Page 163 of Dead Beat

Through all the late hours she berates him, kisses him, humiliates him. My gullet is full, but that is not enough.

In the morning, he lies broken on the floor.

“All the world’s riches,” he sobs. “All the world’s wisdom. And all I long for is her.”

“Poor master,” I croon from inside my box. “I can tell you how you may bring her back, but it will be a gruesome business.”

“Just tell me, wretched thing.”

“And then you’ll set me free?”

“I swear it.”

“Then listen closely. I can do it, but I will need a few small things.”

You see? I’ve learned to lie too.

That night, out into the city, he goes to set about his grisly errand. When dawn comes the wailing of a thousand women reaches my ears as they wake to find their children with their throats slit, their small hearts cut from their small chests. The women cry out in agony, confusion, desperation, fury. Over the palace walls their desolation pours up to the tower where I am kept, a feast of delights. I am glutted. I am fed.

My master sits against the wall with legs splayed, his robes soaked with blood, his pockets stuffed with slippery little pieces of flesh. I laugh in the morning hours as I tell him it was all for nothing, a jape I played. I lap up his remorse and shame. When he trumpets, “I banish you, spirit!” I laugh all the more.

Through the door I go, free and joyous.

My nurse applauds and kisses my many faces. I have become what I was meant to be, a worthy prince, a demon true.

I understand a lesson has been learned and I am glad for it.

I tell myself I am glad for it.

But mostly I am hungry.

Into the box, Alex thought. Into the cage.

“It’s easy,” she said, echoing Golgarot’s words to her. “All you have to do is save him.”

“You saw what he did to me.”

“I get it. Someone made you suffer and now you want everyone else to suffer.”

“You’re a murderer too.”

“I am. And I will be again. But you? You’re going back in the box.”

The room spun, alive with blue flame. The creature in the box wept and mewled, and Golgarot went to his knees, dressed now in velvet robes, the pockets red with blood from so many infant hearts. Was this why he had flinched when he first saw her? Had he seen the old wizard or some other apparition from his past?

Through the windows came the screaming of a thousand women, a broken chorus, a tide of sound. Golgarot put his hands to his ears, leaving bloody handprints in his hair.

“Make them stop!”

“I can’t stop what you began,” she said.

He clawed at the box, listening to the yowl of the cat inside. He struggled to lift it, but it was far too heavy, weighted with millennia of cruelty, of longing and anguish, of stolen souls.

Alex felt no sense of joy or triumph. She’d been in the box with him, a small creature full of curiosity, craving sweetness, happy to be fed on pap. She’d felt her appetite change as she was used and lied to. Alex knew what it was to feel abandoned. But this was what all living things learned, to take from each other, to hurt and then to heal if they were lucky.

Golgarot threw himself over the box, banging his head against it, sobbing.

She knelt beside him.