#. with ; ingeborg endeman

[howdy-cowpoke]

TIMING: Mid-July LOCATION: The Bizarre PARTIES: Monty (@howdy-cowpoke) & Inge (@nightmaretist) SUMMARY: Monty & Inge meet each other at the Bizarre, finding kinship in their struggles with hunters and bonding over a little murder. CONTENT WARNINGS: Zombie-flavor gore lol

—

There were probably much safer places to do this, but there was nowhere more convenient. Anyway, it wasn’t like he’d come alone — he had Daisy, Dallas, and Denver with him, there more or less as support in case the harvesters on the other side of the market decided to cause trouble. Again, possibly. Monty still wasn’t sure if they’d been the ones to send the strangers that had slaughtered a portion of his livestock, but he might as well assume they had and prepare for the worst. 

The reason for their visit to the market was business: they needed to hire more hands to help protect the farm, as Emilio had suggested. For all his shitty opinions, that hadn’t been one of them. They needed more people, and more that knew how to handle themselves in a scrape. So the four set up a temporary booth in the market after finding out where the new entrance was, plopping their folding card table and chairs in a vacant spot. There was nothing flashy about the production, mostly just a “Help Wanted” sign and Daisy working her charm on passersby. Monty sat at the table to speak with the ones she was able to draw in, and Dallas and Denver stood behind him, arms folded across their broad chests, looking every bit the bodyguards they were meant to be. 

One such interested party, stopped by Daisy for looking like a capable young man who was down on his luck, was corralled toward the table with promises of a place to sleep and free, ethical meals. There was more vetting to be done, of course, and Monty couldn’t afford to let his desire to help anyone that needed it get in the way of his goal. It was clear to him that there was a lack of community between different supernatural species, seeing as how shifters and fae had helped attack the farm. At least of the ones they had killed. So it would continue to be an undead-only venture, and while zombies were preferred, Monty wouldn’t turn away an undead that felt kinship to them. There would be follow-up training sessions that would weed out the liars, of course. This had never been their way before, but someone had made such caution necessary. 

Smiling up at the young man as he walked with Daisy up to the table, Monty held out a hand to him. The palm that slid into his was warm, too warm for an undead, and his grip tightened as he regarded the young man carefully. 

“You are not dead,” the cowboy stated bluntly. The man looked around at them anxiously, his gaze lingering on the brothers that stood like pillars behind Monty. 

“What… what d’you mean?” He laughed nervously. Monty sighed, lacking his usual patience. 

“You are not dead,” he repeated. “We are only hiring undead, I’m afraid. I wish you luck.” The smile on the stranger’s face fell slowly into a frown, and he shoved his hands in his pockets. 

“Fine, whatever, man,” he huffed before stalking away. Daisy gave Monty a shrug, who lifted his hat to run a hand through his hair.

“I would suggest trying to touch them before you decide to bring them over,” he offered curtly, which earned him a hard stare from the woman. He quickly relented, dipping his head. “Sorry, Dais. I am just…” 

“I know, sugar,” she said softly, giving him a sad smile. “It’s alright.” 

Monty felt a hand on his shoulder, much heavier than Daisy’s own, and glanced back to see Dallas reaching out to him. He laughed gently, patting the man’s hand before adjusting himself in his seat, then giving up and getting to his feet. “Take my spot, eh, Denver? I need to… stretch my legs.” The other man nodded, sitting down in the chair that was too small for him, expression stony. Monty couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him or his brother smile. Times were… hard. Dallas followed Monty away from the stall after a quick exchange with Daisy, refusing to let him wander around by himself even when the older zombie insisted. So the pair began their walk, Monty making sure they stayed well away from the meat market section of the bazaar. 

—

If a place could be a muse (in the artist sense, not the fae one — Inge didn’t know very much about those types), then Wicked’s Rest was one that could never be depleted. It showed her time and time again that there was still room within her to feel horror. And it was through that horror that her art improved, that her nightmares were more vivid and rewarding than they had been in a while, that she felt like the muse – again, not the fae kind – was blossoming.

But it was a double edged sword. For all the inspiration she gained, she also gained paranoia. Suffering made great art, she knew that. She knew that for all the stress she experienced she’d come out an even more accomplished artist, that soon she’d have a breakthrough again and create something that would be a culmination of the past three years in this town. One day she’d look back on her time in this town and stroke the scar on her stomach and not think of factories, classrooms or bunker basements, but in stead of the sculpture or installation she’d made.

So she had to keep at it. Despite the paranoia. Despite Cortez’ promise to chop her up. Despite Dīs being gone. And so that was why she was here, at the supernatural night market. She wanted something to protect her home, the apartment she’d grown so fond of over the past three years. A corner of Wicked’s Rest she wanted to feel as safe in as she did in the astral. Coincidentally, she knew of the place because of the astral — one of the mares she’d encountered over the years was employed there. Inge found it preposterous, using ones astral hopping skills for employment. Still, it was nice to have a connection to the Bizarre. 

She was interested in getting some kind of artifact that could safeguard her home, but it was slim pickings. She knew something like it had to exist – she’d heard of it before, had encountered something of the sort at another similar market (but she’d been too cocky to get it, then) – and yet. Nothing. No slayer repellent. 

Besides, it was hard to not get distracted by all the things on offer. She’d always had a materialistic streak, even if she also tended to be a little stingy. Her eyes were glued on a strange looking medallion she was resisting to ask about when she crashed into a pair of other patrons. It was an act of clumsiness she didn’t think befit her, but her shame would never reach her cheeks as the blood in her veins was stagnant. “Oh,” she said, “Sorry.” Her gaze traveled to the necklace for another second and something within her yearned, but she looked back to the people she’d crashed into. The man hadn’t given off any bodily heat. “What’s up ahead that way?”

—

Monty was taking this time to admire the Bizarre for what it was: a helpful resource, one he'd not fully appreciated the last time he'd been here, distracted and afraid as he'd felt then. There was no fear now, just anger. Indignant and burning, righteous in morality but what should have felt repugnant in how it made him crave revenge. It didn't, though. The desire to crack open the skull of that stupid man that owned the organ stall, to curl his fingers around that brain and rip it free from its stem felt good, and that on its own was alarming. Monty had not felt such things in many, many decades, and he dared not speak them aloud. He wondered if any of his friends could tell… if the reason Dallas had accompanied him was not to protect him from harm, but to stop him from dishing it out. 

It wasn't impossible, he supposed. Even Daisy had been extra gentle with him, quickly forgiving his harsher words that he truly didn't mean to let slip. She seemed worried. They all did, but he had of course assumed it was about the attack, not about him. 

But the way Dallas was looking at him now, distracted enough to barrel right into a woman admiring a pendant, Monty couldn't help but wonder. Dallas barely reacted to the collision, only stepping back to give the woman space and raising a hand in silent apology. Monty quickly stepped in, concern lacing his soft features as a hand found a brief but telling home on her arm. 

“Are you okay?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder as he considered her question. He… hadn't been paying attention for a few hundred yards, lost in his thoughts as he'd dissected the nature of Dallas’ gaze as it kept stealing glances his way. “Ah! I am… not sure, besides our own booth. We were busy… talking.” They hadn't spoken a word. He removed his hand politely, giving her a smile. “What's that?” he asked, eyeing the same pendant she'd been mesmerized by. 

—

How ironic, to be using such polite words in a place like this. A sorry, an are you okay — as if they weren’t scurrying around in a bazaar that moved from place to place via the astral. A bazaar that was filled to the brim with unethically sourced goods and magic goods Inge didn’t even fully comprehend. It amused her, the way he was so gallant, almost. Maybe it had something to do with his age — considering his body temperature, there was a chance he was older than he looked.

“Oh – yes,” she said, waving away his concern. Any question of whether she was okay or not had been met with that same answer for decades, and this time it wasn’t a lie. Maybe a few months ago it would have made pain echo through her body, but she was walking with more ease now. “I can handle a little bump.” 

She raised a brow at the revelation that the other had his own booth. “Hm, what is it you have on offer?,” she asked, letting her gaze flick from the talkative stranger to the silent one. Inge might have prodded and poked the quieter person if she’d been in one of her more upbeat moods, but she had come here with a mission. “And I understand — talking does tend to take away quite a bit of my attention on good days.” 

She moved a little closer to the pendant now, lifting a shoulder, “I’m not entirely sure. It looks beautiful, though … not very subtle, but sometimes an outfit needs a statement piece.” Knowing her luck, it was probably cursed. Inge resisted the urge to reach for it — she could step by and barter on another day. “Not sure if it is what I’m looking for. Do you know anything …” A wave of unease passed through her. To seek for protection was to admit that protection was needed, which was to make others know you thought yourself a target. She didn’t much like it. “Ah, about where to find some form of security?”

—

“Work,” Monty responded simply. She was undead, yes, which (perhaps foolishly) instilled him with more trust, but even so, he did not want to reveal too much. That is, not until her attention turned back to the pendant and she revealed what it was she was looking for, then asked if he had any suggestions. He gave her a sad smile, feeling an immediate kinship as a fellow undead looking to protect themself from those that wished them harm. 

“I am sorry you feel the need for it,” he started. “And I am looking for the same thing, actually, though… not in the form of trinkets.” His gaze fell on the pendant again and he shook his head. “This is the work I am hiring undead for. I have a farm, and we were recently attacked.” Beside him, Dallas seemed to bristle angrily at the memory. Monty put a hand on his arm, taking a beat to allow the feeling to pass before continuing. “It was because of our nature that this happened. We are, all of us, undead. The farm is a way for us to have access to food that helps keep us sustained without threatening the safety of innocent people. Someone here,” he gestured vaguely at the entirety of the Bizarre, though his gaze settled in the direction he knew the organ harvesters to be, “does not like that. They want us to be put out of business. They killed a great deal of our livestock. So I am hiring again, to better protect us and our animals.” 

Perhaps he was being too honest. Perhaps he should have said less, but… something about the woman made him want to trust her. Anyway, he had to be honest with the people he vetted for hire, so what was the difference? It did not matter if she could not or would not work at the farm (she did not seem the type, anyway… nor did she seem desperate for a job), because she was undead and she too was seeking safety. “So unfortunately, no, I am afraid I do not have any helpful advice for you, in the matters of protection.” Holding out a hand for an official introduction, he tried to put on a warmer smile. “My name is Monty. This is Dallas. It’s nice to meet you…?”

—

The zombie prattled on, revealing that he was a farmer (this much Inge could have guessed from his appearance, looking back on it) and that he farmed … well, whatever it was he and his kin needed. So zombies or vampires, then. She found the entire concept somewhat endearing, even if she had long ago moved away from the world of farms.

“Hm,” she said, “I am sorry, too. In your case as well. It’s good, though, I always find — to meet more of our kind. For a bit of solidarity, no?” Exchanging hunter’s names and faces, or having a place to turn to when she was ran through with a sword. It wasn’t a luxury to have a network of undead: it was a need. “I would like it very much if a trinket was enough to protect me, but I think that’s just wishful thinking.” Maybe there were spells or charms that could keep a slayer from detecting her — but that was no longer the issue. Slayers had detected her. A fucking necromancer too, on top of it. “It sounds nice, though. Your farm. I’m not much of a muscle for hire, though, and animals dislike me, but maybe if you stumble upon something useful you can let me know? And vice versa?” Her nose crinkled. “Sorry people are giving you trouble for being self sustaining.”

She took his hand without hesitation, glad to hold a hand that was similar in temperature to her own. This place brought risks, after all, so it was nice to be around someone she didn’t have to suspect too much. “I’m Inge. It’s nice to meet you too.” 

—

“Sí, solidarity is a good thing to be having,” Monty agreed. The reveal that animals were not fond of her immediately drew his mind to Ariadne, and he smiled fondly. “Of course I can do this.” They shook hands, and he decided to just ask. “Are you a mare, Inge? What you said about animals… I know a girl with a similar ‘problem’, as she would put it. I do not know much of the details of her kind, but I cannot say that there is not a part of me that envies the less, ah… deadly form of feeding.” 

Dallas shifted his weight awkwardly from foot to foot, prompting Monty to give him a soft, understanding smile. The two exchanged a wordless glance, Monty nodded in the direction of the way they’d come, and Dallas seemed to relax slightly. “Ma’am,” he grunted abruptly before turning and heading back to the stall. Monty watched him go for a moment before turning back to Inge. 

“He is… wary of strangers. I think we all are right now, but the twins are especially, ah, uncomfortable.” His gaze slid back over to the pendant Inge had been looking at, and his brow furrowed. “... can I ask what it is you are looking for protection from?” A knowing look came over him then. “Or is it as simple as I think it might be…” Meaning slayers, of course. What else?

—

“It very much is,” she said, nodding. It was why she continued to gravitate towards the more undead places in town, where she felt at her safest. Inge considered Monty for a moment, before nodded. “Yes, a mare.” She wondered if she knew this girl — there weren’t as many mares around as there were vampires and zombies, and even less that would qualify that description. “It is a bit of a nuisance, but I wouldn’t call it a problem.” She smiled a little, swallowing a comment that she did think her kind had the most refined and interesting diet. “Well, I envy your ability to heal up quick. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side one way or another, hm?”

She gave the gruff cowboy a nod as he departed, amused by the way he carried himself. Though Inge tried to surround herself with fellow undead and long-lived people, it was never the way this seemed to be. A community, living together and sharing their diet. It really did seem nice. It reminded her a bit of the places in New York she’d visit, though those had been more hedonistic than … agrarian.

“I get it,” she said, though she wasn’t that wary of Monty at present. She gave fellow undead the benefit of the doubt. She started to walk, moving away from the pendant and keeping her gaze focused on all else. Inge nodded with a noise of amusement, “Sadly, it is just that simple. Some slayers know my face and name. It’s unfortunate.” Well, that and whatever other enemies she was making. The necromancer, the lamia … probably one of her colleagues, though she doubted they’d wield any weapons besides sharp words. “But it feels … I don’t know, like a trap to admit I need something like a penchant or a spell to feel safe. Maybe I’m careful around strangers too, now.”

—

“Ah… I am sorry to hear that.” Genuine concern laced Monty’s voice as they walked. “... I know how you feel, though. I think, anyway. Like you should not need the extra help, but you find yourself… frightened without it. Worried, at the very least.” He didn’t want to put any words into her mouth, but figured it was probably clear that he was mostly talking about himself at that point. He could pretend that he was missing out on a carefree life he’d once had, but that had never been the case, had it? As a child, he was wary of his brothers. As a teenager, he was wary of the strangers that offered him odd jobs for terrible pay. As a young adult, he was wary of his fellow ranch hands, and then of the people that kidnapped him and folded them into their band of killers and thieves. Even around them, though it was arguably the better half of his life, he sometimes felt wary. There were things about him that they did not know, that they could not know—not least of all because Monty had not understood them himself. He was still something of an outsider with that gang, only ever feeling truly at ease when he was around Hector. He knew his mentor would always look out for him, always protect him. Until he hadn’t, anyway. 

So there was no life that Monty was longing for, not really. He’d always been afraid, even when he seemed angry or brave. And at the farm, he’d still been wary. Not of the new family he had found, but of those that would threaten them. Men and women like Emilio and Jade, people like the ones that had killed their animals. He could not escape the fear, and he could not escape the feeling of entrapment.

So yes, he understood her quite well.

They continued to chat and walk, Monty finding comfort in the woman’s presence, in the way she carried herself so surely. But from the shadows, someone else was watching. Someone who could sense them both, and didn’t much like their continued existence. This stranger tailed them at a significant distance, keeping busy as they talked and eventually stopped by the booth the zombies had come here to run, before Monty became distracted. Daisy was fine with it, though, agreeing that he needed the distractions. She introduced herself and Denver to Inge before informing Monty that they’d managed to pick out four or five new hands, and would be conducting second interviews on the farm the following day. For now, it was time for them to head home. 

Monty looked to Inge, giving a gentle shrug. “Ah, well. I am sorry we did not find what you were looking for, Inge. But, if your night remains free… would you care to get a drink somewhere back in town?” He was just enjoying their conversation, really, and hoped that she felt the same. 

The figure in the shadows prepared to follow them.

—

It was easy to forget that while this was a town full of hunters, it was also a town full of undead. There were no population statistics in regards to species, but Inge was suddenly reminded of this fact and her own conviction that the amount of undead surely had to outweigh that of hunters in Wicked’s Rest — what with them being harder to kill. Being around Monty, who had created such a vast and steady network of undead, made her feel a level of not only security but something like hope. And though she would never want to live on a farm-based commune (the smell of manure reminded her too much of her mortal life), she liked the idea of a coven of sorts. Perhaps she should reconnect with some of her fellow artistic undead.

Still, she’d remember Denver and Daisy’s names and faces, made a mental note of the farm’s name and to look it up once she got home. It was good to know what places were safe in town. Or, at least — she hoped the farm would be safe, now that they were gathering more people to help defend it.

Inge waved away Monty’s shrug, “That’s alright, I was not expecting to find a golden solution here anyway,” she said, even if part of her was greatly disappointed. She wanted nothing more than to stumble into the perfect fix to her issues, though the trouble with that was that the common factor in all her issue was, well, her own arrogance and indulgence. She felt no need to fix those things, though. “But yes, I’d very much like that — it’s been sweet getting to know you.” 

It was good then, that the Bizarre was located near downtown this night. As they stepped into the dark of the regular world, Inge’s eyes gained their red hue. “What bar do you like? I’m personally fond of Dance Macabre, have you been?” Maybe Monty did like eating fingers, unlike the other zombie she’d met there. “Though I didn’t drive, and I suppose it’s quite a walk …” Too bad zombies couldn’t astral project like her. They really did fall short in that regard.

She stopped to consider her surroundings, head turning to see a shape inching closer to them. At least they both fell short in this regard — neither zombies nor mares had excellent hearing. Inge took a step back, pulling Monty along with her as she stared at the stranger and the axe in his hand. For a moment the air seemed to stand still, the world frozen in time before the axe was swung back and the stranger was rushing over, seeming to jump into action rather than discussion, wasting no words — just swinging that fucking axe at the two of them without thought. Inge yelped and ducked, cursing the world and all its inhabitants as she did.

—

“Ah, I do not think I’ve ever been!” Of course he hadn’t. Monty didn’t make a habit of frequenting bars in town, much less ones that were anything other than dark and quiet. And one with ‘dance’ in the name sounded anything but. He was considering the walk, about to suggest they call a cab, when Inge was reacting suddenly to something he couldn’t see behind him. She pulled him away from it, a look of fear flashing in her eyes. Confused, Monty turned to see a stranger rushing at them with an axe held high. Seriously? 

The zombie heard Inge exclaim behind him and heard the scrape of her shoes on the pavement indicating that she’d made some move to get away—good. He stood firm, sizing up their opponent and choosing to believe that they could not remove his head with a single swing. Especially not from the angle they were coming in at—the axe collided with Monty’s chest, skimming over the dense material of his work jacket before finding the more pliable fabric of his t-shirt and burying itself at an awkward angle in his sternum. The sound he made was not one of pain, but one of anger. He did not like dealing with hunters, not least of all because of the guilt that was now associated with it, given Kaden. 

Before Jade, he might have tried to run. He might have stooped down to pull Inge to her feet and dragged her to safety, leaving the hunter to chase them until he grew tired or no longer felt safe murdering someone in public. But this was post-Jade. Something in him had shifted, and his gentler tendencies were falling to the wayside, piece by piece. “Try again,” he hissed, a ringing starting up in his ears. An imagined one, probably—the same he’d always heard over the din of blood rushing past them when he’d been alive, when the adrenaline kicked in and he had to kill whoever was on the other end of his knife or six-shooter. Kill or be killed, that’s what this was. He couldn’t leave room for guilt. Kaden wouldn’t blame him. 

He didn’t carry weapons with him off of the farm, so his hands quickly found the axe’s handle and the wrist of the hunter. “You should leave,” he warned Inge with a glance over his shoulder, not wanting her to get more caught up than she already was in this—if one piece of him still remained, it was his determination to protect others. “I’ve got—” He was interrupted by a knife to his throat, held by the hunter’s hand he hadn’t managed to snag. The zombie let out a harsh, barking laugh, inwardly horrified at his own reaction. “What are you going to do, pendejo? Saw off my head with that?”

—

The scene unfolded quickly and Inge was glad to have ducked and moved away from the axe’s glinting head. Though the slayer didn’t know it, it really was better for it to find Monty’s body than her own — as he would be able to recover easily, whereas an axe to her chest would surely incapacitate her worse and longer. If anyone was going to catch the blows, let it be the one with regenerative and fast healing. Not her. It was a survivalist way of thinking, a selfish one: but she hardly knew the zombie anyway, and he was giving her an out on top of it. 

Inge considered taking it with both hands, fleeing into the astral and not looking back. It would be simple. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Her mind flashed to Sanne’s head toppling off her neck for a moment before she burst into dust. If she had ran then, why not now? Monty sounded so very sure of his declaration, too, and Inge was already in the astral, looking down. For a moment she was taken with the selflessness of the zombie, if not confused by it.

The knife cut off his words, though, and while Monty seemed confident enough, she knew all about bravado. There was one more moment of hesitation, her escape route waiting for her but in the end, Inge decided to go for a quick dive. Reappearing on the earthly plane a few inches above their assailant, she jerked at the wrist holding a knife, pulling it back hard as she fell onto the ground. It was the element of surprise and probably not her technique that made the slayer drop the knife. “Fuck you.”

She skittered back just like the weapon, crouched and almost animalistic as her eyes found Monty’s, wondering what he’d want to do next. Her track record for killing hunters had recently taken a dive and had never been very impressive. 

—

She was gone, or at least deathly silent behind him. He hoped she was gone, hoped she was safe. Even as he stared down this hunter, knife to his throat and blade buried in his chest, he was glad. It wouldn’t be long before he’d lose himself, not at the rate this slayer was going. Once he got the ax out, his eyes would start to glaze over. Once the slices to Monty’s neck the hunter was able to get in started to heal faster than he could make them, the zombie would start to forget. He knew this, the slayer knew this, and yet he persisted. Maybe he had hope that he could cut faster than Monty could heal. It was a stupid hope. One that would cost him his life. 

There was a sudden commotion, and Monty was shocked to see Inge reappear and wrench the knife away from his throat. The slayer stumbled back, startled, looking between the two of them. Monty’s gaze met Inge’s and he gave her a grave nod, acknowledging that she’d just spared him a lot of unpleasant mangling, and more importantly, he might be able to maintain his faculties now. He gripped the handle of the ax with both hands and ripped it free, stifling the shout that wanted to press past his clenched teeth. This needed to be quiet. They’d made too much noise already. If he was going to take care of this threat and then the following problem that would come from the gaping wound in his chest, he needed time. Silence would afford them more. 

So he only grimaced, spinning the weapon in his hands and aiming the sharpened blade in the hunter’s direction. The man’s eyes grew wide, and he dove for the knife he’d dropped. 

Only two weapons? Even Emilio would be disappointed by this lack of preparation.

Monty quickly followed, raising the ax over his head as the slayer snatched up the knife and spun around. He didn’t have time to react; no time to duck out of the way or deflect with an arm, and the ax buried itself deep into the base of the man’s throat, where it met his shoulder. The blood poured from the grievous wound like a brilliant waterfall, but Monty’s focus was elsewhere. He clamped a hand over the slayer’s mouth to muffle his cries and shoved him back into the alleyway to their left. The other hand grabbed a fistful of the human’s hair, using that as leverage to bash his head against the brick wall the moment it was within range. 

The man stilled in his grip, but still Monty thwacked his skull against stone, grunting from the effort but otherwise keeping himself perfectly calm and composed. Quite a feat with the way his hunger was escalating, but there was determination in his dark gaze. Bone crunched beneath his hands, red soaked his hands and sleeves and front, and finally, his prize was revealed. The zombie let the body slump to the ground, knelt down beside it, and dug out what he coveted most. It came free in pieces, the smaller of which were immediately lifted to ravenous, gnashing teeth, and the storm inside of him slowly started to calm. 

He removed his jacket, set the rest of the brain matter inside of it, and rolled it up before tucking it beneath his arm. His attention finally fell back onto Inge, who he was surprised to see still there, still watching. He appreciated her for at least acting as a lookout, even if that hadn’t been her intention. 

In a voice that was not fully his own, coming in at a lower, harsher register than normal, Monty spoke. “Maybe we should save the bar for another time.”

—

There was no saying why the slayer had sought them out, but paranoia told Inge it was because of her. She’d been making a mess in town, feeding left and right, repeatedly on the same people. She also wasn’t just a reclusive artist, but a professor at an Maybe it was just a coincidence, the risk that came with venturing into a place like the Bizarre and leaving with another undead — but that didn’t make it any less discomforting. There being various ways for a hunter to have gotten on their trail was more worrying, actually.

She watched with a look of distress how Monty wielded his zombie ferality against the slayer, blood spraying around them like colorful fountains. Her distress was not with the violence, though that certainly did stir something within her — but with the ease the slayer had found the both. 

It was righteous that Monty cracked its skull and picked bits of brainy gore from the corpse. It was just. Inge watched still, though her distress was ebbing and being replaced by something more dull. Defeat, maybe. Though she admired the other’s ruthlessness and determination to pry the brain from its former container, to benefit from this failed attack — she knew she was not capable of such a feat. Superhuman strength was a gift passed over mares. 

All there was, was fleeing and hiding. Sometimes, there was surprising, like there had been today, but even then it was the zombie who had delivered the fatal blow. Inge felt a fondness for the other, even when stained with brain matter. “Hm?” She looked at him funnily, as if she didn’t understand why they couldn’t go to a bar now. “Maybe so, yes. Though … that was a nice display of strength.” Inge kicked the brainless body. “Good riddance.” She said it with pure conviction. If slayers wanted to indiscriminately kill her and her kind, she wouldn’t shed any feelings of guilt about their own early deaths.

“Rain check, then. I’ll need to buy you a drink sometime soon.” As a thank-you, but also as an introduction into an allyship, if not friendship. She looked the other over, gave a nod. “I’ll reach out. Get home safe, now.” And with that, Inge ventured into the astral, giving into that ever-present instinct to flee.

[ironcladrhett]

@nightmaretist:

[pm] What, of you standing in the dark like a little bitch?

[pm] Aye. Ya got out--told me there was a flaw somewhere. Found it, patched it. Next mare won't be so lucky, n' they got you to thank.

[zofiawithaz]

@nightmaretist replied to your post “[pm] Are you enjoying your new house?”:

[pm] That's Cassius. Kept his good heart underneath it all, huh? Lilac sounds great. Pair it with an ocre yellow ...

​[pm] That sounds about right...

[pm] A nice bright pink for the front door. He'd absolutely love it.

[loftylockjaw]

TIMING: Recent LOCATION: 12 Mudpuppy Pt. PARTIES: Wyatt (@loftylockjaw) & Inge (@nightmaretist) SUMMARY: Inge pays Wyatt another visit in his dreams and makes him start to doubt his own reality. CONTENT WARNINGS: none!

—

She had been visiting this particular dreamer with some regularity. Wyatt, he was called — the mustachioed, buff man who dreamed of the bayou and his family and food. It was important to keep going at it, this project. To keep chipping away at the psyche, to keep introducing small doses of nightmarish birds. Inge had been lacking some of her fervor as of late, though, her inspiration running dry as her mind kept circling back to the factory. Her art reflected it and so did her dreams. Still, Wyatt was a steady source of food. 

The past two months his nights had featured birds at least weekly. Birds with human teeth. Birds with wings that flapped against his cheeks, that pecked at his skin, a bird that stared at Wyatt as he had nowhere to go. The crowing of crows in his dreams (and, once, in the real world too — betraying her presence) and a hawk crying as it dragged Wyatt up in the sky. She was having fun! She transformed herself into a bird that hadn’t been stabbed to the gut and rattled with paranoia and fed herself as her sleeper grew more restless with each visit.

She had a plan as she appeared into his house (a very nice place, admittedly — she had taken the liberty of peeking into his fridge and walking around his living room a few weeks back). He slept like someone who had a tiring job. Inge didn’t bother to find out what he did in his waking hours, as it didn’t serve her. She just sat down next to his bed, cross legged, and reached for his wrist. Pulling it towards her, she pressed her palm against his (just a gesture — there was no need for special touches) and entered his dreams. For now, she’d remain a bystander. But only for now.

—

The townhouse was nothing extravagant, but it was a step up from the shack in the bayou from when he was a toddler. It was brightly painted, the vibrant hues making the sunlight dance through the air as the gentle breeze rustled sheer curtains in the windows. The smell of gumbo permeated the small living space, drawing the young, sandy-haired boy from his room and sending him bounding down the hall toward the kitchen, his trumpet in hand. He rattled off a string of almost unintelligible cajun french as he went scurrying into the kitchen, rounding the table and leaping onto the step stool that sat beside his mother, who was chopping more ingredients to put in the pot. She responded in kind, scooping him up into a hug and laughing as he blew on the trumpet like she was squeezing him too hard. 

