#writing another novella :)

[see-arcane]

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

[wingedcat13]

Synovus: Villains Never Retire (4)

[And the end of Villains Never Retire - this one took much longer to finish, and it's a bit longer than the other segments at 11,334 words. Warnings for death, and rather more descriptions of violence than have thus far been typical. As always, catch up on what's come before from my pincushion post, and find this chapter on Ao3 here!]

How do you keep a clairvoyant from knowing that you are coming for them?

The short answer: you don’t.

The long answer is that it is, technically, possible. However, masking your movements from a clairvoyant is dependent on what type of clairvoyant they are.

Do they read actions, or intentions? If actions, work through someone else or manipulate the environment. Do not decide on a course of action until one conveniently presents itself. A spur of the moment blitz. If intentions, hire multiple actors. One of them will slip through the myriad warnings eventually. (Personally you think this method is a waste of assassins)

Do they only read the short term, or can they predict further into the future as well? If the short term only, poisons over time work best. If long term, be sure to act both kind and hostile in equal measure, until the method of their death is confused.

Is their ability only clairvoyance of the future, or can they read the past as well? If they can, you can never speak of your intentions aloud. Hide your correspondence in code, and send an assassin.

Of course, this all assumes you have time and assassins. You, personally, have neither.

But you do have something else: connections.

—-

When you recognize Athena and Menace in the broadcast, you want nothing more than to tear out of your lair and into the night like the wrath of hell let loose.

But there are several flaws in that plan, including that it is currently daylight, and that doing so would certainly get more people killed than you intend. Specifically people you care about, so that’s out.

Instead, you make a few phone calls.

“Optix.” You were still staring at your phone as the broadcast continued, promising an hour of execution. “Are you the reason I’m seeing this?”

You still weren’t sure what, exactly, Optix was - but it went by ‘it’ and had given its name, and was inherently jacked into any electronic cloud you had ever encountered. You didn’t know if it was a person, a program, or a genuine Artificial Intelligence, but you did know it could be helpful when it chose to be.

A thumbs-up emoji appeared in your messages.

“I owe you.”

A ‘no’ emoji, the red circle with its diagonal line.

“Do you have a location?”

Another ‘no’ emoji.

“Noted.”

The broadcast ended, you swept your phone back into your pocket.

“Boss,” that was Doll, looking very pale. “This is-“

“A trap? A problem? A truly blindingly idiotic move by a pack of misguided muppets I’m about to return to the scrap pile? Yes. Yes it is.”

The shadows are still writing around you, but they are drawing closer to your skin. You managed not to vaporize anything this time.

“Your eyes are glowing.” Doll notes uncertainly.

Glowing? Hm. That’s a bad sign. Normally it’s the shadows that appear there first.

Of course, the shadows come to hand when you are furious, when the anger is hot and choking. They rise when you are defensive, murky and obscuring. But this emotion - you are not certain you can call it anger, anymore, that somehow feels too weak - is cold at its core. Not the freezing, biting cold of fear, but the frost wind that steals warmth and cuts like knives.

And that emotion, whatever it is, is what calls the light.

“I am in control.” You inform Doll flatly. “Gather the others, make travel preparations. I have calls to make.”

Doll nods, bolting out of the room. You know it isn’t to get away from you so much as it is to get to work doing something, to feel as though he can help.

You replay the broadcast, short as it is.

By the time you’ve finished watching it a second time, you have a plethora of messages - other villains, sending you the clip. You don’t bother responding.

Instead, you flip to the number pad. Four digits into the number you intend to dial, it rings, from the same source.

You answer. A frustrated voice spits out a coordinate string and disconnects.

How do you keep a clairvoyant from knowing how you are going to kill them?

You use another clairvoyant, of course.

—-

When you drop from the underbelly of your plane, you do so alone.

Your minions are there, of course - Heather's piloting, with the rest on support positions or with other tasks when they actually land. But you will not take them with you into a brawl when you can help it.

You cannot fly, but you can use a different trick you learned through some very difficult trial and error - summoning sections of shadow and solidifying them, to 'run' across the sky. It's a peculiar feeling that combines vertigo with certain mental acrobatics to circumvent the laws of physics. If you fuck up, you'll fall.

So you don't fuck up.

You also don't try and stay airborne long. Instead, you let yourself drop in increments, cushioned by your shadows, until you reach the scrubland below.

You are, perhaps, a mile out from the outskirts of the town that you've been given the coordinates of. There's no question of whether it's the right one - there's a giant, gleaming metal spire in its center that doesn't belong amidst the southwestern architecture.

(The question of who endorsed these idiots is a problem you will handle later.)

There is no sign of movement in the town itself. The residents are either already casualties, imprisoned, or fled. You don't actually care which, you just want to know if you'll be stepping over more corpses than the ones you make.

There's only one way to find out - so you start walking.

---

Earlier, when you were first starting to train Alexandria, she had asked you why you never carried weapons.

"I don't really need them." You'd answered, even as you went through a practice pattern with a padded staff. "My shadows are amorphous, I can craft them however I need to. Harder mentally than fixing them into shape, but more difficult to physically counter."

Alexandria had been taking a break, perched on top of the giant tire you'd been having her lift. "You sure it's not just an image thing?" She'd asked skeptically.

You'd grinned, "Oh, it definitely adds to the image. I am unarmed, because I am always armed."

"Mom says you should do the opposite." She'd remarked. "Carry a weapon so that people think you're reliant on it, and then when they disarm you, they're surprised."

"That trick only works on someone once - though your mother does put it to good use. Also, her abilities are a little easier to disarm than mine. Shadows are everywhere - water? Not quite so easy to come by in certain circles. And the spear adds to her reach for better maneuverability. Your father too, I suppose, though he's more likely to bash someone with that shield."

Alexandria had studied you. "You really know a lot about how they fight."

In answer, you'd twirled the staff in your hands, and mimicked some of the spear patterns you'd seen both Athena and Legionnaire use.

"'Therefore I say: 'Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.'" You quote.

"Sun Tzu?" Alexandria sighs, "Please don't make me memorize the Art of War. I've already got paragraphs of the Iliad I'll never be able to get rid of."

"Memorization's pretty useless." You toss the staff instead, spinning it for fun instead of a combat pattern. "I just want you to understand what it means, not how much gold you need to allocate per li traveled."

Alexandria had eyed you suspiciously, "How many times have you read the Art of War?"

"No more questions." You'd declared. "How's the flight coming?"

---

Thunder booms by the time you've made it to the spire itself.

