Page 53 of Eternally Yours


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Kacey pushed back the linen sheets. She would google a divorce lawyer. She would call one today. A knock came at the door, and she startled, pulse jumping. It was not, however, her husband, but a maid, bringing Kacey’s usual breakfast: coffee and yogurt with fruit and granola and a side of bacon. A dahlia nodded at Kacey from an opalescent bud vase on the tray. When the maid left, Kacey lifted her coffee cup but couldn’t drink. She lifted her spoon but couldn’t eat. She stared at the out-of-season dahlia’s pink face, and a creepy feeling stole over her. She snatched the flower from the vase and threw it to the floor. It was not normal that she should fear her husband, even when he had done nothing wrong or cruel. It was not normal that she should feel spied upon by flowers and a diamond. It was not normal that she couldn’t recall the faces of anyone who worked here, except that of Amara, whoalsowas afraid of Kacey’s husband.

Something was wrong with him, butwhat?

Kacey remembered his studio.

Maybe she could just peek. He wouldn’t know, would he? It wasn’t like he had locked the door. It could be that he evenwantedher to enter, or at least he didn’t care enough about his privacy to secure it. And if she found something in thestudio that she shouldn’t—What? Proof of embezzlement? Was he rich because he had stolen money?—maybe she could use the information to make him let her go.

Stay away from it, Amara had said about the studio.I say this for your own good.

But what about Amara’s good? She had said she couldn’t quit working for Kacey’s husband. Amara had a slight accent that suggested this wasn’t her country of origin. She had mentioned a homeland. Was she an immigrant, and was Kacey’s husband keeping her here against her will? What power did he have over Amara, and how could Kacey break it? If Amara had indeed signed a contract, maybe it was in the studio.

Kacey pulled on jeans and a T-shirt.

The front yard was empty and still. The air, which had seemed wonderfully warm when Kacey woke up, now felt heavy, stifling, like thickly woven cloth. Kacey crossed the grass to the studio. She reached for the doorknob. She wondered if she would find that it had been locked, but it turned easily in her hand.

Inside, the studio was dark. It had no windows to let in light. The only light came from the open door, and it took a moment for Kacey’s eyes to adjust. When she could finally see, she wished that she couldn’t. Six human-shaped shadows lined the room, three on each side. At first, Kacey thought they were mannequins, like the ones in the attic dressed in theater clothes, but they weren’t.

They were corpses.

They were the bodies of women in various states of decay, some with skin shriveled to the bone and hair lank against a skull, and others with distended, rotting flesh. They stood against the wall, each with a different object at her feet. In front of one, a tennis ball. In front of another, a mask. A clay pot.

The torso of each body had a hole carved into it. Old blood stained the clothes black. Kacey watched her own hand lift—trembling, as if directed by marionette strings—to count each body. Six. And at the far end of the studio was a space, somehow more terrifying because it was clean and empty... save for one rose on the floor. It rested there, looking at Kacey, waiting.

A roar split the air. It was slightly muffled; it came from outside the studio, at a distance. Kacey had been to the Bronx Zoo before and had heard the lions while she stood near the zebras, and had thought about what it must be like for the lions, to be so close to the zebras but not reach them, and what it must be like for the zebras, to be so close to their predators and not be able to run.

But Kacey could. She could run. She didn’t understand exactly what she was trying to escape, but she knew that that rose was meant for her.

She turned, ready to flee, but her sneaker skidded in the blood—which, though old and dried moments before, was now fresh. She fell onto her hip. The bodies of the women now looked almost alive, and she could see their dead, open eyes, the differences between each face—and the sameness,too, for each one was beautiful. Kacey looked down at her shaking red hands and could not move.Prey, Amara had said. The roar came again, closer.

The slightly ajar door slammed fully open. It was not Kacey’s husband who stood there, but Amara, black eyes wide in panic. “No,” Amara said, “not you.” She strode across the bloody floor, grabbed Kacey’s arm, and yanked her to her feet.

“I can’t stop him.” Kacey wept, realizing that she had never been able to stop him, not from the moment he showed up at the diner with his hundred-dollar bills, and that no one had evenwantedher to stop him.

“Yes, you can, if you help methink.” Amara shook Kacey’s shoulders as though waking her from a nightmare. “He is a bride-heart.” A long, bloody welt streaked suddenly down Amara’s throat. Amara kept speaking, though each word sounded strangled and painful to utter. “A creature older than this country.” Another welt appeared.

“Don’t,” Kacey cried, but Amara continued, her throat scarred by each sentence. “He has wed you for one reason only,” Amara said. “He has been waiting for your disobedience. It is sweet to him. It will flavor the meat of your heart. A wife’s heart is the only kind of meat he can consume, and it will sustain him for one hundred more years. You cannot run. We have only minutes before he is here.”

Kacey’s mind was rigid with fear.

“I have disobeyed him, too, with you,” Amara whispered, “and he knows it.”

The kiss by the pond. The watching eyes of the farm, the flowers, the diamond. If he was coming for Kacey, he was coming for Amara, too.

Kacey’s eyes cleared. She knew what they needed to do.

The creature slunk on all fours into his lair. His bright blue eyes lit the dark, but the bride-heart’s sight was his least keen sense. Smell, yes. He could scent fear in the still air, and the sudden freshness of his dead brides come almost to life for this moment, when a new sister would join them. He slid past them, claws clicking against the blood-slick floor. He lapped the blood from his paw and relished the taste, the mix of so many young women, all beautiful, all his, all traitors in the end, too curious, too selfish, too ready to break the one promise he asked them to honor—the promise that, in fact, he hadwantedthem to dishonor so that they would prove how they valued themselves more than him, and be punished for it.

She was here somewhere. His lair was not large.

Then, with his dim sight, he saw her, waiting. They did that sometimes, his women, when they were caught and realized there was no escape, when they suspected that to run would only please him and make their suffering worse when he caught them. She stood beside her token, the deep red rose. She didn’t tremble—too afraid, probably, to move. Her long blond hair lay on her shoulders. He could smell her sweet heart. He crept to her, growling in his throat.

With a swipe of his paw, he snatched the heart from her torso. She didn’t even scream. He stuffed the warm, dripping heart into his maw and ate.

Huddled behind the woodpile, Kacey and Amara waited, holding each other’s clenched, bloody hand. A howl rose from the nearby studio. When it ceased, they dared to creep toward the outbuilding and stood before its open door. There, on the studio floor, lay the dead bride-heart, his greedy paw outstretched. His furred shape was only vaguely human, his blue eyes dull as stone. The bodies of his wives had disintegrated into dust and bones, but one figure stood tall: the mannequin at the far side of the room, wearing the blond wig and a dress Kacey had grabbed from the theater props in the attic. The dress’s fabric was gory with sheep’s blood, but nothing remained of the heart Amara had cut from a grown sheep and laced with rat poison from the barn, returning to the studio to position the lump of flesh inside the wooden rib cage of the mannequin.

Amara shut the door.

“What now?” Kacey had never felt so glad to feel her heart pound against her ribs.