Damaged Gods by K.C. Cross, J.A. Huss
CHAPTER FOUR - PIE
I am backing into a corner, hand over my face, mouth open in a scream of fright, when the monster throws the potion bottle at Tomas’s face. And when the bright green liquid hits Tomas, he just vanishes. Poof. Gone.
I panic and start stumbling towards the door, ready to make a run for it. Tomas told me a little bit about the monster of Saint Mark’s. He’s an angry beast. He is vengeful, and cruel, and petty.
And as far as I can tell, Tomas was right.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the beast growls at me.
My breath hitches in a gasp. That sinking feeling you get when something is about to go terribly wrong is real and heavy in my gut at the mere sound of his voice.
I turn to face him. Well, not really to face him. Just to try to ward him off as I take steps backwards. “Stay away from me!” I thrust my palms at him. “Do you hear me? Stay away!”
His eyes go from yellow to orange to red. And I make a run for it, acutely aware that I cannot outrun this thing. His legs—oh, God, those legs! Like a goat’s, or a bull’s, or a horse’s—I’m not sure, but they are powerful and long. And he has already demonstrated how quickly he can snatch me up when I bolt.
But I do it anyway. The only alternative is to just freeze and hope for the best and I’ve done that plenty of times in my life, so I know it never turns out well.
Better to die trying.
“Stop!” he commands.
And even though in my mind I have every intention of absolutely not stopping—I freeze. The exact thing I just said I would not do.
He laughs, amused at my sudden paralysis. “You slaves,” he grunts. “You always think you hold all the power here. But it’s not true. You hold power over Saint Mark’s, yes, but I’m the one who holds the power over you. And the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.”
And he’s right. Because my entire body feels like it’s been filled with cement. My feet are stuck to the floor, my arms reaching out in the direction of the door. Stiff. My eyes are motionless. I can’t even blink.
His steps are loud, his hooves clacking on the marble floors, but they are also slow. It takes an agonizingly long time for him to reach me. To be right up next to me. So close that I can feel the heat coming off his body. And he is so big—so utterly massive—that when he comes around to my front I am face to face with the middle of his bare human chest.
Which… I’m not gonna lie, it might even be better than Tomas’s chest. And if Pia were here, and I could talk, I would make a joke about being right. Hot men do hang out together. Even if they’re monsters.
The beast reaches out and takes a strand of my blonde hair in his fingertips as I concentrate on the hard, corded muscles of his body. I want to shudder at his touch. This is an invasion of my private space, but I cannot move.
He drops my hair and turns, walks a few paces forward before turning again.
I am still staring straight ahead, but his full body is now in view.
Half human, half beast. The lower half is covered in straw-colored fur, shaggy in some parts, but not shaggy enough to fully hide his genitals because he is not wearing clothes. His hooves are black with squiggly bands of cream running vertically. His face—while not fully in my view because I can’t look up—is serious and hard in my peripheral vision, a bit of a blond beard covering his chin and upper lip, and his hair is cropped too short to discern the color, but it’s probably blond too.
“Don’t worry.” His gruff voice is deep and penetrating. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of me from this point on, slave.”
I don’t know what he means by that, but I don’t like the sound of that word ‘slave.’ I’m one hundred percent sure the flyer said ‘caretaker.’ Not ‘slave.’
“You don’t need to get all your looks in now. Did he explain it to you?” His voice is softer now. But I can hear the lie in his milder tone. I can hear the malice lurking underneath. He nods his head in the direction where Tomas used to be. “Did he tell you what you stumbled into tonight?”
Tomas talked quite a bit, actually. His freaking mouth was moving like he had a million years to catch me up on. But almost none of it penetrated into my brain for comprehension. I mean, when someone starts explaining how you have been cursed and your life as you know it is now over, you tend to stop listening to the embellishments and just focus on the facts.
So that’s what I did. I shut down. I stopped listening. My mind was a whirlwind of confusion, trying to piece together the flyer, the gate, the boy who turned into an old man, the loss of Pia—where the hell is Pia?—and then the sudden appearance of the beast and my subsequent trip into unconsciousness.
