Warped Page 5

  “You watched me come in, and you still chased me?” Her brow furrowed at the remembrance of her terrified flight.

  With a noise of discontent, he shifted his weight and refused to meet her eyes. “I was unable to control that instinct. For that, I sincerely apologize, Mademoiselle.”

  She nodded, accepting the apology. Aside from the chase, he hadn’t shown any sign of acting like a Beast — his curse seemed to be visually oriented, at least, as far as she could tell.

  “What do you mean that I didn’t belong?” she asked.

  At her question, he relaxed his shoulders and brought his gaze back to her from the floor. “You were dressed wrong, and you did not act like the villagers. Mademoiselle, you did not fit. There is something about your very nature that sets you apart.”

  “I’m not from the same time as they are — or that you are. That alone sets me apart.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So, there you have it: in the world without being part of it.”

  “You can travel anywhere you wish,” he snapped. Leaning forward, he said, “If you wished it, you could certainly take part in it. I do not have that option, Mademoiselle.”

  “Neither do I,” she retorted, mirroring his posture. “Because of what I am and what I do, I will always be different. Always. I am alone, Prince. That’s the story of my life. I do my job alone. I live my life alone. Hell, I’ll probably die alone,” she muttered angrily.

  “Are you quite done, Mademoiselle?” he asked, leaning against the back of his chair as he studied her.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not.” Jess stood up and glared down at him. She crossed her arms in front of her, gripping her elbows so she wouldn’t shove her finger in his face as her anger rose. “You judge me, and you don’t even know me. Am I in your exact situation? No. If I were, I wouldn’t be here trying to help you. You should be grateful that I’m here at all when there are dozens of other curses I could be breaking — people that I could be freeing. Instead, I’m here, with you.” She put her hands on her hips, daring him to refute her words.

  Finally, he asked, “And what would you have me do?” He looked up at her, green eyes uncertain.

  “I told you,” she snapped. She gave in to her anger and pointing at him, albeit from a few feet away. “Tell me ‘thank you’, stop doubting me, and help me break your damned curse.”

  He bowed his head for a moment before meeting her eyes. “Merci, Mademoiselle.”

  At his words, the anger drained out of her. Her hand dropped to her side, and she took a deep breath to settle herself. She sat back down in the chair and silently reminded herself why she was here: not to argue, but to help. With that thought, she rid herself of the vestiges of anger.

  “How is it I can assist you, Mademoiselle?” he said, his voice a gentle rumble in the fire-lit room.

  “I need to know what happened. I need to know the truth behind the legend,” she said, holding back the eagerness she felt. One of the things she loved dearly was hearing the true story of how a legend started.

  “Where shall I begin?” he asked with a tilt of his head, “for there is much to the story that you are not aware of.

  “Well, you mentioned a ‘Marguerite’? There’s no ‘Marguerite’ in any of the stories I’ve read.”

  He turned to look at her, green eyes focusing on nothing. They grew distant, and Jess knew he was thinking about Marguerite. “No, there would not be. I suppose you would know her as Belle.”

  “Do you mind if I write this down?” she asked quietly.

  “Be my guest. After all, my story has already been told.”

  “No, it hasn’t, and that’s the issue,” she said. She dug into her knapsack for her notebook, “and what I’m going to remedy.” She leaned over the bag, peering into the dark contents as she searched.

  A grunt from him brought her head up, and when she looked at him, softly, he said, “Merci.”

  Her fingers touched the embossed barrel of her silver pen, and she grasped it, detangling it from a black ribbon before pulling it out. She smiled and started to settle herself into the chair when her stomach growled, reminding her that she’d skipped lunch.

  Reaching back into the bag, she pulled out the two rolls jammed into a side pocket. Hesitantly, she offered one to the Beast. “I skipped lunch,” she said apologetically. “If you want one, though, I have enough, or I can wait until we’re done —”

  He shook his head and tapped a finger against the arm of his chair, creating an impatient rhythm that he quickly stopped when she looked inquisitively at him. “Eat, Mademoiselle. My curse rarely grants reprieves, and you should eat while we are unbothered.”

  She gave him a shy smile, and polished off the roll. After brushing the crumbs off her notebook, she picked up her pen and asked, “What can you tell me about Marguerite?”

  “She was not from Boisombre. She had just moved there a few months prior. Her father had died, leaving her alone, near penniless and destitute. She had family halfway across France, but on her trip to find them, she was robbed of her scant funds and found herself waylaid in Boisombre until she could continue her journey.”

  “So she was only here a few months before finding you?”

  “If she had been in Boisombre for years, she never would have found the castle. Or me,” he finished, a soft growl in his voice. The fire flared, illuminating his mane, turning it from a plain gray to a brilliant gold.

  “Why not? The curse, again?”

  He nodded. “The curse prevents anyone living in the village from finding me, and potentially freeing me.”

  “But she was living in the village. I’m living in the village.”

  “No,” he said sharply. “You are not living there. You are a traveller. She, however, was living there. The curse takes time to insinuate itself into the other victims. From what I have seen, it happens over a long period of weeks and even months before they are unable to find or see anything related to me or the curse.”