The sky has been steadily darkening, as you've picked your way through the empty streets. There are pock marks in the asphalt, holes in the buildings. Some of them are burned to the ground or melted - Cobalt's work, most likely.

You briefly wonder if they have a recovery factor, if you'll have to put them down again today. It doesn't change much, either way.

No bodies. Bloodstains, crumpled cars. Someone's had the wherewithal to clean, at least. Or someone who could raise the dead showed up already - hard to tell from context clues.

If you weren't wearing your helmet, you could've taken a deep breath and smelled only the heat, melting into the softer gentleness of rain. You could've felt the wind on your face, in a steady breeze.

But you were wearing your helmet, so you only noted those things distantly, and that made it all the more contrasting when you stepped into the trap that had been laid for you.

---

There are sirens wailing, somewhere. The few who have not been cut off already, cut silent as the screams of the living have been, one by one and in waves. The hush that should follow is denied by the high pitched whining of machinery and the sound of burning things. There are sparks, and pops. Something like words worn smooth in the background, run over so many times that they're part of these floorboards that are now cracking and failing, released again at the moment of unmaking.

You focus on the sounds, because you cannot see the devastation. You focus on the sounds, because you cannot smell the burning. You focus on the sounds, because if something does not force you to confront it, you do not know how fast or far away you would be running.

You shut your eyes and fight for air. Your hands close into fists, and you feel the world roll around you. An earthquake? You should be running -

Breathe. Weigh the situation, then move.

The sirens are too loud. The flames - you would've noticed them earlier, seen the smoke. The pieces of this scenario do not match.

You flip the settings on your helmet. The sounds do not change.

A mental effect, then. An illusion?

On a hunch, you blanket the area around you in shadow. From a building to your left, you hear a squeak of terror.

Slowly, not trusting your sense of direction, you turn towards it and take a single step.

"I know that you are there." You say calmly. "Your illusions are good, but they are not perfect. Come out, or my shadows will drag you out."

There's a pause, and the illusions intensify - you can feel the heat of fire on one side of your body, smell harshly chemical smoke - then the thunder cracks again, and you are abruptly returned to the near silence of reality.

A shuffling of footsteps. Then a small head pokes around a doorframe.

You run your shadows over them anyway, to make sure this is not an adult pretending to be a child. If they are, they're either much better at illusions than they're letting on, or they can also shapeshift.

You'd say the figure that steps into view is no more than eight years old.

"What is your name?" You ask, still calm, still gentle.

"Ciaran." The answer is in a near whisper.

"They did not give you a code-name?"

The child pales. "Ch-Cheshire. Like the cat."

You nod. "Very well, Cheshire. I am Synovus."

You look up and down the street, and compare the feelings of your vision to the area that surrounds you now. A few things make sense.

"I know." The child says, swallowing. "Please don't kill me."

"I will only kill you if you try to kill me." You answer, matter-of-fact. It's no use protesting that you don't kill children, no one ever believes you. "Your abilities - that wasn't an illusion, was it? It was a memory. A memory you pushed into my mind."

Cheshire nods, hesitant. "Ez - Jester said I should make you scared."

"And so you chose something that had scared you." You complete, "I felt your fear. And why did Jester want me scared?"

"I'm not supposed to answer any questions."

"You already have."

"You're going to hurt me. Hurt them."

You fold your arms. Why do you keep winding up in moral arguments with children?

"That will not change based on what you tell me, little one."

"I wasn't supposed to be here." Cheshire blurts. "I was supposed to wait - to wait until you came inside, and then -"

They fall silent, and you nod. "And then Jester would teleport behind me, hm? And why are you out here then, alone?"

"Because I don't want you to hurt them. I thought I could make you run away before you fought."

"Others have come here before me. Have you scared them away too?"

The child scuffs a foot. "Some of them. No one's ever found me though."

You crouch. "You've done a very stupid thing, coming out here to face me. But I am not here for you, and I am in a hurry. Hide, and I will not hurt you."

Cheshire steps back, but hesitates. "And Jester?"

You sigh. "They must face the consequences of their actions."

Cheshire's bottom lip wobbles. "Don't kill him! He's - he's my brother, I don't - promise you won't kill him!"

Sometimes, you really do hate yourself. Past, present, and future.

"I promise." You grit out, "That I will not kill your brother, Jester, on the condition that you hide, and not use your powers again, until a woman named Rosie comes to get you. Do we have an agreement?"

A stubbornness enters Cheshire's expression. "Pinky promise."

Again, you feel like this is a trap. Also, you're mildly offended that you would need to make a further oath than the one you've already made, but this is a child. So you hold out one hand, as far as you can, and Cheshire does the same.

When Cheshire nods solemnly, you straighten, and turn back towards the spire. The sound of scuffling marks the child's scramble through the rubble, and you hope you haven't made a terrible mistake in letting them get away.

You allow yourself another heavy sigh, and call Rosie to tell her what to expect.

---

You don't actually know for sure whether or not you have siblings. But wanting to sacrifice yourself to save a family member? You can remember feeling that way.

You know who your parents are (sometimes you wish you didn't) and you're reasonably sure your mother didn't have another child after you. Your father could have a whole bevvy of children, a miniature army, and you would never have known. An elder full-blooded sibling could've been taken away prior to your conscious memory.

Your father was known as Sunhallow. He who is Hallowed by the Sun. A god-made-flesh, who seemed to bleed gold and healed in the sun, and could incinerate enemies in beams of light.

Your mother was simply your mother to you, and if she ever did anything with her minor telekinetic gifts beyond keep up with you, you never heard about it.

When you were young, an enemy came calling. Several, perhaps. You were packed from your private tutoring into a safe room, and you did not come out for several days. It was you, your tutor, and a few others, who you knew would die to protect you on pain of a worse death at Sunhallow's hands.

When you finally came out again, you were brought to see him. He told you that your mother had had to go away, but if you worked hard enough, you could be allowed to go see her again. When you would not be a burden to her work.

Desperate to please, you had thrown yourself into your education and training. Combat, economics, athletics. Trying to find a way to call the sun the way Sunhallow could, in vain.

Several months in, your shadows had finally manifested for the first time. You'd been delighted to show him, begged to be allowed to speak to your mother - a letter, a phone call.

Sunhallow had refused.

After that day, he called you his moon-child. You became his shadow, never speaking, never moving unless called upon to do so. Your training, somehow, increased.

And when you had done that for a month, you were brought into a room where a caped hero had been restrained on a table. You knew their name from the list you were to memorize, and their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. Their name was Willowsteel.

