APIBAGS Chapter 15

After some time, the footsteps that had been prowling on the other side of the door—footsteps that sharpened the appetite—went quiet.

Andras—saddled with the undignified name "Jelly" by Evangeline—leaned his back against the door and gasped for breath. Each violent cough wrenched something from deep inside him. He coughed up viscera and flesh. Blood ran from his eyes, his nose, his mouth—his face was already ruined.

The injuries from the cat had healed within hours. It was the holy water Evangeline had poured down his throat that was destroying him from the inside.

His tongue, unable to hold the water, had burned through. His esophagus was dissolving, flesh searing as though it were being branded. Being the sun god's holy water, it felt remarkably similar to the time he'd been executed by burning at the stake.

The best Andras could do was repair the body as it corroded. If he hadn't consumed several before coming here, he wouldn't have been able to keep pace with the destruction. He'd have simply died.

Damn cat. He'd only teased it—said it was playing pet when it hardly suited—and it had reacted like that. And then to put holy water in Evangeline's hands. Against Flauros he might have managed to dodge. Against Evangeline's grip, escape was impossible.

She hadn't been holding tightly. But something in his instincts had locked every muscle in place: do not move. So when the holy water was pushed to his lips, he'd had no choice but to drink the poison quietly.

The thing that had taken up residence in Evangeline Rohanson's body was deeply strange.

It wore a human face, and arranged itself accordingly—performing humanity—while making no effort whatsoever to conceal its wrongness. It was beyond cognition. Looking at it made the breath stop. Made the body afraid. To make Andras submit. To have Flauros fawning like a house cat. What but a god could do that?

But that thing could never be a god.

Whoever summoned it had done quite a remarkable job.

Centuries of shared history, and Flauros showed no interest in whether Andras bled or vomited flesh. Out of sheer spite, Andras stayed planted at the door despite being told to leave. Flauros had said the blood smell would seep into the sofa—refused to let him sit there—and was now sprawled out at leisure looking entirely content.

Insufferable cat.

"Be quiet."

And as though that weren't enough, Flauros had the nerve to reprimand him for the noise while he was suffering. Who had fetched the holy water in the first place? Andras was practically dying because of it, and all that coldhearted creature cared about was whether Evangeline might be woken by the noise.

Out of the cat's form, Flauros was—and Andras was speaking only of appearance—so exquisitely formed that one might momentarily mistake it for an angel's descent. Curling golden hair that looked as though sunlight might dissolve it, skin like powdered sugar—even by Andras's exacting standards, beautiful.

The one flaw, if one had to name it: the collar, embroidered in catastrophic incompetence. Flauros, of course, appeared thoroughly delighted by it.

Flauros rubbed its face against Evangeline's hand as though it had always been a cat and nothing else. From a certain angle, it looked rather tender.

It would have been better without the hundreds of thousands of eyes blooming across the ceiling and floor like mold.

Because of those eyes everywhere, the room looked to Andras less like a room and more like the interior of a living creature. No wonder the cat's scent had been detectable from so far away. Every single eye watched only Evangeline. For Evangeline to tolerate this revolting scene—she must be quite fond of Flauros.

Then, all at once, the eyes rotated.

They looked at Andras.

No—past him. At what was behind the door. He was wiping the blood from his mouth when the door opened—very quietly. Through the narrow gap: yellow eyes.

"Sir Jelly. I can't sleep because of the noise."

Kanna's voice, from beyond the door.

Kanna glanced inside, saw Evangeline sleeping, and dropped her voice immediately. She didn't want to wake Evangeline. She spoke barely above a whisper.

Andras's pained gasping carried clearly through to the room directly below. Unable to bear the sound between the floors, Kanna had gone outside for a while—and returned to find it still going on, which had brought her all the way up to Evangeline's room. She couldn't bring herself to enter without the lady's permission, and so stated her complaint from the threshold.

"My sister is frightened. Could you please be quiet?"

At night, Rohanson estate carried sound unusually well. Henna had been covering her ears against the unceasing moaning. And she'd been worrying—'What if your voice starts sounding like crying?'—and had asked Kanna to speak to her at regular intervals.

Andras felt the complicated wretchedness of being dismissed by a human now—then reminded himself that Kanna was the human Evangeline was particularly fond of, and dredged up his patience.

Sure enough, chosen by Evangeline Rohanson. This one was not entirely sane either.

She appeared to see the eyes, and moved through them as though they weren't there. That alone suggested exceptional nerve. And now she was asking someone who was coughing up blood to keep it down.

That was twice today he'd been told that.

