Kill the Beast by Serra Swift: Chapters 1-3 - Reactor

For thirteen years, Lyssa Cadogan has been hunting faeries and the abominations they created…

Join us every Monday through October 6th for an extended preview of Kill the Beast by Serra Swift, a debut fantasy of revenge, redemption, and friendship with a dash of gritty adventure. Kill the Beast publishes October 14th with Tor Books. Get started with chapters 1 to 3 below, and find additional excerpts here.

Chapter One

Lyssa hefted the bloodstained burlap sack and shoved her way through the door of the Kingmaker, tracking sooty slush on the expensive carpet. She bypassed the line of patrons waiting to be seated, ignoring the ripple of protests that followed in her wake, and made her way to where a pinch-faced headwaiter stood by the entrance to the main dining room. He glanced her way with an automatic, “I’m sorry, miss, you’ll have to…” then faltered, his expression landing somewhere between disgust and horror as the sight of her sank in. The trio of ladies he had been speaking to turned—as well as they could in forty pounds of petticoats, layered skirts, steel-boned corsets, and starched collars, anyway— and glared at her. Their eyes skated right over the bloody bag in Lyssa’s arms, seeming to find her mud-spattered pants and unkempt braids far more objectionable.

It was too bad no one had ever figured out how to feed off the disdain of the rich; the downtrodden would never go hungry again.

“Servants’ entrance is ’round back,” the headwaiter barked at her before apologizing profusely to the women. “I am dreadfully sorry about that, they never seem to learn…”

Lyssa trudged back out into the frigid air, where her bullmastiff, Brandy, was waiting. His tail started up like a metronome when he saw her.

“Around back, I guess,” she told him, and together they picked their way carefully down the dark side alley, the pavement made treacherous with ice, until they reached the servants’ entrance. Lyssa rapped on the door and waited until it was thrown open by a harassed-looking cook with a startlingly familiar face. Richard Miller, one of the city’s innumerable orphans, and a member of Lyssa’s childhood gang. He was all grown up now—as was she— but she would have recognized that crooked nose splashed with freckles anywhere.

“Dickie?” Lyssa shoved his shoulder with mock playfulness, trying to hide the shock of seeing him again after so long. “I didn’t know you worked here!” If she had, she would have chosen somewhere else to do this.

“Lyssa?!” He wrapped her in an awkward one-armed hug, carefully avoiding the sack she was carrying. He didn’t seem to notice the gore, or maybe he just didn’t care. That was cooks for you, completely unfazed when it came to blood and animal parts. “It’s been an age! The boys and I all wondered what happened to you, after…” His grin faded. “Listen, I’m really sorry about Eddie. We all were.”

Hearing her brother’s name on someone else’s lips, after more than a decade of mourning him alone, was like an unexpected punch to the gut. She sucked in a sharp breath, suddenly nauseous.

“Thanks, Dickie,” she said, forcing the words past the lump in her throat. “That means a lot. Hey—I’m here to see Mary. She in?”

“Sure, she’s here.” He opened the door wider to let her into the chaos of the kitchens. Lyssa scraped the soles of her boots on the stoop before stepping into the heat, her face prickling with pain as the feeling returned to her nose. Brandy followed her inside, raising his snout to sniff appreciatively at all of the tantalizing smells clinging to the air.

“That the same dog?” Dickie asked, shutting the door behind them.

“Same dog.”

He let out a low whistle. “He’s got to be—what? Going on seventeen?”

“Fifteen.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “But counting never was your strong suit, was it?”

Dickie grinned. “Feels like longer since I’ve seen you. How’s that even possible, though? I thought dogs that big… you know.” He thumped his heart with a fist. “Gave out early.”

Lyssa made herself smile back. “He’s like me—hard to kill.” She wrestled the burlap sack into a more comfortable position, adding a fresh smear to her already-filthy shirt in the process. The bottom of the bag was blooming with fresh damp, which meant the bundle inside must have soaked through its wrappings again. She always forgot just how juicy these things were, even weeks after they were dead. “Can you go get Mary? I’ve got something needs doing, and soon.”

“Hey, Turnip!” Dickie shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth so that his voice would carry over the clatter of pans and the shouts of the other cooks. “Go fetch Mary, will you? And hurry up!” One of the kitchen boys saluted him and dashed out. Dickie turned back to Lyssa, nose wrinkling as he nodded at the sack in her arms. “What is that, anyway?”

Lyssa rocked on her heels. “Beets.”

“Bullshit. You think I don’t know what beets smell like? Come on, tell me what you’re up to. Or is Lyssa Cadogan too good for her old pal Dickie now?”

It took an effort to keep the stupid grin plastered on her face, so that he wouldn’t sense the hurt he had caused. She hadn’t heard Cadogan in a long, long time. Not since her brother had died and she’d started using Carnifex instead—which simply meant “butcher” in the old scholar’s tongue. “You know William Clarke? Of Clarke and Sons?”

Dickie spat on the floor and ground the gob with the toe of his boot. “Yeah, I know him. What do you want with the bastard?”

“He owes me money. And I’m going to make him pay.”

Her old friend eyed her, and she could see the assessment in his gaze. That skinny-but-vicious child he had known, almost feral in her rage, was now nearing six feet, her biceps straining the fabric of her shirtsleeves, her shoulders broad and thick with muscle. And then there was the double-barreled percussion pistol at her hip, and the enormous bullmastiff by her side.

“I don’t doubt that for a second,” he said with a wink, though it quickly turned into a grimace when he noticed the rusty brown fluid now dripping from Lyssa’s burlap sack onto the floor. “And afterwards, maybe you could help me mop up.”

The doors from the main dining hall burst open, and Mary came bustling in on the heels of the kitchen boy, her cheeks flushed and her starched cap askew, straw-colored hair escaping in wild curls. Her face brightened when she saw Lyssa.