Sunhallow put a dagger in your hands, and pointed at Willowsteel.

"There is the man who took your mother." He told you, "Go and get her back."

You had torn into them as though somewhere inside them was a key, and you could use it to open a door, and on the other side would be your mother, happy to see you after so long apart. But there was no key: only blood, and eventually that ran out too.

When you were done, Sunhallow had led you to another room, and showed you your mother's corpse.

---

The rain began to fall just as you stepped over the threshold of the spire.

It caused an interesting audio phenomenon on the inside, as it rang off the metal in a discordant harmony with the hum of the air conditioning. Thunder rumbled again.

There was no one in the entry hall that you could see. Only an empty room, wide and spacious, with a large grand staircase leading up. It feels more like a warehouse than a lair.

“Optix.” You whisper inside your helmet. “Does this place have an intercom?”

A two note trill that you take as a yes.

“Would you be so kind as to patch me into it, for a moment?”

Another two note trill, then the sound that usually heralds you should leave a message in a voicemail.

“Perhaps I was not clear enough, the last time we spoke.” You drawl, and in your voice is cold fury and disdain. There are sounds of startled movement from the stairs. “Allow me to clarify.”

Metal really is a horrible building material - the boots of anyone who is coming ring with such finality as they run to meet their deaths. A line of those you take for goons, pale-faced and unsteady and armed with automatic weaponry you know is stolen.

Your voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t change. Each word is delivered with gravitas and perfect diction. “Thou hast fucked around.”

You take several steps forwards into the room, your cape billowing behind you. The empty black blank of your helmet offers no reprieve or indication of humanity - only their own reflections.

“Thou shalt find out.”

Thunder shakes the sky - and the goons open fire.

—-

How do you keep a shadowmancer from killing you?

Well, that depends on how you define a shadow.

Must it be pure, pitch darkness? In that case, arrange for sufficient lighting, and they will be powerless.

Must it be a living thing’s shadow? Lure them into a trap, provide sufficient lighting, no living shadow to work from.

But can it be a half-shadow? If so, sufficient lighting becomes a problem. One need only cup their hand to create a negative space within the light, and draw a shadow from there. A bundle of a cape edge. The hollow of one boot.

And speaking of hollows - if a shadow is simply where the light isn’t, what, then, of a body’s hollows? The spaces in the mouth, the lungs, the small pockets inside various cavities. The slim space between brain and skull. Are those shadows?

Because if they are, a shadowmancer does not need external shadows to kill you.

And how do you keep a shadowmancer like that from coming to kill you?

Short answer: you don’t.

—-

You don't bother to count your kills. The ticker on that particular statistic is long broken, and you will not linger here. You grant them the mercy you have to give, and make things quick.

It takes you less than thirty seconds to go from staring down a wall of automatic rifle barrels to stepping over corpses, and up the stairs.

About halfway up the first level, the air shifts.

You pause, and when no immediate strike is forthcoming, you turn. "You do not have so many opportunities available to you that you can afford to waste an opening like that." You chide.

Jester is flushed, their breathing heavy. They stand where you were seconds earlier, and stare at the room, and then up at you.

"What did you do to Dymania?" They ask, and you see the edge of desperation in their eyes.

You decide that this is a lesson that can only be truly taught once. "A better question." You say thoughtfully, "Would be what I did to Ciaran."

At the mention of their brother's name, you watch Jester's face go through a variety of emotional contortions. You wouldn't bother to name all of the shades, but 'terror' features predominantly among them.

To Jester's credit, they learn quickly. The next time they teleport, there is no more pretense of talking.

---

In the rooms above you, you cannot see it for yourself, but you will learn later that Dymania is paralyzed. They lie on the floor, in the room crafted for them to get the most from their gifts. Overloaded with a thousand potential futures, each only a maddeningly small difference from the next, they occasionally shout or spasm.

In the room above them, Minerva has finally found an opening. She is trailing more goons, there is a bullet in her shoulder, and her leg is still not completely healed, but she manages to reach the rainwater, and that is all that she needs.

On the same level, down the hall, Alexandria is no longer held in check by her mother's captivity. They far underestimated her strength, and she has broken the bonds on herself and several others. When someone tries to enter the room, she takes the door off of its hinges and literally sweeps a path clear for the other hostages to flee.

Outside, Rosie is sitting on a chunk of concrete rubble, talking to a little boy who has no idea there are four others hidden in the area around him, ready to strike anyone else who approaches.

And a single figure hurtles through the sky, with no way to know that he is already too late.

---

You probably could've ended the fight with Jester much sooner, but... okay, so you were maybe having some fun with it.

Not because he was so clearly distressed, mind, just because how often did you really get to brawl with someone? No super strength, no weapons, no summoned spouts of fire, just a good old fashioned punch-out.

Yeah, sure, the kid teleported, but that just made it more interesting to fight him.

(You weren't sure what would happen if he solidified in a space he happened to share with, say, your arm, and you were disinclined to find out, so you had to lead your movements just enough and - well, it was harder than it sounded.)

And yes, you are furious still, but that fury was largely alleviated by doing something, and with the pieces you have set into motion, you will have to trust in the others in the building to play their parts. Also, you did promise not to kill this one, specifically.

So when he tries to gain enough momentum to blindside you by teleporting up and coming down, and you sidestep on the blood-slicked staircase, there is not a spike of shadow waiting to impale him if he does not teleport again quickly enough. When you see an opportunity to force him to carry through a motion and crack his skull into the railing, you stay your hand.

Mostly, though, you move in circles that broaden to leaps of your own, until Jester decides to try and pick up one of the guns of the dead goons.

You fold your arms as he aims at you. "Nice try."

Jester furrows his brow, the mask contorting to match. He glances at the barrel, does a doubletake, and swears. Frantic scurrying only turns up more of the same.

"I don't - what - how?" He cries, jumping from body to body for a gun that works.

"Solidified the shadows in the barrels." You lean against the railing and cross one leg over the other. You're only mildly winded.

“You can do that?” Jester cries in horror.

You hum. You aren’t entirely unsympathetic. “I can do many things.”

Jester looks up at you, something like determination in his eyes - and disappears.

When he does not reappear, trying to punch you again, you sigh. “Damn it.”

You click your way through to Rosie again. “Yeah, I overdid it. No, I’m fine. I am not that old. The roof? Fine. There better be an elevator.”

Grumbling, you find the elevator at the heart of the spire. They haven’t locked it yet - so you’ll take however many floors you can get out of it before they do.

—-

When you were younger, your mother told you about the things that made someone Great.

