Page 16 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger

LYSSA

T he scent of my father’s fish stew, a smell that has meant comfort and home for my entire life, is nauseating tonight.

I sit at our small, scarred wooden table, a ghost in my own kitchen.

The warm, yellow light from the tallow candles casts a cozy glow on the familiar room, but I feel no warmth.

My mind is miles away, in a cold, moonlit clearing, with a monster whose pain has become my own.

I push a piece of boiled burgona around my bowl with a listless fork, the simple act of lifting food to my mouth an impossible effort.

Clara and my father talk, their voices a low, familiar drone that I can’t seem to parse into words.

Something about a leak in the roof of the smokehouse, a dispute between two fishermen over a prized net.

Their world, with its practical, tangible problems, feels like a story being told in a foreign language.

My world is one of glowing hearts and stolen voices, of a joy so pure it manifests as agony.

How can I possibly bridge the gap between their reality and mine?

I keep seeing it. The way Thorrin turned from me, the sound of his growl, the raw, unadulterated pain in his voice.

Don’t laugh like that. I can feel it… here.

The memory is a brand on my soul. I touched something ancient and broken in him, and the aftershocks are still trembling through me.

I feel a restlessness so profound it is a physical ache in my limbs.

I need to be out there. The suffocating warmth of this kitchen, the well-meaning but empty chatter of my family—it all feels like a cage.

The only place I feel real anymore is in that clearing, in the vast, honest silence of his presence.

My skin prickles with the need to be gone, to return to the only place where I am not just the “cursed girl,” but something more. Something seen.

“You’re not eating.”

Clara’s voice cuts through my reverie, sharp with a worry that is quickly souring into frustration.

I look up from my untouched bowl to see her watching me, her brow furrowed.

My father sighs, a heavy, weary sound, and pushes himself away from the table.

He knows an argument is brewing, and he no longer has the strength for them.

“I’m not hungry,” I say, My voice flat and distant even to my own ears.

“You’re never hungry anymore,” Clara retorts, her hands clenching into fists on the tabletop.

“You’re never anything anymore, Lyssa. You’re just…

a shell. You drift through this house, you drift through the village, but you’re not here.

You’re out there.” She gestures wildly toward the window, toward the oppressive darkness of the forest. “You disappear every night, chasing ghosts, and you come back looking even more haunted than when you left. What is happening to you?”

The accusation, so close to the truth and yet so utterly wrong, ignites a spark of anger in my chest. She thinks I am weak, that I am surrendering to my grief.

“I’m fine,” I bite out, the lie tasting like ash.

“No, you’re not!” Her voice rises, cracking with the force of her pent-up fear and frustration. “You are breaking, and you’re breaking my heart watching you do it! Whatever you think you’re finding out there in the dark, it’s not Mother. It’s just your own sorrow, eating you alive!”

The spark of anger erupts into a wildfire. The years of her gentle pity, of the entire village’s suffocating sympathy, of being treated like a fragile, broken thing—it all comes pouring out. I slam my hands down on the table, the bowl rattling, stew sloshing over the side.

“At least something out there listens to me!” The words are a scream, torn from the deepest, most wounded part of my soul.

They hang in the sudden, shocked silence of the room, a testament to the chasm that has opened between my sister and me.

The look on Clara’s face—the stunned, deep hurt.

But I cannot take the words back. They are the truest thing I have said in this house in years.

I don’t wait for her response. I flee. I run from the hurt in my sister’s eyes, from the stifling air of that kitchen, from the life that no longer fits me.

I don’t grab my cloak, don’t stop for my boots.

The splintery floorboards are cold beneath my bare feet as I throw open the door and run out into the night.

The sharp stones of the path and the frozen mud of the street do nothing to slow me down.

The physical pain is a welcome distraction, a sharp, clean feeling that cuts through the messy agony of my emotions.

I run with a reckless, desperate energy, my breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps.

I am not walking to the forest tonight; I am running to it.

It is the only refuge I have left. The trees swallow me whole, their dark branches a familiar, comforting embrace.

I crash through the underbrush, not caring about the branches that claw at my tunic and my skin.

I am of the wild now, and this is my home.

I stumble into the clearing, my lungs burning, my feet numb and bleeding.

And he is there. He is not a calm, waiting statue tonight.

He is a predator, a caged storm. He paces, his body a taut line of contained violence, his breath pluming in the frigid air in harsh, heavy bursts.

His chest is a chaotic, unstable maelstrom of deep, angry red and a desperate, wanting purple. He is tormented.

He stops when he sees me, his skull-face snapping in my direction. His ashen vaults blaze with a wild, dangerous light. A low growl rumbles in his chest, not a greeting, but a warning.

“I shouldn’t let you be here,” he says.

He wants me to go. He wants to drive me away for my own safety.

But I have just burned the last bridge to my old life.

There is nowhere else for me to go. I am raw and hurting and so full of a defiant, reckless need that I feel I might shatter.

I take a step toward him, into the circle of his torment, my bare feet sinking into the snow.

“Then make me leave,” I whisper, and the words are not a plea, but a challenge.