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see-arcane · 1 month

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Blood of My Blood: Domestic

For those keeping tabs on the Blood of My Blood AU, this is currently just a fanfiction of that fanfiction. Also a doorstopper. Only @ibrithir-was-here can call whether this massive sucker is canon or not. But it's out of my head now and I can ice my hand.

Summary: A portrait of a special night for the self-appointed patriarch of Castle Dracula. One of strange intimacies, stranger revelations, and secrets hidden in stone and cemetery earth.

Warning: This contains mature material in the way of profanity, attempted assault, violence, and very dubious consent.

Happy reading.

His first attempt was also his last.

After his good friend had sold himself, after the baffling enigma of the pregnancy, after the boy, child of three bloodlines, was upright enough to not be an anchor in the arms of his parents. After all this, he made his attempt.

Months had crawled past the obvious point of action. Almost a year. Had the caravan with their burden of wagons been there, he knew he would have to laugh along with questions as to how he could hold off so long. She had chosen the airiest of her departed Sisters’ attire to glide in, her face was voluptuous in its venom, and she could not even speak aloud! A blessing, they would laugh, more so for being the spoils of war.

A warlord’s right. Yes, yes, it was so.

Had he a mirror and a reflection to find in it, he would have mocked it. Why this hesitation over a collared pet? Let her bite, let her hiss—her Sisters had done that and worse in their centuries—it would come to the same conclusion. Her will was his property as much as her veins, her teeth, her flesh. What was wanted could be had at the first impulse. Now the impulse was here. Enough of one, at least.

Already took her woman in Whitby. Her groom offered himself on a silver plate. May as well.

He frowned to himself. What was that? ‘May as well?’ As though it were a chore to get on with. He shook his head and wasted another quarter of an hour pretending to care about a choice of oil for the job.

Job?

A curse caught under his tongue and he twisted a coil of hair before his eyes. Black as tar. Black as hers. No, he couldn’t blame this dawdling on a waning prime. Such a thing was hardly a hindrance but a few summers ago. Not with his dear friend who had come willingly, fled fearfully, and slunk so docilely back into his arms.

Perhaps that was it. It was hardly the same affair without Jonathan himself in the scene. Was there any way to make him watch? If he was drained enough, he could be flung back from the bed like a child should he scramble to intervene. Or they could dust off one of the dungeons and drag in a mattress. Or, while the spouses were mid-tryst, the woman could be slipped on like a skin at his will, and Jonathan could look up to find his Master’s eyes in her skull, his grin in her lips…

For he would know. If not in that exact instant, then when their Master used the whole of the woman as his personal apparatus. Such games had been played before, once upon a time. Back when his Loves had excited anything from him. The idea held the same potential as the tableau of the three of them as a chain of warming skin, playing as adults do once children were tucked away in their dreaming. A notion that nettled something giddy awake in him.

Finally.

This time he cursed aloud and wished there was something at hand to break.

No, no, it wouldn’t do to herd them all into such games ahead of the rightful order of things. He was Count. He was Master. He was owed his claim. The Bridegroom had that particular flag planted in him years ago. Now for the Bride.

…The baptism was near enough, no? You claimed her that night in October. You collected in November. You told her yourself after your little indulgence that there was nothing you truly wanted of her. All that was wanted was the ownership of her, which you have. She is beaten. Can that not be enough?

On second thought, he no longer wished for a reflection. He wanted a doppelgänger whose throat he could wring like a chicken’s. Such whining! Such foot-dragging laxness! The ghosts of a thousand grumbling wives seemed to reach out as one to sneer at him. They had gone into their grim arrangements with less fuss than he put up now.

And why is that?

In lieu of answering himself, he pocketed a bottle at random and tore out of the room to find her. There was no need to fret over Jonathan or the boy. Both were out in the courtyard, enjoying the late spring night. Doting, Jonathan had brought home chalk for the child to scratch at the flagstones with. New words and prancing little figures. A cloying scene he was happy to leave them to.

To his surprise, the woman had left them to it as well. She was nowhere to be seen in the great moonlit square.

Instead, he found her at one of the furthest ends of the castle. Skulking around the chambers that had ostensibly belonged to her Sisters between daylit drowses. In all her time here, he had yet to see her paw over the littered jewelry and gowns left behind. Once or twice he had borrowed her eyes and seen her glance dully at the English books. Relics of the time when Castle Dracula had turned into a grammar school in preparation for a time of travel that would now never come for their lot. Beside these were glimpses of the trio’s pastimes. Unfinished paintings, a dust-caked violin, a frayed bit of tapestry with its threaded demons left half-made in Hell. Nothing had interested her bar the change of clothes.

Again, he thought of what he would have to grin along with the next time Old Danil and his men were beckoned. Did he tell them he had ordered her into the flimsy falls of silk and sheer? Or would it be better to tell the truth, that she slipped them on herself? The latter might earn some words of congratulation. They did not have to know she wore it for her husband and herself; for where had she to go out smothered in layers for strangers? What difference was there now between a nightgown and the full raiment of human decorum her useless career in etiquette had primed her for? What, beyond the allowance or removal of comfort?

Throw one of the heavier dresses at her, the internal voice tried to chuckle. Dress and shawl and cloak and all. Bury her in it. Ha. Ha.

The humor of the thought was so shallow as to be vapor. Yet he truly would prefer that she go about in the same elaborate cover as her Sisters. Her Sisters, who had chosen the dresses themselves from their fashion plates. Her Sisters, who he had foisted the scantier costumes on in younger centuries, back when they’d interested him. What was this in interest’s place now?

Later. He would answer his own nonsensical queries later. For now, conquest and consummation. He craned his head over his shoulder, eyeing the distant windows over the courtyard—

How long must he play nanny out there?

—before forcing himself to stroll rather than storm up to the room she hid in. She didn’t hide all that well, of course. There was no point when he could follow the thread between them or yank her to him with a tug. Most conveniently, she had chosen an area clotted with bedchambers for her den.

Less conveniently, she had let herself into a room he had forbidden her Sisters from on pain of punishment. Had he ever warned her against it? It did not matter, naturally, for he had not given her permission, but he wondered. He sighed. Pandora will always open what she’s not meant to. Such a pair, his Harkers.

He peeked through her senses and into the room as his stroll turned into a quicker stalk. Relief hit him first upon seeing that the space was unmarred. No more than he had left it, anyway. He had moved out the broken or burnt furnishings, leaving only bed, wardrobe, and portrait behind. The latter was the only one left of that likeness and he preferred to have it around for the occasional glare. Any further intrusion was cut short when her line of sight flicked down.

His mind snapped back into itself with a flinch. That it was a flinch made him want to laugh and strike himself at the same time. As if he had not seen flashes of her bare hide before!

When she is with him. When her skin is an inch from being a costume.

Even so. He had seen it all before. Worlds more with her Sisters. What a child he had become to grow skittish at seeing the woman below, gasp, a bit of décolletage. The gawping shame of the Englishmen had infected him on his single visit. He grinned it away. And why not?

She was out of tonight’s white dress and donning something else. He’d caught a glimpse of rich black. Odd, for he recalled nothing but heaps of white and red in the Sisters’ wardrobe. Blood on snow. He must have gotten them a splash of night to go with it once upon a time and forgotten. Ah, well. She would not have it on long.

He did not waste the gesture of a knock. Jonathan might bristle at the sound, his limited senses allowing him to occasionally be taken by surprise. Not so here. He let himself into the room and settled for clicking it firmly behind him. And, if only for punctuation, bolted the lock.

She did not move from her place behind the folding screen, only paused to slide the garnets of her eyes to him. A withering thing that might have stopped a mortal intruder’s heart. It pleased him to see.

It confused him when the glare caught on the brandished oil and, rather than flare in rage or horror, simply rolled away from the sight of it and him. She resumed her fumbling behind the screen, either shedding or fastening. An unplanned silence unfolded as he kept his back to the door and she kept her back to him. The oil sloshed in its bottle as he turned it.

Well?

The word fell in his head like a jabbing hand against a stuttering understudy on the stage.

“Well,” he bit back, “you take me by surprise. I had thought there would be more theatrics when we came to this.”

I have not come to this. Given even an atom of free will, I shall certainly not come to you.

He thought of and discarded a particularly juvenile rebuttal. It was something he might have reserved for Jonathan, but it felt cold and unctuous in trying to fling it at her. At least to say it out loud. He flicked it at her like a psychic worm instead. Another roll of the garnets.

Aloud, “You have only as much will as my will allows.”

So you love to remind us. Which is why the larger share of surprise is my own. You are so adamant in your role as Master of the Castle that even you cannot avoid bowing and scraping to it.

The oil froze mid-twist in his fingers.

“You have a gift for talking fluent nonsense. No doubt something you took from the Dutchman.” His gaze leapt to the crescent scar that still blazed in echo of the Eucharist. “Prior to the parting blessing, I expect.” Her ruddy lip curled like a warning wolf’s. His own curled back in delight. Better, better. “Do you think it would be him or the fawning doctor who swooned more at the state of you? We know already the lordling and the American would simply have killed you outright, but the supposed men of medicine would have a sermon apiece to wail out before grabbing the saw and stake.” He feigned a pondering stance. “I believe, if we think in volume of wasted breath, it would be the Dutchman who languished more. But his pet student would likely have an actual point to it, being so wrapped up in the effort to cry demon while also struggling not to play with his tool at the same time. His blade as well.”

Are you four-hundred or fourteen?

There was less ire than annoyance in the words. The mental equivalent of shooing a fly. More fabric shifted. She had gone through the formality of lighting a lamp for the room rather than trusting her vision alone. Its glow revealed the shadow puppet of her silhouette in the screen. Yes, she was dressing. But there was no bell of a dress as yet. Not even a chemise.

He withheld a sulk. Half the fun of the act was the prelude and half the fun in that was the peeling away of layers or circumventing them entirely. There was a certain pleasure in opening and shedding the frail shields of an ensemble—he admitted to some strange internal leap that equated it with the old work of skinning and dressing one’s kill in the forest—and almost as much in proving those shields protected nothing. A hand slipped under a hem was child’s play. Working that and other anatomy into place when making a mist of himself was a unique treat.

Had Jonathan told her so yet? If so, he likely needn’t have bothered. Not when such memories might be dropped neatly in her head as she paced and hissed. At last, she could experience it firsthand!

Ha. Ha.

The oil was fidgeted with again.

I cannot imagine this was the ‘charm’ you dragged out for her.

Her?

Ah.

Unbidden, his head craned to face the faded portrait. The figure in it was now all but a ghost on the canvas. A representation not too many brushstrokes removed from how she had been in life. Considering her appearance in the mausoleum, it remained an ironically perfect likeness.

A maiden of snow, alive and dead, with the artist’s dancing ice seeming to radiate from her rather than the backdrop of a leaden sky. Behind her loomed the Mountain where they had learned so many Lessons and taken their parting forms. Strigoi had held no appeal for her, even with its many gifts. Instead she’d chased the hardy vourdalak with its wan corpse-skin and its eternal voracious passions. Chased it and wore more names through the ages than even he had invented to wear the guise of his own descendants.

She who had spread love like a disease until settling on her resting place in 1801. Her precious little nothing-village, all turned. All free from mortal ills. All asleep and dreaming into each other in their graves. Content to be confined. With love.

For them.

Doting fool of a Countess.

How much a fool, really? She burned from the lightning. She once suffered the stake to her heart, the blade through her throat. And then she was up again. Unmarred and unbothered without a drop of blood upon her tongue. Bloodless and unbound to you, she stood whole after you’d shooed Jonathan’s idiot predecessor on his way. She would not have a scar from a spade still on her brow.

Her painted eyes found his as he mulled this. That impossible glacial blue. His gaze shied from it and trailed down the flax fall of her hair, braided away to show the throat where his kiss ought to have gone. Up again to her lips. The only point of color that blazed on her, turned down in perpetual sorrow. This or disappointment.

All this woolgathering passed in an instant. He shrugged out of it with his own dismissing glance.

“There is a difference between you and her. One is maiden of noble blood, who was once worthy of courtship. The other is a trophy long overdue to be enjoyed.”

Where is she?

In a graveyard in a pauper’s village that dragged her down like a colony of filthy feeble vermin.

“Not here. If you wish to play comparison to my women of old, it should please you to know that none are of your particular measure. None of my bedmates thus far have been at once the downed enemy and the stolen wife. It—,”

In the painting.

As if he had not spoken. It was not even the pitch of one trying to distract from the topic. He followed her stare back to the portrait and its grim setting. The Mountain. An obsidian peak that seemed at once a mouth and an eye over her fair shoulders.

That peak isn’t one in this range.

Ah, fishing. The Dutchman had mentioned the Scholomance, he recalled. Tricky thing. But not by enough.

“Says the Englishwoman.” He clicked his tongue. “You know nothing of the land that holds you. You shall not for very long yet. What good fortune you have, you and your clever mind, to now have so much time in which to learn. I think by the end of the next century you shall know a third of the crags in the Carpathians. Maybe half!”

At the rate you dawdle, it will take twice as long before you get around to the same epiphany I have had to reconcile with since I first climbed out of the box. The same revelation that has been sitting out in the open, free for your voyeurism to trip over at any opportunity, only for you to go on strutting and preening at yourself. As though you still had a reflection to impress.

She had ceased dressing behind the screen. The outline of her did show the fall of a cloak, but still no dress. He found he did not much care. Not for her choice of attire or her tone.

“Do forgive me then. As you are suddenly consort and counsel, please, do enlighten me. What grand epiphany am I overlooking?” Then, in a moment of inspiration, he capped with, “Feel free to lecture between positions.”

Finally, a wave of disgust radiated from her. Hate. Wrath. Check, check, check. But buried under it all was an uninterrupted core of exasperation. Even disbelief. As if she had handed him an apple and he’d declared it was a grape. Indeed, though he couldn’t know it, she was kneading at her brow the way she had in private when a particularly dense group of girls was foisted on her to teach. There was a very clear and grousing sensation from her that spoke of desire for the ability to enjoy liquor again.

A lecture? Fine. You do so love hearing yourself talk.

Before he could grasp her meaning, she shoved the screen aside. Everything in him crashed against a stone wall as he recognized her ensemble.

You never brought them anything in black, piped the inane inner voice.

She wore the proof head to toe. If only because she was wearing one of his own suits. Being almost as long-boned as Jonathan, it needed only a few folds of the cuffs to fit and his stolen cloak masked whatever else begged for tailoring. On the whole it was…it was like…

Ah, see? You do still have a reflection.

His mind scrambled in something near to panic for salvation. He dug up memories of his Loves in nights long gone, when he had let one or another wrap herself in one of his capes in lieu of cover. That had carried some fine thrill once. But the fresher, the brighter thought, was of Jonathan in their private summer.

Back when his dear friend found his few English pieces disappearing one after the other until his courteous host began slipping his own clothes into the wardrobe. How well they’d suited him then. Better still today, when the rules of the house dictated he peel away the set of modern tailoring he kept for the town errands and sheathed himself in his Master’s uniform. White. Red. Black.

Once, in an older age, the red was swapped for blue. The death shades of necrosis, of walking winter. Their velvet was worn with the ease of cold Morena awaiting her yearly demise at the birth of spring.

He clung to all of these connections for a blink before the overwhelming memory tipped them over. A memory made precious only by its rarity in the murky sea of his human recollection rather than sentiment. Chiefly because it was one of the first times he began seriously considering murdering his brother. His little brother, who had snuck into his quarters, shrugged on his best raiment, and laughed as he was caught en route to some infantile play at the daughter of their father’s guest. At her.

This was not that. It wasn’t, it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, he should be flattered, should be enticed, should be—

“You thieving bitch.”

If I am such, it is only because you set such a fine example in both the action and the role, O Kin of my Kin. On top of all the rest of your aggravations, you have even soured the daydream I once had of proving my former students wrong. My poor girls who swore up and down that to have siblings was a curse. I almost had a brother in spirit, once. It was a nice thing of sentiment and foam. But now here you are, smashing the fantasy and proving the girls right all along. What have you done since entering my life but steal what is rightfully Mine?

Something horrid was curdling in his stomach. A sensation he’d thought was outgrown centuries ago. What was this? What was this? In answer, a scrap of inspiration drifted to him. He nailed up a grin.

“Oh dear,” through teeth clamped so tight the words had to squeeze through, “you do take our boy’s idle talk too seriously. If dark hair and rosy eyes were all it took to make one a relative—,”

Three years. Three years ago, my son made that guess of brother and sister. You did laugh then. Laughed as if you might choke. But you have remembered it too.

“Hardly an effort when I can recall the last four centuries.” More or less.

And the last four years, no doubt. Years in which the nearest you have willingly gotten to me are when we lay down in our boxes or when you want to turn my Jonathan’s head.

“Our Jonathan.”

So you delude yourself. Just as you thought Lucy was yours. Just as you think to welcome yourself to all that is Mine.

“Have we not gone over this Lesson before? Does it not follow that if one owns a dog, they own the creature’s toys? Its pups?”

She had been resting her hand atop the folding screen. The hand snapped shut and sent fragments flying. A reflex that he himself had needed to train himself out of lest he shatter or crush every bauble under his roof. For her part, she seemed not to notice the runnels of blood escaping the healing palm.

“Such a temper,” he chided. “Shall I kiss it better?”

Immediate bile rippled into him at the words.

Yet the bile did not belong to her.

Shall you?

She flapped her hand at him, streaked with dark coagulation. Her claws had grown out and the knuckles bunched up into a talon. The nails holding up his grin loosened.

Ah, but that is just the hand! Surely this is what you want?

As he watched, her face changed. Muscle and bone shifted like clay until a bestial deformation replaced the sharp beauty. A product of his own form of vampirism. While those he conscripted could not assume an animal’s full form, his efforts in the Scholomance bled down into them, filtered into countenances that overtook in a rage. Here was rigid and stretched flesh, a bristling forest of fangs in a beartrap maw, the huge and hating pits of the eyes. A bat’s face stretched into grotesquerie.

Now let us get on with the craved rendezvous! Come, where is my kiss? This is what you came for! What you have, with so much anticipation, withheld yourself from all these days and weeks and months and years! Delayed gratification must be the sole reason, no other.

Then, in a tone that did not carry her soul’s voice, but another’s he had known all his life, whispering up from his own mind:

Is it not so?

In asking, she had taken a step forward.

The back of his heel struck the locked door as he started back.

Enough.

He had initially thought to order her to the bed. His Loves of the past had needed the Lesson. An example as to how strong the chain their Master held was, as much as the rightful collection of that treasure that rests between a maiden’s legs no matter their surplus or absence of appeal in other regards. Now he had no patience for such puppet strings. His spare hand took her by her cravat and shirtfront—

Mine, these are MINE—

—and stopped just short of taking her by the neck as he had done to soldiers and subordinates in ages past. That much would be injury. And he did recall the laughable conditions his dear friend had laid out. So careful, his Jonathan. In all but his choice of spouses.

He thrust the latter on the postered bed along with himself, pinning her the way the wolves wrestled over each other to get at the throat. Before she could get tooth or claw into him, he brought down an anvil of his will onto hers.

“Take off that face. Now.”

The monstrous face twitched, half-smoothed.

You are squeamish over such a thing? I had not realized you were so delicate!

Her mouth, still jutting with spire teeth, managed to grin.

I wore the whole of that face before Jonathan once. Brandished it like Medusa’s head. The proof under the husk that passes for subsumed humanity. I wanted him. I want him. He was, he is, he shall ever be Mine. But the Vampire is made only of extremes. In that mood, I was at the extreme of self-loathing for what I had reduced his wife to. For the thing I had allowed myself to be. Yes, you were the infection. Yes, the others warned me against taking my own life even as I cozened them to take it in my stead. So quick they were, seeing none of my terror at their quickness, the same mercy wielded for my Lucy. They made their killing oath while Jonathan swore his own.

“He did. He killed to see you whored rather than dead. Such is the loving loyal gallantry of our—,”

We both know I lied when I baited him with tales of old. When I spoke of the men who would kill their womenfolk to save them the indignity of the enemy’s touch. A clumsy hook. One I only half-believed. But I wanted him to have an out, you see. We have known each other to the soul for almost half our lives. Just as he permitted me to know what was not written in the diary. Those gaps.

Her face hardened again, the abominable ridges stretching into a demon’s mask.

It was all but code. Something I could say before the others. And while I do not doubt he feared a grain of truth in that requisite threat—of this pantomime we are limping through now—the reality was always there at the top. No matter how I might have begged, might have entreated, bribed, or gnashed my teeth.

Her fangs clicked together once. Hard.

For all that you took me for my brain, for my senses, for the petty vengeance over your spoiled earth, for the cliché of a hundred other despots who prey upon a woman to attack her men, these were mere filigree. You took me to take him. Is it not so?

“Fix. Your. Face.”

Her face resumed smoothing…slowly. All the while her mind ran like a broken spigot.

Yes, of course it was. It did work out so prettily for you in the end. Not because of the blood on his hands and mine, not even because of our child. It has happened because I was as great a coward as you. You, who ran from my Jonathan when you saw he meant to cleave you in a crowded street. You, who fled back to this roost when the first wrinkle came into your plans after centuries of sitting idle on your laurels. And I? I spoke aloud of suicide before them all. Baiting their worry, their oath.

‘No no, Madam Mina, it is too soon to think such things! And worse, risks rising as the Un-Dead!’

Ha. Ha.

I did not do as Jonathan had, who makes his resolutions in silence. He held out as long as he was able, until the only option was escape or undeath. At that point he trusted himself to be broken on the cliff or torn by the wolves rather than risk eternity with the Sisters, waiting for you to come back and collect. A death that would have ruined him past the point that vampirism, still a mystery then, could have saved him. All for the chance to come back to me. Me, now a thing almost as unworthy as you, who clung to hope of life without the excuse of ignorance.

Obviously I could have ended it before he ever set foot on your mountains again. I could have burned. I could have shattered myself after a long fall. I could have found a dozen ways to destroy myself past your intended use for me. And I didn’t. I was not even a Vampire by more than an ounce, yet there I was. Shying from my own destruction when it could have saved them all—when it could have stopped him from putting himself on your altar.

And because I shied, because I lived to follow the thread you left behind, this is where we are.

He is Mine. Our child is Mine. But because you hold my chain—this reason and no other—you can imagine they are yours. That he is yours. So I showed my Jonathan what was left of his wife. The monster he sold himself to Hell for, a thing not worth the love he gave or being mother to the son they’d made, a thing who would lose hold of her martyr-mood soon, so go, Love, go and take our boy, run from the Pit.

Instead, he kissed me.

And to this night he stays and plays your games, does your work, keeps the dust from gathering on your child-brain. For me. For our son. But any reason would have done it for you, wouldn’t it? Any lure or collar. Anyone you knew had hold of his heart. You’d have turned his grandmother if that was what it took.

Her face was at last reset. Still his dead stomach did not settle.

If it were half a millennium ago, all of us wearing the roles we are in spirit, you really would have held a knife to your own kin if it meant—

A flash.

Little brother, teeth bare in glee, talking of how sad a state it was to have the younger son find his bride first.

‘Do not fret, you have your books and your bloodshed and your future under the Mountain to keep you busy! Ah, you will be missed. Perhaps even by her, tender thing that she is. You have addled her, Brother, with your talk of the Powers under the Earth. A shame to draw along some poor maiden with your occult fairy stories, wasting her canniness on war and drivel. But her interest will pass and I shall take care of her while you go try not to die to your Devil’s Lessons. Best of luck.’

A lie, of course. It had to be a lie. He was eldest, he was the ruler-to-be, Weathermaker, rider of the Dragon, Dracula, of course their father would promise her to him. Union would come into it, the wisdom of the move was undeniable, but more, it was his right. It was his due.

It was her.

Under the titles and the trades and, yes, even the teasing thought that she too wished to brave the Mountain, to grasp its Lessons and bring home its gifts to guard those she loved, whatever the cost.

To the enemy or to her. Prepared for any altar, in marriage or blood. Pliant as the snow, cutting as the ice. The chill of her like the breaking of fever. An impeccable spur to the mind, forever turning me towards joy as she parried wrath with her tongue or talent; occasionally in unison. Even in fear, in our play, recognizing the monster before I ever ceased to be a man, she kept herself a gag in my teeth. Oh, I was no fool, Countess. How many lives were spared because you blocked my way in word and flesh? The idiot chattel will never know.

You did love me once. When our hearts beat with our own blood. When we bowed our heads under the Mountain. When we crawled from it, half-mad, damned in our own directions, cold hands clinging together as revenants of different breeds. Yes, I think you must have loved me. Why else would you think to chase the form of your homeland’s vourdalak? I joked that you did not trust me and my kiss.

We laughed and I was not bitter. You had chosen Love and I had chosen Conquest and so I thought I had you forever. Vourdalaks can only Love or Hate. And you loved. And I loved. And it was well. Until it wasn’t. Until the coin of extremes flipped in you, seeing all that I had become. Love to Hate in a single night. I could not hold you when my chains were not in your soul. I could not break you when your dead flesh shrugged every wound. I could only heal from the mauling you left me with, losing you in the fall of hail and sleet. Gone to throw yourself to mortal maggots. A quest that took you to the rotting village and its endearing diseased cattle, weeping for fear of loss of each other.

