House of Salt and Sorrows - Erin A. Craig Page 0,123
exploded directly over us, and Morella began to laugh, clinging to her belly as the next contraction ripped through her. A commotion rose at the far end of the hall, shouts and screaming.
“Go see what it is.” I kept the iron trained on Morella. “I’ll stay with her.”
Morella watched Camille go before meeting my gaze once more. “Annaleigh, you must believe me. I didn’t want you to die. I…I did at first, before I knew you—I wanted to make Ortun pay for how he’d treated me—but then…You’ve been so kind to me. You took care of me, befriended me. I didn’t know Viscardi would use the Harbinger to collect his payment, truly I didn’t. That’s why I gave you the book to read…so you wouldn’t sleep at night. So you wouldn’t dream of that thing.”
I said nothing.
A feeble mewing squeezed out of her. “I can’t do this, I can’t,” Morella groaned, shoulder blades popping. Her lower jaw jutted forward, sinking into her upper lip. “You could do it, you know. Just go ahead and do it.”
“Do what?”
A crazed sheen glazed her eyes. “Hit me. I know you want to. You know you want to.”
“I don’t.”
“Just raise it up and bring it down over my head. Then it’ll all be over.”
I backed away from the bed, looking out into the hall as the shouting grew. Servants ran by with buckets of water and towels. Smoke poured out of a room at the far end.
“Do it, Annaleigh,” she called out. “Bash my head in. Bash my brains out. I killed your mother. I killed your sisters. Take your revenge and kill me.” A bloodcurdling howl ripped from her mouth, and a spot of red appeared on her nightgown, growing larger and wet over her thighs. “Please!”
“I don’t care what happens to you, but I’m not killing my brother.”
Laughter erupted past bared teeth, cruel, sharp pieces of shrapnel ricocheting off the walls. “You idiot girl.” She groaned and hunkered down as she began to push, pushing around the contractions, pushing past the pain, pushing the baby free. Her voice was low and grating, like metal skidding down a cliff. “This is not your father’s son.”
My stomach lurched. “What?”
She gasped for air. “Viscardi and I had to seal our bargain somehow…. Once it was set, Ortun fell at my feet, begging for forgiveness, begging for another chance, begging to come back to my bed. And I let him. I let them both in. And then…I let them ravish me.”
Her groans turned to a shriek of anguish as a dark shape hurtled from her, spilling onto the bed in a mess of tangled limbs and dark, membraned wings. My eyes couldn’t seem to focus on the details, couldn’t make sense of the shapes flailing through the air. A mouth too wide, too full of teeth, opened and let out a lusty wail.
It wasn’t a baby. It was a monster.
Camille burst back into the bedroom, her face flushed and smudged in soot. “Lightning struck the roof. The fourth floor is on fire! We have to get out!” She came to a screeching halt as she saw the writhing mass on the bed.
The thing flipped over, exposing its winged back, and grabbed at its umbilical cord. It tugged on the opposite end, and Morella cried out in pain, clutching her stomach. Raising the cord to its mouth, it bit through the muscle in one snap, freeing itself. I turned to the side, unable to stop myself from throwing up.
Camille grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door. Servants ran by, shouting for us to hurry downstairs. The fire couldn’t be controlled. We needed to escape now.
“Wait, don’t go!” Morella called to us, her voice high and reedy. For a brief moment, her eyes lost their madness and she looked like our stepmother again. “I can’t get downstairs by myself! You wouldn’t leave me to burn to death, would you?”
Standing on the threshold, I dug my heels in, stopping Camille’s race for the stairs. “We can’t just leave her here.”
She groaned in exasperation. “That’s exactly what she’d do to us!”
Morella struggled to free her blood-soaked legs from the wet sheets. She tilted her head, listening to something beyond our hearing. From the adjoining sitting room came the sound of heavy footsteps. My mouth went dry as a black spider of fear sank its fangs deep into my stomach.
Viscardi had arrived.
Camille yanked on my arm again. “We can’t stay here! The fire is already in the