At this point, he felt like some kind of criminal whose only crime was suffering too loudly.

Ugh. Sleep paralysis.

Why on earth was there a ghost in a romance fantasy world. I'd spent the entire night listening to a ghost wailing outside my door, and I hadn't slept properly at all.

The disrupted sleep meant a late rise again today. Not just today, actually. Since possessing this body, I'd become lazy—consistently waking up at noon, when the shadows were at their shortest. I reached for my phone to check the time, realized there wasn't one, hauled myself up to look at the desk clock, and lay back down.

I was wondering whether I was still dreaming when I felt the warmth of the cat at my pillow, and reality reasserted itself. Though it still didn't have quite the weight of reality. Not a dream, but a world made of nothing but text. Not so different.

Right. Don't go down that road. That way lay homesickness, and there was no way back anyway.

I tossed and turned for a long while, but sleep wouldn't come, so I got up.

"Good morning, Pudding."

"Did you sleep well?"

I'd been addressing Pudding, and the answer came from the wrong direction entirely. I'd distinctly told Jelly to sleep on the sofa. Jelly was now on the bed beside me, tail wagging.

"Off. Now."

"Why does that one get special treatment?"

Jelly wanted to know why the treatment was different and made an entirely unreasonable case for also sleeping in the bed. Obviously, because Pudding was a child.

Yesterday I'd asked Jelly whether Pudding could also take human form, and gotten back a response implying I should have known this already. Having been affectionate all this time under the assumption Pudding was simply a cat, I'd briefly retreated in embarrassment—only for Pudding to look so devastated that I'd had to come back around immediately. No more absentminded pat-pats on the behind, though.

Pudding, unlike Jelly, couldn't manage human speech very well, which suggested a beastfolk young enough for that to still be the case. An enormous relief that I hadn't been patting a grown man's backside.

"Make friends with each other."

I'd woken up in this body without any warning, and I assumed I'd disappear from it the same way. When I left, Pudding would lose a caretaker. I'd been sorry about that. But knowing Pudding was a beastfolk made it a little better—Jelly was a beastfolk too. Pudding would be looked after.

After a day together, no matter how I looked at it, Jelly wasn't the male lead. I'd suspected the looks, but being generous, second male lead at most? In truth, he just felt like a pet.

Was saying that species-ist? Me, a discriminator against other species....

Knock knock.

While I was despairing, someone knocked at the door.

"My lady. It's Kanna."

"Come in."

The door opened, and a vision of red curls—the color of cherry blossoms in the garden—filled the frame. For a moment there was an entirely imaginary effect of petals drifting through the air, like a romance fantasy cover illustration.

My battered soul healed on the spot.

This was heroine-level quality.

"My lady. Look!"

Kanna had pinned the badge I'd embroidered to her uniform and was showing it off proudly. My own work. Genuinely terrible. It could have passed for hieroglyphics. And yet Kanna liked it anyway, and something in my chest went warm.

Kanna and I sat and talked, and Henna brought the food. Even with Jelly taking up residence, meals were still just me and Kanna. Jelly announced it was going to eat and led Pudding out the door.

"Ideally it won't come back."

Kanna said it quietly, watching Jelly's retreating back—drifting away like someone with absolutely nowhere to be.

Kanna had been wary of Gabriel. With Jelly, it seemed more like simple dislike. When she'd first seen Jelly as a wolf, there had been something like fondness. The moment it transformed, her eyes had gone cold. Because I'd found Jelly first, the development between Kanna and Jelly seemed to have been derailed.

"Still no word from Sir Gabriel."

"I know."

I'd assumed the male lead would handle it competently enough, but something made me uneasy.

Get the painting taken down and deliver me my innocence already! No contact, but the male lead would fail? Absolutely not. Preposterous. Romance fantasy male leads were devastatingly capable.

Your classic romance fantasy male lead tracks down a heroine who fled at full speed, with no GPS, without breaking a sweat; topples a duke's daughter who shakes the entire empire with a single sentence—in short, if you didn't have the capability, you weren't the male lead.

Crown princes and dukes had money and power, so slightly reduced capability was acceptable. But Gabriel was a Knight Commander. Without the capability, that role didn't work. There was a reason knights tended to be second leads.

Hm?

Wait. Now that I thought about it, Gabriel could actually be the second male lead.

The Crown Prince was middle-aged and there was no Grand Duke, so I'd assumed male lead based purely on looks—but come to think of it, knights were better known as second leads. I'd been a shut-in recluse since the possession. I might not have encountered the actual male lead yet.

Gabriel and Kanna already seemed like an unlikely pair—so why was I analyzing this now? Because...