The cattle who you chose to turn and dream with in the dirt.

Like you nearly chose…

Thunder snarled outside.

Under him, the woman bared her teeth in a grin he would swear he had seen elsewhere. In a looking glass or on the whelp he called a brother?

Enough!

He dropped himself upon her, willing her mouth to pucker and part for him. Doing so, he thought wildly of sieged buildings, of broken windows, of smashed doors, of barriers sundered, wood, glass, stone, iron, that was all, that was all, he would break in and be gone and—and—

His eyes were closed. Why?

You know why.

Something was wrong. Her lips were there, but also not. It was another’s mouth, heavy and coarse with hair. He opened his eyes.

And saw himself.

Himself, seen and felt through her senses, now crouched and crushing his own face with graceless gnawing.

Shall I turn you over first? We can oil a stake if you’re so eager to bow for yourself.

So saying, she pressed her knee up between his legs.

He threw himself away from her as if she’d turned to sewage. A ball of coagulation and bile even managed to lurch up his throat. It coughed out of him with a retch, splattering on the faded rug. Thunder was joined by lines of lightning.

“Disgusting witch!”

I take after my kin.

He spat again. The taste of her was the taste of himself. And, as though she were somehow in his head despite the burning wall he’d laid between them:

We are monsters, both of us, and neither has a preference for themselves. A point you have been trying not to know as you fought to convince yourself that you wanted anything more out of me than a sentient shackle to keep on my husband. This, when you once so happily crowed about my cleverness and fate as a companion-to-be. How much was in earnest versus mere theatre for me to pass on? Do you even know?

“Caveat emptor. Is that your supposed Lesson here?”

I am a teacher by trade and I would claim such a Lesson if it were mine. But it isn’t. I am merely trying to spare us all the collateral of your pride.

She twisted herself on the bed until she sat straight and crisp in her stolen garb, the pose of a queen on an invisible throne.

Order her on the ground. Have her bay like a jackal on hands and knees, lick the bile from the rug, claw off her own damned face—

What do you think would happen after he found out, O Lord of the Castle? You would have kept to the letter of the agreement, I’m sure. I would not have bled, I would wear no injury. If you were feeling especially needy you might have had me mouth mute words of worship. But after? What of him?

“What of him, witch?”

There wasn’t as much vitriol in the words as he wished. It was too fair a question. One he had only turned over briefly that evening as he resolved to get on with this belated task.

Task. That really is the word for it. Was the word.

In his brisk consideration of the aftermath to the afterglow, he had thought of Jonathan’s face. The revelation there. Not merely of despair and impotent fury, but the far end of acceptance. Acknowledgment of what could be done to his woman—their woman—on an impulse. A single Lesson for his friend on what could and would be done if he thought himself unburdened enough to leave them, to cut his leash and run before the period of agreed respite ran out. Twenty years. That was the most there would be. Enough for the boy to reach his prime without taking a life.

Jonathan, their precious fountain, their boy’s nursemaid. The gag in all their mouths to play at penance while shielding the mountain people from their thirst. A lesser soul would have broken a year after the child’s birth. Broken and run, with or without the babe. Without the wife-thing he had damned himself for. But love held him pinned in delicious Purgatory between life and death, not merely chained, but a willing servant. Willing in so many ways.

Yes, Sir, of course, Sir, if Sir pleases. That professional veil that let him hide in the veneer of mere servitude. A series of duties performed for a client.

Still so shy, his Jonathan.

Less than twenty years left of this charade. And then?

The white down of the hair, the marble throat, spectral blue bruised to violet to red to bed and now there is no leaving, no running, never again, I will watch you drink from the weeping cattle whose names and pity you will have learned after twenty years, oh yes, you will gorge yourself, we will all indulge, and you will feed yourself back and back to now, to here, to youth, to my friend, my Jonathan, my Bri—

It was a winter night when she’d left. When they’d warred. Lightning and ice. He had tried to goad as much as wrestle her. Hanging the lives of thousands of bleating human sheep over her head. A slaughter to paint the continent red in her absence. Had she been human, perhaps this would have worked. But the creature in her place was only Love or Hate. It was this very threat and a thousand other proofs of his monstrosity before it that had locked her into the latter.

Hate. Hate.

It had struck him deeper than the ice that speared him like a great thrashing insect. Boulders of hail had fallen that same night, hammering the edges of his castle into crumbling stone and mortar. He had driven his hand through her chest and twisted out her heart. In retaliation, she had slapped him. The print of her hand went black with frostbite. Eating. Cracking. Shards of his face breaking as his castle broke. So much blood it had taken to mend!

But he had not thought of it then. Only of the blinding black-white of the storms, of how even his winds could not hold her as she cut back and away from him. A ghost in the snow. Gone.

Gone, because she was not his. Not in a way that could be trusted, that could not be broken. Love was a chain and that chain needed strength. He wound that chain around every throat he kissed and fed the ichor of his heart. His, his, his.

Even the wretched thing in her stolen suit would someday bend as the Sisters had; centuries, that had taken, but it had happened. At least enough to smile for him. Even to laugh with him. His Loves, been and gone, like infuriating and cherished cats.

And is it an accident you hunted for a fair girl first? She, with her white-gold waves and spring sky stare? No, old devil. You know better. How hastily you threw yourself at two dark ones after! As if you could hide your own weakness from yourself by overbalancing the collection against that first desperate theft. Then came the surprise in Piccadilly. The one that nearly froze you so long the kukri all but gutted you where you stood gaping.

The surprise of his Jonathan. His hair was dark as earth the night before, but the morning had left it white. His eyes were bright and cold and dead in their living sockets. That same cold had scarred the air around him as he lunged out of his pack of Cross-wavers, he and the blade coming to kill him for the Love and Hate that made up all that he was then.

That he was now.

He is here out of love, she thought at him.

He almost jumped. His mind was walled off, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

There is something like peace under this roof and endless hateful play for you because of him. Because you hold the safety of his family hostage. Because he is himself, and because you are yourself, he is prepared to take a thousand blows to his dignity and well-being. This you know. But you have forgotten the cost that comes with endangering what he loves.

“Hardly. He buried the corpses of that cost, did he not? He is paying his own price ad infinitum.” A fee that had come with the forsaking of the kukri. Such a fine toy. It was still whetted and gleaming in its scabbard for the night it was returned to him, the better to watch him split a few squealing targets open with it. But until then, confiscated. “Or do you mean to imply he shall again come at me with a shovel? Do you truly believe he can do me any harm, by day or night, that I could not immediately shield myself with using your mobile carcass?” At last, an opportunity to leer back at her: “Or little Quincey?” An absurd name on the tongue. The American was a curse even now.

Her face rippled in that hideous shape again. Then settled as she thought a truth she hated to offer almost as much as he hated to hear it:

I do not know. No more than I know whether you are justified or not in thinking you can pounce and turn him before he strikes a blow. The only guarantee is that everyone in this castle, bar Quincey, is damned. For our sins, for our Nature, we are hellbound. The only thing we have left to lose is…

She gestured dully at the room, the castle, the entire imperceptible trappings of a stage. A grimace of almost comical dissatisfaction rested on her.

…this. A penny dreadful satire of the family home. One held together because my son is owed a life that Jonathan and I have forfeited for ourselves. We are all living in a balance that is maintained by the chain on me, by a child’s needs, and by the ability of my husband to cater to all of us by a strength of will you would not find out of a million men. This he does because no one has broken the fragile eggshell of his faith that you can be trusted not to kick a hornet’s nest.

If that eggshell breaks, everything breaks.

The agreement. Truce. Relative peace. Whatever you wish to call this. Whoever is left to survive after, the only certainty is that those parties will be in a state of constant misery and war. A generally unpleasant prospect to most. Unless you were the sort to consider a permanent state of trying to hold back an opposing will from sundown to sunup, unable to budge lest you be mauled or worse, for the rest of eternity, a positive outcome.

A silent sigh gusted from her.

Understand this: If I thought it would spare him, no matter how he protested, I would play concubine as best I could. Being bereft of the ability to lie or to act on anything but my own wants, it would be a feat. But you could rut and pretend you were enjoying yourself all you liked, supposing it meant he would be left out of that particular chore. Except we both know that wouldn’t happen.

There is no contract with us. No consent. And, let us be honest while we can, you have not cared about me since you scurried back to the castle in that blighted old November. I have nothing to barter with to keep you from abusing my husband’s willingness to be a barrier between you and what he loves. By any means.

“I need no reminder,” he hummed. And, unable to help himself, “His means do so sweetly justify the ends.”

Her teeth bared again.

Pig.

His bared back.

“Bitch.”

Imbecile. Or do you have another name for a man who would throw a brick through his own window to prove he can? Neither of us wants to bed the equivalent of a twin. Neither of us wants to risk the discovering what would happen if Jonathan discovers what you attempted to force on me tonight, and each for the same reason—we do not know what comes after. Who lives? Who dies? Who suffers? I truly cannot guess. Can you?

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Scraped his tongue across his fangs.

In his mind’s eye, he wandered through the most probable outcomes:

Here was Jonathan returning to that uncanny rage upon finding his wife was preyed on. Even unharmed, he sees the contract as broken. Fine. He attacks.

His Master uses mother and child as shields. Perhaps he has her hold Jonathan down while the bawling boy is held at the window, ready to be dropped and splattered. A loss of an experiment, if need be. But no need! The woman holds her husband. The Master pries the man’s mouth open and, already pocked with years’ worth of kisses, the ichor turns him quickly. Then what?

Does he keep them all? Can he keep them all? Even the Sisters settled enough that he did not have to be on guard at all waking hours.

A coin toss between mother and child. At least one must go.

If the child, an immediate spur to the parents. An even worse strain. No.

Mother, then. Slain or preserved? Blood was necessary only for health, not existence. It would be an arduous process, but he wagered he could manage sealing her in her box and encasing it in concrete. No route for her mist through that. Let her rot in there a few decades while he wrangled the rest of the family.

But the boy himself would grow and be untethered. His Papa would strain like a rabid beast at every hour. A nuisance.

Fine. Dead mother, dead child. Put Jonathan in the sealed box. Wait. Talk to him through the concrete, the wood, the silk lining. Think at him. Check and check until he was ready to behave. Starved, insane, he would be broken out as a broken thing. Something to sculpt into proper form, into a companion who knew better, who would be a good boy, good Bridegroom.

Unless he really did find some way to end himself despite the grip on him. A Vampire was all want and Jonathan had wanted to die too many times as a human being to banish the notion, even with the undead form’s predilection for self-preservation. If anyone could, Jonathan would find a way.

And there he would be again. Alone.

Assuming other scenarios didn’t overtake these entirely. He had suffered much from results he was too sure of himself to even entertain. Now the potential outcomes included some which ended with him slain or abandoned. He couldn’t say which rankled more to contemplate.

The bed creaked. He looked up to see she was unlocking the door. She was in no especial hurry as one garnet eye regarded him blandly over her shoulder.

Your storm frightened my son, if you care. Jonathan has brought him inside. I will do us both the courtesy of not mentioning this farce to him.

‘This time,’ hung unmentioned between them.

She did already think herself living in Hell. There was little more to do besides count the hours or gamble. And if she truly thought this was a sword to hang over his head?

Well. That wouldn’t do.

His eye fell on a heap of white left behind the folding screen. The discarded dress. He hooked it with his boot, kicking up and catching it in a gnarled ball to toss at her.

“Do another courtesy and dress in a way that does not insult and sicken to behold. And, if you will humor me, bestow some clarification. The heart of the issue is, to you, the assumption of assault, yes?” Her eyes narrowed, but she gave no answer. He beamed at her. “If that is the case, you have my sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding. When I turn myself to acts of affection, I never dream of gifting them without consent. That much you should know from your husband. He is a selfless soul, so willing to accommodate. I shall be sure to make clear all intentions in our future together and to not make any advances without all parties’ allowance.”

He dropped a wink and sent a nettle her way. A hazy phantasm of the three of them, their spectacle condensed upon a single bed. Two bodies willing to trade themselves over the other. Only one being forfeit, lest horror and violence break him at the sight of his wife’s breaking. Him. It would always be him.

‘No, no, take me!’

‘If you insist.’

A loving wall between them. The living shield keeping their teeth away from each other. Their dear, dear Jonathan, knowing his wife would play out the scene expected of all martyr-maidens, trading their one universal coin for their beloveds’ sake. Knowing he would go mad to see her folded under their Master, the mechanics of the display made worse for it being an attempt to protect him. Their Jonathan would weep, would beg, would claw them apart and straddle their Master like a horse just to spare the woman the touch of him.

In contrast, she would be only too happy to wrench said Master’s head off. But she and her will could be held at bay. This he could do while she clung to her husband’s back, weeping precious red tracks as her Love loved another. For her.

A new storm roiled across the woman’s face. Claws ripped into the pale silk. Before she could linger for another mental barb, he willed a gust to rush from a window and down the corridor to suck the door shut on her.

Good riddance.

He pondered the oil bottle still in his hand.

…Not an entirely mediocre play.

It wasn’t dissimilar from what he’d try in her position. Her grasp on the psychic angles of vampirism was also advancing at a pace that put her Sisters’ dabbling with the trance state to shame.

Ah-ah. She is not their Sister, is she? Surely we have established that by now.

His smile soured at the thought. What a waste to lose a harem and gain a relative. He wanted to spit again. Still, he could not grouse too much. She was a small price to pay for the prizes to be gained. He was Master of the lot, however much she might rankle at the notion. It was early nights yet and centuries enough would defang her.

In the meantime, there was the present to deal with. A little punishment for biting the hand and for the purloining of that particular costume. A theft that echoed days long gone. Perhaps he could deliver her a dream during the day, featuring all the many places one would have to dig around the castle to find the pieces of his covetous little brother. Just so she knew where he stood with regard to sticky-fingered siblings. But clothes were not the greater concern, much as he would prefer she think so.

Let her think it only a matter of pride and property. While she thought it, he would have to scour his room and be certain there was no breach of the hidden place where his souvenirs from the Scholomance rested. He hardly feared that the woman would decipher the texts within, let alone be able to limp through even their most basic instructions. But she was clever and ‘kin of his kin.’ She was therefore petty enough to set the ancient parchment ablaze in a fit of retribution.

Yes, it would need checking. Yes, she would need a crack of the whip in some way.

But first.

“Did that amuse you?” he asked of the portrait. “I’m sure it would have were you here. Would it serve your mood to know how many times I have failed to fill the hollow you left behind? You see I am never satisfied. Whereas you were content enough to settle for a village of half-dead bootlickers. It is a better thing to be gratified by only the best rather than to lower oneself to preen over scraps, don’t you think?”

The portrait did not say. Only stared on in that melancholy gleam of blue. So hard to think a creature like her had ever bloodied her hands. Out of love, of course. Always out of love. Such stories she had told under the Mountain, away from the eyes of a God who gave His flock mere trinkets to ward off the thousand monstrous and manmade evils of the world, the caring sins she had beggared her soul for already. Loved ones threatened. Loved ones rescued. Loved ones alternately grateful or aghast, but ultimately saved by her knife, her poison, or the lure of her chilled flesh.

Always there had been a chill to her. Even when her heart was alive.

The thought tugged him to the wall above the titanic bed’s headboard. His fingers traced the loose mortar around one stone. He thrice-checked that his senses were blocked from interlopers before moving it out. Three treasures waited inside.

The closest was a skull. Final resting place for a waste of time. Such a churlish solicitor he had first invited to his home! Had he ever introduced him to Jonathan? He had already thrown out the man’s name and redubbed him Yorick after his Loves and the wolves finished with his carrion. Were there less sentiment attached to it, he might have already gifted the lump of ivory to his dear friend, who so loved the Bard. It would make a fine paperweight as he bent over his myriad books and forms.

But the sentiment was there because she was there. She had seen the opportunity with the idiot wandering so close and had tried to herd him into her tearing hands. Love and Hate. She could not love a stranger, but she could hate that he was marked by the stamp of her Count, proof that he was intended for a task. There would have been no teeth in the man, no kiss. Just a disassembling of anatomy long before the wildlife tore him. With how poorly he’d received his host’s hospitality, perhaps all of them would have been better off if Yorick had never been rescued by the thunderbolt or the Wolf.

“You did tell me so, didn’t you?” Again he turned to the portrait. The skull turned over in his hands. “You told me not to go forward. Do not play Alexander, you said. You will conquer nothing and weep just the same. You knew already how it was back here. How I had not begun a true march upon the world, had not drowned it in its own blood.”

How he had stormed and slaughtered for only as long as the emptiness of the scarred castle could be ignored. This he did longer than any of the squealing countryside preferred. But not long enough. It had seemed only a blink. The frustrated lashing of a butcher mutilating the livestock until their fine cuts were mere pulp under his blades and teeth. And no gladder for the mess. He had stolen the first fair girl away before closing himself back in the high stone walls. A girl like sun on snow, who’d made her family laugh and her village swoon. With her collection the great conquest was brought to a halt.

Yorick’s skull gained a new crack where he gripped it. He tossed it on the bed in favor of the second treasure. Still shut in its jewelry box like a fairy tale’s secret.

Opening the ruby-pocked lid revealed a lump of stained linen. It swaddled the heart he had stolen from her chest. The meat had never rotted. Never attracted the vandals of fly and maggot. Simply sat there in the cloth, a dark red mound of muscle and dried blood. He remembered the hole that had closed up before his eyes as she vanished into the sleet. Had a new heart grown in her breast or had her form shed the anatomy forever? He still wondered. There were times when he thought of pricking it with the tip of a dagger. Vourdalaks were immune to a pierced heart. A cleaved head. One of their few advantages compared to the strigoi. It would feel good to halve the heart, he was sure.

But it went uncut. His thumb dragged over its curves as he convinced himself the pressure was felt all the way in that lightning-struck pit she still hibernated in. Bloodless and cold. Dreaming.

The heart was rewrapped and set in its box before the last treasure was perused. It too was still in its proper place. He caught himself close to a chuckle as he removed it.

How strange that his lifetimes before and after undeath had drawn so many little scholars to him, all with a penchant for bloating a journal with their personal scrawling. His Harkers seemed to have glumly hung up the pastime, refusing to pen anything which their Master would, naturally, have the right to peruse. A shame. There were blank volumes enough to fill another library with their prose if they wished. He had so enjoyed the few excerpts gleaned from their little manuscript that he’d tossed them a bejeweled book apiece to fill. Books that had found their way into the child’s eager hands, doomed to be ruined with crayon.

The book in his own hands had been a gift as well. A volume bound in dense old leather, the pages all thick leaves. Something to last through ages. He peered at the inner cover where her name was gouged. The one she had worn before the Lessons under the Mountain and after their vows were broken. She had given that name away to the worthless peasants of her necropolis to chisel in the marble. Not even another pseudonym, but her own maiden name, as though his title was a gangrenous limb to hack off.

“You do grow maudlin,” he sighed to the pages. The book returned to its place, the box after, the skull last. Back went the stone. Grudgingly, he resigned himself against forbidding entrance to the room. His own chambers were understandably forbidden, but this space would appear senseless to prohibit. Especially when it had been breached already and left unbothered with for nigh half a decade. It might be taken as an arbitrary thing—or worse, evidence to the woman that she had landed a blow with her act—but ultimately she might come sniffing around again. He would have to relocate the mementos soon.

But for now, there was more pressing work.

He found said work waiting for him in the library.

Out of all the cavernous rooms in the castle, it remained the nearest their strange brood had to a shared familial space. When it was allowed. He lingered a moment outside their perception as a shadow at the door.

The boy was tucked between his parents, insisting on reading to them from one of the books of fables and fairy tales. His Papa had brought home a version in every language he could find some while back. Mama had once tried to play go-between, fishing innocuous knowledge from their Master’s head to be secondhand tutor of the land’s many tongues. But it was a childish ploy and he had found them out with the ease of one kicking over a stone to watch the beetles scurry.

Jonathan, for his part, had made a more than admirable leap after his ‘brain fever’ left him in the care of strangers. The language barrier was one he had no intention of tripping over again, and so he had juggled his dead master’s business affairs and his first prodding at the Carpathians’ voices years ago. Now he was sharp enough to not only comprehend his paperwork and the talk of the townspeople without struggling on a given word, but to know exactly what he heard when his Master called:

“Draga mea. What has our little devil learned tonight?”

Jonathan showed no bristling of posture, no gooseflesh. Only the barest flicker of composure pulling its laces tight across the wan face. Even the smile refused to falter. The boy’s eyes flew up from the pages and bounced between fathers. He knew the term too, for it was one reserved only for his Papa.

“Father!” he chirped, holding up the book. It showed a painted girl in red walking through a wood with a smiling Wolf. “I have almost all of it! English and Hungarian and—,”

“Diavol.” His voice like a snap of fingers. The boy winced. His mother shot a look like a knife through his head. Jonathan spared a hand each for their shoulders. The boy’s back was to him now and so his eyes could flare in that grim crystalline way. Frozen lakes framed in whorls of snow. “Did I speak to you or your Papa?”

The child hung his head over the book.

“Please forgive me, Father.”

For I have sinned, the voice in him sing-songed. He swallowed an unbidden laugh.

“He has reason to be excited,” Jonathan’s offered. A soft roll of sound that now weighed almost as much as his Master’s in a room. “He has conquered the English, the Hungarian, half of the French and—,”

“The French?”

“Sweetheart,” Jonathan spoke lightly to the top of the boy’s head. “Show him.”

Sheepish but eager, the child brandished his new victory. Genuine surprise tumbled through his Father as he recognized the woodcut illustration. A view that stunned as much as tickled.

“So many of the best ones began in French writing,” the boy declared. “Charles Perrault wrote this one, Bluebeard,” he enunciated carefully, “Barbe bleue, forever and ever ago. It’s so scary! Like Mama’s ghost stories and your histories, Father. See?”

“I see,” he told the boy. And he did. The illustrator had done a fine job depicting the grisly chamber and its bounty of prying wives’ heads. “It is a good story to learn and a better one to take to heart.”

Like Pandora’s Box.

Another surprise, hearing her tone chime through the mindscape. The surprise withered upon seeing the honed edge of her gaze. A warning that did not quite slip into the mental currents shared in the room:

Who here is Pandora? Who must mind the loose lid over the box of miseries?

Jonathan looked at her with only a mildly concerned curiosity.

Her word was kept. For now.

Fine, fine.

“Exactly so,” he said aloud. “And what is the Lesson in these tales, child? Do tell.”

The boy straightened where he sat, beaming, “Trick question! I know there is more than one. The first is that when you are told not to open a thing, it is for good reason. The second is that the terrible things inside are put there by a villain, who really does want the door or the box to be opened so that they can have something awful happen after. Third is that what’s scary does not last forever. Hope is in the box and heroes slay the villain in the end. And,” he wrinkled his nose at the book, somewhere between humor and annoyance, “it seems like people who made old stories really wanted girls to think they would only have an awful time to look forward to once they marry.”

“It can happen that way, Sweetheart,” from Jonathan, before Master or wife could jump to comment. There was no erasing the somber angles of his look for the boy this time. Even the smile he mustered was a solemn curve. “Not everyone is as fortunate in love as us. Sometimes people find themselves with spouses they do not love or who do not love them. It is…uncommon to enter something so terrible as these storybook marriages. Most spouses are not monsters. But some are callous, some are dull, and some only wed at all because they see it as a chore.”

“A chore?” Another wrinkle of the nose. “Like putting playtime away?” Jonathan nodded, the smile an increment lighter.

“Or doing Father’s papers or minding the horses. Something like that, yes.” The boy sat up scandalized at this. He looked from his Papa to his Mama and Father as if hoping for one of them to tell him this was a joke. The scandal deepened as he saw, for one of the few times in his small life, that Mama and Father’s expressions were an utter match. Both on their faces and in their minds.

Still, he tried, “That can’t be true, can it?”

It is, from her.

“It is,” from him.

Each answer flat as a coin. Again, he had to tamp down bitter laughter.

The boy’s mouth dropped open on a glimpse of pearly needle teeth. A fever dream’s vision of a cherub being told by Cupid himself that all the arrows had been burned and they weren’t to make any more.

“That’s horrible! You mean there are families who just pick a mama and a papa and a father and just—just—,” A thunderhead came and went on the little brow. “Just sit there? Not caring about each other?”

“Child,” his Father hummed as he finally idled from the entryway, “you seem more distraught at this than the dead brides.”

“Because it’s different! Barbe bleue, he’s just a monster in a book! And even if—,” ah, how sickish he turned, “—if there are real villains like him in the world, they are rare! But you speak as if the whole rest of the world is out there,” he waved a frantic hand as if to encompass everything beyond the castle, “making families of each other and not enjoying it. Not loving each other at all.”

