Read Online Beastkeeper by Cat Hellisen - Free Book Online Page B

decay was everywhere, but over it was another, stronger smell, rank and musky.
    Sarah edged back, the smell assaulting her nostrils. There was something in it that reminded her of one of the houses they’d once moved into. There’d been a playhouse at the back of the garden, but Sarah’s initial excitement had come crashing down when they’d found feral cats had been using it to live in. There was a sour ammonia smell of pee that no amount of scrubbing had been able to lift. That smell was here too. Only a thousand times worse, mixed with the sweet-gross smell of spoiled meat and decay.
    Nanna bent to push open the door to the hovel with her elbow. “This way, girl,” she muttered as she looked back, catching Sarah with a wicked gleam of her eye. Reluctantly, Sarah followed her into the darkness. The floor of the shack was thick clay mud, and it sucked at Sarah’s shoes, like hands unwilling to release a captive. The stink was stronger inside. As Sarah’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could finally see where the stench was coming from. Most of the shack was taken up with a simple iron cage. The metal was black and wet-looking under the thin moonlight that slanted through the broken roof.
    Inside the cage was a beast. At first Sarah thought it was a bear, with its head lowered between great hunched shoulders, but then it moved and it was clear that this was no creature she’d ever seen in any book, or on television or at the zoo. There was the essence of bear, yes, but also of wolf, of lion. It was a king beast, great and gray, with coarse fur like matted wires, teeth long as her fingers, eyes like lost planets.
    The beast turned in its cage as Nanna set the pot down and fished out a small, ornate key on a slender chain around her neck. The key seemed a ridiculous thing, pale as fingernail parings, but as Nanna held it she whispered, and the key grew larger, sharper, wicked-looking.
    Sarah rubbed at her eyes, and then firmly decided to put it down to a trick of the light.
    Nanna bowed down to unlock the small door, shoved the pot in, then slammed the door shut as quickly as she could. All through the shack the sound crashed, making the walls shiver, and the wet timbers dropped flakes of gunky dirt down on their heads.
    The beast raised one huge clawed paw—more like a hand—and batted at the pot, spilling the meat and bones into the mildewed straw that covered the floor of its cage.
    From the cage came the most awful sounds. A crunching, splintering cacophony. A gnawing and grinding and sucking. Sarah hugged herself tightly and breathed out through her nose, too scared now to move. It’s not real. None of this is real. Wake up. Wake up. She pinched her arm through the thick knit of her sweater, twisting hard enough to know that she’d be bruised in the morning, but nothing about the scene changed.
    Nanna said nothing while the beast fed. When it was done, she hooked the pot out and locked the cage again. Another whisper, and the key shrank in her hands till it was no bigger than the first joint of Sarah’s smallest finger. She tucked it into her dress again. “There,” she said to Sarah. “Now you’ve met him, the one who carries the curse and passed it on to my son. The man who has tied me to this place, and tied your father, and now you in your turn.”
    Sarah’s arms felt limp, the bones turned to custard. They fell to her side with all the strength sucked out of them. Her legs felt just as useless. She needed to get out of there. With an immense deep breath and a force of will she wasn’t sure how she was able to muster, Sarah staggered backward, away from the thing in the cage. Away from the woman who kept him there.
    Was this what her mother and father had meant when they’d whispered about curses? It had to be. It couldn’t be. This was what her mother had run away from, and it was in Sarah’s family, in their blood. The