You can’t quite say they were stories, because they were more like… half-anecdotes, strung together on a line. But they were always meant to entertain and teach, and you could listen while you did other things.

For a long time, you thought they were all about your mother and father. She was every brave woman who thought to heal instead of breaking, every woman who drove a weapon’s blade through solid stone, every woman who adventured and every woman who stayed home.

Your father was every man who proved the truer than his enemies, who rallied others to his cause, who truly believed and in that faith called others to follow. Inspired them, rather than commanded.

And you? You were both of them. You had your mother’s adventuring and wisdom, your father’s effortless grace and pure heart. You did not need your own stories, when you could frolic in the mix of theirs, leaping from one tale to the next, an ephemeral sidekick.

Your mother never corrected you. But you learned, eventually.

Your father was never the protagonist in those stories at all.

And where did that leave you?

—-

The elevator stops about two stories up, by your reckoning, and had you been standing by the door like a dunce, you would've been pummeled by a torrent of water.

And had there not been mirrors at the back of the elevator, you might've pummeled Minerva with a torrent of shadow.

But there were, so you could see it was her from your vantage of tucked-into-the-corner, and she could see it was you as the center mirror cracked and shattered.

(You weren't sure if you should commend these young idiots for thinking of the corner tricks, or condemn them for putting in wall to floor mirrors. Really, those things shatter no matter what kind of treatment you give them.)

"Synov-" Her incredulity is cut off, as you sweep around the corner - and sweep her into a hug.

She must be exhausted, because you get away with it. She stands rigid for a moment, bracing, likely thinking you're tackling her or some other nonsense. Once it becomes clear - oh, a second or two later - that you're only wrapping your arms around her in reassurance that she's alive, some self-preservation instinct drops.

For a moment, she rests her head on your shoulder, and gently presses one arm against your back.

When she pulls away, you do too.

"I should've known you'd come for Al- Menace." She says, and her throat is raw. Smoke? Screaming? (You're going to burn this town a second time) "Had to show me up one more time."

"One day, Minerva." You say quietly, "I'm going to prove to you that my affection for you is not a trap, or some kind of proxy for your child. But for now -"

You spread your hands, summoning shadows between them. You spin them like thread, that thickens to wire, that thickens to cord, pulled taut and bulging on one end. That end clarifies - sharp edges, a wide base that narrows to a point. A replica of Athena's spear.

Minerva - Athena? - takes it, weighing its balance. She opens her mouth to say something, but you are already holding out a disc in the shape of her shield.

"The weight's wrong." She says, taking the shield.

"Shadows." You say apologetically. "Not the heaviest things. Shall we?"

Minerva clears her throat, "Menace is searching for more cells. They had a lot of people here."

You nod, and follow when she walks away. "Anyone other than Jester and Dymania I should worry about?"

Athena adjusts her shield. "Not while I'm around."

---

When you were Sunhallow's shadow, he called you 'Eclipse.'

You were not his enforcer - he did that well enough on his own. You were the spy, the assassin, a card near the bottom of a very stacked deck. An observer, time and time again.

And, as proves inevitable when someone is taught to find loopholes and make observations, they will begin to find chinks in their predecessor's armor. They will learn to ply their skills for their own gain, rather than only on instruction. It is what makes them good at what they do.

You were very good at what you did.

In all of your searching and spying, you put together several pieces. You conducted your own investigations, slipped additional questions into interrogations, took the time to talk to your targets before you killed them.

Their words painted a very different picture than the one you'd been given. They showed that your mother had not been abducted, but had left willingly. May have even opened the door. They showed that Sunhallow was not the first to claim godhood, only the most recent to become so prominent. And that not everyone, as he had claimed, recognized his inherent superiority.

Your father told you that one day, you would become Holy, as he was. The Sun would hallow your bones, bless you, and raise you to take over where he left off. But you knew what he looked like when he was lying, by then. You also knew he liked to tempt others by offering them the idea of his position, his glory. It was bait.

And the day the light finally responded to your call, you realized that you were going to have to take it.

---

When you and Athena find Menace, it's by finding the end of her trail of ducklings - nearly thirty people, milling about in varying levels of distress and shock.

Someone screamed when they caught sight of you, in your distinctive costume, and Athena with her spear and shield of shadows. You sighed, unsurprised, but didn't have time to even start trying to explain yourself before a head rose above the others. And kept rising.

Nearly flat to the ceiling, Menace shot over the heads of her flock, and hurtled into the pair of you to grab you both in a hug.

"Super-strength, super-strength, super-strength," you chant in warning, wanting to come out of this reunion with your trachea intact.

"You saw me ten minutes ago." Athena chides gently, but her heart isn't in it, and she hugs Menace back just as tightly.

“I’ve never been so happy to see a pile of garbage bags in my life.” Menace says, giving you a very careful squeeze. You have time to make an offended noise before she turns her attention back to her mother; “And you - you got shot? I specifically requested you not get shot.”

“The people.” Athena reminds her, nodding towards the shambling mass of mundanity.

“None of them got shot either.” Menace replies mulishly. When Athena sighs, she relents. “No major injuries so far, though some of them are pretty banged up - bruises, scrapes. I think I’ve gotten most of them out by now, unless there’s a basement to this place.”

Athena looks at you, and you shrug. “It would make sense that they did, but the elevator didn’t go down that far, and herding prisoners down stairs gets very annoying very quickly. If there is one, I’m betting it’s maintenance.”

The shambling mass of mundanity has been whispering since you arrived. You could wait for Menace or Athena to soothe them - but you’d rather not.

“Oh, shut up.” You tell them crossly. “If I were here to kill you all I would’ve blown up the place and been done with it. You all get to live and deal with the trauma for the rest of your sorry lives. Lucky you.”

There’s a collective gasp of shocked breath, and the nearest ones edge back from you a little more - but they do go silent.

Athena elbows you in the ribs. “Synovus does have a point about the stairs.” She says calmly. “And the elevator isn’t safe. Have we found an alternative exit?”

Menace sighs, “I could punch through an outer wall and carry people down?”

Athena considers the group size. “That would take some time. And we would be vulnerable during movement.”

“The ground level is secure.” You mention idly.

“Which doesn’t rule out snipers or the two remaining supervillains.” Menace points out.

“You.” Athena says suddenly. “You can make discs of shadow, and you can hold them. You can make one wide enough for them to all stand on, so they can be lowered down together.”

You could also make a slide that curves around the spire all the way down, but you don’t say that part out loud.

“I could.” You concede. “You would be putting their lives in my hands.”