“Perfect timing. He’s being especially awful today.” She grabbed an empty serving cart and wheeled it over, dodging a cook wrestling with a live chicken and a boy struggling to carry a tray bigger than he was. “Dickie, love, hand me a tablecloth and a covered platter—yes, that big one.”

Lyssa nudged the bottom shelf of the cart with her boot. “Brandy, up.” The bullmastiff obeyed, squeezing his bulk onto the metal shelf with a grunt and curling up with his head on his paws. “Good boy.”

Mary covered the cart with a white cloth, hiding the dog from view, and placed the platter in the center. Meanwhile, Lyssa set down her burlap sack with a wet squelch, lifting out the blood-stained bundle inside. The kitchen staff had gathered around in a loose ring by now, and watched her unwrap the severed head of the troll she had killed last week. Death had only made it slimier and more putrid; it smelled like rotting fish shoved into a barrel of brine and left out in the sun to bake for days. The treated cloth she had wound around it had been the only thing keeping the worst of the odor at bay, and the staff made a collective sound of disgust as the stench escaped.

Dickie’s face turned the pale gray of workhouse gruel. “What in the Blessed Lady’s name is that?” he asked as Lyssa set the head down on the platter and arranged some lettuce leaves and lemon wedges around it artfully.

Surefire way to spot a city boy: he’d never seen a faerie with his own eyes before. There was too much iron—poison to their kind—in a place like Warham. What few of them remained kept to the gnarled forests and ancient lakes, a problem for the shepherds and farmers, mostly. But with the cities expanding farther into the countryside every year because of industrialists like William Clarke, they would soon be wiped out altogether. Lady willing.

Lyssa was happy to do whatever she could to help… though not for free. Not when the men employing her were almost as rich as the king himself.

“This,” she said, plumping the lettuce around the severed head, “is one of the monsters our grandmothers warned us about.”

“Like… like that thing that killed Eddie?”

There was that punch in the gut again. “No,” she said lightly, covering the head with the platter’s polished silver lid. It did nothing to improve the smell. “This is just a river troll.”

The thing that had killed her brother was far worse—not a faerie, but a monster made by the faeries for the sole purpose of slaughtering humans. Someone like Dickie wouldn’t know the difference, though, any more than Lyssa would know an oyster fork from a salad fork. The newspapers these days acted like stray goblins were just as dangerous as something like the Beast of Buxton Fields, giving them all equally sensationalized headlines, and since he hadn’t been there that night…

Well. If he had been, he’d be dead, too, and he still wouldn’t know the difference between a troll and a Hound.

“What are you doing with its head?” he asked.

“She’s the Butcher,” Mary hissed, as though Lyssa would take offence to his ignorance.

Dickie’s brows shot up, and he looked Lyssa over with a new appreciation in his eyes. “The Butcher, huh? Have you heard what the papers say about you?”

“I have.” That the Butcher was eight feet tall. That she could rip a man’s head off with her bare hands. That she was—alternately— half monster herself, or some kind of savior. Either way, it had been agreed upon that she was not entirely human. The details seemed to depend on what she had done to get into the news that day, and who had paid for the article. The only thing they’d gotten right was that she killed faeries for money, and that she was good at it.

“So, that head,” Dickie said. “You… cut it off yourself?”

“I did.” Lyssa nodded at the now-covered platter. “This troll was living under a bridge Mr. Clarke wants to tear down. It took a lot of work to kill it for him, and now he thinks he can short me on the payment. Either he gives me what he owes me today, or he leaves here with a belly full of rotting troll brains.”

The staff clapped and whistled at that.

Mary tossed Lyssa an apron and a cap. “Better get moving, then. He’s in and out today, on account of some big meeting this afternoon. Got an earful while I was pouring his wine.”

Lyssa tied the apron on over her filthy clothes and tucked her braids up into the cap. “Ready, Brandy?” she asked, and there was a woof of assent from behind the cloth draping the cart.

Lyssa wheeled the serving cart through the swinging double doors and out into the main dining room, blinking in the overpowering glow of the Kingmaker’s newfangled electric lights. She had only just gotten used to gas lamps by the time something even brighter had come along to replace them, and the intensity dazzled her for a moment before she managed to shake it off.

The hideous odor emanating from beneath the covered platter invaded the room almost instantly, and the murmur of polite conversation and the gentle clink of silverware ceased abruptly in its wake.

“Apologies,” Lyssa announced to the sea of wrinkled noses and scandalized faces now turned toward her. “Delicacy from overseas, incredibly rare and expensive. I understand the fragrance may be offensive to most of you—it takes a true connoisseur to appreciate. I’ll be out of your air in a moment, I assure you.” As she wound her way through the dining room, a handful of people hailed their waiters and demanded that the same delicacy be brought to their tables immediately.

“They’d eat goblin shit if they thought it was in vogue,” Lyssa muttered to Brandy.

The private booths were in the back, away from the barely upper-class riffraff in the main dining room. The booths were completely enclosed, the mahogany walls polished to a blinding shine. Lyssa opened the door to the largest booth and backed the cart in, Mr. Clarke already hurling reprimands at her.

“—took you so long? I have been waiting for a full fifteen minutes for your return, and I am not accustomed to—”

“Mary had to step out for a moment,” Lyssa said brightly, kicking the door closed and maneuvering the cart so that it was perpendicular to the table.

Whatever else he was not accustomed to, William Clarke was most certainly not accustomed to being interrupted by the waitstaff. He glared at her, clutching his roast beef sandwich so hard the meat was beginning to slide out from between the bread. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing forearms covered in more hair than now resided on his head, and he had a napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt to protect his finely embroidered waistcoat from the au jus dribbling down his chin.

“What is this? What is that stench? And who are you?” Mr. Clarke demanded, finally seeming to register the bloody button-up shirt and mud-splattered pants beneath Lyssa’s apron, far outside the usual dress code imposed upon the Kingmaker’s female staff.