His father sat at the kitchen table, wearing an expression that looked both amused and annoyed. “Ya shouldn’t’ah gone n’ gotten the boy such a fool thing,” he reprimanded, waving Wyatt away from him when the child clambered down from his mother’s arms to instead go toot his horn in his dad’s face. “Ah, ya, ya, you’re a real riot, boy! Go learn you a tune or two, why don’t ya?! Somethin’ pretty, not this wacky-dack blastin’ah yer lungs.” The boy gave a comedic bow before hurrying out of the room again, toward the small balcony that overlooked the busy street below. He hopped up onto the iron railing, his back pressed to the wall behind him and lungs filling with air as he lifted the trumpet to his lips. 

—

This was why she didn’t long for dreams. Dreams were memories, but twisted. They were wishes, ungranted. They were your unconscious playing tricks with you. Inge knew that if she still dreamed, that she’d dream endlessly of her daughter — that she’d not be able to escape the death the way she managed to avoid thinking of now. Semi-successfully. But in dreams? In dreams you returned to the past or arrived in a parallel future only to wake to the cold world outside. She didn’t miss it. She thought, sometimes, she did people a favor by overtaking their subconscious. Better plagued by a mare than by ones own mind. 

So she’d take over Wyatt’s dream soon enough, end this scene of domestic bliss. The trumpet, was that wishful thinking? Something he’d wanted as a child but never gotten? Or was it something fundamental? Perhaps she’d search around his house and find out later. For now Inge followed him to the balcony, appearing in the sky above as a pigeon, diving towards where he sat. Pigeons didn’t move like that, but did it matter? Dreams weren’t reality. The pigeon dove, its eyes flashing red and its hoot echoing darkly as it pecked at the fingers on the trumpet, demanding the child-version of Wyatt let it go, wings flapping aggressively. Another bird landed on the railing, also eyeing the trumpet hungrily. Another was bound to follow.

—

He’d only played a few notes when a pigeon came out of nowhere and dive-bombed him, forcing him to yelp in surprise and kick out with a foot. “Hey! Arrêtez !” The boy swung with the trumpet, but the birds were both now pecking angrily at his fingers and he dropped it, watching fearfully as it fell to the street below. “Non ! Regarde ce que tu as fait, stupide oiseau !” His balance on the railing failed him, but he fell backwards onto the little patio with a cry for help, still kicking and flailing as more birds descended upon him. “Mama! Mama!” came Wyatt’s tearful wails as he tried to scramble back to his feet and retreat back into the apartment. The birds followed. 

Sprinting through the small home, he headed straight for the kitchen. His mother still stood at the stove, ignoring his cries. His father still sat at the table, and he was sprouting a few errant feathers that definitely did not belong there. 

“Mama! Help!” She looked at Wyatt, her gaze unusually dark and cold.

“Such a disappointment,” she ground out, and he felt his heart sink. 

“Mama, the birds—” They were on him again, snapping their beaks and ripping holes into his clothing, and his parents just watched. His father had wings now instead of arms, and was getting up from his chair. He let out a thunderously loud caw like a crow, his black feathers gleaming in the glow of a light that was no longer the sun. 

—

The French – different from the one she’d spoken in Nice, Paris and Arles – fell off the young version of Wyatt’s lips and Inge considered shoving him off the balcony, making him fall and fall until he’d forget what landing even was. But he ran back into the house and she followed with the rest of her birds, letting the fear fill her. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was a nice little taste, a little starter to the meal she was anticipating. 

Her past dreams must have left an impression, with the way the father sprouted wings and beaks, and Inge let that run its course. She considered it part of her installation, a side-effect of the repetitive dreams. She focused on the mother, so cold and so steady, and made herself one with her body.

She clapped her motherly hands and the birds halted, freezing in the air. Wyatt’s mother, who was really just Inge at this point, bent towards the boy as if she was going to say something very important. The birds all watched her move down, obedient. As if it was always her who’d controlled them.

She opened her mouth and on her tongue laid a baby bird, its talons clutching onto her teeth. Still slick from whatever egg it had crawled from, cawing at its brother. It left its ‘nest’, leaving scratches on the mother’s/Inge’s mouth and reaching with its claws for Wyatt’s eyes. She clapped once more and the birds were on him, furious and relentless.

They continued until it went dark and Inge allowed Wyatt to wake in his bed.

—

His little heart thundered in his chest and he wanted to scream, he wanted to wail with all of his might, but he couldn’t. There was no air in his lungs to carry the sound. So he just watched, shivering like he was freezing to death, as his mother leaned toward him. The kindness that always curved her lips into a smile and crinkled the corners of her eyes was gone, leaving only hollowness in its wake. He whimpered, his bright blue gaze dropping to her mouth as it opened. The sight of the chick had his face twisted up with fear, but it wasn’t until the thing reached for his eyes that he found his voice. He shrieked, falling to the floor as the birds made a feast of him, ripping him like tissue paper—

Bolting upright in his bed, Wyatt gasped for air. His chest heaved with each breath, sweat dotting his brow. It took a moment for the lamia to regain his senses, to come back to the present. He was fine. He was home, in Maine, in his own bed. Grown. Not a boy, not being attacked by— “Birds. Fuckin’ birds,” he growled to himself, running a hand over his face. The man swung his legs over the edge of the bed and got up, meandering toward the bathroom to splash some water on his face. As he flicked on the light and approached the counter, his confident stride faltered.

A lone, black feather sat in the sink. 

Fear began to creep in from the edges, starting up a ringing sound in his ears. No. He was seeing things, surely. There was no way an errant feather had somehow made its way into his home. Picking it up and spinning it between his thumb and index finger, he realized… it was quite real. “What the fuck.”

—

A dream within a dream. Sanne used to pull this trick on her, back when she’d still sleep. She’d make Inge dream of horrifying scenes only to have her wake up in her not-bed, in her not-bedroom and next to her not-husband. Sometimes not-Hendrik would become monstrous and cruel. Sometimes he’d melt into a bloody, ugly substance and leak through the sheets, pool all around her. Sometimes not-Vera would cry but be nowhere to be found. All until she’d wake, tangled in sheets, her husband disgruntled at her gasping for air. 

It was a cruel trick, but it worked. It was the scariest thing of all, wasn’t it? The idea that there was no escape. That every door opened to another room to be stuck in, that no matter how hard you ran you didn’t move an inch. It was how life was, in and outside of sleep. That was what Inge believed, any way — there was no outrunning her nature and the risks that came attached to it, the hunters that nipped at her heels and the dread that rumbled within her. 

She let Wyatt awaken and stumble from his bed. She let him believe it was as simple as this, as waking in the middle of the night because of a cruel subconscious — but there was the hint of it being a dream, still. A feather in the sink, a bird in the bathroom window, an owl hooting far away. Something stirred in the drain. A bird’s beak clicked underneath, one oily, shiny eye staring through the holes, leathery wings stroking the porcelain within. It moved, its beak gripping the screw that put the drain in place and starting to turn it. If Wyatt were to listen closely, there’d be more beaks clicking merrily. Further down the drain. Waiting.

—

It was like watching a wreck happen. You were fearful, aghast, and yet you could not look away. Wyatt’s piercing gaze was fixed downward at the drain cover, the shiny eye staring back up at him as its owner slowly backed one of the screws out. More clacking beaks could be heard beyond the one at the front, and the lamia’s heart leaped into his throat while his stomach sank at the same time. 

You’re still asleep. You’re still fucking asleep, you need to wake up! Even though he knew he was still dreaming, that did nothing to detract from the horror that was building up inside of him. In fact it only added to it, because he’d been so certain he was awake… Backing away from the sink, the shifter fumbled with the door a moment before slamming it shut and looking back to his bed. 

Wake up. Please, fuck, just wake up. He continued to back up through the room, right into the glass sliding doors that faced the trees. He could hear the birds in the drain start to escape, hear the clink clink clink of the screws getting kicked around in the sink by little bird feet, hear the flap of wings as they took to the air, hear the thud of their bodies against the door like they thought they could break it down with sheer force. Wyatt grasped at the door handle and ripped it open, stumbling into the cold dark of the night in little more than his underwear, heart beating like a war drum. “Fuck off!” he bellowed in the general direction of his bathroom, which of course, only attracted the attention of more avians that were outside… filling the trees around his house, perched on his roof like a blanket of feathers and beaks and claws, even lining the railing of his outdoor deck. 

If any of them moved so much as an inch, he was shifting. He’d tear them the fuck apart, even if this was just a dream. Maybe that would wake him up.

—

There was something stirring within him to try and wake but she held onto him a little longer, continuing to push the sounds and images of the birds. Wyatt was a success story. Inge was certain he’d dream of birds even after she’d moved on from him. She was an impressive woman like that, memorable in her terror. She saw it as a point of pride, even if it wasn’t always like that.

She used to despise having to make people afraid. To give fear while she was still reeling with her own terror. She used to hate this part within her that could create horrifying things in concert with someone’s subconscious, knitting together memory and fantasy to make something that could feed her for days. But to learn an art was hard work. The first years of picking up drawing was no walk in the park either, and so it went for nightmares. She’d learned to draw and sculpt and paint just as she’d learned to revel in her terrorizing.

A bird knocked on the window with its beak, like the robin in an old Dutch nursery rhyme had done. It knocked, just to see how far she could push her sleeper, and it were her own red eyes that were in the bird’s head, watching Wyatt with bated breath. In dreams, she did breathe, as in dreams she was alive.

—

His chest was heaving, fear gripping him in a way it never really had before. He was forgetting that this was a dream, falling deeper into the hallucination as his gaze met the burning red stare of the bird on the windowsill. 

As with all things, when the lamia felt cornered or threatened, he responded with violence. He let out a bellowing shout, his body morphing as he charged at the fucking thing, smashing into the glass snout-first, jaws snapping and gnashing.

And just like that, the creature was in bed again, twisted up in shredded sheets, the bed frame groaning beneath the weight of his shifted form as he woke up for a second time. Wyatt thrashed among the soft linens in a fit of fear, throwing himself from the bed and continuing the rampage against the bedding from where he collapsed onto the floor. His pupils were narrow slits, reptilian claws raking through the sheets and tearing them into little pieces. He felt trapped in his own mind. How could he be sure he wasn’t still dreaming? 

Outside, a crow cried. Wyatt froze up, breathing heavily, his thick tail thumping loudly against the floor as it slid off of the mattress. His yellow gaze darted to the unshattered window. 

The crow cried again.

The lamia whimpered. 

[nightmaretist]

TIMING: Mid-December PARTIES: Zofia @zofiawithaz & Inge @nightmaretist LOCATION: Dance Macabre/the streets around said bar SUMMARY: Inge finds Zofia in the undead nightclub by accident and addresses her — the two string up a conversation and find common ground. CONTENT WARNINGS: None.

Dance Macabre always enveloped her with welcome arms, it seemed. Inge didn’t really wish to go out in any place else in this godforsaken town, as she kept finding herself looking over her shoulder. Here, though, her kind gathered and here, she was certain she could find some kind of sanctuary. Nothing perfect, nothing that didn’t make her wonder if perhaps she should be looking out for that Cortez, that Rhett, that Owen.

She was in a good mood, all things considered. The alcohol helped. As did the relative absence of Christmas decorations in this place. But she was still alert, at least somewhat, and when she passed by a woman introducing herself to another as Zofia she halted, turning on her heel. Inge took her in, this dark-haired beauty and went over all she knew.

A woman scorned, a woman maimed, a woman seemingly maddened — these were all grounds for her hard-to-gain sympathy. But then she had undone Cassius, hadn’t she? And so, her empathy ended before it could even properly begin. She mixed herself into the conversation with little hesitation, not having struggled with taking up space in at least a few decades. “So you’re the elusive Zofia,” she said, extending a hand when she’d like to raise it to smack the other like she’d smacked Cassius. “Ingeborg.” She was sure to squeeze tight and smile sweet. “Heard a lot about you.”

___

Zofia needed a fucking drink. 

She’d finally obtained some clothing that didn’t look as though it had taken a trip to hell and back and was also her own taste. She’d traded in the jeans and t shirt she’d been given by Alistair for some new finery the moment she’d had the means to do so. Donned in sheer black lace cut in a deep v down her chest, maroon pants, and red lipstick, she felt more herself than she had in an eternity. 

Sat at the bar, she kicked one leg over the other as she surveyed the space. No familiar faces. For the best, probably. She wasn’t sure she could deal with complicated reunions and questions of where she’d been. Or worse, running into those she’d already seen since she’d been back. 

She flicked her dark hair over her shoulder, downing the last of her drink. She felt a tap on her shoulder and a face she didn’t recognize asked if she was someone named ‘Jessica’. Did she look like a Jessica? “No. I’m Zofia. Sorry.” The stranger went on their way, and Zofia went back to her drink. 

Her name carried over the music from a voice she hadn’t heard before, and Zofia felt as though she’d been doused in ice water. She went still as a statue, fighting every urge to hastily dispatch whoever it was and get the fuck out of there. But that would cause a scene, and scenes were bad for people trying not to be hunted again. That and something about promising to try and better herself and then lashing out sat wrong with her. A fake smile gritted across her face, appearing more like the bared teeth of a wild animal. 

She turned, taking in the other woman, trying to assess if she was a threat or not. “I’m at a disadvantage, Ingeborg.” She took the woman’s hand, giving it a shake. “You seem to know me, but I don’t know you.” Her eyes narrowed. “So who sent you?”

_____

Was she a bad friend, for being intrigued by this elusive creature? Sofie, the person she’d only ever known as Cassius’ disappeared lover as he’d never introduced them. Zofia, the person who had left him crumbled upon her return. Were there other versions of her out there, just like she carried her past versions with her? Nika Beinhacker, Ingeborg Beenhakker-de Jong, Ivonne Coëme and now Inge Endeman, all different editions of the same person. Who was this Zofia and perhaps more pressingly, why was she?

And she did resent her, this vampire who had hurt someone she cared for. But another part was intrigued, the way she often was. In a way that went against better judgment, in a way that made her cross whatever boundaries she may have set for herself. Inge had never been a person of very strong principles. She followed her heart, and if not, she followed her desire for whimsy, inspiration and distraction. She wasn’t sure win what category the vampire fell, yet.

The other didn’t seem quite as charmed by her, as it turned out, and Inge was intrigued by this. She was quick to take the seat next to the vampire, settling easily as she crossed her legs and considered her drink options. That could come later, though.

“Oh, no, no. No one send me. I am not someone who is sent.” She gave a knowing smile, which hardly revealed anything. Perhaps she should try harder at not seeming like a hunter type, but the notion of her being anything like a hunter was so offensive to her that she hardly considered it. She turned her attention to the barkeep, ordering another round of, “Whatever she’s having, for the both of us.” 

Then, back to Zofia. Sophie. Sofieke. Whoever. “We have a mutual …” Inge thought for a moment, then shrugged, deciding against a label, “Cassius. I heard you went through quite an ordeal, but …” Tsk, her lips clicked together. “Have been causing a stir yourself. That’s all. I figured we should meet and hey, here you are.”

————-

She was pretty. About the same height as her, with big brown eyes and auburn hair. Zofia’s eyes flickered from feature to feature, looking for any clues as to what she was, and what she was up to. She had come to Dance Macabre, so there was a good chance the woman no longer had a pulse. Or she was a hunter who was running the risk of being caught for the sake of staking out a target. Literally. 

The stranger ordered another round, and a few moments later two dry vodka martinis with lemon twists floating on top were set before them. Good. The drink would make whatever this was about to be more tolerable. 

At the sound of an all too familiar name, Zofia took a lengthy sip of her drink. “I imagine whatever you heard of my ordeal is lacking in details.” Another lengthy sip as she started thinking of an exit strategy. There had to be other places to drink in this town where she wasn’t likely to get a stake in her chest. Or that didn’t have friends of Cassius lurking to confront her for her actions at their little reunion. 

Perhaps, on second thought, being staked would be preferable.

“So you are a friend of his?” She asked. It wouldn’t surprise her. Cassius, after all, was a good person. A kind person. A person who frequented all the same spots as her- how the hell was she going to find new places to go when only a handful of places were designed for undead clientele?!

__________

She gave a hum of approval at the drinks that appeared, taking her glass and taking a small sip. The vampire had good taste, that at least could be said. Inge could appreciate that. As for who she was and what she’d gone through and done subsequently — well, she hadn’t quite made up her mind. For all the love she had for Cassius, she did sometimes think his judgment to be rather poorly. (Which in Zofia’s case could be a blessing or a curse.)

Not that Zofia’s judgment seemed all that sound. Leaving bodies around for a past lover was admirable on a dramatic level, but otherwise a rather outrageous action. “Well, they do say every story has many sides. I’ve heard his.” Inge shrugged. “I am not opposed to hearing yours.”

And that was true. She had been in a position like this before, hadn’t she? Escaped from hunters, her mind frazzled and not quite her own. Looking over her shoulder. She was a solitary creature, one of little loyalties, but she did feel a kinship with her fellow undead — most especially when they had fallen into the claws of some cruel slayers. “What I do know is that hunters can do a number on you. Irregardless of whatever else.”

Inge nodded, circling the rim of her glass. “Yes. But like I said, he didn’t send me. It’s — well, pure coincidence.” She smiled, as if it was a lucky and happy accident. She considered rubbing in the other’s face that Cassius was properly heartbroken, but swallowed the words. 

———

The music changed in the club to something with a consistent pulsing beat. It made Zofia’s skin crawl. She lifted the glass in a half-salute before downing another sip, trying to chase the thoughts away. 

Her eyebrow raised over the lip of her martini glass as the other woman offered to listen to her story. “Are you asking out of morbid curiosity?” The music thumped on. Her eyes closed, her face screwing up in concentration as she tried to shove away the matching plink plink plink of leaky pipes in her mind. The tempo changed and the thoughts subsided. 

A sad smile settled on her face. So that was it. She sat back in her seat, her hackles no longer completely raised. “They certainly can.” She sighed. “Tell me, how old are you?” Zofia cocked her head to the side. How much had she experienced? How much running, how much fear? How much living had she done?

She hummed, unamused. It figured that the universe would have a warped sense of humor. Depositing friends of his directly into her path. “It’s a small world, after all.” Zofia glanced around the space, trying to determine who else might be a friend of Cassius’s, intent on coming over and reminding her of what she’d done just by announcing his name. “Care to take this conversation outside? It’s quieter.” And less of a chance of being overheard. And there were more routes for a quick escape.

———

Many things Inge did were out of morbid curiosity. She’d watched a zombie maul a man because of it, just as she’d entered Parker’s workshop because something within her needed to be satiated. But this wasn’t really one of these cases — whatever Zofia had done and gone through wasn’t bound to stir her to her core like a hunter’s place for torture, after all.

Maybe it was simple solidarity. She did think that important among her fellow undead and besides, she could not help but draw a parallel between what she’d heard about Zofia and what she herself had gone through. “No. Curiosity, yes. Morbid, no.” 

Some relief seemed to spread through the other which was a welcome sight. Inge didn’t mind people being distrustful of her, but she disliked it a little when it came to people like Zofia. Undead. “Almost eighty,” she said, knowing it could be relatively young by certain standards. “What about you?”

She nodded. “Exactly.” Never mind that Zofia had returned to Wicked’s Rest, rather than flee to another town — which is what Inge would have done, in her shoes. Always running, barely ever returning in case of what if. She considered the other’s proposition. “What do you suggest? An alley, in stead?” That wasn’t particularly safe, either. “A quieter place would do, though. We could go for a walk?” 

________

Zofia could respect curiosity. A little. She thought. But what good had sharing the little details of her life done for her in the past? Gotten her friends? Maybe so. But where had those friends been when she’d needed them? She took another long sip of her drink. 

Almost eighty. The ‘almost’ drew a smile from the vampire. It reminded her of when little children insisted they were almost the age they’d be in eleven months, which meant they were practically a grown up. Of course, almost eighty was long past childhood. Long enough to experience, long enough to grieve, to love, to mourn, to hurt… But still young. It was closer to childhood than Zofia had been in a long, long time. “Three hundred fourteen. Three hundred fifteen in the new year.” 

Taking one last sip of her drink, she set some money down on the bar before sliding off her chair. “A walk sounds good.” Moving was good. Moving meant if she was being followed she would notice sooner rather than later. She slipped her coat on, wrapping herself in the burgundy wool, even if the cold night air wouldn’t really bother her. She extended her arm for the other old woman to link her arm through before heading out the door. “I’m sure you have questions.” She sighed, glancing back at the other woman. “Will you ask them now, or shall I start at the beginning?”

_______

Oh, she was old. Properly old. Inge felt a tinge of inferiority spread through, almost wished she had lied about her age — seventy seven was still just a human age, one that people lived to with some back pain and complaint but generally little issue. But being over three centuries old, now that was an accomplishment.

But she swallowed her insecurity and gave a look that did reveal her being impressed, “Good job on sticking around for so long.” Not everyone managed, did they? She’d known undead like them to lose their minds in their immortality. Though that might be a kinder fate than having your head chopped off. She thought of Sanne, how there had been a small moment of her head falling before she’d turned into dust. 

She threw down some money as well, still wanting to pay for the round she’d ordered on proud principle and wrapped her own body in her leather trenchcoat. She’d gotten it in the nineties. Inge stared at the arm offered to her, bemused and surprised by this move, and took it. If it was a challenge, she’d meet it. If it wasn’t, then she wasn’t sure what it was. Once the night air greeted them, it seemed the conversation was bound to properly start. “I’d rather you tell it however you want. I know speaking of such matters isn’t always the most … easy.” She certainly did not talk of the ways hunters haunted her, still. “Speak, if you’re fine with that. If you’d rather have questions, sure. Start with what happened.”

________

Zofia snorted. “It goes by in a blink.” She’d heard it said so many times over the years, from people with white hair that spilled around faces with lines and wrinkles. People with eyes that spoke of a wealth of human joys and sorrows. She wondered what her eyes spoke of. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know anymore.

Ingeborg linked her arm in Zofia’s, and the vampire led on. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, she sang over and over in her thoughts. She didn’t know if she had friends any longer. It was safer to keep everyone so very very close. The closest of enemies, so that she could see the cogs tick in their minds, so she could figure out the trap before it snapped shut with her inside. 

She sucked the cold night air in, embracing the chill. “It’s a story that started some time ago.” Zofia said simply. “You would have been a young thing. Maybe in your twenties. I had a family. A family that I chose, and for hundreds of years a family that continued to choose me. And god, did we live.” A wistful smile stole at her features, only to be swept away as the story continued. “Someone plucked them all away from me. Dead. Missing. Who’s to say, really. I never saw them again, and I gave up hope that they’d ever turn up a long time ago.” 

“And then I started to rebuild. Let myself enjoy life again. Enjoy love. And…” She cut herself off, her eyes darting toward an alley at the sound of a crunch. She watched, waiting for the trap to spring to life. A rat skittered out of a dumpster with some papers in its little mouth, squeaking as it scampered away with its prize. She continued walking.

“It was dark there. You’d think I wouldn’t mind the dark, since I can’t enjoy the sun anymore. You’d think it would have been a wonderful little respite. But it’s never been fully dark out here. I’ve always had the stars… the moon…” Zofia looked up at the distant, twinkling lights. A reminder that she had found a way out. “A dark, small room. A bunker, really. In the ground, deep down, below some old cabin in the woods. Probably long since forgotten by everyone in this damned town, except  for the monsters who hunt things like us.”

“They were looking for information.” She continued, not wanting to live in the details for any longer than what was necessary. “They used all the tricks of their trade. All the things they knew could hurt, to try and figure out where the members of my clan, my family, had hidden themselves away. I was the easiest to find. The easiest to catch. The weakest remaining link. And they tried so very hard to break me.” Her voice wobbled. She stopped talking for a few minutes, refusing to cry in front of a stranger, especially one who’s knowledge of Zofia consisted of information gained from a love story that had ended spectacularly badly. “They succeeded. Just not in the way they were hoping.” 

She couldn’t always see them. Couldn’t always hear them. But she knew they followed. The ghosts that had visited her. Haunted her. Watched her, unable or unwilling to help. She could see them now. Lurking just at the corner of her vision. Still not helping. Still not quite comforting. Simply watching. Waiting. Zofia fixed her gaze on the woman who’s presence she’d proven to herself was real when she’d taken her arm. “What questions do you have.”

__________

“So they say,” Inge said. And she supposed on one hand life had flown by. How many years had it been since her daughter had died? Since Sanne? Since she had died? It all still felt like something that had happened not much longer than a few weeks ago while simultaneously feeling like a lifetime ago. Decades stretched, decades melted together. Time was an incomprehensible thing, both in dreams and in real life. 

As the other started speaking she moved with her in tandem. She had always envied the vampires and their clans, those houses and families that stayed together forever. She’d had Sanne once, her former nightmare and for a while current dream — but it hadn’t been the same. She was glad for her nature, did not envy those that had to drink blood to survive (boring, compared to the nightmares) but mares were often so solitary. Even if named after animals that moved in packs.

But what good where these micro-societies when hunters could rip them apart? It meant there was more to lose, more to leverage against you. Inge did not envy Zofia any more in that regard. The losses she’d suffered had ruined her enough, she figured.

She let her talk, resisting the urge to interject or let out an expletive, but her expression was one of empathy. Slayers were a cruel kind. Never able to simply kill, it seemed. Taking advantage of the undying bodies of their prey that could be maimed endlessly. She needn’t ask what had happened. She remembered Italy. She remembered Switzerland. She remembered Wicked’s Rest.

The story wrapped with a request for questions, as if Zofia was one of her students presenting a piece of art. Inge looked at her inquisitively. Her eyes were red. She should don her sunglasses. “First off, I am sorry that some people felt entitled to ruining your family. That they thought — that there was some righteousness there, that it was their right to. They’ve taken from me too.” Sanne’s head toppled from her neck and turned into dust before it could hit the ground. She blinked up at the stars. “And I am sorry they did this to you. It is an ugly delusion, that they think they can. That they think —” She shook her head. “It makes them better than us. I’ve always figured it makes them worse.” At least vampires healed fast, she figured. At least there was that blessing. In this area she envied her blood-drinking kin, too. 

“Did they survive you, in the end?” That was most important. “Are they after you, still?” That mattered to her personally, too. More slayers was never a good thing, especially not in this damned town. “And … what is it you’re after?”

__________

Zofia knew what pity felt like. It was cloying and smothering and altogether intolerable. This wasn’t pity. This was understanding. She didn’t cringe away from the red eyes as they studied her.  Whatever Ingeborg had been through in her life, it was enough to compare to the last half century of her own life. Steely eyes shifted to a red that matched Inge’s, and Zofia met the younger woman’s gaze. 

“I’m sorry for whatever cruelties you’ve endured at their hands.” She wasn’t used to this understanding. It wasn’t uncomfortable, thankfully. It was bolstering. It made her feel as though she could reforge the broken bits of her with damascus steel, remake herself into something that would not be torn asunder again. They both could. 

“Only one was there when I got out.” A dark smile drew up the corners of her mouth as a memory of lullabies and the metallic scent of fresh blood drifted through her mind. “I wish I could say he got what he deserved, but I didn’t have time for that. He’s burning in hell, all the same.”

The smile fell as another face drifted through her mind. “The one in charge wasn’t home. He’s still out there. And the other one probably had friends.” Zofia took a moment, mulling over the final question. “Everything they took from me. Security. Family. Peace. And I won’t have any of those things until I see the life fade from their eyes. Is that too much to ask for?”

———

She supposed that was an acceptable way of putting it. Having endured cruelties at their hands. Inge refused the title of victim. It was not one she would don, not for Hendrik, nor Sanne and certainly not a handful of hunters. But she had endured cruelties at all their hands. Endured, being the key word, cruelty being the condemnation of the other party. To have gone through it made them stronger. To have doled it out made the perpetrators worse than them. (Still – she didn’t quite think her ex-husband or creator perpetrators. She preferred not to think of them at all.) 

“It’s okay,” she said resolutely. “I will outlive them all, in the end. And so will you.” Those slayers, with their petty lifespans and their even pettier lives … most of them didn’t make it that far in life. “Let every scar we bear remind us of what we’ve managed to survive, hm?” This unlife was to be a celebration.

Zofia had killed one of her tormentors. That was good, Inge thought. A closure of sorts. She wondered if the vampire was vengeful enough to after the rest of them. “Good. Let him burn there forever.” She wondered for a moment how the other murdered. Was it all vampiric fangs and bloodshed? She carried herself with grace now, but perhaps she was more brutal out there. 

