Page 61 of This Vicious Hunger

I let out a startled laugh. The pain is a slash of brightness across an otherwise black night. I lick the blood, the wound already knitting, sucking the taste of it mingled with wine. The pain is too good, over too soon.

I snatch up one of the glass slices from the ground, holding it up to the sky.

The moon is hidden and offers no light. I wish Olea was here; I’m craving the taste of her.

But she isn’t, and I’m simultaneously glad.

My stomach aches, not with the hunger I’m familiar with, a sensation that will grow until fed and then retreat.

This is a different, vicious sort of hunger. Untameable.

More wine. My lip is healed. I lower the shard of glass to my arm, hovering with indecision for just a moment. Enough time to convince myself that I need it. Need—it’s a funny word, isn’t it? What is the difference between want and need but strength? Where do they blur?

I need the cut. The pain. That bright slash of feeling.

It is the most I’ve felt in days. I drive the glass into my arm, drunk with the carelessness of it.

Thick blood wells at the wound, and the trigger of sensation—it is everything .

I moan, writhing as I watch the wound heal, a pleasant tickling the only evidence as the skin stretches back towards itself. And then I lower the glass again.

I drink the rest of the wine, slicing and stabbing wildly: my arms, my inner thighs, the soft skin at the back of my knees, my belly and my breasts. Each new cut tightens something in me, something that has been unravelling.

I only stop when I become aware of the mess, slowly and distantly. My nightgown is scarlet, sopping, and the stains around the fountain are no longer of paint and lust but this reckless science. I lick the blood that dries sticky on my hand and fall back against the fountain, spent.

Sometime later I come to consciousness, swimming upwards from dreams of sluggish red rivers cutting through soil, vines coiling, leaves scorched with sun.

I am so hungry that it hurts, but this is not the pain of mere hours ago.

It isn’t hot and bright; there is no pleasure in it.

It is dull, an ache so deep it might have doubled me over—if I were still myself.

I peer through the shadows of the foxglove, the long grasses hiding the edge of the trees and the side of the tower.

Olea might never find me here if she didn’t come looking.

But of course she will. There is no space.

I want—no, need —to run, to burn the hunger from my bones, but every way I turn there is eventually another wall.

Could I climb them? The iron spikes atop it won’t do me any lasting harm.

I flex my muscles. They feel… weaker. A lot weaker.

I could probably still do it, though, scale them and swing myself over to the other side.

Or I could find a way to smash the lock—though, again, I’m doubtful that it would be as easy today as it might have been two weeks ago.

It’s not as if I’ve not considered it before. Why didn’t I?

It’s the same question Olea and I keep passing back and forth, always dancing just on the edge.

Then what? I come back to the thought now, circling it like a vulture.

Whatever poison now flows in me is here to stay.

Olea says to give it time, she is hopeful the toxins will fade outwardly and soon we will be able to join, and rejoin, the rest of the world.

The cure has to fix the poison in our touch, doesn’t it? That’s what it was for.

The more time passes, the less I am sure.

Olea might not be able to feel the poison, for her it’s a normal state of being, but I can.

I know what to look for, that surge of reckless energy, that base urge driving me on.

I know without knowing that if I were to touch Petaccia on her next visit to these walls she would fall down dead. And Leo, my only friend—

Olea’s last mention of him bothers me. Unfinished business.

When I’d said those words I was thinking of my life outside these walls, of learning and libraries and academic acclaim, all the things I left without realising I’d not likely go back.

They are so close—sometimes I hear the scholars, the slap of their hard-soled shoes as they race across the square, and I can see the window of my old rooms from the gate—and yet so far they might as well be on another continent.

My world has shrunk. And yet the first thing Olea thought I meant was Leo.

She’s jealous, that’s all. I have a friend outside these walls and she no longer does. Is it only jealousy, though? Is it insecurity too? She has me, a captive audience, she is my sun and my moon these days, and still she wants more. Does she realise the way this hurts? No, I don’t think she does.

More. I said that too, didn’t I? More. More. Nothing will ever be enough. If this is living, then what kind of life is it?

Suddenly my cheeks are wet with tears. I blink them back angrily, hot salt stinging. It is too late for crying.

A rustling in the grass shocks me to silence. I am so used to the peace of being surrounded by poison that it takes me a moment to understand what it is I’m hearing, but the second it clicks, my brain stops being my own.

Rabbit , it hisses. Run. I move without thinking; sticking close to the ground, I slink into the long grass. It parts for me, stalks twisting away from my body gently so I make no sound at all. Bare feet in the earth. I follow the sound of the rustling, creeping closer and closer until I spot it.

It is a hare, like one of the ones Petaccia brought to us. It isn’t dead yet, having by some miracle avoided most of the garden’s tricks, though its movements are curiously sluggish. My stomach clenches, famine driving me onwards. The hare doesn’t see me. It doesn’t sense my approach.

I can smell it. Dirty fur, soil, and the scent of living, breathing flesh. Its heartbeat quickens. My mouth fills with water. And then I lunge, capturing its frail body with ease. It is hot in my hands, its fur soft. I picture myself sinking my teeth into its neck, the pulse of blood, the—

“Thora, are you out here?” calls a distant voice.