“Not the entire world,” Jonathan began. Before he could go on, his Master finished for him:

“But not a small portion either. Love does exist, but it is a precious thing like gold or blood. Many wish to have it for their own, but not everyone may claim it as theirs, let alone find it. Sometimes not even those who have died for it.”

He stood before the three of them on the couch now. His dear Harkers. Fire from the woman, wonder from the boy, a wary stillness from Jonathan. All braced, all listening for the lecture’s Lesson. He knelt until his eye was level with the child’s. The child sat forward, his mind at full attention while the spades of his ears pricked like a pup’s. He really was a good boy.

“Your Papa is right. Not everyone is as fortunate in love as us. There are unhappy homes where mothers and fathers battle with each other and do worse to their children. There are homes where bones are broken, where there are tears every night and day, where there is only toil and hate and, yes, even death. For you are right too. There are villains in the world who slay the ones they should love, out of madness or for sport.”

He watched the boy’s eyes first widen and then well. Bright red beads balanced on the edge of spilling. If they ran, he would go to bed with hunger and then grouse all the more as he waited for their feeding night. So he laid the wide white spider of his own hand upon the child’s other shoulder. Jonathan gripped his side tighter. The woman grasped the boy’s small fingers.

“But this home is safe from that. We would none of us have come together were it not for love. Your Papa, your Mama, myself, we are all creatures of singular will. We do not do what we do not wish to do, and so we would not be here if we did not desire it, if there was no love in these walls. You are the proof. We made you together.”

The boy sniffled. His scarlet tears did not roll, but settled back with a blink.

“Like Pandora? She was made out of lots of pieces from lots of gods.”

“That she was. And like Pandora,” his hand drifted from the boy’s shoulder to drum his fingers on the book, “you have gone and opened something which brought you to tears. But there is Hope yet. You shall not lack for your own Loves when the time comes, diavol. For now, know that you need not weep for others and their clumsy pairing. Your heart will bleed forever once you start. And if that should happen? Why, your poor Papa will never have blood enough to satisfy you again.”

The boy’s expression squirmed for a moment, uncertain.

“…Really?”

Jonathan bowed over him, smiling, “Your Father jests. I will always have enough for you.” In his shift, more of the mottled throat was laid bare while his hair hung in a silver-white curtain. Through it peeked those strange sapphire eyes; melting ice set in soot lashes and a cadaver’s sockets. The mollifying mien of a living corpse.

An image passed behind his eyes of that pale smile daubed with blood.

The oil bottle dug against him in its trouser pocket.

“But not tonight,” he intoned. His palm moved from the book of fairy tales and up to the hand Jonathan still had on his son. The man barely tensed as he was pulled up alongside his Master. “Feeding is not for another dusk and your Papa has work waiting. Your Mama shall hear out the rest of your progress.” He flicked a glance her way. “Perhaps she could introduce you to one of Papa’s own favorites. I believe it was, One Thousand and One Nights.”

This time he could not stave off at least half a chuckle as his Harkers all seemed to jolt as one. Loathing here, curiosity there, and, laughably, a prickle of incensed decorum from Jonathan himself. There was even a flush in his pallid cheek.

“Would that not be best to reserve until he’s older?”

“My friend, he is reading of murder already. What harm could your little adventures do?”

“Sir—,”

“What’s it about? What happens in the Nights?” from the boy. His gaze now bounced eagerly among his herd of parents. There were few things his Papa would deny him and so to hear of something even he would try to hold out of his son’s reach was more tantalizing than any forbidden chamber or pretty dowry box. “Papa, I’m old enough, you can tell me!”

I can tell you, came the woman’s rescue. The parts you are old enough to hear.

“But Father said!” If Father said, the family Did. That was one of the rules. A good Lesson to hold above all others. But Jonathan’s eyes pleaded with both the promise of bribery for mercy and, again, that absurd flame of parental dismay. Very well.

“Father said perhaps,” he corrected. “And I said introduce. You do grow fast, child, but not fast enough. There are secrets meant for men and women that you must wait to learn before you can access all there is to consume. Until then, you can see what you can wheedle from your mother on the matter. But first, give Papa your good-day.”

Another shocked descent for the boy, another raising of hackles for his Mama.

“Papa’s working all night?”

“Ah-ah, not all night. You took him up for half of it, did you not?”

The boy shrank guiltily against his pillow, mumbling, “Maybe…”

A third, from the woman. At most.

Her eyes and scars seemed to blaze as he knew his own to do. Now it truly was an effort not to think of her as kin and shudder for it. The air in the room seemed abruptly charged as her line of sight refused to drop from his.

You could make her. Walk her off to the bookcases, even. See if she cannot accidentally smash her fingers under a leaden tome. Maybe—

Jonathan’s hand gripped his. Cold against colder. Then he was on his knee, cupping the child’s face.

“It is my fault, Sweetheart. I should have kept better track of the time. There is something that needs working out tonight, very important for your Father’s own affairs.” Another smile for the boy. Spring come to thaw. “Now please, can I have your good-day? I should not like to head to bed without it.”

And just like that, the boy was up and folded in his free arm, squeezing back like he could pin the man there to stay and read of Scheherazade and her Sultan until the sun rose. But his Father was watching and so he consoled himself with the embrace and the good-days and their bloodless kisses to each other’s cheek.

“Mama’s turn!”

Jonathan scarcely had time to repeat him, nodding—“Mama’s turn,”—before the woman had snatched him to her. Not a common display, this. At most they knew their Master would suffer only some saccharine peck and a pining stare in his presence. Let the woman rut while he at least had some distance and a turned back. Now she seemed on the edge of eating him. Not that Jonathan appeared to mind.

His eyes were shut far more lightly than his Master’s had been not an hour ago. A gesture of bliss rather than nausea. Because his eyes were closed, he did not see his wife’s eye crack open and shoot a line of mingled hate and joy into her Master’s skull. Over Jonathan’s psyche and masked from the boy’s questing mind, he dragged a mental dagger and spill of salt over hers.

This he punctuated with a very clear, Curvă.

She winced under the twist of the spectral blade in her brain, but did not let her nails become claws in Jonathan’s cheek. Her eye narrowed. Another blade was sent back to him.

There was even a dimpled hint of a smile as she enunciated, oh so lightly, Încornorat.

Jonathan bit back a yelp as he was hauled to the door with barely time enough to call back a, “Good-day, Darling.”

He no longer had his hand in his Master’s, for his Master held him by the wrist. So it remained until three long halls were between them and the library. Then another hall after that. Stairs. Hall. Stairs. Towards the tower.

Where all dragons keep their maidens.

The thought’s attempted humor died before it even drew breath. Kin of his goddamned kin, indeed. He could hear his little brother cackling up at him from Hell. Who did the contemptible sow think she was to dare? To even conceive of vomiting such a label at his feet? She, the one with the wedding band!

Yes, the same plain ring as his. While you, barehanded, claim to own them both. You are Master, you are Groom. And yet…

Jonathan sucked a breath over his teeth.

Their pace halted in the moonlight of a window-loaded wall. A glance at the trapped wrist showed it was connected to a hand going blue as the mortal bones grinded and creaked. The white hand curled open to reveal a hint of the bruise to come. Jonathan kneaded the spot without recoiling from his Master’s side.

The man’s smile had fallen away like a veil. Here was only his face as it was. The sweet-bitter mark of surrender that was the mournful turn of the lips, the frozen dew under the hoods of his lashes. Tired but waiting for the next scene. Wisely keeping the obvious question tucked in his throat: What’s wrong?

Instead his Master heard, “I received correspondence from Vidor today. He says the delay is due to losing one of the horses. They had to comb two villages for a replacement, but he thinks they can make it by mid-July.”

So casual, so ironed out into the cadence of Agent and Client. Anything else, Sir? Anything we might discuss in arid tones before the inevitable, Sir?

There was such talk available, if his Master felt like bothering with it. Stony talk of setting stone. A long-belated repair of the old damage to the castle’s crumbled edges. He knew there were also pamphlets and science journals waiting tidily on the ebon desk with the usual bureaucratic flotsam. Dreary things about the advancements of pipes and electric wires that would be an arduous and superfluous hell to weave into the grand old stonework. Especially when, in fifteen years’ time, there would be no humans left to want them under Castle Dracula’s roof.

Still, it was a good sign, these tries at what the English called ‘homemaking.’ Renovating his cage kept him busy between bleeding and writing. More, it gave an excuse to be allowed out of the tower. The same tower where his life might have gone on even to this night, with only the hungry visits of wife and child to prove they still existed.

His Master had daydreamed about it more than once. How it would be the dance of that distant summer intensified and expanded when Jonathan Harker found he was locked permanently in. There would not be so much as the meager freedom of the office, where he could scratch and type and imagine he was far away in his snug English firm. No, in his dreams, he’d left Jonathan only the tower and the bedchamber at its top. Only what food his Master brought, what clothes his Master offered, what sundry supple tasks his Master put to him in that narrow box in which the spoils of war lived and bowed. Unable to dare so much as the thought of escape, even with a will that was all his own.

But no, no. Better to leave that sword hanging. A punishment threatened did more work than the punishment itself. Really, for all the savory misery it might wring from him, all the placations that might be offered for release, it would hardly satisfy in the long term. Not unless he wanted a repeat of his missteps with his prior Loves, turned idle and useless but for proving the castle was not his dwelling alone.

All this musing passed within a heartbeat he did not have. In the present, he crossed his arms.

“A lost horse, he says. And how did they lose it?”

A calculating flicker of the blue. Careful, careful.

“A broken leg, Sir. It had to be put down.”

“A broken leg. On what mountains? In what ditch between here and the mason?”

“He didn’t say.” No quaver in the voice. No dropping of his gaze. But there was a hairline crack in what should have been the calm of one delivering dull news. Small, but there. Then, the fatal line: “Why does it matter?”

Ah, my friend. Sometimes I do wonder if you enjoy dangling raw meat before my nose.

“It matters because you are hiding something.” His hand landed light and immovable on the man’s shoulder.

“I’m not lying, Sir.” Yes, that much his Master could tell. Except.

“We both know there are worlds of difference between speaking the truth and choosing not to lie. Even the boy knows that.” The hand did not tighten, but claws now scraped against the shoulder. “So. What was it that Vidor blamed for his poor lost horse?” Jonathan opened his mouth. What could have been a word was cut off as he was suddenly wrenched around and marched toward the office. “No, let us not exhaust you with recital. Surely you still have the letter. I shall see it myself.”

“Sir—,”

But they were already at the door and the door had already opened on a handy gust. The same breeze tugged the heavy wood shut and, in passing out a different crack in the office’s window, skirted between the man’s legs. Jonathan hardly had time enough to flinch before he was thrust in the tufted chair that stood facing the desk. His Master was already thumbing cheerily through the immaculate filing; here was another reason to neglect his little fantasy of the tower. Mr. Harker really was an artful organizer. Never a paper out of place. Even the ones he wished he might get away with tossing on the fire.

But such liberties were only for his client to enjoy.

Case in point, here was Vidor’s letter, folded back into its envelope, neatly slotted in the Pending drawer. He kept his attention halved evenly between the note and his wincing friend in the chair. My, but the latter’s intuition had honed well with the years.

“He writes to me and says wolves attacked and ruined the stallion’s leg. Wolves cause him to be late.” He refolded the letter until its edges could slit a lying courier’s throat. “Wolves. Along the route I mapped for him.” His eyes leveled at Jonathan’s head like twin pistols. “You would hide this from me?”

“No, Sir. Only—,”

“Only what? You wish to see me deceived? To see these vermin get away with wasting my time as they drink and chase the slatterns along the road? By all means, explain.”

“I thought only that he must have made an error. That what he thought were wolves were merely dogs. There are few small breeds here and some are bred to outweigh their lupine cousins. More to the point, I do not see the why of purposefully delaying your delivery, even for a drink or a dalliance. Vidor and his men know they’ll not wring more money from you in losing time. The trek to and from all the destinations involved takes up days and energy all of them would rather spend at his home or some attractive holiday.” The closing statement: “He is not a liar, Sir, only mistaken.”

‘Please do not kill them.’ If only you had a violin to play as you grovel.

Out loud he sighed and shook his head.

“Do you never grow tired of covering for the ineptitude of others?”

It wasn’t an unfair question. Jonathan and his woman had been the key to dredging up the exact methods by which his Master’s web around England was forming and been instrumental in tearing them away. The Dutchman had led the lordling, the doctor, and the American along in slaying his poor Lucy, his fetching first claim planted upon the land. But the pack of them would have been running in circles without his dear Harkers. Too quick, too canny, and all the while shouldering the brunt of the effort in the hunt. There was some chiding of kismet in that, he knew.

He recalled that nascent night’s exact words.

You dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.

Words from an unsuspecting old thing who’d had to run for his unlife for the first time in ages as Jonathan Harker slithered out the window of the Piccadilly house, steel thirsty and flashing. Coming to slay him. To pierce his heart and sever his head in the middle of a screaming street. Prepared for a cell or his own death as the chattel shrilled, not knowing there would be only dust where a carcass should fall. Yes, yes. He would have. He could have.

Once.

But Fate ensured he reserved that knife for his friends, who had sinned even worse against his woman. If Jonathan marked his Master as a thief, then the stalwart dogs who had dared to turn on the sole bitch in their midst were worse for daring her destruction. Such was the price of not recognizing a Jackal while busy hunting a Wolf. In fact…

“You say Vidor is mistaken? That he lost his horse not to wolves, but other beasts? If this is so, I would not wager it was a dog that did the work, but a jackal.” He folded his hands and smiled. “You wish him to be spared the punishment of a liar. Why not assure that the reality matches his words? It need not be done with the kukri. In fact, it need not be you at all. Dear Mina, she so regrets depleting you. Perhaps she would appreciate the sport of her own hunt.”

Jonathan did not blink. The fear remained in its careful place, the fatigue alongside it. But there, lurking just under the membrane of the willing prey, was something else. Cold and sharp.

“Even if such were not against our arrangement, Sir, there would be a dilemma.” There was no tremble as he said it.

“Oh dear. What dilemma is that?”

“The waste. Leaving aside the concern of relatives and friends raising an alarm about a group of missing workers, it will be counted as another strike against this place’s stability.”

It was an effort not to clap. Good boy, Jonathan. Follow the trail.

“Stability?” he pressed, doing what he could to drip with pompous ignorance. Jonathan did not crack.

“Yes,” he told his Master. “The stability of this place’s image as the home of a respected Count and not a guaranteed death trap. The people of the Carpathians live in the center of your influence. They understand what it is to risk angering you. But you know firsthand that this place exists inside a shrinking circle. More information flies faster, more straight lines are drawn that whittle the world down into maps that mark every dark corner down to its smallest inch. Which means that if Castle Dracula, to say nothing of its Master or those he controls, gain a reputation for erasing visitors in bloody fashion, people will just stop coming here.

“Unless those people are in uniform and hail from tiers of governance above the one you choose to wear rather than frighten the human gentry with the reality of you. I know I say nothing you do not know. You have not kept these mountains under your thumb by being careless. That you would suggest the idea of Mina or I casually murdering innocent strangers as either their punishment for tardiness or to simply tug our respective chains to have us do a trick you already know we are capable of suggests only two things to my mind.

“The first, that you have more important issues on your mind than the delivery of a commissioned pile of rocks. The latter is an easier annoyance to deal with than the former, so you have laid it on the chopping block first.”

The white hands remained folded, but their claws grew again. His fangs ached. What blood he had left in his veins was all very busy rushing to a single extremity.

“How very astute, my friend. And the second thing?”

“The second thing,” Jonathan said with a precise note of exhaustion thrown like a comforter over his riskier patter, “is that you don’t know how difficult it is to convince anyone other than novice solicitors or loyal caravans to march up the mountains, even with what you’re paying. Modern men don’t need to be superstitious when they’re already skittish about known threats. Like the wildlife. Or the cliffs so high you cannot see the foot of them.”

“Or murderers?” The word was a purr and a knife. In answer, a whisper:

“Or us. Yes.” With this boulder pushed up the proverbial hill, Jonathan folded his own hands and stared back at his Master. Not to see whether the boulder would roll back down to crush him, but how best to lay in its path and cause the least amount of damage to those behind him. To that end, “I do not seek to belittle what you truly deem important, Sir. But Vidor and his troubles seem too small a thing to earn your genuine ire. If something more is wrong, I should like to help.” His eyes gleamed. His Master wondered if they might draw moths. “What can I do for you, Sir?”

The same pitch. The exact same. One echoed from back and back to—

‘Balaurul meu, you cherish your wrath more than your joy. You rage over having nothing to rage at. You rave only for the sake of baring teeth, tearing after whatever happens to be nearest. It is no good for you. You should devour only what is worth consuming. Tell me what that is, if you can name it.’

The chill of her hand on his. Her eyes deep and killing as the sudden crack of ice over a lake. Drowning him.

‘What is it you want to eat?’

He looked to Jonathan. The look tried to be a glare. A threat. A promise.

Jonathan’s look—

The lake, the freezing, pulling lake, drowning again—

—did not falter. An invitation to anything. To be and endure whatever his Master demanded.

The office had seen plenty of use before. A fine backdrop for the cliché of the mishandled secretary tucked under the desk on hands and knees or, the better to see him, said secretary bent and spread across the ebony. Other rooms had their turns, of course. Many others. Sometimes his own chambers, the ban lifted for such special occasions. But most often it happened in the tower.

Somehow he felt it would not be enough tonight. Even if he took his friend on a tour of the entire castle, every room and turret, even into the obsidian walls of his own coffin, it would not be enough, yet he could not place the why of it. There was the woman’s provocation to consider. Then the abrupt haunting from the ghosts his traitor mind had conjured to harangue him. The undead could not produce their own ghosts, he knew. Not counting those of the imagination.

That much would explain the leering vision of his brother.

Not so for her.

A wife whose unhallowed chamber was all her own while the dead brides in her wake were left to wander elsewhere. Bluebeard would balk. But Bluebeard had never had his Countess.

Perhaps the imagined whisper of her was right.

Perhaps he was only angry for want of something to pounce upon and feed his wrath. Something to overtake, to conquer, to crack a relieving fissure into the ever-denser callus growing over him and his unlife. Such restraint he lived under for the sake of a charade! For all that his subjects mewled over their lot, there was not a single devil in Hell who did not know how he now chafed under his friend’s ‘contract.’

So many ages he had spent withering himself, finding less and less point in the ownership of his genius loci and its shivering cattle, less and less point to the study and toil and terror of his manifestation. A Limbo broken only by his desperate planning for the taking of England, the modern Rome with its gluttonous hands sunk deep into the refined world and its culling colonies. It had been something to wake and drink and think for. A purpose to the infinity he had bought so eagerly only to grow listless with it like a cagey child bored of his gift.

Then had come his Harkers.

Jonathan, his blessed, blighted, bloodstained Jonathan, had come to show his belly and his throat to ransom his loved ones to his enemy’s mercy. A bargain made for the sake of the stolen woman who could not go from him, the raw newborn that she was. A newborn with a newborn; their impossible babe.

Oh, how fast it could have ended then.

How quickly he might have torn the Madonna and Child to ribbons—Better! Have her tear the latter apart in her arms first! Let his friend watch!—and fallen on the sweet screaming fool who had cast aside his blade. His friend might have been baptized against the red pool that had been the bride and brat he damned himself for with the slaying of innocent men. Then dragged down and away into his Master’s tomb to await the beginning of their new eternity together.

But he had done the wise thing instead. He had accepted the terms, had let them into the space once filled by his slain Loves. This he did not regret. Nor would he ever, for the sake of his mind. Oh, O, his mind! Damn them for a hundred little scratches as he bit into their throats, but the Harkers had saved and salved that much. Every night was freshly riddled with the promise of performance and pained fealty, of the warring of wills, of the crushing fist, of the rapid wheeling mental clockwork that he once chased so feebly while he rotted among his harpy Loves.

True, true. Except you have now grown too content in this little circuit you now walk. Walk, not run. Fed, not slaked. You became the nightmare of these mountains for a reason. The women had their helpings from the children’s sweetmeat veins. But you? You were the hungry shadow to watch for in the forest. In the roads. In the secret dark of the mountains. You were a horror who could be avoided when full, but brought death down on the unwary of any age when it came time to feed. Now here you sit. A pampered boyar like the rest, waiting on your helpings of flesh and succor while a Child is somewhere being tutored and a Woman makes a nuisance of herself and the only one carrying the whole thing is a Vassal playing duped and dutiful Atlas.

So much power. So much of him awake and thrumming. So much left caged.

A Wolf turned to a Dog.

Back in the office, time had passed only by another heartbeat. Plus the cracking of an armrest in the talon of his hand.

Jonathan did not react to the flying splinters, but did slowly, carefully, crane his head enough to steal a glimpse of the window. To his Master’s surprise, a twinkle of hope fell across his face. If not hope, enterprise. He faced the glowering shape of his Master behind the desk.

“The moon is full tonight.”

“What of it?” Each word a thorn. But this seemed only to draw Jonathan up another inch.

“How many hours are left until sunrise?”

“My friend, I am stung.” When he grinned it showed his teeth to the gums. “You wish to be rid of me so soon?”

“That is half my thought, Sir.” Jonathan leaned forward, gripping his hands so they couldn’t quake. “The other half being that you might benefit from a hunt.”

Tonight was a parade of surprises. Shock ruled his face while an agonizing ache struck him at the chest and groin.

“A hunt,” he parroted, already scenting the condition of the thing.

“Yes,” Jonathan nodded. “Though I am hardly a winning stag, I have not forgotten what it is to run from the demons of this place. Nor have I forgotten that my escape was built on luck rather than Providence.”

“My Loves were long since spoiled by then. Ravenous, yes, but comfort so often won out over craving. If it were not so, I should have returned to find half the Carpathians drained in their greed. Even here, our own home, they tried so many times to pin you rather than exert the effort of a chase. They could have pounced while you rested on the couch or at the window, but no. The trance came first. Lazy, lazy.” He clicked his tongue against a fang. “That in mind, I fear you would make a poor quarry. You escaped through lax claws and slow jaws, my friend. I would have you within the minute.”

Within this one, perhaps.

Jonathan risked a small shrug and looked again at the risen moon. Past midnight now.

“Perhaps.” A hard swallow. Then: “Or perhaps you are too used to easy meals to bother. I understand, of course, if you worry you cannot outpace me—,”

The chair slammed into the rug as Jonathan slammed into the tufting. A hand like a noose was locked around his throat. He neither gasped nor gagged. Only waited for his Master’s decision. His eyes drowning, freezing.

The oil bottle weighed more than a mountain now.

‘What is it you wish to eat?’

“You will have five minutes, stag.”

Out the window, down castle and cliffside, into the fringe of the forest. He willed the film of sparse clouds away to further free up the moon.

No lantern. No compass. There had been no pause to change shoes. Jonathan didn’t even wait to be asked before unlinking his pocket watch and passing it into his Master’s hand. This he did placidly enough. But his eyes gave him away, so wide and lambent in the gloom.

A wariness radiated from him now. The belated fear of one who has only just realized a foolish wager was made. It was not a fear of death—that particular aroma had lasted only so long even in their first faraway summer—but that unmapped dread of consequence which can make fatality seem a reprieve. His Master was happy not to relieve him of it.

“Five minutes, Sir?”

“Four and three quarters now.”

The last word had barely hit the air before Jonathan Harker dashed into the dark. A healthy pace for a trim young man. Remarkable, his Master knew, for one so routinely exsanguinated. It was almost precious to watch how his speed changed once the shadows grew dense under the canopy. As if the poor stag truly thought such a thing could mask his trick. But the hunter’s eyes were far keener than his prey’s and so he could tell at once when the healthy pace broke into the expected gait. From a mere quick jog to a fired arrow.

He had puzzled over the timeline of his friend’s escape from the castle more than once. Even among the plainer signs of that surreal metamorphosis, this aberration deserved attention. Such speed in a body that he himself drained the night before! Athletes of every era would have blanched at the idea of cutting across the Carpathians in their prime, let alone in the solicitor’s state. And that would come only after descending the towering face of castle and cliff without so much as a rope. Yet down and away his friend had flown. A powerful proof of the extraordinary.

One that went on to seem miniscule beside the scene of the men returning his soil.

The matter should have been equal parts tedious and amusing.

It had been the same men who had dug and boxed the earth in the first place, just as content to take his money and goodwill to reverse the process once the movers in England saw to collecting and shipping the crates. The Eucharists’ polluting presence had been ordered removed upon request. Jonathan himself had invented a delightful excuse that had been a joy to read:

‘In addition to a personal tragedy cutting short his intended transferal to London, my client has had the misfortune to discover an English variant of his homeland’s superstitious parties in the form of a band of modern-day zealots. They are apparently of a sort who regard Matthew Hopkins as an idol. While my client has not suffered overmuch from what he believes were failed attempts on his life by these individuals, they have taken pains to track the cargo that was delivered from a rich deposit of Transylvanian soil.

