“No.”
Not human. Not even close.
“I…” He clutched her legs tight and looked up at her.
She stared down with so much tenderness and curiosity in her gaze, and he felt he really had no choice but to speak the words. He needed to tell somewhat what was wrong, and if she feared him, so be it. Perhaps he deserved any pain due to him.
“I—I’m not the same anymore,” he croaked. “This thing…” He released his hold on her legs and scratched at his chest. He wished he could tear out the monster inside of him and send the beast back to hell or wherever it’d come from, but he couldn’t. The curse that turned him into the creature was part of his DNA, just like his eyes being brown. “This thing inside me, the magic—”
“Magic?” She took a step back—just one step—and she knelt primly, pressing her knees together and smoothing her skirt over them. “What do you mean, Andreas?”
“When Contessa pulled the magic back…” He scratched at his chest again, and at his throat so he’d stop making that gods-awful growling noise that was obviously setting her on edge.
She gripped his wrists in a stunningly hard grasp and shook his hands. “Stop that. Talk to me.”
“The magic. I can’t control this. I don’t even know what it is.”
A swallow convulsed in her throat and she crawled toward him, pressing her knees to his and releasing his hands. “That’s why I can’t read you? Why you don’t feel to me like all the others?”
He nodded. “I’m cursed. It came back when the magic did.”
“What kind of curse?”
He rubbed his sternum and leaned his head to one side, then the other. “There’s some kind of animal inside me. I don’t know what kind. There were always rumors…”
“An animal? How do you know it’s there? I haven’t heard those rumors.”
“I feel it. And I lose hours of memory. I don’t know what makes me turn, only that I’ll wake up in places I’ve never been and that I don’t remember how I got there. Or when I’m wearing that beast’s body, I may catch a flash of myself in a reflective surface, but don’t recognize that I should stop and look. When I’m in that form, thoroughness doesn’t matter. Getting answers doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me about the curse.”
He shook his head hard. “I don’t know all the details. My family didn’t speak of it, except in the most general terms. No one had been affected by it in centuries, not since the gods repealed our magic, and I think my father would have mentioned if it were affecting him. I spoke to him four days ago, and he seemed fine.”
“So now the curse is back, and you’re the lucky victim.”
He dug his fingertips into his biceps and pressed hard. The pain made thinking easier sometimes when the animal in him was so close to the surface, and that animal suddenly seemed entirely too curious. Because of sweet Mary, the beast wanted out.
He shook his head hard. “No. You can’t.”
“Can’t what, Andreas?”
“Not you. The—”
He couldn’t say the word. Couldn’t tell her about the thing that wanted its way, because the thing had its way.
“No!” His bones shifted painfully out of their sockets and his skin pulled taut over lengthening bones and his shifted skull. “No!”
He couldn’t stop the transformation, though. He never could.
Mary scrambled back from him, fear pulling at her features, and reflecting his own.
He didn’t want to scare her, not really. Not anymore.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “That I brought you in here…” His body writhed in protest, and he repeated “No!” like a refrain. His voice was more snarl than words as his body became more beast than man.
His consciousness was fading away, but he could see Mary, guarding herself behind a support column, and he wanted to scramble over and plead with her not to run—not to go—because he could fix things, eventually, as soon as he figured out how.
“Ma—ry.”