Page 83 of Besieger
Stefan looked up at Irena’s bound form and noted the way the light shone off her eyes. Her irises were amber, the pupils a thin horizontal slit; the eyes of a fox.
“When we first met, you asked what beast I turned into, sweet Irena. Now, I’ll lethimreveal that to you. I marked him myself.” Krum croaked the words and left the two of them alone.
Stefan let the exhaustion take him. His sleep was splintered into lucid fragments. He blinked and saw Irena chained, hanging over him, like a blasphemous Christ. Not bleeding from her hands and feet with blood, but shedding light from her face and eyes. Heat radiated from her body in waves and mingled with the miasma leaking from his own flesh.
It was unbearably hot in the cellar. No matter how hard he pressed against the bare stone floor, Stefan could not find a patch of coolness. He moaned in frustration and tasted blood. The chain around his leg clinked and tugged him back whenever he tried to crawl beyond the reach of Irena’s shadow. He did not talk to her. Even if her mouth was not gagged, he could not think of anything to say. That they were going to be all right? That help was coming? The only creatures who knew he was here were Krum, his pups and Vasili.
All of them strangers. All of them beasts.
From Krum’s speech, Stefan expected the change to hit both of them at the same time. Yet Irena remained motionless, watching over him. What a desecrated life they shared at this moment, each at the mercy of the other.
He dozed off again, curled at her feet like a faithful dog.
Stefan shifted in his sleep—
—a lucid dream surging through him, slashing, lifting him up;
Irena levitated above him on the rack, the glow in her eyes blinding like the beam of a lighthouse.
—the basement tilted, collapsing beneath his palms, bleeding through his fingers—
—a convulsion seized him, like the cramp of a muscle, stiff and hard and painful and pulsing, desperate to move, to stretch and grip, eager to tear, to rip, to break, to bend and ooze, salivating with all the fluids a body could yield and a mouth full of teeth, a tongue lapping at blood and flesh, at marrow and bile. To be transformed out of the flesh of man and into the ribs of an animal crawling out of the birth-canal of depravity and into thelight of a reverted sun. Starvation embedded in the flesh, this new pelt,
a ribcage empty of all reason,
jaws opening,
unfettered
IRENA, 2008
Krum’s idiocy was going to get them all killed. He had convinced himself that lycans were only able to mate in their animal form, as if that alone guaranteed the seed would take root and fester into a beast. He wanted her to shift and let his goons mate with her; a fox forced to carry a wolf’s cubs.
The truth was, Irena had no idea how lycans came to be naturally. She might have been one herself, but Irena’s father had a sister, and her children were human. Irena’s aunt was also human; the fox gene had skipped her. The same way it could skip any children Irena might have one day. Although now, chained to the wall with a shivering sweating stranger at her feet in a cellar God knew where, the very last thing on Irena’s mind was childbirth or procreation, of any kind.
A howl rose from somewhere deep within the maze, a beast in pain. It had to be the other prisoner, the man she had glimpsed when they first dragged her underground.Great, Irena clenched her teeth around the gag.I have two newborn shifters to worry about in addition to the grizzly lot.
The kid at her feet was shivering. His eyes, whatever remained of them, had turned yellow, a telltale sign of the upcoming shift.
Irena had only ever seen her parents shift. While other children had learned rhymes and songs at school, her mother andfather sat her down and told her tales about beasts. Not legends, not ghost tales, but a promise—a life to look forward to. When the time came for her first shift, the panic was overwhelming; so suffocating, in fact that her mother held her hand, and reminded her to breathe, to let go, to let the body do what it must. It was natural. Irena was built for it. Whose body but a woman’s knew how to encapsulate and bring forth life, her mother assured her. Irena would never bear a child, but at that moment, as the blood burned and pulsed, and her skin itched and split, she gave birth to herself. A powerful, hungry being, eager to go and devour life.
The memory of her parents shifting, their bodies elongating, fur sprouting down their chests in a flair of colour: white, orange, yellow; their faces now ever smiling muzzles of foxes that should have looked monstrous for a child but, at that moment, Irena could not wait to join them. She was eager to run through the forest and hurl herself against the tree trunks, snap her jaws through the undergrowth in search of rabbits and little creatures. It was a simple, beautiful memory against the horror unfolding before her in the cell. The kid howled and screamed, pain taking fresh, expanding, contracting, leaking, breaking.
Irena did not remember her second birth hurting. Her mother—once morning broke and the moon melted from the sky—told her how good she did, how strong and controlled Irena had been.How can one be controlled if they do not remember being so… The last thing Irena had seen was the ground she crawled and clawed at, the pebbles digging into her palms as they burned, burned, burned.
She had not planned on being captured and dragged into this hole, but they had overpowered her, and the kid that leapt out of nowhere to her rescue had helped her attackers rather than disarm them. They had strapped her to a rack, the chains too weak to hold once she shifted, and Irena had planned on escaping after she regained her strength and night fell. Until Krum,oh, vile Krum, had changed his plans. He had clawed out her saviour’sface and thrown him as an offering, an attempt to appease a goddess into granting her favour.
She was not curious about what kind of animal Krum could shift into, he might be a rat for all she cared.This is too cruel,she thought watching the kid’s torso tear and reform.
“What you have is a gift, Reni,” her mother had said. “It is yours to give to those you choose. A gift born of love. For love.”
There was no love in the warped shape before her. No loving hand held the arms as they stretched and bent, or helped balance the legs as the knees broke backwards with a sickening crack. The thing’s maw split into a chasm full of teeth and agony. It shook and spasmed; black fur erupted out of every pore, its claws raked the ground and a long whip-like tail lashed uncontrollably from the base of its spine.
It was bigger than her, bigger than any shifter Irena had seen. Its one-eyed muzzle fixed on her for a fraction of a second before it pounced.
Irena swayed awkwardly, hopping on one foot until the pain became too much to bear and she shifted her weight to the other, less damaged leg. Those animals had gone for hind legs first, jaws grazing deep into the muscle.Clever, she spat and the red of her saliva vanished into the sea of gore coating the floor. Her mouth was full of the tangy, pungent taste of raw meat. Every time she swallowed, the clot of blood and phlegm lodged in her throat swelled, making her retch. She could not cough it up no matter how much she tried, dry-heaving on all fours, back against the wall.
She had shed her fur coat and wore instead a heavy film of blood and mucus, most of it her own. Torn pieces of carcass and scattered limbs littered the basement; there were so many thatIrena could not tell where one body ended and another began. She had never been violent when she shifted; the older she got the rarer her hunts as a werefox became. Irena liked running, jumping over bubbling brooks and chasing after birds. On the rare occasions she remembered the sensation of inhabiting the animal skin, the human part of her peeked between the jaws. She could control when the shift happened, all born could, but once she shed her human face, she had no command over the animal.
