The yellow vanara made a hurt and wounded sound before turning to the one beside him. “Would she really, brother?”
Behind him, Gauri pawed the ground. Panic frosted his thoughts. If she turned on them, would he be the first victim? As the vanaras argued, he glanced behind him. Her eyes were the same despite resting in a face that had the tufted ears of a leopard, and strange glittering antlers uncurling from her forehead. She tossed her head, lips pulled back from her teeth as she snarled and mouthed: Use. Me.
Right before his eyes … she grew. The tunic split down the middle, but it didn’t matter, because gold fur grew where skin once stretched. She stood, taller than a horse, back as broad as a bear’s. And then she roared. The vetala laughed even as the rumbling sound shook him from the iron tree and sent him tumbling to the floor.
The vanaras gasped. “She took it!”
“No—” screamed the gray one.
Vikram turned and grinned.
Too late.
Nothing human remained in her aspect except those glittering eyes. A snow leopard’s tail lashed from behind her.
Now, said her eyes.
Vikram sprang toward her, grabbing the vetala as he jumped onto her back. Somewhere in the shadows of the Kishkinda kingdom, he thought he heard the barest trace of delighted laughter. The vanaras loosed their arrows, but Gauri broke them in her teeth.
“Vetala!” he yelled. “We’ve kept our word. Now honor yours.”
The vetala shuddered. “Honor? There should always be better motivation than honor. Try something more appealing. Like half-clothed women or a vat of goat blood.”
“Tell us where to go!”
“Pretty monster,” said the vetala, patting Gauri’s massive head. She hissed. “Bad cat.”
The vetala licked his hand and held it to the windless air. “Into the wall.”
“Are you insane?” asked Vikram.
“Yes?”
“Straight into a stone wall?”
An arrow sliced through the air. Gauri brought down a massive paw and snapped it in half. Vikram thought he heard a laugh rumble in her stomach.
“Get out of the way or die,” he said to the vanaras.
Gauri began to gallop, her body stretching for the stones just before them.
One.
Vikram’s gut wrenched. He didn’t want to die slammed by a wall of stone. He didn’t want to die at all.
Two.
The air smelled sour. He could imagine the sound of Gauri’s beautiful antlers shattering.
Three.
Her fur glinted, light rippling over her body. Vikram held tight, bracing himself for a thud …
That never came.
10
A BOWL OF LUSH MEMORIES
GAURI
I didn’t know hurt. Or fear.
When my skin gave way to fur and my nails bent into claws, I knew what it meant to be stripped down to your barest self. It meant seeing the world for what it was. I took off my skin and released the thing that had always lurked, crept and slept within me: A beast. A monster. A myth. A girl. What was the difference?
My last thought before I turned was the wish I would’ve made. For freedom. True freedom. And even though I couldn’t speak it aloud, I could feel the weight of that wish filling me from the inside, pressing against my teeth. I felt that wish like a line of light, a boundary that my mind wouldn’t cross lest I lose myself forever.
We ran and I reveled. I could see and smell and taste. I licked starlight out of the air. Saw midnight cresting over a mountain. I thought I’d lost Vikram as we jumped through that wall, but then his scent caught me. He smelled of wanting and bottled-up dreams. And in some dimmed human part of me, heat flared.
The vetala stroked my head. “Run toward the scent of death, pretty monster. The Grotto of the Undead will be the first boundary to Kubera’s kingdom.”
It was not a difficult scent to follow. The smells of death lit up the world already, but finding where the scent rang strongest was painstaking. I pawed the ground, turning up the earth and trying to find that smudgy scent of stale death—mushroom pale, a crease of shadow in a skein of light, flattened sounds that trembled in my ears like the blunted teeth of echoes.
When I found it, I chased it. I didn’t know how long I ran. I ran until there were no more animal sounds. No more scents. This was death: the absence of all. I was still a beast when we finally reached the Undead Grotto. But my claws had receded. An antler had snapped off sometime earlier. The effects of the demon fruit were fading fast.
I shrugged off the vetala and Vikram like an itchy cloak. They tumbled to the ground. The vetala let out a stream of curses, but Vikram only stood and straightened his tunic. Whatever brief understanding we’d shared before I turned had disappeared. Once more, his eyes sparked as sly as a fox’s.
“Since you can’t respond yet and since you have no claws left, I will take this moment to remind you that you thought eating the demon fruit would be a bad idea. It was not. To which I say—” He drew a deep breath. “—I told you so.”
“Fool,” muttered the vetala.
I snarled and with one last burst of strength, swiped my paw behind Vikram’s knees and sent him tumbling. He gasped.
“I will,” he wheezed, rolling onto his stomach, “take your silence as a form of agreement.”
Vikram sat on the ground, tugging one dark curl around his ear. Even with dirt smudged across his ears and nose, he looked regal. His long legs were crossed in front of him, and he reclined against the rock outcropping as if the earth had put it there just for him.
I turned to the Undead Grotto, which was a desert-like basin between two cliffs. Bone white trees rose from the uneven ground like spindly fingers. Lichen and greasy-looking flowers splashed over vermillion rocks. The moon was nowhere to be found. Even looking at the place made my fur stand on end. The Grotto was a place not quite out of myth. Scouts had sometimes returned to Bharata carrying tales about the place. How the wind taunted members of the scouting party. Those who wandered into that land refused to leave or were never found. Even those forcibly brought back were never the same. That much was clear from the landscape alone. Piles of abandoned armor. Even some weaponry. I padded through the refuse, pawing aside the rusted bits until I found a blunt knife. It was better than nothing. I picked it up in my mouth, carrying it back to Vikram and the vetala.
Vikram kept his gaze on the Grotto. “How much longer until the demon fruit stops working?”
“She is already turning.” The vetala huffed. “Don’t look so disappointed. I know what you’re trying to do, tall fox. You think the Grotto is a place you can fight through with the help of some demon fruit. But it’s not about fighting. It’s about seeing,” said the vetala. “Alaka has two doors before it opens its golden ones: the Grotto and the Crossroads.”
I remembered the rhyme from the ruby: Alaka is past the place where memories devour and the held-breath place to put an end to cowards. Which one would the Grotto be?