“If you wanted them dead, you’d have killed them by now.” Athena counters. “So time to live up to not wanting them dead.”

You survey the crowd. You have an image to maintain - or, well , partially reconstruct.

“Fine.” You drawl, and stalk closer to the group. You shoo them all to one side, and rest your fingertips on one wall, feeling for the vibration of the rain. “This is the outer wall?”

Athena breaks off reassuring the people to call to you, “It is. Maybe four, five inches?”

You resist the urge to make inappropriate jokes. Someone in the crowd does not. Someone else smacks them on the back of the head. The first person mutters something about stress responses and apologizes.

Experimentally, you lodge a spear of shadow into the wall. It sticks until you dismiss it. You can see a faint gleam of pale light through it.

Well. Shit. Shadows are very adaptable things, but they don’t cut very well - they’re more brute force and occasionally piercing.

Which means you’re going to have to use the light.

Whatever. At least it’s not made of concrete.

You don’t bother to explain yourself to your companions, not with an audience present. Instead, you raise a wall of shadow between yourself and them, thick enough to block the glow of radiance when you summon light to your hands.

A beam would be easiest, here - but it would also be like setting off a beacon. The most subtle would be to use the light as a knife, as you normally do when you have to use it, but that would take forever. So… laser cutter?

You use three sharp, long lines to hack off either side and a new roof line, giving it a shove near the top with your shadows so it doesn’t try and fall inward. Another slash at the bottom cuts it loose. The chunk of metal falls away with a relatively soft screech (which is, still deafening) and drops with the rest of the rain, and your shadow wall.

You reveal yourself again, already turned to face the group, with the rain now drumming on the metal flooring (you may have erred on the side of excess for height) and the wind blowing your cape out dramatically. You gesture to the open air, shadows already weaving a basket to hold a large group of people.

They cannot see you smiling, but they can hear it. It is not a polite or joyful smile. “Your chariot awaits, dear friends.”

—-

No one thanks you for putting a raised edge on the platform.

Menace would’ve caught them, of course, but still. Did your efforts to save them from falling mean nothing?

Had circumstances been different, you might’ve complained about that to Athena, loudly and at length. Instead, you stayed quiet, and kept time in your head as you lowered a herd of sheeple to solid ground.

You stay up in the spire, though Athena rides with them to reassure them, and Menace drifts alongside. Once they’re down, she argues with her mother for a moment. Then she flies back up, carrying Athena.

“Refused to stay put for her injuries?” You remark, having found a chair to lounge in. That actually did take a significant amount of energy, though you’ve done everything you can to disguise that.

“Yes.” Menace grumbles.

“I told her I’d climb the spire by hand if I had to.” Athena says stubbornly. To Menace, she said firmly, “I let someone slow me from coming to you once. Never again.”

“You two are going to have the strangest rivalry.” You said admiringly, to break the tension. Both of them turn to you instead, and even if Menace’s head is covered, you’d bet their expressions are identical.

You raise your hands in mock-warding - and pause as the air shifts again.

There are two people in the hallway. One, the bruised-but-mobile Jester. The other, slumped against a wall and looking much worse for wear, is Dymania.

Menace and Athena both tense, drawing a step closer together in preparation for a fight. You cross one leg over the other at the knee.

"You know, you two are terrible hosts." You call, casually flicking a crease from your costume. "Leaving us alone for so long? Incredibly ru-"

"Shut UP Synovus!" Jester yells, near manic. You can see the whites of his eyes all the way around, even under the mask. "You weren't even supposed to be here! You're retired!"

"Someone doesn't check Twitter." You remark, amused.

"I - What?" Aw, you've genuinely thrown this one for a loop.

"Twitter." You repeat. "I tweeted 'nvm, comma, I'm back' an hour before I arrived." You enunciate each letter in 'nvm' instead of approximating a word.

Athena sighs, "Synovus."

"Yes, honored colleague?"

"Shut up."

You respond by rising, and giving an overexaggerated bow. Dymania yelps and throws themself to one side - because as you straighten, you throw lances of shadow at both of them.

---

The fight really didn't take long.

You're pretty sure the only reason they got Athena or Menace was by threatening the hostages they already had, and you could've wiped the floor with them on your own. You still didn't kill Jester, and even helped cushion a hit he took from Menace.

(The hit wouldn't have hurt him as much as the rebound against the floor. Menace would've been terribly upset to have accidentally killed him.)

(Though, if she or Athena killed him, you wouldn't be in violation of your promise.)

(But - no. You wouldn't do that to either of them. Not now.)

The end of things really came when Athena managed to pin Jester against the wall with her good arm, and you'd managed to herd Dymania away from his companion. He stumbled back again, and wound up crossing into the area where the rain was still falling.

(Lightening up, you noticed. Better finish things quickly then.)

The change was immediately noticeable. Dymania stiffened, clutching at their head with both hands, and tried to run forward out of the rain - only to find you there, walking them back to the edge.

"H- how did-" They cut themselves off, and you nodded.

"How did I know about the rain?" You asked politely, as much taking pity on them as taking the chance to grandstand. "The Silent Ones told me. You know how they feel about Clairvoyants who don't conform."

It isn't really possible for more color to drain from Dymania's face. Instead, they drop to their knees with a groan.

"What?" Menace asks, looking up from where she's trying to convince Athena to trade off with her.

You raise your voice a little, so she can hear you better. "The Silent Ones. An enclave of Clairvoyants, hidden from most of the world. When two clairvoyants cross each others paths, it's like putting two mirrors opposite each other. Endless reflections. They hate it."

You watch Dymania try to stagger back to their feet, and feel no pity. "That includes if one shows up in their own futures. It gives them headaches at best. Sometimes they wind up in comas, if they're particularly unprepared. So one of them eventually hit upon the idea - what if all of them lived together?"

You glance towards the sky, calculating how long you have left. "They live according to a very strict schedule, and interact as little as possible with each other. If everyone does exactly as ordered, there's no need to make predictions. No traps to fall into. They don't force others into it, but they certainly don't like it when someone has plans that conflict with their order either."

"You mean like, someone leaving?" Menace asks, having managed to take half-ownership of keeping Jester pinned. She sounds offended on their behalf.

"No, they can leave whenever they want. Its the ones who want to do something about their enclave - like find it, exploit it, or destroy it - that find themselves suddenly overwhelmed with bad luck. And the chaos of the rest of the world is often too much for them, once they've gotten used to the enclave."

"So its... more like a sanctuary?"

"Yes. And they know you, Dymania. They know that you cannot stand the rain."

