The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (35 page)

Rein whispers something. I pull his head onto my thigh and lean closer, my ear right at his lips. I squeeze my eyes closed as he chokes on his words. “I shall—I shall not come into—the hall...with—with words of fear upon my...lips.”

It’s the berserker’s dying prayer.

I force my eyes open. He deserves better than for me to shy away from this death I’ve caused. His eyes are wide, and I meet them without flinching. They are all the colors of the forest: green pine needles, gray bark, rusty brown earth. Colors mingling in his eyes like rain has washed it all together. I pick out the colors, memorizing them. I cannot ever, ever forget his eyes.

“Gladly shall I drink...ale in...” he sucks in a shuddering breath, “in the high seat.”

His eyes don’t move, but I can see them focus through me. I’m not with him anymore, and he’s seeing something else. Valkyrie, I hope. Riding down from the sky to take him home.

He can’t finish the prayer. His mouth stops. His blood soaks hot onto my leg.

“Rein,” I whisper again, seeing not only him but my brother and sister and Mom and Dad. I can finish it. His heart still beats, creeping slowly to a stop.

“The days of your life have ended,” I say. “And you die with a laugh.”

I kiss his lips, giving the words back into him. He is dead.

Leaning back on my heels, I wipe my hands down my thighs. Blood roars in my ears. My heart is spinning fast, and I am feverish with a burning need to destroy.

LISTEN!

They say that Luta Bearsdottir dipped her finger into the berserker’s wound and with his heart’s blood drew a spear down her cheek.

Ever since I was little, I’ve been deeply fascinated by stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Bluebeard”—stories where the girl faces down the psychopath and is subsequently rescued, but just barely. I loved the urgency of it, the sense of mortal danger. Mostly though, I liked that the girls in these stories were special. They had seen all the way down to the very heart of evil, nearly been seduced by it, and then lived to tell about it.

The last few years have seen me write a lot of imperiledgirl stories. I mean, a lot. They come in different forms, countless variations on the same characters and themes. In a way, it’s like I’ve written the same story over and over, trying to get it right. And in another way, it’s like I’ve made it my mission to find out how exactly many different stories one premise can make.

“Lazarus Girl” is a kind of culmination of all the iterations that came before it, because Rosamund has gone somewhere the other girls haven’t. She’s not waiting for rescue or even rescuing herself. She’s already seen all there is to see. —Brenna

A
t first, nothing. A dry scrape of leaf, a creak and sigh of branch and twig.

The ground is frozen, feels a thousand miles away. For a long, disorienting moment she thinks she’s home, lying in her bed and only dreaming that the shadows on her walls are solid, becoming trees.

The sky is low and starless above her, rolling with clouds. If it met neatly in the corners, she could almost confuse it with the ceiling.

. . .

I wasn’t supposed to be there.

It was a faculty party—grad students only—but Portia Miles had heard about it from the TA in her Modern Drama class. And anyway, it was Saturday night and we were the girls who crashed the grad parties, who made shy, bookish boys ignore their dates and turn longing gazes on us instead.

The two of us were standing by the hors d’oeuvres, talking about the girl campus security had found in the woods. Or at least I was talking about the girl in the woods.
Portia was picking through a dish of mixed olives, looking for the black ones.
The house belonged to one of the literature professors—this tall, balding guy with a wispy goatee. He taught courses on the Romantics, and his parties were almost always catered.

“Don’t you think about how she must have felt, though? When she realized what was happening?” I reached for a finger sandwich on a tiny plastic sword, which made Portia roll her eyes. I waggled the sword at her. “I mean, how can you stop thinking about it? It’s so messed up!”

“Rosie,” Portia said with her arms around my neck, the music swelling from seven or eight strategically placed wall speakers. “Rosie, Rosie, what are we going to do with you?”

And I laughed because I was where the nightlife happened, on the inside, and we were nineteen, wicked, and warm like August, and it didn’t matter that a week ago a girl had died in the little clump of scenic woods, right in middle of campus. None of the horror was ours. We were gorgeous and shocking and could always find someone to walk us home.

