“He unzipped my skin, layer by layer. I tried to scream but couldn’t. I was too afraid as the creature gradually morphed into its solid form in front of me. Eyes gray and dark and colorless.” Like Alistair’s eyes, Isobel thought. “Its body was like the roots of a tree, all gnarled and twisted. The edges of it hung limply like ribbons, thin and translucent as flakes of skin.”
He leaned even closer, bringing his voice down to a whisper. A warmness began in Isobel’s stomach that felt less like fear and more like desire. She scolded herself. She shouldn’t be feeling attraction during such an unnerving story—and to the very boy keeping her prisoner, no less. It was simply because they were a hair’s breadth apart in a bed, the lights dimmed low, and Alistair had a smile that looked wicked in more ways than one. He was using her own moves against her … again.
“When I looked down,” he murmured, “all of my organs lay exposed, gray like something pickled, something dead. There wasn’t any blood.”
Finally, he pulled his hand back. But they were still too close, and she didn’t move away.
“It unzipped my face last. My sight split in two as my eyes moved apart. I could no longer see it in front of me.” His eyes drifted from her chin to the top of her face, as though retracing the incision the monster had made. His gaze lingered on her lips a moment too long, then he looked up again and continued his story. “But I felt it.”
One by one, he lay his fingers over hers. Gradually, they slipped in between once more, intertwining. It felt far more uncomfortable, now that she knew the context of the story.
“It fit perfectly. In between every bone, in my windpipe, in my skull. It was like something being stuffed down your throat, like pressure prying you apart from the inside.”
Isobel grimaced, imagining such a feeling. She felt claustrophobic in her own skin.
“Once it is whole, it lives in its host body forever, intertwining so completely that there is no place where the human ends and monster begins.”
She let go of him and pushed him hard in the chest. “You made that up.”
“I did not.” He inspected her neck and shoulder. “You have goose bumps.”
She ignored that comment and instead challenged, “Then prove it’s real.”
He lifted up his sweater to expose his stomach. A long scar traced up the center, pale and pink, disappearing among tufts of hair at the bottom and his undershirt at the top.
Isobel narrowed her eyes. “Where is that scar from?”
“I’ll leave it to your imagination.”
Maybe Isobel’s mother had been right about Alistair. Maybe he was unstable.
“You never answered my first question,” she said. “Who dreams of being a monster?”
The corner of his lips lifted in a smile. “If you want to know all my secrets, you’ll have to force them out of me.” For a second time, his gaze traveled down to her lips, but now his gaze lingered. Isobel didn’t need the Divining Kiss to read his mind. If they weren’t champions in the same tournament, if he didn’t possess magick when she did not, she might have been tempted—her own backup plan be damned.
“You know that monsters aren’t real, right?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t be so sure. What do you think of when you hear the word ‘monster’？”
Because Isobel wasn’t raised on Ilvernath’s ridiculous fairy tales, her mind didn’t conjure an image of a dragon or a big bad wolf. It wasn’t even an image that came to mind at all.
It was a voice, rasping and sharp.
You don’t get to choose the family you’re born into.
She winced, instantly feeling guilty at her own thoughts.
“I’m going to sleep.” She flipped to her other side, her back to him. Over the next few minutes, she closed her eyes and feigned slumber, even as she heard Alistair set his book on the nightstand and change his clothes.
It wasn’t until the lights were extinguished that she realized the drowning dread she’d felt earlier was gone. She had cured a nightmare with a nightmare.
And though she didn’t tell him so, Isobel realized she might have learned the secret of Alistair Lowe after all.
GAVIN GRIEVE
Champions have tried to escape the tournament by tunneling beneath the Blood Veil or piercing it with spells, but their magick is no match for its enchantment.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Swearing, Gavin turned around and picked his way across the moors. The landscape had never really made much sense to him—out here, the moorlands were like two jigsaw puzzles that had been mixed together, one muddy and sulfurous, the other brimming with plant life and animals crouching in the underbrush.