  “When did it first start? I mean, when did you first notice the curse affecting outside people?”

  “In the mid-1720s, I believe. Shortly before Marguerite’s arrival. Marguerite arrived about twenty years or so after my curse was set. It felt like a lifetime. I was wrong,” he said bitterly with a shake of his head.

  “And did Marguerite fall in love with you?”

  “No.” He waved a hand in irritation, mouth twisting in a grimace that bared sharp canines. “That is simply another falsehood from the stupid fairy tale.”

  “You said she tried to save you, though. Why did she fail?”

  “She failed because I am not meant to be freed, Mademoiselle,” he said with a disparaging look.

  “I doubt that,” Jess muttered. Louder, she said, “She tried to free you? How did she try?”

  He paused and let out a slow breath. “Yes, but as you can see, she failed to save me, therefore it does not matter how she tried, only that she failed.”

  Before he finished speaking, Jess was already shaking her head, dismissing his words as being untrue. Pressing her pen hard into the thick paper, she pressed, “I need to know why she failed, and what steps she took.”

  He shifted his weight, leaning heavily against the arm of the chair. It creaked with his weight, and he straightened, folding his hands in his lap. “Let me ask you something, Mademoiselle. Can you save someone who believes with every fiber of their being that they do not deserve to be saved?”

  “You don’t get to decide if you’re worthy of being saved. Someone else made the decision to curse you, and I’m making the decision to free you.” She bit her lip, wondering what memories were going through his mind that were dark enough for him to decide he shouldn’t be freed.

  “Yet again, my own destiny is out of my hands,” he growled.

  “I can leave you if that’s what you really want, so you can stay a beast and wallow in self-pity and self-recrimination forever.” Jess winced at her harsh tone. Shaking her head, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  He stood and paced back and forth before the fire, the small room only giving him a few steps in either direction. Any further and he’d be walking into her. She moved her knees to the side as he stepped too close.

  “No, I apologize,” he said. He exhaled deeply, but did not pausing his pacing. “You are not at fault for what has been done to me, nor the thoughts that I have. I simply do not wish to discuss this any further.”

  She nodded, settling back into the chair, but keeping her eyes on him. Jess had been expecting that he would have a limit of what he’d tell her, but she hadn’t thought he would apologize. This was not his first apology, either.

  “You are still uneasy,” he said with a small grimace. He stopped pacing and stood before the fire. He toed the end of a log back into the hearth. As he did, a spark popped out of the fire, and a glowing ember trailed to the floor.

  “It’s not you,” she said, tucking her feet under her thighs. “I know it’s your curse — I can feel it trying to convince me to leave. It’s been strongly affecting my mind since I first saw your iron gates, and it’s trying to play on the fear from our chase.”

  “You said the curse has been affecting you since you started trying to locate me?” When she nodded, he continued, “It will not end, as you know. Even now, you feel the indescribable terror and the need to escape pressing you.”

  “Your curse isn’t like the others I’ve worked on,” she admitted. “They all try to make you leave, but yours is different somehow.”

  “Mine, Mademoiselle, is sentient,” he said. He turned to look at her with piercing green eyes. “The terror, the panic, the need to escape — those are all tools of my curse, used to keep everyone out and me in here, cursed and alone.”

  At
his description, she shuddered, feeling the weight of the curse pressing on her, forcing the air from her lungs. For a moment, she felt the desperate need to flee to safety. Then his words came back to her: she was safe. If she fled into the darkness, the curse would find her, and somehow, she knew it would not let her leave. Swallowing the rise of emotions, she tightened her grip on the pen. Taking a deep breath, she slowly released it and the vestiges of the curse-borne terror.

  “It drove me just as it drives you now,” he said.

  “Drove? It doesn’t anymore?” Jess stopped writing and looked at him, brow furrowed.

  “Not in the same capacity as it does you. The first ten years were the worst for me, and I was never safe, not even in sleep. It found me and punished me, chasing me through my dreams. It still harries me, always finding me when I have found a moment of solace. It hounds me every night, never letting me forget what I am.”

  She bit her lip as she thought about what she’d felt coming up here, even in the village itself. The villagers didn’t want her there. She had assumed that they didn’t want a stranger poking around their slice of the curse, but now she wondered if they were suffering from the same symptoms that she was — the nightmares, most of all. She found it unlikely that they knew they were cursed — in her experience, there was only one or two that were fully aware of the situation, and usually they were the cursed party.

  Her mind went back to what he’d said: the curse had started out differently. “The darkness outside is obviously a physical manifestation of the curse. Was it like that in the beginning, or has that changed?”

  “That has also evolved,” he replied with a slight shake of his head. “In the beginning, the curse only affected me mentally, with the fear and panic. It was not until twenty years had passed that it gained the ability to warp shadows. In time, it controlled them to the level that you see now, until there was little I could do to fully escape them.”

  She pulled out two apples from the knapsack and a small amount of waxed paper filled with sausage and cheese. Taking an apple, Jess set the rest on the side table, offering it to him. “You’re welcome to it.”

