As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) (15 page)

Belle stumbled in confusion. As clear as if it were occurring right there—behind her eyes—she saw the truth: the Prince who was the Beast, the spell, the rose,
the Enchantress.

Her mother.

The rose was from
her
garden. That was why it had looked familiar.

Belle held the blossom before her face in wonder. Her mother had held it exactly ten years before, the same way.

But under her look and the light of the moon, the rose began to fall apart. The petals fell and shifted into glittering red sand that disappeared before it hit the ground. The stem dissolved inch by inch until there was nothing left.

And the Beast howled in despair.

The castle shook. There was a mighty clap, like the largest crack of lightning in the history of the world struck the tower. Strange loud noises erupted from everywhere at once; somehow familiar, they touched the very core of Belle’s soul. Something between a cracking and a crack
ling,
but much, much bigger.

Ice.

It sounded like ice breaking across a pond, and brought with it the accompanying dread: as when a foot steps down and lines shoot out from under it into the white distance and death is in the frigid air.

Somehow Belle wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole palace began crumbling around her—but that wasn’t what was happening.

“MY ONE CHANCE!”
the Beast cried.
“MY ONE CHANCE AT ENDING THE CURSE. IT’S
GONE.
YOU’VE RUINED IT!”

She was only half paying attention to him; he was standing still and screaming and not accosting her. More immediate things were happening outside. She ran to the window.

Strange bone-white
things
were coming out of the ground just beyond the perimeter of the castle walls. Too angular and thick to be vines, too solid to be ice. At first Belle thought they were something like antlers or bones being forced out of the dirt by whatever forces were now at work. But they
kept
coming up, unending and sickly. They twisted and turned as they shot forth, whipping around and sticking to whatever solid object they touched. Once they came in contact with the wall, they slowed. But then they grew like frost on a window, crisscrossing each other and spreading unnaturally.

Spiderwebs.

Somehow Belle knew without even wondering.

Not the ones that hung in neat circles and octagons and whatever-other-gons in bushes and on flowers with a pretty little spider sitting in the middle. The
other
ones—the messy ones that covered the ground and grass like snow on dewy mornings, all random peaks and valleys and impossible to see where the spider hid. Three-dimensional. Complicated.

Her mother…had liked…roses…and natural things…Belle remembered this vaguely. Her mother the
Enchantress.

It made sense that she had cursed the castle with webs.

Belle turned to look at the Beast.

His eyes were empty of everything except for animal-like anger. There was no spark of intelligence or humanity left in them. He stood on all fours and bellowed madly.

Belle was paralyzed for a moment. Then instinct kicked in and she ran, pushing past him and out the door.

Without wasting a moment to look behind her, she dashed down the steps, two and three at a time, and raced through the great halls.

She had to get out of there.

“
Ma chérie!
Where do you go? What is happening?” Lumière plonked awkwardly out of the shadows after her.

“What have you done?”
shrieked Cogsworth.

“I’m sorry,” Belle sobbed. “I’m…”

She didn’t know why she was sorry. Maybe it was because she was leaving the cute little things back with that monster, to be sealed up with him, to face his wrath once she was gone. Here she was, on her first and only adventure, and somehow she had ruined everything immediately.

She flung open the front door and ran through the courtyard, past the fountain, to the gates. A single strand of webbing as thick as her wrist had grown over them, holding them mostly closed. She reluctantly reached out to touch it.

Sticky.

Just a little.

And cold.

Belle swallowed her revulsion and tried to pull it aside, but it didn’t give at all in the way she imagined a giant piece of spider silk should have. It was hard and unyielding. She pulled her hands away and scrambled underneath it instead, forcing her body through the small crack, pushing the metal bars apart with her legs. Her clothes brushed against the gluey surface of the webbing and it grabbed her like it was alive.

Belle kicked and screamed and forced herself out, entirely giving in to panic. Her dress tore with a sound that seemed to rip the world. By the time she got up and brushed herself off, the webs were already re-covering the gap, thicker, behind her. Almost as if they sensed the breach and strove to fix it.

Belle shuddered.

Phillipe, bless his horse heart, was still there. And more than ready to run himself, ears cocked and eyes rolling, at the strangeness of what was happening.

Belle grabbed his reins and leapt on his back. He didn’t need to be told twice.

In a turn and gallop that would have made his warhorse ancestors proud, Phillipe dashed into the woods. His long legs pushed hard against the ground, hooves smashing into dust everything that wound up beneath them. They were going to make it and she was going to ride triumphantly through the snow back home.

Then he stopped, rearing up. Belle was almost flung from his back—and that’s when she saw them.

Wolves.

