this! Janina pulled me into it!”
And yet she’d benefitted. She gloated about her wealth and rubbed it in Emil’s face while he bore the brunt of all the misfortune that would have otherwise fallen on her and her family. She’d known for years but had shown Emil no compassion, only throwing him enough scraps off her abundant table so that he didn’t leave Dybukowo.
“Is that so?” he asked, holding her up by the one leg. The fox mask had long fallen off her face, leaving it exposed, with traces of tears blackened by mascara. “Please, I will give you anything you want. You can have my daughter, if you want. You can have everything. Let me g—”
Adam’s jaws opened so wide it should have been physically impossible. Terror twisted her features just before her imminent death. Like the others, she didn’t deserve a grave, but she would be the last of the four-meat feast he’d been destined to celebrate tonight.
Emil had foretold this. Whisperer blood had been strong in him, and he’d been able to see into the future when even Chort hadn’t known what awaited them tonight. The meat of a pig, a wolf, a fox, and a deer—a four course meal of sinful souls.
Smaller than the others, Mrs. Golonko fit into his mouth whole, but despite the bitterness of all the bile in her body, her meat left him sated by the time he glanced into the sky, where a crescent moon cast a spotlight down at him.
The rush of bloodlust was gone, but there were other desires he longed to satisfy.
Adam blinked, looking far into the distance, taking in all his subjects, and roared into the sky. A choir of howls, hoots, and bawling answered his call, celebrating him with a different prayer.
Lord of the Forest, you came back.
This was his domain, and once he understood that the soul of every living being in the valley and beyond belonged to him, it became clear he would no longer waste his life on foreign superstition. If other gods existed, they weren’t here. But Chort was. Adam was. They were.
He didn’t need to rein in his instincts or feel guilt over loving the wrong person, because nature made no mistakes. Nature had nothing to do with morality or belief, but a man could only be content if he made peace with who he was. Adam’s love for Emil had never been a mistake nor was it a sin, and the doubts of the narrow-minded man he used to be dispersed when he finally saw the world with clarity.
His place was here, in Dybukowo, with Emil at his side, bound to the mountains forever.
Chapter 25 - Emil
Words couldn’t describe Adam’s transformation, but when one of his eyes clouded to resemble a polished coin, Emil knew he’d lost him.
He pulled on the binds until his wrists hurt, his will to live growing with each drop of blood spilled in the sacred grove. For all the love he had for Adam, he would not just lie there and invite the beast to rip into his naked chest.
He’d heard stories of this creature all his life, he’d seen it in fantasy drawings, but nothing could have prepared him to see the beast in the flesh. Taller and more muscular than any man Emil had ever seen, Chort was covered with gray fur, denser on legs, which had large hoofs and were shaped like those of a goat’s, and thinning on deceptively human-looking pectoral muscles. The thick, ribbed horns were as large as a man’s arms, and the monster’s features, stained with the blood of his latest victims, expressed a wild palette of ever-changing emotion.
The ground shook upon Chort’s approach, but as the mountain of a beast stopped a few paces away from its human sacrifice, hope drained from Emil’s heart.
Emil yanked on his restraints a final time but then fell back, resigned to his fate. He’d come here ready to offer his freedom so that Adam could leave, and he would have given his life for him, no questions asked, but this imminent death would be a waste, because there was no one left to save. He’d be Chort’s dessert, forgotten and missed by no one.
He imagined Adam’s parents coming back to Dybukowo twenty-six years since their initial visit, desperate to find their son. And as he looked up at the horned monster with burning eyes, his hope was that they wouldn’t find him.
Adam was gone, consumed by the beast that had twisted