Madame LeFleur was like many living beings in this strange and wonderful realm, disguising deadly venom under an array of vibrant colors.

That was part of the reason the parasite had picked Madame LeFleur. Typically, the parasite went for weaker-minded hosts, ones whose consciousnesses were more readily overcome. But with each body, each mind, came a price, and the parasite had grown weary of inhabiting the unintelligent.

Madame LeFleur sometimes used brains in the many potions she concocted—the ones that actually worked, the ones she sold in the underground market rather than the watered down briarseed oil she bottled in cheap crystal and peddled to desperate women. The parasite had now witnessed quite the assortment of brains. Lizard brains, rat brains, human brains. It fascinated the parasite to observe the differences—the smooth silky film that coated the outer layer of the rodents’ brains versus the cascading folds and the plunging shadows that carved texture into the human brains.

The parasite sometimes wished Madame LeFleur could use that glinting scalpel of hers to slice out the brains of the parasite’s previous human hosts; she was fairly certain what she would find: a glaring absence of hills and valleys cresting the wet, juicy membranes.

But the parasite’s previous hosts would all be decayed beyond recognition by this point. Most of them had returned to dust and were likely being chewed up by livestock at this very moment, so the parasite could only dream of such things.

“Did you hear me, child?” Madame LeFleur asked, her pitch heightening in what most would have mistaken for agitation when the girl remained planted in front of the counter. “We’re closed.”

Madame LeFleur finally looked up from her incessant scrubbing, allowing the parasite to get a good look at the girl through the Madame’s eyes.

Plain and unadorned as a mouse’s tail, the girl was the kind who often fell prey to the beauty elixirs the Madame fashioned from the leftover lard that sloshed off her morning bacon.

That was, of course, all the Madame noticed about her.

The Madame couldn’t sense what the parasite could.

Desperation, raw and crude and completely unrefined, emanated from the girl, radiating from her soul and pulsing in noxious waves.

The parasite could get drunk on that sort of energy.

“I…” The girl’s gaze flitted back toward the door, and the parasite’s hope threatened to wither. No, the girl couldn’t leave now. Not when the parasite had endured so many unsuitable women with unsuitable auras today. Not when she’d almost given up hope of finding anyone fit for her intentions. But then the girl’s back straightened, and she plastered a look of determination on that unremarkable face of hers and said, “I’m told you sell potions that alter one’s appearance.”

Predictable, the parasite thought. But useful all the same.

“You’re a bit too late for that, I’m afraid.” Madame LeFleur lowered her spectacles, as she often did when she was looking to get a particular thrill from asserting her dominance—disguised as disapproval, of course—upon a youngster. “Sold out of those a week ago, the hour the prince announced he’d be throwing a ball.”

The girl frowned, which didn’t help to soften her less desirable features. Tethered to the Madame for now, the parasite had only recently become able to discriminate the slight differences between the faces of the humans. The variation in their features was so slim already, and the Madame had never been all that good at it. It was as if the Madame could see faces as a whole—pretty or, more importantly, ugly—but her brain couldn’t quite grasp onto the details. The parasite was almost positive this had not been the case in previous hosts, and it often had her wondering what sort of pattern the curves on the Madame’s brain made.

Perhaps one day the parasite would find out.

“Surely you have something.” The girl tapped her fingers against the counter, the beat off-kilter with the dripping of the spilled ink still slowly splattering the floor.

The Madame shook her head, her curls bouncing against her ears. “Nothing at all.”

It seemed that whatever courage or insanity it had taken the girl to come here expired as her shoulders deflated and she turned to go.

No, no, no. The parasite tried to remember the position of the sun a few moments ago when the Madame had glanced out the window, for the Madame kept scrubbing, and the window was nowhere in sight. The parasite was certain it had been just about to slip over the horizon, and if that was the case, she needed only a few more moments…

If only she could be free of the shackles that bound her, the magical barrier between the Madame’s faculties and her own…

“But dearie?” the Madame asked just as the girl reached the door. The parasite wasn’t sure that she’d ever felt relief, not like her human hosts did, but the weight that pulled away from her consciousness when the girl turned back around was a striking replica.

“Yes?”

The curiosity in Madame’s brain warred with the anxiety welling in her stomach.

Once again, the parasite was thankful to her past self for her choice of host.

As far as the Madame was concerned, curiosity would always win.

“I must ask, why are you not attending the ball?”

The plain girl swallowed and bit her lip, embarrassment flushing her cheeks. “I thought I might, but I’m no fool. There’s no use going like this.” She gestured to herself as if that explained everything.

In the Madame’s opinion, it did.

Something pungent wafted through the Madame’s consciousness. The parasite fought back the sudden urge to recoil. Over the years, she’d come to recognize the useless emotion, but its scent never failed to make her queasy.

Pity was the most unpleasant of human emotions. It smelled like rotting flowers and settled in the Madame’s stomach about as well as soured milk.

The Madame sighed. “Well, perhaps I might have something stored in the back. But have your payment ready. It’ll cost you forty coppers and I haven’t time for you to be finagling through your coin purse. I really don’t have time to be doing this at all.”

The girl nodded and rummaged through her coin purse while the Madame slipped behind a red velvet curtain into the storeroom and did some rummaging herself.

The parasite never understood why the Madame did this, if not for the sale. She was a clever human—about as clever as they came. And during the full moon, her hands could craft poisons specific enough to kill only the intended target, leaving buyers free to distribute the poison into entire vats of wine rather than a specific glass, without threat of murdering an entire party. She could brew love potions that needn’t be drunk, only inhaled, and the victim would fancy themselves obsessed with the original wearer of the scent. That was the parasite’s gift to the Madame, another reason she’d chosen her above all others.

The parasite had been around for a long time. Long enough to have gotten good at knowing just what kind of gift a host might manifest.

It was all in their aura, which the parasite could taste in the air as potential candidates soiled it with their breath, with their fears and hopes and dreams. Sometimes it was a skill—one they were already predisposed toward—and all the parasite did was enhance that skill.

Other times, it was a desire.

And from the sweet, intoxicating desperation sluicing off the plain girl in sheets, the parasite had a sneaking suspicion of how the girl’s gift might manifest were the parasite to take her on as a host.

It was the kind of potential gift the parasite had been sniffing for all week, ever since the Madame had heard the news.

Did you hear? The prince is throwing a ball. He intends to take a human as a wife!

Oh, the parasite had heard all right.

And better yet…

He’s hosting it the night of the full moon. Isn’t that romantic?

These humans of Dwellen and their fascination with the moon. It was part of the reason the parasite had migrated here.

In fact…

I was just dreaming of you, sweet friend, the parasite thought as the sun slipped over the horizon and the crest of the moon took its place. It didn’t matter that the storeroom contained no windows. The parasite didn’t need to glance outside to know what shift had just occurred.

Cool, intoxicating pleasure washed over Madame LeFleur’s body, and when she stepped out from behind the curtain, the hands into which the girl pressed forty copper coins no longer belonged to Madame LeFleur.

Slipping from Madame LeFleur’s fingertips into the plain girl’s body was as easy as letting go. As simple as the thudding of Madame LeFleur’s dead body against the cold ground.

That had a tendency to happen when the parasite abandoned a host.