‘Irony seems to haunt my client, for his unwell hunting party seemed to regard this collection of scientific fodder as bewitched graveyard earth and so heaped—and, I may add, shamefully wasted—a loaf’s worth of the holy Eucharist onto the loam. My client requests that the movers sent to reseal and ship the abandoned crates do him the courtesy of removing the Wafers from his samples to the best of their ability. If the Wafers have attracted pests in the meantime or if any granules have scattered in the topsoil, feel free to clear these out as well. He sends his gratitude in advance.’

Words and money enough to reverse the shipment had brought the earth back home. A bitter victory for both sides, admittedly. Here was proof that Count Dracula had officially taken his bootheel off of England’s throat for the moment. But here too was the return of those men who had not only moved the earth to begin with, but had rushed their boyar out of reach. With their speed and aid, the woman was lost. The kukri had drunk. And all of this had come in the wake of their seeing the poor Englishman bleating and pleading in the window.

A sight that had rightly spurred them to laughter.

They had laughed again as they returned with the wagons, knowing what Jonathan was to their boyar now. Jonathan had already begun gleaning the language and so knew what commentary they had to share as he oversaw the arrival of the boxes and their unburdening. His Master had hidden to oversee him in turn. To watch his face and inhale the despair. Alas, there was too much dead in him for their jeering to stir much of anything in the way of insult. Jonathan Harker seemed a soul built for subservience and the polite receival of abuse. Even the caravan’s head, resplendent Old Danil, had frowned at his men the way a father scowls at his boys for kicking at a lame dog.

But that was the issue, wasn’t it? Seeing only a dog. A leashed dog, collared until he choked, crippled and toothless. Go on, laugh. They are safe.

Really, they had wasted much of their breath and time on laughter. Their boyar’s own grin had faded with the ticking of the watch as they lazed and drank and nudged the boxes only as breaks between the taunting chatter Jonathan appeared so deaf to.

Until they spoke of his wife.

The woman had not been present, needing to cradle her infant in the chapel to quiet his fit. But her Master had spoken of her in the correspondence with Old Danil. It was to be expected that she would leak into the men’s talk. Her scars, her silence, her beauty, how she had been ‘taken in bed’ as her husband slept through it all, how perhaps her Master would be good enough to have her share her hospitality with them, ha ha.

Jonathan’s stillness had changed. The late spring warmth had curdled around him as his head turned to those who spoke. They were clustered at the end of their wagon, two thirds of the boxes still stacked behind them. Jonathan had stared. The laughter had dwindled. Bluster had simmered in their tongue.

‘What, dog? Don’t like us talking about your bitch?’

Jonathan had not answered.

Jonathan, his Master knew, was silent as a flurry when there was a task at hand. Swift as a hailstone too. Between one blink and the next, the men had been hurled aside like flour sacks and Jonathan was on the wagon. A blink after this saw the men shouting and scattering as the earth-boxes were hurled off one after the other. The same boxes it had taken up to three men apiece to hoist. More shouts, more scurrying as the next wagon was emptied. Again, again.

Jonathan had turned to Old Danil, unmoved from his chosen post at the courtyard gate. A single iron brow had managed to rise over the whole scene. Jonathan had held up the purse full of pay his Master had given him for services rendered. His back was to one of those who had spoken of touching his wife. The man had his knife was out. The man took a step forward.

The purse of gold had flown back and cracked that man’s teeth. Then Jonathan himself fell on him as the man’s curse turned to a shrill. Other knives and pistols were scrambled for.

At the height of this, thunder had cracked in the clear night sky.

The Master of the castle emerged.

The men had jumped. Old Danil had craned his head. The man under Jonathan changed to a tone that ordered as much as begged through his bloodied mouth.

‘Get it off! Off off get it off me my hands please my hands damn you cowards get it OFF—!’

Jonathan had remained set upon his task. His Master could hear the crunch of it trapped in his fists.

‘Jonathan. Up.’

Jonathan had gotten to his feet, but without releasing the squealing man’s hands. It was a fascinating thing to observe now that he was not the one on the receiving end of…ah, but he still did not have a name for it. The enigma of Jonathan Harker, a man with a monster lurking in the chambers of his heart. A poet might call him a creature of Eros. Damned, empowered, and possessed by the weight of Love. But his Master was no poet and so admitted he had only his own title for the thing.

Jonathan, his Jackal. Obedient in all things—anything—but for the border of his Love.

When his eyes lifted, they had burned cold.

‘You heard,’ he’d grated in the men’s own tongue. ‘You heard.’

‘I did.’ Calm. Even. Easy, easy. Good boy.

Oh, the delicious balance of that moment. Did he dare shred the contract just to see if his friend would go mad at the rescinding of his one and only caveat while strangers lined up to have their turns in his wife’s coffin?

He had paused long enough to make dear Jonathan wonder. Just long enough to see his face harden to a full rictus. The unlucky fool in his friend’s hands let out a fresh shriek as something new broke and other bones crackled. Around them, the men had stood paralyzed in uncertainty, weapons half-drawn. Old Danil had checked his watch.

‘Let him go, Jonathan. Wait for me inside.’ He’d had to fling his will out at him. Hard. ‘Now. I shall see to the rest.’ Jonathan had released the man as if invisible fingers were fighting to pry up his own. Which was not too far from the truth. The man had scrambled away on knees and elbows, his head permanently turned to keep an eye on Jonathan—only to freeze again as his boyar clapped a white hand onto his shoulder. The courtyard had sucked in a collective breath. Every grip turned limp as jelly on their scabbards and holsters.

Jonathan had gone in.

His Master had chuckled, walking the broken-handed man to his wagon. To the blood-dewed pouch of gold abandoned on the ground.

‘You are to be envied, my friend. He left you with only a warning.’

‘Envied! Look at my hands!’

‘I see them. And you are lucky to have them still attached. As well as your head. He was being polite, you see.’ The hand on the man had tightened until the print of it bruised. ‘The last men to talk of laying hands on her did not get to live long enough to regret it. I do not know for certain what he did with the bodies, but I think they are buried. Wolves and jackals do so love to save their bones.’ Tighter. More than sweat had run on the man’s face. ‘He is such a loyal creature now. I have made him so. I have made him much more. And, like his Master, he does not take kindly to jokes made of touching what is his. What is ours. But perhaps he merely misunderstood, yes? Perhaps you and your brothers spoke of trying to bed another boyar’s property? Surely this is so. If it were otherwise…’

He had let his teeth show in full.

And the men had risen up in an assuring chorus that sang yes, yes, of course, they spoke of another castle’s woman, not his, never his. And the broken-handed man had scooped up the fallen gold with mangled fingers. And Old Danil, moved at last from his sedate constant enough to imitate curiosity, had approached him as the men fled back onto their wagons.

‘The Englishman. What is he really?’

‘Mine.’

Which was what mattered in the end.

Mostly.

He could possess so much without effort. Take where and what he liked. But that his friend, his Jonathan, was so alien a thing among the mortal flock made both the victory of his surrender and the temporary loss of England all the sweeter. For he had not run merely from the clamoring of the Dutchman and his pups or the waving of the Cross. Whatever Jonathan was in body and soul was as rare as…as…

Remember the sight of her in her loving throes? Before she was vourdalak, before you had ever whispered of the Mountain together, you had watched her at work. A favored serving girl left bloody after a visit from a soldier taking his due. An invitation to a dark room, unrecognized in her stolen serf’s guise. And then! Then! The art of it! The speed, the hush, the fruit of the harvested Adam’s apple! With this you saw her color her lips for the first time. And you had crept from your hiding place, offering to aid her in disposing of the corpse with the same tone as a courting youth offering his lady a rose.

Rare as a white stag, perhaps.

The initial defeat would have burned a thousand times more had it been the work of a lesser creature. The consolation—the whole concept of the contract—would have been cackled at before he gutted the wretched couple with his own hand. But his Harkers were worthy, curse and bless them for it. And Jonathan, his prize, his spoils, his quarry darting through the night for his pleasure, felt more worth the delay of conquest with each passing night.

He checked the watch.

The five minutes were gone.

In a blur, so was he.

It was easy enough work catching up. His poor friend had not thought to disguise his route by darting in new directions or taking pauses to steady his drumming heart. Every breath was a harsh pant. But for all this, he did not make the capture itself simple.

New bursts of speed came whenever he felt his Master’s presence press close. Each was a helpful lunge that would have left an ordinary predator snapping his jaws shut on air. It hardly hurt that his Master was enjoying the run too much to end it with a mere leap. Instead, he lingered over swiping his fingertips at the bare throat. A hand was pawed through the white cloud of hair. The teeth of a great bounding Wolf caught and tore the billowing shirt.

On and on down the slope they went, children at play.

He was at play, at least. Jonathan seemed to have found no fun in the game. Whenever his Master drew parallel there was always a look of anxiety bordering on terror waiting on his face. The eyes, like trailing ghost-light, stayed planted firmly on the terrain before him. Almost as though he were trying to outrun more than his hunter. It was when the latter politely allowed him another little lead that it became clear where the man was heading.

A chide and a chuckle rose up in him as he heard the rushing stream. The one meager haven the forest had to offer. Of course.

He let his friend leap down into the water, smiling at the muffled gasp that followed his splash. A sound that stopped short of becoming a curse. As if the noise would be what gave him away. Feigning a tutting posture, his Master idled to the ledge and let himself sprawl. He was halfway into his mist form and was not disappointed when Jonathan peered up at the effect with a shudder. Hovering between flesh and fog made a roiling giant of him, as though a great shadow cast by a candle were made solid.

Letting his eyes flare and his smile curl past the point where ordinary muscle should have permitted it, he shook the haze of his head down at the frozen figure in the water.

“Ah, now, now, my friend. That’s cheating.”

“Just…” Jonathan started. Stopped. Swallowed. “…endeavoring to give you a challenge, Sir.”

“Ah, of course. Always so considerate.” He let the smile become a maw as his arm unfurled down, down, down, the hand at its end wider than a man’s head. “My dear friend, Jonathan.” He solidified back into himself as Jonathan was snatched up onto land, the illusion of safety snapped neatly in two. “I believe that is you captured, stag.”

“It seems so.” The words were thin. His wide eyes seemed to both see and dismiss him. He actually shook in his Master’s hold. Taking notice, Jonathan forcibly settled himself by grasping his own arms. His head hung until the sodden hair could mask him. “Forgive me, Sir. I had hoped the water would be warmer.”

“Transylvania is sparing with her warmth, my friend. Even in spring.” His own gaze had ducked lower as he examined his catch. No, the stream had done no favors for the fish, but plenty for the fisherman.

He wears white far better than his wife.

Aloud, “But the nights are mild when hunter and quarry are wise enough to avoid such tricks. When the boy has grown out with a few years more, perhaps he should join us. He cannot subsist on you forever. Once our lovely family dinners are at an end, we shall all of us have to seek our fill…”

Jonathan stilled entirely. His hands gripped tight a last time before relaxing. Somewhat.

His head didn’t raise as he asked, “…You are certain you wish to invite him?”

“What reason is there that I shouldn’t?”

“There is none, I suppose. Nothing but my own mistaken assumption.” Jonathan moved to stand. His Master’s hand jerked him back down on his haunches. Still his head stayed bowed behind the pale curtain of hair.

“What assumption was this?”

“It is nothing, Sir. Please, forget I mentioned it.”

“What assumption, Jonathan? I am listening.” He heard silence. Sighing and smiling he whipped a mesmer hook into his friend’s will. “Jonathan. Speak.”

Jonathan’s lips twitched apart with a grimace.

“I had thought…that we might make use of this for something else…something private.” Finally, the head rose. The ice chip eyes had gone dark. “Where neither of us would have to be mindful of others.” He had bitten his lip in the effort not to speak. The skin had broken and painted him there. “My apologies for misunderstanding.” At ‘My’ the blood smeared without Jonathan appearing to notice, still dripping from the stream. His whole mouth was glazed red.

Looking back at the stream in what was either shame or—

No. No, it can’t be.

—disappointment, Jonathan did not see his Master’s eyes turn to lanterns.

“I love them. You know I love them. It’s why we’re here. Why I am here. And every night…” His fists balled into stones in his lap. The wedding band caught a sliver of moonlight. “Every night I must smile for them. For Mina. For Quincey. Sometimes for you. But it isn’t what it was between us in that summer, is it? When I thought I was acting only for my life and not my humanity. When you were seeing how far I could bend until I broke. Two months of pretending wasn’t bad back then. But that is old ground now. It feels ancient already. If you order a smile from me now, you order it. You couch it in pretense occasionally, but that much has been tainted by the comparison we live with every night.

“The playacting of it all. That’s for our son alone. A sweet theatre too cloying for the adults in the room to perform when his back is turned. And even with Mina I must—,” The lump of his throat leapt and choked him. “I have to give her something. Something we can both pretend is worth what we’ve given. So I smile for her too and she smiles back and I must try to bury so much under the bedrock of my mind to keep her from tripping over it in horror. Which leaves you. This.

“You can believe me when I say this or not. That doesn’t matter. I keep no diary to purge myself into and I have no doubt that if you show this memory to her, she will take it as a cruel joke you invented to hurt her with like so many others. Or else she’ll see it and know her husband has finally gone mad.” New wet tracks rolled over his cheeks. Clear as the stream. “You are the last refuge I have for admitting the worst of myself. The tower is no more than a box to rot in. My Mina, my Darling, how much worse would I become in her eyes if I were to be anything less than the Love paying his reparation for being too selfish to let her wishes be honored and have our friends live? And our boy. Our son. He will never know.

“There are only two monsters in your castle. Mina does not believe me when I tell her both of them strain under their performances. I cannot blame her. There is a slim line between the Count I first met and the one I serve now, but it is there. And for one who has spent lifetimes untethered by anything other than his own caprices, I understand this means much. I am grateful. I hate that I am grateful. I hate that I have just run from that great stone stage of a prison we call our home, and thrilled at the distance, knowing I was not merely dashing to a town in which to put on another act. I recognized my thrill and feared it and that fear did not stop it.

“Nothing is left, you see. Hope is out of the box and burned over a candle and there is nothing left that is sane or good to reach for but the safety of my Loves. Always, always that external greater good, never my own, and knowing such is deserved for what I’ve done doesnothing to soften my want of something, anything not nailed down to catering to the entire mess—to the fantasy that I’m anything other than what I am. Even if it is this. Two monsters in the dark with nothing good to intrude upon their abuses.”

Jonathan kneaded his eyes. Bloodshot blue.

“Ha. But I’ve ruined it already, haven’t I? Now that I’ve said I enjoyed it, it will be taken away. Perhaps that is best. This whole thing was foolish start to end.” Jonathan turned to look at his Master. “Perhaps we should…”

Jonathan saw his Master. Seeing him, there might have been an instant in which he realized he had said too much. Discarded some invisible ward without thinking or else let the current of his babble pull him into deep water. For something had happened during the pour of his words. Something which could not be taken back. Something that regarded him with a starving avarice that had been nurtured since the night two students clambered cackling and screaming from the Mountain, lightning and ice welcoming them back to the sight of a sky.

A new thunderhead rolled overhead. Abrupt and sultry as a tropic tide washing across the stars.

“You talk of monsters and their abuses as if you comprehend both. I fear you are acquainted only with one.”

One hand gripped the damp shirtfront.

The other thumbed open a glass bottle, spilling oil.

“Allow me to educate you on the other.”

Jonathan Harker was taught his Lessons.

He learned them on the thin bed made of his Master’s cape, with cadaver skin finally thawing in the tangle and grasp of each other, the only pause for words or breath allowed between the sealing of a nursing mouth on bloody lips. The castle had never housed a thing like this for them. Not under any command, any tugging of trance, any handful or taste stolen with the idleness of a man stroking his pet. Under the storm and worn by its maker, Jonathan seemed either to shed a husk or shut himself into an armor.

Whichever it was, it gave credence to his phrasing. Two monsters. They loved—

Hands, his hands are still cold, always, always her hands were cold, locked into my skin arms back can feel the lines drag there no matter no matter you can drink it away or let them stay a banner-badge-brand to bring home to the chapel do you see do you see little Sister you lose like the brother who came before and knew it when he died and oh oh it is the Mountain again out in the open after the years of work of horror of being Horror and here we are against the rocks and filth and grass again under the rain but oh O so soon so fresh from it all we could not be tender yet not yet and so we loved

—like they fought.

Jonathan turned them over first. The shock and strength of it let him manage it, the same curt motion as hefting an earth-box. He sat bent and digging his fingers into the undead hide as if to shred or cling. For a moment the view was enough to paralyze. Here was the white head thrown back against the marbled night, eyes bright as the lightning, howling a sound that could have been a shout in pleasure or fury or the harsh note of a lunatic that lost itself in the next thunderclap. His lip was bleeding again. The rain carried it over his chin and down a teasing line along his throat.

The moment passed and Jonathan was crushed on his back again. Still holding. Still held. He tried to rise again, that mystery of power straining against the pressure of his better, his Master, his Lord above God, his—

“Balaurul meu. Say it.” Had his voice shaken? No, a trick of the noise. So much thunder, so much drumming rain, so much balmy wind moaning in the trees.

“What?” A thrust. A cry and clutch.

“These are your Lessons. Now say it.” Another jolt, a snap of lightning. “Say it.”

“Balaurul meu,” in a gasp. “Balaurul meu. Balaurul meu.”

Good. Good. More.

“Eu sunt al tău. Now!”

“Eu sunt al tău.”

More.

“Sunt al tău pentru totdeauna.”

Jonathan repeated this and every line after, echoing and reechoing so that the two of them might only have been the ghosts of lovers reverberating in a cave. On and on, every oath that could be thought of, every line left branded in the walls of memory was poured out and engraved on the learning tongue. And his friend would keep to every word. Oh, yes. That was certain.

There would be no running beyond his reach, no raising of will he could not break, no leaving him injured and roaring a name out into the sleet, or begging the same name at the threshold of a cemetery where Hating eyes crawled like insects upon him, no, no, no. Not with him. Not with them. Not with the beginning of a new eternity here in the dark with his monster, his maiden, his victim vassal jackal bridegroom—

“What are you doing?”

—who fed him his draught of blood and drowned him in a lake of freezing eyes—

“Sir.”

—his Scheherazade who was prey and play and predator and anything everything all things with the magic of her talent on the altar of her Sultan’s lethal loneliness—

“Master. …Count.”

—and no, no, how could he waste such a thing, risk it slipping away—

“Stop!”

—over the stream and into a rotting future in a pauper’s graveyard, no no no, never, not him, no—

“Dracula!”

He came back to himself as if slapped.

Perhaps Jonathan might have dared it if only his hands weren’t so preoccupied. The man still sat where he was slotted, but now with both palms flat against his Master’s chest while the pair sat upright under the rain.

The left side had been split open by a claw and now dribbled its dark fountain down his ribs. Its wound welcomed like a smile as Jonathan strained an inch from having his mouth crushed against the blood as his wife’s had been, two implacable hands clamped at his head and back. Pantomime of an embrace. If he snatched the man’s wrists up, if he took his hair for a handle and forced him down…

There’s still time. What say you, Count?

“Please,” Jonathan huffed through locked teeth. As if it would be barrier enough. “Please, not yet. They still need me as I am. Please.” The Arctic eyes slid up to the hellfire of his. “Please.”

The dead hands ceased their slow press, but did not move. Fingers twined and stroked in the wet snow of his hair.

“Draga mea. You know you only prolong your Purgatory as you are. I and my Loves, your ‘Weird Sisters,’ we were not without our pains at the start. Lifetimes as men count them came and went. It all turns to less than a heartbeat eventually. Even Mina,” a name he was proud to make sound like several other four-letter words, “for all her lovely vitriol, even she will someday match me in passing out of this shadow. Hate grows stale. Tiring. So too does despair. Do you think I laughed with my Loves outside your door because I ordered it? Do you think I let them get away with going behind my back to take what was mine, with mocking me to my face, because I remain forever in one mode?

“We three, we are in the middle of a long Lesson. The boy is a happy surprise, but even without the curiosity of him, it would still be us. Me and my Harkers, so hard-won. You and I in our sea of wonders. Whether or not you wish to hold onto guilt once you are free of humanity, time will still march, and you will still be mine. A moment will find you, despite how you drag your feet and cling to the miseries of an unclean Good Samaritan, where you will break as you broke tonight—and you will laugh and love as I do.”

It was fascinating to see how responses rose, fell, and faltered at the edge of his friend’s tongue. Negations all, and all of them caught on the tightrope between lie or truth, both saturated with shame. Catharsis and comfort dangled out of reach only because he refused to crawl from the Pit he chose to burn in.

For his Love.

“You say it is inevitable?” Jonathan’s voice was now a croak. Gone raw with baying.

“I know it is.”

“…Then it shall wait.” Four words made heavy with regret. The sheer weight of the latter, the dread of the hanging sword and the ached-for release of finally being free of waiting, were almost enough to stir another round. But even with the red taste lapped again and again from the torn lip, the well nearly ran dry. The bulk of remaining vitality was already going toward mending his split chest. A sight that made Jonathan sigh with what could have been relief or sorrow. “It must wait.”

“If that is what you will.”

“It is.” So saying, Jonathan paused. Then, so quiet it was almost less than breath, “Thank you for this.” Jonathan tried to stand. The white hands gripped again and threatened to shove him back in place. It was just a single day from the evening the family dined. The hunt could end with the intended meal and so provide the fuel for yet another gauntlet.

Or.

“Thank you, who?”

Jonathan’s tongue curled at the start of a Sir. But a creeping thread of mesmer reached out and prodded the proper response from him almost before he knew he was speaking:

“Balaurul meu, my thanks for the hunt. I look forward to being broken again. Te iubesc.” Jonathan leapt in his own skin as he heard himself. “That isn’t funny.”

“Of course not, my friend. Merely practice ahead of the inevitable. This is funny.” Jonathan had wobbled up to his feet and left himself open to a swat that made him yelp and stagger. The monster was asleep again, it seemed. Just as well. The fair maiden needed returning to the tower and some rest before the dragon broke his fast with the other suckling mouths.

It was as he mused on this and admired the view of his friend stretching and bowing to retrieve their clothes from the trees’ shelter that a stone broke against the back of his skull. Others pelted his shoulders. Wrath came to an immediate boil and just as quickly froze as he regarded the falling pellets. This freeze expanded until gooseflesh spotted him from the neck down. Jonathan’s voice reached him as if from the other side of the world.

“What is it?”

“Ice.” Then, because he needed to hear it said, “Hail.” He had unmoored his mind from controlling the sky and Nature had taken her reins back. Rain swept too high in the gale would freeze with or without orders. Fool. “It is only—,”

Looking up, he forgot what he meant to say. He forgot language. He forgot he knelt naked on his cape in the muck as he had once knelt before Powers older than any name for what Man called God. He forgot time and he forgot space and kept on forgetting until the only memory left was the one standing in front of him.

No, not memory.

Her.

She stood under the canopy of the boughs, her ice cascading by her as it did within the portrait. In lieu of the painted gown, she stood before him half-dressed. The garb she’d worn on the bier hung lightning-burned on her still. She looked as she’d been the night of the tug-of-war with the failed solicitor, Yorick saved from her rending, the thunderbolt thrown blind. He’d run as the Wolf. Slunk back as a Dog. He had dropped words of mockery and anger and hate and want and threat at the edge of her necropolis like a heap of bones, all of them amounting to the same frail skeleton of a plea as he pressed it into her mind.

Come back. Leave these chattel to their dreaming. Do not sully yourself in their earth. Come back. Come back. Te iubesc.

Și te-am iubit, balaurul meu, had come her answer. Her head bowed until the ice chip eyes whetted to points. But you broke that Love when you tried to break me. Your love is too much like war. Your cherished Conquest. You would have had me as a bound Bride. A partner made a prisoner. This I could not allow. No more than I could stay to help you march upon the world and slit its throat simply to exercise the ability to do so.

Lightning and hail had snapped at each other again. Tempest tempers raging.

Why, then? Why the Mountain? Why the peddling of your soul and self for what it offered just to consign yourself to this waste!?

The hail had softened to an almost gentle patter.

Certainty. Proof to myself that those I Love will be safe with my protection. Even if I must endure their Hate in the how of it, my Loves will never suffer while I stand guard. That is all. I need no more. Go back to your castle, Dragon, but know that it is better you kill your little Englishman or turn him away.

She had frowned then as she frowned in the portrait and as she frowned down at him here, now, stripped bare upon the earth.

Do not play Alexander. You will conquer nothing and weep just the same.

She moved toward him in the present. The hail did not touch her as she walked.

A dream! Yes, of course! Only a dream! It must be, she must be, do not fool yourself, old devil. Get up. Wake up. Now. Now!

But he didn’t. He was awake. And if he wasn’t, he would have snapped Morpheus’ neck if he dared to rob him now.