Lyssa tapped the toe of her boot against the metal leg of the serving cart, and Brandy slipped out from beneath the cloth, taking up a position to Lyssa’s right.

“You brought a dog into my booth?” Mr. Clarke sputtered. “No wonder that cart smells so foul.”

Brandy growled low in his throat at that, his hackles rising.

“You asked me who I am,” Lyssa said with a grin, tearing the ridiculous cap from her head and letting her long, messy braids tumble down her back. “My name is Lyssa Carnifex. Some call me the Butcher.”

Clarke’s expression soured. “The bounty hunter we hired to get rid of the troll at Prince’s Pass? What do you want?” He shook his head, waving her off with greasy fingers. “No, no. Forget I asked. Whatever it is, my office will handle it. I have far more pressing matters to attend to at the moment—finishing this sandwich, for example.”

Lyssa snatched the sandwich out of his hand and took a bite before tossing the rest to Brandy, who swallowed it whole.

“Now you don’t have a sandwich, so my thing takes precedence.”

Clarke slammed his hands down on the table, rattling the silverware. “How dare you, you insolent bitch!”

“You can afford to have another one delivered to you later, I’m sure. Right now, you and I have business to discuss.”

“I told you, my office will handle it!” he roared.

“I have already been to your office,” Lyssa explained slowly, rolling up her shirtsleeves to expose the tattoos on her forearms: Ungharad’s flaming sword on her right, and a butcher’s cleaver crossed with a blacksmith’s hammer on the left. “They were unable to assist me.”

“So they sent you here?” Clarke snapped, and in his expression Lyssa saw the promise of hell to pay. But her squabble was not with this man’s long-suffering secretary or cowering accountant, and she refused to let them be punished for telling her where to find him.

“They didn’t send me anywhere, Mr. Clarke. I am a hunter. A good one. And you made for very easy prey.” She blew a stray hair out of her face. “You know, you should think about changing up your routine a little. A man with your wealth can afford to be spontaneous once in a while. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Isn’t that what they say?”

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“I want what I am owed.” She removed the lid from the covered platter and dumped the troll’s head onto Mr. Clarke’s plate. Slime and au jus went flying, spattering every inch of the tablecloth— and Mr. Clarke. So much for the napkin.

Clarke tore said napkin from his collar and threw it on the floor. “You—”

“Your office refused to pay me what was advertised,” Lyssa spat. “They said the amount had been set at your behest, and they hadn’t the authority to give me a penny more.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t—”

“No?” Lyssa pulled the bounty advert out of her shirt pocket, the paper crinkled with dried troll blood, and unfolded it slowly before slapping it down on the table. “Here is the price that was advertised.” She took out the check she had received from Mr. Clarke’s office and slapped it down beside the flyer. “Here is what your accountant gave me.”

He looked at her incredulously. “B-but the difference is only a shilling!”

“A shilling I earned,” she growled, her anger spiking at only. A shilling meant a hot meal with good meat in it. A place to sleep out of the cold. And the more shillings she collected from rich assholes, the more jobs she could do for destitute widows free of charge.

“But—”

“One thing you must understand, Mr. Clarke,” Lyssa said, putting the check back into her pocket, “is that I do not forget or forgive those who have wronged me. Robbing me—even of a shilling—is a tremendous wrong, in my book, and I suggest you balance our account while I am still willing to accept late payment. After that…” Lyssa grabbed the back of his head and forced his nose to the bounty advert. She unsheathed one of her knives with her other hand and slammed the point into the table an inch from his face, pinning the paper to the wood. “I will take something of equivalent value from you. Like your head. I am quite good at cutting them off, you see.” She forced him to turn, so that he was looking at the faerie monster she had killed for him and his suspension bridge. Its tongue pressed against his mouth, and he let out a whimper. “Or perhaps I could make you into something more useful than a mere trophy. The rest of this troll is being stitched into a coat as we speak. But you have a nice hide as well, supple and smooth.” She caressed his cheek with the back of her hand, and he flinched violently. “Would you like to be a new set of gloves? A pair of boots? Oh, I know! Undergarments! So that you can kiss my ass all day long.”

“All right,” Clarke gasped. Lyssa let go of him and he sat up, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his expensive shirt. “I… I don’t have anything on me. I do most of my business on credit. But if you come by my office tomorrow—”

“Not good enough, Mr. Clarke. Brandy?” she said sweetly, and the bullmastiff’s ears pricked up at the indication of a command to follow. “Kill this man. Try to leave enough of him intact for undergarments.”

“Wait!” Clarke cried, cringing when Brandy growled at him. “T-take the silverware! A single fork is worth more than a shilling!”

Lyssa leaned against the table, her face an inch from his, and he shrank from her. “This establishment is not in my debt. You are.” A feral smile split her face as she looked him over. “Give me your belt, and we’ll call it square.”

He fumbled with the belt and surrendered it to her without argument. It was a fine thing, tooled with an elaborate, interlocking pattern of stylized wolves, the buckle genuine silver. Worth far more than all the forks in the entire restaurant, but Clarke’s expression suggested that he deemed the cost justified, if it meant this would be the last he saw of her.

Lyssa slung the belt over one shoulder, like she had just won a prizefight. “A pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Clarke,” she said, plucking her knife out of the table and saluting him with it. “Think of me the next time you have a faerie that needs killing.”

Chapter Two

The streets of Warham were bustling, despite the cold. Lyssa strode down Hollyhock Avenue, picking stray pieces of rosemary from her teeth with a sliver of bone. She had pilfered a whole roast chicken and two treacle tarts from one of the tables on their way out of the Kingmaker, and had shared the meat with Brandy while they waited for the pawnbroker to assess the value of William Clarke’s belt. One of the tarts kept them occupied while the tailor put the finishing touches on Lyssa’s new troll-fur coat, and the second one went surreptitiously to the tailor’s assistant, who looked all of ten years old and was far too thin.