"Make it stop." Dymania begs you. You aren't even sure they've been following the conversation - their eyes are unfocused, trying not to see or feel the falling water around them.

"Clairvoyants, as a whole, despise rain." You mention idly. You have not moved. "The randomness involved in where each drop falls - it ties them up into knots. Worse, if they predict how the droplets will feel on their skin. Some of them can filter it out, like white noise - Dymania is not one of them."

You tilt your head, and then turn back to the others. "Very well. Let's go."

Like you know they will, Dymania gives a cry of desperation. They push, once more, to try and make it to their feet. And at the point where their future diverges, they try to draw the handgun Jester had forced them to carry.

You pivot, and in one smooth motion, kick Dymania out of the spire.

"Dy!" Jester cries.

"Yes." You muse. "I suppose they will."

---

The fight goes out of Jester, after Dymania falls.

The three of you drag him up to the roof, at your direction. Once the skies clear, Heather will bring the plane back around, and all of you can reach it easily enough from the highest point. Plus, at this point, it's less stairs to go up than it would be to go back down, and you really don't want to do the disc trick again.

It turns out the roof is less a flat roof, and more of a ring near the top. You notice Menace shudder as you reach it, and tilt your head at her in question.

"They threw hostages over the railing here." She says quietly.

You nod. This explains why neither Menace or Athena protested much, at what you'd done. But you don't protest or labor the point either - instead, you clasp her arm in sympathy, and look up at where the sky is clearing.

"How did you time that so well?" Athena murmurs when you come up alongside her.

"Weatherwitch owed me a favor." You reply casually.

"Weather witch. The Silent Ones. Your council. What else is there, some kind of... Villain union?"

"Well..." You admit, "there is... something of a minion union, though I stay out of their business, mostly."

Athena sighs.

You almost take your helmet off to grin at her. You probably would've, but then you hear Menace, and the sudden tension in her voice as she says, "Mom?"

You both turn immediately - and see Legionnaire, hovering at the railing, and staring at you.

---

You didn't forget Legionnaire existed.

No, really, you didn't - but you did try really hard not to let yourself think about it for too long.

When you had named him (and Athena) as your rivals, you had made your choice based on what you thought was a genuine good in them. They did not hesitate until the cameras arrived. They did not extort or demand. They took some care for collateral when lives were involved, if not property, and they regularly showed up to help with rescue or relief efforts when they could.

And there was the fact that they had a kid.

You'd fought them enough times to know that they didn't mess around to grandstand or showboat. They maintained secret identities fairly well. They weren't like Dazzler, who would try and seduce villains in the hopes of fucking them back to civility. They weren't like White Shadow, who was always high enough when you fought them that you weren't sure they knew what was happening.

The closest, you thought, to real heroes.

So when you'd seen those bruises on Alexandria's arm, that first day, you'd been... surprised. You didn't exactly have the highest opinion of humanity in general, and you'd learned too many early lessons about pedestals and how much they hurt when they fell over on top of someone. But you had expected better of them.

From your observations, conversations with Minerva and Alexandria, and the things they didn't say, you'd pieced together a lot over the last year. That Minerva did have her flaws, but was trying to be better. That her healing factor meant that any bruises or sprains would've healed long before anyone else saw them. That Alex, though wary of Minerva sometimes, had still talked about her when she wasn't around. She almost never mentioned her father, and when she did, it was only questions about how you knew him, or in conjunction with her mother.

You had been worried, at first, that you were conflating him with Sunhallow. A man claiming holiness (the Sun made him Hallow, the Son of Mars) with strength and a following (A cult, a fanbase) and who coerced their child into working for them (Eclipse, Mercury) and who harmed them-

So you hadn't let yourself go out to find him and have it out. On better days, you admitted it wasn't your fight to have - it was Minerva and Alexandria's, if they wanted it. On worse days, you weighed the benefits and consequences of hiring someone versus doing it yourself.

And you had kept a degree of surveillance on him, just in case. Nothing in depth - you didn't know what brand of frozen pizza he bought or his Netflix account, you didn't care if he still had a job or had lost it - but just. General locations. Whether he went out in costume. You had Legionnaire watched, and not Albion.

But sometimes those lines blurred - so you knew that he had started drinking more heavily when Alexandria left. More again, after Minerva. The last two months, he'd seemed to be getting better, but he had stopped going out in costume.

And now he was here, and you had no idea what to do.

---

For what feels like an eternity, you all stand in silence. Athena had been startled into dropping Jester, automatically readying her shield and then stilling herself before she could aggravate her bullet wound any more.

(She still held the shadow set you'd given her, you hadn't found her usual weapons in the spire, though you had personally looked.)

You grabbed Jester, who was glancing back and forth with confused interest.

"Say a word, or try and teleport away." You tell him quietly, head next to theirs. "And I will make Dymania's death seem like a kindness."

Judging by the way he nods, slowly, he also remembers that you technically have Ciaran.

And Menace - oh, Menace - has lifted from the ground, hovering, with her hands curled into fists.

It's Legionnaire who breaks the silence first; "You inherited my powers."

He sounds... proud. Tired. His voice is rough. He's looking at Alexandria as though she is a prized pupil who has shown an aptitude in his favorite subject.

(He doesn't deserve that pride.)

"I have my own powers." Menace corrects him, her voice clipped and short.

Legionnaire moves his hands gently in a faint 'settle down' motion. "Of course." He says quietly. "All yours, Alex."

"Why are you here, Albion." Minerva demands. She's pulled off the Athena mask, and glares him down as he looks her over. Notes the shadow-weapons, the injury.

"I saw the broadcast." He explains, gesturing to the spire. "I thought - you needed help."

"We're fine." Minerva says flatly.

It's hard to shift uncomfortably when you're flying, but Legionnaire manages it - as his gaze slides to you.

"Oh, come off it." Minerva follows his gaze, and now sounds heated.

"Can you really blame me, Athena?" He says, and sounds beseeching. "This all started with him, when he took Alex -"

"They." Menace interrupts, nearly strangling the word. "Synovus is 'they,' not 'he.'"

Legionnaire bites his lip, flicks his eyes away, then back again. "Fine." He says, though his calm is less even now. "They took you, Alex. And then they took your mother, too."

"I left of my own free will." Alexandria has risen now, a little further up. Not quite even with her father. "And my name. Is Alexandria."