I stare down at the hare. It is still moving.

It doesn’t wriggle, but I can feel the trembling of its tiny heart in my hands.

A swoop of hope overtakes me. It isn’t dead.

The bird that flew into the garden died almost instantly, but this hare still clings to life.

I lick my lips, still tasting the imaginary blood.

I’m still watching hungrily as its movements grow still.

It happens so slowly I don’t realise straight away, but the slowing of its heart, the throb throb , the pause between each beat and the next is longer and longer until there are no more.

Horror overtakes me. Bile rising in my throat. I didn’t mean to—

Too late.

I am struck dumb, like a fish thrashing in a tightening net. Who— what —am I? I lay the hare down gently, crouching in the dirt, tears falling.

“Thora?”

Olea appears beyond the fountain. I smell her before I see her. Rage fills me, and then terror.

“Go away,” I snarl.

“What’s going on?” Olea climbs through the crumbling, empty fountain, her hand trailing the statue as she passes its centre.

“I said fuck off.”

She pauses, her eyes growing wide. She’s seen the hare, and the state of my gown. I try to cover myself with my hands but there’s too much blood.

“What… Thora?” she asks. “Are you all right?”

“Do I look all right?”

“What happened? What did you do? Is that—”

“Fuck. Off.” I infuse my words with as much venom as I can muster, and the sound is a low vibrato.

“We can talk about… whatever this is.” Olea waves her hands, continuing to edge forward.

She climbs over the rim of the fountain and past the broken glass and the bottles, and then into the long grass.

The garden doesn’t bend away from her as it did from me, long stalks swaying to touch her legs, a gentle caress.

“No, we can’t. This is all kinds of wrong. It’s unnatural. I’ve been trying to persevere, I have, but there’s something so, so deadly wrong with us and you’re too busy playing pretend and using me to satisfy your needs to see it.”

Olea stops, her hands dropping to her sides. It is too dark for me to read her expression, but I can tell from her body that I’m pushing my luck. I don’t care. I don’t want her here.

“You’re one to talk about using people to satisfy needs,” she says coldly.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, Thora. You’re storming around as if you’re the only one this affects, yet you’re just as guilty in all of this as I am. It takes two for a consensual tango.”

I laugh, a caustic, bitter sound. “Oh, really? I’m guilty?”

“You brewed the goddamn antidote. We’ve been over this. And you’re just as guilty, using me and your precious Leo however you see fit so you feel better about your reckless choices.”

“Why do you keep bringing him into this? Leo is—was—my friend,” I growl.

“Not that you’d know anything about that .

He’s a good man, and his wife, thanks to you, is gone.

And I don’t think he understands why! He was right to be suspicious of you.

You’re manipulative, do you know that? Why do you only mention him when I’m unhappy?

I’m sorry I thought it was appropriate to be a shoulder he could cry on, when he was there for me in return.

Leo isn’t like you. He doesn’t think of me that way. ”

Olea’s laugh is just as dark as mine. “Oh, come on, Thora, isn’t it time you stopped lying to yourself?

You were using him, stringing him along while playing house with me.

You’re so caught up with ideas of propriety and what’s the done thing.

You pretend you flout the rules of society, yet here you are because you were too afraid to sack them off entirely.

Your dead father has the same hold over you that my…

that Florencia has over me. Only you’re too blind to see it.

You talk about me being scared to leave even though it’s what I truly want—isn’t that what you’ve done your whole life?

When I met you, you were still wearing your wedding band—why?

Was it because it meant something to you beyond your marriage?

Or was it because you were afraid to exist in the world without it?

“Admit it. You were half in bed with Leonardo before you ever fell into mine. If he’d asked you to marry him, and let you stay at the university, you would have done it—for propriety . Wouldn’t you? Whether or not he wanted other things from you.”

“That’s not true!” I exclaim, ignoring the roaring in my ears that says she’s right. Olea thinks she knows everything, but she doesn’t.

“Believe what you want, Thora. At least I acknowledge that what we have is only possible because of our stupid choices, and I don’t want to be so quick to just throw that away.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you’re obsessed with the idea of freedom but you’ve never stopped to consider that the sort of freedom you talk about is a privilege.

It shouldn’t be, no woman should have to choose between safety and love, between safety and anything , but we do .

You’re so focused on the details that you haven’t stopped to consider that this, what we have now, is what others like us can only dream of. ”

“You think women dream of this?” I lift my bloody nightgown and point at the dead hare.

I don’t like the way she says women like us .

Are we so different? “This is killing us, Olea. I don’t know if you can sense it like I can, but we’re falling apart.

My strength is failing, and I’m so, so hungry.

It’s not sustainable. It’s not worth it.

What kind of life are we selling to Petaccia?

What if she takes the cure elsewhere? Do you think anybody would want to be poison like this? ”

Olea takes one step forward, so I can finally see her face.

Her eyes are hollow and they glitter dangerously.

And then she says something I have never considered.

It freezes me cold. “Poison,” she says, deadly serious, “is the only thing that has ever kept me safe. I thought you of all people would understand that.”