The indignant diner Lyssa had stolen the food from was one of the Billingsly boys—he and his brothers had thrown stones at Lyssa and Eddie once when they were children—and when he objected, threatening to have her thrown in jail for larceny, she’d plopped the troll’s head into his lap. A bit of slime on his clothing was the least he deserved; the torrent of vomit that had followed was merely a delightful bonus she hadn’t anticipated.

All in all, the afternoon had been quite a success.

“This coat was an excellent investment,” Lyssa said as she and Brandy made their way to the post office on Fifth Street, stowing the bone she had been using as a toothpick in her pocket along with the others she had saved from the roast. Usually, she would be stuck in the ever-present crowd, carried along in the current of bodies, pushing and shoving to no avail. That was the way of Warham, whether you were a pauper or a lawyer or a woman with a pistol at her hip and a terrifying array of knives hidden on her person. But the stench of death still clinging to the late troll’s fur had everyone scrambling to get out of Lyssa’s path. “I think it’s my favorite possession.”

Brandy yowled in displeasure, and she frowned down at him.

“I don’t own you, silly. You’re my friend.”

Her only friend, these days.

The bell above the post office door jingled merrily as Lyssa stepped inside.

“You stink worse than usual today, Carnifex,” the postmaster’s wife said by way of greeting, waving a brown hand bedecked with rings in front of her nose dramatically.

“Hello, Rosaline,” Lyssa said, leaning her elbows against the counter.

“Absolutely not,” Rosaline said, whacking Lyssa’s arm with a stack of bounty flyers waiting to be tacked to the board beside the mailboxes. “Get that filthy sleeve off my counter.”

“What’s the fuss, my sweet little—oh dear gods above,” Postmaster Jude said as he came out of the back room. “Have you been rolling in shit, love? Or is it the dog?”

Brandy made an indignant sound at the suggestion.

“This coat was a troll a few days ago,” Lyssa said brightly. She pulled her money bag out of one of the pouches on her belt and extracted a few coins from it. As she had suspected, Mr. Clarke’s belt had been worth a ridiculous sum; when added to the amount she’d gotten from cashing the bounty check, she had made out quite well for only a few weeks of work. She’d given a healthy cut to Mary, for helping to arrange Lyssa’s meeting with the building magnate, as well as a bit for Dickie, for old times’ sake. Afterward, there had been plenty left over to pay the tailor, and her mailbox fee, and a few other expenses besides. “Here’s the next twelve months up front.” She slid the coins across the counter, and Rosaline noted the amount in her ledger before depositing them in the lockbox.

“You made a coat out of a troll?” Jude shook his head. “Do you want to send people running when you get within a mile?”

“That’s the idea,” Lyssa said with a grin, crossing to the rows of mailboxes and unlocking hers. She liberated the mass of letters shoved inside and flicked through them quickly, the knot in her stomach easing once she had confirmed that none sported her father’s handwriting on the front. Strangely, most of them had the same return sender noted on the envelope: Alderic Casimir de Laurent, with an address in Bleakhaven. “You should have seen us,” she said, dumping the letters in the drawstring bag her new coat had come in. “We practically flew here from Main, didn’t we, Brandy?”

Rosaline rolled her eyes. “Before I forget, there’s more for you that wouldn’t fit in the box.” She got up and disappeared into the back room for a moment, then trundled out again with a basket full of envelopes and newspapers.

“What’s all that?” Lyssa asked, raising her brows. She tried to keep her voice light, but the tightness had returned to the pit of her stomach.

“That’s what happens when you only pick up your mail once a year.”

“Oh. Right.” Sometimes she forgot that what had only been a month or two to her was often substantially more in the mortal world. That was what she got for living in a strange liminal realm when she wasn’t killing faeries, she supposed. The days out here passed by in a blink, leaving her in the dust.

“You know, love, this sort of thing would be a lot easier if you registered an actual address with the postal service, so that we could bring your mail directly to you,” Jude said gently.

Lyssa snorted. “That would be easier, if I had an address to register. But I don’t.” Not one the mail coaches could find, anyway. She shoved the rest of her mail into the drawstring bag and started to lean against the counter, but Rosaline swatted her again.

“Uh-uh. No. Get out. That stink is giving me a headache.”

“But Rosaline—”

“Don’t ‘but Rosaline’ me. That coat is never again allowed on the premises, as of the moment you set foot outside. So if you want to peruse the bounties or get your mail, you’re going to have to leave that hideous thing in whatever hole you crawl out of each morning.”

“But—”

“I said no buts, girl.”

Lyssa turned her pleading eyes to Jude, but he shook his head. “Rosaline’s rule is law,” he said, “and I’m inclined to agree with this one.”

“Fine. See you next time. Without the coat,” Lyssa promised, when Rosaline opened her mouth to argue.

Brandy let out a whine the moment they left the pleasant warmth of the post office. Lyssa knelt and wrapped her arms around his neck, planting a kiss on his cheek. “I know it’s cold, darling, but we have one more stop to make. Okay?” He woofed, and she kissed him again before setting off.

Troll-fur coat notwithstanding, it took forever to get to the far eastern edge of the city, where the Hagswood used to border Warham. The forest was gone now, thank the Lady, but the old fairground—the place where Lyssa’s brother and so many others had died that night—was still there, converted into a memorial park to honor the victims of the massacre. The black iron gates were propped open, headstones and statues dotting the frost-rimed grass beyond, blobs of color here and there where families had left flowers.

“I should have brought something,” Lyssa murmured. “I never remember to bring anything.”

Brandy whined, as if to reassure her, but it didn’t work. Grief and guilt were already closing in, overwhelming her like they always did when she came to this place. She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the brass plaque on the gate post. IN LOVING MEMORYOF THOSE TAKEN FROM US BY THE BEAST OF BUXTON FIELDS, June 20, 1876.