She halted, looking at the vampire. “I understand.” Did she? She ran from her tormentors. She ran from town to town, finding no security, no peace, no family. But art — there was always new art. “It is an understandable approach. They deserve nothing less.” Inge wasn’t going to offer her assistance. She barely went after the slayers she encountered. Worse, she’d recently bought one a drink and fucked another. “You deserve nothing less.” 

But. There was a but. She let it dangle in the air for a moment before grabbing it. “But, Cassius. Can you leave him be? I know — well, I don’t, not fully. But whatever transpired, it must ache.” Sanne’s head toppled from her neck. A lost lover could make one quite lost. “I suggest you do if you want those things in this town. Security. Peace.” Inge shrugged. “Perhaps even family.”

———

“That we will.” She certainly planned to outlive hers. It would be easy, since she didn’t plan to rest much until they were incapable of doing harm to her or anyone else again. Though Zofia supposed it would be easier when the scars weren’t still open wounds on her soul. It would be easier when every noise and shadow wasn’t another threat. If that day ever came. 

A dark smile danced across her features for a moment. It was a memory that gave her comfort. One gone. She managed to avenge the lives of those she’d lost and herself, even just a little. 

She paused in their walk, the humor that had momentarily flickered in her eyes all but snuffed out at the reminder of who she was there on behalf of. Even if she hadn’t been sent by him, he’d no doubt hear of this exchange in passing. “That won’t be an issue,” Zofia’s affect was cool and detached. “He has another, now.” Now. As if so much time had passed. The vampire felt herself bristle. Replaceable. Was that what she was? A piece that could be swapped out and exchanged easily with another? 

“Perhaps,” she echoed, the anger that had bubbled up fading at the mention of the one thing she still, somehow wanted. Family. “I’ll rebuild, I’m sure.” 

_______

There was a switch, like all the heat was sucked out of the air. Inge wasn’t surprised. She looked at Zofia calmly, vaguely understanding of the anger of a scorned woman but also, most of all, protective of Cassius. It was a strange balance to try and uphold. To care for him while also understanding her.

Because there was a string of past lovers, faces that had come after Sanne. She had broken some – if not most – of their hearts, but some of them had left her own metaphorical one cracked. There was still, even after all these years and all her experience, something deeply intimate and vulnerable about the exposure of sex, the constant return for it. She was still emotionally driven, more than by lust. She’d haunted a man who’d broken her heart, once. She got it.

But she wouldn’t tolerate it. Not in herself, let alone in Zofia.

“Indeed.” And it was cruel of him, wasn’t it? To have moved on. It was, in a way. But matters of the heart often were. She got that, too. “And I am sorry, for that. It’s no easy thing. But there’s no use in … eyes for eyes, and the like.” 

Inge hesitated for a moment, then linked her arm back with Zofia’s. “You seem like you know what you want. So you shall get it. And there’s plenty interesting people in this town, surely you know that.” Cassius was one of them — but there was a whole world beside him. “If there’s one thing our kind has, it’s time.”

———

“Well there is a use for it,” the vampire sighed, shaking her head. “But not in this case. Not with him. I can spend that currency elsewhere. With people who actually deserve what is coming to them.” Zofia would rather spend her resources securing her safety and exacting her revenge on the hunters that had taken everything from her than wasting it on someone who, at the end of the day, did not deserve it. 

She let out a soft huff. “I’m very old. I have only  so much time before some switch in me flips and whatever humanity I cling to burns out like a lightbulb. If there’s even much of it left, now. This town may be full of interesting people, but I’m not sure time has much left in that particular deck of cards for me.” Still, there was no point in writing it off entirely. She could still enjoy herself, if she could allow anyone close enough to her to enjoy. 

“You have my word. I’ve no intention of hurting your friend. I have better things to occupy my time with, and no interest in spending it hurting myself further.”

———

Inge had killed a slayer before. Humans died so easily compared to the likes of her. Lacerations of her skin hurt, but she would never bleed out, her skin would always regrow — but humans bled. Humans didn’t need their heads cut off or their bodies starved from sustenance for over a week. But when she’d taken a slayer’s life it hadn’t been calculated revenge. It had just been a move of self defense and desperation. She tended to run, after all, as that was the easiest option for her. Flee into the astral and look down on the world and its dangers. Except for that time. That time she’d drawn her gun and loosened all six bullets and disappeared.

Had it felt good? Sure. There had been a satisfaction. But it hadn’t lasted. Not because she felt guilty, but because in that case death wasn’t the end. She was still looking over her shoulders, there were still hunters out there. It had been futile. It was not something to just throw on the table, though, this insight in that fear of hers she was still convinced didn’t exist. “Good. Focus it on them, then.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps. Maybe the issue is that you’re still thinking in terms of humanity when we’re not human any more and haven’t been in some time,” Inge said. “But you can find your people again. That we do need, hm?” Even she had her tethers. Even if she snipped them from time to time, when she ran. 

She nodded, appreciative. “Perfect,” she almost smiled while saying it. Unsaid went the pain she’d already delivered to Cassius, but Inge wasn’t the type to think much of a slap to the face anyway. “Perhaps we can spend some of that time together, hm? I’d like to hear about all the things you’ve seen and done in your years.”

______

A smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. “Perhaps,” the woman drawled. It was a difficult thing to let go of, humanity. She’d been playing pretend for centuries. Drinking blood from glasses as if it were simply another expensive vintage from the DuPont wine cellar. Zofia had known better, had always known better. It might do better to let herself be something more. Something new. Something not quite human, but not quite monster. And perhaps it was time to find more like minded people. 

“ I think,” The flicker of a smile caught on her lips and lingered. “I think I’d like that very much.” 

[banisheed]

TIMING: Pre-goo LOCATION: University of Maine Wicked’s Rest PARTIES: Stingeky (@nightmaretist) and Stinkbhan (@banisheed) SUMMARY: A potty poltergeist forces Ingeborg and Siobhan to bond.

Death came for all. It sat still, knocking at the doors of life, inviting bodies into its dark and cold arms. What existed beyond Death didn’t matter; it came, it asked, people gave. No one gave more to death than Siobhan Dolan, who was born in its clutches, raised under its indifference and who worshipped under its rules and chaos. Fate and Death always came together—two sides of the same weathered coin—but it was a fact of the world that some people existed beyond nature, beyond death. What did her scripture say about people like Ingeborg Endeman? Mostly, that she was a horrifying abomination and an affront of the natural order. What did Siobhan say? 

“Fates, I can’t piss if you’ve spread your filth around here.” Siobhan scoffed, gesturing at the undead professor--this was probably some sort of violation of workplace principles but Siobhan didn’t care. There was only so much disgust that she could pretend she didn’t hold and discomfort that she could swallow down. She spun on her heel, uninterested in anything Ingeborg had to say. She crashed against the door, stumbling backward. She kicked at it, watching the hinges wobble but the door remained shut in place. “Okay,” she spun back around, rubbing her red nose. “Very funny. This is one of your…” Siobhan gestured vaguely. “...tricks. Open the door, Endeman.”

—

She did lack subtlety, this Siobhan Dolan. Ingeborg often thought this a complimentary trait in women (as centuries of subtlety had hardly done anything for anyone), but as the other used it to express her dislike of her, she found it unbecoming. Amusing, some days, but frustrating on most others — there was a benefit in having her undead status fly under the radar at her place of work, after all, and Siobhan could be considered a threat. Besides, there was that hint of paranoid concern she liked to deny which wondered if this woman was a hunter. (A passive one, if so, so seemingly not a problem. As of yet.) 

She watched the professor of whatever-she-taught walk into the bathroom as her own lipstick was raised mid-air, ready to repaint her lips red. “Ah, and I haven’t even gone number two yet,” she said, dotting her lips with the lipstick with her eyes trained on the more pleasing person in the bathroom. Inge’s gaze released her mirror image when she heard a crashing noise, watching her colleague turn around. Half-painted lips spread into a smile, eyebrows raising in amusement and interest. “One of my tricks? What are you talking about?” She wasn’t even being facetious this time: she was not doing anything. “The door is push, not pull. Do you read?” 

—

Siobhan’s eyes twitched. Her annoyance was not masked— the undead didn’t deserve decency or politeness. It was embarrassing to march herself back to the door and try all manner of directional force: push, pull, turn, caress, groan, push again. When she approached Ingeborg again, her face was red with anger. “Stop it. I don’t want to be locked in a bathroom with you; it’s not funny.” She felt like a child, complaining that some older kid was picking on her by moving her bone collection around. “I have pushed. I have pulled. Yes, I can read. No, that shade of lipstick does n-not look good on you.” The lie burned the back of her throat, searing her tongue on its pained journey out of her mouth. It was unfortunate that Ingeborg was attractive; she would have looked better decomposing but now she had robbed the world of the opportunity to have her bones. Siobhan spread her palm over her abdomen with hopes that her hand would soothe her twisting stomach; she reminded herself that the lie was worth it. “Putting makeup on a corpse doesn’t change anything,” she huffed. “Unlock the door. I want to be freed from your stink.” 

—

“Oh, trust me, the displeasure is very much mutual. I’m not keeping you here, though,” she said calmly, taking in the other’s anger with some kind of amusement. If this woman was a hunter, wouldn’t she take this opportunity to bring out a knife, some salt, or cover the keyhole. (Inge’s eyes flashed to the keyhole suddenly, glad to still see it uncovered.)  She continued putting on her lipstick, clicking the tube shut with the loudest noise she could produce and turning towards the other after leaving it on the sink. “Your dramatics are impressive. Are you sure you don’t wish to join us in the art department as a professor of the dramatic arts?” She did have the looks to stand on a stage, but that was hardly something that had to be said out loud. “Putting make up on a corpse changes all the same things it does for a living body, actually.” Inge moved towards the door, trying the handle while staring at the other — ready to prove that she was being ridiculous. It didn’t budge, though, and she tried once more while staring at it. “Well.” She looked at Siobhan. “What the fuck?”

—

Siobhan rolled her eyes. “No, it doesn’t. There is nothing more beautiful than a dead body— why would you put makeup on it? I want to see the discoloration, the desaturation, the gauntness.” Siobhan looked at herself in the mirror; she was beautiful but she didn’t look like a corpse. That was the tragedy of being a banshee: no livor mortis. Distracted by her own splendor, she nearly missed Ingeborg’s futile attempt to open the door. “You’re asking me?” Siobhan scoffed. “You’re the one that locked it with your undead trickery!” Siobhan waved her hands in the air as if the motion would prove her point, as if in between the waving Ingeborg would drop the act and unlock the door. The lights flickered. The bathroom groaned like a giant awoken from a nap. The lights flickered again. “I can't teach the dramatic arts.” What was acting but lying? There was a reason fae productions were often made using indentured humans. “But I’d be amazing at it if I could.” The light flicked off and when they buzzed to life again, red dripped from the mirror. 

Siobhan’s nose crinkled. “I think that’s a message for you.” The oozing red text read, simply: STINKY. 

—

Maybe in another world the two of them could get along. Professor Dolan was somewhat morbid, after all, with her talking of stages of decomposition as if it was nothing. Alas. “Then go find yourself a dead body? You won’t find them in the bathroom.” Ingeborg swiveled to the other, creasing her eyebrows in annoyance. “Undead trickery? I could use my undead trickery to leave this room if I wished! And I certainly would like to right about now!” She couldn’t completely, in all fairness, as it was day outside and Inge couldn’t take her body into the astral with her. And while escaping with just her spirit to leave Siobhan with a comatose body might be funny, she didn’t trust the other. “You know, I wish I could do this.” As the light flickered, she felt envious. Inge could do this in dreams, but never in the waking world. To her, this was a poor version of the dream world out there.

Inge stared at the message on the mirror, reading the word stinky with squinting eyes. “I’d sooner think it’s for you. The one who blames people is often the perpetrator of the stink.”

—

“You are a dead body, in case you have forgotten,”  Siobhan sneered; Ingeborg was being purposefully obtuse, she thought, but she couldn’t help but to fall into her play a little. The situation was frustrating and so was her company. “Don’t lie to me! You undead have…” Siobhan waved her hand around in the air again. Away from her tutelage of her family, Siobhan had no way of knowing what new, perverse tricks the undead picked up. It was unlikely that forty years created a brand-new, door-locking evolution in the undead, but Siobhan wouldn’t underestimate them. Diseases often adapt, after all. The lights flickered again and the bathroom groaned. The stall doors flung wildly, flicking open and slamming shut only to burst open again—each time accompanied by a loud and shrill banging. The STINKY on the mirror seemed to ooze more. “What sort of rule is that? Clearly, I am not the purporator of the stink. I smell lovely. Smell me.” Siobhan pointed to the stalls. “Stop doing that, Endeman. The sound is annoying.” Images of maggot infested corpses swarmed Siobhan’s mind all at once, unfortunately for whomever thought the sight would terrify her, it was the sort of thing she often pictured. As the faucets started to rattle, Siobhan got another idea.

“I think this might be a poltergeist, Endeman.” Siobhan said. “It’s very tacky of you to have invited one into the toilets. You struck me as a woman of more class–albeit, disgusting class.” 

—

“To you,” she sneered in return, refusing to agree with such a notion. Her body was strange, certainly, and Inge had her own mixed-bag relationship with it — but it was definitely alive. Not with something as arbitrary as human blood, nor tied to just one plane of existence: but it was alive, if only because it could be killed. “What even are you, Dolan, to judge me like this?” It was thrown in off-hand, a question she didn’t expect an answer to but wanted one for anyway.

The bathroom had to be possessed, or something close to it, and Inge felt something run up her spine — something like excitement. It wasn’t often that she was the one on the receiving end of some scaring – which wasn’t to say she was scared – and whenever she was, it was a thrill. Her eyes were wide when taking in the leaking lipstick, the flickering lights, the slamming doors and the suddenly running faucets. In her mind, pictures of dead bodies crawled around and she let out a sound of surprise. Whatever could do this had her admiration and envy, that much was certain — she wished she could manipulate reality like this. “Annoying? You have to respect the work, Dolan! It’s glorious.” 

As the other dropped the word poltergeist, it did seem to fall into place. Inge turned to look at Siobhan, eyebrows raised. “Doesn’t it get exhausting, being so presumptuous? I didn’t do a thing! But you have to admire its fervor, or are you incapable of looking beyond anything when it’s supposedly dead?” The sinks were clogged up, somehow, and water splattered onto the ground. “I wonder what that makes you, Dolan, a slayer of sorts …? Or just extremely dull?”

—

What was she? Siobhan preened at the suggestion of it; she was something great and powerful and perfect and beautiful and much, much better than the filthy abomination that Ingeborg was. She opened her mouth to explain what she was, and then she thought better of it and snapped her lips shut. It wasn’t wise to be so free with her knowledge, even as her fingers twitched at her side and her jaw ached, begging to be unclenched so the one, beautiful word, could be uttered: banshee. She had every right to judge the undead, ridicule them and make it known how much Death did not agree with their existence. Siobhan looked at herself in the mirror, fixing her strands of soft brown hair as STINKY continued to dribble down.

“Glorious?” She turned to Ingeborg, scandalized. “What is the point of it? Do either of us look scared? It’s a waste of effort.” Siobhan tapped Ingeborg’s reflection in the mirror. “Now this is scary.” As water splattered on to the ground, Siobhan lifted her feet, plopping around in the water as she groaned. All of this was nothing more than an inconvenience and she was just about to pull the salt she kept on her out of her pocket when the other professor went on. Slowly, Siobhan's brown eyes widened. “Slayer?” She clutched her chest, scoffing. “Slayer?” She repeated, offended beyond regular measures. She turned her head around and scoffed everywhere she looked, gesturing and opening and shutting her mouth as she struggled to articulate her disgust with the sentiment. 

“I’m a banshee,” Siobhan said, slitting clutching her chest. “A banshee! I’m Irish! I’ve got bones in my pockets!” She pulled the mandible of a mouse out of her inner jacket pocket. “By what idiotic metric would you even fathom that I was a slayer? A slayer! If I was a slayer, you’d be dead—again. I’d be beheading you right now! I would have beheaded you months ago!” Granted, she had thought about beheading her, but she thought about beheading most people that she meant—it was one of her ‘happy thoughts’. “A slayer!” She scoffed again and again and even as the bathroom started to flood, water rising up to Siobhan’s ankles. “I’ve never been so offended. I am a beautiful, superior fae and you would compare me to a disgusting, lowly human? And at that, a breed of hunter? Me?” Siobhan spun around. “I can’t–I don’t even want to look at you right now. You’ve offended me so greatly. If I wasn’t in exile I would sic pixies on you. You’re so lucky I can’t do that. You’re so fortunate.” 

—

It was true, neither of them looked scared. The poltergeist must be going through some of the possibly worst frustration a fearmongering creature could go through: the one that came with failure. These were cheap tricks, too little to inspire any kind of reaction besides one of glee from Ingeborg, and Siobhan Dolan seemed hard to shake herself. Still, she carried a certain level of respect for creatures and people similar to her, so she frowned at the other’s assessment. “Maybe they’re new to this, the scaring. We should support their efforts, even if they’re not particularly effective on us. If it was a freshmen here, they’d have peed their pants right where they stood!” 

She was annoyed with the water, which was not yet reaching her socks (thank God for her leather, expensive boots) but was capable of doing damage to the suede on the long term. She was more focused on Siobhan than the boots, though, wondering what her accusation of the other being a hunter would do. Either she was one, and it would lead to something annoying and potentially dangerous, or it would be offensive. To call something supernatural a hunter, after all, was a horrible thing. Inge knew that very well: when the tiny Bugbear had called her one, she had been terribly offended herself. There was no worse thing to be on this earth. 

And so, Siobhan revealed herself. She was a banshee. Now that was interesting, more interesting than whatever the poltergeist was doing. Inge stared at the bone, then at the other. “I don’t know, there are some real lazy slayers out here. You sure seem to share some of their viewpoints,” she said. Her hand traveled to her neck at the mention of beheading, caressing the scar that lined her throat. “A banshee is much better, though. I can’t say I’ve met any before.” Fae were strange things, still a mystery to her even if there had been decades of experience with the supernatural. They liked their elusiveness. She would respect it, if she wasn’t so curious herself. Her lips spread into a smile, impish like the pixies Siobhan talked about. Or, at least, so she assumed. “Oh yes, I’m very fortunate to be stuck in this room with you right now where we splish splash around. And what’s this, Dolan? You’re exiled?” Now, she was just going to be mean. “Can’t be that superior, if that’s the case.”

—

“What? Like they’re a child?” Siobhan was particularly offended by the idea of thoughtfulness; her mother was never forgiving towards her sensitivity and Siobhan learned that if anyone wanted to get better at something, it needed to be done with a firm hand. No, Siobhan absolutely wasn’t going to pretend to be scared just to temper the feelings of some untalented poltergeist. “You can scare a freshman by telling them there’ll be a group project. It’s not hard to scare a freshman.” She did it all the time and only occasionally by accident. 

“Shut your gob,” she hissed. She was done. The stalls kept banging and there seemed to be no end to the water rushing out of the burst pipes and Siobhan was done. She thrust the bones back into her pockets and rummaged the cavernous holes for the tiny packets of salt she kept on her; if there was anything that annoyed Siobhan without abandon, it was ghosts. She hated ghosts. “I’m still superior to you, you undead fiend; you abomination of the natural order; you disgusting, abhorrent, attractive, useless speck of wasted space. I am a banshee. I am a fae and I’m going to do something I should have done five minutes ago.” Triumphant, she pulled a fistful of tiny packets from her pocket; white paper jutting out from between her fingers. One slipped out from her grasp and plopped into the rising water, floating to the top where its black label glared at them: “salt” it read, with its own cartoon salt shaker. 

Siobhan’s eyes burst into pure blackness, two pools of ink. She shoved her salt-packet filled fist towards Ingeborg. “Do you want to be useful for once?”

—

“Well yes, a new poltergeist might as well be a child! I don’t expect you to understand, but there’s a learning curve when it comes to scaring. Not your area of expertise, though, so …” Inge shrugged, waving away the rest of her sentence. Siobhan’s comment on freshmen left her with a genuine sound of amusement, though, much to her own dismay. It was funny, but to laugh at something someone who disliked her said, well … it was below her. “And yet it’s so much fun.”

Siobhan kept going on, throwing vitriolic insults that Inge wanted to let slide off her back. She succeeded mostly, but she wasn’t immune to the nagging anger that rose in her as the other went on about her supposed superiority. She looked at the other with an angry gaze, “A banished fae,” she said, as if that would undo all of her arguments. “And oh, you’re so limited if you think the natural order is so boring as not to include us undead! Nightmares are natural, lest you forget, and besides — it’s not as black and white as you might want to think it is.” 

And then the banshee was pulling out salt, and worse, holding it out to her. Inge looked at the packets of salt, glad they were covered in crinkled paper, and looked up at Siobhan. Her eyes were as black as the India ink she used in some of her works, a sight that made her want to move closer to inspect it and grow inspired by it. “No.” She shook her head, curt and determined. “Get that shit away from me. Do what you’ve got to. I’ll watch.” 

—

Scaring wasn’t really Siobhan’s expertise; she had been raised to fit in, draw as little attention as possible, not that she really did that or wanted to do that. In fact, her whole family talked about the importance of plainness and never once practiced it. Anyhow, scaring wasn’t her business; it was a hobby. She didn’t know what suddenly made Ingeborg and authority and then it all clumped into place like a soggy jig-saw puzzle. Undead. Salt-aversion. The sparkle on her skin as she passed a big window on a sunny day, which Siobhan had previously begrudgingly accepted as the strange glow that beautiful people sometimes had. Her insisting that nightmares were natural without any acknowledgement that she wasn’t a nightmare, she was just a thing that could cause them—completely different.

Siobhan laughed, throwing her head up to the swampy ceiling. As she quivered with amusement, a couple more packets of salt fell from her hands and plopped into the water. “You’re so boring,” she said, lowering her gaze back on Ingeborg, “so predictable. How long have you been alive? You haven’t learned any style? Any originality? You’re not even moderately useful to the natural order; at least vampires and zombies clean up. What do you do except run around like a disease?” The black of Siobhan’s pupils burst, plunging her eyes into an inky darkness. The world turned dark and Ingeborg faded into a soft white stain. When she spun around, she found a girl sitting atop the stalls, greasy hair stuck to her bloated blue cheeks and her legs kicked out like she was running an invisible marathon. Siobhan tore open the salt packets and threw them at her. 

The flickering lights stopped, the stalls creaked on their hinges, wobbling with inertia, the faucets squeaked shut, and Siobhan flicked herself around, irises back to brown, scleras back to white. “You’re utterly useless, you know that?”

—

She was boring? Inge let out a similar laugh to the banshee’s, finding the entire statement so ludicrous, so ridiculous — hadn’t Siobhan been proving this entire time that she was small-minded and limited? She couldn’t understand why someone would not find the existence of undead interesting, why someone would think the mere idea of there being people out there who could move from one plane to another boring! She was anything but boring. She refused to be anything but boring. “You’re the boring one,” she retorted once her voice had ceased to bubble with that echoing laugh. Her eyes were wide with indignance. “You know nothing of my style or originality, because all you know to do is narrow your eyes and stare down a tunnel of small-mindedness!” 

She had half a mind to put the banshee to sleep and give her a daydream, show her how original and unboring she could be — but she refrained as there was still that poltergeist to deal with. Besides, when she saw Siobhan’s eyes turn inky black she was enthralled, thinking the woman more beautiful than she had ever appeared before. Inge watched with a begrudging awe, wishing she could appear that way when on the earthly plane but limited so dreadfully in this existence.

Everything ceased, then, and it seemed that the inky black eyes and salt-throwing had done their job. Inge was annoyed that Siobhan had succeeded where she could not, but she tried not to show it by shrugging casually. “I don’t like getting in the way of my ilk,” she said, sparing a look at herself in the mirror. At least her lipstick looked right. “This was very enlightening, Siobhan. We should do it again.”

—

Siobhan’s insides coiled and the beginnings of a scream burned behind her ribs. She didn’t say anything; Ingeborg Endeman had earned the final word and Siobhan was left soggy and clutching mini-satchels of salt. When the professor left, somehow prettier after their ordeal than before it, Siobhan waited and then followed her out, watching her back as she claimed the hallway with her even strides. She wasn’t sure if she wanted Ingeborg to look back and see her and if she did, what would she see? Siobhan didn’t know what sort of face she was making, she’d avoided her own gaze in the stained bathroom mirror as she exited. She clutched the wall and held her breath. Finally, Ingeborg turned and disappeared and finally, Siobhan could breathe. 

Ingeborg Endeman was dead, unbothered, delightfully macabre and timelessly beautiful and Siobhan hated her for it. 

[wickedsrest-rp]

Name: Ingeborg Endeman Species: Mare Occupation: Fine Arts Professor / Sculptor Age: 77 Years Old (Looks about 33) Played By: Marin Face Claim: Olivia Cooke

"No live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

TW: Domestic abuse (implied), terminal illness

Life for Ingeborg started in a small town in the north of the Netherlands, where she was born third of five. Inge brought a loudness to a house so very quiet. Above the fireplace were pictures of a sister who hadn’t made it through the months of famine that had happened prior to her birth, at the dinner table sat a mother with wringing hands and next, in the shed a father who didn’t talk. Growing up was not much to boast about. It was dull, a sober protestant existence in a town where everyone was always looking in but never really bothering to look further. And yet Inge fit in the mold made for her. Life followed the trajectory laid out by the church and her parents, marrying a boy with a sweet smile at twenty three and giving him a babe less than two years later. Vera was a screeching child, a daughter that roared with laughter and weeping and Ingeborg loved her completely. Hendrik less so, as he was a man of little passion and even shorter temper, with stark and traditional opinion of where a woman belonged. He was a right fit, on paper, but that was where it ended.

The nightmares started not soon after Vera’s birth. Dark circles started deepening around Ingeborg’s eyes as the nights were full of terror, harrowing scenes of furious husbands and housefires where nothing could be saved. The nightmares came and went but always came again, like furious waves polluting her mind. A doctor asked her if, perhaps, she did not love her child enough — that they saw this often, with new mothers: a depressive attitude, a struggle with motherhood, the longing for pregnancy once more. These were years of paranoia and fear, of a wedge growing between herself and Hendrik, of asking her pastor if perhaps God was punishing her. It was seven years of cycling through periods of heavy fatigue and dreamless sleep and periods of nightmares and insomnia. For a period, she spent her days and nights in an institution where her nightmares ceased, only to continue when home. The only solution would come in the form of death, when the mare who had been feeding off her finally went too far. 

Sanne, she was called, the mare who’d crept into her mind seven years ago and had taken until there was nothing left to take. Ingeborg was pulled in by apology, by her promises of what the future could hold and how she seemed to know her. The first nightmares she gave others were repetitive. Ingeborg replayed the horrors from her own dreams and handed them to others while feeding. It was a way to cope, albeit a twisted one — but she was just glad to be rid of them, to have the tables turned. She remained in Wanneperveen for a few more years, filling the minds of familiar people with nightmares until she turned her back. The divorce was a scandal, but it mattered not: life was to be larger than whatever the town had to offer. 

With Sanne and her daughter, she moved to the big city. No more smell of manure. Art, culture, a better school for her daughter. A nightlife that allowed her to roam endlessly, that filled her life with interesting people but brought plenty to feed on. The shock of her nature had, by then, worn off, and instead Ingeborg found herself hooked on the rush of delivering nightmares, of growing innovative with it. Motherly duties stood on a backburner and her relationship with Vera withered. She moved out the second she turned eighteen and Ingeborg admittedly felt freed of motherly shackles, though it wasn’t something she easily admitted. 

Sanne she loved, in her own way. Sanne had shown her, had transformed her, had made her. The years are a whirlwind, the only constant red thread Inge’s enrolment in art school and her getting the education she was robbed of in her former life. Maybe they were pushing it though, the pair of them, and soon enough there were hunters on their heels. Sanne screamed for her help and Ingeborg ran, taking the opportunity the other’s murder offered to get out. The image of her friend beheaded would repeat in other forms in the dreams of future victims.

She was alone, for the first time in her life. Mid-nineties and Ingeborg was running, crossing a pond and then plenty of rivers, delving into another city, and then another, another, another — she filled her portfolio with sketches and paintings of nightmarish things, of her daughter as an angry teen, of Sanne’s death, of the world at its end and springflowers blooming violently. The 00s marked a period of sculptures, that were shown under a pseudonym at the Biennale, Ingeborg representing a country that was not her own. The Netherlands was too small, the way her town had once been.

But one call would bring her back, and it was Hendrik’s canny voice. Vera was dying before she could even turn forty. Inge returned, looking younger than her decaying daughter, all skin and bones under her hospital gown. Human illness, something she considered boring nightmare material, turned out to be terrifying after all. While Ingeborg had reveled in her state of immortal stasis, her daughter had been consumed by an illness and grown physically older than her. 