Out in the street it was starting to rain, the sky spitting little drops. The spray blew diagonally, spattering the windows as Portia steered me through the crowd with her hand tucked in the crook of my arm.

“Do you think the killer is out there right now?” I said, making witchy fingers in her face. “Do you think he’s prowling the streets like Jack the Ripper, in a wool coat and a top hat?”

“Rosie, be good,” she said. “Don’t go around freaking everyone out with the morbid talk.”

And I nodded but knew I’d do it anyway. When it was a choice between the small talk or the crazed killers, the choice was not really a choice at all.

I kissed her on the cheek and then slipped into the crowd in search of a promising conversationalist. Someone lonely, shy. Easily rattled. They were a dime a dozen in the English department.

I wound my way through impeccably disheveled rooms. Stylishly obscure books were stacked two deep on all the shelves, and the furniture was artfully mismatched. I made the rounds, stopping occasionally to insinuate myself into a debate or a conversation. In the kitchen, a tall, shaggy-haired boy wearing a battered wool blazer that was too short in the sleeves was holding forth on feminist readings of pre-twentieth century works, but when he asked my opinion on portrayals of women in Shakespeare and I saw the unfortunate state of his teeth, I smiled vaguely and moved on. I’d know my quarry when I saw him. Someone shy and wistful—easily separated from the herd.

He was standing alone by the unlit fireplace, holding a highball glass like he didn’t know what to do with it. He was perfect and had the saddest eyes. The line of his jaw was so delicate it made me want to bite him.

There was an oil painting over the mantle, and I’d used it to meet people plenty of times. It was a decent reproduction of a piece by one of the less-infamous Pre-Raphaelites, set in a heavy frame, and it always gave me the perfect opening.

“I was named after her,” I said, coming up beside him.

He glanced up, flinching when he saw me there, so close I was nearly touching him. It was a look I’d learned to love—the one that says,
Beautiful girl, I am terrified of you. I am in painful, staggering awe of you.

“Oh,” he said, backing away. He almost whispered it. “Rosamund’s a pretty name.”

“No it isn’t. I mean, the first half is. Did you know that Eleanor of Aquitaine murdered her? She caught Rosamund sleeping with her husband and gave her a choice between poison or stabbing. Or else she had her beheaded or drowned her in the tub or something.”

He shook his head, avoiding my eyes. “That’s just a story, though. Rosamund Clifford died in a nunnery.”

It wasn’t the way the script was supposed to go. He was supposed to be impressed by my brashness, not lecture me on actual facts, but I played it off, making my eyes narrow, looking suggestive and bored. “Did she die of sexual frustration, then?”

He blushed deeply a beat too late, turning his head to the side, showing me only a well-shaped ear, one reddened cheekbone. “Of natural causes.”

“There’s nothing natural about celibacy. Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”

“Bryce,” he said with his hand held out, not to shake, but like he wanted to rest it on my arm and was too shy.

I smiled demurely, grazing my bottom lip with my teeth, and moved closer....

. . .

Under the dead leaves at the base of the buckeye tree, she rolls over. Then, with the grace of a sleepwalker, she shakes off the layer of debris and gets to her feet.

The woods are silent and bare, and the grass at her feet is brittle with frost. In the dark she is a chilling sight, with long, matted hair and dirt under her nails.

Her steps are unsteady, gait made uneven by the lumpy, frozen ground and one missing shoe.

She picks her way down the footpath, back toward the lake. The night is cold, but her breath doesn’t hang in the air, and if she feels the chill, she doesn’t show it. There’s something so lovely in her face, so lost. She has been lonely all her life, but never so fully or so truly as she is tonight.

. . .

The Botticelli knockoff was bad. The brushwork was too heavy, and the colors reminded me of a circus. It depicted the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and I was forced to admit that yes, there could be such a thing as too many arrows.