The Beast of Buxton Fields. Before that it had been the Terror of Trottingham, and before that, the Monster of Mill Road, names piling up along with the bodies as the creature slaughtered its way across the Ibyrnikan Isle over the past two centuries. Most people called it That Thing—afraid that speaking any of its names would somehow invoke it—but to Lyssa it would always be “the Beast.” The horror that had shaped her life into something she hardly recognized, and still haunted her nightmares almost thirteen years later.

It was getting dark now, and someone would come along to close the gates soon. But it didn’t matter. Lyssa wouldn’t be leaving the same way she had come in, anyway. There were certain places where the border between worlds was thin, and crossing the threshold was easier. Buxton Fields happened to be one of those places.

She entered the park and followed the winding concrete path until she got to Eddie’s grave marker, the lichen-crusted stone kissed by dying light. It had been paid for by some charity or temple, and said only: EDMUND CADOGAN II, GONE TOO SOON.

Edmund. He would have hated that. Their father’s name. The sight of it brought the sting of shame to Lyssa’s eyes; it was evidence of one of her many failures as a sister. She should have been the one to pay for her brother’s headstone. She should have been the one to dress his mangled body for burial, the one to say the rights and cover Eddie’s eyes with the proper fare for the riverman, the one to toss the first fistful of dirt into the grave. Instead, she’d gone running after the monster that had killed him, and accidentally stumbled into the liminal realm that separated her world from Faerie. By the time she had come back again, he had already been in the ground for days.

Lyssa knelt before the headstone and traced the asphodel flowers engraved above his name with her fingers. Brandy sat beside her, pressing his warm body against hers.

“Hey, Eddie,” she murmured. “Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve come to see you.” She never knew what to say to him. Felt sort of stupid for saying anything at all. But it would be weirder to sit here in silence, her thoughts fluttering around uselessly in her head. Maybe he couldn’t hear her when she spoke to him out loud, but he certainly couldn’t read her mind. “I’ve been busy, you know? Killing faeries. I still haven’t found the Beast, but it can’t hide from me forever.” She rubbed the scar on her palm, an oath made in blood. “I… I saw Dickie today. He said he was sorry about what happened. He’s all grown up now. Handsome. Works at the Kingmaker. Absolutely reeks of pomade. Lady Bright, you would have given him shit for that.” She laughed, but it died in her throat. Seeing Dickie today had thrown her. He was a reminder of all the things Eddie would never have—a grown-up life, a future stretching out before him. Instead, her brother’s body had long since rotted beneath the grass she now knelt on.

How different would things have been, if she hadn’t made him take her to the circus that night? Would he and Dickie still be friends? Would they all be working at that restaurant together, as inseparable as they had always been, complaining about their rich-asshole patrons over pints of stout once their shifts had ended?

She shook her head, angry at herself. She might as well wonder what things would have been like if her mother hadn’t died, if her father had never dumped them at the workhouse before fleeing the country and his debts. Those were things Eddie had forbidden her from ever thinking about. It was pointless to look back when the past would never change. Better to look ahead, to push relentlessly forward. Give yourself five minutes to break, he had always told her when things went bad. Then shove your pain down deep, where no one can see it, and keep going.

But it was hard not to look back, when she had dedicated her life to avenging the past.

She rubbed the scar on her left palm again. “I miss you,” she whispered, and leaned forward to press her forehead against the cold stone.

Oh yeah? What do you miss about me? She imagined him saying. Go on. Let me bask in your adoration.

There were a thousand things, of course. The countless invisible threads that made up the tapestry of a relationship: the language of siblings, references only they understood, half-remembered jokes only they found funny. She missed his smile—not the grin he used on the people he was charming out of their money, but the one he saved just for her, for those quiet moments when the nights were so cold they had to huddle together for warmth, their breath fogging the air. The smile that said you’re a nuisance but I’m glad you’re with me. It was a smile Lyssa imagined all brothers bestowed upon their sisters like a blessing, and she wished now that she had answered each one with I love you, too.

She missed having someone to huddle beside in this cold, unforgiving world, someone who would share his warmth with her simply because they were family, and because he loved her despite her sharp edges.

Their friends would say they missed Eddie because he was funny, and kind. But he was so much more than that.

He was everything.

And the Beast had taken him from her.

“Lyssa?” a voice said behind her, and in an instant she was on her feet, her pistol in her hand, Brandy growling beside her.

Lyssa’s father stepped into the light of the gas lamp at the edge of the cement walkway. He was clutching a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a creased photograph of their family in the other, taken before Lyssa’s mother had died. Before everything went to shit.

“What are you doing here?” Lyssa demanded. She didn’t lower her pistol. “I thought you were in Westgate.” She had gotten immense satisfaction from seeing Warham’s worst debtors’ prison listed as the return address on his last few letters. Had gotten even more satisfaction from burning what were probably pleas to help him, to pay for his release, unopened.

“I got out six months ago,” her father said. “I’ve been visiting Eddie every week since, to make up for lost time.” He looked old and frail now, his hair graying, dark circles beneath his eyes, the blood vessels in his nose broken from a lifetime of drink. He was thin, too, the muscular frame he’d had as a younger man sagging, his shoulders stooped.

But he wasn’t in rags. He was dressed in the clothes of a clerk, as if he had just gotten off work. The realization released claws of cold fury in Lyssa’s stomach, inching their way toward her throat. He should be suffering, as his children had suffered. Sleeping on the street with discarded newspapers for blankets, as they had often done.

“You don’t deserve to mourn him,” Lyssa snapped. “It’s your fault he’s dead.”

That wasn’t entirely true. It was her fault, too. If she hadn’t goaded Eddie into trying to win the prize money for killing some faerie-made monster in a cage, he would still be alive. But their father was the reason they’d been that desperate to begin with.

Lyssa’s father seemed to fold in on himself, the bouquet drooping as his shoulders slumped. “I know.”

The admission surprised her, but she didn’t lower her pistol. Didn’t respond.

