“You really are a stubborn one, aren’t you?”

Michael looked up, his face swollen and tight from the sobfest. He was hollowed out, unable to summon shock at a voice in the silence, or shame at being caught with red eyes and snot dripping down his chin. Korri was in front of him again, in the same dirty, white shift, the same bare legs covered in scar tissue and her hair hanging in wild corkscrew curls and dripping onto her shoulders. 

“What do you want?” he choked out. His head was blank, white noise between his ears and nothing else. 

“What I want doesn’t really matter,” Korri muttered. It seemed like that fact irritated her to no end. She crouched in front of him. From this angle she looked much smaller, a fragile, fair thing. The moonlight reflected off of the knobs of her spine and the bones of her shoulders not covered by her clothes. Purple marks he hadn’t noticed before were littered on the delicate areas. They were familiar. 

“Pablo Neruda,” he whispered and Korri stiffened.The line from outside the bar coming to mind. He knew that poem, ‘Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks.’ He knew what those marks were. “’They pocked her with cigarette ends and burnt corks.’ That’s you isn’t it? The Mermaid?” 

Korri didn’t move; Michael couldn’t tell if she was even breathing. If he was less numb, he’d feel bad for saying that. As it was, he observed her suddenly defensive posture. A white shift, thin skin, glass bones and cigarette burns. It wasn’t a nice picture. “I’m sorry.” He was. He really was. Even with all she’d put him through, those pockmarks screamed pain. Something else was bothering him too. 

“That song, the one the creature was singing. I know that one too.” Korri flinched, her expression watchful and pinched. “Kemp Owen. Is that supposed to be Isabel, who was turned into a monster? She’s your ‘Lady,’ right?” He huffed out a laugh, the pieces finally falling together in the face of Korri’s muteness. “Damn, I knew all the stories were real, but I didn’t think that meant all the stories. Do all of them have a tale like yours?” He waved to the pairs of eyes that glinted from the trees and the objects that hung in the air. 

“Most of them,” Korri muttered with an aborted jerk. 

“So what? Isabel finds you and brings you here? As charity cases?” His relaxed tone failed to conceal the bite in the words.

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Korri hissed, bristling like a cat. “You know nothing! I wanted to die after what they did to me! That poem only scratched the surface of what happened.” Her fingers gripped the bark, splintering sections with her inhuman strength. “Isabel saved me. She called me here. She loves us. She would love you too.” She reached up and snagged a pearl necklace that floated in the air above their heads, twining the chain around her fingers like a nervous habit. 

“If you can really see the future,” Michael said, “you know I won’t stay here.” He refused to be trapped. He was stubborn, just like she said. Korri stared into the distance, pinching one of the pearls hard enough to cause spiderweb cracks to form. 

“I see hundreds of futures, Pretty Boy.” She moved so the burns were no longer in his line of sight. “It’s up to you which one you choose.” She sighed, standing up. “Try the far path by the south side of the dome tomorrow.”

“What made you suddenly decide to be helpful?” Michael asked snidely. 

“There was a future I hoped wouldn’t come to pass.” Korri flung the pearls back into the floating river of lost things. “Then you woke up.” Without a backwards look, she leaned back and fell off the tree limb, floating gracefully to the ground below. 

“I hate this place,” Michael muttered, watching her form fade into the trees. 

Korri hadn’t lied, there was a path on the south side of the dome. It had taken him about an hour to determine that it was south given that the sunlight through the water wasn’t exactly steady. His boots clattered over loose stones and knobby roots, and slid in patches of sand and broken sea shells. The further he went, the darker it became and the closer together the shrubbery on either side grew, nearly obscuring the trail he was meant to be following. Trees that had been widely spaced at the beginning of his trek were crowding around him, catching the shadows and blocking out the light. Thorns the size of his thumb began making themselves known, digging into his pants and tearing loose threads with each pass. A glance down revealed he had three new tears in each leg of his perfectly decent dark wash jeans. The exposed skin now bore tiny nicks, welling with sluggish, dark blood. He ignored the stings and plowed on, mentally cataloging anything he could drag up from the depths of his memory about Isabel. 

Like a lot of ballads about cursed women, it was the step-mother that did it, turning Isabel into a monster and tying three strands of her hair to a tree to trap her in a craig by the ocean. For each kiss, a strand of hair was unlooped, gradually freeing her from the curse. According to the ballad, he’d done the deed and once she was beautiful again, Kemp Owen fell in love with her. While the ballad seemed to have had a happy ending, obviously reality was a bit different since Isabel was still trapped in the monstrous form. Of course, in the tale, the step-mother got punished for her crimes by being turned into a monster as well. That was justice Michael could get behind. Screw the whole ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’ crap. If you bite, expect to get bitten back. He’d told his sister something similar once, but it was the vaguest of memories and he didn’t pay it much attention. 