“Let me explain it clearly,” the beast says. “So that we’re on the same page. You belong to me. You are my slave. You are part of my curse and you will remain here, with me, until such time that another one of your bloodline stumbles into our sanctuary.” He pauses to chuckle. “And I know what you’re thinking. ‘Well, if I stumbled into this curse, surely someone else will too.’ But it almost never happens. Grant was here for over fifty years.”
If I could gasp in this moment, I would. I don’t even know how I’m breathing. I don’t think I am breathing.
Focus, Pie.
Fifty. Years.
That’s why the caretaker—Grant—that’s why he looked like a young man when I met him, and then turned old and sickly when he left. All of those fifty-plus years he spent here caught up with him in an instant and he was suddenly old. And he must’ve known this was how it would end. He must’ve known that when he left, his life would be nearly over.
And yet he left anyway.
“And the one before him?” the beast continues. “He was here for two hundred.”
I am so fucked.
“But listen carefully, slave girl. I do not care what Tomas told you, there is a way out of this. If you break my curse, you break your curse as well. So it would behoove you to work diligently on that task from this moment forward.”
I, of course, am unable to answer him. But if I could, I would protest mightily.
I do not break curses. I don’t know anything about this place. And I am not from Grant’s bloodline. That’s not possible. My mother was an only child. I am an only child. And even though I don’t know who my father was, I doubt he has any relation to the boy who was here before me.
I mean, how could I be related to these caretaker people?
Grant was younger than me when we met. Surely, there was no way for him to already have had children before he got stuck in his curse.
“Now,” the beast says, “I’m going to let you go, but you will stand still.” He doesn’t wait for me to answer him or agree to his command, of course, but says, “Proceed.”
In that moment, my body is no longer cement, my feet no longer heavy. I fall forward and the marble floor is rushing up to meet me when his powerful, clawed hands grab my flannel. I stop—just for a moment—but then the flannel rips and I crash the rest of the way to the floor.
Luckily, it was only a few inches, so while my nose does hit hard enough to make it bleed, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been.
I breathe hard and heavy for a few moments, trying to catch my breath as I study the thin gray veins in the black marble slabs.
I don’t know that I was really expecting the beast to help me up, but it doesn’t matter. He does not. He stands in front of me and I stare at his hooves for a moment, just blinking. Trying to force myself to make sense of my new reality.
When he moves away my view changes to the open doorway where I can see Tomas walking quickly towards us. He’s not even halfway across the grand entrance hall when the apothecary door slams shut of its own accord.
I roll over in time to find the beast with a hand raised, like he just commanded the door to close with his fingers.
Tomas pounds on the door, yelling to be let in. But his voice is muffled and his exact words unclear.
The beast snorts, but it’s a sound of satisfaction. Presumably he is happy about Tomas’s banishment. His attention abruptly turns to me. “Get up.” Then he crosses the room to a very messy desk near a tall, stained-glass window and picks up a notebook. He spends a moment thumbing through it, then, apparently satisfied that this was what he was looking for, he tosses it onto the floor in front of me. It lands with a loud thump. “I said get up.”
I get my feet underneath me and rise, one hand covering my bloody nose, the other grabbing for the book. But this is not a one-handed kind of book. It’s thick, and wide, and feels like it contains a million years of information within those pages. I have to use both hands to pick it up, so my nose drips blood onto the cover until I can shuffle it around and hold it tight to my chest and use my other hand to cover my face.
The beast points at the book. “That is where Grant left off. You will pick up there.”
I put the book down on a black stone counter, take off my flannel, and bunch it up so I can use it to stop my nosebleed.
When I look over at the beast, he’s staring at my perky breasts because I am wearing a scarlet-red bustier that looked very sexy and cool last night, on Halloween, but is getting more and more ridiculous as this day progresses. I glance over at the beast and when I look down, I find him…
“Oh. My God.” I cover my eyeballs, then nod at his semi-hard, male appendage and glance up at his face. “That’s gross. Put on some pants, for fuck’s sake.”
He doesn’t even blink. But his eyes do migrate upward from my breasts and meet my gaze. “Do you understand me, witch?”
