Yurui The Cursed One

The dead woman lies in the sand, face up toward the stars, except that there is nothing left of it; even most of her neck is gone. All that remained was just some skin and flesh hanging off the shoulder area where the neck was supposed to be.

For a while, I just stare at her.

The desert wind drags loose strands of hair across the sand. Blood has soaked into the dirt beneath her body, turning the pale sand into a dark, muddy smear. One of her arms is bent in half, bone sticking out. Her leg was crushed beyond recognition, twisted into something I couldn’t make sense of.

I looked away fast, bile crawling up the back of my throat.

I wait for the barfing to start. It doesn’t. The guilt creeps in instead, slow and poisonous, spreading through me one inch at a time. The scariest thing is that the guilt feels entirely manufactured, like my brain noticed the situation and started producing the appropriate response accordingly. But deep down, I know the truth. I couldn't care less whether she lived or died. Hell, my mother probably has not even gone cold yet, and I have already stopped thinking about her.

Does that make me a bad person? Maybe. I don’t think I have the luxury of caring about morals right now.

Nara lands beside the corpse and straightens, feathers settling around her shoulders. The bat hangs from one hand, blood and bits of gore dripping from it.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Stephan?!”

Her voice cuts through the night like a knife dragged across glass. I turn my eyes toward her. She is standing a few steps away from the corpse, wings half-spread behind her, one hand clenched around that bloodstained baseball bat. Her face is twisted with rage.

“We had three girls,” she screams, jabbing the bat toward the dead woman. “Three! And now there’s just one left!”

Stephan looms a few feet away from the ruined car, moonlight sliding over the brutal slope of his shoulders. From the waist up, he almost looks human. Almost. Then his body drops into a pale, segmented mass, dragging behind him through the sand in thick, swollen folds. He looks at the dead girl. Then at Nara.

“I’ve had her, she surrendered!”

Nara’s laugh comes out sharp enough to cut skin. “The only thing you ‘had’ was a hole in the ground and a body getting ripped apart in pieces.”

“What the hell was I supposed to do ?! She kept skittering around like a damn flea !”

“She was moving too much? Seriously ?! That’s your excuse ?”

“I had it handled ! She surrendered ! Then you came crashing in and fucked everything up !”

Nara sighs and gives Stephan a cold glare. “Yes. Brilliantly handled. You let her tear you apart so badly that I’ve had no other choice but to put her down. The blood's on your hands.”

“But—”

Stephan pipes up only to get shut down instantly.

“Can you imagine what would happen if we brought a Miracle Inc. agent that nearly tore you apart into the main compound, with the boss and every executive waiting inside? Fuck, forget that. We’re lucky the purple bitch couldn’t be bothered to keep an eye on us, or we’d be fucked six ways to Sunday.”

Stephan squirms nervously at the mention of the “Purple bitch.”

“Remember, she may be overseeing us, but when it comes down to it, we’re on our own. We do the job right, she takes the credit. We fail, we take the blame. Then she punishes us for embarrassing her.”

Nara looks up at the moon. “Such is life. We adapt or die.” She tilts her head toward Stephan. “And I don’t want to die. You hear me, Stephan?”

He nods.

Nara leans down towards me, and a creepy smile crosses her face.

“Well. At least this one is still breathing.” She pokes my cheek with her finger. “Good girl, aren’t you? Didn’t even try to run. I like good girls.”

Her smile widens.

“You know what? We want the same thing, really. You want to survive, and I need you alive. So why don’t we make this easier on both of us and work together?”

She taps me on my shoulder hard enough to send pain flashing through my entire body.

I grit my teeth.

“You know what? I’ll even try not to break you too badly, as long as you play nice. How about that mmmm ?”

I didn’t know why, but those words struck a chord in me. My heart started beating faster, and all of a sudden I could feel heat welling up inside me. They keep talking. Their mouths move. Their voices crash into each other. Nara’s wings twitch like broken fans. Stephan’s shadow crawls across the sand whenever he shifts his weight. I hear all of it. Then my focus tightens, and the sound drops away all at once, like the world has been shoved underwater.

A pulse starts behind my eyes. Thump. Thump. Thump. As if something were beating drums against the inside of my head.

I can feel my skull tightening around my brain. The desert tilts. The dead woman blurs. Nara’s voice stretches into a long, ugly sound before fading into the ringing in my ears. My body suddenly feels light.

The chicken woman backs away slowly, feathers shifting around her shoulders, her expression tightening. What? Is there something on my face? Did I shit myself while I was lying there? I look down, and the answer comes to me naturally, all on its own.

The same sleek insect-like legs were back, long, curved, and armored, folded beneath me like they had always belonged there.

Ah. Good. Right on time.

This time, I do not fear the monster crawling out of me. I need it. I crave it. I embrace it.

I push myself up slowly, armored legs scraping against the sand, and even though I cannot see my face, I can feel the smile stretching across it.

I move lightly across the sand, almost floating, each step coming with zero effort. My feet were moving without me even having to tell them to. Normally, that would terrify me. It doesn’t now. A strange euphoria takes hold of me instead, overwhelming enough to smother every sensible thought in my head.

