Page 89 of A Mastery of Monsters

My feet thud on the concrete as I sprint through the maze of tunnels.

They’re large enough to accommodate the beasts roaming within them but still have a good number of sharp twists and turns.

But there isn’t much else. At least the second and third tests had hiding spots and foliage to blend into.

This is all stark concrete and metal bars.

The way this is made forces you to interact.

I also have to deal with the potential of running into the wrong monster.

A roar sounds behind me, ripping up goose pimples on my skin. It could be any of the monsters, but it feels like Virgil.

I try to remember everything that Margot and Corey told me.

Flesh exchange.

I had to run because I needed Virgil to be fully transformed, but now that he is, I have to figure out how I’m going to do this. I also need time to slice my skin.

Which is impossible to do when I’m running.

At the very least, there shouldn’t be anything distinct in my scent.

I’ll smell sweaty, like any other candidate.

In the morning, I even slathered on a leave-in conditioner that I don’t usually use to confuse him.

The pungent sewer smells are a natural cover too.

I need to find somewhere to hide and prepare.

Because once I cut myself and he smells the blood, it’s over. It’ll pierce through all that.

I scan the walls. There has to be something to help. They wouldn’t just throw us in here with nowhere to go.

Finally, I spot a grate in the ground. I stop and lie down on my stomach, peering into its depths. The hole is small. Enough for me to fit, but definitely not enough for Virgil to fit.

I slot my fingers into the grate and tug, squatting around it and using my thighs to push myself up.

But it isn’t moving. I run my fingers over the sides, scrambling to find some sort of trick.

Though at the same time I’m wondering if I’m wrong and this is just a drainage grate, and it isn’t meant to be any sort of hiding spot.

Until my finger slides over a screw. It’s a flat head. I yank out one of my knives and slide the tip in, turning the screw as fast as I can. When it falls out, I could cry. Instead, I move to the next one.

The ground trembles under my knees, and I work faster, sweat slipping down my face as I twist my wrist and another screw falls.

The same guttural roar sounds again, but this time it’s like the claws are working at my throat. The sharp tips grazing the skin. Too close.

I’m turning the last screw when Virgil comes around the corner.

Even without having ever seen him in this form, I know him. Those are his eyes. Dark amber.

He walks on all fours, and he’s at least eight feet tall and covered in thick wiry black fur.

His tail is long and has metal spikes running along the full length.

The metal is so shiny that it looks almost like a gemstone.

The long nails on his paws are made of the same thing.

His face has transformed into a long snout, packed with those rows and rows of teeth like a shark, his maw stretched and distorted to accommodate them all.

As he spots me, the tips of his triangular ears twitch.

He makes Isaac’s form look like a docile puppy instead of a hell hound. Virgil is the sort of beast that brings you nightmares.

And though the eyes are his, there’s nothing of Virgil in the depths of those irises.

He’s gone.

The monster is here.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?

He races toward me, bounding on all fours as I struggle with the last screw, turning it as fast as I possibly can.

In the end, I don’t even get the thing fully off before I rip up the grate and jump inside, landing hard on my knee with a cry and dropping the knife.

I scramble forward in muddy water and scream as something slices across my back.

I keep moving forward, eventually getting my feet under me, and crawl to the far corner of the underground space. It isn’t a tunnel, it’s a fucking hole. There’s nowhere else to go.

I’ve trapped myself.

Virgil roars from above me and his tail whips down into the space, attempting to lash at me, but it’s about a foot too short.

I press myself against the damp wall, huddling my shoulders and reaching tentatively toward my back.

There’s a long slice, its edges ragged. I whimper as warm blood flows onto my hands.

I try to slow my breathing, taking a long deep breath in through my nose and holding it, then pushing it out through my mouth.

I reach under the fabric, feeling along the wound and find the spot that hurts the most, where a piece of my skin is flapping free.

“Motherfucker.” I clench my teeth against the pain.

