Free Beast by Abigail Barnette Page A

The nightmare visited him so often, it was hardly upsetting anymore. It would continue, he knew, with him running from her through the halls of the palace as the mirrors cracked from the heat and the chandeliers melted. Always, it was only her and him, playing a dangerous chase through the flames, constantly pushing her away.
    This time, though, something changed. When he pushed her, his hands put out the flames, took them into himself. They didn’t burn, but moved like ghosts up his arms. He grabbed her to him, smothering the fire that burned her but turned to a harmless specter at her touch. She fell against him limp as a doll, her hair burned away, her scars long healed, but still she screamed.
    “Philipe!”
    He opened his eyes, confused for a moment at his surroundings. He’d almost expected to see his bedroom at the palace, burned all around him. The wretched sobs and shouts from his dream had followed him back to the tower at Hazelhurn, and the momentary respite of a blank memory gave way to a hellish crush of reality.
    “Philipe!” Johanna called out, thrashing in her sleep.
    It was one thing to ignore a wordless nightmare, but only a monster would leave her to call him and not respond. His head still muddled from sleep and fever, he rose on shaking legs and went to her bedside. He reached for her, brushing her shoulder gently, then, when she did not wake, giving her a little shake. Her eyes came open, wide and frightened in the dark. “Philipe!”
    “I am here,” he told her, but it did not calm her, and he remembered then what Wilhelm had told him. When gripped by her terrors, she sometimes appeared to be awake when she slept on. What a diabolical torture, for her and for her brother. Philipe could not imagine it, appearing to be awake to the world, but senseless in horror, all the while tormented by nightmares and unable to wake in earnest.
    Standing at her bedside, he was reminded too clearly of the night before he’d left Hazelhurn for the last time, the night that an easily bribed guard had seen to distracting Johanna’s old nurse so that Philipe could slip into her room for one last attempt at his ultimate end goal. He could admit now that it hadn’t been only his heart that had longed to possess Johanna. Now, the thought of that guard, and how quickly he’d acquiesced for a little bit of coin, tasted bitter instead of triumphant. If he’d been a smart prince, he would have known something was wrong at Hazelhurn, for a guard to so willingly desert his post. Forgive me, Johanna, I was so stupid then.
    Now, just as he had done that night so long ago, he slipped into the bed beside her, to pull her against his naked body. Fifteen years ago, she’d woken, startled, then melted sleepily into his arms, eager for his kisses, for his hand between her legs, but she’d not surrendered her virtue even then.
    When we are married , she had whispered to him, her fingers closing around his hard, eager flesh, I want you to take me as your wife, not as a lover.
    Those words had been so naive, he’d believed them. Now, he knew better, that a wife should be a lover, that a husband should have that passion for her. It was why he’d never married. He could not sustain that passionate interest in any woman for long.
    In the present, Johanna fought against him when he drew her to his body. She slapped at his chest and thrashed, and for a moment he thought she might have woken and gotten the wrong idea at finding him naked in her bed. But then she quieted, her body going limp against his, and she whimpered his name.
    In the darkness, he could not see her terrible scars, and the body he felt through her thin chemise, though thinner than before, robbed by starvation and time of its softness, felt as familiar and exciting as that night so long ago. He remembered the way she had touched him innocently at first, then she’d grown bolder, using her hands and mouth on him. It had been over so quickly, too quickly, and