There's a certain exasperation in Legionnaire's expression that he can't hide fast enough. Changing tactics, he looks to Minerva again instead, "Athena, think about it. Synovus changed you! You know they used to say he - she, they - had manipulative powers. They've kept you isolated, and now let you get captured just so they can sweep in to save you-"

"Synovus." Minerva grits her teeth, "Did not make me move several hundred miles inland, away from my family and the source of my powers. Synovus did not discourage me from getting involved in the community, in case I accidentally gave our identities away. Synovus-" She has taken a step forward, with each line, and the tip of her spear is slowly lowering to point towards him. "-did not hurt my daughter."

Legionnaire exhales, "So did you." He points out. "It happens, it's not anything unusual - its how kids learn! I-"

"I am ashamed of that!" Minerva shouts. Alexandria has sunk an inch. "We were supposed to be better, Albion! We talked about trying to save cities, to save the world, and we couldn't even save our own daughter from ourselves!"

"No one is perfect." Legionnaire deflects.

Minerva points her spear at you. You do not flinch. "I have lived with them for over a month." She says, with a steely calm. "I have seen those who live with them. I have seen how they are with Alexandria." There's a subtle emphasis on the last half of the name, a pointed correction. "They provided me medical care without blinking, and though I have yelled and raged and attacked them, they have never raised a hand against me while I was in their house."

Legionnaire scoffs, "So Synovus learned to play nice for a while, that's not -"

"It's more than you ever managed." Minerva says with venom.

There is a silence then, deep enough that the entire spire could fall into it and further, swallowed by a negative space that never ends.

Finally, you speak again, but only when you are certain your voice is under your control. "The plane is here." You say calmly. "Someone should make sure this one-" You jostle Jester, "-is received properly."

There is a two-fold offer in the statement, and one you know both Minerva and Alexandria hear.

Tell me to leave, and I will.

Because you will, if they want. You are party to this story, but it is not yours. It will hurt you, and you will worry, but you know about closure and what it can take to find it.

Tell me to take care of him, and I will.

One more death will not be a burden on your conscious. Not when you feel responsible that he was allowed to continue - that you have protected this man for years. Logically, you know that's ridiculous. It isn't necessarily Logic that wants to kill him.

This pause is shorter, lighter. Minerva whirls on you, searching. You wait for the protest - that she can fight her own battles, and you should fuck off before she comes to her senses and fights you again, a villain at the scene of a crime.

Instead, she glances at Alexandria, who is still hovering, still staring at Legionnaire.

"Alexandria." Minerva says softly. "Our priority is still the people."

"Yes." She responds automatically. It takes her another moment to move, to shake herself out of her paralysis. "I can carry you both."

You know that does not include you.

"Athena, don't -" Legionnaire starts.

You ignore him, and look at Alexandria. "Menace." You address her by the title, helping knock her out of it a little more.

(Yes, remember - you want to tell her, - you are more than his daughter. You have stood in a room full of powerful people and held your own, and more.)

"Lady Synovus." Menace returns. You know it's specifically to spite Legionnaire's earlier assumption that you were male.

"As Legionnaire is your rival -" You ignore Legionnaire again when he starts to interrupt, raising your voice to talk over him, "- it is your jurisdiction as to what measures I can take."

The formality is a shield. You hate to ask this of her, to force her to say - but even if you weren't bound by the rules you'd created, you need to know. If she asks you not to hurt him... well, you'll try.

Alexandria pauses, watching Minerva. Minerva looks back at her, meeting her gaze through the helmet.

"It's your decision," She tells her daughter, "But I will stand by you, no matter what you decide."

"What's this about 'rivals'?" Legionnaire tries to interject.

Alexandria stiffens, as though she might yell at him, and you brace yourself to have to intervene - but instead, she just reaches up and removes her helmet.

Alexandria looks her father square in the face as she says, "Lady Synovus, I give you leave to do as you feel appropriate. No restrictions."

"You are certain?" You ask, because you want her to be sure.

"I am." Her voice doesn't waver.

Minerva takes Jester from you, frowning to remember that he's here, and he's overheard all of this. Alexandria drifts backwards, to gently gather both her mother and the defeated villain into her arms, before going up.

Legionnaire tries to follow - but can't, as you've already got a shadow wrapped around his ankles.

You slam him back down with relish.

"No." You say, your voice chilly, "You are not invited into their lives anymore, Legionnaire."

"And you get to decide that?" Legionnaire demands, trying to slice through your shadow. You tighten its grip in answer. "You get to decide I can't talk to my wife, my son-"

You are glad Alexandria is out of earshot.

"You have never had a son." You say harshly. "And Minerva is not yours in any capacity. You have had months to figure this out, Albion. Time's up."

He seizes on your word choice. "Figure it out - so you did do something! You took my family from me!"

The words, similar to the ones Minerva had yelled at you only a day earlier, make a sheltered part of you ache. But, you remind yourself, she did defend you. She trusts you.

Granted, looking at Legionnaire, still trying to find a way out of your shadows, you admit the bar is pretty fucking low.

"You did that yourself, you idiot." You hiss. "You drove Minerva away. You refused to accept your child. I am not the reason your life is terrible, Albion. You are."

He straightens, and you recognize the arrogance that returns to his posture. He still thinks you're trying to fool him. That he is correct. And he will not be swayed.

"Say whatever you want, Synovus!" He yells, "You won't keep me from the ones I -"

This time, it's a shadow that shuts him up - drawn out of his throat and coiled to serve as a gag. His eyes bulge. He did not know you could do this.

With a flick of your wrists, the shadows holding him down are gone - and replaced with chains of brilliant light. They drag him down, relentless, scorching the skin they touch, until he is pinned to the floor.

"I believe." You say, as you pick your way over to him. "That the missing word there is 'love.' But I am going to choose to believe you were going to say something else - because everything you have said today, Albion? It is not love."

You stare down at him. "You came here. You knew where they were. The lives in peril were of no consequence until it was Minerva and Alexandria. You did not come to save them. You came to try and make them listen to you again."

He may not be listening, but it doesn't matter. You do love a good monologue, and this particular serpent has been coiled in your chest for a long time.

"That isn't love, Albion." You tell him softly. "It's obsession. Possession. You don't respect them enough to consider that they have opinions and wants different than your own. And they deserve so much better."

You pick up the spear that he'd been forced to drop, and twirl it idly. He redoubles his attempts to struggle, to escape - he's always been so strong, but you have always been stronger.

You are very tempted to cast your powers aside here. You want the satisfaction of feeling his bones break beneath your hands, the visceral feeling of grabbing and tearing away. You want to make him suffer.

You want to look for a key that will give Alexandria and Minerva their happiness back.

