A Universe of Wishes by Dhonielle Clayton

Author:Dhonielle Clayton [Clayton, Dhonielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984896223
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The sun is high in the sky by the time the monster—if you can even call it that—wakes in its treehouse made of fallen branches. (Not human bones like those nitwits in the villages claim; the monster always eats those.) Its belly burbles, and it releases a throaty groan. There’s no doubt about it now: the monster’s most recent meal had been absolutely rotten.

It groans again, this time in regret. It should’ve known: the moronic boy had smelled awful, and he tasted of sour milk and rancid meat. He was more pompous than the others, too. Hurling insults until the monster finally ate his face.

Now, staring up into the canopy of green and listening to the music of the forest, with a bellyache from the deepest circle of hell, the monster can feel the change in the air that marks the approach of an interloper—and potential meal. Perhaps this one will be better. A stomach-settler. It’s happened before: the relatively nice boy who tried to use kind words to lure the monster into a rather obvious trap had been like a dose of milk of magnesia after the havoc wreaked on the monster’s gut by the blustering, ruddy-faced chap the monster had previously eaten. That boy had attempted a curse-filled sword attack and tasted like dog dung.

A breeze rustles the leaves overhead, and the monster sits up. Inhales. There’s something…different. About this intruder. Different than the dumb-as-bricks boy-humans with their clubs and spears and bows and arrows—all objects now strung up around the monster’s tree as an unheeded warning. The monster had devoured those boys in a blink and with abandon, though the monster is smaller than the boys had been. And they—the boys—were always so much less filling than they looked. Instead of heart and meat, full of hot air and utterly lacking in substance.

The scent in the air now is missing the mustiness of puffed-up ego and the pungency of presumed victory. There is…sweetness. With a smack of spice. Like a bouquet of flowers wrapped in a string of cinnamon sticks.

The monster hasn’t smelled something so sweet in…well, it can’t remember how long. It brings to mind someone the monster used to know but hasn’t thought of in as long as it could think: a girl.

And she was a girl. Dare had been this girl’s name, the monster recalls, and despite not fully comprehending the word princess, it arises beside the girl in the monster’s mind. And she felt settled in her body and skin, though the monster knew, somehow, that there were many who assumed this girl not fully “girl” because of the way she refused to embrace frivolous things the silly townspeople decided were part and parcel to girlhood. Dresses and dolls and tea parties and stolen glances at their—presumed—boy counterparts.

What the monster does understand is that princess, whatever it means, didn’t seem to fit this Dare girl. Her shoulders had stooped as though she carried the weight of a relentlessly cruel world on them.

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