I close my eyes and shake my head, trying to banish the image of his beastly dick from my brain, and turn back to the notebook. Again, it is a very hefty book bound with glue, and cloth, and leather with studs pounded into it. And when I open it, the paper is thick and has a coarse texture. One quick glance at the pages is all I need. I will be disappointing the beast tonight, because… “I do not speak Latin.”
“What?” I look over my shoulder and find him sneering. “You’re speaking Latin right now. It’s the common tongue.”
I turn all the way around to face the monster. He is intimidating. But facts are facts. And I don’t have very many to work with at the moment, so I feel like taking a stand on the language we’re both speaking. “It is not the common tongue. It is a dead language. Even I know that, and I failed three history classes in my high-school career. And no, sir, I’m not speaking Latin right now, I’m speaking English and so are you. This?” I pick up the notebook and drop it onto the counter with a dramatic thump. “Is not something I can help you with, even if I did speak Latin. Which, once again, I do not. I am not a…” I pause to choose the correct word. “I am not a witch. So I won’t be breaking any curses, or conjuring up any spells, or whatever. I live in reality, thank you. And these are the facts.”
He blinks at me.
And for some unknown reason, I burst out laughing. A proper guffaw. Because I don’t live in reality. I have never lived in reality. Because my one and only friend in this world is a talking bird. And she’s not a parrot, or a mynah bird, or a starling, or any other kind of bird that mimics talking.
She is an invisible sparrow.
The beast scowls at me and I just laugh harder. He ignores my outburst and continues to boss me around. “You will stay out of the cemetery, do you understand?”
I laugh again. Not as loud. It’s more like… one of those stifled giggles you see people do in public places at the most inappropriate times.
“You will spend your days in here. In this room. Reading those books—because you can read them, and you can speak and understand Latin, and you will find the cure.”
This time I don’t even bother laughing. I breathe out the word, “Ohhhhhh,” then suck in air through my teeth. “Here you go. Here’s what I’m gonna say. Are you ready? OK. Fine. No problem. I will pretend to read your books and learn how to break your curse. But if you honestly expect me to be of any help to you, you will be disappointed. So you should seriously consider getting yourself another… witch. Or whatever. Because the longer I stay here, the more behind you’ll be.”
He ignores my words. “You will put the ring on, you will—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Did you say ring?”
“You will put it on. You will do as you’re told. And as far as that pet goes? I don’t want to see it. And if it shits on my floors—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” And then it hits me. “Pia, you mean?” Can he see her?
“—you will clean it up immediately,” he continues like I’m not even talking. “If I see one speck of bird shit on anything I will—”
“Where is she?”
“—punish you,” he finishes.
I look up. Then at the door. “Where is she?” I throw my flannel down—my nose bleed under control now—and start walking for the door. Tomas is still pounding on it, still spewing threats at the beast. But when I try to open it up, it doesn’t budge.
“You do not walk away from me, girl. You are mine. I command you. And I’m in the process of commanding you to listen to me explain your role here.”
I turn, flip him off, and say, “Fuck you. Where is she? Pia?” I call, shouting up at the ceiling, even though it’s pretty clear she’s not in here. “Pia!” I shout it.
“She’s out there.”
I look over my shoulder at the beast and he’s pointing at the door. “Open the door right now so I can go find her.”
“You need to find the ring and put it on. Then you can find your pet.”
“She’s not a pet, you idiot. She’s me. And I already have the ring.” I walk over to my flannel, pull the ring out of my pocket, and hold it up in the light. “It’s right here. But I’m not putting it on. It’s got creepy writing on it.”
“It’s the charm that lets you leave.”
“What?” I blink at him. “Did you just say leave?”
“Yes.” My hope builds. “Temporarily,” he adds. “For a few hours at a time so you can run errands for me.”
I snort. Like, literally snort. “Run errands for you?”
“Put it on.”
“No. I’m not putting it on. This ring feels like a trap. Like once I put it on, that seals the deal. I’ve seen enough movies to understand how it works. You need to bind me here somehow and this ring is how you do that.”
“You will put it on.”
“I will not.”
