Read Online Beasts and Burdens by Felicia Jedlicka - Free Book Online

that was enough to get Danato and me into a buck fight or two. He was jealous of our friendship, and no matter how many times I vowed my loyalty as a friend to him, he just didn’t like it.”
    Cori nodded remembering Belus explain why he was keeping such a distance between them. Danato would have been wounded deeply if he thought Cori was getting too close with Belus.
    “Within a few more months they were married. It was against every protocol imaginable, but I didn’t fight letting her out to move in with him. I moved out, into this place, to give them privacy. They lived happily ever after for about a year. They were trying to have children, but it was proving difficult.” Belus paused staring down at the coffee table. When he looked back up his story renewed. “Then the radio arrived.”
     
     
     
    17
    Cori vaguely remembered Ethan telling her about the radio that helped them discern her from the other transmorphs. What was very memorable was how viciously Belus destroyed the device.
    “It’s hard to say if the house created it. It should have been outside of its abilities. Creating music I mean. I still suspect that it was planted by someone, but who and how are so dizzyingly complex that I’ve stopped asking the questions.” He paused possibly thinking over those questions once again. “She didn’t know. She picked it up to move it and it played a delightful song she hadn’t heard in years. She hadn’t heard any music in months, so she was thrilled. She danced and laughed, and when Danato came home and saw the radio, he threw it against the wall, shattering it.”
    “But I thought you used it to help me.”
    “We did. I was very surprised to see it. To my knowledge the scraps had been thrown into the incinerator. I was most unhappy to see it again. I’ll be furious if it returns a third time.”
    “What happened to Olivia?”
    “Nothing…so far as we could tell. Life continued as normal. Olivia still couldn’t get pregnant so they did some tests.” Belus frowned. “Everything came back blank.”
    “No problems.”
    “No, no results. The pap and blood tests showed nothing, they might as well have been testing water. The ultrasound showed up as a blank white image. It was being blocked by something. Olivia denied knowing anything, and at the time I don’t think she did know, which made every decision that much harder.”
    Belus stood up and paced for a moment. Cori already knew how this story ended, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t going to be hard to hear the second time. “You couldn’t extract the entity?”
    He frowned and shook his head. “By the time we figured it out, it was already entrenched. Removal was not an option and believe me we entertained far more options than we ever thought we would.”
    “Couldn’t you have just, left it be?” She waited for him to glare at her, but he didn’t offer anything. He was barely in the room with her at all. “I mean if it wasn’t hurting her. Couldn’t she just be a host or something?”
    He looked at her blankly and shook his head. “Olivia was long gone by the time we knew Cori. Her body was alive, but all independent brain function had stopped. She wasn’t just a host, she was a shell. The sickest part of all of it was that the entity duplicated her mind so perfectly that she didn’t know any different. Right up until the moment I raised my gun to shoot her, she was still pleading to me that she was Olivia.”
     
     
     
     
    18
    Cori hadn’t expected the sniffling tearful hiccups that wracked her body, but she couldn’t fathom what it would be like for Danato to lose his spouse and Belus to have to kill his friend. It was just too much for her hormone addled brain to take.
    “I’m sorry,” she apologized trying to calm herself down. Belus brought her some water and she sipped it. He took a seat beside her and waited for her to settle.
    “The part of the entity that was Olivia, or played at being Olivia, is still a part of