I was walking straight toward Stephan. Weirdly enough, it almost felt as if I were looking from outside rather than piloting my own body, as if it were some kind of weird out-of-body experience. Nara backs out of my way. Her mouth opens and snaps shut. For one stupid second, she just stares at me like she was confused as to why the last piece of merchandise was approaching the man who just broke the other two.

Stephan turns slowly. His small, cruel eyes settle on me. “What?”

I stop in front of him. Up close, he is even bigger. His torso blocks half the sky. His breath smells like old meat and copper. I have to tilt my head back just to see his face. For a second, neither of us moves. Then I raise my fist and hit him in the stomach.

It is a terrible punch. Weak. Awkward. Probably embarrassing to everyone involved. My knuckles meet his body with a dull little thud. Stephan blinks. Nara stares. Somewhere deep inside me, a hysterical laugh scratches at the back of my throat. Well. There goes my heroic moment.

For a moment, the entire desert seems to pause, as if it were feeling secondhand embarrassment.

Then Stephan backhands me.

The world lurches sideways. Sand, stars, car, blood. Everything spins. I hit the ground hard enough to knock the air out of me. My shoulder cracks. Something hot tears through my arm. When I look down, a pale shard of bone is sticking through the skin near my elbow. I stare at it. I should be screaming at the sight of my own mangled limbs. Instead, I feel nothing.

Must be my imagination.

I push myself up. My broken arm hangs at my side.

I start walking again.

Behind Stephan, Nara lets out a strangled sound. “Are you kidding me?”

Stephan looks over his shoulder at her. “What?”

“The last one is broken too!”

“I barely touched her.”

“You barely touch everything! That is the problem!”

Their argument explodes again, louder than before. Nara swings her bat at him this time. It cracks against his shoulder with a dull, meaty thud. Stephan turns on her. For a second, the two monsters forget I exist.

Nara takes to the air, wings beating hard enough to whip sand into spirals around her. She darts around him in quick, furious arcs, her bat flashing through the moonlight. Once. Twice. Three times. Each hit lands with a heavy crack. For one bright, impossible moment, it almost looks like she is winning.

Then Stephan reaches up and catches her by the ankle.

Nara’s eyes widen. “Wait—”

He yanks her down. Her body slams into the sand so hard the ground jumps beneath my feet. Before she can roll away, Stephan seizes one of her wings at the root, where it joins her back.

Nara’s scream cuts through the ringing in my ears.

He pulls.

The wing tears free with a wet, fibrous rip, spraying blood across the sand in a dark arc. Her scream rises into something raw and almost inhuman as Stephan flings the severed wing aside like a piece of trash.

I walk up behind him. My broken arm is still dangling uselessly, so I use the other one.

I punch him again.

I think he felt this one; heck, I felt this one.

The impact snaps up my arm, sharp enough to cut through the hazy euphoric feeling dulling away all my senses.

His body shifts forward half a step before he slowly turns his head toward me. He does not look hurt so much as offended, as though I have not injured him at all but personally insulted him.

I look up at him.

His hand comes down.

Everything goes white.

For a moment, I cannot hear, think, or breathe. There is only the ringing sound blaring inside my head. When the white fades, I am on the ground again, sand pressed against my cheek, staring at a blurred smear of moonlight. Dark gray clouds drift across the sky, swallowing the moon, smothering what little light the desert had left. Scarily enough, the hearing hasn't reappeared. All I could hear was a dull ringing haze. The world becomes muffled, like I have been dropped underwater. Through the blur, I hear Nara shouting from far away.

“Stephan! Are you trying to kill the last one too?! Look at it! It’s bleeding from the eyes, the nose, the mouth—fuck, everywhere!”

I try to push myself up, but my body refuses to cooperate. My head lolls back, too heavy to hold up, and my arms hang uselessly beneath me.

Who is bleeding from the ears and nose? That is my last thought before my body gives out. I collapse headfirst into the sand.

For a while, I cannot move. My arms feel heavy. So do my legs. I feel as if my entire body were made out of lead. The sand beneath my cheek is cold. The blood running from my nose is warm. Above me, Stephan and Nara keep yelling, but their voices drift in and out like a faulty radio.

I should stay down. That is the rational choice. I have always chosen the rational thing. No matter how ugly. No matter how cowardly. No matter how much it made me hate myself afterward. At some point, I even started taking pride in it.

Stay down. Stay quiet. Let it pass. Survive.

My fingers dig into the sand instead. Then my arm moves all on its own.

A sharp heat blooms in my chest. Not pain. Something deeper. Something scarier. It spreads through me in a slow wave, crawling under my ribs, down my spine, into my broken arm. My skin prickles. My teeth ache. My ears pop, and suddenly the world comes rushing back, loud and sharp. Nara’s ragged breathing. Stephan’s heartbeat, slow and heavy. Thea’s blood sinking into the dirt. My own bones shifting. I could hear it all.

A wet little click snaps through my arm. Then another. Then another. My broken elbow twists back into place. I look at it. The bone has slipped back beneath the skin. Dark armor spreads over my arms, swallowing the exposed flesh piece by piece.

I start laughing. It comes out weak and ugly, more of a cough than a laugh.

“I guess my body still has something left to give after all.”

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