Close. Closer. Yet he remained on his knees, gawking up. Afraid that any motion might erase her like smoke in a breeze. His mouth was the only part of him that dared move. Not that he could hear himself. He didn’t dare speak so loud that he might miss something from her lips. But she came silently until his head was level with her skirts. A single hand reached for him, white and blue and grey with the pallor of her kind, cool as snow against the cheek she once rotted from his jaw.

But he felt her.

He felt her.

His arm snapped around the back of her like a vise while his free hand clapped against the fingers still resting on his face. She was not mist, could not be mist, for her kind were too solid, and this time, this time, she would not be gone, would not leave him, let her cut and freeze and skin him, but she would not go again.

Draga mea. Draga mea. How are you here?

You forget the time, balaurul meu.

Her trapped hand lifted his face from where he crushed it against her stomach. The eyes that met his were no longer ice or ghost-light. Only coins. The Ferryman’s toll.

Tonight is mine as it is yours. As it belongs to all our kin. The graves are open and the dead come forth to walk. And talk.

The scarlet sickle of her frown turned up.

Enjoy your Walpurgisnacht, my Dragon. I have enjoyed mine.

She was gone.

In her place stood Jonathan, caught and confused. Concerned. His mouth opened.

Do not ask me what is wrong, Jonathan Harker. Do not dare.

His mouth shut so fast his teeth clicked. Then, carefully, he offered the folded black bundle of his Master’s clothes. These were snatched away and their courier almost thrown more than released. Around them the hail thinned away. The rain ceased after it. Jonathan kept himself very busy with peeling up the muddied cape and snapping what muck he could from the exterior, doubtlessly wishing it had not been the velvet one that needed cleaning. But when he could help the cloth no more, he turned to his Master, still fighting with his buttons.

“Sir?”

“What?” No answer. His Master turned to bark the word again and stopped. Jonathan had rolled up his sleeve. Here was the tiny map of his son’s feeding. Kisses ringed with white and blue and grey.

“If—If you want it.” Jonathan gestured his gaze and his head at his Master’s face. “You have lost some. Sir.”

The meaning was lost to him for a moment. Then he realized his cheeks were wet with more than rain. In the same instant he took note of Jonathan’s right hand, the one that had been flattened and trapped against the bearded cheek. He’d fussed with the cape because he did so one-handed, trying not to lay the bloodstain on it too. The same was smeared onto the white of his shirt where his Master had set his head.

Even knowing what he would find, a white hand rose up and swiped under his eyes. Bloody tears came away on his fingers.

“Sir? Do you want it?”

‘What is it you want to eat?’

Jonathan was captured for a second time that night. This time the hunter feasted. Not from the wrist, but the bend between neck and shoulder, inhaling the scent of the nape. He was filled with heat and ache and when his teeth slipped back behind the sheath of his lips, the mouth stayed planted where it was. The same went for the cage of his arms, binding their catch for a moment that might have been a minute or an hour.

“…Are you sick?”

“No,” Jonathan breathed with what tried and failed to be a steady tone. The voice of someone trying not to sound as if they were scrambling for comprehension. “No, Sir. I feel well. Not ill, that is.”

“So you say. But I must have caught something from you to act so against myself. Perhaps it was something from your mouth.” A mouth finally scabbing. It left the bluish lips a mottled violet. “Or else the night itself is playing tricks. Too much lightning in my eyes. Do you disagree?”

“I don’t, Sir.”

“Yet you are not ill.”

“I do not believe so. But I could be mistaken.”

“Wrap yourself, then.” He stepped away and plucked the cape from Jonathan’s hold before twisting it into a cord tauter than steel. Rainwater fled it until it was all but dry. “Transylvania’s seasons are so very fickle. It would not do to have you unwell for tomorrow.” Before the requisite agreement could leave him, Jonathan found himself both swaddled and off his feet. His Master pondered the image of the hunter hauling home his quarry, his friend flopped over his shoulder like an indignant piece of game. But that would leave only one hand holding him.

That in mind, Jonathan was bundled up into the snare of both arms while remaining supremely unclear as to why.

“This isn’t necessary, Sir. I am fine to walk.”

“Sunrise approaches. You are not up for a race back.” He said while dawn could be felt two hours away and his own pace merely ambled. “Rest, my friend.”

“I—,”

Rest.

An order that took his friend’s mind by the scruff and dragged it to bed. Jonathan furrowed his brow against the mesmer, squirming like a child even as his eyes drooped shut. The lakes iced over.

“I just…just wanted to ask what you meant…before…”

“What I meant?”

“Called to me… Didn’t know. Don’t know. What was the word? You never taught me…”

Sinking, sinking. Almost gone. He whispered down at him now, light as far-off thunder.

“What word?”

“Thought it must mean, ‘Come to me…’ So I came.” The lashes fluttered and fought with gravity. Lost again, showing only slivers of frost. “What does Dolingen mean, Sir?” He was asleep before he got an answer. Still, his carrier whispered.

“You misheard, my friend. That is all.”

Up to the tower, stripped and dressed, tucked into bed.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

A far more fruitful occasion for the term than the debacle of battling trances. Such a bleak little comedy. The thought brought him back to the boy and that inciting matter of the snared wolf, his would-be pet. Something near to mirth made him grin. He knew he was to blame for the child’s initial fascination with the creatures. A seed planted in infancy when, as a taunt, he had willingly cradled the babe as his parents stiffened mid-kiss. He had stood teasingly close to the window.

As he did, the wolves had started to sing of their own volition. The boy had perked up at once despite his hunger.

‘Rrooo, rrroooo. Fah-rr. Rrooo!’

In his head, a muddled but excited impression of wolves traipsed back and forth across the shared mindscape. The pack outside had howled again.

‘Rrooo!’

His Father had opened his mouth on jaws of changed teeth. No longer a man’s neat rows and the hanging fangs, but the jagged mountain range of the Wolf’s. He’d howled lightly as the child all but glowed with recognition.

‘Roo? Fah-rr roo!’

As his Harkers watched, their Master had entertained the child in a way that would have left any other parents in the mountains squealing prayers. For he had changed first his jaws, then his eyes, then the whole of his head to mirror those fantastical Folk of the picture books where Herr Wolf could knock at his victim’s door with a paw in a glove. The boy had shrilled delight and scrabbled merrily at his fur, even tucking his head into the open muzzle to see if it was really just a trick. But the proof had been offered as his Father lost his arms and legs to be a Wolf in full. One the size of a small bear.

In his defense—as if it were necessary—it had kept the boy from pestering his Mama to hurry so Papa could feed him. Ah, how he’d sulked upon looking in his Papa’s mouth and finding no signs of the Wolf there.

‘No, diavol. I am the only Wolf here. Wolf. Lup.’

‘Wohll. Luhp.’

‘Very good. Now take your kiss.’

It had sprinted along from there. Now the boy had graduated from attempting to trance a wolf into permanent residence to trying to coax the entire pack into natural obedience. A friendship to span three generations. He really did have his head too deep in the fairy tales. Perhaps there was a Lesson waiting in that. A small one to assure he did not idolize the softness of things overmuch…

But that could come later.

For now, the night still lingered with, fine, he could admit it, a wisp of the fairy tale. Here rested a beauty, living and dead, the only color resting across the mouth. Gently, he pricked the scab of the bottom lip open again, smearing red. Jonathan slept on.

There was no witness as the man collected a last kiss in ignorance before his dragon skulked down from the tower.

Down and deep and into the dark of the chapel. He did not stop to change and so was pointed out at once by the boy, always so eager to stay awake. His current project, a lopsided schematic in charcoal, was abandoned.

“Father, why are you all wet?”

“I was out hunting. Your Papa nearly got away, diavol.”

The boy gasped while his mother, still sitting with him and his palette, narrowed her eyes.

“You were hunting Papa?”

“I was. He almost got across the river. But he was caught in time, not to worry.”

“But why were you hunting him? Papa isn’t a,” the boy tried to think of hunted things, “a rabbit or deer.”

“No, he is not. Your Papa is many things, but not such meager creatures.” He looked over the child’s head and through his mother’s skull. “We were merely at play, diavol.” This came as an even greater shock to the boy.

“Grownups play? I thought all you did was work. You and Papa were supposed to be working all night.” A statement that carried all children’s dread; the fear that age came with a great dull void where enjoyment used to be.

“Grownups do work a great deal. Sometimes too much. Your Papa and I had such a problem and so we went out to play. You and your mother are free to do far more play than work, of course, so such things are outside your needs.”

The woman smiled and hummed into the shared mindscape:

Our play has turned to work, as it happens. Rather, it is work he wishes to try.

A hand upon the boy’s shoulder.

Show him.

Bolstered, the child gathered up his drawings and stacked them as neatly as he’d seen his Papa’s papers. As he did this, his mother sent a private message to Father:

What did you do?

He thought of showing her. He’d been thinking of it since first stealing her husband out of his clothes. But tonight was dense with secrets even as the Veil had turned to gossamer. Moreover, it was important that a man held some things out of reach of his woman. For everyone’s good. Especially when it left the imagination free to conjure up far more creative possibilities than a collection of curious wives’ heads.

So the answer he tossed back was merely that of a closed door, a key thrown into the abyss, and a fraction of truth.

Nothing that concerns you, ‘Sister.’

The boy rushed him before anything more could be said. He offered his drawings with a small flourish.

“See?”

His Father flipped through the sheets.

“I see a book in the process of being torn apart.”

“No, no! Being made!” He pointed to what was, to him, a clear depiction of himself and his mother piecing books together with nebulous arms. There was also a wolf sitting on a crescent moon and a bat flying in the dotted outline of a star. “I want to try bookbinding with Mama.”

“Child, there is a grove’s worth of blank pages in spare volumes for you to use. Why would you bother?”

“Oh. Just—,” the boy flicked his line of sight briskly from his Father’s face. The cobwebs and stonework were suddenly enthralling. Likewise the state of his own toes. “Just to make something. A fun kind of work. That’s all.”

It was all his Father could do not to sigh. The boy still could not lie to save his unlife, let alone duck a punishment for the attempt at lying in the first place. But before he could form the beginnings of a sentence, the woman came into his head, away from her son’s reach. This time with a uniquely acidic edge.

He wishes to surprise you and Jonathan with a gift. He’s realized he missed an important date and wants to make up for it.

Walpurgisnacht—this night, her night—almost rose to the surface of his mind. He buried and burned it behind a wall of fire. Casually.

What date is this? His day of birth has been and gone.

The woman glared at him with a perfect blend of loathing and disbelief. When he continued not to guess, perhaps partially to watch how much her ire would grow, she handed him the answer as one might hand over a chamber pot.

Yes. But he posed a question to me and I did not give him a lie. St. George’s Day has two meanings for this family. The eve before, anyway.

For a moment the answer was as baffling as the question. But epiphany quickly fell in place. He almost laughed aloud.

The first solicitor he’d beckoned had his useless life saved from the undead on Walpurgisnacht.

Jonathan had been delivered to him almost a year later, just short by a week. This had been on the eve of St. George’s Day with the glimmer of the blue flames lining the mountain road like a wedding procession. The night the boy’s fathers had first met. A magic alignment of dates to a child’s mind. Shame on his Harkers, letting the date go unrecognized by half for so long.

He smiled for the boy and stroked his hair, declaring, “Child, I am merely the bank vault to loot in such a request. You must convince your Papa to bring you materials, not me. Ah-ah!” He hooked the boy’s nightshirt before he could dash for the stairs. “Not now. Your Papa is asleep already. Wait for evening.”

For once the boy did not sulk over the coming of morning. He flitted as excitedly to his coffin as he had aimed for the steps, taking his art supplies and another book to wait for sleep with. The poor silk within would be ruined with charcoal and crayon before the year was out.

Having deposited his treasure inside, the boy whirled around and rushed back to his Father who stood waiting on the tomb steps.

“Can you do it all the way this time?” He feigned interest in the dirt and coagulation still under his nails. “I do not know that you have enough blood in you…”

The goading was small, but enough. He watched the boy shift from flesh to fog mid-step and surge up to his Father’s shoulders. His Father clapped once. It echoed against the chapel walls.

“There you are.” And, because the boy had earned it, he opened his arms. The child-mist became a child again, dropping as a proud little weight into his hands. He let the boy hug tight around his shoulders while the fragile curve of the head nuzzled his neck. “Good-day, diavol. Well done.”

“Good-day, Father.” A moment later he’d leapt down and circled around to his mother who stayed low enough to let him simply crash into her arms. They exchanged a bloodless kiss apiece to the other’s cheek. “Good-day, Mama!”

Good-day, Dearest. Please don’t sleep on your palette.

The boy notably made no promises as he climbed into his box and moved to close the lid. He paused before it could shut, looking out at them from the gap with eyes like expectant rubies.

Neither Father nor Mama could tell when the child had decided there was a ritual to complete before he could allow himself to begin trying for sleep, but it was one of the few points of their coexistence which they agreed upon in their distaste. The effect was doubled on her Master’s side, what with the final thread of any nuptial framing so grimly torn away since that evening’s confrontation.

Still, they smiled and closed the distance between them.

Good-day.

She laid her hand inside his and sent a vision of him thrashing and howling in a bonfire.

“Good-day.”

He skimmed her knuckle with his lips and sent back the sight of her abandoned on a mountaintop, the Dutchman having successfully removed her head and staked her heart, leaving her to the wolves and flies.

Finally, the boy shut his lid.

Yet there was no parting of ways. The woman gripped his hand.

Is he hurt?

“Of course not.” The pinned-up smile curled to a more natural state as he twitched his fingers out of hers. “We were only playing.”

You—

“I,” he hissed, still through a grin, “am tired. Many things more, many clever epithets, yes, but mostly tired. Whatever lecture you think is worth droning at me, it will wait for moonrise. Now go.” He leveled a finger at her coffin. “To bed.” If she had any more venom to spit at him, he made himself deaf to it. The wall of fire around his mind was turned up to a full conflagration as his will forcibly shoved her back to her box. The most she could spare him was another glower before the lid shut. Peace at last.

Of a sort.

He carried that feeling into his crypt and his coffin. Settling into that familiar dark, he would have called the feeling wholly new if not for the certainty that he had experienced it before, so many ages ago. Not a mere settling, not a tallying of little victories. It was peace. Peace as it counted to him. Even with the brief rattling of his foundations in the wake of Walpurgisnacht. Of women endured or women craved. Even with that.

There was peace. There was thrill. There was Hope drowsing in his box.

Look at yourself. Scrape this saccharine filth out of your head at once.

He didn’t. Though he was happy to build over it. Scenes of a future that may not be centuries into the future, but mere decades. Perhaps less. A future of ruling night and bled oceans. A future that bowed its head and bared its throat to him. A future where he laughed and the sound was not alone.

Like music and crystal. Like thunder and ice. Like broken things ecstatic to finally be pieced together in his image.

His future.

Their future.

That was the core of it, he knew. Thinking and enjoying in a plural shape rather than solely his own. Such was the dulcet trap of the domestic life.

In this vein his thoughts turned to the evening’s waiting kisses, the cozening of the boy before his pliant Papa, a trading of barbs with the woman, and, since they both could use it, perhaps an overdue bath for himself and his friend. Exsanguination tended to make a body languid, whether from the loss or indulgence of blood. A sweet-sluggish cleaning away of last night’s evidences would be most welcome. Even if his friend went and did something silly, like washing ahead of time to save the trouble.

No, no, my friend, I insist…

From that thought he leapt to others and others, descending down the trail of implausibility until he found himself somehow on a balcony of the English’s gaudy confection of a palace. He knew with the certainty of a dream that the boy was grown and flashing the winsome lie of his smile at a pack of hunters who’d thought themselves safe behind the Cross and Wafer just before they began to lose pieces. Elsewhere, his Sister was watching her former ‘brother’ of a lordling writhe upon the lance she had pierced him with, the sweet logic of fantasy refusing to let him die quickly as he paid at last for the theft of their Lucy. And with him? With him were his Loves. Both folded into the sides of him, painted red from the lips down with feasting. Ice chip eyes soft against his basilisk gaze. Two heads of snowdrift hair resting over his heart.

Yes, yes.

Peace at last.

She felt the Dragon slip into sleep.

Felt the Scarred Love stir carefully in her box. Testing the psychic waters. Wait, wait, but not too long. Yes, she could wall her thoughts off better than he knew. No, she did not dare risk anything but perfect ignorance either way. Up traveled the line like a wisp on a breeze. Brushing the mind of her living Love.

Darling, from her.

Darling, from him.

Their minds spilled up and down to each other. It was one of many secrets the Dragon did not know. This secret was as simple as it was vital: There were no secrets between them.

They gave the Dragon hollow prizes in the night. Pandora’s Box was empty. Bluebeard’s chamber left unoccupied. Even as the scenes they endured for the other, for their child, for their Love, all conspired to raise a fury that would blister the sun in both their hearts, there was no doubt in them. No accusation. The only tears shed were for the other, as ever.

I should have been closer! Should have at least stayed inside, in earshot! Mina, he could have—he was really going to—

He didn’t. He never will now. Nor will he think the room ever mattered to me. Not when he frets over his master’s chamber being plundered. All was as he left it. As I left it.

It was a thin respite she’d had before the Dragon made his attempt on her. Time was too short for more than confirmation. The work had to come after. While the boy was busy in his books and his mother was busy in her own and his fathers were out and away and lost to anything else. On that note.

You did not have to give so much of yourself to him. To let him do worse than he already has and preen over it. As if he deserved more from us, from you, than what he was content with before tonight. Oh, my husband, my Love, he will expect the same and more from you now! You cannot—

I can because I must. I must because it worked. It will work again. Just give the date and it will happen.

Jonathan.

Wilhelmina. We must not merely hope, but know he is distracted for you to do what’s needed. We must have the guarantee that his eyes will not look through yours and see what you’ve found. What you have already learned. Or was the hailstorm truly an accident?

It was not. Only an experiment. One made at too dear a cost—

Then she did not lie?

She had not.

The key was in her book?

The key that was written in blood from her own hand. It penned the details of translation from the Scholomance’s text. This had not been part of the Lessons, but her own precaution. She had split the key across the borders of the journal’s pages, hiding them in the illuminated ink. Her blood was the dullest part of the lush illustrations and carried a chill when traced. She had not made them easy to parse.

Yet the pieces were found tonight. Once they were arranged into the whole, it allowed the reader, the Scarred Love, the one whose mind had carried in it a grain of Sight long before she was bitten by the Dragon, to make sense of the first scraps of knowledge left waiting in old pages.

True, the Dragon had his hoard to go over, given the chance.

Given the time that one Love would sell himself to buy for the other.

But there had been early prizes waiting in the book behind the stone. One whose theatre had aligned so beautifully with her own small addition to the show. It had taken much, stretching the vision so far. Not in blood, for she craved none when there was no Love to carry it in their veins, but in focus. In keeping her pressure subtle as she pulled ghosts through the Dragon’s mind like a haunted sieve.

Walpurgisnacht had helped, insomuch as the forces that surged behind the night could be said to acknowledge anything like a human calendar. Such things moved more like a tide or a season. All one could do was ride the crest of them when possible. It might have been possible earlier. One, two, three, four years ago.

Except the child would be too young then. Not old enough to be left alone, with his reading and play and the practice of howls at the window while his Mama drifted off to do whatever mothers did. This year he was old enough. This year he could be trusted not to be an innocent witness, there to mention to the Dragon that his Mama had found the strangest things waiting for her inside a wall.

It was this year that she’d come to the Scarred Love by a daylit dream. Explaining what the Dragon had planned for her. What might be planned for him in turn. They had walked the labyrinth of the castle and into the abandoned room that was so Hated and Loved with its mementos still resting where the Dragon left them. The Dragon would move them as soon as he could once he found the Scarred Love there. Perhaps somewhere no prying eye or misty figure could reach. If she was to take advantage, to piece the key, to note and save and use it again, it had to be done within Walpurgisnacht. And the Dragon could not know.

All this was delivered up to her Love in the tower. How to parry the Dragon’s advances? How to hold his body and mind at a distance?

Each Love had given their answer.

Each answer had been Hated.

Each answer had worked.

Now they were a step closer. A foothold in the side of the Mountain. Good, good.

She was already retreating with the coming sun when she felt the brush of that entreating mind again.

They stood beyond the mindscape now. The dreamscape allowed for more Sight. Here the Scarred Love was not scarred, nor of the undead. Only what she remembered of herself. A living woman, scarcely more than a girl, clasping a journal that no longer existed as if it were a rosary.

She, the visitor, stood only as she was. Still corpse-wan, fair hair left in a fall as eyes of frost stared on unblinking. But she was not the ragged thing the Dragon saw. Her friends had come up from the ground for her, finding a dress to change for what was burned, their hands mingling with her own as they rebuilt the mausoleum stone by stone. Their kind was immune to the wild rose and to the garlic blossom, and so they’d planted them in abundance for good measure. The ash sapling grew higher each year. Such they knew, even as they settled easily back into their rest. Into the vourdalaks’ serene torpor and its mingling of souls, their Loved and Loving phantasmagoria.

You are going? from the Scarred Love.

I am. I must. from her visitor. The year brings few hours where we are allowed even more than the lot that Supernature grants us. My will and Self can only hold here so long before it snaps home.

Where is your home? How far? The question buried underneath, too important to leave unsaid: Can you help us?

Her visitor showed her the waiting home. The dead village laced with its history of disease and suicide and so much cruel decay born of Nature at her most callous. A village whose people had huddled within their scant borders, refusing to carry their ills out to their neighbors. Who had seen her ride to them and pleaded with her to stay back unless she sought death.

I told them I did. My heart ached with want of Love. With the burden of Hate. I left the Dragon to seek reprieve from both. You know yourself how difficult the strigoi are to end. It is far harder for the vourdalak. Yet I was prepared to try for such a miracle if I could not sate my nature. Satiation came when I found home with them. My friends. My Loves. It is a place not far as we would reckon it. Horse or train, perhaps, but not us.

The Scarred Love swallowed a breath she did not have.

Then..?

Her visitor shook her head.

I cannot help you as you would wish it, Mina Harker. It would mean leaving my Loves. It would mean the Dragon warring with me, which would mean warring with you. Or do you think he would not sacrifice you as insulation against my frost? No, you know he would, contract or no. Just as he would endeavor once more to cage and break me, as he endeavors with your Love. The Dragon is the best student of the Scholomance. I can battle him, I can escape him, I can parry and dance around him. But I will not be what destroys him.

You are a student too! from the Scarred Love. Vivid and livid with the unvarnished core of herself. Her dreamscape bled. You have your numbers! Your storm! We live in his chains, with our child and my own mind at his mercy, with my Jonathan a slave and worse to him! Please! Please… In her coffin, the Scarred Love wept precious scarlet lines down her cheek. Please do not go. Do not leave us with him.

Her visitor ached. Of course she did. She had combed through the entirety of the Harkers’ souls at a glance like Psyche herself filtering Charon’s harvest. There was much to pity in them and more to Love. But.

Would you like to see what he did to me when last we crossed paths, Mina Harker?

She did not wait for an answer. Only showed the Scarred Love how wise she had been in choosing the vourdalak and its endurance as her shape of undeath. She could not scar, could not crumble from an injury. But pain came in its plenty. Especially when a lightning bolt powerful enough to shatter stone and set her ablaze came firing down.

The Scarred Love watched in horror as her visitor keened and roasted and died.

And stood.

And healed.

And scoured the burnt flesh off the new skin, dead though it remained.

That he did by folly. A bolt with intent would have done worse. As for my storm, I mastered only enough to slay the living, who are the far more industrious and plentiful villain. I once shattered half the Dragon’s face off with my cold. Yet it mended with blood and time enough. Meanwhile, the only scars I have seen on himself and his kind amount to three marks.

The Son left a brand with His forsaking of you.

You kept the muting cut upon your throat, made before you had changed.

And then there is the Dragon’s only unhealed wound. A scar left by a spade in your Love’s hand. Why is that, Mina Harker? More, why is it your mind has suffered his petty puppeteer strings, yet rebuffed the transformation’s inebriating influence? You have not dulled in the years since you turned. You have not diminished to the state of the ‘Weird Sisters’ or your lost Lucy. If the Dragon were not so preoccupied with himself and his Conquest, he might know to worry.

A student of the Scholomance is admitted only once, Mina Harker. The Lessons are not easy. Triply so if not given access to them beneath the Mountain. But you have seen it is possible. That you were able to use the key at all marks you as a student. ‘Studying abroad,’ you would call it. You have the freedom to learn and to master all that you can bring yourself to dare. Which means you can master what the Dragon has. The will of the Weathermaker, the Speaker and Wearer of Beasts. It can be done.

Worst of all for the Dragon, he does not remember that what is sacred is not always the property of an Abrahamic hand.

You and your Love possess a holy strength that is innate. It does not hail from any church. The gods who bless and burden you, who have gifted you souls so tightly knit, are as old and steeped in sacrifice as the tutors in the Mountain. Some have even taught there.

Here, the visitor smiled.