The years after these were ones of indulgence and denial. Inge’s ventures into other’s dreams became more plentiful, more creative and uglier. The horrors she created were distractions, made to divert her thoughts from grief and loneliness — but she grew sloppy. Hunters, once more, ended on her trail and she made it out of every corner she was backed in, though never with inspiration for future nightmares. The details of being hunted were offered to her victims and poured into her art, a cycle kickstarting that she had no intention of ending.

About one and a half year ago, Ingeborg settled in Wicked’s Rest. Scoring a job as a fine arts professor at the local university (her surname brand-spanking new and only the dates on her CV a lie), she found a kind of routine in the odd town that felt pleasurable enough. Her cycle continued, with new challenges and new inspirations.

Character Facts:

Personality: Creative, outgoing, warm, direct, knowledgeable, delusional, aimless, selfish, callous, extravagant

Inge teaches fine arts at UMWR and prefers to work with sculptures herself. While she enjoys painting and photography, it’s with three dimensional installments that she has the most fun. She’s especially fond of very large pieces of art that can be touched, walked on or interacted with. Her more private way of creating art is something she only does with her victims, by giving them nightmares beyond their imaginations. She considers it something of a gift. 

Though indulgent in plenty of ways, Inge tends to be somewhat stingy and is very good at saving money. Generally speaking, she is very good at taking good care of her possessions — some of her clothes are decades old and still in good condition. The thing she mostly splurges on is rent: Inge always wants to live in a place that is aesthetically pleasing and offers her plenty of room. She rents a lofty apartment in Deersprings.

Her birth name is Ingeborg, though her original maiden and married name are different. She chose Endeman for its dutchness and because it has a little edge, she thinks. She has gone by a multitude of names over the decades, though.

Has little qualms about giving people nightmares and has a few delusions about the function of fear in the first place. At the end of the day, though, Inge has little regard when it comes to mortals and sometimes thinks all she does is give them something. Fear is a form of hurt and through hurt art is made, after all. 

Wicked’s Rest is a fun place to live in, Inge thinks: the hunters bring a challenge, but there are also so many meals around. The people here often have plenty of scary memories to build on. She treats living here as being an artist-in-residence, a place to give her inspiration and to keep her fed while her art takes a new and exciting direction.

[ironcladrhett]

TIMING: Current LOCATION: An abandoned soap factory PARTIES: Rhett (@ironcladrhett) & Ingeborg (@nightmaretist) & Siobhan (@banisheed) SUMMARY: Siobhan and Inge hatch a plan to get revenge on the warden that kidnapped Ariadne with a little kidnapping of their own. CONTENT WARNINGS: Torture, body horror. Like, fr. It’s gross. You've been warned.

—

Hunters were a cruel sort who based their existence on exactly what she was doing now: stalking, keeping an eye out, intending to drive their prey into a corner and then – after a strenuous and long process – undo them. She’d heard some of their convictions before, that moral obligation they felt to clear the world of predatory species such as herself — as if they weren’t a pest all the same. Inge didn’t often play their games, but she could this time. Because the opportunity was right. Because she didn’t want to run from this town, even if that was wisest.

So she had kept an eye on Rhett ever since Ariadne had hand-delivered the news that the warden was injured. It was glorious timing, was it not? Siobhan Dolan expressed her desire for blood and soon after the man they both wanted to make bleed was down on his luck. Inge reveled in the sight of it, anticipating seeing more as she reigned in her fury and instead stuck to the plan thus far.

Tonight was the night it was to go down, if the stars aligned right. Siobhan was sitting idle nearby and Inge was in the astral, looking at Rhett stalking the town of Wicked’s Rest and waiting for opportunity. It wasn’t often that she took the path of offense, after all, and now that she did, she refused herself recklessness. In stead, she waited until he was alone and then severed her connection to the astral, her earthly body appearing not behind or in front of the wanter, but above. A move she and Sanne had practiced, once. She fell on him with her legs around his neck, a little clumsy but with enough momentum to pull him to the ground with her. “Surprise,” she said, her weight on his body, her hands flying to his neck. More easy to reach without the beard in the way. Red eyes glowed as she stared into his eyes, all her energy pushed towards her hands to put him to sleep.

—

As it turned out, used hearses were readily available online. Vintage—as purported by the listing—and teeming with residual Deathly energy, the vehicle was not inconspicuous. But nothing about Siobhan had ever been inconspicuous. Siobhan’s phone buzzed and with one quick glance spared to the text, she raced down the street and screeched to a stop beside Rhett’s sleeping body. He looked cute in that way all sleeping humans did; she could drop an anvil on his face and watch his confused brain (if it remained intact) sputter to make sense of what had occurred. She loved, more than anything, the human disorientation of waking up, as if the body didn’t understand the concept of slumber. It was hard to believe such a vulnerable looking man was capable of doing anything to Ariadne. 

Siobhan stepped out of her new-old hearse, one long leg after the other, heels clicking on concrete. “That was a little anticlimactic,” she said. She didn’t explain that she’d been hoping for a bit of a struggle, Ingeborg, for all that she insulted the other woman, possessed a quality Siobhan had lost a long time ago: sensibility. She considered waking him up and undoing Ingeborg’s work, just to piss her off, just to imbue their work with excitement. Whatever part of her—whatever foolishly sentimental part—that had truly wanted to see justice for the sweet Ariadne, was also lost. Or, rather, smothered. 

She reached down and grabbed him by the ankles, pulling him across the ground; his arms scraped along the concrete and his head bobbed with each uneven movement. Finally, she looked up. “Well?” Siobhan huffed. “Are you going to help me or…” Siobhan didn’t possess any delusions; between the two of them, she was probably considered the ‘muscle’. She opened the back of her hearse and threw him inside, grunting and huffing; he was heavier than he looked. Climbing in after him, she took care to tie his hands together behind his back and bind his feet, just in case he woke up. She slipped her gloves on and carefully searched his body, it was likely all of his knives were cold iron and she could do with not hurting herself before the main event. 

In the end, moving across his body in a clinical fashion, she removed five knives and one wrinkled advertisement—torn from one side as if ripped from a book—for a lavender goat milk soap flecked with crystalized honey and imbued with essential oils. If ordered now, a free soap bar would be thrown in at no cost. Siobhan pocketed the advertisement and packed the knives away in a plastic bag. 

“Okay.” She jumped out, closing the door behind her. “Are you going to come with me or do the whole…” What she’d meant was ‘teleportation’ but what she signaled, squeezing her hand in the air, was more like a groping motion, boobily directed. “It…” Siobhan swallowed a compliment for Ingeborg’s work. “You’re alright.”

—

It was a quaint sight, the hunter incapacitated in innocent sleep. Of course, Inge knew there was no such thing as an innocent sleeper — people dreamed of horrible things even without mare intervention, their subconsciousness spinning tales that were better forgotten and unsaid. What did he dream of, now? She had half a mind to slip into his mind and take a peek, to be nothing but a bystander to this man’s psyche. To intrude into his privacy the way he had intruded on her feeling of safety.

But Inge was sensible, or at least, she could convince herself to be. She sent a text to Siobhan, her unlikely ally in all this after getting off the brute’s body, the toe of her boot pressing against his head to make it so that he’d look at the stars if he was awake. When the banshee pulled up in her hearse – an admirable show of commitment to the aesthetic – Inge did expect some kind of praise. Instead she got a dry comment, and her face twisted a little. She’d like to see Siobhan try to do what she just did. Not that Siobhan had seen it, anyway, the way she’d fallen from the sky and used her limbs against the other! “You just missed the best part,” she grumbled.

And so she was fine letting Siobhan do some of the heavy lifting. This was not because the other was presumably far more experienced with these things, certainly not. It was just because Siobhan had made a snide comment and Inge had not yet forgotten how lowly she’d spoken of her kind. “Oh, sorry,” she said as the request to help came her way, and she lifted the hunter by his neck without putting in a whole lot of effort.

She watched with curious, hungry eyes how Siobhan got to work, tying up Rhett with an expertise that Inge lacked. She did think of her own legs strapped to chair legs and her hands bound together by his own hands as she’d been knocked out. How the tables had turned now. How victorious she felt, for once, in the face of a hunter. Even as she stood by, watching Siobhan produce knife after knife. For good measure she wrapped her hand around the man’s ankle, keeping him asleep before stepping aside. 

An amused and puzzled look was thrown Siobhan’s way at the motion she gave her. Inge was glad, most of all, for the not-quite-compliment that followed. It was an acknowledgement, at least, which probably meant she should voice that the other seemed to know what she was doing. That she looked skilled and good doing it. “I’ll come with you,” she said, before begrudgingly adding, “So are you. Now let’s go. I want to see his face when he wakes up.” With that, Inge popped into the astral, only to reappear in the passenger’s seat. She’d at least give Siobhan the honors of driving her funeral car.

—

The old hearse wheezed to life, coughing black smoke from its rusted tailpipes. After a few sputters and stalls, Siobhan coaxed it into a steady pace down Wicked’s Rest’s pot-hole afflicted roads. Each crack threatened to send the hearse closer towards car heaven but each curse and forceful thump on the accelerator seemed to drag it back to life. It wasn’t going to die today, but the same couldn’t be said for the slumbering man jostling behind them. She reached towards the console between them and flicked on the CD player, letting Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” fill the air—a reference to their online conversation that Rhett wouldn’t get because he was sleeping and a joke that Ingeborg wouldn’t understand because she was stupid and undead (a redundancy). 

“What do you reckon the man’s thinking of?” Siobhan jutted a finger back, gesturing to Rhett. How many dreams had Ingeborg seen? How many nightmares did she cause? Was there a commonality between them? Siobhan bit her lip, keeping her rather friendly curiosities to herself. “Think it’s tits? Might be dreaming about tits,” she laughed. “The man’s about to die, would be a shame if his last dream is wasted on those…oh…” Siobhan waved her hand in the air. “In the classroom naked? A test that wasn’t studied for? You know the sort; human minds are so dull.” Not that she’d ever actually seen one for herself. She glanced at Ingeborg. How many, she wanted to ask. Did you like them? Do you remember them? Hold them? Do you regret them, Ingeborg? Will you regret this?

She turned her gaze back to the road. “What do you think?” she asked again. “What do you think a man like that dreams about?” 

—

It wasn’t tits, as it happened. What he was dreaming about, that is, not the situation at hand. The situation was very tits, as in it had gone tits up, as in it was bad, bad news. Not that he really knew that, not yet. Hell, he’d not had a lot of time to process his predicament before being sent off to slumberland. And wouldn’t you fucking know it, he hadn’t even deserved it this time. Not as a reaction to anything he was doing immediately, anyway. There he was, minding his own business and looking for ‘for rent’ signs in windows, when suddenly wham! He was on the ground. 

It was black, mostly. An empty void with no light, no echo, no sound at all. He felt like he was falling forward, careening over a cliff that he couldn’t see, but the rush of wind was eerily absent. His mouth opened and he screamed, but nothing came out. Panic gripped him, tightening his chest and sending a terrible cold all through his bloodstream. Something grabbed him by the throat then, jerking him out of the freefall and throwing him to the floor of an old, run down shack. He pushed himself up onto his hands, shivering and gasping for air, relieved to hear the sounds of him trying to catch his breath.

“Dad?” he heard a soft voice call to him. Looking up, he saw Ophelia standing there. Younger than she was in reality, an imaginary version of what he thought she might’ve looked like when she was twelve or so. And her mother… her mother sat in a chair beside where Ophelia stood, looking just the same as he’d last seen her. 

“Mari—” He couldn’t get it all out as the nymph stood from her seat and shrieked at him, exploding with light and blinding him all over again. He wailed, falling away from her, throwing an arm across his useless eyes. 

“You killed us!” she screamed, standing over the top of him. “You killed us, you monster!” 

In reality, the warden stirred fitfully in his prescribed slumber, straining against his bonds but not waking. Not yet. 

—

She flicked down the passenger mirror, this time not to check her lipstick but rather to keep an eye on the restrained hunter as Siobhan drove. The music choice was inexplicable and Inge refused to ask for an explanation or to even comment on it — it felt like a test of sorts. Or maybe the banshee just had bad taste in music. It mattered little: there was a much more interesting sight for her, a turning of tables right behind her. She did not often indulge in vengeance, aside from petty little things, as vengeance was an act for the reckless and stupid and she would like to think of herself above such things. But this was a sweet sight, a promise for some kind of righteousness.

She glanced at Siobhan when she asked her question but looked back soon enough. “Every dream features tits sooner or later,” she said, before snorting, “I cannot imagine him having such mundane dreams — but the ones about public nudity are common.” Inge placed her boots on the dashboard and wondered about what made the man stir. “When I entered his dreams a few months back, he was dreaming of a woman on a boat. Pregnant. Some kind of deeply personal thing. An ex, you know? Who doesn’t dream of those?” Not her, but she didn’t dream any more. If she could she probably would dream of Hendrik and Sanne alike, so she was very much glad she didn’t. 

She kept a close eye, wondering if she should indulge the rather rude banshee. She gave her a glance, held up a finger. “One moment.” Inge disappeared, projecting into the astral for a few moments before ending in the space where Rhett had been laid. It was better than climbing over the seats, even if the cramped space still led to a little bit of an awkward position. She tilted the other’s chin up, pressed her fingers on his throat and entered his dream, where a woman was stood screaming over the slayer. The same woman Inge had described moments ago. She didn’t do much to the dream, not quite trusting Siobhan with her fragile and undefended body. It would be a waste not to add a personal touch to this dream, though, so she filled the scene with floodlights and the sound of squawking crows. 

All in all it took a few minutes before she returned to her seat, glancing at the driver. “His presumed ex, again. She didn’t have her tits out, though.”

—

Siobhan didn’t dream of exes, that would require her to have them—romance was often far from her mind and when it wasn’t, the reminder that her life would never fit it was stronger than most wistful thoughts. The rare dreams that didn’t turn into nightmares were often concerned with animal life: the cows and their swaying flaps of fat as the bounded up to greet her; the sheep clumped together in one mess of dirty wool; the strutting chickens in an ancient coop, pecking at hay; the pale horses on the hill; the birds above; the ants in a their single-file line carrying crumbs to their underground home. Siobhan couldn’t admit that to Ingeborg; saying she didn’t dream of exes—because she’d never once indulged in a properly romantic relationship—and instead dreamed of cows, felt like the exact fuel needed for a terrible, scathing insult. She kept her mouth shut. What exactly did it mean that Rhett, someone sworn to duty just like her, would have a relationship to mourn? Was he the weak one, indulging in selfishness? Or was there something wrong with her? Clearly though, it hadn’t worked out for him; people rarely dreamed about things that worked out for them. 

The cows were popped by her screams, the sheep were used as butchering examples and the running chickens were target practice. The birds fell from the sky, dead like leaves on the ground. One day, her mother gleeful explained the process of poisoning ants—the dry loaf they’d been stealing from had been injected several times over with a concoction of her own creation and look, now there were no ants (Siobhan thought this was strangely cruel, but her mother never had a lot of hobbies). Only the horses had survived but their living fate had been the worst of them all: deaf and unnaturally docile, the sensitive creatures were wrung out over generations; they didn’t move unless prodded and they wouldn’t eat unless forced. Siobhan could only tell they lived when the statues of them on the hill would be broken by the reflexive swish of a tail. No, the animals hadn’t worked out for her and no, her dreams never did feature tits. 

Siobhan’s grip tightened on the wheel as the roads turned uneven and weeds burst through the widening cracks. Around them, windows were broken and then boarded and then broken without a care for boarding. The trees grew tall and thick, unencumbered by humanity. It took more power than she expected to resist from telling Ingeborg that her astral movement was astonishing--it inspired awe the way a bloated corpse found around the corner did. “If I was dreaming about an ex, her tits would be out,” she said. “We’ve picked up a boring one.” The concrete of the roads seemed to disintegrate as they moved, turning into rocks and gravel. The hearse wheezed to a stop in front of a large brick factory with rusted smokestacks looming above. The words had fallen off years ago but out of luck or in a curse of its former glory, the important part remained: “SOAP”, it read. 

“I put some more toys in there for us,” Siobhan explained as she grabbed Rhett from the back. “Bone saws, chainsaws, hacksaws, circular saws, jigsaws, pole saws, crosscut saws—Hm, I see now that I focused a little heavily on the saws.” Siobhan continued, musing to herself. “I did see one of those old iron brands in there; it has the soap logo on it. Wouldn’t that be funny? Perhaps we should start there? Well, no, of course we tie him to the chair first—I didn’t think to bring the torture chair, it’s a regular chair. But it is plastic, which I think is torture enough.” 

—

WELCOME TO YOUR KIDNAPPING & TORTURE. The big, block letters shivered in the gentle breeze that slid through a broken window, the banner they were pasted upon swaying alongside the colorful bunches of balloons and streamers that stood in stark contrast to the rest of the forgotten structure. It was all shades of gray and brown until you got to this spot, a nice open area on the factory floor with plenty of doohickeys and thingamajigs for Rhett’s captors to festively decorate and angle him toward. Even the chair he was strapped to was red, the hardy rope used to hold him in place a nice shade of royal blue, really making this feel like the kid’s party to end all other kid parties. There was an unusual amount of saws for a kid’s party, though. 

The warden snorted violently as he snapped awake, the image of his screaming ex and crying daughter fading to make way for the bright, bobbing balloons and fluttering crepe paper. His last remaining eye blinked rapidly as he tried to orient himself in his new surroundings, head turning this way and that to make up for the lack of peripheral vision, yet he still couldn’t really figure it out. A stupid, confused sort of sound slipped out of him as his darkened gaze finally found the two other figures in the room and he went still again, only now feeling the binds around his wrists and ankles. His shoulders were sore from his arms being pulled behind him, his leg ached from the aging werewolf injury, and his eyepatch was somewhat askew on his face. He glowered at the pair, recognizing Inge after a few seconds, but having no clue who the other one was. She was fae, though; that much he could determine. Not helpful. Inge, though…

“You still that upset about the bunker?” he growled, his voice gravely and low. His one-eyed gaze jumped from her to the stranger, and he sneered. “Who’s yer friend?”

—

“Who knew there were that many saws out there …” The fact that she and Siobhan had partaken in a creative effort was an unexpected thing, but when it was put in the context of revenge and viciousness it perhaps made more sense. Regardless, she thought their kidnapping location was far superior from that drab basement she’d been held in, never mind that stinky van. Inge did something uncharacteristic, here: she let Siobhan take the lead. This was no time for pride, was it? She had a goal she wanted achieved, and that was for the hunter to die in this abandoned factory — to let the one with more experienced hands charge seemed only logical if she wanted to see that goal accomplished. Inge would’ve never thought to bring this many saws, after all. Her form of torment had always been purely mental.

Still, she was very much capable of tying down a man twice her size.

For all the ways she claimed not to understand hunters, she was still here, satisfied as she watched Rhett come to. Groaning and struggling, roles reversed and some kind of justice at the tip of her fingers. His comment about the bunker only caused a wave of distaste to roll through her. Was it not her good right to still be upset? She was not one to let go of her grudges, anyway — and that’s all this anger was. A grudge. Not incessant fear, gnawing at her subconscious. 

“You look good like that,” she snipped back in return, “And come, you’re one to talk, considering you were dreaming about her again.” Inge would very much like to meet this woman, she found. “ Maybe you should start tying up your loose ends so they don’t come bite you in the ass later on.”  She looked at Siobhan. “I’ll let her introduce herself.”

—

“Did you get held in a bunker?” Siobhan’s gaze snapped between the tied up warden—some of her best work, really—and her accomplice. “His bunker?” She jutted out a finger at Rhett, who did in fact look good tied up. If the trauma wasn’t too much after this, perhaps he’d consider bringing light bondage to the table with his ex. Maybe she’d come back then. After this. Siobhan hummed. Right, she was supposed to kill him. They were supposed to kill him—he wouldn’t get an after this. “That’s so embarrassing. I had no idea I was working with such an amateur.” She stepped away, approaching a long metal table which housed all of the aforementioned saws, as well as a variety of implements she thought might be fun to use. Her eclectic assortment ranged from a set of sleek, stainless steel automotive picks to a blender. 

She was an artist among her paints and brushes, gleefully planning what could be done with her canvas. Siobhan was no stranger to torture. “It made sense for the little one,” she called out to Ingeborg, slipping her legs into a pair of white disposable coveralls. “But you? Everytime I try to think more highly of you…” She zipped the suit up. “At this rate, my opinion just can’t get any lower.” Securing the hood around her skull, she snapped two rubber gloves on. “I was first tortured at the tender age of six.” She fastened plastic around her boots. “If you could call it that; I think of it more like a demonstration.” She crinkled as she moved; crinkled as she approached Rhett. Siobhan, an artist, could admit that some choices were born out of practicality rather than aesthetics. “I can demonstrate it for you, Rhett.” With a smile, she circled the chair. 

“At six…” Siobhan leaned down, giving her story tenderly to his ear. “My mother told me there were these people known, in English, as wardens. You’re familiar, aren’t you? You must have gotten this conversation in reverse, though, were you younger? Were you born knowing what you were? What you would become?” Siobhan’s hands dropped to his, tied behind the chair so tightly that his skin bulged and verged on purple. “She said they would do terrible things to me and I asked ‘what things, mother?’” Lazily, she trailed a rubber finger from his forearm, to his palm, to his middle finger. “A demonstration of an idea of torture.” Her fingers tightened around it; she felt his joint in her palm, his flesh at her disposal. Testing, she rocked the finger gently back and forth. “She believed in a tangible style of teaching—method. You’re familiar, aren’t you, Rhett? I imagine you were taught similarly; we all are.” Siobhan moved her grip to the top two thirds of his middle finger, which she held firmly. “You learn who your enemies are before you learn how to spell your own name.” She grinned. “Which is Siobhan, actually.” 

And snapped his finger. 

—

Huh. Bickering between his captors wasn't something he'd encountered before, and he quietly wondered if it wasn't something he'd be able to use later—time would tell. His gaze drifted to the spread of… implements, as you like, and he frowned. Ah. This wasn't a simple steal and kill operation, then. This was more like what he had done countless times to countless fae in his hunt for the ex he wasn't even sure he wanted to murder anymore. 

Incredible how this had only managed to catch up to him now, after everything. After all the promises he'd made, here he was, paying for it anyway. It was fair, he supposed. Didn't mean he had to like it. Still… As the fae whose name he had yet to learn strolled his way in her coveralls, talking about torture and demonstrations, he couldn't help but wonder what sort of lessons he was going to be taught in this chair.

His eye jumped again to the table of dangerous looking things, and he swallowed thickly. 

He was quiet as she spoke, of course, absorbing what information about her that he could. And once she was behind him, his attention settled on Inge, who he watched with a surly sort of expression. His jaw was tightly clenched—he knew what was coming. Her hand wrapped around his finger and he sucked in a short, quiet breath, bracing himself for the break. Siobhan. Sharp pain raced through his hand and up his arm, accompanied by a loud crack, and he half-stifled the grunt of pain that hissed between his teeth, the rest caught in his throat. His body reacted to the pain without his consent, beads of sweat appearing on his brow as he tried to take a slow, even breath. 

“Harsh upbringin’,” the man muttered, wracking his brain for what sort of fae that would make her. She wasn't a nymph, that much he was certain about, given the quieter-than-usual screams of protest in his head. He didn't know spriggans to teach their young in that manner, nor muse or faun. That left banshee, which made sense. She seemed like a banshee. 

“What you doin’, associatin’ with and undead thing like that?” he asked the banshee, though he was still focused on Inge. “Don't their kind go against every li'l principle ya hold dear? Wouldn't ya rather it was dead? Real dead?” He leaned his head back to look at Siobhan, wearing a smirk in spite of the pain. “You ‘n I ain't so different.” 

—

Amateur, Siobhan called her, not simply making light of her stint in that bunker but pointing out the obvious failure on her part. Her feeling of victory slipped from her, the combination of Rhett’s gloating and Siobhan’s continued string of words dragging her down feeling like an intruder to her own event. Inge witnessed with brewing anger how Siobhan donned her torture suit, something she did with practiced care as she droned on and on and on. She wondered if she should get clad in a similar suit but refused to mirror the other like some schoolgirl trying to imitate the most popular girl around.

“Only for half a day,” she pointed out, her words defensive, “It wasn’t so hard to escape.” Because she had escaped! And that was what always mattered in the end — there was an inevitable quality to the way hunters seemed to catch up to her, so it was not about prevention but evasion. Why was she even trying to justify it, though? She didn’t owe it to Siobhan nor Rhett. Inge narrowed her eyes, demanding of herself that she got her shit together and crossing her arms, remaining standing near the intriguing assortment of devices. She could appreciate a woman who understood her instruments, who was creative in her craft — but right now there was little appreciation for Siobhan to be found.

No wonder that she was so very comfortable around this, if she’d been exposed to it at six. A revelation that made Inge want to pull the banshee apart at the seams, to hear every story from her past and let her imagination run wild with it. Her eyes bore right back into Rhett’s, refusing to let his gaze do anything else than engage her. And the first good thing to happen in that strenuous moment of her embarrassment on display happened when there was a crack of bone and the grunt of pain. Her lips spread into a satisfied smile, but once again the feeling of victory remained short-lived.

 “Grasping at straws, are we?” Her gaze flicked from the warden to the banshee, trying to gauge the situation. “What, you reckon she’s stupid enough to kill me and team up with you?” Inge turned to the table, letting her hands glide over instruments that didn’t befit her means of torment. “Siobhan, did you not bring a gag? His voice is grating.” As was hers. She longed to kick the other to the side and slip into Rhett’s subconscious, tweak around with his dreams — but she didn’t quite trust Siobhan with her incapacitated body. “And distracting us from what we’re here to do.” 

—

It could not be denied that Rhett possessed the power of deduction. In fact, to Siobhan, he seemed quite skilled at it. Through the pain of a broken finger, he’d categorized her accurately. Of course, Siobhan briefly considered that maybe it wasn’t that impressive; she might as well walk around with a giant, blinking sign that proclaimed her banshee identity. Still, she liked to give credit where it was due and Rhett wasn’t going to have any victories for a while. She was one of those generous torturers. “You’re right, we’re not so different, Rhett.” Siobhan stood. Her gaze trailed from Ingeborg’s feet to the top of her head—not a very long distance, she thought. “I have this fantasy where her head rolls down an endless hallway; her eyes watch the spinning tiles until it feels like a carousel and then she smiles, bobbing down the hall, because she thinks she’s at a carnival.” Siobhan looked at Rhett. “What do you think it means? I’ve always thought it was a metaphor for how much I want her to go join a circus.” 

Siobhan didn’t say that despite Rhett’s accuracy, the answer was simple: she just didn’t want to kill Ingeborg. From the moment they’d met, she’d thought about it. Then those moments turned to days and then weeks and then she realized that the thought of a dead Ingeborg Endeman didn’t excite her. Honestly, it was kind of embarrassing; it was almost as if she’d grown fond of her, fond of hating her. She left Rhett and his bent finger and approached the table again. “I didn’t bring a gag,” she said to Ingeborg. “I like it when they talk, it gets too boring otherwise; you’ll learn.”  When she returned to him, she set out a few new items at his feet: more rope, a knife, one of the picks, a bone saw, a hammer and pliers. As if tending to him, Siobhan sat down at his feet, among her tools, smiling up at him. “Doesn’t falling in love go against every principle you hold dear? Or is that woman you dream of someone you’re indifferent to?” 

She tied his calves to the legs of the chair, tightening the ropes against his tibias. She tapped his left knee and then his right, counting a rhythm on her head. Her fingers flew back and forth as she mouthed the words, stopping with a smile upon his left knee. With equal care, Siobhan undid the bindings at his ankles, taking his left boot into her lap—grip form in case her new calf bindings weren’t good enough to keep him from kicking at her like a horse. “I find myself uncharacteristically happy to know you have such a shite bunker, Rhett. And that, apparently, you’re quite terrible at killing mares.” His dirt painted boot—speckled with holes and adorned with fraying stitches—came off with one quick pull. His toes stared back at her.  “I like torture with a bit of a narrative, what do you say? Artistic, I call it. I’ve already given you my mother, do you want one of your own now?” 

Siobhan grabbed the long, metal pick, slipping the pointed side under his big toenail. “The first warden who captured me had a cabin, not a bunker. And a very peculiar interest.”  With one thump, she wedged the metal between his nail and his skin. With another, the pick thrust under his nail, peeling it from his flesh. And another, and another, driven deep by agonizing increments. And another. And another. Thump, thump, thump—she chiseled under his nail. “I don’t want to hurt Ingeborg,” Siobhan said tenderly. With a twist, she slipped the pick out, marveling at how quickly hot red blood gushed to freedom; more pooled under the half of his nail that remained. “Anyway, that first warden, he liked to go slow. Maybe you would have liked him.” Siobhan patted his bleeding foot. “Shall we let our mare have a go, Rhett?” She turned to her accomplice, taking a pair of pliers into her hand and clicking it in the air. “I don’t want to have all the fun; I am one of those generous torturers, after all.” 

