I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (I Feed Her to the Beast, #1)

by Jamison Shea

TO THOSE WHO FIND FREEDOM IN BECOMING A MONSTER WHEN DENIED THE SPACE TO BE HUMAN

In every room was a chance to have our graceful suffering acknowledged.

“The shoe is an extension of your foot.” And the best shoes required a delicate balance—rigid enough to prop you up but beaten into silence and the shape you needed. Firm but still broken. And always beautiful. Just like the perfect ballerina.

And I’d be perfect too. Girls like me didn’t have any other choice if we wanted to belong.

Strangely, all the room’s daylight appeared dimmer in that corner where he sat, like a photo gone fuzzy around the edges. Broken TV static and shade obscuring an image I had to squint to see. I

Maybe two years from now, one of us would be cannibalizing her. We hated her as much as we loved her, because she had our dream caught between her perfect, pearly white teeth, dangled in front of our faces.

Coralie was a demigod competing against mortals. She belonged, born of the ballet with stardust in her blood. And it took everything in me to fight back the bitter taste in my mouth at the thought.

It scared me a little, that unearned influence, and in these moments, she truly resembled her star-powered mother.

“They’re all vultures in people-suits,” I continued acidly, wanting to test her. See how far I could go. “In cotton candy tutus, ready to devour me if I give them the chance.”

“Without ballet, I’d be dead.” Because I meant it. I didn’t see a world for me without my art in it, where I didn’t live this beauty and torment every single day.

I glimpsed beyond the stage, the golden sculptures and filigreed columns visible even with the house lights off. Angels with trumpets and lyres stared down from the ceiling in judgment. The grand chandelier glowed like the painted heavens were watching. Just looking at it, you wouldn’t know it fell once in the early days of the Palais, crushing the audience below under several tons of gold and burning light. A woman even died.

After all, this was Opéra Garnier, inspiration for The Phantom of the Opera. It was often that the air stopped completely in certain corridors, and we all heard the ghostly footsteps that accompanied walking the halls alone. There were strange doors in the dressing rooms that didn’t open and tunnels beneath the stage, and no one knew where they went. We didn’t know what lay in the pools below, and just earlier that day, I’d sworn shadows flickered in the corner of my vision. We seldom talked about it aloud—if you asked an older dancer, you’d only be met with the same advice: Ignore it.

“But I was saying, there is a perception when one comes to see the Paris Ballet, you know? Opéra Garnier signifies luxury, exclusivity, delicate performers. It’s not typically what our audience expects, to be forced to think of inequality and social issues…”

There wasn’t a single black or purple bruise dotting my knees or shins, no blisters or loose, broken skin to pick clean on my feet. All my toenails were whole and attached and healthy. Disgustingly, unrealistically perfect. Those badges that marked me as a dancer, the calluses I’d earned over the months and years, erased.

The apprenticeship didn’t belong to anyone, technically; Coralie didn’t deserve something just because her mother once held it. And really, nobody else with power stopped to question whether they earned their places. It belonged to the most powerful.

Because I, Laure Mesny, a nobody with nothing, beat Coralie Baumé, the daughter of titans. My power exceeded hers for once—her name, her face, her legacy. Those judges saw a replica of Rose-Marie and still chose me.

Though I ran away six years ago, my father was gone long before that. And I wasn’t a helpless little girl anymore. He created this distance; I was merely maintaining it.

I’d skipped the line. Sure, I might have forced their hand, but that made me a dark horse, not a thief. A clever hero, not a villain. The savior of the ballet, not its ruin.

thrill ran through me at how her eyes rounded, the flash of fear in them as she finally, finally noticed the red in mine. The beast that was tired of feigning deference, waiting patiently for scraps. I squeezed a soft yip out of her and growled, low and full of malice, “Do. Not. Test. Me.”

He’s sitting out of reach because he’s poisonous,

“Well, I was obsessed with beauty. I painted it, I sketched it, I photographed it—then I wanted to become a work of art. And then I wanted to create it myself.” “And then it changed you,” I supplied the ending. “And then I craved it so much, I let it change me,”

“And maybe I don’t want to be good. Maybe I’m tired of being perfect and polished and pretty all the time.” I wanted to be messy, to make a mess of everything. I was so sick and tired of order.

“What if I told you I wanted to be my most monstrous self all the time? What if I wanted to be a god? Would you pray to me?”

“Of course I would pray to you.” He frowned, eyeing lips he couldn’t have. Because the last time we kissed, I lost it. “I’d worship you any way you please. I’d melt Palais Garnier down and build an altar in your name, if you so wished.” It was a reverent whisper, the kind uttered in the wings of a stage, before an audition, with desperation.

I craved annihilation.

I fed her to the beast, and the beast was me, and the beast was within me.