“Trust me.” And for the first time since we met, the beast smiles at me. But it’s not a friendly smile, it’s a snarky one. And it comes with fangs. It would be easy to forget what this thing is if you’re only looking at his face. I mean, the shock of the horns has worn off and I’m not looking at his lower half ever again until he learns what pants are. But when he smiles, he shows me his teeth. They are the teeth of a beast and this smile says, I’ve got you. There is no way out now. “You will put that ring on,” he continues. “You will need to leave the sanctuary. We will run out of food in a matter of days. Grant’s weekly grocery trip is tomorrow.”
“Grocery trip? The fuck?”
“Put it on,” he snarls again.
I’m not going to put it on, but before I can object again, the door bursts open and Tomas comes tumbling through.
“Get out!” the beast immediately roars. “You are not allowed to break through my magic!”
Tomas gets to his feet, dusts off his hands, and then points to the beast. “Fuck you, Pell. In case you haven’t noticed, things have changed around here with the new girl. Looks like you’re losing control. Maybe there was a limit on the number of caretakers you were allotted? Or maybe the gods are just bored with you and have decided to hand things over to someone else.”
“Someone like you?”
“Yeah. Someone like me. Someone who can get shit done.”
The monster—Pell—scoffs.
“Come on,” Tomas says. He extends his hand to me. “Come with me. I’ll show you around.”
I hesitate. And I don’t really know why I do it because Tomas has a certain look to him. A look that says, I’ve seen things. I know things. I can do things. And I don’t know what that whole conversation was really about, but I’m pretty sure about one thing and one thing only.
Tomas is not the one in charge here. Has never been the one in charge here.
So even though I want to go with him—I would feel safer with him—I can’t.
Because this is a moment that will decide things and I need to think this through.
If I leave with Tomas, we will be split clearly into two camps. And I have a feeling that eventually Tomas will end up on the losing side. He’s big, and muscular, and he’s strong-willed and loud, but he’s up against a beast. A monster who is nearly seven feet tall. A monster who can freeze me in place and slam heavy wooden doors with the wave of his finger. A monster who just explained that we are cursed and our curses are tied together.
Is this curse thing real?
I don’t know.
Is Pia real?
To me, she is. And if my talking alter-ego is real, this curse thing might be too. I don’t know. I need time to process. And maybe I’m not all up on the whole Saint Mark’s curse and everything, but it doesn’t take a genius to understand that siding against the beast in charge isn’t in my best interest.
On the other hand, if I’m truly stuck here, I don’t want to alienate Tomas. So there is just one thing left to do. “No,” I tell Tomas.
“No?”
I look over my shoulder at Pell. “No to you as well. I don’t know what’s going on here. Perhaps I’m just dreaming and in a little bit I will wake up and laugh at the absurdity of it all. But then again, maybe not. It wouldn’t be the first time the gods have frowned upon me. All I know is…” I pause and look the beast straight in the eyes. “I don’t need you. You need me.”
Then I turn my head and look at Tomas. “And I like you, Tomas. I think you might be a good man and you’re kinda hot—but while I’d love to trust you, I’ve learned a thing or two about trusting attractive, charismatic men who take an instant interest in me. So I don’t need you, either. I don’t need either of you. I’ve been traveling through this life on my own, with just my pet at my side”—I sneer the word at the monster—“since I was nine. And that’s how it’s gonna stay. So you can tell me where Pia is”—I point at the beast—“or not. She is me, and I am her, and I will find her with or without you.”
The beast called Pell straightens. And this makes his absurdly large male appendage straighten as well. “For fuck’s sake,” I mutter, turning my head to the side. “Can you please put on some pants?”
I turn on my heel, push past Tomas, and walk out into the grand entrance hall. Unsure of where I’m going, just very sure I need to get out of that room and away from that beast.
“She’s up there,” the beast calls. And when I look back at him, he’s pushing past Tomas too. Then he points to the ceiling. “She’s up there. I saw her earlier.”
I eye him with suspicion. Because his tone has changed once again and this time, the softness doesn’t feel like a lie. But it still could be. He’s probably just being helpful to make Tomas mad. But right now, I’ll take any assistance I can get if it helps me find Pia.