—

Stupid? No, clearly not. And while Ingeborg’s suggestion hadn't been what he was after, he supposed it was as worth a try as anything else. Mostly he just wanted to annoy them. What else was he to do about this? The less pleasurable it was for them, the less satisfying his death would be, which is all he could really ask for. But Siobhan… she persisted, unbothered by his taunts. She was going to be a tough nut to crack, he figured. 

“Circus is the place fer clowns, aint it?” Rhett grumbled. Keeping his eye on the banshee as she placed the implements on the floor in front of him, he felt his pulse quicken. Inge had said he was distracting them from their task. Siobhan asked him about Mariela. He frowned at both, his gaze hardened in spite of the jackrabbit kick of his heart. “No.” A lie, at least in the case of her being fae, which neither of them could know. Before he could ask what this task was, Siobhan was speaking again. Monologuing, more like, as she untied and retied his leg to give herself easier access to his foot. “Don't suppose ya got tickle torture in mind…” He was speaking mostly to himself, interjecting between her story about a warden and a cabin. Sounded familiar. Less familiar was the metal thing she was poking beneath his nail, and a chill ran up his spine. Fuck. He opened his mouth to protest, a reflex not often given in to, but all that managed to escape was a shout of agony. His wrists strained against their binds, vision blinded for a moment as he bucked in the chair. The plastic held for now, but white streaks of stress in the material spread across the legs that his own were tied to. “Motherfucker!” he bellowed, trying to wrench himself away from her with each dig of the pick, panting in spite of himself and keeping his head turned away. 

Obviously he’d broken a lot more fingers than he’d had nails removed. 

Finally, though the act was painful enough on its own, the relief of the pick being removed came and let him scramble to regain some of his cognitive ability, enough to realize what a moron he was. Playing into this, Rhett relaxed back into the flimsy chair, sucking in deep, ragged breaths. It was Inge's turn, apparently. Siobhan had turned to look back at her, and the warden saw his chance. He kicked both feet out as hard as he could, snapping the chair's legs right off and sending him to the floor. The plastic still tied to his legs, Rhett sent another kick in Siobhan’s direction to keep her away, then scrabbled up onto his knees—easier said than done, with his hands still tied behind his back. His bad leg screamed with pain as he put weight on it to start running the fuck out of there, but he'd only made it a few steps before he felt a hand on him. “No!” It was no use—his unconscious body crumpled back to the concrete floor, a trail of blood marking his brief attempt at an escape. 

—

Maybe Siobhan had a point. Maybe it was good if he could talk — maybe then she would get to see what she wanted most of all. For Rhett to plead, to ask for mercy before having the lights go out. Perhaps she was projecting. She hadn’t ever chased this kind of vengeance, which meant there were plenty of hunters out there who she’d like to tie onto a chair as well. But she knew how this went, and knew that getting the other to beg might be an occurrence outside the realm of realistic possibility. She’d sat in that chair after all, albeit not faced with someone quite as vicious and creative as Siobhan, and refused to mutter the word please, bitte, alsjebieft or per favore even in those darkest moments. And though Inge thought herself miles above the hunter, she also figured he had the same bogged resolve when it came to these things. 

But when he broke out into a bellow, when he strained against his ties and he bled that gorgeous red she hadn’t bled in almost fifty years … it was something. It was stirring, to see the mess Siobhan left behind, like something Inge hadn’t seen before. Something she hadn’t recreated in someone’s mind before just yet, because she didn’t have the reference. It was gruesome. It was some kind of rotten thing to do this to another person and yet she could not look away, yet she wanted Siobhan to keep moving from one toe to the other. “You had a point about the gag,” she said eventually, finally agreeing with the banshee. It helped that she expressed a disinterest in hurting her. It helped that Siobhan’s focus on her task was like iron. She took to the task with no question or qualm and one thing was becoming clear: Rhett would leave a horrid corpse. Let that be penance. “He sounds sweet like this.”

Her head was swimming with thoughts, wondering what else Siobhan had up her sleeve and then remembering that she was not just a spectator — she too was a master of torment, even if it was a different kind. Inge didn’t need tools or crinkly suits, she had her imagination and her touch. But before she could answer Siobhan and give her some kind of look, there was a loud crack. The plastic hadn’t held. And how reversed the roles were now, Rhett with his broken chair so similar to how she had crashed against his bunker’s floor — but Rhett couldn’t dematerialize at will. Inge took a moment to take stock of the situation then made chase, quicker than the hunter if only because she had two healthy legs. Her hands were greedy as she gripped the hunter by his tied-back hands, her focus strong as she willed him to sleep. Now the hunter was in her preferred state: asleep, soundly and sweetly, bleeding like a pig but not as noisy as one. 

She crouched down, turning his face sideways so one cheek rested against the concrete. “When I’m back,” she told Siobhan without looking up. “Can you make sure he’s properly restrained again?” Surely the other could manage. Inge waited a beat for a response and then delved onto another plane of existence, where Rhett’s subconscious was waiting for her. 

Where he awoke he was restrained, too, head positioned in a way where he could barely look away from his body — it was more as if he was frozen in time than feeling any kind of rope around his flesh. Under his skin something moved, scratching and flicking as it crawled up his chest, curled gray hair (a creative and hopefully correct assumption) moving. Inge wasn’t interested in building a narrative tonight, in a slow build up. She wasn’t even interested in wasting her birds on Rhett, and so she returned to an old favorite: bugs. More somethings started moving, bodily sensations those of icy pinpricks, like tiny sharp paws padding over his flesh. Up and up and up, towards his neck, towards his chin, two clicking over his cheeks. And then, a gust of wind, a sound of warning and they burrowed out, all of them — moths with thick wings bursting through his skin, flapping sharp wings and covering every inch of him so there was nothing left to see.

—

Siobhan stumbled back, gasping as she hit the ground and Rhett’s body blurred in front of her with movement and shattered plastic. Then she laughed as he hit the ground. “I like a runner,” she said, watching Ingeborg. Then, there was nothing to watch and the buzzing of the night filled the cold factory. 

The world of dreams was inaccessible to Siobhan and so, dutiful, she waited in reality. The poor plastic chair had served its function and so she untied the shards that held to her ropes and redid Rhett’s bindings. This time, careful not to wake him, she tied his upper body together as if it might unravel—across his shoulders, his biceps, his elbows, and his wrists together against his back. She bound the legs at the thighs, but let the rest lay free. There was something about his legs that she liked; they’d carried him for a long time. They’d held him up, helped him sit, gave him the boost he needed to break out of a chair. Such obedient legs they were—each toned muscle marked their faithfulness over the years of Rhett’s life. How many places had he seen on them? How many times had those knees felt the ground as he knelt? How many times had they saved him? Taken him away from places he couldn’t withstand being in? Rhett had lovely legs. 

The metal teeth of the bonesaw screeched against the ground. 

—

It was such a strange thing, trying to scream and feeling like you were underwater. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation, he’d experienced it a few times during his nightmares, but that made it no less maddening. He wanted nothing more than to thrash and carry himself away from the moths, even though that made no sense because they were coming from within him, but it was just his instinct to run. But he couldn’t move, and his voice was gone. A whisper, drowned out by the cacophony of wingbeats as the moths ripped through his flesh, rending it from his body as they covered him in a skittering, fluttering blanket. He wailed silently, wishing again and again to just die. Just let me die, he begged no one. His breaths were shallow and fraught with terror, growing deeper to fuel those soundless screams every now and then. 

Just when he thought he couldn’t stand another second of it, something even more terrible pulled him from the nightmare. Something had started to cut into his flesh, a very real threat drawing a very real and tortured scream from him. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t get away, and the pain was unlike anything he’d ever felt before. It took him a few moments to understand what was happening, the slow, rhythmic grind of a saw against his ankle only registering as such after a few push-pulls. He wasn’t even sure what he was screaming anymore, if it was words or just sound, the only clear thing coming through being the stop, stop, stop on repeat in his head. But it wasn’t stopping, and there was nothing he could do about it, and god he felt lightheaded—

The wails devolved into shocked gasps for air, peppered with whimpers and whines as his mind decided to take a vacation and spare him the horror of experiencing this to its full extent. His eye glazed over and stared blankly into the distance, head slumping to the freezing concrete floor. Eventually, the vibrations of metal against bone that rattled through his entire skeleton came to a stop, but this didn’t bring him out of the episode. Normally, these things would manifest as memories replaying over the top of current reality, but not tonight. Tonight he’d fully shut down, a mixture of his dissociative disorder and pure, unadulterated shock. His breathing was heavy and stuttering, but he said nothing. Just let me die. Just let me die.

—

As natural instinct seemed to take ahold of Rhett, Inge was met with that sweet taste of fear. She didn’t go hungry (out of self preservation and because she simply saw no point in abstaining), but Rhett’s fear still satiated some kind of gap within her. Like ichor it spread through her, something that made her determined to keep going. More leathery wings — let them climb down his throat, into his ears and pry his eyes open! But before she could focus on feeding more, the hunter was awoken and with that, Inge’s awareness returned to her earthly body. 

She was met with a spray of blood and a scream that rang through the hollow factory hall. Eyes widened in what might as well be genuine shock, she scrambled back from the sight. At least Siobhan had restrained Rhett properly again, as had been her request — but it seemed unnecessary with the sight her eyes fell on. What had she expected, for Siobhan to not use her saw? For the banshee to give a head’s up about her intended dismemberment? Inge stared at the sight, her back resting against a rusty beam that kept the rusty factory standing up, eyes blinking and yet not looking away. This was nothing like the moths, the birds, the cruel murders, the chases, the shrinking rooms and the rot from her dreams.

This wasn’t something that existed elsewhere, but right here. The warm blood on her jeans, hands and face proved as much, its sticky nature surprising to a woman who hadn’t bled in years. She watched, unable to look away and feeling that rare sensation of being stirred to her core. Ingeborg didn’t get afraid any more (or so she endlessly claimed), but she got affected. And with that, she got inspired. She watched, not bothering to pretend to breathe, and wondered what a foot felt like after it had been cut off.

Eventually, when the deed was done, she looked at Siobhan. “A little warning, next time?” Her voice echoed vaguely, sounding raspier than she’d anticipated. 

—

The saw wasn’t designed to cut flesh. Its purpose was obvious by its name: bonesaw. It was exactly what it was designed to be; an instrument of simple function and dutiful adherence to title. And wasn’t that true for all of them? Rhett: warden. Ingeborg: nightmare. Siobhan: butcher. Bonesaw: not the first step to amputation. Siobhan leaned on the blade, running the teeth along Rhett’s flesh. Blood sputtered from his ankle as she pressed the full force of her weight down, but she was hitting muscle, not bone. She took out her big hunting knife and sliced his ankle, watching the layers peel away: dermis, muscle. Her knife screeched on his tibia. Then, the saw. Back and forth and back and forth along the bone. She held his bloody foot with one hand and worked the saw. Occasionally she would stop to pull, wondering if a good jerk would snap the bone free, but she had no such luck. The saw she’d chosen was antiqued: designed for use in war hospitals. Back and forth, back and forth. The piece of tibia she’d been working on snapped, beside it—back and forth—the more demure fibia. Another snap. Rhett’s foot dangled off his leg like a frayed thread, stuck to him by one flap of meat. 

Siobhan had first learned to butcher on a pig, a sow she called Elizabeth. Elizabeth had been a good teacher, showing her where to cut along her tendons, her muscles, around her joints and through her thick hide. Elizabeth became parts: shoulder, back, loin, ham, spare rib. Everything was just meat. Siobhan sliced her knife down Rhett’s ankle, freeing the foot from the body: on Eizabeth, that’d be called the hock. She held it up as if serving it. Cheap cut of meat, good for stock. The meaty flap remained at Rhett’s ankle—or rather, where his ankle was. Siobhan thought it looked like red liquorice someone had left on the dashboard of a hot car. Elizabeth didn’t teach her this, her mother did: use the flap, sew it up. 

She hadn’t noticed Ingeborg coming back, she hadn’t noticed Rhett going away—screaming, giving up. As a butcher, the meat needn’t be minded and her job ought to be focused on. She stood, coveralls red, dripping Rhett’s blood, smiling. “It needs to be bandaged now,” Siobhan explained calmly. “If he bleeds too much then he dies too quickly.” She looked down at him, pitiful on the ground. “Do you remember war? Have you seen it? This is how the surgeons did it: on a conveyor belt, almost—factory manufactured dismemberment. Cut one, on the next; meat and then meat.” Her attention turned to Ingeborg. She squeezed her gloved hands together and grinned at the squelching blood. “Did you have fun?” She asked. “It’s really not fair that I don’t get to see.”

Siobhan smiled down at Rhett. “Did you have fun?” 

—

The warden’s eyelid fluttered as his body reflexively tried to wet the drying orb, but every muscle in his body was taught, and his half-blind eye stared widely into the middle distance. Where blinking failed, tears took up the mantle, sliding across his cheekbone before dripping to the dirty floor. It was involuntary, just like the way he shivered from the cold and the shock. He wasn’t there, not really—he was in Parker’s bunker with the other warden, watching him work. His methods were calm, careful, and meant to spare the fae from as much pain as possible. Hell, Parker even sedated them, which would have been a fucking blessing tonight. 

Rhett’s own methods had always been less so, and he supposed that’s why this was happening to him now. It was why he’d die at the hands of these two, for all the transgressions against them and their kind, violently and miserably. It was all he deserved, but he still couldn’t face it. Still couldn’t prevent himself from slipping away to some other place. 

Siobhan spoke to him, and he didn’t respond. He just wheezed another rattling breath, in and out and in again. Parker looked up from the table and gave him that look that was almost a smile and began to explain his process, but Rhett couldn’t hear him, either. It was like they were all underwater, or… or maybe that was the blood rushing in his ears. 

His shoulders burned. He couldn’t wiggle his toes. Why… where? Oh. 

His dark eye jerked in his skull as a shadow loomed over him and he recoiled, coming back into himself like his bungee cord had snapped and let him slam into the ground. It was a brief, violent outburst, stalled almost as quickly as it had started when the mare’s hand found his head and silenced his panic. For now. At least until she could spark it again in her own, unique way.

—

She remained at a distance for a moment, taking in the scene in front of her. A nightmare on the earthly plane, the gore real and gruesome. Was that a metallic scent, wafting to her? Inge blinked even if there was no use to it, watched the warden cry and thought perhaps that was the only good thing about this scene. Siobhan was talking, a vision in red, and though Inge had always enjoyed the concept of a woman covered in blood she now had to do a double take. “I was born right after it,” she answered, “My sister died in the famine.” Why was she answering like a schoolgirl would? With no second thought? She didn’t know.

She was looking at the leg again, felt confused by her own weakness. She’d seen and created more gruesome sights like this, and yet — she thought perhaps she would be sick. But she wouldn’t be. She refused. “It was very fun, wasn’t it?” Her gaze locked onto Rhett again, reduced to something so pitiful. There would be even less of him when they were done with him. Inge looked at Siobhan. “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.” She moved in again, wanting away from this plane of existence and to the one where she excelled, where she was the butcher, the monster, the one with the power. 

He seemed more present moments before she pressed her hand against his forehead and it almost seemed like she was a nurse, taking his temperature as she kneeled next to him. Let Siobhan do her thing. She’d do hers. Inge put Rhett to sleep and gave the banshee a look before returning her focus to the plane where dreams roamed.

Here was only darkness, until there wasn’t. A singular light turned on, flickering, and Rhett would find himself in a small room. Four walls that seemed to be made of some strange material. Maybe he’d look at them all in search of a window or a door, but there would be nothing to be found. Just those bumpy walls. 

Wait — did one of them move? Did all of them move? There was something crawling on them, it seemed, but not just one singular thing. Like a wave, like a hivemind, tiny feet scratching the same way they had when they’d been in his body. Maybe Rhett would walk. In this dream he could: Inge hadn’t taken away his foot or toenails, gave him the mercy of having free mobility in a room that offered no freedom otherwise. The walls crawled. The walls moved in, closer and closer. Tighter and tighter. Maybe Rhett would try to place his hands against opposing walls to stop them from inching closer, but there was no stopping it. The walls separated, the moths that were covering flying from one to another, from surface to their prisoner. Latching onto him, his skin, his hair, his nails as the walls inched closer and closer and closer until there was no space left.

The dream ended but the nightmare would not upon waking.

So it would continue to be. Rhett would sleep and be exposed to Inge’s repertoire of nightmares, moving from moths to murder to the snapping jaws of beasts. Rhett would wake and be exposed to Siobhan’s repertoire of bandages, saws and musings. On the second night, he’d wake to the lower half of his leg gone, discarded to the side by the banshee’s hands. A night later, and between every dream another toenail would be gone until none were left.

There would always be an end to the waking or sleeping nightmare, but never any relief — not in consciousness and not in the lack thereof. 

[ironcladrhett]

TIMING: Current

LOCATION: Still an abandoned soap factory

PARTIES: Inge (@nightmaretist), Siobhan (@banisheed), Emilio (@mortemoppetere), & Rhett (@ironcladrhett)

SUMMARY: On the night that Rhett is to lose his second foot and probably his life, Emilio makes a daring entrance and tries to bargain with his captors for his freedom.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Suicidal ideation (of the life exchange variety)

—

It wasn’t really like Inge was short on nutrition at the moment, with Rhett providing a steady supply of snacks, but there were still those human cravings. Besides, Siobhan presumably did require human sustenance (or did Banshees sustain themselves on screams?) and so a grocery store run seemed fitting. The mundanity of overhead lights and inflation were a stark contrast to the blood that had just coated Siobhan’s fingers, but it came with important rewards. Lollipops. 

As the pair walked to Siobhan’s non-conspicuous car, Inge was sure to continue the point she’d been trying to make. “I think you’ve– we’ve had our fun. The longer go on like this, the riskier it gets.” She pulled open the passenger side door, tossing the groceries in before taking a seat. “Someone’s bound to look for even such a sorry sod at some point.” She pulled the door close, muffling any other words from any sharp ears, looking at Siobhan sharply. “I want him dead before sunrise. Can you settle with that?”

—  

Torturing Rhett had given Siobhan an emotional and creative fulfillment that she’d never felt before. It had also—though she would never admit it—given her a friend. A friend she hated and a friend that was an abomination and a friend that, perhaps, didn’t see her as a friend at all but a friend nonetheless. It would be embarrassing to admit that she had prolonged Rhett’s torture not just because it was fun but because she was having fun with Ingeborg. She thought they were really bonding. Violence was what made true friends; so it had been in her aos sí, so it was in that soap factory. 

“Oh.” Siobhan leaned against the driver’s side door; one arm spread on top of the hearse, which she rested her chin upon. “What risks? He’s hardly a danger. Risks of having too much fun?” Following Ingeborg—could she just call her Inge now? They were friends, after all—lead, Siobhan ducked into the car. “You’re such a bore. I wish someone would come for him. That’d really make it interesting. I could use one of the other saws on them. I was thinking about the circular one; it’s brand-new.” Siobhan turned to her accomplice and noted the lack of amusement. “Fine.” The car sputtered to life, wheezing and coughing up black exhaust. “Dead tonight, meanie. Give me one of the candies.” 

—

Ever since he’d found Rhett’s cane abandoned on the street, Emilio had been a flurry of activity and nervous energy. No time had been taken to pause for stupid things like sleep or meals, and any responses to texts or messages from friends had been brief and curt. He wasn’t stupid. He knew how this was likely to end, knew he was probably looking for a corpse more than he was looking for a man, but even so, he searched tirelessly. If a corpse was all that was left of his brother, he’d still bring it home. He’d still do for Rhett what Rhett had done for Juliana and Flora in Mexico two years ago, even if he was the only one who’d care enough to visit the patch of dirt he planted him in. 

And he’d still make sure whoever was responsible paid for it.

That anticipatory grief in his chest was matched only by the anger, the rage that warmed him like a furnace in the dead of winter. On some level, he knew it was a stupid thing to feel. Rhett had been reckless since coming to town, had gone after too many people and let too many go. The fact that most of them were people who didn’t deserve it ached in a different sort of way, but it wasn’t relevant to the point. This town was probably full of people who’d like to hurt Rhett, and Emilio shouldn’t have been surprised that one of them took a shot. But the grief was there anyway. The rage was there anyway. So he did the only thing he’d ever really been good at — he followed the trail. 

Javier heard from Lara who heard from Beto that a professor at the college hadn’t been in in a few days. The professor was one with a familiar name — if anyone would go after Rhett, Emilio thought, it would be the mare he’d locked in his bunker. But wherever she was hiding, she was hard to find. In a way, that gave him hope; it meant Rhett might still be alive, though it promised he’d be in bad shape. Still, Emilio did his best to douse the feeling. Hope would do nothing but get him killed here.

It was funny; when he finally found her, it wasn’t even intentional. He stopped by the store to pick up a protein bar when his stomach finally began to cramp in protest of its emptiness, and there she was. It was something of a surprise to see her with Siobhan; maybe it shouldn’t have been. He hadn’t heard anything about Rhett going after the banshee, but a fae would have every reason to want a warden dead regardless. Neither of them spotted him. He wasn’t sure either of them would know to look for him. It was easy enough to fall into step behind them, far enough away to avoid detection but close enough to keep from losing them. Inge’s presence helped with that; all he had to do was follow that pull in his gut towards the undead thing ahead of him, ignore the way it mingled with the dread there.

One way or another, he’d get his brother back tonight.

—

Siobhan’s complete apathy to the risks was something that made Inge feel inferior. She was not overreacting, was she, in assuming that this could lead to more trouble? Violence begot violence. That was why they were here now. That was why she tended to run rather than face the people who chased her tail. She dug around for a lollipop of a flavor she liked and unwrapped it with a note of frustration, telling herself she was wary and that was good and that it wasn’t really that Siobhan was better than her, she was just … unhinged. Yes. That was a good term. 

She popped the lollipop in her mouth and got a cola-flavored one for the banshee (this was, in her opinion, the worst flavor), undoing the wrapping for her as well before holding it out. “The best hunter is a dead one,” she said sagely, wondering if Siobhan would simply bite down on the lollipop or if she’d reach for it with her hand. Inge kicked up her legs, licking her own candy merrily. “We can have our fun another way.” 

The drive was quickly over and done with, the hearse pulling up to the abandoned factory with fitting noise. The place had grown familiar, but the sight that was Rhett the Warden hadn’t. Inge’s torments and her horrors existed somewhere else, on a plane not bound by earthly harm. Or so, at least, she had told herself. So Sanne had told her, eons ago. It was different. It was more sophisticated. It was a gift. Her eyes flicked over the sight of him before tossing the bag of groceries on the ground. This was hardly a gift. The only thing left was to kill him in a poetic manner and move on. “Told you we’d be back soon,” she said to Rhett, wondering if he’d want a lollipop. “Do you like artificial sweeteners?”

—

The best hunter is a dead one. Inge’s simple statement rattled in Siobhan’s head; bouncing around with each rumble of her hearse and each jump over cracked concrete. The clever retort that she felt obligated to have didn’t leave her mouth—it hadn’t even been formed. Instead, Siobhan watched the shifting landscape as they approached the factory. There was a time where she believed in the practical minimizing of harm; a time when Fate’s course seemed linear. Life existed in a tangle: webs and threads interwoven, pulled through space-time, woven again, transported into unknowable, unthinkable dimensions. When she’d tried to minimize harm, when she’d tried to be kind, she cost her people seven other lives. The best hunter was a living one, until Fate came. And Fate had not yet called for Rhett. 

Lost in her thoughts, Siobhan hadn’t realized that she’d entered the factory at all. Had she remembered to turn the hearse off? Park it in the overgrown bushes where it couldn’t be seen from the road? She shook her head. She tried to bring back the face of the woman who adored violence, who only knew it, but instead a woman who mourned controlled her features. She saw Rhett as he was: bloody, broken, miserable. She wondered if he’d ever forgive her one day—then she castigated herself for thinking that. And, anyway, he would be dead soon. But she hadn’t screamed for him yet, and until then, she wondered if he would forgive her and if he’d think it was silly that she cared about that at all. 

Siobhan knelt to the bag, crinkling plastic cutting through the air thick with the acrid scent of old blood. Off to the side, the bits of Rhett’s lost leg buzzed with a swarm of happy flies. “What flavour do you want, Rhett?” She smiled for him; dead men deserved kindnesses, sometimes. “We got everything because I said—well, it won’t be funny now if I retell it—but I wanted all of them. And there’s jellybeans…” Siobhan held up the little bag full of them—a plastic bag inside of another plastic bag. Did humans hate the world this much? “I don’t know anyone that likes jelly beans. They’re an abomination.” She pointed to Inge. “Worse than her, actually.” 

—

He couldn’t be absent for everything, unfortunately. While his tendency to slip into altered states of consciousness had done him some favors over the last few days, sending the two creatures off in the wee hours of the morning to resume their activities the next day, he always came back out of it. The first time they’d decided to take a break, they’d left him secured to a pole that ran from floor to ceiling so he didn’t excuse himself without their consent. He’d been stuck there since, sitting with head bowed and long hair framing his face, silent until he heard the sound of them returning. 

Rhett drew a long, shaky breath as their footsteps grew louder. They’d taken his leg, cut it off just above the knee and cauterized it about as well as you’d expect, and he was pretty sure he had an infection on top of the constant, agonizing pain of nerve endings being ripped to shreds by less than surgically precise methods. He stared down at it, down at the bloodstain where his limb should have been, at the frayed edges of pants hurriedly cut away, stained a blackish-brown. His right leg, while still attached to him, wouldn’t be for long. Siobhan had started in on the toenails of that foot last night, which meant that tonight, if she was working in a pattern... It was a miracle he hadn’t died from blood loss already, but maybe that’s what the breaks were really for. And maybe, he thought as his captors questioned him about sucker flavors, that was the only reason they were giving him any kind of sustenance.

Rather than answer on the subject of his liking of artificial sweeteners or his preferred synthetic flavor, he just lifted his chin and stared. If you didn’t count all the tormented hollering, he hadn’t spoken a word to them in two days. He just shivered, underdressed for the frigid weather, and blinked blearily at them.

“You ain’t screamed,” he finally said pointedly and in a hoarse voice. That meant he wasn’t going to die… yet. He knew the amount of time that could pass before the banshee let one rip was highly variable—it could happen days before he departed from this mortal coil, or it could happen seconds before what remained of the light in his eyes was snuffed out. It would happen, but there wasn’t much comfort in that unless he was on his way to someplace safe. This was not someplace safe. This was… hell. 

His gaze jumped to Inge.

“Why am I here? This about you? This about revenge?” he growled, lowering his chin again. His hands, now more loosely tied behind his back and keeping him from wandering far from the pole, twisted against each other at the wrist. His frustration was building, unexpectedly, since he’d more or less been floating through the last few days in a quiet haze or full dissociative state. He was frozen half to death, he was starved, exhausted from lack of sleep and blood loss, and everything hurt. How long were they going to drag this out? Even he didn’t torture fae for this long. Once they told him what he wanted to know, he killed them. 

“What d’you want?” the warden snarled before giving them time to actually respond. “Just fucking—get it over with. Just fucking get it over with.” He wasn’t begging. Rhett would never beg for his own life. But maybe that was only because he tried to mask the desperation with anger. He snapped his head up to look at Siobhan, looking furious. “Scream, already!” he commanded, like that would help anything.

—

It was agony, following them. Keeping back, suffocating that rage in his chest to something that had him acting tactical instead of lashing out… it wasn’t in his nature. Emilio had always been a flurry of fury, with a style of fighting that could only really be described as animalistic. His advantage always came in the way he kept fighting until consciousness left him, not in anything resembling planning. He knew he was no good at that. He’d proven it time and time and time again. And, right now, everything he had wanted to launch himself at these women who’d taken his brother from him, wanted to rip them into pieces, wanted to tear their throats out with his fucking teeth. 

But then, he stopped to listen. 

He eavesdropped, he let their conversation wash over him. They spoke about Rhett like he was still alive, and Emilio knew he’d never get his brother back before it was too late if he killed his captors now. The way they spoke implied that Rhett was in bad shape; there would be no time to look for him, especially not when he knew he’d have to do it alone. He couldn’t ask anyone to help him with this. Not Wynne, who had good reason to hate him. Not Teddy, who he’d seen having pleasant conversations with Siobhan online. Not Jade, who was so interconnected with Regan that going after the other banshee in any way was bound to cause complications. The only person he could realistically expect assistance from was Parker, and he was pretty sure his rage at him matched his rage towards Rhett’s tormentors at this point. He’d never be able to trust the other warden in a fight.

