I can only manage a muffled gasp of pain as her teeth glide through my skin, right above my collarbone. My vision goes starry, then white. She releases me, jaw unlatched, a flap of my skin hanging over her bottom lip. Snakelike, she swallows it whole, with a gory slurping sound.
There’s a slow trickle of blood pooling in the hollow of my throat. Still frozen, my caged heart throbbing its panicked beat, I watch her lean forward again, mouth opening, her lips jeweled with my blood.
And then she crumples. Her body ripples, all her willowy limbs going limp. She tips to the ground, Gáspár’s blade in her back, and once she hits the dirt her body fissures open, a spew of ruby-gilded rot and droning black flies. They crawl all over the mangle of her face, split down the middle into neatly mirrored halves, and eat away at the flesh still clinging to the vault of her rib cage. Sensation returns to me slowly, with one staggered breath and then another, and all I can do is watch the flies devour her.
Gáspár lifts his ax, the edge of it slick with blood and rot. “Are you all right?”
I touch the wound on my throat. There’s a muted jolt of pain as I do, something fuzzy and far-removed. I nod, still mostly numb. “Was she . . .”
“A monster,” he says. “Just like the witch in the sod house.”
Virág has told stories of girl-shaped creatures that move behind the tree line, shadowless, their feet leaving no prints upon the earth. Their targets are guileless hunters and unfortunate woodcutters who roam the forest at dusk, alone. I can only guess that her power was not enough to hold both of us at once. I almost want to laugh, manic with relief, and then, abruptly, with chagrin: I should not have believed that old magic was stamped out everywhere but Keszi.
“Your forests are just as dangerous as mine.”
He snorts in acknowledgment.
I draw in another breath and let it out, shakily. Gáspár stares at me, brow furrowed with concern, eye darting from my face to the small wound on my throat. I watch something red drip from the corner of his mouth.
“You’re bleeding,” I say.
He lifts a gloved hand to his lips, and his fingers come away damp. Frowning, he looks back at me. “So are you.”
“I know,” I say, touching my neck wound. “It’s nothing.”
“No,” he says. “Your mouth.”
I wipe my lips with the back of my hand, staining my skin. There is something gathering under my tongue, and I let it dribble out, onto my chin. It’s as dark and glossy red as boiled cherries, with a sweet-sharp taste.
“Juice,” I say, in a voice that sounds nothing like my own.
Gáspár’s lips and chin are smeared with it too. I feel a coiling heat in my belly, unexpected and strange. The edges of my vision are still blinkering as I take a step toward him, fingers clenched.
He stares down at me, gaze wavering. I like seeing the puzzlement on his regal prince’s face, his flushing indecision. “Let me look.”
Then he reaches toward me and sweeps the hair from my neck, leaning closer to examine the wound. The pain of it has ebbed entirely. I can only feel the gentle pressure of his fingers against my throat and my jawbone.
“It’s nothing,” I say again, and this time my voice is little more than a whisper. “I can do worse to myself.”
As if to prove the point, I hold up my left hand, looking odd and skewed with only four fingers. Gáspár removes his hand, letting my hair fall back against my throat.
“You’re worse than any monster, it’s true,” he says. He gives a soft laugh, but his eye is solemn, humorless.
Ordinarily I might have chafed at his words. Now I only feel a small quiver go through my chest, a heady pulse of thrill twined with fear, the way the air grows thick and close before a storm. “And why is that?”
“You have the uncommon ability to make me doubt what I once thought was certain,” he says. “I’ve spent the last fortnight fearing you would destroy me. You may still.”
I laugh then, too, a sound without an echo. “I think you are forgetting yourself. You’re a Woodsman and a prince, and I’m a trifling wolf-girl. All my life I’ve been terrified I’d wake to see you at my door.”
Gáspár swallows. I see his throat bobbing, skin streaked with that red juice. He lets his ax slide from his grasp, thudding softly to the ground. Then he raises his hand and tugs at the clasp of his suba, letting it pool around his feet.
I stare at him then, unarmed and uncloaked, though still with that stubborn set to his jaw. I remember looking at him down beside the lake outside Ezer Szem, when we were both panting and slick with monster blood, hatred burning a hole in my belly. The memory cleaves open without my willing it, and another flowers from the black space: him holding me in the hollowed tree, his gentle breath in my ear. The nights on the ice, anchored in the warmth of his body. Him wrapping my wound with such vexed tenderness, like he couldn’t believe the stirring of his own hands.