“I’ve been trying to find you,” he said, his voice quavering. “Since before they put me in Westgate. Since I realized your name wasn’t listed with Eddie’s on the memorial wall. I had almost given up when I saw an article about the Butcher in the paper. You may have changed your last name, but I knew it was you.” Those words were accompanied by a disapproving frown that only stoked her fury. As if he had any right to be disappointed that she’d wanted to cut all ties to him.

“How?” she demanded.

“Lyssa Carnifex, the most vicious woman in all of Ibyrnika, hunting the kinds of monsters that took Eddie’s life? It wasn’t too difficult to figure out. You always did have a temper, and when it came to protecting your brother…” He shook his head. “I sent letters to the post office box listed in the article, but I never heard back. I—”

“Save your stamps,” she said through clenched teeth. “I burn anything with your name on it unread.”

“I just want to talk,” he said, spreading his arms wide. Petals drifted from the flowers in the bouquet, scattering at his feet. “I want to apologize for—”

“I will never accept an apology from you,” Lyssa said. “I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to see you, I don’t want any more of your fucking letters. Do you understand me? You died the moment you left us at that workhouse, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Lyssa, please. I didn’t know what else to do.” Her father took a step forward, and she cocked her gun.

“Don’t think I won’t put a bullet in your heart,” she warned him, and he froze. “If you ever see me here again, you are to leave without speaking to me. Swear it.”

“I… I swear,” he said, defeated.

“Good.” She turned on her heel, whistling to Brandy, and plunged deeper into the park, where the light of the gas lamps didn’t reach, walking as quickly as she could until she got to the stone wall bordering the far edge. It was almost double her height, and engraved with a complete list of the Beast’s victims. Lyssa leaned her back against it and let out a shaky breath, unnerved by how present her past was today. It felt like a warning, somehow— but she wasn’t about to sit out here in the cold, picking it apart at the seams. She hitched her drawstring bag full of letters and newspapers up higher on her shoulder and secured her pistol in its holster.

“Ready to go home, Brandy?” she asked, and the bullmastiff huffed a heavy sigh in response. A pang of worry squeezed Lyssa’s heart. Every trek back into this world aged her beloved friend, and he was already older than any normal dog his size should be, as Dickie had pointed out. She knew she should stop bringing him along, but he hated to be left behind, and her resolve to do the right thing for him always crumbled at his first anxious whine.

Looking over her shoulder to make sure her father hadn’t followed her, she reached into one of the pouches on her belt and pulled out a stick of white chalk. She drew three lines on the stone wall, forming the rough shape of a door, followed by a knob. Then she tucked the chalk back into her pouch and knocked. The lines she had drawn began to glow, and the Door swung open.

Lyssa stepped over the threshold, into the forest on the other side.

Chapter Three

It was golden and warm in the Witch’s Wood, a sleepy summer’s day entirely at odds with the cruel winter still clinging to Warham. Dust motes drifted lazily in the air, and a curious bee bumbled around Lyssa’s head as she stepped through the stone archway that acted as a gate between this place and the world she had just left behind.

Brandy barked happily and bounded ahead, the magic already beginning to leech away the ache of old age from his bones. Lyssa breathed in the heady floral aroma of the woods, sun-drenched and green, and felt her own pains begin to subside—the soreness in her muscles from weeks of tracking and eventually killing the river troll; the ache in her heart that visiting her brother always brought on, the old wound made worse by the confrontation with her father.

By the time she got to the clearing where the witch Ragnhild had built her home, Lyssa felt stronger. Steadier. Shove your pain down deep, where no one can see it, and keep going.

Ragnhild’s cottage was a quaint, thatch-roofed thing, with a deep covered porch and diamond-paned windows propped open to let in the breeze. Behind it, just before the tree line resumed, was the smithy where Lyssa worked and slept whenever she wasn’t out on a job. In the mortal world, she would rather sleep on a city street than next to a forest, but Ragnhild had long ago killed the faeries hiding in the Witch’s Wood—she and Lyssa were of a mind when it came to that—and had deemed it safe.

Lyssa climbed the porch steps, careful not to knock over any of the little ceramic herb pots crowding them, and let herself into the cottage. Brandy had already made himself comfortable in his straw-stuffed bed by the hearth, and was working on the beef-hide chew he had left behind.

There was a foul odor clinging to the air in the kitchen, sour and bitter and burnt. Ragnhild’s apprentice, Nadia, was crouched on one of the rickety wooden chairs around the table, knees pulled up to her chest, her long black hair hanging around her face as she tied knots in a silk cord for one spell or another. Her face was screwed up in concentration, dark eyes darting between the cord and the open book lying on the table. The pages were covered in scrawled symbols and cramped handwriting in a language Lyssa didn’t know.

“You smell,” Nadia said without looking up.

“So do you.” Lyssa dug into the pocket of her coat and pulled out the chicken bones she had saved, slapping them down on the table.

“What are those?”

“Bones.”

“I know that,” Nadia said, with the perfect eye-roll that every teenage girl seemed to master instinctively when they hit puberty. “Why are you giving them to me?”

“To practice with.” Lyssa hefted her drawstring bag up higher on her shoulder.

Nadia looked at her with disgust. “I can’t practice on your leftovers,” she sneered. “Carving bones is a sacred art form. Your saliva will desecrate it.”

Ragnhild trundled into the room, stray leaves sticking out of the steel-gray thicket of her hair, the soles of her bare feet dark with dirt. The witch’s wizened face split into a smile when she saw Lyssa. “The brute has returned, which means she has coin in her pockets! Ooo! Chicken bones!” She swiped them from the table and held them up, squinting at them. “These will be perfect for Nadia to practice on!”

Lyssa grinned at the apprentice, who glared at her in response.

“How much did you bring me?” Rags asked as she stowed the chicken bones in a jar by the sink, to be cleaned and dried before they went into the cupboard where the rest of the witches’ supplies were kept.

Lyssa pulled out the pouch of coins and tossed it to her. Ragnhild tested its weight in her palm as if she could count the number of coins by clink and heft alone.

