Page 64 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Thirty-Eight

A fter Leonardo is gone Olea leads me back to the tower like a wayward child, holding my hand.

Half, I suspect, to guide me and half so I don’t bolt.

I don’t tell her not to worry—after all, if you’d asked me an hour ago whether I wished any harm towards Leo, it would have been an emphatic no .

I stumble and sway as she leads me into the sitting room and deposits me on the chaise.

I know I’m not myself, but I can’t think what else I might be.

“Do you want to talk about what happened out there?” Olea says once I’m settled.

She’s antsy, has barely stopped moving since we got back.

Her fingers dance like butterfly wings trapped under a glass dome.

She lights a couple of candles, but otherwise the room, with its bright tapestries, is left wrapped in gloom.

I’m glad. I don’t think I could face Olea’s sunshine hopes.

It’s too warm in here. I miss the cool breeze of the garden. I want to go back out there and run my hands through the loamy soil where Olea has watered the nettles. I want to bury my hands and my face in the earth.

“No,” I say.

“Are you sure?” Olea comes to kneel at my feet. She takes my hand in hers and massages my palm.

“What’s the point?” The touch of Olea’s skin is both soothing and, as always, deeply erotic. I wriggle, withdrawing my hand. Olea’s fingers gravitate towards my knee instead and I feel my heart trip. “You said yourself: It’s my fault. I brewed the antidote. I’m the one who got us in this deep.”

“You were trying to save me,” Olea corrects me, her voice soft. She lifts one hand to my chin, the skin there no longer bruised but still surprisingly tender. I turn away.

“You don’t have to console me.”

“No?” She grips my chin harder and turns my face back towards her. I try to fight but she’s surprisingly strong. Her eyes glitter; her lips—are they darker than they were a few days ago?

“No,” I grunt. “I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ah, we only talk when you want to.” I can’t tell if Olea is seriously angry or if she’s trying to tease.

Then I realise: it doesn’t matter. When I hoped the cure would tell me if she was really for me, really mine, I missed the vital point.

Regardless of the reason, Olea and I are joined in this. She is mine—even if only for right now.

“Fine,” I say huskily. “Perhaps we shouldn’t talk at all.”

Olea keeps her grip on my chin tight as her other hand surges under my nightgown. She rips it up, her eyes glittering with anger and frustration and tenderness all in one. Her fingers are strong, bordering on cruel.

There is no shred of our gentleness in her touch.

No hesitation. We have explored each other’s bodies now in a hundred different ways.

She moves her hand from my chin down to my neck.

The pressure is pain and pleasure at once.

I moan, encouraging. She squeezes harder.

Her other hand pinches, scoring my skin in bright hot lines with her sharp nails.

And then come the teeth. The teeth.

We fuck until dawn, barely pausing for breath.

Unlike our early lovemaking, this is not punctuated with wine and cheese, with laughter and acting.

This is purely animal. Teeth and claws, grunting and moaning, using whatever we can find to draw blood, to punish, to maim.

The healing of the wounds is as much a part of the ritual as the sex—and when we are spent, the tower walls, and Olea’s tapestries, are flecked with dark blood.

The taste of iron still in our mouths, we lie together on the chaise, bodies braided together like twine. I want to cry, but I don’t. The hunger within me consumes it all.

The sunlight hurts our heads. Olea’s eyes are puffy.

We block the edges of the shutters with the rags of our destroyed nightgowns and set up camp back in the cellar, blankets and cushions amidst the sacks of food.

Our garden days, fucking in broad daylight, revelling in the beauty of the garden, seem years behind us.

“The antidote is fading,” I say. “You can feel it too, right?”

Olea doesn’t speak, but I know she’s been thinking it. It’s hung between us, this toxic miasma, for days. Our world has shrunk again, this time to the size of a pinhead.

“It could just be temporary…” she hedges.

I prop myself on my elbow. “Come on, Olie. There’s naivety and then just plain stupidity, and I know you’re not stupid.”

Olea refuses to open her eyes. She lies on her back, a vision in her white gown, black hair braided and freshly combed. If not for the slow, slow rise and fall of her chest she could be a corpse ready for the cradle.