It was one of them who made the first vourdalaks. The Passionate Dead who exist in only Love and Hate. Our Loves are made prey and protected forever, those Hated are marked for destruction. Love and Hate are your whetstones, Mina Harker, as they are Jonathan’s. Whatever weapon you wield, it will be sharpened to an edge the Dragon cannot heal from. Do you understand?

The smile broadened into a bitter curl of sharp ivory.

The Scarred Love thought she recognized the look. Her husband had worn it once as he whetted the kukri and listened to yet another announcement of doom in their hunt for the Dragon.

I am not leaving you with him. I am leaving him with you.

The sun was coming now. Her phantom grip loosened. Almost time.

Almost time. Is there anything more you wish to ask?

The Scarred Love thought. Her answer came fast.

…What side of his face was it?

Her visitor’s eyes burned white-blue, ice and flame at once. There was no tinkling crystal to her laugh. Only joyful madness.

The left, Mina Harker. Aim true.

Years would pass. Twenty long years of domesticity, of a sort. It was at the cusp of those twenty years,

As a young man boarded coach and ship and train,

As a Dragon found his keep robbed of its living treasures,

As a vow was upheld in a baptism of blood,

As a storm brewed at the will of a new Mistress,

As a thunderbolt fell with the precision of a needle onto a shock-slack face,

As a scar as brilliant and agonizing as the lightning itself erupted in the weathered skin,

As a Dragon realized this scar was the second one due to stay until he was dust,

Countess Dolingen of Gratz dreamed of her husband.

And smiled.

#you know the best way to take a break from finishing one book and starting a second? :)#writing another novella :)#my carpals are tunneling and my eyes have fallen out :)#anyway #blood of my blood #dracula #dracula bad ending #jonathan harker #mina harker #quincey harker #dracula's guest #countess dolingen #horror #my writing

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tyrelpinnegar · 1 year

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Rabbit Hole by Tyrel Pinnegar

Paranormal Horror - 14,800 Words

This is the story of a lonely girl with an affinity for the macabre. Although she had never been the type to believe in ghosts, she couldn’t help but indulge fantasies of romance beyond the veil. However, when a cocksure spirit with a dangerous infatuation drags her deep into a private purgatory of blood and decay, what was once an innocent fantasy quickly becomes a precarious negotiation that could cost the girl her life.

Download Rabbit Hole for free at TyrelPinnegar.com, or read the full story under the cut:

Chapter 1

This story begins in a cemetery. A proper cemetery.

Nowadays, proper cemeteries are vanishingly rare. A proper cemetery is old enough to have been forgotten. At least, to a degree.

The last time you visited a cemetery, it was likely to pay respects to the recently deceased. Someone whose memory is still fresh enough to spark pain. You may have noticed, while you were there, that the cemetery was not entirely dissimilar from a suburban backyard. A neatly manicured, monocultured lawn, devoid of any weeds, or insects, or interest. Sterile, wasted space.

The only thing that set it apart were the grave markers. Little, x by x inch polished granite slabs that lie flush with the ground, and weigh so little you could pick them up and carry them away, if you were so inclined. Each one computer-engraved with a stock image chosen from a catalog. Some may have even been engraved with a customer-supplied digital photograph, as if they were some sort of mall kiosk knick-knack.

There’s a reason these grave markers lie flush with the ground. It’s so the groundskeeper can run a lawnmower over them. A matter of convenience. It’s easier, and therefore cheaper, to trim the grass when the stones that mark the graves are easy to ignore. Isn’t it something, that the lawn seems to take precedence over the dead?

Cemeteries like these serve their purpose I suppose, in a dull, soulless sort of way. But they hardly instill reverence.

This cemetery instilled reverence. It was overgrown. Unkempt. The tall, dried autumn grasses had gone to seed, forming not a lawn, but a meadow. The fallen leaves that littered the earth had already decayed down to the veins, reclaimed by detritivores and fungal mycelium, leaving the old, gnarled oaks that had shed them as skeletal silhouettes against an overcast sky.

None of this is what makes a cemetery a cemetery, of course. Only graves can do that, and this cemetery had no shortage.

This cemetery contained hundreds of graves, some older than the oaks themselves. A person could have spent a lifetime studying the lives of the people buried in that soil, and still barely have scratched the surface.

And save for a few that had crumbled to nothing over the centuries, each of these graves had a marker. Some were towering mausoleums, elaborate sculptural monuments to a life of privilege and means. Others were simple headstones, heartfelt labors of love, chiseled from whatever stone could be found.

Neither the rich nor the poor are immune to the rasp of time, however. Many of the older markers had been rendered nigh unreadable by lichens and erosion. Identities wiped away, leaving only death’s heads and other memento mori.

One of the deceased had chosen a more practical memorial. A dark, heavy, granite bench. Perhaps they themselves had once found comfort in visiting the cemetery, and wanted to make it easier for those that came after.

It was clear that their gesture did not go unappreciated, as there was someone sitting on the granite bench. A girl, with dusty, cornflower-blue hair, loosely braided into twin pigtails with white twine, and a short, feather-duster of a ponytail in the back.

She wore a thick, pale, turtleneck sweater just a few shades lighter than the color of her hair, and a pair of oversized, circular, white-rimmed glasses. The lenses were fake, for if they’d been prescription, they’d have been far too heavy to remain on her face. Secretly, her amber eyes functioned perfectly well.

And although the cemetery was old, this girl was not. Her birth date was decades more recent than any death date on the gravestones that surrounded her. She was not exceedingly young either, however. She was an adult by most definitions, though she rarely felt that way.

This girl was not there to pay her respects, but to surround herself with death. She had an affinity for the macabre. It might not have been immediately obvious from her appearance, but a peek inside her sketchbook would have left no doubt.

It was brimming with the Gothic. The romantic. Ghosts and phantoms, spirits and specters. Skeletons and apparitions. Wilted roses and tender, affectionate embraces. Why she drew such things was a mystery, for she was not the type to share her work with others. Her sketchbook was a place of privacy. A refuge for feelings and thoughts that would have otherwise been bottled up.

And yet, despite her efforts to keep her drawings hidden away, someone was admiring them now. Even as she sketched.

A presence.

Invisible.

Immaterial.

The girl shivered. There had been no wind, but the air around her suddenly felt cold. She shut her sketchbook and held it close to her chest.

If she had turned around in that moment, she might have seen something resembling a pair of eyes. Concave hemispheres, as if someone had dissected the tapeta lucida from behind an animal’s retinas and rendered them intangible. Each one, a reflection without a surface.

But she didn’t turn around, and they vanished as quietly as they had arrived.

The girl had just begun to reopen her sketchbook, when she felt a chill brush her cheek. Not a breeze, but a gentle caress. She let out a small yelp and staggered to her feet, glancing about nervously.

Her breathing became tense. She wasn’t the type to feel uneasy in an empty cemetery, but somehow this cemetery didn’t feel so empty anymore. Eventually, she turned to leave.

It was then that something seemed to tickle her earrings. The feeling of surgical steel against cartilage sent a violent shiver up her spine. She ran.

The girl scrambled her way down an old footpath, clutching her sketchbook tightly. She felt that if she could only reach the entrance gate, she’d be safe.

All of a sudden, she felt something shove her sternum with startling force. She staggered backward and began to lose her balance, only to be caught by unseen hands and tipped back upright. She stumbled forward, then swiveled around in a panic.

Silence.

The girl took a moment to catch her breath.

Then, she felt a sudden, sharp jab at her side. Then another, and another. An incessant jabbing, at her kidneys, her rib cage, her spine. She recoiled, repeatedly and involuntarily. The jabbing became shoving, and the shoving became herding. She shut her eyes tightly and waited for the ordeal to be over.

And then… it was. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

UNKNOWN SKELETON 9-24-62

Those were the words on the headstone the girl found herself standing before, deeply engraved in crystal white granite.

It was a very plain stone. A simple, upright, rectangular slab, slightly wider than it was tall. No grass grew nearby. The ground was bare save for a few stunted weeds, as if the earth surrounding the stone had been salted.

The burial vault had collapsed long ago, leaving a hole in the ground near the base of the stone. The hole was dark, and deep, and just narrow enough to dissuade exploration.

The girl simply stared at the stone a moment, chest heaving.

A sound from behind. Like the snapping of fingers, echoing in a way her surroundings shouldn’t have allowed. She swiveled around and stared into the distance. Listening.

Behind her, something emerged from inside the collapsed burial vault. A snare on a swivel, fashioned from thin, braided steel cable. It flared open slowly, without even the faintest sound, and came to a rest on the ground.

The girl’s heart was racing. She could feel it in her chest. Hear it in her ears. She stood her ground.

But nothing came.

Her heartbeat began to slow. Her breathing, began to calm. Her muscles, loosened. Her jaw, unclenched. And for just a moment, she let herself relax.

Something blew a sudden puff of icy air into her face. She took a step backward.

Deep down in the darkness, bones assembled. The snare zipped tight around the girl’s ankle. With a sharp yank, she was flat on the ground. And with a steady pull, she was

dragged

down

the

hole.

Chapter 2

Hello rabbit.

Those were the first words the girl heard. They were spoken in a raspy, feminine voice that seemed as if it were both breathed into the crook of her neck, and reverberated inside her skull. It was dark, and she couldn’t see their speaker.

The girl uttered a pitiful whimper in response, but there were a set of cold, arachnodactyl fingers wrapped around her face, clasping her jaw shut.

Sh-sh-shhh… Don’t speak.

A moment passed as the presence verified she’d been heard. She had been. She unclasped her fingers from the girl’s face, affectionately stroked one of her cornflower blue braids, then retreated into the darkness.

One by one, crudely formed candles began to light. But they didn’t burn with fire. They burned with something unfamiliar, something that seemed to suck color out of existence.

As each candle was lit, it faintly illuminated a skeletal hand, which then retracted back into the shadows. As if it were setting the candles alight by pinching their wicks.

Eventually, the candle lighting ceased. The girl could just barely make out a figure looming above her. A skeletal silhouette, nearly indiscernible in the dim, unearthly light. She strained her eyes, trying desperately to decipher what she was looking at.

Then, the figure ignited. Forcefully, like an antique propane stove burner, lit a few seconds too late.

And there she was… An uncanny, luminous silhouette in a well-worn sheepskin aviator jacket. The girl simply stared at her a moment, dumbfounded.

The spirit looked as if she had been diaphonized, and immersed in glycerin. A semi-corporeal matrix of decellularized tissue, lit from inside by luminous teal bones.

She moved as if she were immersed in glycerin as well. An inquisitive cock of her head sent her ethereal white hair drifting, like eelgrass.

The girl averted her eyes, trying desperately to wish herself awake. But the spirit placed a finger beneath the girl’s chin, and raised her eyeline to meet her own.

In this state of coerced eye contact, the girl finally peered deeply into the eyes that had stalked her in the graveyard. Concave, hemispherical eyes, mottled with iridescent teals, blues, and golds.

The spirit grinned impishly. Her skull was kinetic. Each bone moved freely, independent of the others. It looked as if the bones of a human skull had been teased apart at the seams, and their edges whittled smooth. Scraps of bone carved into an intricate, emotive mechanism. It was almost piscine, like the skull of some ancient Devonian fish.

The spirit took hold of the girl by the jaw, rotating her head from side to side. Studying her. Finally, she released her grip, affectionately tapping the girl on the nose with a finger.

The spirit laughed. It was a harsh, gravelly laugh, and it rattled the girl’s teeth in their sockets.

The spirit’s cavernous maw contained no teeth. Instead, her jaws formed a bony, jagged, shearing edge. Scissor-like, as if she’d been mindlessly grinding maxilla against mandible for ages.

Her laughing ceased. She stared at the girl expectantly. Almost playfully. The girl remained silent.

You’re a quiet one, aren’t you rabbit?

The girl reminded the spirit that she had told her not to speak. Her words were whispered, and just barely escaped her lips.

A pharyngeal snicker pushed the spirit’s ethereal white tongue from her throat. She pinched it betwixt the cusps of her bladed jaws, but it did little to conceal her amusement.

The girl surveyed her surroundings. She was in a burrow. A spacious burrow, but a burrow nonetheless. Fine, pale roots hung from the ceiling, and the walls were a rich, loamy soil.

The floor of the chamber was a deep, humid layer of finely shredded wood. Tweezed apart fragment by fragment, like a bored parakeet shreds paper. The girl briefly wondered where it had all come from, but her curiosity was quelled by the sight of rusty coffin nails blended into the mulch.

There were holes in the walls of the burrow, just a few inches across. Too narrow for a person to pass through, but wide enough for a human skeleton, if it were done bone by bone. Where they led, she had no way of knowing.

Over her shoulder, the girl spotted a larger tunnel. This one was wide enough for a person to wriggle through, with difficulty. But no wider than that. The girl feared how far it might extend before it reached the surface.

Not that it mattered. It was the only way out of the burrow. The girl side-eyed the spirit surreptitiously. The spirit was distracted by the girl’s sketchbook, admiring her work with a delighted grin. Relishing the eerie, Gothic romance of it all. She licked a finger and turned the page.

This was the girl’s chance. She bolted for the tunnel, and began to scramble inside.

Ah-ah-ah…

She felt the spirit grab hold of her ankles with long, icy fingers, and yank her violently back into the burrow. She gripped the girl tightly by the shoulders, and rolled her onto her back.

What are you running from, rabbit?

The girl shouted at the spirit, demanding that she stop calling her rabbit.

The spirit was taken aback, but only for a moment. She let out a short, harsh laugh. She seemed almost thrilled by the girl’s newfound pluckiness.

Why? I caught you in a snare, didn’t I? You live in a hole.

The girl exclaimed crossly that no, she did not, in fact, live in a hole.

The spirit glanced about the burrow, rather facetiously. She grinned widely and looked the girl directly in the eyes.

You’re sure about that, are you?

The girl gave the spirit an uneasy look.

The spirit extended an arachnodactyl hand. After considerable hesitation, the girl reached out and grasped it. The spirit’s touch was intensely cold against her bare skin.

The spirit hoisted the girl upright, and she found herself seated quietly on the soft, wooden mulch.

The girl rested her head in her hands. She was still very much struggling to process her situation. She raised her head meekly, and asked the spirit, rather bluntly, what she was.

A disquieted expression flitted across the spirit’s face, so subtly as to be nearly imperceptible. She was quick to recover however, flashing a fabricated grin.

That’s a good question, rabbit. If I ever find out, you’ll be the first to know.

The girl then inquired, her tone exceedingly wary, about just what it was the spirit wanted. The spirit’s playful demeanor returned.

I want for naught, rabbit. I have everything I need.

The girl then requested, if the spirit did indeed have everything she needed, that she let her go. She struggled to mask the growing indignation in her voice.

Oh, I can’t do that, rabbit.

The girl stared crossly at the spirit, awaiting an explanation.

If I did that, I’d want for something again.

There was an extended silence. The girl wasn’t quite sure what was supposed to happen next.

So she asked.

The spirit cocked her head just a little further than one might expect possible, and smiled at the girl. Almost sweetly. But she did not speak.

The girl scoffed. Averted her eyes. She didn’t want to give this ghoul the satisfaction.

But the spirit was patient, and eventually, the girl’s eyes wandered back. She found herself staring intently at the spirit’s heart. It was visible through her unzipped aviator jacket, nestled snugly within her rib cage. It beat softly between a pair of nearly imperceptible lungs, visible only by the cartilaginous rings scaffolding their various passageways. Inhaling and exhaling with a surprising tranquility.

The spirit’s heartbeat seemed to have an almost sedative effect on the girl. Her mood became still, and serene.

Would you like to touch it?

The girl looked to the spirit, and to her own surprise, she nodded… she did want to touch it.

The spirit descended from her mid-air perch, and delicately grasped the girl by the wrist. The girl inhaled sharply. She knew the spirit’s touch would be cold, but somehow it still caught her off guard.

The spirit looked the girl in the eye, as if awaiting some sort of signal. The girl’s silence seemed to suffice. The spirit plunged the girl’s hand deep into her abdomen.

The girl gasped, and by reflex, attempted to withdraw her hand. But the spirit was strong, and held steady.

A moment passed, and the girl began to recover from her initial shock. She flexed her fingers experimentally. The spirit’s entrails were so faint as to be nearly invisible, but they could be felt. They were cold, and fluttered with a rhythmic peristalsis.

The girl could feel them intersecting her flesh. Seeping between her cells like syrup through a sieve. To feel something so visually insubstantial provide such tactile resistance was an uncanny sensation.

The spirit slid a hand along the girl’s arm, and braced her elbow with the other, guiding the girl’s hand up and into her rib cage. The girl resisted ever so slightly, but the spirit resisted in return, slowly pulling the girl’s arm deeper into her chest.

Her fingertips intersected the spirit’s lungs, and she could feel a freezing wind within. She could feel the spirit’s heartbeat, sending ripples through the tissues surrounding it. Her breathing began to quicken.

The spirit’s breathing ceased entirely. There was no more freezing wind. Just stillness. Silence.

The girl could see her own curled fingers, just millimeters from the spirit’s softly beating heart.

She extended her fingertips, and the two intersected.

Immediately, the girl felt the warmth vacate her body. It began with the surface of her skin, and crept steadily toward her core. A coldness she never would have thought possible in a body with a pulse. She began to struggle.

The spirit released her grip, and the girl tumbled backward onto the damp mulch, shivering violently. The spirit watched with interest.

Oh rabbit… are you getting cold?

She asked this with an inquisitiveness, as if it were a novel concept to her. She received no immediate response.

The spirit removed her sheepskin aviator jacket, and hung it gingerly over the girl’s shoulders. The girl held the jacket tight to her skin, but it did not warm her. In fact, it only seemed to make her colder.

A few minutes passed. Eventually, the girl had recovered enough to speak. Through chattering teeth, she asked the spirit where the jacket had come from.

I stole it.

The girl quietly examined the worn leather, and aged wool. The jacket appeared well-cared-for, but it was obviously very old.

The girl noticed that her thinking seemed slower than it had before… Sluggish. Strenuous. But eventually, a second question began to percolate through her mind. She asked the spirit who the jacket had been stolen from.

A pilot. Don’t worry… they weren’t using it anymore.

The girl decided not to question any further. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what the spirit had meant by that.

Again, a few minutes passed. The girl found herself focused on the flickering of the candles that lit the burrow, wondering if they might provide some modicum of warmth.

She attempted to reach for the candle nearest to her, only to find her muscles had stiffened. It felt as if her body had become waxy. Every movement, met with a distressing resistance. Yet somehow, she managed to grasp the candle, and bring it close.

But the candle provided no warmth. Passing her fingertips through the uncanny flame felt no different than passing them through thin air. Even touching the burning wick itself provided no sensation.

It took a disquieting amount of effort, but the girl finally managed to form a coherent question in her mind. She asked the spirit where the candles had come from.

I made them.

The girl pondered this a moment, before realizing that the spirit’s answer clarified very little. From what did she make them?

There’s plenty of wax to be found in a graveyard, rabbit.

It was only after the spirit spoke that the girl realized she must have wondered her question aloud. However, she was no longer cognizant enough to decipher what the spirit had meant.

She awoke suddenly. She had only slipped into unconsciousness for a moment, but to regain consciousness without any memory of losing it was jarring. She shook her head.

The girl felt something sickly and wet soaking into her clothing. An opaque, crimson liquid was seeping from the walls of the burrow, and pooling in the mulch beneath her.

Repulsed, she attempted to stagger to her feet, only to find her previously waxy muscles were now rigid, and immovable. She began to panic.

Something the matter, rabbit?

The girl told the spirit that she was stuck. That she couldn’t move. There was a genuine, unmistakable fear in her voice.

The crimson liquid continued to pool beneath her, like an incoming tide on an exceptionally shallow beach.

She pleaded for help. The spirit sank slowly to the floor, and knelt in the pooling liquid. She began to run her fingers through the girl’s cornflower-blue hair.

The girl’s ribs began to seize. It was becoming difficult to breathe. She tried to express this, but her breath was restricted enough that she struggled to form the necessary words.

Nevertheless, the spirit understood. She lovingly brushed the girl’s cheek, staring deeply into her eyes.

Oh rabbit… don’t worry your pretty little lungs about it.

The rising liquid met the girl’s lips, and began to flow down her throat. The spirit embraced the girl tenderly.

You’ll never have to breathe again.

Chapter 3

A thought entered the girl’s mind. A casual inkling that perhaps this was death.

She felt weightless. Adrift in a vast abyss. The barrier between her body and the fluid that surrounded her felt vague. She wondered if perhaps she was dissolving into it… unspooling, like gossamer threads. She couldn’t deduce the position of her limbs, or the temperature of her skin. Or whether her eyes were open or closed. There was no light. No sound. To someone who had always found the world a little too bright, and a little too loud, it was a welcome relief.

With nothing to upset her senses, the girl quietly became aware of her own heartbeat. She could feel it pulsing gently through her veins. Hear it flowing through her ears. If this was death, she thought, perhaps she didn’t mind it so much.

Her lips parted slightly. Fluid seeped between them, caressing the tip of her tongue. It tasted metallic… like a nosebleed.

The taste of blood sent the girl into a panic, fracturing any sense of tranquility as if it were glass. Once again, she felt cold, intact, and desperate to breathe.

She struggled to wake her sleeping limbs. Flexing the pins and needles from her ragged nerves, she swam weakly in a direction she desperately hoped was upward.

Thin air. A gasp for breath. Coughing violently, the girl clambered onto the surface of a vast, crimson lake. Somehow, the lake’s surface bore her weight. As if, despite everything, the lake was only millimeters deep.

The girl simply lay there, in a film of blood, trying desperately to catch her breath.

Shivering and terrified, the girl rose to her feet. Her clothing was saturated with blood, and weighed heavy on her shoulders. She stumbled slightly. Whatever lay beneath the lake’s surface felt almost spongy beneath her feet, like the saturated soil of a peat bog. Eventually, she found her footing.

She surveyed her surroundings. The air was as still as the surface of the lake itself. The vast blood flat might have appeared mirror-like, if there had been a sky to reflect. But there was no sky. There was nothing but a deep, dark, velvet void.

Staring into the distance, she tried to locate the edge of the lake. On the horizon, she saw what appeared to be dead trees. Branchless. Pale. Needle-like. Pointing steadfastly toward that abyssal nothing of a sky. Reflected in the glassy surface of the lake itself, like a grove of cedars, flooded a century ago.

That’s what they looked like to her, at least. They seemed so far away, it was difficult to tell.

She focused carefully.

A pair of arachnodactyl hands clasped the girl’s shoulders from behind, and a facetious whisper in her ear sent a shiver inching up her spine.

You’ve soiled my jacket, rabbit.

With a single swift movement, the spirit yanked her sheepskin aviator jacket from the girl’s shoulders. She slipped her own arms through the sleeves, and shook off the excess blood, like a starling in a birdbath.

Droplets of blood spattered the girl’s face. She felt her hairs bristle, and her temper flare. She snapped. She screamed at the spirit, demanding that she let her go.

For a fleeting moment, the spirit appeared almost startled. A careful observer might even have glimpsed something resembling a second thought flicker across her face. However, it was quickly brushed aside by a cocksure smile.

The spirit circled the girl, so swiftly and smoothly that by the time the girl had noticed, the spirit was already behind her.

The spirit hooked an arm around the girl’s neck. The girl tried to protest, but was silenced by the spirit pressing an icy finger to her lips.

Hush now, rabbit… You’re safe with me.

In another context, from another individual, this sentiment might have brought comfort. It was spoken in a calming tone, after all, and with a loving inflection. But this was a very specific individual, in a very particular context, and the girl didn’t find it reassuring at all.

The spirit nestled her chin in the crook of the girl’s neck, nuzzling her blood-stained cheek with an unnerving affection. The girl inhaled sharply. Exhaled with a shudder. The sensation was deeply uncomfortable.

The girl attempted to wriggle free, but the spirit’s vise-like grip only tightened. She felt the spirit’s thigh creeping up her own. She saw an opportunity, and struck.

She reached for the spirit’s femur, plunging her fingers through ghostly layers of muscle and sinew. She gripped the bone tightly in her fist, and attempted to wrench it from its socket.

Startled, the spirit instinctively released her grip. She panicked, and began batting at the girl’s cranium with open palms. The girl, in turn, twisted the spirit’s hip ever more forcefully.

She could feel the joint failing. Gripping the bone tight with both hands, she gave it one final twist.

The bone popped from its socket with such force that the girl lost her balance, falling backwards into the shallow lake and landing on her coccyx.

She winced in anticipation of pain, but the marshy substrate managed to soften the blow. She gave her head a shake, and stared at the bone in her hands.

It was no longer luminous. Outside the confines of the spirit’s ghostly flesh, it resembled any other stray bone. Dull, and dusty, and stained with tannins.

Yet, something felt off. It was weighted oddly… heavier toward the hip than toward the knee. A closer look revealed a tarnished stainless steel hip replacement, cemented tightly to the bone itself.

Give that back! It’s mine!

The spirit’s voice was shrill, and furious. The femur obviously wasn’t hers. It was stolen, and the girl said as much.

Of course I stole it, that means it’s mine!

