Cursed Opal (The Cardinal Winds, #3) - Kathryn Ann Kingsley

1

I am a monster.

Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold the pencil. She had snapped the sharpened tip several times already. Now she was scratching at the paper with blunted lead and pointed bits of wood. It barely left a mark on the page of the notebook in her lap.

She stared down at her hand—is this mine?—that was attached to a wrist she didn’t recognize. To a forearm that wasn’t hers. To an elbow that wasn’t hers. She was shivering. She felt numb. She knew it was from the painkillers he had injected her with. But the painkillers were better than the pain that had woken her up, the sound of a scream ripping from her throat.

A scream she hadn’t recognized.

A scream that hadn’t been human.

The pencil slipped from her fingers—through the white and black fur that covered her digits. With a low whine in her throat, she tried to pick it up again. She didn’t feel in control. These weren’t really her hands. She didn’t have fur.

She didn’t have claws.

“It’s all right. Try again.”

She didn’t look up at the soft voice that was gently trying to coach her through the action. She pressed harder against the wood wall at her back, feeling the edges of the plank digging into her.

She felt numb.

But somehow, she still felt too much at the same time. Every movement of the air. Every ridge of the wood floor. Every light was too bright. Every sound was too loud.

And these were not her hands.

“Try again, sweetheart…it’s going to be okay.” The man didn’t come closer from where he crouched on the floor some ten feet away. He had tried to. She had also tried to tear open his face because of it.

She reached for the pencil with trembling hands she still insisted weren’t hers. This time it stayed in between the grayscale fur on her fingers. White and black stripes ran over the back of her hand and up her arm to just past her elbow had no business being there.

Shouldn’t have fur. Should have been pink skin. Should have been normal. Her nails should not have been pointed claws.

She put the blunted pencil to the paper and began to scratch out words.

“It’s good to keep a journal. Especially now that so much has changed. It will help you sort out your thoughts and feelings.”

She was shivering again. She was altogether too hot and too cold at once. She refused to look up at the man. She didn’t know what she would do if she saw his face.

Scream?

Try to kill him?

Cry?

She focused on the paper. And she wrote the words.

My name is Opal.

I am a monster.

Four months earlier

Opal watched the sun rise onto rows of white linen hospital beds. The nurses and doctors all wore the same color of perfect, pure fabric. She wondered how it was possible to keep everything so tidy in their line of work.

Spares, she assumed. And bleach.

Lots, and lots, of bleach.

There were at least a hundred cots in this one room alone, arranged in two long rows with their headboards up against the walls. Windows high overhead provided a glimpse of sunlight or, as was more common in Britannia, dreary gray clouds. It was early morning, and just a bit of that elusive blue sky was visible through a few of the panes.

The ward didn’t have much of a view. It wasn’t designed for that.

It was designed for the dying.

She had tuberculosis. “Consumption” was what her friends and colleagues called it. It was a common enough of a fate in her line of work, after all. She fought a cough, fought the blood that wanted to bubble up and fill her mouth. She could taste it in the back of her throat—coppery and bitter. She scooched up on the bed, sitting a little straighter and placing her shoulders against the brass tubes of the headboard. Maybe a better angle would help her breathe.

Nope. It didn’t.

She sighed, coughed, and grimaced at the taste. She wiped her lips with the scrap of cloth they gave her. Her hands trembled and shook as she did. She had become so weak over the past few months.

It wouldn’t be long now, they said. She had a month at most. But illnesses like hers could escalate without warning.

Opal was going to die.

At least they kept her on painkillers when she was here in the hospital. She could go home, but they wouldn’t let her leave with any of the opium that helped take the