I didn’t know, but her bloodline was one of the most potent in recorded history. A few nights after I left her, she climbed to the top of the bell tower. She cursed me in front of the entire village, told them of all my shortcomings and that very soon the ugliness inside of me would be seen by everyone. Then she spouted some incantation to invoke the harvest moon.” An aching smile etched across his face. “You know, I actually scoffed when she jumped. All I could think, when she hit the ground, was how foolish she must have been and how lucky I was to be rid of her.” His eyes flickered back to me. “That’s the kind of person I was.”
His hands found their way into his pockets and his eyes moved away from me again. “I was already with another woman when it happened the first time. It was almost a month after Satina died. It came on me like a sickness. I was on top of her.” He bit his lip. “In the middle of it all. I felt myself heaving. It was so painful the first time that I couldn’t stop myself from screaming. And her eyes, if I live a thousand years, I’ll never forget those eyes. That poor girl was terrified, and with good reason. One look in the mirror showed that I was a monster; a horrific hairy thing that no one could ever love.”
Abram folded his arms as I lay there motionless on the ground, half terrified and half enthralled.
“What happened next?” I asked, too stunned and too curious to move.
“The girl tried to run,” Abram said softly, as if the memory had taken him by surprise and he was afraid he might drown in it.
“Tried?” I asked, hoping that didn’t mean what I thought it did.
“You have to understand, when the change happens, it doesn’t just affect my body. Everything is heightened. Every sensation is a thousand times stronger. Anger, grief, lust—even love; it’s all supercharged. I wasn’t equipped to handle it then, especially not on that first night.” He shook his head hard. “She called me a demon. She said she was going to tell her father what I was, that she was going to have me burned with all the other abominations.”
“Burned,” I muttered, thinking how long ago that must have been. “How old are you?”
“I didn’t want to kill her, but I was so afraid and so angry that I almost did. It took all I had in me to run.” He slid down the trunk of a nearby tree so that we were nearly level with each other. “Satina came to me after that, as an apparition of sorts. That’s when she told me what she had done. She’d cursed me, made it so that the monster I was on the inside would be what I was on the outside.”
“But you’re a man now,” I answered, waving my hand at him.
“She’d called on the moon to perform her curse, so it’s only in effect at night.”