Virgil must have caught me with the tip of his tail, which, as I watch it probe down into the space, has a sort of bulbous growth covered in fur and dozens of those metal spikes. Like a goddamned medieval mace. It’s shining with my blood.

“Just breathe, just breathe,” I chant to myself as I hold the dangling flesh with one hand and reach back with a knife with the other hand.

I take a breath in and slice the skin free.

Mercifully, it comes off with a single cut, but I still scream as I do it.

It falls with a wet plop into the shallow, murky water that fills the hole.

I retrieve it and lay it on my palm to check the size. It fills the area. More than enough.

I strip off my sweatshirt and rip it up, tying the fabric tight around my body. I still have the dry fit shirt on that I was wearing underneath.

Unless I want to either bleed out or have Virgil eat my corpse, I need a plan. A way out.

Squinting, I look around the hole, hoping for some sort of opening to reveal itself. There has to be something, right?

But the more I look, the less likely that possibility becomes.

I have my bit of flesh, but I need some from him.

Virgil’s tail is a terrible option. Fur and barbs and spikes. Anything I get is more likely to kill me as I try to swallow it. I need a better piece, but I also have no way to get around that fucking tail.

I slide along the wall, feeling for a notch or something that might hint at a secret exit. There has to be something down here. I don’t believe they’d put a hole in for the sake of it. This is supposed to be a test, after all.

I fail to find anything, but Virgil does.

He’s still whipping his tail around in the space, trying to get me, when he hits something on the far wall that flies off, revealing a small tunnel.

A tunnel to freedom.

A tunnel to freedom that will require me to get past that tail.

I gnaw on my lip. If I try to run past that thing, he could spear me in my gut without a second thought, ripping out entrails as it comes out.

Somehow, I need to distract him. I look at the piece of skin in my hand.

I cut it in half. I throw a piece into the water, where it lands with a wet plop.

Virgil’s tail pauses its probing and then slices straight down, sticking its spikes into the skin and whipping it up and out of the hole.

I don’t hear any chewing, though there also wasn’t much to chew on.

But when the tail returns to the hole, the skin is gone.

Assuming typical monster behavior, he should have eaten it.

Unfortunately, that also means it’s currently metabolizing. I need to move fast.

I hold the other half in my hand. If I cut it up smaller, he might not be able to find the pieces, and I don’t know if the half I threw is enough for bonding. I need to toss this and then go for it.

I’m trembling. One wrong move and I’m dead.

I toss the piece of skin, and the instant Virgil’s tail moves for it, I hold my breath and shimmy past the barb toward the tunnel. Moving quickly enough to get to it in time, but not so fast that Virgil’s more distracted by my movement than eating the skin.

His tail disappears, bringing the skin up.

I leap into the tunnel just as the tail comes shooting back down.

I swear I feel his fur brush the back of my neck.

I drag myself through the tunnel and hope it goes to something useful.

At the end of the space is a piece of metal that I manage to kick out.

In that room, there’s another grate overhead, with footholds on the wall leading up to it.

I almost start crying but stop myself. I’m doing something right.

Handholds mean these spots are supposed to be used.

I squat in the water and splash it onto myself, ignoring that it’s literal dirty sewer water, and hoping it’ll cover the blood scent.

I know blood is the stronger smell, but the wound is wrapped, which helps.

When I pop my head through the grate, Virgil’s still bent over the original grate.

He doesn’t turn.

I plant my feet with intention, inching up close to him and unsheathing two knives, one for each hand.

My eyes rove over his body. I don’t know that I have room to be picky.

But a chunk of his back should work. I need to jump on him like with that ferret centipede monster in the third test. Give myself time to get a piece of flesh and hope he won’t risk stabbing at his back and potentially hurting himself.

I’m so close. So very close.

My fingers inch toward his back.

The toe of my shoe scuffs against the floor. He whips around, opening his jaw and lunging for my face.

I jump and stab out with both knives on instinct, and they both lodge into his right eye, each downward at a diagonal.

The perfect angle to take out a chunk. He growls and bats me away with one of his paws.