“We heal fine, though,” she says.

“Sure. We do now. But… that could change without warning. You saw me out there with Leo. I was absolutely beside myself.”

“You want to talk about it now?”

And, surprisingly, I do. Fresh from the ache of her inside me I am no longer so afraid to voice the horrors.

“I’m a monster,” I say.

“You told me I wasn’t.” Olea opens her eyes and rolls onto her side. “You emphatically told me so.”

“I wanted to kill him.”

Olea kisses my bare shoulder, working her way down my arm with gentle precision and then kissing my palm and each of my fingers.

“No,” she says. “You didn’t. That wasn’t you.”

“How do you know? It certainly felt like me.”

“I know,” she assures me. “Because I know you.”

“I killed that hare.”

“Also not intentional.”

“Isn’t there a point, though,” I say sharply, pulling my hand back and struggling upright, “where intentionality doesn’t matter?

Do you think the monster was always a monster?

That he set out to hurt people? I doubt it.

It doesn’t matter that I didn’t want it to happen.

It doesn’t matter that there were other factors.

All that matters in the end is that it did happen.

It may not be my fault, as you say, but it sure is my fucking responsibility.

Maybe it’s best that the antidote fails; maybe this is what we both deserve. ”

Olea is silent at that. I regret it almost instantly—but I’m right, aren’t I?

That night, Petaccia returns to the garden. Olea and I are waiting for her. This time we haven’t bothered to tidy our mess, blood and tattered rags of clothing scattered through the sitting room. The candles burn low, the shutters closed against the draughty night.

The doctor doesn’t bother with pleasantries. And it’s clear she’s not here to bring supplies. She marches in with the air of somebody who has much more important places to be, barely glancing at us as she starts to unload a leather valise onto a side table. The candles gutter, casting long shadows.

“I want blood samples. Body measurements. Olea, you go first, strip and stand over there so Thora can measure you.” She barks instructions as the two of us sit, unmoving.

When she throws a tape measure at me, I let it bounce off my shoulder and roll to the floor.

“For god’s sake. What’s the matter with you two?” Finally, for the first time, she looks at us. “Is this about your little visitor?”

“You know about that?”

Petaccia rolls her eyes. Of course she knows. She knows everything, though I still don’t know how. I grip Olea’s hand tightly in mine, one last squeeze, before standing abruptly. I’m weak, the muscles in my arms and legs complaining from their earlier exercise, and I sway a little.

“Why didn’t you come to make sure we were all right?” I demand. “If you knew there was somebody snooping around?”

“Oh, he’s hardly just a somebody.” Petaccia shrugs. “I know he’s your friend. Besides, you girls—and the garden—can look after yourselves.”

Anger whips through me. “Not that you care.”

“I’ve been busy in the lab,” Petaccia says airily. “You’re not the only ones who need my attention.”

“You haven’t.” Olea is horrified. “You’ve made more of the antidote?”

“You’ve used it?”

“Not on myself I haven’t.” Petaccia closes her valise with a snap. “But every experiment needs a control group. I’ve made variants with animal blood—matching type to type.”

“You can’t!” Olea shrieks. “You haven’t got the faintest idea what this could do. Look at us. We’re…” She lifts her hands helplessly.

“I think the compound must be breaking down,” I provide mechanically.

Petaccia glances between the two of us, taking us in with a clinical eye, and then all she says is “Mm-hmm.”

“What?” I demand. If only I had more strength. I’d love to rip her apart. Briefly, for one mad second, I wonder if Petaccia has timed her visits like this on purpose, visiting early on, when we were confused and high with discovery, and now. The thought is too terrifying to probe deeply.

“What are your symptoms?” Petaccia says instead of answering. “Dizziness? Fatigue? Any shortness of breath, photosensitivity? Hunger and thirst all normal? Any cravings for steak, venison, or otherwise raw meat?”

Olea and I both stare, slack-jawed. Petaccia, with her hands on her hips, her skin covered nearly head to toe in thick black cloth, is the bringer of death.

She knew, I realise. She knew all along this would happen.

