Her chest warmed and eyes welled. She swallowed through the lump in her throat.
“Goodnight, Elizabeth,” he said, and she could only nod as he left the room. She looked down to the book, wide and thick and heavily-bound, with sticky notes sprouting from every direction. Forgetting about her tea entirely, she opened to the most curled of page markers. It was the section she’d read many times. Elizabeth wondered if Aglaé was as hypnotizing in real life as she was in the picture. She wondered how many there were, how they came to be.
Nearly every word had been highlighted with rushed yellow strokes—sentences about unbreakable curses and even the cross-reference to Diableron. She turned the page, skimming over more highlighted passages, and almost skipped over the four paragraphs that had been left alone, the dull typeset standing out against the rest, with its colorless background. The way the highlighter had deemed it too irrelevant to mark made it seem that much more significant, and she found herself reading it more carefully than the rest, her brain catching certain terms like a filter catches particles.
The bond of Cursed and Curse Breaker: Reversals, cures, or antidotes to Aglaé’s curses are never easily found. In rare instances, the antidote is simply an act that must be performed by the Cursed himself, and only the Cursed. But most often times, the curse can be broken only through the specific act of another, and when accomplished, a special connection between the Cursed and the Curse Breaker is created. In those cases, both the Cursed and Curse Breaker undergo a chemical change, creating a bond both physical and literal. Some have explained it as a oneness or a sense of belonging to the other, their lives becoming one in the same soon after the curse is broken—as in the legend of Absolon and Elvire.
She went on to read the brief account of Absolon and Elvire, whose story she remembered reading as a child: the story of how true love can conquer the barrier of any outward appearance. It was a tale with a moral, a story that had always taught her to look at one’s soul, not at their physical exterior.
It was the story of a man who was cursed by Aglaé to the confines of a dark cave for the remainder of his life, and the baker’s daughter who brought him bread. A man with skin transparent enough to see his insides, skin so sensitive that even a flicker of light left burns, and a woman who was so frightened by his hideous form that she at first left him bread only at the entrance of the cave. But eventually her pity turned to a compassion that drove her inside, and in the dark of that cave, Absolon and Elvire developed a love so deep that she never left him. It was her love that broke the spell, but in the moment the curse broke, a mob of angry villagers raided the cave and crucified her for loving a Cursed. Absolon, though alive—and a new man—had then been stabbed. He’d cradled his dead Elvire and, when his blood dripped into hers, her life was restored—all thanks to the bond that formed between them after the release of the curse, when the chemical change in the blood of the Cursed and Curse Breaker was most powerful. By the grace of that short window, and the magic in his blood, she was made whole. It was the first time such a power was realized and the only time it’d been used. According to record, that was.
Beneath the fourth paragraph was a Baroque-style painting: a pale man sobbing over a dead woman, both faces dramatic and both bodies naked amidst crimson robes, his blood pouring into hers.
Elizabeth lifted her eyes to the beast asleep on the floor, and she knew then why he hadn’t highlighted this section. He was one of the rare beings it mentioned in the beginning: a Cursed whose only antidote was an action of his own, a Cursed who could never have a Curse Breaker.
***
The blurred edges around Henry’s vision darkened, as though he looked at life through a black fog. It made concentrating difficult, made seeing her face nearly impossible. Elizabeth, he thought as he stared up at her. He hated when she cried, hated how unjust it was for someone like her to feel any kind of sorrow, but the sensation of her hands on his face felt like home. Elizabeth.
I’m not going to leave you, she promised, except the sound was trapped within the confines of his head, warbling as though her voice traveled through water. I’m going to get help. Her face left then, replaced by a shattered china plate: the moon, obstructed by twiggy, spider-like branches.
It felt like a dream. A nightmare, more precisely—given her tears and the way flames licked his side. They scorched, sizzled his flesh, yet he couldn’t move. And still, with his eyes closed, he stared at the moon. Then red, flowing hair; crimson, seductive lips; lavender eyes. Her face flashed in his mind over and over again, first expressions of anger then those of unbridled rage, making her hair appear as flames behind her head. Flames all around—on the witch, on his body, on the trees.
She screeched that awful sound, and even with his eyes closed, he couldn’t escape the glaring fire and her face—her face that held every evil captive behind her beauty.
His head caught fire, his brain like kindling in his skull. He screamed but nothing came out, nothing changed, and still he slept. The witch’s laughter: it was a disturbing sound, mixed with her deafening screech. I’ll kill you before you can kill her, she kept saying, and even though he knew what she meant, it didn’t make sense. I won’t let you do it. You’ll always be mine.
He wanted to say he wouldn’t do it anyway, but his vocal cords caught fire, too. Then he realized he was nothing more than a monster and had never been able to speak.
Like a reel of photographs set on automatic scroll, her face lit up his psyche, expression after expression. It wasn’t her face anymore, though, but the face of eviclass="underline" a Diableron, as repulsive as the soul Aglaé lacked. Elizabeth, he thought again, sending his thoughts outward, to wherever she might be. Elizabeth, run!
He saw her then, suspended above by the curling branches of a hemlock that appeared more alive than Diableron herself. He called to her but nothing came out, and through that black mist of his vision, his fur was aflame. The flames spread from his body and licked their way across the forest, where the trees—suddenly bare and dry—ignited with an explosive force.
Elizabeth screamed, agonizing and drawn-out, and amidst the wretched sound were pops and crackles, noises that would usually remind him of fresh logs on a campfire. Her screams made his own pain intensify, made the flames on his body turn a mysterious blue. Elizabeth, he called out. But she didn’t hear, for her flesh began to bubble and melt away, dripping from her skull. Soon, her screams stopped all together until a charred figure lay lifeless in the arms of the hemlock. Somehow, every strand of her silken hair had been untouched, if only to remind him the blackened, fried body was hers.
The screams inside him were so earsplitting his skull cracked under the pressure, fracture upon fracture. And as though they went hand in hand, the pain in his heart and the burning of his flesh only scorched hotter. He would kill the witch when this was all over, when his spirit was freed from this inferno of a prison.
Water shot from his eyes in a pressurized stream, like a leak in a hose. Tears? They sprayed everything, even Diableron, and through his cries the fire extinguished, the forest turning green again. Even Elizabeth’s skin became supple and alive.
He jerked at the face in his black, foggy consciousness: Arne, frantic and sleep-deprived and telling him everything was all right. Was it? She’s all right, he said through the ocean in Henry’s ears.
His chandelier, his ceiling, his windows draped in the golden silk he hated. Elizabeth’s face, her hand, her faint and distant promises that he would be all right, that she would never leave him. Had she saved him from the fire, or had he saved her? I thought maybe we could save each other, she had once said, though every memory seemed lumped into one and he couldn’t recall when.