Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 74631 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 299(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74631 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 299(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
“The beast,” I whisper. It’s harder to stop talking to myself and to the roses. It’s harder because I’m so tired, and I’m so sad, and sometimes it feels as though the better idea would be to pretend it never happened. Sometimes my mind tries to convince me it didn’t happen. That it could have been a terrible dream, and now I am wide awake with the visions haunting me and my questions and prayers going unanswered.
I am so terrified and shaken I cannot even roll to my side. I can only stare at the ceiling of my bedroom. A tear drips down my face to my pillow, but I do not move.
I keep telling myself Crawe was a bad man. He needed to die. They would have killed the beast and for what? For me? It’s hard to swallow with the guilt and shame.
And then I see his beastly face. An image of something I’d never imagined.
He is a beast, but when he touches me he is a human. I know it is so. The magic did not deceive me every time I felt his hands on my body or his body over mine or his lips on my skin. I know he is human when we touch.
But the beast I saw when Crawe came to the castle…
What was I seeing? I have no explanation for the things I remember. Perhaps the two are not the same. My mind plays tricks on me. So many of the beast’s orders don’t make sense, and I cannot tell if it’s him or me who is mistaken.
I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to forget. I have tried to forget so many times, but it does not work. If for no other reason than to give sleep to my burning eyes and rid my mind of the sight of tonight. The memories are a permanent thing, unless the magic can offer me something to forget them.
I shake my head as if the magic had floated me some sort of potion to take away the memories. It hasn’t. I think if the castle did have such a thing, I would have been offered it by now. But I do not want to forget, and neither does the castle.
I think, though I cannot be sure, that the castle does not know what to do, and so it is repeating the last thing it knew to bring me comfort and joy. It is filling my room with roses.
So many roses.
The wreath of roses above my vanity is no longer visible. It has been completely covered by more plants that have shoved themselves in through the opening that the first climbing rose peeped from. They grow along the walls of my bedroom in masses, their scent filling the room with a suffocating sweetness. It is harder to breathe in here almost every minute, but I don’t have another choice, because finding another place to go would mean getting out of the bed, and I cannot do it.
By the time I get out of bed, with sleep evading me, I do not know what the magic will have done. Perhaps the roses will have filled the entire castle. If they keep growing at this rate, their thorns will cut into me as I lie here in the bed.
“Don’t do that,” I manage to say, louder. “Don’t fill up the bedroom. I have to be able to breathe.” The words come out numbly as more tears slip down my cheeks.
Somewhere in the castle, the beast is breathing too.
Thinking about tonight like I am, most likely. I was already outside when the first two villagers, who I recognized from my work at Ara’s bakery, reached the top of the iron gate and jumped down. They were the first to die, because they were closest to the beast when he attacked.
The men’s screams from that night fill my ears as if they are still happening. Their shrill shrieks send shivers down my spine. For so long, I listened to the tales of the beast and the castle and the magic. I listened to what happened to the villagers who tried to capture and crucify him. I heard stories of those screams, and I thought I had imagined them vividly. I used to have dreams about those stories when I was a girl and would wake up with tears in my eyes from imagining the howls of pain.
What I imagined was not like the reality. The screams of the dying men were more like wounded animals. Some of them didn’t have time to scream. Some of them made worse sounds. It was as if it was all happening mere steps in front of me, though most of the killing was done when I stood at the front entrance, watching with horror and shock as the beast tore into those men.