Lights.
The other hunters were moving through the trees, half a mile away, flashlights bouncing off the dark. Normally, they wouldn’t dream of coming near the Hush Woods border, but now a fourteen-year-old girl was dead. That gave people courage. Vengeance is a brilliant motivator. Not that it would help them—they were too loud, too slow. The Beast would see them coming a mile away, just as I had.
The witch screams quieted down just as the wind picked up again. I sniffed the air. There was a new smell to it, metallic and pungent.
I spun around . . .
The Beast was tearing into a coyote, fur and paws and nose and gore. I’m not squeamish—that’s for pansies—but the scene was harsh. Cannibalistic.
I looked away, up at the sky. The moon was bright red-orange now, like it was made of embers and glowing warm.
Everything smelled like blood.
I nocked my arrow. The brick-colored moon shone down, as if leading my hand.
I didn’t make one effing sound. I was silent as the stars.
I took aim.
I rarely miss. When I shoot, it’s to kill. But the Beast looked up as I pulled back the arrow. It looked right at me.
It tensed, as if to run.
But at the last second . . .
It stopped.
Stopped.
Something about its eyes, its expression . . . It was almost as if the monster was begging me to strike.
My arrow flew. It whistled through the air, nicked its shoulder, smacked into a tree.
I’d missed.
The Beast tilted its head back and howled.
And then it began to change.
Fur melted into white-blue moonlight skin. Paws pressed into the earth and dissolved into hands, fingers, feet, toes. Long spine twisted, curved, and softened into a back, a waist, hips.
Indigo sat naked on the muddy ground next to the mauled coyote. Her brown hair hung in her face, and her shoulder dripped blood.
I called out her name, but her eyes were already on mine. She looked fierce and proud and sad.
I took off my cloak and threw it around her body. She reached up and wiped blood from her mouth and teeth.
“So,” I said. “It’s you.”
She just nodded.
“Tell me.”
And she did. She sat there naked in the forest, smelling of night and earth and fur, and told me about her family, and its curse.
“One girl in every generation becomes a Shade,” she said. “That’s what my family calls the Beast. The sun sets, and we shift. We hunt and kill, like an animal. The Shade picked me, the youngest, out of five sisters. I turned fourteen, and it began.”
Indigo pressed her back into my chest. She was nestled into my arms, her head on my shoulder.
“My parents let me stay with them for as long as they could. We were careful. We lived outside town, on a farm in Minnesota. I quit school. No one knew. I thought I could control it. I thought . . . I thought a lot of things. My parents tried chaining me up, but I always broke free. I’m so strong, Brahm. So strong. And then one moonlit night I mauled a boy. They found his body six days later. His name was Ethan. He used to be in my class, in school. I’d known him since kindergarten.”
Indigo started crying, her back trembling against my chest. I held her. I put my face in her hair and held her until the sobs slowed down and she was breathing normal again.
“My aunt was here in the Hush Woods before me,” she whispered when she could talk. “And her cousin before that. The locals don’t like to come to this forest, as you said. So it’s safe. Safer. There’s a cabin hidden deep in the trees where she lived. That’s where I live now. My aunt took her own life. She was only twenty-two. She couldn’t bear it. We all . . . we all find our way to death eventually.”
Indigo’s shoulder was still bleeding, but every time I moved to stanch the blood she just clutched me tighter.
“I will kill again,” she said. “And I will keep killing until someone stops me.”
They found us an hour later.
We saw their flashlights first, white lights casting long shadows across the forest floor. She got to her feet, naked except for my cloak. I stood at her side.
They saw the blood and the coyote, and they knew. People aren’t as dumb as you think. They aren’t as dumb as you want them to be.
Jon Jasper stood at the head of the group. He looked at me and nodded, just once. “We’re going to kill her. We’re going to end this. Try to stop us and we’ll kill you, too, Valois.”
I saw the rope in his hand, the noose at the end. Indigo shrank from it. I felt her recoil against me.
My bow was ten feet away, right where I’d dropped it in the mud.
“Change,” I whispered to her. “Change into the Beast and run. Run, Indigo.”
“I can’t.” Her voice caught. She shook her head, cleared her throat. “It doesn’t work that way.”
My eyes met hers. She nodded. I nodded back.
They won’t string her up like one of those three Valois women.
I could give her that much, at least.
The mob drew in, thick and tight.
They started with rocks.
I turned and threw myself in front of Indigo, long arms, broad shoulders, brawny back. The blows fell on me and me alone. I’m built like an ox. I didn’t feel the stones, didn’t feel the bruises.
She crouched beneath me in the dark. She matched her breath to mine, slow, steady, soft. I reached down and pulled the bowie knife from the straps around my left calf. She grabbed my shirt in her fist and squeezed tight.
“Do it,” she said.
I cupped her tiny, pointed chin in my large hunter’s hand, and tilted her head back.
I slit her throat.
She slipped to the ground.
I turned back to the crowd and dropped the knife.
The mob took a step back, waiting to see what I’d do next. But I just slid down beside Indigo Beau, slid into the blood and the mud.
The crowd left.
My brothers found me near dawn. They helped me up, arms supporting my weight.
“My bow,” I said to Philippe.
He fetched it, handed it to me. I pulled the string back, muscles straining.
I nocked the arrow and shot Indigo Beau’s limp body straight through the heart.
I am the new Valois Beast. My hair is long and tangled, my beard thick, my clothes ragged. I sleep in dirt and old leaves. I hunt and I eat what I kill.
People scream when they see me in the woods.
That’s as it should be.
I wait for her. I wait for the next Beast. I know she will come, five years, ten years . . . Sooner or later she will come.
But this time she won’t be alone.
This time she will have me.
WHITNEY ATKINSON’S VILLAIN CHALLENGE TO APRIL GENEVIEVE TUCHOLKE:
Beauty and the Beast: Suitor’s Revenge
GLAMORIZED RECOVERY: EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY
BY WHITNEY ATKINSON