“Is that all?” she asked with a frown.

“Minus expenses.”

“Expenses, expenses. Are the fancy chocolates you never deign to share with us considered expenses, hm?” Rags tucked the coin pouch into one of the pockets of her apron. “It’ll feed us for a little while, anyway. Nadia, I want you to go through the Gate soon.”

“Why doesn’t Lyssa ever have to go get groceries?” Nadia grumbled.

“Because I bring in the money,” Lyssa told her. “If you want to spend an afternoon hacking off a troll’s head, be my guest. I’d be happy to do the shopping for a change.”

“Sit, sit,” Rags said, ignoring their bickering. “Let me brew you some tea.”

“No, thank you. I just came to drop off the coin.”

Ragnhild’s face fell. “I see. Well, we’re having roast lamb for dinner, if you’d care to join us.”

“Thanks, but I have food in the smithy.”

“You’d rather eat tinned sardines than my roast lamb?” the witch said, sounding flabbergasted.

“You never use enough salt.”

Rags waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, pah! Salt is expensive, and doesn’t deserve the lofty reputation it enjoys. Just wait until you try the mint jelly!”

Lyssa sighed. “It’s been a long couple of weeks, Rags. I just want to be alone.”

“But—”

“Oh, let her go,” Nadia said with a smirk. “Lyssa has her own life, you know. She’s far too busy cutting out newspaper articles and reading romance novels to have any time for us.”

Lyssa scowled, her face growing hot with anger. “I told you to stay out of my smithy.”

Nadia stuck her tongue out at Lyssa. “It’s not your smithy, it’s Ragnhild’s smithy, and she asked me to clean it. Absolutely filthy. The cobwebs, I mean, not your books, though they did seem a bit—”

“Rags,” Lyssa started, but the witch didn’t let her finish.

“Stop it, you two!” Rags snapped. “Nadia, don’t be a pest. Lyssa, if you don’t want us going in there, you have to keep it clean. I will not tolerate filth. The cobwebs, I mean—read whatever books you want to, dear.”

“Ungharad’s flaming sword,” Lyssa said through clenched teeth. “I don’t even know why I bother staying here when I could rent a room in the city and not have to deal with you two.”

Ragnhild’s face softened. “Oh, don’t be like that. It’s just that we’re worried about you.”

“I’m not worried,” Nadia muttered, going back to her cordspell.

“You work so much,” Rags said, ignoring her apprentice. “You deserve a nice meal and some rest, once in a while.”

“I’ll rest when every last faerie is dead,” Lyssa said.

Nadia muttered something under her breath as she picked at a difficult knot in her cord, scowling at it like she was trying to disintegrate it with her eyes. But Lyssa didn’t care about whatever snide comment the little witch had made. She turned on her heel and strode to the door.

“It’s okay to live for something other than revenge, you know,” Rags said, and Lyssa’s hand froze on the knob. “Not every last minute has to be spent fulfilling that oath of yours.”

Lyssa stiffened. Turned. “I seem to remember a certain witch making a bargain with a distraught child, promising to make her into a weapon of vengeance. And now that that’s exactly what I am, you’re… what? Having second thoughts?”

Ragnhild’s eyes shone with something like sorrow. “I never meant for it to consume you.”

That was what grief and anger did, though—they consumed. It wasn’t something Lyssa expected Ragnhild or Nadia to understand.

But it didn’t matter what they thought. There was nothing left of Lyssa but her oath, and she had made peace with that. She didn’t deny herself small comforts, like her sweets or her books— she needed something to get her through the long nights, after all—but building a life, a future, when Eddie’s had been stolen from him… it didn’t seem fair.

Besides, she had tried making room for something other than revenge in her heart, once, and it had ended in betrayal. At the time, it felt like a sign from the Blessed Lady, a reminder that Lyssa had one purpose in this life, and deviating from it was not an option.

“A sword is only a sword, Rags,” she said. “I can’t be anything else.”

“Even a sword spends some time in its sheath.”

Lyssa rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’ll eat your damned roast and stay a few days. I need to go through these anyway.” She patted the bag full of newspapers and letters.

Ignoring Ragnhild’s invitation to sort her mail at the kitchen table, Lyssa headed out to the smithy. Brandy followed with his beefhide chew, and together they climbed up the creaking wooden steps to the loft above the forge. The space was big enough for her bed, a tiny writing desk and chair, and her crates of tinned food and books—some romance, as Nadia had teased, interspersed with several of the newer detective novels. She had read them all a hundred times, and would probably read them a hundred more, taking comfort in the happy endings—a mystery solved, a killer captured, the triumph of good over evil. Fiction was so much tidier than real life. Justice always prevailed, and the heroes were always victorious.

Brandy resettled himself on the bed while Lyssa tossed the drawstring bag down on the desk and stripped out of her filthy clothing. She inspected the cuts and bruises riddling the hard planes of her body, then undid her braids and combed out her hair with her fingers. She needed a proper bath, one that involved soap and vigorous scrubbing. Or at least a soak in the hot springs, to heal her cuts and ease what aches the magic of this realm hadn’t been able to soothe.

But first, she had work to do.

She sat down at her desk, gazing at the newspapers tacked to the walls, the edges of the cheap paper curling from the relentless heat of the forge. Articles about deaths and disappearances that seemed like they might have involved faeries, or the creatures they had created. The walls around Lyssa’s bed were papered in clippings about the Beast, specifically, along with all of the information Lyssa had gathered on the creature. There were lists of its various names, its numerous victims. A map of Ibyrnika, with red pins to indicate verified deaths or sightings before Buxton Fields, and yellow pins to indicate potential sightings or deaths in the years since. There was only a smattering of yellow pins, despite how active the creature had been before—and not a single one of those leads had panned out. Lyssa had wasted so much time chasing down dead ends, stalking rumors and shadows, and all the while the monster lurked somewhere just out of her reach, biding its time until the next massacre.