The girl stumbled to her feet. It was clear from her stance that she had become fed up with the spirit’s games.

She glimpsed a flicker of hesitation in the spirit’s eyes. A fleeting moment of uncertainty, interrupted by a hollow bark of aggression.

I said give it BACK!

Her words were hissed, as if they had been puffed through the throat of a brooding mute swan. Yet the girl stood her ground.

The spirit stared daggers into the girl’s eyes, then glanced briefly at the femur. The girl took notice, tightening her grip on the bone defensively.

The spirit shivered with frustration. She shrieked like a jealous gull, and lunged at the girl.

The girl swung the femur with all her might, wielding the steel implant as a blunt weapon. The spirit dodged the attack, and lunged a second time.

Again, the girl swung her improvised war club. The spirit heard it whistle past her skull, at a proximity she immediately deemed too close for comfort.

The spirit quickly backed off, and held out an open palm, signaling the girl to stand down.

She did, a little.

The spirit began to approach the girl, palm still outstretched. The girl abruptly dropped to one knee, and braced the femur over the other, threatening to snap it in half if the spirit came any closer.

The spirit drew back apprehensively. It was clear she took the girl’s threat seriously.

A moment passed, and a thought crystallized in the spirit’s skull. Its conception was apparent on her face, if only for a split second. She breathed what appeared to be a sigh of relief, then locked eyes with the girl.

Alright rabbit…

She smiled, casually brushing back her ethereal white hair. The girl stared warily, ready to act on her promise.

I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot… let’s take a few steps back.

The spirit began circling the girl, slowly. Deliberately. The girl instinctively rose to her feet and took a step back, unsure what the spirit was playing at.

Not literal steps, rabbit.

The girl scoffed. She knew perfectly well what the spirit had meant, and she knew the spirit knew it as well.

Figurative steps. Let’s figure out where this all went… sour.

A whiff of something rancid prickled at the girl’s olfactory nerves. An oily, iridescent film had begun to form on the lake’s surface. The spirit snapped her fingers, recapturing the girl’s attention.

You do like it here, don’t you?

She could feel the spirit edging imperceptibly closer with each circle she made. A gradual, encroaching spiral.

Of course you do… it’s quiet. Peaceful. Just like that graveyard you spent so much time in, right?

A low-pitched burbling. The girl turned to identify its source, but by the time she saw it, all that was left was a ring of concentric ripples in the lake’s surface, dispersing into nothing.

Right. So what is it that’s upsetting you, rabbit?

Another burbling sound. And another. The girl saw them this time, from the corner of her eye. A pair of large bubbles, rising from the surface and bursting, as if from a volcanic mudpot. It dawned on the girl how thick and dark the blood had become. It was… coagulating.

Spit it out, rabbit. Nothing I’ve done, surely?

The bubbling gradually became more persistent, overlapping frequently enough that the girl quickly lost count. She began to choke, and sputter. The gas rising from the lake smelled of decay. Of putrescine and cadaverine. An anaerobic slurry, breathing rancid puffs of hydrogen sulfide.

Speak up rabbit, I can’t hear you!

The surface of the lake had begun to form a froth. A putrescent scarlet seafoam that shuddered and trembled with each bursting bubble. A feeling was welling up in the girl’s abdomen. An unbearable nausea unlike anything she had ever experienced.

Use your words, rabbit! Enunciate!

The poor girl was retching. Her abdominal muscles contracted rhythmically. Violently. Forcing the feeling up into her chest, into her throat, into the very sinuses of her skull.

The spirit was close now. Close enough that she was practically whispering in the girl’s ear.

Thaaat’s it rabbit… let it out.

The girl doubled over. Vomited. The spirit delicately plucked the femur from the girl’s fingertips as she fell to her knees.

Oh rabbit… It’s the smell, isn’t it?

She popped the femur back into its socket.

Don’t worry. It’ll pass.

The girl simply knelt there. Breathing labored. Staring at the mess. Gradually, the bubbling began to subside, and the sickly stench no longer seemed quite so unbearable. Now that her gut was empty, the endorphins began flowing through her bloodstream, gently quelling her nausea.

Instead, her nausea had been replaced by a burdensome pressure in her ears. The atmosphere felt constricted, as if it were held taut inside a latex balloon. She swallowed, attempting to equalize the pressure inside and outside her skull, but it didn’t seem to work.

The girl felt ten slender fingers slide beneath her arms, along her rib cage, and begin to lift her to her feet.

Alright rabbit. Up up up.

There was effort in the spirit’s voice, as she hoisted the girl’s dead weight. The girl groaned softly. Her abdominal muscles still ached from the strain of retching.

The girl teetered slightly, then stumbled. The spirit gently corrected her balance. She patted the girl affectionately on the head. Began stroking her hair. Comforting her.

The girl lashed out, pushing the spirit away. Warning the spirit not to touch her. To never touch her.

The spirit winced. Noticeably, as if the girl’s words had inflicted a sharp and sudden pain. An ice pick to her chest. For a fleeting moment, there was hurt in the spirit’s uncanny, iridescent eyes.

Her diaphanous muscles tensed. Her arachnodactyl fingers balled into fists. A quivering, guttural growl of frustration forced itself up through her trachea, and she turned her back to the girl.

There was a long, inelegant silence. The girl began massaging her forehead and temples with her fingertips. Her patience was wearing thin, and the pressure in her ears was becoming uncomfortable.

She was interrupted, however. By a sound. A deep, omnipresent hissing, almost too low-frequency to hear. It began quietly, then slowly grew louder, eventually becoming a fleshy, infrasonic sputtering that rattled her core. Both the girl and the spirit alike surveyed the sky apprehensively.

A deafening eruption. A sudden decompression. A violent, stinking windstorm, and a sharp ringing in the girl’s ears. Where once her eardrums had been pressed uncomfortably into her skull, she now felt them bulging outward.

The wind roared like whitewater, and the girl struggled to remain upright on the soft, slippery muck beneath her feet. She leaned into the gale, desperate not to lose her footing.

The spirit watched calmly as the girl struggled. She seemed almost unaffected by the storm, save for her fluttering, ethereal white hair. She nearly found herself reaching out to help the girl. To break her inevitable fall.

But instead, she paused. Let her arm fall to her side. The wind faltered, and the spirit watched as the girl fell face-first into sludgy, clotted blood.

Chapter 4

The velvet black sky had collapsed, crumbling like gold leaf, raining down like ash, and dissolving like candy floss.

In its place was an overcast sky. A featureless, unbroken sheet of mist, diffusing a cold, sterile light.

The girl sat cross-legged in a thick, liver-colored mud of congealed blood. She watched absentmindedly as little somethings scuttled about on its surface. She couldn’t quite call them flies. They moved too erratically to identify, and only seemed to sit still in her peripheral vision. A glance, and they would take to the air, leaving behind tiny clusters of carefully deposited eggs.

At least, she assumed they were eggs. To her, they resembled miniature tapioca pearls, only a millimeter or two across.

Suddenly, the girl piped up. She asked, rather casually, what it would take to convince the spirit to let her go.

The girl looked skyward. Roughly fifteen feet up, directly above her, the spirit hung motionlessly in the air. Balled up. Back to the ground. Hiding ineffectually behind the thick leather of her sheepskin jacket. She spoke drearily into her folded arms.

There’s nothing you can do to convince me, rabbit.

Her voice was coarse, dry, and disillusioned. A prickly static in the girl’s ears.

The girl thought on this a moment, before abruptly proposing a bargain of some sort… a trade, perhaps?

You have nothing to trade, rabbit.

Not on her, the girl admitted. But if the spirit were to let her go, she could retrieve something. Anything the spirit wanted.

The spirit sighed softly. Too softly for the girl to hear. The girl waited patiently for an answer, but she did not receive one.

How about a favor then? A task to carry out? Surely there was something the girl could do in exchange for her freedom?

The spirit balled up tighter, burying her face in her knees. She hung silently in the air, save for the gentle creaking of leather against leather.

Again, the girl prodded. What was it going to take? She was willing to make a deal with the devil.

The spirit uncurled, slowly. She swiveled around. Body first, with her head lagging behind. She squinted at the girl.

I’m not a devil, rabbit!

The spirit’s voice was saturated with incredulity.

I’m not a demon!

I’m not a fiend, or a monster!

I’m not trying to hurt you!

I’m not trying to make you unhappy!

The spirit lurched forward with each statement. She reached out toward the girl with one hand, resisting the urge to touch. Her fingertips hovered mere inches from the girl’s cheek. Her hand trembled with frustration, then snapped into a fist.

Wh…

The spirit inhaled softly, her jaw trembling. She tilted her head in genuine, wounded confusion.

Why do you hate me so much?

Now, this was a question that caught the girl off guard. This spirit really had no idea. She was naive. Completely naive. Naive to the way people work. How they think. How they feel. Naive to pain. To empathy. To human suffering.

This spirit had never conceived of a point of view that ran contrary to her own. Never had any inkling of the existence of an outside perspective. And now that she was face to face with a girl who embodied this concept fully, her worldview and confidence were beginning to corrode.

The girl simply stared at the spirit. In disbelief. In pity. All she could think to do was ask her: What did you expect?

The spirit’s breathing began to hasten, and shallow. Huffing quietly through her open mouth like a dying animal. She averted her eyes. Not in shame, but simply to allow herself time to think. She raked her fingers awkwardly through her drifting, ethereal white hair. Swallowed an uncomfortable lump in her throat.

The spirit began wagging her index finger, as if she were trying to summon a thought from deep in the folds of her brain.

You and I, w-we were supposed to…

She retracted her finger. Bit her lip betwixt her bladed jaws.

We were going to be happy together. I th-th-thought…

The girl squinted narrowly, watching in silence as the spirit, for the first time, struggled to find words.

I-I thought you would fall in love?

This was not worded as a question, but it was certainly spoken as one. It was less of a question for the girl, and more of a question the spirit was asking herself.

The girl answered it nonetheless, with a question of her own. A question that caused the spirit’s diaphanous muscles to tense, and her heart to visibly palpitate: With you?

The spirit appeared reluctant to look the girl in the eye, but the penetrating silence slowly forced her hand.

The girl shook her head in disbelief, uttering a question so blunt and direct as to fracture bone: How could you possibly have thought that?

The spirit remained quiet for a moment. Her thoughts seemed distant, and her psyche fragile. She chattered her mandible rapidly, a strange tic that caught the girl off guard.

She was thinking.

Eventually, the spirit drifted a ways away. She rolled up the sleeve of her sheepskin aviator jacket, reached deep into the congealed blood, retrieved the girl’s sketchbook from the muck with an unpleasant suction noise… and rose silently into the air.

The girl returned to her pondering. The little tapioca pearls peppered the ground now, like tiny hailstones after a brief and gentle storm.

A closer look revealed something moving inside. Nearly imperceptible threads, wriggling about wildly like little stop-motion dancers. The girl watched them intently, for there was little else to do.

Over time, she began to grow almost attached to them. She watched as they turned from a pale, translucent white to a deep, oxygenated crimson, and grew from the width of a silken thread to that of a horsehair plucked from a violin bow. She watched as they grew increasingly snug in their little gelatinous wombs, and wondered what they must be thinking. Or if they thought of anything at all.

One of the pearls burst, splitting along an invisible seam like a wine grape squeezed between two fingertips. Its occupant wriggled free of the deflated pearl, and out onto the vast expanse of gelatinized blood.

Why do you draw these, rabbit?

The girl was yanked suddenly from her thoughts. She apologized. She hadn’t quite heard what the spirit had said.

Why do you draw these?

Again, she asked the spirit to clarify.

The spirit turned a page of the girl’s sketchbook. The pages were delicate, and saturated with blood. Yet the graphite drawings were still clearly visible, and the spirit’s fingers were nimble enough not to tear them.

These… romances.

The spirit’s voice was wistful. She caressed the cheek of one of the figures on the page. It was a girl, not entirely unlike the one who drew it, in a passionate embrace with a spirit, not entirely unlike herself.

The girl briefly pondered why she drew such things, but she quickly brushed those thoughts aside, convincing herself that she didn’t know. In the silence that ensued, she became vaguely aware that she may have whispered her thoughts aloud.

She shook her head dismissively, assuring the spirit that they were just drawings. That they didn’t mean anything.

The spirit tore the page from the sketchbook, wadding it up like a wet paper towel. She squeezed the excess blood from the page, and tossed it into the girl’s lap.

Look again.

The girl uncrumpled the drawing. Stared at it. Reminisced on the feelings that had spurred its creation. If she were being honest with herself, this drawing had come from a place of longing. Of loneliness.

There are a hundred drawings just like that one in this book of yours, rabbit.

The spirit snapped the book shut with a wet slap, brandishing it in one hand as if to draw attention to it.

You spent time making these.

The girl asked the spirit what her point was, in a tone both sheepish and standoffish. She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she had failed to mask her embarrassment.

My point is, rabbit, that you’re a liar.

The spirit tossed the book in the girl’s direction, and it landed in the sludge with a sickening splat.

You say these drawings mean nothing. It’s not true.

The girl gathered her sketchbook and held it protectively to her chest. She stared at the spirit, brow furrowed.

They must mean something!

The spirit’s tone was accusatory, that was undeniable. But it betrayed a desperation. The staredown that ensued made it clear that behind the posturing, and the arguing… the spirit was pleading with the girl.

But the girl refused to back down. Her eyes were intense, and their contact, unbroken. How long this lasted, neither could say. But it felt an eternity. The spirit began to squirm.

She shuddered violently, as if she were struggling to tamp down an outburst that was welling up inside her. But instead, she swiveled around, and went silent.

The girl rested her palms on the ground behind her. It was more worms than blood at this point. The tapioca pearl eggs had long since hatched, and their occupants grown, consuming and replacing their curdled blood substrate. All that was left were tangled clots the color of red wine, undulating gently, and contracting suddenly when disturbed.

The girl wondered where the time had gone, and why the sensation of sitting cross-legged in writhing worms didn’t seem to bother her as much as she thought it should.

She closed her eyes, and exhaled.

Do you know why I chose you, rabbit?

The girl inhaled sharply. The spirit’s voice had come from directly over her shoulder, and it startled her.

I’ve watched people wander that graveyard for decades. They’d come with expensive cameras. They’d come with rolls of paper, and colored wax. Occasionally, they’d come with flowers, if they were very old. But not you, rabbit… You came because you were lonely.

The girl began to fidget uncomfortably. She assured the spirit that was not the case. Why would she go to a place so empty if she were lonely?

You’re lying again, rabbit. I know what loneliness looks like.

The girl sighed softly, her lip quivering.

You sat on the same bench, time and time again. Drawing ghosts, and spirits. Each day I’d watch you draw another. Another daydream. Another intimate fantasy.

The girl’s cheeks flushed red with blood, and she turned her face away from the spirit’s voice. The spirit sidled closer. Close enough that the girl could feel her cold breath in the crook of her neck.

When you came to that graveyard each day, you were hoping, secretly, that a phantom would sweep you off your feet… weren’t you, rabbit?

The girl cringed in embarrassment. As silly as it sounded when spoken aloud, the spirit was correct. She had hoped for that. Precisely that, in fact. Of course, she never believed that such a thing might actually happen.

There was a long, lingering silence. The spirit swiveled around, turning her back to the girl’s.

Anyway, rabbit. That’s why I chose you.

The girl muttered under her breath. You can’t just choose someone. They have to choose you back. A nearly imperceptible grimace flitted across the spirit’s face.

So I’ve learned.

And with that, the spirit kicked off the ground, ascending quietly back into the sky.

Had she? The girl wondered this question aloud. The spirit drifted to a halt, and hung in the air. She swiveled around, and gave the girl a quizzical look.

The girl repeated herself: Had the spirit learned?

Are you deaf, rabbit? I’m not going to say it again.

The girl insisted that if that were true, and the spirit really had learned from her mistakes, then she should just let her go! Find someone else, who actually wants all of this!

The spirit began to sink lazily back to the ground, headfirst, like a salted baitfish through glycerin.

In the distance, there was a deep groaning sound, followed by a cracking, and a splintering. The pale, branchless, needle-like trees on the horizon had begun creaking, and toppling, their trunks the last thing to be consumed by the matted expanse of worms.

The spirit snapped her fingers, so as to attract the girl’s attention without touching.

Their eyes met, and with that, the two were face to face. The girl, right side up, and the spirit, hanging upside down, as if from an invisible thread.

The spirit’s expression was almost tender.

I can’t let you go, rabbit. You’ve been without oxygen for several hours. You don’t have an intact enough brain to go back.

The girl was struggling to understand. The spirit could see it in her eyes. She put it more bluntly.

You’ve begun to decay, rabbit.

The gravity of the situation finally began to dawn on the girl. What had once been an idle thought was now cementing itself in her mind as an irrevocable truth. This really was death.

She began to breathe heavily. Her larynx began to ache. No. The girl repeated herself. No no no no no. This couldn’t be happening. She stumbled to her feet. Began pacing.

Listen, the girl said. Listen. She told the spirit she didn’t need a body. Just let her go. She could live with being a ghost.

The spirit shook her head dismissively.

There’s no such thing as ghosts, rabbit… once a soul dissipates, it’s gone.

The girl couldn’t believe what she was hearing. What was the spirit, if not a ghost?

I’m just me, rabbit.

No. No no no no. She pleaded with the spirit. There must be something she could do to fix this! There had to be some way to undo what she had done! Please!

Listen, rabbit. The hocus-pocus it would take to unrot that brain of yours would literally kill me.

In the distance, another tree began to creak, and fall.

Your program is running on my hardware, rabbit.

The spirit tapped her temple knowingly.

So get used to it.

Chapter 5

A cocoon bounced off the girl’s forehead, and tumbled to the ground, disappearing amongst an endless expanse of others exactly like it.

The blood had long run dry, and the worms had coiled tightly, pupating inside a thick, leathery shell of dried mucus. If the girl had been bothered to look around, she might have compared them to beans in an endless silo.

Here and there, one would split at the tip, with a nearly imperceptible click, and a pale, pulsating ptilinum would peek through the crack.

A second cocoon hit the girl’s face, this time bouncing off her cheek. She flinched, causing the dried blood on her skin to flake off, and drift to the ground, like dandruff.

The air smelled of mold. Of mildew. Of dust and must. It bit sharply at the girl’s nose, but she didn’t seem to care.

A third cocoon, and a fourth.

Cat got your tongue, rabbit?

The spirit hung miserably in the air, flicking cocoons in the girl’s direction.

The girl didn’t respond.

You’re stuck here forever, rabbit. The least you could do is try to hold a conversation.

The cocoons continued to split at the tip with a click, creating a quiet cacophony not unlike the desynchronous ticking of a clockmaker’s workshop. The early risers had already wriggled free of their leathery shells. They were soft, and pale, and their legs flailed wildly as they struggled to find their footing.

The spirit twirled a cocoon in her fingertips while she waited, visually tracing the spiraling imprint left behind by the liquefying worm inside.

She touched the cocoon to the tip of a bony, tooth-like cusp, and applied pressure, impaling it. She sneered distastefully, tonguing it back off the cusp, and spat it at the girl.

The cocoon landed in the girl’s hair, and stuck there. She shuddered involuntarily.

A handful of the pale, scrambling dipterids that peppered the ground around her had begun to harden. To blacken. To pump their crumpled wings full of hemolymph, and air them out to dry.

The spirit watched the girl, waiting for her presence to be acknowledged. But the acknowledgment never came.

The spirit cast her remaining fistful of cocoons at the girl.

Why won’t you speak to me, rabbit?!

The cocoons bounced off the girl’s skin, and rattled as they hit the ground.

You couldn’t keep your mouth shut before!

The girl’s lip quivered. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes, and she was trying desperately to prevent their escape.

I’ve been alone in that hole for sixty years, rabbit! Do you have even the slightest idea what that feels like?! Any idea at all?!

The girl’s breathing became unsteady, and agitated. Yet somehow, she found herself unable to muster the energy to move. To speak. To do anything at all.

The spirit kicked a filthy clod of cocoons at the girl. The handful of flies that were capable of flight took to the air with a pitiful buzzing, settling back to the ground only a few feet away.

Look at you! You can’t even bring yourself to look at me! Am I that repulsive to you, rabbit?! Is the prospect of my company so distasteful to you that you’d rather just wither away?!

The girl was crying now. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. The spirit’s screaming had triggered a paralytic panic attack, and the spirit knew it. Yet somehow, the girl’s upset only seemed to provoke the spirit further.

So she continued. She continued until her voice was hoarse, and the ground had turned to a thick carpet of flies. Crawling on the girl’s skin. Buzzing in her ears. Swarming her nostrils to the point where she could barely breathe.

You can hate me all you want, rabbit! It won’t make a difference! Nothing you do will make a difference!

The spirit’s voice was strained, and her chest tight. And although there were no tears in her eyes, she breathed as if she were sobbing.

You’re never leaving me, understand?!

You’re MINE, rabbit!

The spirit quivered with rage. With frustration. She clenched her fists, and screamed at the girl. It was a primal, guttural scream, that caused vast clouds of flies to take to the air in wild murmurations. A droning, thickening darkness that blackened the sky.

It was in this fleeting moment, after the suffocating carpet had lifted, but before the flies had choked out the last glint of light, that their eyes met. Only then did the spirit finally grasp the depth of the girl’s pain. The weight of her suffering.

And then, everything went black.

Chapter 6

I’m sorry.

That’s what the spirit would have said to the girl, if the lump in her throat hadn’t plugged her larynx like a cork.

The swarming flies had long since dispersed, leaving the two of them sitting silently in an endless expanse of bone, as flat and smooth as a pebbled beach tumbled by the tides.

The girl ran her fingertips along the exposed blade of a pelvis, discolored and stained by blood reduced to soil. It had been halfway buried beneath carpals, and tarsals. Maxillae, and mandibles. Scattered teeth and disarticulated fragments of skull. She wondered if perhaps these were her own bones, repeated to infinity.

To the spirit, the girl seemed strangely at peace. A state of mind that the spirit envied, for her head was absolutely swimming. She felt guilt scratching and scraping at the folds of her brain, and regret prickling at its stem. A frightening and unfamiliar sinking feeling in her chest. A deepening awareness of the unforgivability of what she had done.

Again, the spirit tried to force an apology through her aching trachea, but her tongue stoppered her throat, and all that escaped was a pathetic croak.

The girl looked at the spirit a moment, and sighed softly. It was a sigh of quiet acceptance. It seemed foolish now, that she ever expected anything more from this spirit.

In time, the sun began to peer over the horizon, turning the sky from a paper white to a gentle sky blue.

In the warmth of the sunlight, the bones began to whiten imperceptibly. In time, they became old, and dry. Cracked, and weathered. Chalky, and pale.

And all the while, not a single word was spoken.

From between the sun-bleached bones, tender blades of grass began to emerge, reaching desperately toward the sunlight, and rooting themselves deeply into the soil beneath.

The spirit snuck a furtive glance at the girl, her head bowed meekly. The girl was simply sitting there, watching the grass grow.

It was no wonder the girl hated her. After what she had done, she deserved her hate. She had taken the girl’s freedom. Her life. Without hesitation, or thought. There was no redemption for her.

She was selfish. Ghastly. Loathsome and cruel. The fact that she had ever thought highly of herself now filled her with a stomach-churning embarrassment.

She was unworthy of the girl’s love. Of anyone’s love. She was an unsightly stain on creation, and the world would have been a better place had she not been a part of it.

Eventually, the endless expanse of bone became a verdant meadow that rippled in the breeze like ocean waves, though the spirit failed to notice. She simply picked at the grass, unconsciously. Compulsively.

And thought.

Chapter 7

The girl was not breathing.

Her heart no longer beat. Her skin was cool, and pale. Her muscles, rigid. Her amber eyes had sunken in their sockets, and her corneas had become clouded, and tacky. Like those of a discarded fish head left too long in the open air.

This was the body of a person who was unmistakably, unequivocally dead.

The spirit’s sheepskin aviator jacket was still draped over the girl’s shoulders. Her handmade adipocere candles had long burned down to stumps and snuffed themselves out. All that was left to light her burrow were her own luminescent bones.

And although her bones still radiated a diffuse teal light, it was no longer as vivid as it was before. No longer as intense. It was a dim, sickly light.

One of the spirit’s ribs fell from its cage, landing softly on the mulched coffin wood beneath them.

The spirit shivered and twitched. The nictitating membranes that had shuttered her sleeping eyes trembled momentarily. She was deep in the dream. A dream that had long since ceased to be pleasant.

The spirit, in her unconsciousness, only seemed to squeeze the girl tighter, nuzzling her face deeper into the crook of her neck. As if, for the first time, it was the spirit who was succumbing to the cold.

A second rib fell to the ground. The girl’s index finger twitched, nearly imperceptibly.

Chapter 8

The girl inhaled, sharply and suddenly. As if the tip of an icicle had been run up her bare spine. She turned to the spirit, dumbfounded.

“What did you just do?”

