The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

Snow kept secrets.

“She’s highly suggestible. Her stepmother lets her read novels. All those stories have left her giddy,”

The world was fragile. One day, growth; the next day, kindling.

In this, at least, his grandfather had been correct. Evil was invisible, and it was everywhere.

Too late, he saw that she was one of those temptations better left untried, like a whiskey so potent that it left you blind.

she came to him like a kind of smoke that clung to your hair, your clothes, the inside of your lungs.

So many women seemed to turn their words over in their mouths like sugar cubes, until you could never be sure of the shape of the original thought.

She stared at him with those wide, gray eyes. Like the sky heavy with clouds, or the flint-gray of a Boston ocean.

But no good ever came of worrying, unless there was an action to be taken.

Ounces, grains of sand, seconds falling through an hourglass: Life was all accounting, and at the end of it, the same tab for all.

The mountains that had looked like distant hieroglyphs, ragged tears in the sleek shell of blue sky, now seemed far closer.

“Then the Lord must be mightily displeased with you, because he has led you into the valley of death. Make peace with your Lord before it is too late, because the hungry ones are coming for you.”

Perhaps he only wanted to die in peace.

He beat her to it, though, and his laugh was like water running over stones in the creek—fast and free and clear. She wanted to enter that laugh and to swim and bathe and splash in it, to drink it down and be cleansed by it.

Hope, Tamsen realized, could be a very dangerous thing, especially when dealt to desperate hands.

You can’t stop angry, unreasonable men.

The sudden clarity moved through him with the sharpness of an icicle—seemed to still his heart and uncloud his thinking all at once. The truth was like that, sometimes. Not like being saved, as his grandfather had once told him, but the opposite: cold and terrible and paralyzing.

Reed once thought that love was akin to passion, but he saw now that it was something different entirely; that it was, perhaps, a kind of faith.