She spent the next two hours scouring the newspapers Rosaline had saved for her, searching for anything that might lead her to the Beast: frantic eyewitnesses insisting they had seen a monster; accounts of livestock being brutally slaughtered in the night; reports of violent deaths perpetrated by unknown assailants, especially if the speculation was either “serial killer with no discernible motive” or “wild animal that has developed a taste for human flesh.”

There was a knock on the smithy door below, Ragnhild’s hopeful call of “Dinner!”

Lyssa ignored it. She would eat later, when she had finished her work.

But there was not even a whisper of the monster in close to a year’s worth of papers. It was like the damned thing had vanished.

She was starting to fear that it had. The Hounds—the creatures crafted by the faeries for the sole purpose of slaughtering humans—couldn’t be killed by ordinary weapons, nor did they die of old age or disease. But that didn’t mean someone else hadn’t gotten to the Beast first and hidden it away, out of her reach.

Someone who knew exactly what killing it would mean to Lyssa.

She shook the thought away, and the spark of anger that accompanied it. No. The Beast was still out there, somewhere. It was only a matter of time before she found it.

Or it decided to come out of hiding and unleash more than a decade of pent-up bloodlust on another circus, another celebration, another group of unsuspecting humans.

By the time she was finished with the last newspaper, her muscles were stiff and her mood was dark. She desperately needed that hot bath.

“I’m going to the pool,” she told Brandy, but he was already snoring, his paws twitching in dream, what remained of the beef-hide chew on the floor. Lyssa picked it up and set it on the bed beside him so that it would be close at hand when he woke up.

Shoving the stack of letters still waiting to be read into her bag, she slung it over her shoulder and went downstairs without bothering to put on clothes—surviving on the streets of Warham had robbed her of any sense of propriety, and it was only Ragnhild and Nadia here, anyway.

As she slipped out of the smithy, her foot landed on something soft and squishy. Lyssa reeled back, nearly falling on her ass, before she realized that it was a plate draped with an embroidered hand towel to keep out dirt and curious insects. Her dinner, presumably.

“Did you have to put it right there?” she snapped, and could imagine Nadia’s smirk, Ragnhild’s measured reply. Where else was I supposed to put it? Next time, come eat at the table when I call you, if you don’t want your food left on the ground.

With a muttered curse, Lyssa snatched up the plate and took it with her into the forest.

There was a river a little way into the trees, and she followed it until she came to a switchback path leading up a steep incline. The hillside was dotted with pools overlooking the river below, each with a different temperature; Lyssa climbed nearly to the top, to one of the hottest pools. She set her plate and her bag full of letters near the edge and slid into the steaming water, sucking in a breath at the sting of it against her wounds. The water had healing properties, and by the time she got out of it, her fingertips wrinkled and her muscles loose, her bruises would be faded yellow and her barely scabbed cuts would be nothing but soft pink scars. It was only good for minor injuries, though—anything worse, and she would need Ragnhild’s magic instead.

Lyssa unwrapped the towel from the plate, picking up bits of tender lamb and roasted garlic potatoes with her fingers and popping them into her mouth. Not enough salt, of course, but Rags was right—the mint jelly more than made up for it. The lamb was better cold than the Kingmaker’s chicken had been fresh, despite being slightly squashed, and she almost regretted not sharing any with Brandy.

She leaned back against the side of the pool and opened her mail between bites.

A lot of it was junk—advertisements from various shops begging her to try their wares. Everyone wanted to be able to say that the Butcher relied on them for all of her faerie-killing needs. She tossed the handbills aside and set about opening the letters from Bleakhaven next. The ones from this Alderic Casimir de Laurent. Lyssa snorted, and almost choked on a piece of potato. Only a prissy rich prick from a long line of prissy rich pricks would have a name like that.

The first of his letters was dated nearly a year ago—right after she had last been in Warham.

He gave the address of a pub in Bleakhaven and promised to make it worth her while. She snorted again—the prissy rich prick spent every single night in a pub? Probably hiding from a nagging wife and a gaggle of snot-nosed brats he couldn’t stand.

The next few letters were more of the same, though as time wore on they began to sound a bit indignant at her lack of a response.

A laugh burst from her lips at that, and she tossed the paper aside.

The last letter was dated only a few weeks ago, and the tone was entirely different from the rest. In fact, it contained only two sentences, rather than the lengthy paragraphs of flowery language that had characterized the others.

Despite this Alderic Casimir de Laurent clearly being the exact type of man Lyssa hated most, she was intrigued. Like most noblemen, he had danced around what it was he wanted her to kill, but his mention of the Serpent of Ire led her to believe that it wasn’t some ordinary ogre he needed eradicated from his property. The Serpent of Ire had been a Hound—a faerie-made monster, distinguishable from the faeries themselves by a glowing glyph located somewhere on their bodies. Each glyph was different, and held a key to the magic that had made the creature, which Rags could then use to figure out how to unmake it. As for the unmaking itself, only a weapon crafted with certain ingredients and spells could kill a Hound.

If de Laurent was begging for Lyssa’s help because she had slain the Serpent of Ire, he might have a Hound for her to kill. And if there was a Hound lurking around Bleakhaven, there was a chance it was the Beast of Buxton Fields.

If it wasn’t, well… at least it sounded like de Laurent was desperate enough to pay her handsomely to kill whatever it was he wanted dead. Besides, it would be more fun than dealing with trolls.

Lyssa winced. She had promised Rags she would stay here for a few days. “I’ll rest after this one,” she said aloud, as if this modified promise would somehow make its way down to the witch’s ear. Who knew—maybe it would. She had no idea what the extent of Ragnhild’s powers were. “Really, I will. But for now, there’s a lead to follow.”

Lady willing, it was the lead she had been praying for.

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Kill the Beast

Serra Swift

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Kill the Beast

Serra Swift

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Excerpted from Kill the Beast, copyright © 2025 by Serra Swift.