The spirit refused to acknowledge the girl’s question. She simply sat there, and continued to pick at the grass. The sun had slowed to a halt in the sky. Its stillness was too subtle for the girl to perceive, but the spirit knew.

“You’ve changed something. What’s going on?”

The spirit assured the girl that she had changed nothing. That she was being paranoid. The sun began to reverse direction. Again, too slowly for the girl to perceive.

The girl watched the spirit closely. She was up to something, and the girl was determined to find out what it was.

The grass began to retract. The girl could sense that something was off, but she struggled to pinpoint exactly what it was. The girl’s frustration grew, and she needled the spirit further.

“What are you playing at? Tell me. Now.”

The spirit snapped at her. She was up to nothing, and the girl should drop it, rabbit.

What seemed like hours passed, without a word spoken. In time, the girl’s suspicions became obvious. The grass was several inches shorter than it had been before. And not only that, it was speeding up.

But the girl said nothing. She simply watched. She watched the spirit, sulking in her little divot in the grass. She watched the sun as it inched back toward the horizon. And she watched the grasses retreat back into their seeds, and ungerminate.

The bones around them began to darken.

“Tell me what’s happening. Please.”

The spirit averted her eyes.

“I deserve to know.”

The spirit asserted that it was rude to look a gift horse in the mouth, rabbit. The girl briefly pondered the spirit’s slight misunderstanding of this phrase, but it was clear the spirit was offering something she considered a gift.

The girl backed off.

The gentle blue sky above them was long gone now, having faded to a stark paper white. The spirit coughed an ectoplasmic mucus from her lungs, and swallowed it back down her translucent esophagus.

“Okay, no. That’s enough. Explain yourself.”

The spirit struggled to suppress her hacking and sputtering. The girl rose to her feet and approached the spirit. She knelt down and began tapping the spirit’s skull repeatedly, forcing her to pay attention.

The spirit screamed at the girl. She screamed that she was trying to undo her mistake, rabbit! That she should be left alone to concentrate!

A string of mucus was hanging from her mouth. She wiped it from her chin and rose into the air, embarrassed. But it wasn’t long before she fell back to the ground with a bony clatter.

She coughed up a thick wad of mucus onto the ground. The girl approached her from behind, and placed a warm palm on the spirit’s shoulder, gently brushing her hair aside.

“How can you possibly undo your mistake? You told me that if you tried to unrot my brain, you would die…”

The spirit looked the girl in the eye, her jaw quivering. She looked as if she were about to cry.

Chapter 9

The air was black, and thick with flies. A ceaseless, thunderous buzzing battered the girl’s eardrums. There was nothing she could do, except wait for it to pass.

Eventually, the clouds of flies began to thin. Enough, at least, for the girl to stand, and attempt to find her bearings. The swarm was still thick enough to stifle her breathing, and her vision was impaired by the flies that fought incessantly to drink from the corners of her eyes. But the girl remained undeterred, swatting them away as best she could manage.

It took time, but the girl eventually found the spirit, sitting silently on a bed of empty, leathery cocoons. She was carpeted with flies. They drank freely from her open eyes. Lapped the phlegm from her mouth, and throat. The girl could see them, scuttling about deep inside the spirit’s trachea. An intrepid few had even wandered into her lungs themselves.

The spirit’s eyes shifted subtly in their sockets, as she sat, and thought. The end of her life was fast approaching, and she was taking the time to process that thought. She could, of course, have turned back at any time. And yet, for reasons she was still struggling to comprehend, she didn’t.

Was this really what she wanted?

“Is this really what you want?”

The girl’s voice snapped the spirit gently from her stupor. She was suddenly acutely aware of the insects in her chest, and began coughing violently, spewing clouds of flies into the air, followed by another thick, gelatinous wad of mucus.

She attempted to wipe the mucus from her chin using the sleeve of her jacket, with little success.

“You don’t have to go through with this, you know.”

The spirit insisted that yes, rabbit, she did have to go through with this. There was an audible irritation in her voice. A deliberate and precise articulation clearly intended to dissuade the girl from questioning her further.

The flies in the air around them began to fall to the ground, one by one, as their wings softened, and their bodies paled.

“You don’t. Not for me. I can stay here, if I need to. I’ll find a way to manage. Neither of us has to die.”

The spirit reminded the girl that she was already long dead, and rotting in a hole. She had killed her herself, rabbit.

The girl gave the spirit a withering look. That was not what she had meant, and the spirit knew it.

The spirit grinned smugly at the girl. It was a grin meant to taunt. To antagonize. But it was clear that it was masking an intense frustration.

The fact that the girl was willing to throw away her life for her sake was infuriating to the spirit. Somewhere along the line, this girl had got it in her head that her life, and that of the spirit’s, were of equal worth.

She was wrong.

The girl had a full life ahead of her, and she deserved every minute of it. She deserved the love, the hate, the pleasure and the pain. Everything that life had to offer, was hers to experience.

The spirit, though? There was nothing left for her in this world. The time she had spent with the girl had made that fact crystal clear. She had nothing, and deserved nothing.

The flies were dropping, as the colloquialism goes, like flies. Feverishly squeezing their soft, pale bodies back into their cocoons, which snapped shut around them as if they had never split in the first place.

The girl sat among the clicking cocoons, thinking quietly to herself. A very particular thought crossed her mind, and she looked to the spirit.

“You’re the only one, aren’t you?”

The spirit’s neck turned as if on a swivel, and she glared cautiously at the girl.

“You’re the only one of your kind.”

The spirit retorted, rather curtly, that perhaps that was for the best, rabbit. The girl insisted otherwise.

“No. I can’t sit back and let the last of anything die. I refuse to have that on my conscience.”

The girl approached the spirit, and placed a palm on her shoulder. The spirit recoiled from her touch.

“You’re a tiger. A predator. Even if someone dies, you don’t kill the last tiger for doing what comes naturally.”

The spirit became even angrier. A tiger? She wasn’t a tiger, rabbit! She was lonely, and selfish, and stupid! What she is doesn’t excuse what she’s done!

She clutched a fistful of cocoons so tightly they burst, and threw them in the girl’s face. She began to rise into the air, screaming every vicious insult she could muster. The girl was an idiot! An imbecile! A simpleton and a fool!

The girl scrambled backward, before clambering to her feet and retreating into the distance. She heard the spirit hacking, and choking, and the rattling of cocoons as she fell back to the ground.

By the time the girl turned around, the spirit was doubled over on the ground, wheezing, and gasping for air.

The girl simply stood there, watching the spirit struggle.

Eventually she took a seat.

Perhaps she should let the spirit die. As far as the girl could tell, it might be her only chance to do so.

The spirit had told the girl that she had been alone in her burrow for sixty years. So she was at least that old. Probably much older. She wondered if perhaps, once a person reaches that age, it feels like enough?

The spirit had also told the girl that she would be, quote: stuck here forever, rabbit. To the girl, forever seemed like a very long time to live. Too long, to be honest. For a person or a spirit.

Maybe this was for the best.

The last fly clicked back into its cocoon, and the world went utterly still, and utterly silent. The only remaining stimulus of note was the musty, fungal smell left in the wake of decay.

So the girl sat.

And waited.

Chapter 10

The girl stared absentmindedly at the skyline, where wine-red worms touched paper-white sky. She watched as the branchless trunk of an ancient cedar rose from the lake. It rose slowly, like a buoy lifted by an incoming tide.

With time, the tree stood upright, and reattached itself to its stump with an unsplintering, an uncreaking, and an uncracking.

The girl had never heard anything uncrack before, but now that she had, she knew immediately that it wasn’t a sound she’d be able to describe to anyone.

Not that any of this was something she was planning to talk about, once this ordeal was over. She’d witnessed an impossible event, and she knew better than to relay the impossible.

All she would be able to do is forget this ever happened. A task easier said than done, of course, but at the very least, the notion was comforting.

A second tree unsplintered. Uncreaked, and uncracked.

The spirit’s sickness was worsening. Her once drifting, ethereal hair was now knotted and tangled, clinging to her semi-corporeal skin like wet gauze, and her shimmering, concave retinas had become clouded with a sickly bacterial film.

The spirit’s body was not the only thing that had fallen ill. Her mind was sick as well. Sick with doubt. Sick with guilt. Sick with fear. The finality of death, once unfamiliar, was beginning to dawn on her, and she was scared.

In the distance, the trees continued to unsplinter, and uncreak, and uncrack. One by one, like the ticking of a clock.

There was a numbness in the spirit’s fingertips. She could feel her heart fluttering, a tightness in her throat, and an aching in her chest, caused not by the flies that had wandered too deeply into her lungs and passed away, but by a stagnant and suffocating dread.

A tree cracked, and creaked. Splintered and fell. The girl snapped to attention. These were sounds she recognized. But despite their familiarity, she was not happy to hear them. The trees were supposed to be uncracking. Uncreaking. This break in the pattern was, frankly, alarming.

She swiveled to face the spirit.

“What are you doing?”

The spirit didn’t answer. Instead, her breathing became rapid, and shallow. Like a mouse with its pelvis caught in a rat trap.

“Don’t play coy. Tell me what’s going on. Now.”

The spirit began to shake her head. Whisper nonsense into her own ears. Anything to drown out the sharpness in the girl’s voice.

The girl rose impatiently to her feet.

“You promised you’d put me back in my own head! What’s with the backpedaling? Are you toying with me?!”

The girl could hear the spirit’s pitiful whimpering. The way she chattered her jaw, like some sort of idiot toucan.

“You’ve decided to keep me prisoner after all? Is that it? You’ve decided to make me your little pet?!”

The girl cocked a middle finger against a stiffened thumb and struck the spirit between her sickly, half-blind eyes with an audible thwack.

“Hey! Answer me, dipsh—!”

The spirit shrieked at the girl. She’s scared, rabbit!

The girl’s aggression withered in an instant.

“What?”

She’s frightened, rabbit! She’s afraid to die!

The spirit’s words hit like a battering ram to the chest. The girl felt a hot wave of guilt wash over her. A surge of embarrassment and shame so searing that she feared the blood flushing her cheeks might cauterize her veins.

The girl began to tremble. Her fists balled, and her lips pursed tight as a thumbscrew. She felt her eyes welling, and her neck bristling, as her emotions wrestled violently with one another.

She growled in frustration. Swiveled around and stormed off. But of course, there was nowhere to hide. She kicked at the sludge beneath her feet, swore fiercely, and fell to her knees.

She braced an elbow against a knee. Her forehead against a thumb and forefinger. She could smell the coppery stink on her skin, and feel the worms dissolving back into coagulated blood and seeping through her knitted leggings.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her turtleneck sweater. In the distance, she heard another tree creak, and splinter, and fall.

The spirit was panicking inside. Her eyes darted about as she struggled to think, and she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. They floundered aimlessly, seeking to grasp at something that simply wasn’t there. Eventually they stumbled upon her mouth, and her breath hissed between her quivering fingers.

Another tree began to creak. The spirit reached out toward it. As if her subconscious mind thought she might be able to tip it back upright, if only she could reach it.

It crashed into the lake.

As the approaching ripples lapped at her shins, the spirit began sobbing. Apologizing tearfully. Profusely. She was so sorry. She was trying, rabbit. She swore she was trying.

The girl buried her face in her knees. Pressed her wrists to her ears. Anything to muffle the spirit’s mournful cries. She was trying, rabbit. She was trying…

“I KNOW you’re trying! I’M SORRY!”

The spirit went quiet, her breath trembling. The girl swiveled to face her, tears streaming down her cheeks. She stared into the spirit’s clouded, sickly eyes.

“I’m sorry…”

The spirit’s jaw began to quiver. She wrapped her spindly fingers around her face, and began to cry.

The girl rose to her feet. She approached the spirit. Took a seat alongside her. And in an act that surprised even herself, she placed her head gently on the spirit’s shoulder.

In time, the coagulated blood began to thin, like oil paint in turpentine. Gradually settling back into a shimmering, mirror-like surface. In the distance, the trunk of an ancient cedar rose from the lake. Stood upright. Unsplintered. Uncreaked. And uncracked.

Chapter 11

The girl sat silently. She stared uneasily at the spirit, lying lifeless in a pool of blood. Her bones no longer luminesced with a diffuse teal light. Her lungs no longer drew breath. Her heart no longer beat.

The spirit was gone.

The girl couldn’t shake the sinking feeling in her gut. The spirit had done this for her. She didn’t like that thought. That the stinking carcass before her was an act of love. She still wasn’t entirely sure she was worth it.

But what was done was done. There was no turning back now. However, as the girl continued to stare, she began to doubt whether there was still a moving forward.

Surely, something was supposed to have happened by now?

The spirit’s mouth hung open like that of a spent salmon, washed up dead on the riverbank after a spawn. Her once ethereal flesh was now sickeningly tangible, and her matted hair clung to it like withered algae to a seaside stone.

The girl could barely bring herself to look the spirit in the eye, although there were no longer eyes to look into. The rot had long since taken them, and where once there had been shimmering teals and golds, there were simply empty pits lined with decaying silverskin.

The girl began to fear that the spirit had not completed the task she had set out to do. Was it possible that the spirit had fallen short of her goal? That her sacrifice had been wasted?

The girl was struggling to shake the awful notion that she might be stuck in this place forever. That at this very moment, her brain was being reclaimed by decay. Its circuitry undone, for a second and final time.

The girl continued to stare at the spirit’s body. Its empty eyes. Its slackened jaw. Her lip began to tremble. Despite her better judgment, the girl was mourning the spirit.

The spirit had truly loved the girl, in her own terrible, misguided way. The proof was lying right in front of her, in an endless pool of blood. And even if that love had remained forever unreciprocated, the girl would have preferred to spend an eternity with someone who loved her, than an eternity alone.

The girl reached out to touch the spirit, but hesitated, just for a moment. Despite her fascinations, she had never encountered death so directly before. At least, not that of a person. She worried that her instinct to touch might not be appropriate.

Yet she did it regardless, touching her fingertips to the crook of the spirit’s neck.

The spirit’s corpse convulsed, like the salted flank of a freshly butchered cod. She gasped for air, but drew no breath.

The girl drew back, startled. She gawked at the spirit, lying limp in blood. As if she were a fish in the bottom of an aluminum boat, trying in vain to flush its gills with water.

The girl watched the spirit struggle soundlessly. Too weary to move. Too ragged to breathe. This was a being teetering between life and death.

The girl approached the spirit cautiously. It was clear to her that the spirit was unaware of her drawing near. How could she have been, with her eyes claimed by decay? For all the spirit knew, she was alone in this place. And despite her vacuous, dead-eyed stare, the girl could tell the spirit was frightened.

“Can you hear me?”

She spoke softly, and calmly.

“Hey, hey. Listen to my voice.”

The spirit twitched in response.

“How are you feeling?”

The spirit flexed her jaw as if she were attempting to form words, but to no avail. Her larynx had long since been reduced to tatters.

The girl couldn’t bear to see the spirit lying in blood.

“I’m going to touch you. Is that okay?”

The spirit’s rib cage expanded breathlessly. The girl reached out and gingerly touched her shoulder. Her mandible chattered.

“You okay?”

The spirit acknowledged the girl’s question with a barely perceptible nod.

The girl took hold of the spirit by the shoulders, and hoisted her upright. The spirit’s entrails spilled from her abdomen, followed by kidneys, liver, heart, and lungs.

Somehow, this didn’t seem to faze the girl. She took a seat across from the spirit, knee to knee, and touched the spirit’s forehead to her own.

The spirit began to shiver.

“Hey, hey. Listen to me. I’m here.”

The girl spoke softly, as if to a frightened child.

“It’s okay. You’re okay.”

A fragile silence.

“Oh hey, I just realized. I don’t think we were ever properly introduced.”

The spirit’s face twitched erratically. She seemed confused.

“My name’s Wren. Wren Barrows.”

The spirit’s twitching ceased.

“What’s yours?”

The spirit yawned widely, her jaw distending as if she were a sculpin on a fishhook. The girl coaxed it shut with a gentle finger to the spirit’s chin.

“I’m guessing no one ever gave you one, am I right?”

The spirit’s head quivered back and forth, ever so slightly.

“Would you like me to give you one?”

The spirit’s rib cage expanded, despite there being no lungs with which to inhale. The girl closed her eyes, and took a thoughtful breath.

A moment passed before she opened them again.

“How about Adrienne?”

Something stirred within the spirit. The girl could feel it.

“Adrienne Thistle. How does that sound?”

The spirit smiled weakly. One half of her mandible sloughed off and fell to the ground with a wet clap.

“I think Thistle’s a good name. You want to know why?”

The spirit awaited the girl’s answer with bated breath.

“Because you’re a pain in the ass.”

The spirit’s rib cage began to spasm rhythmically. She was laughing. The girl couldn’t help but crack a cheeky smile.

It wasn’t long before the spirit’s laughter deteriorated into heartbroken sobbing. The girl was swift to comfort the spirit. She placed a hand atop the spirit’s head, softly stroking her tangled, withered hair. The spirit tightened her grip on the girl.

The girl quietly returned the gesture.

Eventually, the spirit loosened her grip, and her arms fell weakly to her sides.

The girl let go of the spirit, hesitantly. Poised to catch her should she happen to fall. But the spirit did not fall. She simply sat there, quietly breathing nothing.

The girl stared at the spirit, with an expression of genuine concern. She had a thought, and nearly spoke it aloud… but fell silent when the spirit rolled up a sleeve and plunged her open hand deep into the marshy substrate beneath the lake.

She began pulling. Struggling to uproot whatever it was she had wrapped her spindly fingers around. When her progress slowed, she began to tug, repeatedly. Again and again, until her tugging became yanking, and her yanking became wrenching, and the girl began to fear that the spirit might literally tear herself apart.

The girl reached out as if to stop the spirit. To plead with her to take it easy. But the moment she did, her sketchbook came unbuckled from the muck and the spirit collapsed to the ground.

The girl stared a moment at the sketchbook in the spirit’s hand. And then, at the spirit herself. She was breathing heavily, although at this point it was more out of instinct than function. The girl found herself at a loss. She didn’t know what to say, or how to proceed.

The spirit began to lift herself from the blood, her hair hanging like a starched curtain around her decaying face. The strain she was exerting upon her increasingly fragile body was, to the girl, distressingly clear.

Again, she found herself reaching out to help the spirit. To keep her tendons from snapping, and her joints from dislocating. But there was a hesitation in her movements, as if she feared her fingers might cleave the spirit’s flesh like wet clay.

By the time the girl had composed her thoughts, the spirit was already sitting upright. The girl retracted her arm sheepishly, and felt a twinge of guilt nip the nerves along her spine.

The spirit placed the sketchbook in the girl’s hands. Her struggle was so pronounced that, to the girl, the book appeared unthinkably heavy. But of course, once it was in her hands, it was revealed to be no heavier than one might expect.

The girl stared at the book. The binding was tattered and frayed, as if it had been exposed to the elements for years, and its blood-saturated pages had become so delicate that they would have torn each other apart had she opened it.

The girl held the book tight to her chest. There was a profound sadness in her eyes, as she watched the spirit’s tactile fingertips probe the lake’s surface, searching blindly for any sign of the girl’s presence.

The girl took the spirit by the hand. First her left hand, and then her right. She held them tight. The spirit chattered what little was left of her jaw.

The spirit traced her fingers along the girl’s arms, and placed a hand upon each of her shoulders. With a remarkable tenderness, the spirit leaned in close, and touched the girl’s forehead to her own.

The girl peered sadly into the spirit’s hollow, empty eyes. Her breath quivered softly. She touched her fingertips to her lips. She nearly touched them to the spirit’s as well… but she stopped short, and her fingers curled.

The spirit arched her back. Braced her shoulders. And without warning, plunged the girl deep beneath the blood.

Chapter 12

The girl awoke.

She tried to draw breath, but her ribs were locked. An attempt to flex her fingers revealed they were rigid, and unfeeling. When she went to open her eyes, they steadfastly refused. And where she expected to feel the anxious beating of her heart, she instead felt nothing.

Although the girl’s mind was beginning to stir, her body was still cold, stiff, and dead.

With each thought that passed through the girls head, a modicum of oxygen was burned, and her brain sunk deeper into a desperate suffocation. An unbearable hypoxia, accompanied by an intense and overwhelming urge to breathe.

Finally, the girl’s lungs began to expand, drawing a sickly, rattling breath. And with that breath came a thump, thump, thump in her chest, as thick and stagnant blood began to pulse through her veins.

The girl opened her eyes, but saw nothing. Either she was shrouded in a near complete darkness, or her retinas had yet to regain their function. Although the girl could not have known it, both of these conclusions were true.

Slowly, the feeling began to return to her fingertips. At first, all she could feel were pins and needles. Prickles and stings. To most, an unpleasant sensation, but to the girl, a welcome relief.

With a repeated and conscious effort, the girl began to flex her slumbering fingers. Through the numbness, she could feel the zipper of the sheepskin jacket that hung over her shoulders. It was a jacket she had forgotten was there. The moment of her death felt so distant now, it had slipped her mind.

The girl extended a stiff, waxen arm to the ground. She felt damp mulch. Rusty nails. And loose bones.

Finally, an unobstructed breath. A gasp, spurred by a sharp and sudden realization: These were the spirit’s bones. She attempted to retract her hand, but was met with a distressing resistance.

With time, the girl’s body began to warm. Warmth was an almost unfamiliar sensation, at this point. It massaged her stiffened muscles, loosening them gradually. Dissolving their tension, until they could no longer support the girl’s frame, and she collapsed to the ground.

And there she remained, for quite some time. Not because she was incapable of rising. She was, within minutes. But simply to rest. To recover.

With newfound warmth, came the sensation of cold. The girl slipped her arms through the sleeves of the spirit’s jacket, and bundled herself tightly within its old and yellowed fleece.

What felt like an hour passed.

The girl extended a hand, and began a cautious and tactile exploration of her surroundings. Immediately, she felt something familiar. Her sketchbook. She picked it up and held it close. It wasn’t weathered, or soaked with blood. As far as her fingertips could surmise, it was just as she remembered it.

The girl explored further. She felt waxen stumps, and burnt-out wicks. Fist-width tunnels dug from loamy soil. Thin, delicate roots that hung from the ceiling. And eventually, the burrow’s entrance.

She ran her hands along its perimeter, measuring it carefully. To her, it seemed frightfully narrow. A nervousness tickled the back of her neck. But of course, she had no choice in the matter.

The girl took one last look over her shoulder. It was not an act of logic, but of instinct. In the darkness of the burrow, there was nothing to see.

But the girl did see something. An atlas, glowing with a faint teal light. A glow so faint that in the light of day, it would have been imperceptible.

The girl paused, and stared silently at the bone. A dull, dusty little vertebra that had once cradled the spirit’s skull. Her eyes shifted subtly. To the floor. To the tunnel. Then back to the bone. A moment passed.

Quietly, the girl plucked the atlas from between axis and occipital, and slipped it into her pocket.

Chapter 13

The girl emerged from the hole on a bright autumn morning. The sky was a pale and delicate blue, and the breeze carried with it an invigorating chill. The cemetery was empty, as it nearly always was. She was thankful for that.

The girl took a moment to assess herself. She seemed healthy. Intact. Perhaps a little tired. She had a sketchbook in her hand. A jacket on her back. A bone in her pocket. She felt as if perhaps she were a different person than she had been before, but there’d be time to evaluate those feelings later.

She felt a little jolt upon hearing the sound of an SUV arriving in the parking lot over the hill, and of indistinct conversation as its doors slammed shut. After taking a moment to compose herself, she shuffled off toward the bike rack near the cemetery’s entrance.

The girl fiddled with the dials on her bike lock, and entered a four-digit code: The date she had buried a pet mouse she’d had as a child. She hopped atop her bike, and rode home.

The girl had been missing for nearly seventy-two hours. It wasn’t long enough for someone to have filed a missing person report. After all, the girl was an adult, though she rarely felt that way. But it was long enough for loved ones to worry, and despite the girl’s loneliness, she did have a handful of loved ones.

She made excuses. Told them that it was no big deal. That the jacket on her back had been found in a ditch, and justified its retrieval with a price check online. Indeed, the price of such a jacket was considerable.

In the days, and months, and years that followed, the girl often left peculiar happenings in her wake. By the time they were noticed, the girl always had an explanation at the ready. Never a truthful one, but always a plausible one. Either that, or she had already slipped away, unseen.

No one ever discovered the atlas the girl carried in her pocket, despite it being on her person at all times. Occasionally, she would wonder if she might be able to pass it off as the bone of an animal, should it come to that. But the girl was clever enough that it never did.

Whatever it was the girl was hiding, it remained a secret to anyone but herself. She had decided long ago that no one would ever know. That no one needed to know. And indeed, no one ever did. Not family. Not friends. Not you, or I.

And in the end, the girl was content with that. Her choices were her own. Perhaps she had made the right choice. Perhaps she should have known better. But one thing can be said for certain:

She was never lonely.

#rabbit hole #tyrel pinnegar #horror #novella #novelette #short story #fiction

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