And I don’t know why I’m surprised. I’m just like Olea, it turns out: ready to believe whatever lie the good doctor tells me.

“How could you keep something like this from us?” I attempt to throw myself at her, arms—clawed nails—outstretched, but Petaccia is light on her feet, sidestepping my movement easily so I stumble against the side table, knocking the valise.

I grip it for support. “Don’t we deserve to know what’s happening? What else do you know that we don’t?”

“Are we dying?” Olea asks quietly.

“I didn’t keep anything from either of you that you wouldn’t have discovered yourselves,” Petaccia says calmly. “A good scientist should never be in the habit of sharing her suspicions with the subjects of any experiment of this type. It could colour the results.”

“Is that all we are to you?” I slam my fist against the wall. Days ago, I’m sure, that would have left a mark—in the wall, and in me. Now the only evidence is an ache deep in my bones.

“Anyway, it’s quite clear there’s no need to keep the information from you.

Even if you are both horribly hard work where gathering results goes.

As far as your current symptoms: I suspected that given the unstable nature of the antidote you concocted”—she looks at me—“there’s little support for a consistent outcome.

The dose between the two of you was variable, which only extended the support for my hypotheses since you both had very similar reactions.

Death, and undeath, shall we say. The healing of exterior wounds is, of course, a bonus—”

“What are you trying to say?” I spit. “Speak in the plain fucking common tongue, won’t you?”

Petaccia looks a little put out but shrugs it off.

“Well, to put it simply, the antidote doesn’t come without risk.

It seems to me, given that red blood cells take around four to six weeks to be fully replaced by the body, there may be some extra instability around that time as the body replenishes.

Consuming another dose, made to the same strength using—well, to put it bluntly— human blood, would likely avert the more serious of the potential issues.

Though of course of that part I cannot be certain. ”

“You suspected this. The whole time. And you’ve been keeping us in here, knowing that this might kill us both? Why are you doing this?”

“Please, Thora dear, stop with the righteous act. I warned you. Science is not always clean and easy. We’ve had to rob graves, use slaves, cut cadavers without permission to get where we are.

How do you think your father learned the art of autopsy?

Yes, I know we’re not supposed to talk of all that, but it’s integral to the craft.

How do you think medicine has progressed as it has?

This is depth of discovery we’re talking about.

How can you be offended when science, experiments like these, are the reason smallpox no longer kills thousands of people a year? ”

“That’s different!” I exclaim.

“How?” Petaccia raises an eyebrow, as though she’s genuinely baffled.

“What we’re doing will change the world.

When my own father died I would have done anything to bring him back—wouldn’t you want the same?

I know you idolised yours. And think of the accolades!

Oh, I know you think that’s silly now, but not long ago I know you’d have scratched my eyes out for the chance at this kind of fame. Why should death be the end?”

“My father never hurt anybody in pursuit of knowledge,” I spit.

“And I’ve no dealings with slaves or robbed graves.

Nor have you, I presume. That stuff all happened years ago, and you shouldn’t justify your behaviour by the immorality of the past. You can’t just start experimenting on people without their permission. It’s—”

“It’s wrong?” Petaccia lets out a coarse laugh.

Olea says nothing, but I can see the fury burning in her face.

I know if given the choice she would never want to see this vile woman—her mother—again.

Though, of course, choice is a tricky word.

“You forget: I did not force you to do anything you didn’t want to.

You made the antidote. You both consumed it.

All I’m trying to do now is make your concoction safe for others, to give the world a chance at something new.

Don’t you think that if I don’t do it somebody else will?

And I can assure you they will be a damn sight less accommodating of your… shall we say lifestyle .”

Olea’s face is frozen marble, but her cheeks are bright with colour. The mortification shuts her down, but it only drives me on.

“But it isn’t safe! You said yourself. It’s unstable, it’s—”

“It is at the moment, yes. But, you see, once I have an idea of exactly how the breakdown plays out, I should be able to tinker with the mixture to stabilise it. And next time we’ll simply add a second dose of the cure and see how long that lasts.”

“Next time?” Olea asks.

“Yes,” she says simply. “Whichever of you handles the red blood cell count better will need another dose.”