Of Beasts and Bruises: A Beauty & the Beast retelling with two beasts by Rebecca F. Kenney

Author:Rebecca F. Kenney [Kenney, Rebecca F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

I walked the first floor of the castle, locking and barring every door, securing the shutters over every window. It took the better part of an hour, but by the end, I’d ensured that Lyrical couldn’t get back inside.

Once that was done, I could no longer postpone a far more unpleasant task—a foray into the dungeons to inspect the secret passage.

It had been constructed as a way for the royal family to escape if invaders ever broke through the castle’s defenses. I’d tried to leave by that route myself, but I’d always been repelled by the Faerie’s curse.

But other things could get out that way.

When there was only one petal left on a girl’s rose, I would take her down to the dungeon and shut her into that cell, the one with access to the secret passage. I’d tried to let the women out that way while they were still in human form, but the grip of the enchanted rose was impenetrable, even to the one who had laid the spell. I could not release them from what I had wrought—at least not without lethal harm to myself.

And here was the secret I’d kept from my brother, all these long years.

When a girl entered the grounds, the Fae curse prevented her from leaving. Once the girl plucked one of my roses, a countdown began. The rose would guide her to me and entrap her within a second prison—the castle walls. The rose enabled me to spy on her and influence her with aphrodisiac scents—but in exchange, it gave me a limited time to win her heart.

If she decided to love me, she would be released from the rose even as I was freed from my curse.

But if she did not love me before the last petal fell—then the terror of the magic revealed itself.

Magic always had a cruel side. Always the terrible and monstrous blended with the good and pleasant.

When the last petal drifted from each woman’s rose, she would transform into a demon of darkness, a creature of night and horror.

A welaway.

I’d watched every transformation, out of guilt and out of respect to the women. I felt I owed it to them.

And yet part of me had always felt vindictively satisfied, as if they deserved their fate for refusing to love me.

After a guest had completed the transformation into a welaway, she would nose around the cell until she inevitably noticed the only way out—the secret passage. I never closed the entrance to that tunnel—after all, only a demon could escape that way, and nothing had ever tried to come back in, until last night.

I didn’t blame myself for the side effect of the rose spell. I blamed the vagaries of magic itself. I hadn’t intentionally woven that particular consequence into my spellwork—magic had decided it. Magic had a mind of its own.

The welaways had existed in the woods of our kingdom for more than a century. Two of my cousins had been killed by them when I was a young sorcerer just learning how to use my magic.

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