Page 42 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

There’s hardly any food in the city. He told her how people had started eating rats up there too.

He grins at her. “Me.”

She doesn’t understand at first, but then she remembers his stories, what Bennet did to him over and over.

She recoils, shaking her head violently.

He steps towards her. “It’s alright. I’ve regenerated loads of times. This’ll be nothing. If you go slow, you’ll be able to eat as much as you want.”

She tries to back away from him, her hideous, monstrous legs skittering across the dry tunnel, shapeless noises burbling in her throat as she tries to speak.

“It’ll be fine,” he says, and the torch flickers out, and she’s as blind as he is when his hand finds her in the dark. “You saved me, now I’ll save you.”

She tries to push him away.

“Don’t worry. This’ll be nothing,” he says.

As her senses adjust, she can see that he’s still smiling. Six, the only person who will ever know that she was once a girl with two eyes and a mouth and two hands and feet.

She won’t do this. She can’t. He’s all she has. She will never—

But she’s so hungry.

She moves a little closer, only wanting to smell the sweetness of him. She will not eat him, she will only—

Her body moves instinctively, knocking his legs out from under him, pinning him down with huge hands. He gives a startled gasp but doesn’t struggle.

She forces herself to loosen her grip so he can slip away and escape her, but he lies still, only shifting to pull his shirt and jacket up so that they won’t get bloodstained.

She finds his hand with her own small hand, one of the few parts left of her. Feeling his fingers with hers, reminding herself that it is Six, her only friend, as burning tears stream down her face, the salt blurring her senses.

He squeezes her hand. “It’s alright. Loads of times—remember? Just… s-slowly.”

She gasps several times, trying to block out his scent.

She won’t. She’s not a monster.

But her mind goes blank with hunger and her fangs drag across his belly, his organs shredding open beneath her teeth. She gulps desperately, filling her shrivelled belly until her lungs begin screaming for air, forcing her to pause, gasping as she remembers herself.

She jerks away with a hysterical sob, turning to flee, to let herself be captured, but Six is still gripping her hand and will not let go.

As she watches in horror, his mangled organs reform, filling the empty cavity.

She dips her head, forcing herself to feed before the incision closes, gulping more slowly.

When she pauses again, her hand is still clenched in his. His expression has grown far away and dazed.

Her fingers tremble, and she is desperate to show him that she's still that girl in the small room, only locked inside a more hideous cage.

Choking back her tears, she falteringly begins moaning the songs she once sang.

SenLinYu grew up in the Pacific Northwest and studied classical liberal arts and culture. They started writing in the Notes app of their phone during their baby’s nap time. Their collected online works have garnered more than twenty million individual downloads and have been translated into twenty-three languages. They live in Portland, Oregon, with their family. Alchemised is their first novel.

REVIEW: The Thrice-Bound Fool by Christopher Buehlman

Review by Rai Furniss-Greasley

Fan favourite chalk-and-cheese duo Kinch na Shannack and Galva dom Braga return in The Thrice-Bound Fool with another heart-warming—and heart-breaking— tale in the Blacktongue world from Christopher Buehlman. Following the events from The Blacktongue Thief, Kinch and Galva find themselves isolated and on the run, heading into a treacherous mountain range, desperate to escape The Guild who pursue them with unfriendly intentions.