He noticed the smell when the light was nearly gone, the trees having become so packed together that that section of the forest was in permanent twilight. The damp air was still and heavy in the gloom and stank of rot and poison. Michael gagged as he breathed in the foul smell. Still, he followed the path. Something was watching him. 

A presence had been following him down the path. Something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. It followed him to the cave where the path ended. He didn’t hesitate before marching inside. For a brief moment, the feeling of being watched vanished. Michael looked around the cave, exploring.

It was a rather clean cave, the rocky floor swept clean of the expected bones and rocks. A pallet was set up in the corner with rough blankets and pillows forming a large nest. The smell was stronger here, but old. There were carvings on the wall, scattered and hastily scratched into the rock. The diorama was reminiscent of children’s scribbles on walls. His fingers trailed over the grooves, not trying to understand them or what they were. He was more focused on the light that flickered over them, coming from the back of the cave. 

There was a room, empty of everything except a scraggly tree in the middle of the floor. At the back there was a wall of water slicing neatly through the cave. Wreathed with stalagmites, it stretched well over his head and into the ceiling of the cavern. This must be the boundary of the dome. He tried putting a hand through the curtain of water, but couldn’t force his fingers past the spray. He pulled back to observe the entrance more closely. The feeling of being watched came back.

The water made a clean line in the cave floor, none of the liquid seeping inside, more like it was being repelled by a spell he could sense but couldn’t see. One thing did cross the barrier, though. A long rope of what looked like twine emerged from the ocean outside and laid across the floor. The end found its home wrapped around one of the branches of the tree. He tracked the twine with his fingertips, noting the rough texture and how it seemed to have grown into the tree. Hair, his brain supplied when he couldn’t remember what the feeling reminded him of. Human hair. 

“This is definitely Isabel’s lair then,” he whispered, almost afraid that talking any louder would disrupt the stillness in the cavern. He failed to notice that the light was rapidly darkening.

“Owen?”

The name rumbled through the walls, vibrations heavy enough that Michael felt them in his bones. He whipped around, coming face to nose with the leviathan from last night. “Owen, have you come back?” Rapidly, the creature shrank, the mutating form blurred by the water wall so that he couldn’t get a clear picture of what was happening. When it shrank to the point that it would fit in the entrance, a clawed, webbed hand reached through the water and wiggled in the stale air of the cave. The rest of the beast came next, still much taller than Michael but far smaller than the all encompassing shadow that had embraced the dome last night. Its milky eyes fixated on him. She was blind.

“Owen?”

He’d never imagined a curse could do something like this. If Isabel had ever been a beauty, every trace of it was gone. Her neck was grotesquely elongated, stretched and bony leading up to a sharp jaw that protruded well beyond what was normal. The long hair that tethered her to the tree was scraggly and in patches on her waxy, pale skull. The rest of her as much the same, skin and bones that were malformed and twisted. The area around her stomach was shrunken and almost pasted onto her spine. Her skin was dull grey and rough, covered in patches of white that looked like scars. Like Korri, she had a tail. Unlike Korri, that tail was covered in black spikes and knobby scales rather than smooth skin. There were knots of more scar tissue that protruded off of the limb, and other spots where the flesh was blackened with rot. Probably the source of the smell.

Michael’s heart broke for her. There was a cloud of death around Isabel, literally. Poison seemed to seep from her skin in a heavy miasma that mingled with the air and threatened to choke him where he stood. How could Korri bear being around it? Isabel’s body was dying and regenerating all at the same time. The curse seemed to have turned into literal poison that mutated her even as it kept her alive. Even as a Reaper, he could feel the numbing effect. It had to be causing intense pain. But, then again, that’s probably what the caster wanted, for Isabel to live and suffer for as long as possible. 

“Owen?” she croaked out again, feeling her way along the floor of the cavern as she pulled herself further inside. Michael shook his head, forgetting that she couldn’t see him. 

“I’m not Owen.”

Isabel cocked her head to the side, birdlike. “Only Owen and Korri come here.” 

“Korri sent me,” he tried. The closer she came, the more she towered over him. He could see now that she’d tied some rope around her waist and dangling from it were small tokens and treasures, along with the ordinary everyday item. There were glass bottles and sand dollars, a crab claw and a shell next to a toothbrush, even a few gold coins and more items that were so decayed he couldn’t identify them. He thought one might be a statue of a deity or The Virgin. Isabel tentatively sniffed the air. 

“Reaper.” There was no true inflection in the word, nothing to give him an impression of if she was excited or angry at his presence. It was more like when you rode in a car with someone and heard them mutter “cows” when passing a farm. “Korri said you didn’t want to stay with us.” Still that same disinterested tone. 

“I can’t.” He waited for anger, but it never came. Instead she drooped, hunching over herself. Sadness floated around the room in a cloud, the smell of poison growing stronger. Michael’s eyes began to sting and water. 

“Owen left too.”

Michael coughed. There was one loop of hair on the tree, which meant Owen had kissed her twice. He didn’t leave, he thought, his head beginning to pound. You accidentally killed him.