So I squint up at the ceiling. It’s a very beautiful ceiling. Like the Sistine Chapel, almost. But with beasts and monsters instead of angels or whatever.
“Pia!” I call. Is she scared? Is that why she flew off? Why isn’t she calling for me? The last time I remember talking to her, we were outside that gate near the cottage. I picked up the ring and… oh, fuck. I wilt a little.
It’s the ring. I put in my pocket and she crawled in there and when the beast threw me up in the air, she flew out of my pocket and disappeared.
But the monster said he saw her and he said bird. But when she flew away, she was a moth, not a bird. I turn to the beast. “What did she look like?” He and Tomas are both staring at me. They are side by side, the monster towering over Tomas, who is well over six feet tall himself. “Hello? I asked you a question. What did the bird look like?”
The beast shrugs with his hands. “A bird.”
“That’s not helpful. Maybe it’s not my bird? Maybe it’s some other bird?”
“There are no birds here,” Tomas explains. “No animals at all.” Then he hooks a thumb towards the monster at his side. “Well, except for him.”
“Fuck you,” the beast snarls back.
A flutter of wings high up in the ceiling draws all our eyes upward.
“There,” the beast says. “That’s her.”
And maybe it is. I hope it is. But even if I squint, I cannot see that high up. “It’s too dark in here,” I say. “Where are the lights?”
“We don’t have lights in the cathedral,” the beast says. “We have sunshine.”
“And sconces,” Tomas adds, nodding to the sconces on the stone walls, which I hadn’t really noticed before this moment. “But we don’t have electricity in here. So. No lights. Everything runs on gas.”
“Everything?” This can’t be right. “Where does it come from? Who pays the bill?”
“None of that matters,” the beast says. “There is no electricity here, so if you are not used to cooking with fire, you should grab a book on it when you go to the store tomorrow.”
I don’t even know how to process that sentence. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Cooking,” Tomas explains.
“I don’t cook.” And did he just change sides? Because he’s acting like I will be cooking for them in the near future. And I don’t even cook for myself, I am certainly not cooking for these cursed people.
“You’re a woman,” Tomas says.
“Women cook,” the beast adds. Like this is a logical sequence of critical thinking.
I snort. So that’s where we are? Some monster version of the good woman at home? I snort again. “I am not the maid.”
“Technically…” Tomas holds up a finger of protest.
“Whose side are you on?” I blurt.
“There is only one side here,” Pell says. “Mine.”
For fuck’s sake. If there is a god, please, please, please wake me up from this nightmare. Soon. I turn away from them and mutter, “This isn’t real. This cannot be real.”
“It is real,” the beast says. “And I was explaining the facts of the curse to you for a reason. If you want out, you must get me out first. I wasn’t talking to hear myself. I was explaining—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tomas interrupts. He walks over to me. “Listen, your bird is fine. She probably can’t leave the sanctuary. Not without you, anyway. No one can leave without you.” He pauses. “Well, I can’t ever leave. But Pell can. You won’t mind the errands. It will get you out of the house. That’s what Grant used to say.”
“The rules,” the beast says. “I’m going to make this easy for you.” He turns to Tomas. “Where’s the rulebook?”
Tomas nods his head to a massive three-story bookshelf just inside the apothecary that has a precarious ladder attached to slide rails. Above the ladder is a small catwalk that lines the perimeter of the room with another, even more suspect, ladder, presumably so you can search for books on the second floor. This goes on for yet another level and if one were actually inclined to search for books three stories up using those deathtraps, they would find themselves a good forty feet in the air.
There are thousands of books and the thought of going through them all to find answers about a curse suddenly makes me weary.
The beast walks into the room and over to the bookshelf. He scans it for several long, silent moments, and then plucks a book off the shelf and turns back to me.
I’m already shaking my head. “Nut-uh. Nope. That is not the rulebook. It’s like two thousand pages long. There cannot possibly be that many rules.”
The beast is not deterred. He walks over to me, thrusts the book at me, and waits. Expecting me to take it.
I salute him with my middle finger. Then I turn on my heel, walk down the staircase, through the doors, outside into the night, down the hill and past his stupid cemetery, and go inside my cursed cottage.