There were, of course, still wolves left around the village where she lived. Once in a very great while, driven by hunger, they would come down out of the hills and mountains and forests to grab a sheep if a shepherd wasn’t watching properly. But unless it was sick or desperate, none would appear in broad daylight to a human on a horse—a human whom it knew probably carried a gun. Wolves were bad guys only in fairy tales and legends to scare young children at night.

These, however, didn’t look like the gray wolves she and her father had once seen trotting in the distance.

They were
huge.
And white. With red eyes that seemed to glow.

Seemed?

She had just fled an enchanted castle with talking furniture and a beast prince ruling them all…
whom her mother had cursed.

These were
not
normal wolves. They were magic, too. They were trying to stop her from leaving the castle.

Belle grabbed the reins and pulled hard, spinning Phillipe the other way.

The wolves howled and bayed like nightmare creatures as they took off in pursuit.

Belle could barely hold on, much less direct Phillipe. She let him go wherever he needed to for escape and didn’t try to stop him from running over a snowy pond like it was nothing more than a field. The ice broke beneath them, with thundering waves of noise that rippled out to the banks on the far side, echoing what was occurring back at the castle.

Unheeding the danger, the wolves followed.

One of Phillipe’s hooves struck a weak spot. A moment later the horse was floundering in the freezing water, churning his front legs desperately and trying to get back up.

But several of the wolves were also caught in the shifting sheets of ice; they had lost at least two of their followers to the blackness below.

Phillipe managed to clamber to the edge of the pond and pull himself out onto solid ground. Belle gritted her teeth as the icy water sloshed in her shoes. She couldn’t feel her lower legs.

The horse threw himself forward, galloping into the forest again. Belle hunkered down, trying to avoid being knocked off by low branches or clotheslined by vines.

They burst into a clearing—and saw three more wolves already waiting for them there.

Surrounded on all sides, Phillipe began to panic in earnest, eyes rolling and making terrible shrieking noises, his eyes rolling. He bucked wildly, slashing his hooves at the enemy. Forgetting about his rider.

Belle flew off his back.

The wolves came closer and closer and snapped at his feet and legs.

Belle shook her head, which was ringing from her hard landing. Otherwise nothing seemed to be too badly damaged. She dragged herself to her wobbly feet and looked round for anything that could be used as a weapon. A large forked branch lay on the ground nearby. She grabbed it and stood with her back to the panicking horse, trying to fight off the wolves that were closing in.

“Stay back!”
she ordered. “I am the daughter of an enchantress!”

The wolves didn’t think much of her declaration.

One wolf leapt at her and grabbed the branch in its teeth, pulling it out of her grip. At the same time another hurled itself into her chest, knocking her down.

Belle rolled away, trying to keep out from under Phillipe’s deadly hooves.

Another wolf stood over her, its slavering mouth inches from her face, its yellow teeth glinting like poison in the moonlight. It snarled and opened wide, ready to tear her to pieces.

Belle turned her face aside and covered her head with her hands, waiting for the finishing bite.

And suddenly the weight was off her.

She peeped through her fingers to look.

The Beast was there, throwing the wolf he had picked off of her to one side. He roared and howled, louder than the pack. The rest of the wolves leapt to attack him. One lunged at his leg, another at his shoulder.

In movements that were too quick to follow, the Beast shifted from two feet to four, shaking the wolves off him like water.

But he bled from ugly wounds where they fell away.

Belle crawled to the safety of a large tree and hid behind its enormous roots.

The Beast was
saving
her?

He stood for a moment, silhouetted against the moonlight, claws out. They were longer than a bear’s and glittered ivory—and ruby from raking through the belly of a wolf.

Then he was all shadows and blurry movement again, throwing himself among the remaining wolves like a reaver.

With yelps that didn’t sound properly doglike at all, the wolves began to sense the battle had turned. The Beast grabbed one of the last and flung it against a tree like a sack of apples. There was an ugly wet-sounding
crack
as it crumpled to a heap right in front of Belle. She flinched at its closeness.

Without a signal or a noise, the wolves admitted defeat and loped into the shadows, disappearing back to wherever they had come from.

Belle looked up at the Beast, who was on two legs now, growling a final warning. His fur was torn and one ear didn’t look quite right. His stance, never normal to begin with, looked more misshapen and awkward than before. There was a small pool of blood forming in the dirt below his right forepaw.

He opened his mouth to say something to her…

…and then, slowly, like a falling tree, collapsed at her feet.

Belle stayed as still as a rabbit, looking with wide eyes upon the scene before her, replaying in her mind what had just happened.

The Beast—the big, malformed, and grotesque thing that lay unconscious in a patch of its own blood before her—had imprisoned her father just for trespassing and then traded Maurice’s life for hers like some sort of medieval despot. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a
good
creature.