  With a deliberate slowness, he extended a claw and speared one of the sausages. Jess supressed a smile as she watched him nibble delicately at the meat. Apparently some princely habits couldn’t be subdued by curses. He seemed to sense her stare and glanced up.

  Jess quickly dropped her gaze to her notepad and continued with her questions that peppered her mind. “You said Marguerite found the castle after a few months of living in the village. How did she find you without knowing about you or the curse?”

  He finished the piece of sausage. “I believe that was also due to the curse growing. When she found me, the curse was not as physical as it is; at that time, it played on the mind, using fear as its main tool. She only discovered my curse when she saw me. She told me she’d wondered why the villagers hadn’t talked about the castle, why no one talked about the fork in the road. She was sent to the lake to find one of the children. She grew curious and walked down the fork instead. When a sudden squall blew up, she ran towards the castle rather than back to the village. She later said she felt as if something pushed her towards it,” he said, stopping when Jess put her pen down on the table beside her.

  Her fingers gripped the paper, crinkling it before she forced her grip to loosen. “On my way here, I felt something pushing me towards the castle. Hell, the gate opened on its own. It wasn’t the shadows. It felt like something entirely different. Something that wanted me here, I think.”

  He grunted again. “I assure you, my curse does not want you here. Even then, the castle and curse was uninviting.” A small smile quirked his lips. “The first time she saw me, with the curse trying to scare her away, she was not scared, not the least bit. It seemed that she only thought I needed saving, like I was some wounded soldier returned from war. Anyone else would have run screaming when they saw my form, but she did not. It was almost as if she expected me.”

  There was a deep longing in his eyes. She wanted to comfort him, but she doubted he’d allow it. Not yet, and maybe never.

  “Well,” Jess finally said. “I expected you.” At a sharp look from him, she amended, “Well, maybe not you exactly. But a Beast, at least. I did run when I saw, you, though.”

  “You screamed and ran,” he corrected.

  “I did not scream.”

  “You may not recall in the moment of you running away, but I certainly do. You screamed, Mademoiselle, although, I cannot hardly blame you.” He shrugged.

  Jess hid a smile and jotted down another note. “Still...just one person in three hundred years has found you...”

  “Is that so strange?” He glanced over her shoulder, and she twisted to follow his gaze.

  There was nothing there, but his concentration unnerved her. Turning back to the fire, she pushed a strand of copper hair off her cheek. “Yeah. The majority of curses are broken before the first hundred and fifty years. The others are usually done before two-fifty. It’s rare that we find an unbroken curse as old as yours. They’re out there, though, the stories lost and forgotten. Maybe more than we realize, with the loss of the stories that hide them,” she speculated.

  “Why would a curse be forgotten?” he said, finally bringing his eyes back to her.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes, people want the stories to be forgotten. Terrible crimes, unjust deaths...It doesn’t matter, though, why someone is cursed.”

  “Do you judge the cursed for the very reason they were cursed?” He waited, with bated breath, for her to respond. Muscles tense, he was still and silent, eyes trained on her.

  “Why would I?” Jess asked, confusion drawing her brow together. “Sometimes, I don’t know why a person was cursed. And even if I do know, it’s not my place to judge them. It’s my job to free them — that’s it.” Jess paused and ran a hand through her hair. “Beyond that, Prince, I think it’s a cruel torment that no one deserves.”

  “No one? That’s a lofty thought,” he said scornfully. “Vlad Tepes wouldn’t deserve this? Atilla? Nero?”

  “No, not one of them. No one deserves this life. Instant death: that I’m all right with. This: how you’re here, by yourself, for centuries? This is pure, unadulterated torture. A slow, unthinkable torture of the mind, body and soul.”

  “Yes, that it is,” he said, almost too low for her to hear.

  After jotting down a few broken thoughts, Jess sighed as she stopped writing. She wondered if his deep voice was the product of the curse or if that was how he had sounded before. Swallowing hard, Jess tried to regain her focus. “Was she here long? At the village, I mean?”

  “She stayed in the village for the winter and visited the castle whenever the snow was not too deep. When autumn came to the village, she left us completely to continue her journey. After that, she wrote down the story; my story.” His harsh laugh echoed in the stone room. Climbing to his feet, he started to pace again.

  “It was not hard to recognize myself, her, or this castle in her story. The bones of the story are right here,” he said, gesturing to their surroundings. “She wrote herself, making herself —” he cut off his words with a sharp shake of his head. “She made herself the hero of the story.”

  “So none of what she wrote is true?” She stopped writing and tried to ease the cramp that caused her fingers to contort painfully.

  “Only partially. It is true that she came to the castle and met me, as I said. But her father was never here. He was dead, if I recall properly. That was why she was traveling across Europe: trying to reach far-flung family, and by happenstance, landed in the village. She ran out of funds when her chaperone disappeared with what was left of her family’s fortune. According to her, at least,” he said doubtfully. “I had no reason not to believe her.”

  “What did she do once she left here?”

  “She took a job as a seamstress, trying to work her way to Paris, somewhere she could start anew.” He stopped slumped against the hearth, forehead almost touching the marble as Jess felt an abject loneliness that resonated with her own soul at the loss of her parents.