And so, Emilio was on his own. It was hardly a rarity, hardly an experience he was unfamiliar with. He’d spent two years on his own after he and Rhett parted ways in Mexico, would have kept at it if not for Wicked’s Rest and its citizens’ strange habit of giving a shit about people they shouldn’t. Emilio was fine on his own, could handle himself in a fight just fine. He’d get his brother back or he’d die trying, but either way, at least he’d be saved the grief of losing him.

So, he followed. To the parking lot, watching what car they slipped into. It was recognizable, hard to mistake for anything else on the road. Not many hearses driving around. That was good. He slipped into the driver’s seat of the car he’d once again ‘borrowed’ from Teddy, maintaining a slight distance behind the hearse as he drove with his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel. His heart stuttered uncomfortably. Left turn. Nausea tugged at his gut. Right turn. He saw a flash of Edgar’s body on the road, crumpled and bloody. Stoplight. Victor sat beside him in the passengers’ seat, sporting every injury his mind could imagine since he’d been spared the knowledge of knowing what killed him. Accelerate. Edgar’s corpse again, but his hair was longer now. Gray. His head tilted, and it was Rhett’s face there instead. Victor, in the seat beside him, morphed in a similar manner. 

The hearse pulled off the road, and Emilio did the same. Into a parking lot, with no one else around. He switched off the headlights, parked a ways away. He watched them enter, and he waited. One heartbeat. Two. He couldn’t stomach the thought of a third, moved from the driver’s seat and onto the concrete. The ache in his bad leg was a long-forgotten thing, his mind forcibly pushing it aside. Pain is a message, his mother told him once. Messages can be ignored. He was getting better at it with practice. 

He unpacked the trunk. Iron blades, weapons borrowed from Teddy’s basement. He grabbed a knife Rhett had gifted him years ago, the handle worn but the blade kept sharp. He thought it might be poetic to kill one of them with it. Both of them, maybe. Everything in the damn factory, if Rhett was dead inside of it. 

The closer he got to the door, the clearer he could hear the murmurs. The sensation of the dead thing inside made his stomach turn just as much as the smell of blood did. The two of them combined had his mind reeling, skipping back and forth between here and there. The factory was a living room was a street. Long dead corpses rotted scentlessly in the corner. His daughter’s body was crumpled in the center of the room. Rhett was missing a leg. Juliana was screaming. Siobhan was silent.

For a moment, he thought he was too late. He thought he’d gotten here just to collect a corpse, just to give himself something else to bury. But then, Rhett shifted. He spoke. He sounded rough, sounded more pained than Emilio had ever heard him, and the world fell apart and fell back together at the same time. It was strange, seeing his brother this way. For so long, he’d thought of Rhett as invincible by necessity. Victor was dead. Edgar was dead. So Rhett couldn’t be. His other brothers died screaming, too young or too old, so he made Rhett a monument to them in their absence, created an immortal thing out of a husk. He’d been proven wrong before, of course; Rhett was already down an eye, had needed a cane even before the monsters in the shadows had taken his fucking leg. But even so, Emilio had never seen him like this. 

He looked small. Emilio wanted to tear the world apart with his bare hands.

There was no time to waste, he knew. The first thing he needed to do was take care of the mare. Prevent her from using the astral to her advantage, keep her from slipping into the shadows to attack him from behind. If she got one hand on him, put him to sleep, this whole thing would be over. The banshee’s scream was a concern, too, but the mare needed to be grounded first. Fighting deaf would still be easier than fighting unconscious. 

Slipping the sword off his back, he tested its weight momentarily. Balanced. High quality. If he survived this, he’d have to thank Teddy for letting him borrow it. He waited until Inge moved a little, waited until she was lined up the way he needed her to be with the wall. And then, in a flurry of rage, he went in for the strike.

He made no sound as he stormed into the room, offered none of his usual dry humor as he shoved the blade through the mare’s stomach and into the wall behind her with all the strength he had. It went in deep, stuck hard. It would take enhanced strength to pull it out again. Otherwise, she’d have to peel herself off it by slicing through herself, sliding to the side. It would hurt either way. Emilio was glad for that.

—

She never stuck around to see the results of her actions when it came to her sleepers. She visited them on a schedule, slowly pushing further and further into their minds to make it her own playground. Sometimes she witnessed them wake, but that was it — Inge always disappeared until they could fully react. And here was Rhett, tied like a stray, wounded dog with blood sticking to him and the surface below him. He was reduced in a multitude of ways. 

It was a strange thing, to be so confronted with her actions. To have the harm done by her collaborator (not her — for all her assistance, Inge remained convinced it was Siobhan responsible for that missing leg) so clearly on display. It wasn’t that it gave her pause, but it was a sensation she wasn’t sure she’d intend to experience again. Even if she’d gained material for new works. She turned the lollipop around in her mouth while considering the sight, distantly glad that it would be done before dawn. It was not a feeling she had any interest in investigating. 

So she simply stared back at him, popping the lollipop from her mouth to answer his growled questions. Questions. He had barely spoken these past days, an impressive feat that Inge would not have achieved had the places been reversed. They had been, once, though not for as long. Humans were easier to trap. “Well, the idea started when you hurt a mutual …” She thought for a moment, “Student of ours. I’m not generally one for vengeance like this, but Siobhan is an inspiring woman and well, I really would like to see you and your experimental ways out of this world.” It would be bad praxis to reveal that Siobhan and her hadn’t really agreed on what had occurred, but Inge wasn’t tactical, nor was Rhett long for this world. “So we agreed to put our differences aside to kill you. We’ll get there.”

She had judged him, hadn’t she? For locking her in that bunker. For putting Ariadne in that van for a week. For the cruelty of it — not just a quick axe to the head, but something drawn out. But this was different. This was retribution. “I don’t like to limit my fellow creatives, though.” With the way he was asking for it, for that inevitable end, Inge almost felt inclined to let Siobhan follow her whims and let this draw out. Even if she was growing antsy from this space, her mind bending in strange ways, leaving her giddy and nervous and wondering if she should start packing, wondering if she should try to help Siobhan with the next toe and whether she could even handle such a thing. Whether she was weaker, for not being able to fight or maim in such a way, or whether it just made her more sophisticated. Whether she was worse than the hunters for this. Whether it mattered. 

She’d blame that spiraling mind for not noticing what came next until it was too late.

The blade reached her only a few seconds after she’d caught sight of Cortez, eyes widening and mind preparing to reach for her beloved astral — but she couldn’t. The sword ran through the full depth of her and a sound fell from her lips, somewhere between a scream and a roar. Her fingers let go from the lollipop, which shattered like glass onto the ground. Eyes dropped to what had been slid through her insides, wide and frightened and furious. She tried to focus, not entirely convinced that this should lock her in place but it wasn’t there, her connection to her favored place of existence. 

Panic was an emotion spread easily, especially when it went hand in hand with adrenaline, and Inge reached forward to try and claw at the now-free hilt, but she only cut herself deeper. Another wail of pain, eyes dancing through the room, “Do it, Siobhan.” Surely the banshee knew what she meant by that.

—

It was interesting being told what to do. Siobhan had spent so much of her life listening, obeying, deferring. She was, by her very nature, a vehicle for choices that weren’t hers. Rhett wanted her to scream, as though his death was up to her—well, it was up to her but it wasn’t up to her. Another banshee would understand (but not Regan, Regan understood nothing). Inge also wanted her to scream and that one tickled in the back of her throat; she almost did it reflexively, just because some woman told her to. She thought it was all a little funny. 

Emilio burst in like a rabid dog—remarkably silent—and honed on Inge as though she had personally eaten the kibble from his bowl. Siobhan watched it all in slow motion: Inge’s expression, the sword, the wall. The sword was a nice touch, Inge obviously trying to blink away from the scene wasn’t. Did she plan on leaving her here? With the hunters? And she was telling her what to do? Yes, do it. She ought to do it. It was always about her and needing to do it; all her life, a series of things to do. All it would take was one scream, in a matter of seconds, to rid the world of Emilio, Rhett and Ingeborg. Did they understand that? Did they ever once think about her generosity? Or, perhaps, why was it that she just didn’t go around screaming? Was any intelligent thought spared for her? Considering the people surrounding her, probably not. It was embarrassing that she’d considered Ingeborg a friend for a moment; she’d be blocking that memory out. 

Siobhan knelt to Rhett’s level, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Any of you move and I scream,” she said. “Except you, Ingeborg, feel free to squirm.” She looked along the bloody factory ground to Emilio, and the pinned mare; he was bundled up, she was oozing glitter. “I shouldn’t have to remind you, Emilio, that all it takes is one breath for Rhett to turn into pudding. Rhett, you tell him.” With her free hand, she rummaged around the grocery bag, freeing a lollipop. Ripping the plastic with her teeth, she slid the treat against her tongue. “Ugh.” She frowned. “Grape.” The plastic stick danced from one end of her mouth to the other as she thought about their situation. 

Ingeborg probably felt very good about herself, impalement aside; she should have listened to her and killed Rhett on that first night. Emilio seemed very upset. Rhett seemed….pale and sticky; torture had that effect. Was he relieved? Scared? He still hasn’t told her what flavour he liked best; she guessed lemon. “I think we should relax.” Siobhan smiled sweetly. “Get acquainted. Emilio, this is Rhett, maybe you know him: he’s a child torturer. That’s a Ingeborg, you can kill her if you want but keep in mind that you will be robbing the world of her attractiveness—she has material value. In addition, she does smell strangely nice.” Siobhan turned to look at Rhett. “Are you sure you don’t want candy, darling?” 

—

A mutual student? The girl, then. The blonde with the flower. He frowned, his gaze dancing between the two of them as that momentary spike of adrenaline seeped away again, leaving him hollowed and hurting. They wanted him dead, but they wanted it done slow—maybe for each day he’d held that young mare in his van. Maybe more. For as long as it was interesting to them. Well, he could try to keep it uninteresting by being mute again, taking their abuse without complaint. They’d get bored eventually. 

He was just about to slump back against the pole when there was a sudden explosion of movement, and the warden jerked away from it on reflex before realizing it wasn’t Siobhan. In fact, she was crouched in front of him now, hand on his shoulder, and—

His one-eyed gaze fell on Emilio and was fixed there as the banshee voiced her threats. She was right, he knew—Emilio probably didn’t. Why was he here? He should have been home, he—

“No,” Rhett moaned woefully. Tears sprang unbidden to his eye and he shook his head, staring at his brother. “Get out of here. You shouldn’t be here.” He could hardly speak above a whisper, throat raw from all the screaming he’d been doing, worsened by his outburst only moments before. He sucked in a gasping breath, glancing away from the other hunter to meet Siobhan’s gaze. “Let him go, he’s not—he ain’t like me. He’s good. He’s a good person, please, let him go, he made a mistake—” He looked back at Emilio sharply with that final word, teeth bared in a grimace. “A mistake,” he repeated. “Go home.” 

He would never beg for his own life, but he'd be the first to beg for Emilio’s. 

Logic and reasoning was not something he’d ever had a strong grasp on, but that was even farther from the truth now. In some desperate attempt to appeal to Siobhan’s chaotic nature and hopefully get his brother out of there in one piece, Rhett gave her a stoic nod. “I like lemon,” he confirmed unknowingly. He spared one last quick glance at his last remaining family, feeling sick to his stomach. “We’re fine here, hua. Havin’ a great time.”

—

It was hard to focus. His mind was still bouncing, still half in the present and half in the past. Flora’s body was still in the corner, crumpled and bloodless and so small. Juliana’s was a few feet away. Edgar was there, too; Rosa, his mother. Even Lucio’s ghost haunted the scene, staring on with the same stricken expression he’d worn when Emilio buried his knife in his gut. None of it was right, he knew; everyone he loved was two years gone, rotting in holes someone else had dug for them.

Everyone but Rhett.

His eyes darted to his brother, who was clearly far more out of it than Emilio himself and with far better reason. It was hard not to focus on the place where his leg ended, on the too-long pant leg and the bloodied concrete beneath it. He wanted to think, what kind of a monster does that to a person? He wanted to condemn it, wanted to think that it was an unforgivable thing. But Rhett had locked a kid in a van for days just to see what would happen. Emilio had tortured so many vampires that he’d lost count now, had done worse than this to them for days and days on end until even their already-dead bodies couldn’t hold on a moment longer and gave out under his hands. There were monsters in this room; there were nothing but monsters in this room. 

In the far corner, his daughter’s body continued to rot.

The mare was screaming. Her — Its blood touched the edge of the sword, sparkling in the dim light of the factory. In a way, it grounded him a little. The screams, the glittery substance. He tried to focus on it instead of Rhett’s blood, tried to ground himself in the present as best he could. Edgar was dead. Victor was dead. Rhett wasn’t. Rhett wouldn’t be. Not as long as there was breath left in Emilio’s lungs. 

His chest heaved as he glared at the banshee. The mare was forgotten now, an afterthought; no longer a threat, and therefore no longer worth looking at. He gripped Rhett’s iron knife in his hand, tight enough to stop it shaking. He wanted to slice the banshee open, wanted its guts to spill on the floor as if that might somehow cover up his brother’s blood that stained it, as if the presence of one would chase away the presence of the other. 

The banshee put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. It made threats. Emilio continued to glare. “Si haces eso te mataré,” he growled. Juliana laughed, a harsh and unnatural sound. He blinked once, hard, trying to remind himself of where he was. When he was. He pushed his tongue against the bottom of his canine, tasting blood in his mouth. Opening it, he tried again. “If you do that, I will kill you,” he said, the words slow and heavily accented as he forced them out in the language that still felt unnatural behind his teeth. “I promise, I’ll kill you if you do that.” Rhett would hate that. You weren’t supposed to make promises to fae; Emilio knew that. But this promise was one he intended to keep, anyway. It didn’t matter if Rhett was a monster; Emilio loved him all the same. He’d do anything for him. He’d tear the world apart with only his teeth. 

His eyes darted back to his brother as he spoke, surprised to see him aware. Not quite himself — Emilio was fairly sure he’d only seen Rhett with tears in his eyes once, in the woods just outside Etla — but here all the same. His chest ached as Rhett ordered him to leave, and he wondered if this was what his brother had felt in those woods when Emilio begged him to let him die. He’d give the same answer to Rhett as Rhett had given him back then: “Fuck off with that shit.” There was nothing in the goddamn world that would convince him to leave Rhett here. If Rhett died here, Emilio would either kill the things responsible or die trying. His glare made that much pretty clear.

Said glare returned to the banshee now, eating its candy like none of it mattered, like it hadn’t mutilated his brother in the floor of an old factory, like all of this was a joke. Like Rhett wasn’t the only family Emilio had, like he wasn’t the last piece of a unit that was otherwise irreparably broken. “I’m not leaving here without him. Whether you’re alive or not when I go is up to you.” 

���

She felt like a fly that someone had swatted and left to die stuck to the wall. Not fully dead but incapacitated in a way where there was little to do for her but watch in growing agitation and continued pain what played out before her. Inge wanted to scream, but only if the scream could have the impact that a banshee’s would have. In stead she followed Siobhan’s instruction (when she should be following hers!) and squirmed, fingers trying to grasp at the blade but getting nothing out of it.

The warden was crying. Putting up a show of emotion, cracking the way he’d not been cracked before despite the horrors Siobhan and her had put him through. This could be perfect. This could be perfect. If the banshee only used her head and did what needed to be done, this could be two birds with one stone — or rather one scream.

But the banshee was impossible to understand, a strange combination of motivations that Inge didn’t get. (Not that she got her own.) They were all talking as if there was something to talk about. Why wasn’t she doing it? She grasped the blade once more, the metal cutting into the palm of her hand as she tried to gain purchase. But to get to the hilt she’d have to bend over and to bend over was to slice into herself deeper. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure what kind of organs remained inside her and if they had any function. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out today, here.

She was shrieking, though not with any intention. Just out of instinct. Her hands were covered in that useless glittery solid now and she was useless. A fly on the wall, left to observe the inaction of a banshee who had once proclaimed to love murder. “Siobhan!” It was a bellow more than a scream, lower than the previous expressions of panic and pain. “Get it over with!” 

—

Amusement fluttered inside Siobhan’s chest: this was the sort of situation that reminded her of her greatest hobby. Emilio’s anger delighted her—his gaze could become so sharp, his words could drip with such acid, he could promise her silly things just to keep himself from charging at her (he was like a dog right now, but with just enough sense to keep himself alive). Ingeborg squirmed on the sword—how wonderful it was to watch her expressions dance, flickering with rage (was that fear under the red glow of her eyes or more anger?). And Rhett—as silly as it was, she’d come to like the man. Over the last two nights she studied his expressions: anguish, sadness, fatigue, acceptance. Her greatest hobby was to watch the ways life existed. What made torture fun was seeing how far she could push an emotion, seeing how she could twist a feeling. And here was something she coveted, something she hardly understood: affection, the most curious of human conditions. 

She waved Emilio’s words away. “I don’t accept your promise. You’ll end up hurting yourself with that one: it’s too vague.” Siobhan’s gaze then flicked to Ingeborg. “That sword looks really cute on you, it brings out your eyes. You should consider it as a permanent look.” 

Siobhan smiled, rummaging through the plastic grocery bag: orange, cherry (her favorite), cola, watermelon, peach, something neon green. “I knew you were a lemon man.” Eventually, she found a bright yellow lollipop and tongued hers into the other side of her mouth so she could rip the plastic wrapping open with her teeth. She held the piece of candy out by Rhett’s mouth. “You are a very astute man. I like this awareness: you’ve always understood how pitiful you are, haven’t you?” She looked at Emilio. “But that’s not a ‘good man’, that’s a selfish one. He holds more compassion for you than he does for poor Ingeborg on the nice sword. Who, for all my knowledge, has never tortured any anxiety ridden blonde children. Emilio’s selective, isn’t he? You don’t charge in here, promise to kill someone to save someone else, unless you’re selectively compassionate. Of course, most humans are like this, but it hardly makes him ‘good’ does it?” 

Her grip tightened on Rhett’s shoulder. “I don’t like selfish men, Rhett.” And Siobhan knew she was cruel enough to kill Rhett only to anger Emilio. Then she’d tie him up and…well, maybe she’d go for the arms this time. And who would come to save him? Would this be a never ending cycle of interrupted torture? The idea exhausted her. “Emilio, are you aware this is a terrible man? Objectively terrible. He won’t argue—tell him, Rhett. Why don’t you? Tell him all the terrible things you’ve done…or does he already know?” She looked at him, wondering if he was the sort of man to share his secrets or if he had any shame for his duty. Did Emilio want to save him regardless? Why? Why? 

Why would anyone want to save this wretched man? 

“Emilio.” In her curiosity, Siobhan’s head cocked to the side. “Why should I let you go? Why should I let Rhett go?” She blinked. “Don’t try to threaten me again, or threaten Ingeborg, it’s juvenile. If I cared about staying alive, I wouldn’t be here. If I cared about Ingeborg staying alive, I would have screamed already. Use your brain, I know you have one.”

—

Wincing beneath her tightened grip, Rhett stared at the lollipop still held aloft in front of him as he spoke. “Emilio. Shut up,” he ordered his little brother, knowing that the man’s temper would not do them any favors in this situation. Then, with the smallest tilt of his head in Siobhan’s direction, he began speaking to her, answering her questions slowly, making sure he didn’t miss anything. If he missed something, she might think he was trying to ignore it, and she might do something rash. Something unhinged, like she was. He had to be careful about what he said for once in his stupid life.

“Pitiful, aye. N’ he knows all ‘bout all the things that make me like that.” Most of them, anyway. “He is bein’ selfish, right now. He should’ve let me go days ago. But he’s family, n’ he don’t let family go easy.” His head was swimming, vision blurred. He felt like passing out, but he had to keep going. “He’s the one that got her out. The blonde girl, the mare. He’s the one that let her out of the van, the one that made me promise… not to go after her again. No one else woulda been able to convince me, so… if ya… care about ‘er, ya got Emilio to thank. Ya should… let him go ‘cuz he’s got more green than red on his ledger. Does more good than bad. Only does bad when… when it involves me, or the people that took away our family.” It was surprisingly introspective for Rhett, but he’d had a lot of time to think about it. The warden sucked in a wavering breath, squinting his eye closed. “I don’t wanna leave here.” He’d tried to run once, back before it had gotten really bad, but now… “But that don’t matter, ‘cuz ‘Milio ain’t gonna leave this place without me.” He finally brought his gaze up to look at Siobhan, and for all the world, he looked genuinely apologetic. 

“I get why ya did what ya did. But don’t make my brother pay for the wrong shit I done. I know he’s bein’ selfish right now, but he is a good man. I promise he is. I promise.” That’s how sure he felt, despite what Emilio might say, what he might think. He knew the last living Cortez was a better person than he himself believed. “I’ll be dead next year anyway. He just wants a few more months.” With that, Rhett deflated from the effort of remaining coherent, bending forward to bite the sucker from Siobhan’s grip and then lean back against the pole, closing his eye like he was relaxing into a nap. He should’ve still been worried for Emilio, and he was, but he was too damn tired to do much more about it. As it was, his grip on consciousness felt weak—held only by one pinkie finger. He hoped that he’d still have a pinkie finger as he slipped away from them, his mind carrying him elsewhere just in case things went wrong and they all had their guts liquified by a pissed off banshee. 

—

The mare was screaming; Emilio ignored it. With the threat of its escape through the astral plane eliminated, it would be simple enough to take its head off when he finished with the banshee. Or he’d leave it here to starve, focus more on getting Rhett to safety instead. He needed some kind of medical care, though Emilio wasn’t sure how to provide it. (If he took his brother to the hospital, what questions would he have to field? Would Zane help him out, understand that Emilio’s presence would need to be an under the radar thing?) Either way, the mare wasn’t important at the moment. Its screeching, its pleas for the banshee to act and its fear disguised as rage. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered at all was sitting in the floor with a goddamn lollipop stuck in front of his face.

The banshee spoke, and Emilio kept his steely gaze on it, body tense and ready to strike at any moment. It would do him no good, he knew. The iron knife in his hand could be thrown with accuracy, but it wouldn’t be faster than a scream if the banshee chose to release one. The most he could hope for was for the blade to find the banshee’s throat just a moment after its scream obliterated him. Maybe if the sound was focused on him, Rhett would survive with only his eardrums ruptured. Maybe someone would come looking, would find him before infection took him. Or maybe they’d both turn to mist with the echo of the banshee’s cry. Maybe they all would. It still felt better than the thought of walking out of here alone.

There were insults, there were implications. This was about the other mare, the kid. Wynne’s girlfriend, the one who hadn’t deserved what Rhett had done to her. But the kid hadn’t even wanted to speak poorly about Rhett; Emilio doubted she would approve of someone being tortured in her name, of someone being killed. He thought of Flora, of the blood he’d spilled and the dust he’d stirred up because she was gone and he was here and things like that needed retribution. Maybe she wouldn’t have approved, either. Maybe she’d never gotten to be old enough to understand the idea of approval. Either way, the blood on his hands remained just as present as his brother’s blood on the floor. His eyes flickered briefly to the corner. She was rotting. She was always rotting.

The banshee kept saying his name, and he wished it would stop. The syllables exiting its tongue felt wrong, felt different. Even when Rhett said it — that fond, shortened version, the one only Rhett was still alive to use — it didn’t feel right. The name reminded him that he was a person, and he didn’t feel like one now. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be one. People ached. People struggled with the things Emilio needed to do. People hurt when you hit them, and he thought something was probably going to hit him soon. He stayed quiet as the banshee spoke, eyes darting to Rhett as his brother joined in. I’ll be dead next year anyway, he said, like it didn’t matter. Like there weren’t little girls rotting in corners and long-dead wives screaming in the distance, like he wasn’t the only family Emilio had who hadn’t decayed long past the point of recognition. Emilio wanted him to shut up, but he was afraid of what might happen when he stopped talking. He was afraid that if Rhett stopped speaking now, he’d never hear his brother’s voice again. The thought made him nauseous. 

He let the silence stretch, periodically looking from the banshee to his brother to the empty corner where his mind conjured up long buried corpses and long silenced screams. He knew he should say something. He was supposed to. He knew that.

“I’m not good,” he confirmed, looking at Rhett as he said it. “Neither is he. Neither are you. Or that.” He gestured to the mare like an afterthought, like he’d almost forgotten it was there at all. (Would Teddy want the sword back? He should leave it in place until he’d killed the thing, at least, but he probably ought to clean it after. The thought felt laughably mundane, even as his mind clung to it.) “But he’s my brother. And I’m not the only one who needs him. He’s got a kid who wants him around, who wants to know him. She’s good, and she deserves to keep him. To get to know him, to decide for herself if she wants him in her life. You can —” He looked to Rhett, to the empty gap on the floor where his leg should have been. “You can do what you want with me. Let me call an ambulance for him, and I’ll let you do whatever you want to me. Take my lungs, my liver, my heart, take whatever, but not him. You can take me apart like a goddamn puzzle, but let my brother go. Please. Just let him live, and I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

—

Siobhan was accosting her with a compliment that made Inge just shout an expletive her way, “Kutwijf!” Her mother tongue, because maybe that would shield the truth of her frustration. The truth of her dread, her — well, her fear, really. It was an ugly thing to admit, but as she was stuck on the wall and her ally in all this seemed to be negotiating with the two hunters rather than killing them, she was afraid. She tried to lean into her anger more. Even as Siobhan revealed her hand. She cared not about what might happen to either of them, had no intention as of yet to commit the murders that seemed to Inge as the only logical next step.

Why were they here? Why had Rhett put her in that basement, Ariadne in that van? What was the point? Inge had thought that perhaps this all could lead to one less hunter, that a proactive stance against a monster like Rhett would lead to the erasure of him — but here she was, pinned to that wall, waves of cold pain radiating from that wound. She and Siobhan had done what she condemned all hunters for. Played with their food and not pulled through.

And then there was the revelation that Emilio had been the one to save Ariadne. The man with the murderous eyes of his mother had saved a girl better than them all. It didn’t add up. There was an angle to it. There was some motive she didn’t understand. 

What was the point? Emilio may have saved Ariadne and Rhett may not have killed her, but there was still blood on all their hands. Emilio had a point — none of them were good. But Inge didn’t want to die, whereas these hunters seemed all to ready to lay themselves down to rest out of some kind of sentiment that she’d perhaps never felt. Her siblings were like strangers. Her late partner she had let die so she could get out. (A price deserved, considering she’d killed her once.) And even now, she had no interest in dying for another. “Well, I guess that makes it simple, doesn’t it?” Her voice was shrill and ugly, directed at Siobhan only. She would be damned if she would stop trying to make her demands. “They’re both down to die for the other, so why not do them that favor?” She wasn’t quiet after she stopped speaking, another shriek of pain accompanying her words from the strain her words had put on her abdomen. She wanted this to end.

—

Siobhan wasn’t sure it made anything simple. The word ‘family’ caught in her head, stuck in a warped loop. The bloody factory floor morphed into long, soft blades of green—the fields of Ireland. Muffled cries echoed behind her ears—smothered, she knew, by biting down into the flesh of her palm, sweet blood filling her mouth. Mother hated it when she cried. She turned to Rhett and waited for the pain that would follow his broken promise—Emilio wasn’t a good man—but there was nothing but fatigue and honesty. He believed it and that was enough. She looked at Emilio, listened to his plea. He really would have given her anything, just like that. And why? Why? Siobhan’s hand trembled against Rhett’s shoulder; under her gloves, under the myriad of scars on her palm, was the half-moon carved by her small teeth and it throbbed. “I don’t understand.” Her voice dropped to an almost whisper. “I don’t understand.” And then her grip tightened all at once, and she crushed Rhett’s tired body under her fingers. “What does family matter? You knew! This is a bad man!” Her voice rushed over itself, vibrating through her. “Family isn’t above punishment!” 

The scars down her back throbbed as her body trembled. The grass and the crying withered away and instead it was her own screams, her own blood and her mother’s heel between her shoulder blades. Siobhan still remembered what the dirt tasted like the day she lost her wings: sulfur, wet clay and saliva. It was a temporary loss, she reminded herself. The same essence of family that Rhett and Emilio were on about was the one that meant her mother was waiting for her, keeping her wings safe, eager to reattach them and be with her daughter again. Yet, even as Siobhan told herself this, her face continued to twist. Her back was on fire; her mother had insisted on pulling them out like a weed, roots and all. “You knew… You knew and you let him live. You know and you come here demanding his life? This man?” She jostled him. “This putrid man?” She heard one of her own bones pop in her hand as she squeezed his shoulder. “What does it mean that he’s family? What does that mean?” How could he be saved? How could he be loved? How could he be forgiven? 