I fly across the hallway, landing hard on my back, the wind knocked out of me.

I twist onto my side, gasping. Virgil is crying and whining, scratching at his face with his paw.

My knives are on the floor, and maybe a foot away from me is a chunk of white flesh with red veins.

Still struggling to breathe, I scramble on my knees to it, grab the piece of eye, and shove it between my lips.

It bursts against my tongue, filling my mouth with a thickness that I want more than anything to spit out. I fight a strong wave of nausea.

Virgil’s tail whips out and spears me in the shoulder. I manage to keep one hand clamped around my lips when all I want to do is scream. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt. The metal spikes dig into muscle and break bone. I bite my tongue multiple times chewing. My vision goes in and out.

I swallow.

He rips his tail out of my shoulder, and the pain is so exquisite, so complete, that I don’t even scream. I just drop forward onto my front, forehead smacking onto concrete, blood pooling around me, my body getting cold.

I don’t want to die.

Not now.

Not like this.

I close my eyes and try to even out my breathing, the way Chen taught us, but I can’t do it. I can’t calm down.

I’m sobbing. Everything fucking hurts. I don’t want to be here. I want Mom. I want her now more than I’ve ever wanted her.

“You’re too afraid to fail,” Mom says, frowning as I drop from the slack line. We’ve been at this for hours. I can’t get the hang of it. “If you’re too scared of failing to try, you’ll never be able to do anything.”

She was wrong, though. I wasn’t afraid of failing. I was afraid of her reaction to my failing. I wanted to prove to her that I could do it. To avoid that frown and her shaking head. I wanted her to smile at me. To tell me I was good enough. To stay with me.

Virgil howls. It’s not like before. Not aggression and wildness. It’s long and drawn out. Like the choking, sobbing breaths I took on the second day when Mom didn’t come home.

I open my eyes, and he’s there. One of his eyes is bleeding, missing a chunk of itself.

It doesn’t matter. In there is the snarling beast that Virgil was so afraid of becoming.

Somehow, staring into his eyes, I know it isn’t the monster form that he was really scared of.

What Virgil is afraid of is the child inside him.

The one who was shunned because of his parents.

The one who hated that they were taken from him.

The one who wanted to lash out. To hurt.

To maim and kill. To make them all pay. The part of him that he shoved down no matter how much he wanted to set it free.

This is what the serum let loose.

I have it too. That monster lives in me.

I hurt people I loved to keep them away.

And if I had the power, I would have done more.

Would have made Bernie pay for what he did to Jules.

Would have made Caden suffer for the way he treated me.

Made the Masters on that panel who disqualified me writhe in pain.

And if I got a hold of whoever is to blame for Mom being gone, I would tear them to shreds.

Dr. Weiss said we all have this shadow inside us. The invisible monster. He wanted it controlled. Tamed. Well-behaved.

Virgil wants that too.

But I don’t.

I can’t .

I won’t be the good girl again. Desperate for praise. I won’t be boxed in. I won’t be what is expected.

I don’t want to tame the monster.

I want to use it.

In the distance, at the end of the hallway, a monster whips around the corner. Blood on its jaw, hackles up. It sees me lying prone on the ground, an easy target.

My eyes slip closed, but I’m not gone.

Virgil steps forward on fur-covered legs. The world is darker with him over top of me.

Shadows were never meant to stay in the darkness.

They can only truly be seen in the light.

When I scream, it isn’t just me. It isn’t just Virgil.

It’s more. It’s the officer at the door saying they need to close Mom’s missing person file.

It’s Henry cupping his hands around my face while he explains that Mommy and Daddy won’t be coming home.

It’s my “friends” turning away from me in my grief.

It’s the people who sneer at me in Summerhill and mutter that I shouldn’t be alive.

And it’s not a scream.

It’s a roar .

A roar that makes the wall shake. That makes the lightbulbs flicker. That sparks in our blood like a flame and burns in that perfect middle of pleasure and pain.

This is how me and Virgil become Master and Monster.