Page 7

Waking Up Monsters

My reflection in the water wavers, changing shape and color, and I think I see the outline of another head—horns, a large snout, dark brown fur, and beady black eyes. Before he emerges, I duck back quickly, hiding my face.

Nothing happens.

Huh. That was supposed to lure him out.

Then again, Eidolon’s spirit’s instructions were specific. To call Aesthetus, a woman must imbue her voice with longing. My stomach knots just a little, despite the numb. Hells.

I look over my shoulder at Tziah, who waves at me to try again. I face the water, knowing I’m actively trying to stir a hornets’ nest without getting swarmed, let alone stung.

Longing. I can put that in my voice without actually letting myself feel it, right?

I clear my throat, then lean out over the water and call him. And still nothing happens.

Hells and damnation.

I’m going to have to feel something. Let myself. It’s a risk. I sign at Tziah. I tell her to be careful. She knows, they all know, that if the Shadows take me over, they have to try to stop me. I made them promise.

This is going to…hurt.

Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath. I think of every time I’ve called out to Reven since Eidolon took him, waiting to hear his voice answer me. Praying. I lean into that hope now, dangling over the deep well the Shadows dwell in, hanging onto my own rope.

Despite feeling for it, my connection with Reven remains so…cold. So empty.

Resentment bubbles up, along with a dollop of guilt. But I hate that he left me, that he gave me the Shadows, that he decided to sacrifice himself at all. I want to hit him for that. Hit him hard.

Don’t think about that.

I center myself on the emptiness instead. At first, the need to hear Reven’s voice just one more time is a fluttering in my belly, one that blooms and spreads until everything I am yearns…but something darker lies beneath. A razor’s edge of hopelessness slices at me over and over, because instinct is telling me he won’t answer.

“What are you doing?” one of the Shadows crawls out of the hole I stuck them in.

Not cackling this time, though.

Good. I let myself feel more . Everything. All of it. Including the poisoned, pitiful faith that is as likely to kill me as it is to keep me going. The resentment, too. And the guilt. The fear of failure and not being able to do this without him. The loneliness. The bone deep fear.

And I’m tired. Really tired.

I fill myself up with everything I’ve been burying with the Shadows until I ache. Until tears leak out from under my closed lids. Until my throat closes in on itself. Until my heart cries out at me to stop.

Has Aesthetus been feeling this same desperation for all these centuries? Goddess, how has he endured it?

I open my eyes and lean over the water to see my image and call out. Not Reven’s name, but it might as well be. “Aesthetus?”

My voice catches on the sounds of his name.

And it works.

My image in the water wavers, and I gasp and duck back quickly.

“Are you a fool?” More Shadows slink out of my well.

The part of the pond I can see from my new vantage point remains glassy, but I hear it. A man’s voice, rife with the same bleeding hope, comes from under the water. Though it sounds as clear as if he was standing right beside me. “Mimick?”

Aesthetus is calling his lover. I glance, wide-eyed, around me, waiting for the other monster to appear. But nothing happens.

I wait again. I give him time to look and see nothing and no one. I need to lure him out of the water. The ghost didn’t say, but it seems like this is going to take several tries. When I think I’ve waited long enough, I force myself do it again. To let the emotions through, to let more Shadows slither out of the well. They fill me up. I lean out over the water and call for Aesthetus. Then duck back.

“Mimick?” he answers. Louder this time. “Don’t hide from me.”

His despair is growing. I don’t have to see him to know, because I’ve heard that tone in my own voice. I hold up a hand, signaling Tziah to be ready. We’ll have a split second to do this when he comes out of the water.

My heart thumps against my ribs, because I don’t know if I can open myself to my own pain one more time.

“Don’t do it,” Reven’s voice, but not Reven, whispers. Hushed.

Are the Shadows afraid?

I reach down my connection to Reven, wishing and wishing and wishing, but not feeling him as I count down with my fingers where Tziah can see—Three. Two. One.

I stick my head over the water. “Aesthe—”

Water explodes in my face, and a creature—half-man and half-beast—bursts forth from the depths, hoisting me by the throat with one hand. He stands on the banks of the pond, at least eight feet tall, dangling me over the water.

Once rumored to be the most beautiful man alive, his torso and face are now that of a bull. Even so, I can still see the beauty in the lines of his shoulders, the ridge of his stomach that dips below the waist of his pants.

Rage rolls his eyes back as he bellows. Dark spots dance before my vision. I claw at his hand, trying to get away. To breathe. To fight.

“You are not Mimick,” he says in a voice that is somewhere between human and animal, the low thunder of it like a stampede of hooves over hardened ground. Then he squeezes harder. “For that, you’ll pay.”

He lifts his other hand, and I see it.

The flute.

Made from the bones of his lover. Mimick’s bones.

It is not shaped out of fingers or maybe a whittled, hollowed arm bone like I pictured. It’s a skull with the jaw hinged open like she is forever screaming, another bone full of holes protruding from her gaping maw.

“Maybe your lovely bones will finally make her whole.” Aesthetus lifts the abomination to his lips…and blows through a hole in the back of the skull, the sound coming out of its mouth like a scream.

Summoning the monster.

“No!” the Shadows shout as one inside my head.