Siobhan’s watery gaze snapped to Rhett. “What does it mean? How can he want to save you? How can he give himself away to save you? You, who are not worth saving. How can he? Why? What is—what is that? I don’t—I don’t understand.” She looked at Inge, still stuck on her wall, and blinked rapidly at her, trying to ask without words. Inge was a mother, so she must understand better than these men. If Inge child’s betrayed their family, she would rip their wings out, ruin their beauty, cast them out and strip them of familial title—no longer a daughter. She would. She had to. Good mothers did that. Family would watch it happen too: grandmothers, cousins, aunts. Family was just. “I don’t understand, Inge.” 

—

He was only marginally aware of what was happening in the room after he’d stopped speaking. He could hear Emilio talking, probably refuting everything he’d said in some stupid attempt to swap their positions—they didn’t want Emilio, they wanted Rhett, for the shit he’d done to that girl. For the shit he’d done to the one pinned to the wall, still screaming her threats and pleas. But of course, just because a plan was stupid didn’t mean that would stop Emilio from trying it. He knew that much about his little brother.

That is, until the banshee’s grip on his shoulder threatened to break his collarbone and he snapped back into the moment, groaning and weakly trying to tug himself away from her as her words caught up to his addled mind. She shook him, sparking the anger that had fizzled out to little more than embers. She was demanding to know what they meant, to know how someone like Rhett could still have someone like Emilio who cared for him, in spite of everything. 

He was annoyed. He spit out the lollipop to better speak.

“Rack off,” he barked angrily, sinking lower to try and relieve the pain that was her fierce grip on him. Something snapped, and he roared the next words in response. “This ain’t a fuckin’ therapy session, you stupid bitch. It ain’t a negotiation, neither! Fuck, all’ah you, just—” His  words caught in his throat as Desmond crouched beside him, a large hunting knife protruding from his back. In his arms was little Flora, eyes vacant as the day he’d buried her. The warden stammered, gasping for breath as his fury was diluted by fear and sorrow. “Ya choose family, ya dense slag. Yer mama ain’t got no skin in the game. Fuck’s sake, let go.” Of his shoulder, of her fucked up relationship with her mother… or both. He didn’t really care. He just wanted this over.

—

The banshee was angry. Yelling (but still not screaming), tightening its grip. And it was hurting him, hurting Rhett. Emilio could see it in his brother’s eyes, in the way he came back to himself. He wished he’d stay in his head, stay out of the conversation. It would be easier to convince the banshee that Emilio was the better toy to play with if Rhett went silent. He doubted a hunter who was already broken would be nearly as much fun to pick apart as one still standing, and that was what the banshee was after here, wasn’t it? Fun. The thought of it — that his brother was a game they’d played for days now, that everything he’d gone through had been for the entertainment of the creatures in this room — made him a little sick. The thought that Wynne’s girlfriend in that van had been the victim of a similar game with Rhett as the creature entertained didn’t help.

The banshee was still talking and Rhett was yelling and Emilio couldn’t make out any of it, couldn’t pick apart the words over the rush of blood in his head. Flora was dead and here and rotting. Juliana was glaring and decaying and gone. Rhett was on the living room floor with blood all around him. The banshee had sharp teeth. The mare was shedding dust. Victor had been dead for twenty years now, and Emilio still heard him laughing.

“Stop.” He didn’t know who — what he was talking to. To Rhett, who was going to make things worse for himself in some misguided attempt to make things better for Emilio? To the banshee, whose grip was too tight? To the mare, whose voice was too shrill? To the ghosts that existed only in the confines of his own mind, or to his mind and itself and its awful method of time travel that he’d never consented to? He took a step forward, and it was a risky move. The banshee only needed to scream. But it had Rhett locked in its grip, and if it was going to kill him, Emilio thought it might as well kill him, too. If Rhett was going to die, he wasn’t going to die alone. 

Another step, and then another. His feet made a sickening squelching sound as they moved through the blood, his brother’s blood, that soaked the ground. He kept walking anyway, until he was right in front of them, until he was reaching out and grabbing the banshee’s wrist where its hand held his brother’s shoulder, until he was squeezing it to loosen that grip in any way he could. 

“It doesn’t matter why,” he said hoarsely. “It — there is no why. He’s my brother. He’s my brother, and I love him. Let him go, and I’ll do anything you want. I promise, I will. I’ll stay here with you. Or I’ll go with him, and I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone anymore. I’ll make whatever fucking promise you want me to make, just let him go. Please. He’s my brother. He’s the only family I have. You don’t have to understand. I don’t know how to make you understand. But that doesn’t matter. I’m — Christ, I’m fucking begging here. Anything you want, I swear. Just let him go.”

—

They were talking of family and punishment and Inge squirmed on her sword with no stakes in the game. Her parents had been distant and quiet in their love. Her siblings had been companions of silence, each of them haunted by the dead sibling most of them had never met and none of them spoke of. She must have loved them, once, when they were kids. She never really stopped loving them, maybe — but there was no liking them. No sacrifice. No grand gestures. They were not parts to hold over her, they were just abandoned limbs from a past life she didn’t think of much. They weren’t to her like Rhett was to Emilio. So she didn’t understand, either.

And the ones that mattered, the truly familial – chosen and blood – that had once existed had already been severed. She’d watched both her daughter and partner die. For Vera she would have done what Emilio was doing, but there was no comparing Rhett and her child. There was no common ground, besides perhaps the love that existed. And Inge didn’t much care for such sentiments as a sword throbbed in her belly. She didn’t much care for it because love was a wound that could not be tended to. It remained bleeding and raw much like her abdomen. 

And above all, there had been no space for heroics in the face of the disease that had taken her daughter. There had been no space for morals or punishments, no use for them. They’d made up and they’d waited it out, the spread of disease. There had been no people to plead with, unless you accosted the doctors who were already on your side. Did Emilio understand how lucky he was, that he got to at least try? That there was at least something to do? That he could drive a sword through an antagonistic body and carry his weapons and make an attempt to sway a woman who could not understand the love he wielded? He was so lucky. He was so undeserving of it. 

“I don’t care,” she retorted, mostly to Siobhan, “You don’t have to understand. It doesn’t matter. The love doesn’t matter. The punishment doesn’t matter unless you do what you gotta. Just end it. It doesn’t fucking matter, Siobhan.” 

—

“Bitch? Slag?” Siobhan shook Rhett violently, rattling his body against the rusted pipe, ringing it like a gong. “A slag? I hold your life in my hands and you’re calling me a slag? Where’s the respect? I’m twice your age!” She leaned to the side and spat out her grape lollipop, which had been mostly crushed under her hurried conversation. “A promise?” She perked up, then, self conscious about how typical of her species she was being—it was just like a fae to lunge at the first chance for promised favors—and in front of a warden, she cleared her throat. The tendrils of the Gaes, warmed up her stomach. She exhaled on the memory of Emilio’s words—I promise. He would do anything she wanted, he promised. She snapped her jaw shut, clamping down on his words. “I accept your promise.” She had claimed something more valuable than a leg and yet, where she expected and waited for glee, ice knocked through her body. 

In her head, her tearful words still cried out for answers: I don’t understand. Siobhan’s gaze fluttered between the bodies: Emilio, so certain and sacrificing in his love; Ingeborg, who understood something that she wasn’t sharing; Rhett, who had given up on himself but not once on his brother. Hollowed out, she was observing something beyond her; each of them spoke an unknowable language. Rhett said family was chosen—Siobhan didn’t understand. Emilio and Ingeborg said it didn’t matter if she understood, but their idea of what did matter was opposed—Emilio wanted Rhett free, Inge wanted them both dead. How could both opinions exist in the same space? How could someone be loved this much? To be begged for? What was love? How did it relate to being a family? What did these words mean other than nonsense? Emilio and Ingeborg were right, what did it matter to her? Why did she care? She ought to kill them; all three. 

She stared at her accomplice, still stuck on the damned wall. If she found herself missing a leg, tied to a pole, would Ingeborg beg for her life? Of course not, they were hardly friends on a good day and after this, she was certain that would have many, many bad days. And if Ingeborg happened to be stuck on a wall, what would she do? “I want promises from you both,” Siobhan said, rising from the floor to grab nearby bolt cutters—she’d been hoping to use it to chomp through Rhett’s toes. “Neither of you will personally end or help to end Ingeborg’s undead existence. You may hurt her, I don’t care, but you will not kill her; give me promises.” This was a kindness and she hoped to feel something; a sudden invitation into their secret language. With this act of what she assumed to be love, she waited for the sudden clarity of family and affection. Instead, her arms trembled holding the bolt cutter to Rhett’s ropes. “And promises not to disclose the identities of Rhett’s torturers with anyone—you will not tell anyone about Ingeborg or myself. I want this too.” 

—

All he could do was stare up at Emilio miserably as his brother made promises he shouldn’t have, but all the fight had left him with those final insults in Siobhan’s direction. He dropped his head, resigning himself to whatever was to come. 

The mare stuck to the wall was doing her best to get them both killed, and Rhett couldn't blame her. But as blind luck would have it, the banshee wasn't interested. He didn't move as she requested promises from them, feeling himself start to slip away again. And as tempting as it was to give in to the out of body experience, he couldn't bear the thought of Emilio suffering for his inability to remain in the present moment. He didn't want to promise the banshee anything, that went against everything he'd ever stood for since Mariela had used it against him, but… this wasn't about him. He knew that. It was about making sure Emilio got out of here safely, and if he had to abandon his principles to do that, he would. He always would. 

“I promise I won't kill Ingeborg,” he muttered without looking up, his voice raw. There was no emotion in it, nothing snide nor sad, just a statement of fact. “N’ I promise I won't tell no one who so generously hacked off half my bad leg for me.” Okay, there was a bit of sarcasm in that one, but it couldn't be helped. Finally, the warden angled his chin up at Siobhan again, realizing that he couldn't see her at all — she was nothing more than a silhouette against a dim background in his limited field of view.

He smirked, letting his gaze wander uselessly. He knew Emilio wouldn't have any issue promising these things; he'd already given the fucking thing a freebie, after all. Idiot. 

—

It took the promise; he figured it would. It didn’t matter, anyway. All that mattered was the man trapped in the banshee’s grip, the only family Emilio had left. Emilio kept his eyes locked on Rhett’s, expression still and icy as the banshee took the promise. He wondered, almost distantly, if Rhett was disappointed in him. If he still thought Emilio was worth it, even now, or if whatever remained of the respect he held for him vanished the moment he started to beg. 

The banshee would use the promise, he knew, but only if it allowed him to survive the experience. He thought that might still be in question, thought it was the kind of thing he ought to be worried about. He wasn’t. He didn’t care what happened to him, meant every word of his stupid pleading. If the banshee let Rhett go, he’d do whatever it asked. He’d pull his heart out of his chest and hand it over. He’d put the saw it had used to hack off his brother’s leg to his own throat. He’d do anything, anything if it meant Rhett got to leave here, if it meant he could go home. Rhett, after all, had a daughter waiting for his return. Emilio had nothing.

Another promise was asked of him, and his eyes darted over to the mare stuck to the wall. He’d almost forgotten about it there; it wasn’t a threat anymore, and it had been written off as a result. An afterthought, a concept not worth his attention. Distantly, he thought it was interesting that the banshee cared enough to request such a promise. There was no request that they not kill the banshee, after all; only that the mare’s head stay on its worthless corpse. Emilio regarded it for a moment but, in truth, he knew it didn’t matter. He said he’d give anything, and he’d meant it. This was included in that.

“I promise I won’t kill your mare,” he replied, letting his eyes move back to the banshee, “or tell anyone who did this, just as long as neither of you hurts him again.” Tacked on the end, a condition of his own. He wouldn’t make a promise only for them to track Rhett down as soon as he was gone to slit his throat. It was a fair enough trade, he thought, especially since he didn’t bother including himself in the conditional. Something like that might have threatened the other promise the banshee had taken; he doubted it would go for that. But Rhett… They’d had their fun there. Emilio wouldn’t risk the chance of them having any more.

—

“She’s not my…oh whatever.” Siobhan sighed, taking her promises from Emilio and Rhett with a forced smile. “Yes, I agree to your deal: I will not physically harm Rhett again.” She waited for Ingeborg’s voice, confirming, before she pulled the final thread of magic and bound them all together; for better or for worse, though usually, it was worse. 

The bolt cutter went through the rope, sawing and snapping at the threads; there was something to be said about her insistence on using the wrong tools for every job. Eventually, Rhett was free. Siobhan stepped back, leaned up against her table of supplies and watched them. Love was no more clear to her seeing Emilio take Rhett away. Something, however, sparked watching Rhett’s blanket drop from his shoulder and Emilio’s rough hands pull the fabric over him again. In seeing the man’s arm steadied so carefully on his brother’s shoulder; their steps done in time together, Emilio’s limp and Rhett’s tired hops. Emilio’s body angled towards them, using his body—his life—as a shield. Their soft voices—or was it just Emilios?—too quiet for her to understand. Despite the bloody floor, Rhett’s haphazardly bandaged stump and the pieces of his leg, buzzing with flies, there was a strange peace; a delicate pace. Until the edges of the factory stole the family from her view, she considered if that was love: if it was those two broken men, tethered, going on to live another day knowing they’d both be in it. If it was Rhett’s weight on Emilio, Emilio’s arms around him. If it was knowing that they both would have given their bodies—limbs, ligaments, organs—just to be certain the other would breathe for one more night. Love seemed to be violent in its sacrifices and selfish in its stubbornness. 

She didn’t understand it, but she knew they did.

Siobhan looked at Ingeborg, still on the wall. She wondered if anyone loved her—maybe they were the same, in that sense. Silently, she gripped the saw beside her, painted with Rhett’s dried blood, and approached the mare. Her strides were long and deliberate, the blade knocking against her thigh. She made it halfway across the factory floor before she dissolved into laughter. “You should look at yourself; it’s hilarious.” Siobhan bent down and picked up Rhett’s rotten foot. “This one’s for me….” And his rotted calf. “And this…” She pointed at the pile of bloody toenails. “You can have those.” Blowing Ingeborg a kiss, she was gone, not feeling much of anything: not remorse, not confusion, and certainly not love.

—  

She was puzzled by these developments, confusion washing over her face as Siobhan made the moves to keep the two hunters from killing her down the line. Inge wondered why she wasn’t throwing her own life into the promise — did she care so little for it? Or did she think herself so invincible? Though she had gotten to know Siobhan a little more intimately over the past few days, this shed another light on the banshee. She squirmed on her sword. Three promises were made and she spoke in a quieter tone as she too, agreed, “I promise not to harm him again.” It was hard to hide the defeat in her voice.

So the banshee, the harbinger of death, was letting them all go. Was keeping them from killing one another in revenge, even. What a miserable turn of events. What a worthless twist. Inge had expected this to end with a corpse to get rid of, but in stead there was the stains of blood that Rhett left as he and his brother moved away. She watched them for a moment, then looked at the blood and flesh, then at Siobhan. Her cruel ally. Her protector, in a way. But also her traitor. She’d wanted a corpse. She’d made that abundantly clear. All she had was her ripped open gut.

She watched her near closer, toying with her saw like a child holding scissors. Not rushing over to come to her rescue, to peel her off the sword. Menacing. “You —” Inge’s face grew furious. “What was – why are you not – you …” She was laughing. The high ceiling made the sounds echo, round and round and round. Was a banshee’s cackle also magical? It had to be, with how miserable it made her feel.

It dawned on her when the kiss was blown that Siobhan was not just pulling her leg and Inge inched forward, eliciting a scream of pain as she hurled words at the other, “Get me off here, you can’t just leave me here, you absolute — SIOBHAN!” The name was repeated a few more times, losing volume every time and Inge remained. Like a fly stuck on the wall, with no purpose and no accomplishments, made witness to a scene that had already ended.

[zofiawithaz]

Who would you call if you had to hide a body?

@nightmaretist .

[ironcladrhett]

[pm] Amateur hour was fun. 🖕🙂

[pm] Wanna go another round? Practice was good.

[zofiawithaz]

[pm] Are you enjoying your new house?

[pm] It is incredibly strange. I still haven't figured out why he let me have it.

[pm] I'm tempted to paint it lilac to see his reaction if he comes back.

[nightmaretist]

Two Horses Walk Into an Office // Ariadne & Inge

PARTIES: Ariadne @ariadnewhitlock & Inge @nightmaretist LOCATION: Inge's office at UMWR TIMING: Early June CONTENT WARNINGS: N/A SUMMARY: Ariadne comes to Inge's office during office hours, during which the other soon reveals that she knows the mare who killed Ariadne.

Going to office hours outside of the school year, before she’d even started a class, wasn’t something that Ariadne had done in a long time. She’d never done it outside of a school year, she didn’t think, and the whole ‘before class started’ thing was also not really something she’d done, at least not this far in advance of classes starting. Still, Professor Endeman seemed nice, and wanted her to come by her office hours, so how was she supposed to say no to that?

She’d dressed in what she figured was one of her most professional outfits - though given the growing heat, she’d gone with a mid-length skirt sans tights, which she hoped would be acceptable to the professor. Ariadne wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to bring, if anything - and so she’d just brought one of her favorite art history texts - for nothing else than to have something to hold, so she didn’t totally let her nerves get the better of her.

She found the office with little-to-no difficulty and knocked on the door, quietly at first, then with one firmer knock. “I - it’s Ariadne,” she began. “I’m here for Professor Endeman’s office hours? Sorry if I’m interrupting anything.”

Ingeborg didn’t know a whole lot of other mares, but there were a handful of fellow nightmares she had come across in the past decades. Celene was one, though she was definitely no longer in town, and so was this Ariadne Whitlock. There were a multitude of reasons as to why Inge hadn’t reached out to the young mare up until now, but none of them were ones she thought worthy of reflection. She just told herself that it was because of her busy schedule.

Her invitation wasn’t to discuss art, of course, though Inge wouldn’t mind if the conversation steered that way eventually. It was to see the young woman for herself and to share the knowledge she held. From the impression Inge had gleamed so far, the two of them were fairly different - but then she had been very different when she had first been reborn herself.

The knock made her lift her head, and soon enough she was on her feet, pulling the door open. Inge wore a mid-length skirt too, some thing from the late-70s, flowy-and-Stevie-Nicks-esque. “Hello Ariadne. You’re fine.” The girl did apologize a lot. Inge wondered if she was guilt-ridden. It had been such a long time since she’d felt guilt herself. “Come in, come in. Sit down. I’ve got some cold water, if you want?” Her lips curled in a smile, her welcoming gestures nothing if not sincere. “And close the door behind you, if you would.”

The very fact that Professor Endeman was wearing a skirt that nearly matched hers set Ariadne at immediate ease. She knew that thinking that way probably made her incredibly shallow, but at the same time, anything that could put her at ease nowadays was welcome, even if it did make her shallow. Being shallow was better than - she shook her head, forcing the thoughts away.

“Okay, okay, thanks.” She looked over to the professor with wide eyes, fighting every fibre of her being to not say sorry again, and so instead she focused on the details of the room - from the texture of the walls, to the books Professor Endeman had on the shelves, and then back to the professor herself. “I’d love some cold water.” Dumping sugar syrup into it wouldn’t be possible, here, but she didn’t mind. Even if Ariadne subsisted on nightmares now, she did still enjoy how refreshing water could be. “Thanks a bunch.”

She nodded, pulling the door closed before she sat down, knees bowing into one another. “Thanks again for taking the time to meet with me, even though school’s done for the summer.” Ariadne smiled at her. “I’ve heard good things about your classes, and I’m wicked excited to get to take it.”

She got up from behind her desk, onto the small cabinet on the edge of the room on her left. A glass was produced, which was soon enough filled from the glass carafe. A couple of ice cubes merrily fell into the glass as well, making it clink as she placed a coaster underneath it. Inge pushed it in the direction of Ariadne with a smile. “There you go.” 

It was very sweet that the student was excited to take her classes, that was for sure, and she was sincere when her smile remained on her face. “Well, I’m very glad to have a motivated student in my class.” She didn’t really have anything prepared for this small meeting, at least nothing in regards to the next semester and the classes she’d be giving. Inge could improvise when it came to suggested reading, though. It would probably tailored to the mare across her.

“And I’m glad we cross paths, Ariadne,” she started, crossing her legs. Inge wasn’t very good at subtlety, which had gotten her in hot water before. But this wasn’t a hunter, so what did it matter. “We have a mutual friend, did you know that? Celene. She told me a bit about you.” She folded her hands on her knees, leaned forward a little. “About what happened between you two. It happened to me too, a long time ago.”

“Thank you,” she said with a nod, before grabbing the glass and taking a large sip of the cold water. It felt nice, and being here with her soon-to-be professor also felt nice. Though of course she still had her usual set of nerves about her, but Ariadne did her absolute best to push those away, at least for however long she was going to be in the office. 

“I - I’m glad too.” Her expression revealed confusion for a few moments, before the words ‘mutual friend’ and ‘Celene’ came out and Ariadne found herself very grateful that she hadn’t been holding her water right then and there.

“You - what?” She did her very best to steady her breath, to focus on other things in the room. Ariadne hadn’t seen Celene in forever - never thought she was going to see her again (as much anxiety and confusion as that caused her), and yet here was someone else, saying they’d known Celene, that Celene had mentioned Ariadne to them, and that the same thing had happened to her. “I - you - I -” she pressed her lips together. “I - you know what I - we’re the same? I mean, same uh, type of - I don’t know how to phrase it.” She blinked a few times to keep herself from crying, because that was certainly not a good first impression to make. “I’ve hardly met anyone else like us.” She fiddled with the fabric of her skirt, “did - did she say anything good about me?”

She could have beaten around the bush. Made this into a game of mental chess, drive Ariadne into a corner she couldn’t get out of. But Ingeborg had little interest in psychological warfare during daylight hours, let alone with fellow mares. No, if she was going to be in this town and Ariadne was to be here too, she would rather create a sense of community. 

But maybe it had been a little bit clumsy. Lacking in subtlety. This much became apparent when the other stirred at the mention of her creator’s name, stumbling over words. Even online, Ariadne had seemed so different from Inge, who carried herself with unearned and sometimes feigned confidence. She looked at her and remembered why she had postponed this: it reminded her too much of who she had once been. So weak and scared and worried. 

“I know that we’re both mares.” If Celene’s information was anything to go off, anyway, and considering the other mare’s nervousness it seemed it hadn’t been wrong. Inge wanted to be better than this, to reach forward and take the other’s hands and look her in the eye, deliver a speech. But she felt somewhat twisted inside, and remained for now. “She didn’t say much. It was more … a courtesy, to let me know. Because of us being unable to sense each other.” Such a pity it was. Inge often wondered how many mares she’d met without knowing. She wished to know them all, ask them about the things they’d done in other people’s minds. How they used the astral plane to their advantage. “Are you alright, Ariadne? I’m sorry to spring this on you like this, out of the blue, it’s just that I thought it’d be good to know.” She creased her brows. “You’re very new to this, no?”

“I - we are?” Ariadne shook her head. “Sorry, sorry, I’m not that stupid, I did get that you’d implied that before.” Another sigh (too many, but she couldn’t help herself), “I’m telling the truth, honest. I don’t usually see any real point in lying.” Not that she readily gave out information about herself, or what she was, but she also didn’t see the point in dishonesty. It was likely to cause harm to others, and if she felt good about something, shouldn’t she use any capacity she had to bring joy - happiness - kindness - to do so, given what she had to do, so much of the time?

“Yeah - it’s - I don’t like that we can’t sense each other.” It would have made finding people to be with so much easier. Would’ve meant that she didn’t have to be paranoid about not ever finding anyone else like her ever again. “Sorry - I - I don’t mean to complain about that, but I just wish I could tell when someone else was like me - like us.” Ariadne’s lips curved into a small smile at that. At the us, because she still knew so few mares, and Professor Endeman had known Celene, so that had to be some sort of sign of good fortune, didn’t it?

“I - no, no, you don’t - you don’t have to say sorry!” Panic washed over her face. “I - no, it’s nice. It’s really nice. You - I - thank you.” Ariadne steadied herself, “I’m glad you told me. I won’t tell anybody else, but I’m glad you told me. That I get to know. That I - I’m not so alone.” Which was likely far too much to be admitting to a new professor, but she was sort of more than that now, wasn’t she? “I am, yeah. Very new. Just - well, since last year. So I’m sorry if I’m an awful example of a mare. I want to be better, I do. I’m just really bad at it, I think. I can astral project real well though, which is kinda cool, maybe?”

The creation of mares was a rather shit thing. While Inge frightened her sleepers with diligent joy, she still thought there was something ugly about the death that mares went through. Despite her lack of consideration for the things she put people through, didn’t mean she wished to take it so far that they’d die. Seeing Ariadne squirm in her seat, so new to this gift of immortality, she found herself reflecting. Was it really a gift? To her it was, and yet she hadn’t spread it around. Maybe she was selfish or maybe … well, there was something else to unpack there. 

“There is a point in lying about it with some people, but with me …” She smiled, shrugged. “Don’t apologize. It’s frustrating, a clear lack in our biology that we aren’t capable of sensing each other. It’s worth complaining about, even if it won’t do stuff.” Immortality could already be so lonely, with most of the creatures that inhabited this world aging and dying when they didn’t. Inge had made something solitary of herself, though, but that didn’t negate the fact that meeting other mares was always and would always be a good thing. 

There was a sound of laughter passing from her lips as Ariadne told her not to apologize. “Alright, no apologies in this room from now on.” From the interaction she’d had with the young woman online, it seemed to be an issue of hers anyway: feeling sorry. As if she was ashamed of her mere existence. That too was something Inge had once felt, but that was quite some time ago. “No, it’s better if this stays between us. I think we should have each other’s back a little, no?” She swallowed a comment on the fact that Ariadne didn’t seem the type who would be excellent at creating nightmares and instilling deep terror in others. There was a learning curve. This too, Inge had experienced, though she certainly preferred to think this had all come naturally to her.

Truth be told, there had been plenty of moments after her death (or, as she liked to call it, rebirth), where she had been frightened and ashamed and disgusted. Where she’d cried at Sanne, who couldn’t undo what she had. She swallowed. “Why are you bad at it?” It had to be the fact that as a mare you had to do what was done onto you. Repeat the cycle that had cost your own life. It was sort of poetic. It was better to consider it poetic than anything else. “That is very cool. Do you use it to your advantage? You ought to.”

“It is a bit of a pain, yeah. I wish I could sense you, or any other mare, because then…” Ariadne sighed, figuring that there was no harm in sharing more – after all, the woman in front of her (she still didn’t know if it was okay to refer to her as Inge, or if she should stick with the moniker of ‘professor’ for now) knew what she was, and had known Celene, so… “then I wouldn’t feel so alone all the time.” She couldn’t keep the passing look of dejection that crossed her face away entirely, despite quickly passing it off with a shrug. “It’d be nice to be able to walk by someone and know what they were, though I guess when I was human, I also couldn’t do that, but most people I met would’ve been humans, so sorry, dumb response.”

She took another sip of her water. “Have you ever had boba? Sorry, off topic, but it’s good, and you can get it super sweetened, so it’s good for us, too. Um. It’s also a bit trendy, so if you care about people looking at you for having sweets, if you do that, then they might not do that as much if you have the boba.” Ariadne placed her head in the palms of her hands. “Not relevant, and yes, I’d like it to stay just between us. I - well, there’s some people who know what I am, but not many, and I’d never ever give away who you are, so…” she grabbed the water again and took a sip, gentler and more measured this time around. “I’d love to have your back, if you trust - if you want me too.” She felt a beaming smile growing on her face. “That’s - I - yeah. I’d really like that.”

Why was she bad at it? Ariadne wasn’t sure she wanted to give the entire answer, but lying to someone who she so wanted to impress and whose good graces she wanted to remain in felt even worse than normal lying did. “I’m just - I’m not good at what we’re supposed to do, and I guess it feels like I should be better now even though it’s only been like, a year? I just feel like I’m a poor example of what mares should be – I’m not anything anybody could look up to, and I’m - well, I’m still scared of stuff. I thought we weren’t supposed to feel that any more.” She worried her lower lip, “I am trying to. It is a cool thing to be able to do, but - how would you suggest taking best advantage of it?”

She was so apologetic. Ingeborg had realized this from their shallow interactions online, that Ariadne seemed to be afraid to take in any space — that she apologized for asking questions, or rather existing. Not much made her sad these days, but this did. Especially for a mare. “No, it’s not dumb. It’s very much true. I wish to know how many of the people I come across are like me. It would be less lonely.” She had, however, skillfully convinced herself that she wasn’t lonely. That solitary life was beneficial to her ways. “Have you met many like us? Others … that are similarly not-alive like us?” Did the young thing even know about vampires? Or even Inge’s favorite: furies? 

