Page 3 of Beast’s Surrender, Beauty’s Revenge

CHAPTER THREE

THE BEAST

How long, since there had been light?

Hours? Days? Years? Centuries?

He no longer knew. Every moment was torment, and each seemed longer than the one before it, but perhaps that was because he no longer knew what a moment was.

He remembered the kind man. His friend. The one who had locked him away. He’d been old. That was what gray hair meant, right? Old.

He remembered the fighting. The endless, bloody, awful fighting. The rage that had filled him to the brim, leaving room for nothing but itself, only anger and violence and blood blood blood.

Only more killing.

It hadn’t mattered who anymore.

Every person with the blood of Tingard in their veins needed to die. Their blood spilled to sate the land. To sate the magic. The never-ending hunger for death inside him.

Tival had been twelve, and his mother a refugee from Tingard.

That moment, looking at the boy’s blond hair and feeling the bloodlust take him, that had been the moment he’d known.

It would never end until they were all dead.

Or until he was.

But he wasn’t dead, and neither were they, so it couldn’t end.

He couldn’t end.

He could never end until Tingard was obliterated. Every single man, woman, and child with that cursed blood in their veins.

And then there were footsteps. For the first time in... forever, maybe. A breeze from above. The smell of a person, of sweat and pain and blood.

Then there was light. Blinding, horrible light, burning his eyes with its fire. He shrank away from the burn of it, the way it flared and burst at the edges of his vision.

The voice seemed to come from nowhere, even though he’d known there was a person there. In front of him.

“Hello, Beast. I have need of you.”

Was that him? Was that who he was? What he was? He thought perhaps he’d had a name once. Like Tival. Like the gray-haired man who had helped lock him up. He’d had a name, hadn’t he?

Perhaps Beast was right.

“You’re going to help me get what I need,” the dark form beyond the lights said, and something stirred within the Beast.

He blinked, again and again, his eyes watering against the light, but slowly, a form took shape. Dark hair. Pale skin, smeared with blood and dirt that made other faces flash in his mind. A man, familiar, cut to near ribbons just inside a portcullis. An old couple, lying in pools of their own blood in a hallway, clearly having died in a fight, collapsed where they died, before a door. Inside that door, two children lying in beds, their throats slashed. A heavily pregnant woman lying in the middle of the floor. Their mother.

Neither woman nor unborn babe had been spared.

Vivi had been four. Her hair had been the same color as this man’s. The blood from her wounds the same color as his lips.

Bloody lips that parted again and said the word.

The only word that meant anything.

“Vengeance.”

The Beast jerked forward, as though the word alone was a command he needed to follow.

Wasn’t it?

Vengeance. That was what he needed.

The blood of Tingard must be spilled.

But... the old man had locked the Beast up, and said it was good. He’d been sorry. Sad. Wished there was another way. Begged the Beast to find one, even.

But no. There had been no other way. The only way to stop the violence had been to lock the monster away.

Beast.

The wretched man came in close to him, until he could smell his skin. Could almost taste the blood on him.

Man was almost too generous a term. He was barely out of his youth, almost still a boy. With wild eyes, he looked around the room, trying to find the ends of the shackles. They were draped around the room, from one end to the other. The problem, quickly apparent, was that there was no discernible beginning or ending to the mass of chains, except for the manacles on the Beast’s wrists.

No locks.

No levers or clever machinery to release him.

Just two manacles on his wrists, and what seemed like miles upon miles of chains.

For a while, the young man tried to find an end. It only resulted in anger, though, when he realized that if he followed the chain from one wrist, it led around and around the room, and eventually back to the other wrist.

“Are you even trapped here?” he finally demanded, irritation in his lovely but ragged voice. “The chains don’t fucking go anywhere. If you just drag them out behind you?—”

For some reason, the Beast felt a compulsion to prove him wrong. Or maybe scare him away.

So for the first time in many years, he tried to push himself up from his knees.

The young man skittered back half a dozen steps faster than the Beast would have thought possible. As graceful as a dancer, he was. He was beautiful under all that blood and grime, the Beast realized.

And now he was afraid.

As he should be.

He should run away from the tower. Far and fast as his quick feet could carry him.

Instead, once he realized that the Beast couldn’t stand up, he was coming back.

“But you can’t move,” he said, voice fascinated instead of terrified. “You should be able to move, but you can’t. And when you try, the runes on these things glow.”

He reached out toward the manacles, and though the Beast tried to jerk away, tried to stop it from happening, there was little he could do.

The too-young man touched the first rune on one of the wrists, and it glowed molten gold for a moment beneath his fingers. When he pulled his hand away, he stared at where the rune was mirrored on his skin.

Slowly, the chains started to disappear. One link at a time, starting on the far side of the room, vanishing with a quiet popping noise, leaving nothing behind as though they’d never existed at all. It sped as it went, faster and faster, until it reached the manacles and the magic hit them with a force that almost knocked the Beast onto his back.

The manacles remained.

Still, for the first time in as long as he could remember, the Beast could push himself up from the floor, and stand to his full height. He was free. Well, not free. Not quite. There was still the boy-man who had touched the manacles. The Beast thought perhaps they were both tied to the manacles now.

Yes, that was how the magic worked. They were both trapped.

Well, that, and there was still the bloodlust. Still the burning need to rend flesh with anything he could take to hand. With his bare hands, if need be.

He was free, and Tingard would pay.