At least she knew about the wondrous world of sweet foods. That was very important, Inge thought. “I haven’t. I don’t much care for following trends, but I do care for satiating my sweet tooth and trying new things!” That was the beauty of immortality, wasn’t it? Some people her age (as in, people in their late 70s) tended to scoff at technological developments but Inge loved it all. “Good. It’ll be between us. And be careful with those you tell, won’t you? Hunters don’t like us much and tend to ask questions much too late.” Pigheaded people, hunters. She didn’t bother to hide her disdain. “Do you know about the way we can share our meals? If you’re ever in a tight corner where you haven’t fed enough, I can share.” But she would have to hunt a bit herself.

This was why she’d have to: to push through the discomfort of it. Inge didn’t like to remember it, the way she’d struggled against her nature those first years. How Sanne had forced her hand time and time again, to repeat what had been done to her. It was ugly, wasn’t it, the way mares were created? Inge tried to dance that fine line between haunting people until it did something to their mind and making sure they wouldn’t succumb to it. Her jaw set. She felt inept and it wasn’t something she liked. Guiding those younger than her was not her strong suit, which was ironic considering her job. But teaching art and teaching to continue a cycle of trauma and fear were quite different things.

“Listen,” she said, sitting up, trying to be somewhat solemn, “It is not easy, at first. You probably recall how it was for you, when you were still sleeping. But this isn’t performance. This isn’t like dance, no one is watching. No one is judging or grading, either. This is an act of self-care at the end of the day, you know? A necessity. You have to feed yourself.” Inge folded her hands. “Like eating vegetables and fruit as a mortal. And fear? Of course we still feel it. That’s necessary for survival. What is necessary, too, is to be fed.” She leaned back a little. “You need to figure out what works for you. I could help.” A smile. “You can travel anywhere on this continent in the night. I sometimes go to museums in New York. Get very close to the art works, with no one to bother me. It’s just one of the many ways you can use it.”

“It really would be,” Ariadne nodded, “others like us?” She pursed her lips, just slightly. “A couple - uh - vampires? That’s what they’re called, I think.” She fiddled with her hands in her lap, trying to figure out what to say next. Even if her professor had told her, more than once now, to stop acting sorry for herself and to actually be assertive. Looking back, now their conversations online suddenly seemed to make a great deal more sense. “But um, no. I don’t know a lot about other people like us. I’m pretty uneducated. I didn’t even - wait.” She shook her head. “How much other stuff is there? I - sorry - no, not sorry, just - this isn’t the time for that, but there’s a lot of other stuff out there? I’ve heard of fae. And vampires. That’s just about it, I think?”

She seemed to want to try new things, and Ariadne brightened at that. Sweets were an easy talking point. “I can bring you some, if you want to hang out again, this won’t be some sort of conflict of interest or whatever for the class once it starts in the fall, will it? I won’t tell anybody we’re friends, if we are, or maybe I can just get tutored or mentored for the class by you so we have time to talk more?” Steadying herself she looked back over to Inge, “That is, if you want to deal with me asking lots more questions - or even just a few.” She nodded eagerly. “Yeah, I won’t tell people I don’t have to, but I know the few people who do know wouldn’t ever give me away, they’re nice and good and not hunters. Or - well, far as I know.” Except for one, but Inge didn’t have to know that right now, or maybe ever. “Celene briefly mentioned that, yeah, but I didn’t know too much about it. So that’s - very nice of you. You continue to be so kind to me. I don’t know if I can ever thank you enough.”

Self-care. Somehow, when the other mare said it, things made more sense to Ariadne than they had before. “Yes, I don’t wanna die again.” She found herself unable to stop watching Inge with a sort of near-reverence. “I - yeah. I think I liked fruit more, but that’s not the point, I know. I’ve also never left town at night, but visiting empty museums sounds really nice. I bet I could also go to where the American Ballet Theatre performs, and sit on the stage without having to worry about causing a ruckus.”

She nodded in confirmation. It was dizzying, wasn’t it? To go from boringly mortal to this, and to learn that the world was more than just your town and its human people. At least Inge had had Sanne on her side, guiding her with forceful and thrilled hand. And though she hadn’t known everything, she had known some. “Vampires, yes. Zombies … or, well, I like to think of them more as immortal cannibals. Dr Lecter, eat your heart out. And there’s some other types out there, I’m not sure.” She frowned a little. “Fae, yes. I don’t know a lot about them. Just don’t thank them or give them things when they ask for it. Like your name. Language trickery.” Which she envied, only a little. “Werewolves. Other shapeshifters. And the hunters, of course, but I hardly think of them like us.” With them, there was choice involved. If she wasn’t a well-mannered person she would’ve spat right now.

Ariadne was asking for guidance and Ingeborg didn’t know what she’d expected. To invite a lost little mare into her office was asking for some kind of mentor role, wasn’t it? Part of her wanted to fulfill that part. Another was hesitant, unwittingly unwilling to be faced with the confrontation of it all. “We don’t play by the mortal rules, if you ask me. If you still want to follow my class, I won’t be against it. But I’m also willing to answer your questions. If you ask me, Celene dropped the ball. And I’m here in town anyway now.” She smiled, hoping that it fit the moment. Her mind traveled to Vera for a moment, but that had all been so long ago that it was easy to block that road. Ariadne called her kind and she sat with that for a moment, trying to figure out how she felt equating that word with herself. “I can help you see the perks.” Because while she wasn’t too good with comfort or support, she knew how to have fun.

That was good: that the other had survival instinct. “How is your hunger now? How often do you feed?” Inge had tried abstaining for a while in those early years, but it had never worked out. These days hunger just reminded her of a hunter back in Italy, who had watched her starve as if it was a television show. “Good thing we can have fruit and fear, hm? And you should go there. Not just sit on the stage, but dance, if you’d want.”

“Who’s Dr. Lecter? Does he work at the university too? But zombies. Okay.” If vampires existed, she supposed that there was no reason why other things couldn’t, even if she was somewhat overwhelmed by the whole deal. “Yes, I do know not to give them my name. Someone told me that. I don’t know if it was a fae or somebody else, but yeah.” Ariadne nodded again, “Hunters are human though, right? So they aren’t like us. One of them almost stabbed me once, but then didn’t, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” 

“I want to follow your class still, yeah. I’d love to also have you around to answer questions. I think - I mean, I’m just assuming things, but I like you, and I feel like we at least sort of get along, maybe. In a - you’re my mentor and I’m a student way - not trying to say you’re my friend, even though if you want to be friends, we can be.” She offered Inge a small, shy smile. “I’d like help with that. I am pretty super awful at that.” Which felt okay to admit, because Inge was like her, and Inge wanted to help, and the relief she felt from that was without explanation. Ariadne sighed. “So yes, I’d like that. To see the perks.”

She looked down at her lap. “It’s… there. Probably more than it should be.” Ariadne bit her lip. “Not a lot. I get nervous to do it, I think.” She tried a smile. “True. I’ve eaten multiple bowls of strawberries in one night, or apples dipped in chocolate, or things like that. But it’s true that fear tastes better.” She hated that fact, the admission of it all. “I could dance. I will. There. That’s a better way of phrasing things, right?”

“Dr Lecter, as in Hannibal? The cannibal? He’s got books, movies, a tv show …” She waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter.” To focus on a fictional serial killer would be a waste of time, when there were actual ones out there and they were supernatural. “Good. Would be a pity to lose such a good one as your own.” Inge was sincere when she said that: a name like Ariadne’s, based in mythology … it was enviable. Her eyebrows creased. “What did they look like? And yes, they’re human, but they’re also … somehow more than human. Some can sense us, but not all. Some are even resistant to what we do.” She let out a breath of frustrated air. “Most of them focus on vampires, though. But you were alright? Did you project away?”

She stumbled over her words so much and Inge tried not to look like she pitied the other. “I like you too, Ariadne. And I can try and guide you a little. I’ve got some experience under my belt.” She wasn’t sure what kind of term she would think appropriate or fitting for whatever dynamic would flow from this relationship, but it mattered little. She just knew that she wanted to have this little mare’s back. “Okay. Some night we can go into the astral and go somewhere you want to go, alright?” 

There was a pitiful look in her eyes now, as the other admitted to her hunger and her anxiety about it. It had been so long since she’d been there. Inge preferred not to think about it, the way she had despised her nature. How it had disgusted her, brought her fear and fury. “Why do you get nervous?” She knew, didn’t she? But she didn’t want to, maybe that was the issue. “Did you know we can share our meals? I could transfer some of last night’s feeding to you. But, you have to do it for yourself, too.” She let out a breath of air. “People have nightmares, with or without us. Fear tastes good. Besides that, it keeps us alive. It is not selfish to want such a simple thing.” Why should they have to apologize for being alive, after all? “Yes. You will dance.”

“Sometimes I lack more pop culture knowledge than I should,” Ariadne offered a shrug. “Sounds famous, I’ll look it up later.” Her face brightened at the other mare’s remark. “You like it? Sometimes people get confused about it, but I’ve always liked it. Loved it, even. But that’s not the point, sorry.” Inge wanted to know what the hunter looked like. Ariadne swallowed, fibbing just slightly. “I don’t really remember. I think I got too startled by it all. I’m sorry. Wait, no — she had a mask, actually. That’s why I don’t remember.” That much had been true, or at least she was fairly certain about that. “I ran away. I dunno why I didn’t project, maybe because I was worried she’d somehow catch me?”

She liked her. That was more than enough to brighten Ariadne’s face, once again. Maybe knowing other mares wouldn’t be so bad. She knew Leila, and now Inge, and she never wanted to leave this office. “I’d appreciate that, however much you can or want to. Anything at all would be good.” Her eyes widened. “I’d love that!” She chirped, just a bit louder than she’d intended, before covering her mouth with one of her hands. “That would be good. Great.” She repeated, voice lower.

“I don’t want to mess stuff up and hurt someone.” Again. Ariadne didn’t especially enjoy the feeling of shame that came with admitting that, but she owed Inge honesty, and the woman seemed to genuinely want to know, to want to find out more. “I don’t know if I knew that, but I’d like that, if you don’t mind.” Another nod. “I understand that I have to do it, and I do, just - do you think you could come with me sometime? Or at least give me advice on where to go?” She looked, rapt, at the other mare. “That’s true. It tastes so good.” Here, it felt safe to admit that. “I do like being alive, so yeah. That makes sense. I look forward to dancing.”

She frowned once more. “Don’t apologize.” It was starting to be grating, the constant apologies, the way Ariadne seemed hellbent on using that damned word again and again. “So I take it you know the myth behind it, hm? Your parents, are they big on ancient things or …?” Maybe under a next identity, Inge would steal a name from mythology, even if the characters she found herself attracted to most of all were more controversial than Dionysus’ bride ever could be. “A mask? Weird. But a woman, at least, that’s good to know.” If this place attracted the supernatural, it’d also attract its annoying hunters. “I tend to pop into the astral when they’re onto me. As far as I know they can’t follow us there.” 

The enthusiasm of the other was endearing, if not youthful. Inge looked at her with a look of near endearment, wondering if perhaps this was what her life lacked. A protegé, a mentee, someone she could give all her knowledge and advice to. “Alright, yes! We’ll do it. Who cares about flying a plane when we can travel through the astral?”

She clicked her tongue. “And so you hurt yourself?” She didn’t mean to sound judgmental, but perhaps she was. This young mare lacked self-love, self-preservation and perhaps even self-respect. Understandable, certainly at that age, but still. Inge thought it a pity. “Alright. I’ll transfer some, and then down the line we can visit someone together. Can I give you the assignment to find someone, then?” There were plenty of people she could find herself, but there had to be some challenge for the other, right? She sat up, leaned forward and looked Ariadne in the eyes: “Dance, then. To let yourself be held back at this point would be a personal betrayal.”

And she meant it, too. If Ariadne Whitlock was to be taken underneath her metaphorical wing (or literal, if this were to take place in a dream), then she’d push her towards her own ideals. There were no other worth her time, anyway. Though the meeting came to a close soon enough, Inge entrusted the other with not only her number, but her address as well, leaving the initiative with Ariadne. When she watched the blonde leave, there was a strange feeling of satisfaction that she couldn’t quite define. Still, the smile on her face was sincere.

[nightmaretist]

BARK BARK BARK // Van & Inge

PARTIES: Van @vanoincidence & Inge LOCATION: A park. TIMING: 15 june. CONTENT WARNINGS: None. SUMMARY: A dog didn't like Inge's mare-ish vibes and chased her into a tree. Van bares witness and tries to help a little, but she's pretty exhausted and mostly amused.

The string of curses that left Inge’s mouth was a combination of English and Dutch and somehow some third language, too. It was hardly like she was occupied with the linguistic nature of her cursing, though, as she was at present being chased by a massive dog. The creature seemed to have gone rabid from its unease and saw it fit to yank free from its owner and start sprinting, flashing its shiny teeth.

Now, it wasn’t like she was afraid. Ingeborg Endeman created fear, invented trauma and terrified for a living, so she did not get scared. She was just worried about the very real threat of this dog burrowing its teeth in her leg and revealing a lack of red blood, as well as its teeth ruining her delicate decades-old skirt. She didn’t mind a scene, but she would mind one like that. And so she ran, heeled leather boots hitting the ground.

It would be perfect if a storefront appeared on either side, but the park offered little places of shelter. There was nowhere to go but up. So up Inge went, clambering into a tree with haste, watching as the dog jumped up and down, trying to nip at her feet. When her eyes fell on a passerby she yelled: “Hey, you! Help!” She was not afraid, please remember that.

Van stuck the straw from her drink into her mouth, jabbing down at the leftover tapioca pearls at the bottom. They were a little too squishy to go through the straw now, so it was a stab and jab kind of deal. Once she’d gotten one, she let go of the straw from her mouth and pulled it out through the small hole she’d poked through the plastic, biting off the pearl. She wasn’t normally a taro kind of girl, and it never tasted right, but she’d been in the mood for something purple to match her outfit. Except she’d sucked down the entire drink within ten minutes and now she was at the beginning of a tummy ache. “Should have gotten it with soy.” She frowned as she found a trashcan to throw the near empty cup into. 

The sound of a dog barking made her look up, exhaustion evident beneath her eyes. The dog was chasing somebody and that… somebody was climbing up a tree. Suddenly, Van was amused. It was like something straight out of a cartoon. Maybe if she’d been a little less tired, she would have been more concerned. 

The woman began to shout, and with Van being the only one in the vicinity, she assumed that it was she who was being beckoned. “Me?” She pointed at herself with her index finger, then looked at the dog, its front paws scratching into the tree trunk while its jaws snapped wildly, spit flying from its jowls. “What did you do to him?” Because he wasn’t reacting to her, which meant that the brunette in the tree had done something. “Did you pretend to give him a treat and take it away? Is it your dog?” 

Give it a few days, perhaps even one of them, and Inge would laugh at this. It would be a moment to look back at fondly, to potentially recount when she met someone new and wanted to exchange exciting anecdotes. In the moment, however, she was nothing if not agitated. She was too unfocused and frazzled and in public to elevate her spirit and body into the astral plane and this entire ordeal was bound to become the source of at least some public ridicule. She really hoped no teenager was filming this. Or worse, a student.

The dog kept snapping and barking, tireless in its stupid rage and ferocity. If she wasn’t so annoyed, she’d pay a little more attention and focus on the details of that jaw snapping, the spit flying. Instead, it was just the young woman she was trying to get her to help that she focused on.

“I did nothing!” The words were exclaimed, her voice an octave higher than she had intended for it to be. “Not my dog either. Its owner has to be fucking somewhere, but it just must’ve whiffed something and —” Inge’s hands pointed wildly at the dog before grabbing the branch she was sitting on again, making sure not to lose her balance. Now that would be even worse. “Can you, I don’t know, throw a stick? Find its owner?” 

The woman’s voice was shrill, full of desperation for somebody to believe her. Van had been there before many times. Only, not in public. She looked at the dog as it continued snapping its jaws, tail low to the ground, ears peeled back. Whatever it saw in the woman, it didn’t like it. At the woman’s suggestion she do something, Van sighed. “Yeah, sure.” She looked over her shoulder, tired gaze sweeping the green behind them, but there was nobody looking slightly upset that their dog was up a tree. Instead, all either she or the other woman gained were stares. 

“I don’t think they’re owner is here and like, I don’t… want to get bit.” Van tried her best to get the dog’s attention by clapping her hands together, but it did nothing. She had some of her slim jim left, the plastic folded over itself to keep it from getting fuzz from her backpack on it. “Hold on.” She dug it out and unwrapped it. “Dude, I hope you’re not on a diet.” She waved the meat stick around, but the dog didn’t even look in her direction. Van looked up at the woman in the tree with a helpless expression. “Any other ideas? You a cat person or something?” If she weren’t so tired, maybe she’d take the situation more seriously. Anxiety, for once, was on the backburner. 

She really wasn’t afraid. Of course, it was easy to claim such a thing when you lacked the flow of blood of mortals and your heart didn’t tend to start pumping excitedly. When you had seen terror in its purest form and caused it. Inge refused to be afraid, even if her voice jumped higher and there was an edge of panic to it. No, this was nothing but pure frustration. Her own gaze drifted over their surroundings, trying to find whatever idiot owned a dog this aggressive, but finding nothing.

“Their owner is a shit, then.” It was fair enough that the other didn’t want to get bit, but Ingeborg found she couldn’t care as much as she perhaps ought to. Her eyes were hopeful when the other waved a meat-stick around, but the dog didn’t budge. Inge steadied herself on the branch she was perched on, breaking off a stick and tossing it down. Hitting the dog on the face did nothing if not infuriate it more. “Yes, sure, I’m a cat-person, but that doesn’t warrant this kind of response, does it?” She was a plant-person, actually, but this could already look suspicious enough for someone in the know of mares. She let out a bark of laughter, ironically. “Fuck! I mean, that’s hardly on you, sorry. But can you believe this?” 

Van made sure to keep her distance from the dog, just in case it decided to turn and chase her instead. She really wasn’t sure what had happened to make the dog so upset in the first place, but she wasn’t sure that she believed the woman in the tree had done nothing to elicit this kind of response from it. 

As the woman broke off a stick from the tree, Van winced, watching it fall down to the ground, but not before smacking the poor animal in the face. Honestly, it probably didn’t hurt very much at all, but she couldn’t help but understand the dog’s rage a little better. The woman spoke again and Van lifted her gaze up to meet the brunette. “Maybe it can sense that you don’t like dogs. Dogs are like, weirdly in tune with that kind of shit.” With a sigh, she looked over her shoulder, scanning for anybody who might be upset that their dog was off leash and barking at some random woman. Still, nobody came into view. “I’m not sure what I believe anymore.” There was some truth to her words, but they weren’t meant for this situation. “I mean..” Van cleared her throat, pausing only momentarily, “do you have any snacks in your pockets? Maybe it wants those.” 

Maybe this was her own fault, for having called out to the stranger. But what was a panicked mare to do? She could have tried to remain calm and wait for the area to clear so she could go into the astral plane and back home, but in stead here she was. Attention on her. The dog still fucking barking. Inge was starting to get a headache. 

“Yes, maybe that’s it,” she said, knowing full well that that was it. Sanne had explained it to her, all those years ago: animals don’t like us, they think there’s something wrong with us. It had been a nightmare to walk around her hometown, with all the cattle and other animals. Inge patted down her jacket, which did have multiple pockets of which she didn’t always remember the content. “Just chocolates, don’t think I should poison the thing, right?” No, she had little interest in that. Despite her tendency to scare the bejeezus out of people who others might consider innocents, she had little interest in harming animals. Hell, she didn’t even eat them. Just as she was about to open her mouth, a stout man ran in their direction, a leash swinging in the air, apologies falling off his tongue.

“Sorry, sorry, don’t know what got into her, this never happens!” He did look genuinely apologetic. Inge didn’t care. If he couldn’t handle a big dog, he shouldn’t have gotten one. The dog’s head turned at the sound of his voice, though, and that, at least, was something good. “Come here, girl, come to dad.” It took all her might not to gag at that.

“No, I don’t think so.” Van’s frown deepened as she craned her neck to get a better look at the woman in the tree. It didn’t seem like she was carrying any bundles of salami, either. She’d seen it in a cartoon once. Van was silently grateful that it hadn’t been her up in the tree. What would she have done? Would anyone have stopped?

Just as Van was about to suggest that the woman get out of the tree to try and pet the dog to show it that she was kind, a man jogged up to them. Van turned around to look at him, his expression melding from fearful to relieved. The dog turned around at the sound of his voice and let out a high pitched whine before returning its attention to the brunette in the tree. The barking had stopped, at least. 

“Can you get your dog? She’s stuck.” Van’s voice came out a little more monotone than intended. The exhaustion really was catching up to her. The man nodded, desperate in his movements as he approached the dog, picking her up without issue. If Van had tried that, she had no doubt that she’d have gotten bit. The man apologized again before he began to coo to the dog who was wiggling in his arms. 

At least the man was strong enough to carry his stupidly big dog himself. Inge watched him from where she sat in the tree, eyes near-blazing with indignation now that her panic was subsiding. “You should really get a stronger leash, or one with a stronger grip, you know! This is outrageous. Look at me!” She gestured at her position in the three. It was his fault, really, and not hers. How could she help it that her nature upset animals? 

“I really am sorry, you’re right — but please understand, it’s never happened before, I’m telling you, I have no idea — well, I’ll just get out of your hair and get her out of here, alright? So sorry.” 

She watched him try and traipse off, the dog struggling in his arms but at least on his leash again, now. Inge stared at his back, hard, but eventually tried to let go of her frustration and focus on getting out of the tree. At least her limbs were still as nimble as they had been when she was thirty three, because if she’d had to do this in an actual 77 year old’s body, she would have been majorly fucked. Still, there was a lack of some grace as she jumped from the last bit of the tree.

“Well.” She looked at the other. “I appreciate you not laughing at me.” She really did, though she did think that in a few months - or perhaps years - she would be laughing about this herself. “I really thought it would never leave me alone and I’d just have to sleep there.” Inge wanted to get away from this horridly embarrassing scene. She tried to pat her hair, wondered if there was a stick in there. “Right.”

Van couldn’t blame the woman in the tree for talking sternly to the man with the wiggling dog. Even as he walked away with it, it still barked and let out high pitched whines that made her ears hurt. 

She watched with mild amusement as the brunette slid out of the tree, half-expecting her to scrape her backside on a rogue branch. She didn’t, however, and her feet were firmly planted on the ground. Van watched her for a moment before shrugging. “It would have been funnier if the dog had been smaller.” With a raised brow, Van tilted her head to the side. “You would have actually slept up there? Really?” She looked back up at the tree and shook her head. “At that point, let the dog bite you. Think about the bugs that could have gotten you instead.” She scrunched her nose. 

Van took a small step away from the woman and shoved the beef stick into her pocket (something she’d started doing in an attempt to mirror Nora), and let out a small breath. “I’m just glad it didn’t turn on me. Then we’d both be stuck up there.” 

Inge tried to look at her backside, trying to gauge if there was any green stuck to her trousers but unable to get very far. She still tried beating some off the dirt off regardless, having given up on trying to seem like a graceful person. Tomorrow she’d try again.

“I wouldn’t have had to climb as high if it was a smaller dog, too. But its barks would’ve been much more grating, so.” She let out a sound of amusement and frustration, somehow conveying both emotions into one. “God, maybe I would have. I’d prefer some bugs over potential rabies.” Besides, there wasn’t really any blood for mosquitos to suck from her veins anyway. What she left unsaid was that she’d just have astral projected herself home.

“Either way, nice of you to stick around and not let me sort-of-fight this battle alone. And fair enough, I wouldn’t wish being stuck in a tree as a dog barks up to it to my worst enemy.” She absolutely would. “Anyway. I’m running late to my appointment as is, so I really should go. Have a nice day without any other feral dogs, will you?”

[nightmaretist]

INGEBORG ENDEMAN — bio. stats. plots. pinboard. playlist. writing.

[nightmaretist]

haunted by your own narrative. || solo.

TIMING: About five years ago. PARTIES: Ingeborg Endeman & Marcia Clarke. SUMMARY: Inge intends to haunt the nightmares of Marcia, a recurring victim of hers. She ends up haunted in stead, by her own poorly repressed memory. CONTENT WARNINGS: Hospitals, bugs, mentions of child death, mention of breastcancer.

Smells were hard to imitate in dreams, as if the subconscious was merely designed to recreate visions and sounds and nothing else. But the smell of hospitals was so deeply present and visceral in Ingeborg’s own mind, that she was able to imitate it for others if she focused hard. That stale, sterile smell, of cleaning agents and bleach, that smell that had embedded itself in the very lines of her brain. A smell that seemed to haunt a fair amount of people, as if hospitals were a monster in and of itself, where people walked into its maw and came out haunted.

What dull thing, Ingeborg thought. What boring, bureaucratic, modern tragedy! To her, there was little inspiration to find in those white hallways and its doctors, the drab meals. Sure, there was death and decay – popular topics of nightmares – but what excitement lay there? What artistic value? And yet ever since the month spent in hospital with Vera, Inge’s mind kept drifting to hospital scenes. So too, did the mind of Marcia Clarke. How depressingly drab her nightmares had been before the mare’s intervention — hospital scene after hospital scene, sick family members.

Sure, it was a valid fear, losing others. Ingeborg found it existed within mortals and immortals alike, sat somewhere in her being too — but if you got to choose what someone was afraid of, it certainly shouldn’t be something as downtrodden as that. What good had come of heart attacks, anyway, besides bad love songs and even worse poems with tired metaphors? 

So Ingeborg walked the halls of a dream hospital, pouring the smell of sterile death around her. It oozed from her as Marcia waited behind one of the doors in the hall, as she had been doing every odd Tuesday and every even Thursday night. Inge’s feet clicked on the hospital linoleum, clawed things making scratches in the surface and creating a sound that Marcia – still in her empty, dark room – could only hear come closer, accompanied with the smell that took her back to other times. 

Marcia’s fear grew as Ingeborg grew nearer, the talons on her fingers growing, scratching at the door. Swinging the door open, she entered. Nurse’s uniform hiding monstrous form, a mask hiding a red smear of a mouth. The light shone in from the hallway as she tapped her clipboard, tutting her tongue. “It doesn’t look very good,” she said, shaking her head in genuine disarray. This too, was an artform: acting. She had more interest in the visual arts, to be sure, but there was some fun to be found here too. She didn’t always take center stage, sometimes opted for nightmares more abstract or larger than just her, but with Marcia it was so simple. A bug crawled from her pen and she shook it off, and as it fell on the floor it began to multiply. She let it.

Staring at her clipboard – this was supposed to be an act, a part of the performance – her eyes got caught on a few words. A surname from a past life — Hendrik’s surname, the one her daughter had gotten and kept even after they’d separated from her father. Vera Beenhakker, with diagnoses that were all too familiar to Inge. The bugs at her feet crawled up her legs and she shook one of her paws, scattering some of them but not able to fight it. “Mrs Clarke, I’m afraid —” She had to finish this dream, the way she always did: on a cliffhanger, with an amount of dread that would haunt Marcia until the next Tuesday or Thursday, but the bugs crawled higher. A bird cawed (the bird belonged to the dreams of another, not Marcia) and Ingeborg wondered if it was possible that her hands grew clammy. She stared at her talons, then at the name Vera Beenhakker, at the diagnosis, borstkanker, at the birth year, 1971. 

Marcia was piping up, suddenly, the woman growing brave now that her nightmarish foe wasn’t acting as it always was. “There’s something on your face.” Why she would say such a thing, Ingeborg didn’t know — but she reached up with her now-human-again hands and patted her cheeks. Something wet, but not quite: it was cold and slick, sparkled as she pulled back her hand. “Are you alright?” Her eyes flickered from her hands to Marcia, the woman with suddenly a lot of guts.

Ingeborg dropped her clipboard, ripped off her mask and snarled, revealing three twirling, forked tongues and sharp teeth that snapped as her warped voice spoke: “He’s already dead! He’s been dead for months, and you must drop the act! I implore you to drop it, ma’am, for your own sake if not your children’s! He’s dead, cease your futile denial, you fool!” 

The nightmare ended there, all darkness and Ingeborg back in her own body. Marcia had to be panting in her bed by now, clutching her sheets before turning to her husband, sleeping peacefully next to her. But it mattered nothing to her, now: while she felt somewhat satiated, she also found herself panting, resting her hands on her knees and staring at the darkness in front of her. This had to be it, then, the end of her nightmare-relationship with Marcia Clarke — not only because she might be revealing too much of herself, but because she was startlingly aware that hospital-nightmares would be a no-go going forward, unless she wished to be haunted by her daughter even more.