But you know that those keys don't exist, by now. And you do not need to make yourself more of a monster to kill this one.

"They did love you, at one point." You muse. "And in another world - who knows? Maybe that would have been enough."

You plant one foot on his chest, and lean in. The tip of the spear rests on his throat, and finally, Legionnaire goes still.

"But redemption's never been my style." You hiss.

You slide the spear home.

---

A week after you return to business, you lead Alexandria and Minerva to a secluded part of the island.

The beach is shallow here, particularly at low tide. You and Minerva slosh through water up to your shins. Alexandria drifts over instead, occasionally splashing her feet in the water.

"Not much further." You assure them, though neither has shown signs of complaining. You are nervous. This place is not sacred to you, but it still has power over you.

There is a sea cave of black rock, out of the way. It does not tunnel into the rest of the island very far - a few hundred yards, that's all. A lava tunnel once, long since collapsed, and the inside filled by now with sand.

You pause at the entrance, staring at the void of perfect shadow. You love the shadows - they have always protected you, and you know this one does too - but you do not want to dive into its embrace. You want to run from it.

You clear your throat, "In here."

Carefully, you summon a small globe of light. The three of you (okay, the two of you) pick your way carefully through the cave's unsteady footing, until eventually the ground rises, becoming smooth stone instead of rocky black sand.

There isn't much ornamentation, here. Just a marker, in the form of a rock, carved with the sigil of the sun.

Minerva stiffens. "That's -"

"Sunhallow's sigil." You croak, and clear your throat again. "Yes. This is - this is his grave."

You stand in silence for a few moments - or at least, if Minerva or Alexandria speak, you don't hear them. You're staring sightlessly at the small obelisk you'd carved, so that you would always know if someone tampered with the body.

You still hate him, decades later.

You still sometimes wonder if you were wrong.

A touch at your shoulder startles you back to the present. Its Alexandria, who is looking at you, and not the grave. "You said that this was your father's grave."

"It is." You make yourself respond, then gesture to the front of the cave. "We should - the water gets higher, later, and I know we don't necessarily have to worry about that, but -"

"But you don't want to be here anymore." Minerva finishes. "That's okay, Synovus. We don't have to stay."

You are silent, until you are back out in the sunlight. It should be the opposite, you think - the sunlight was always his, the shadows were yours. Now he has a lair of shadows, and you seek refuge in the light? You'd accuse the universe of irony, if you hadn't brought this upon yourself.

You are not in costume, today. None of you are. It means that they can see the expressions you have lost control over, as you pace back and forth beneath a clump of palm trees, near the shoreline.

"Sunhallow was my father." You say finally, abruptly. Your shoulders drop. The tension - the weight - isn't gone, but... saying the words didn't hurt. Your throat didn't swell closed before you could force them out. You didn't deflect, equivocate, or dodge.

"Sunhallow was my father." You repeat.

"We gathered that." Minerva says, and you are grateful for her dryness.

"I-" You draw in a breath, and turn, shrugging out of the light wrap you wear. Beneath it is a backless shirt that Alexandria had insisted you buy, for one of your more feminine days. You hadn't had the heart to tell her you never exposed that much skin.

Because on your back, centered on your spine and between your shoulder blades, is a large tattoo of the same sigil. The ink is stark against your skin even before it begins to change. Touched by the sunlight, from the center out, the ink turns a glittering gold.

Hallowed, by the Sun.

You can tell from Alexandria's 'woah' that she thinks it's cool as hell. You can tell by Minerva's sharp inhalation that she knows what it means.

You pull the wrap back into place, and turn to face them.

"I killed him." You say, and you speak quickly, as though someone is going to cut you off and you will never get a chance to tell this story, the one you have never told anyone before. "I worked for him for years, as an informant and spy, but I was too good at what he taught me. I learned things he didn't want me to know - didn't want anyone to know - and I - I learned when he lied. I learned about, about the purges."

When Sunhallow was challenged, he had taken to targeting groups of people. Heroes, villains. Towns. It was purification by sunlight, in great quantities - Hallowing the place, with the Sun.

He did not leave survivors.

You swallow, "He was healed by sunlight." You explain, "So I smothered him with shadows."

You knew he would never let anyone into his rooms after nightfall, when he was most vulnerable. So you'd killed him at noon, when the sun was highest, and you'd have had to be stupid to attack him.

You did sometimes do very stupid things.

"I killed him, and then I packed his body into a trunk, and I brought it out here, and I buried it in the cave where the sun will never touch it again." You are surprised, a little, at the vitriol in your voice.

You hadn't taken any chances, moving him. You didn't know if he could come back from the dead, but you didn't want to find out.

Minerva is staring at you with something like wonder.

"It was you." She said softly. "You were the Eclipse."

You nod, exhaling. "The Heresiarch Heir." You echo glumly. "Patricide. Oathbreaker. Murderer. And coward, besides."

Minerva pushes off the tree she's been leaning on, and reaches for you. "Brave." She says firmly. "No one could stop Sunhallow - but you, you couldn't have been more than twenty when he died."

You laugh, short and hollow. "Sixteen."

Minerva blinks. "I couldn't have done such a thing." She admits. "How...?"

You blow out another breath. "He killed my mother." You say, staring into the middle distance again. "And made me kill Willowsteel."

You do not elaborate on how long it took, or how you knew it had been Sunhallow's hand that had killed your mother. Some things you were not ready to talk about, even now.

"Willowsteel...." Minerva muses, "They had a metallurgy ability, didn't they? Or was it magnetics?"

You still have perfect recall of that list. "Metallurgy, with a particular talent for shaping weaponry." You respond automatically.

And you had known that, even when they'd put a steel knife in your hands. And he had known it too, as you stood over him. But in his eyes, you had seen something like a horrified acceptance.

You had been a child. He could've easily overpowered you, or turned the blade aside. For a long time, you had told yourself that it was because he knew Sunhallow would kill him anyway, and he wanted it to be over.

The day you buried Sunhallow, sitting outside the cavern and watching the sun rise again, you'd forced yourself to admit it - that Willowsteel hadn't killed you, because he would rather have died than hurt you.

Truer than his enemies. A man with faith and belief, even if it wasn't in a god, or a man who pretended to be one.

You couldn't plant willow trees on the island - the climate didn't agree with them - but on one of the estates Sunhallow had once owned, there was a grove of them, in a perfect ring around a monument to all of those lost in the purges.

You spend the rest of the afternoon telling stories, when you could stomach it. They asked questions, sometimes. About your mother, about how you'd scraped yourself back together as a villain under your own power. How you'd drawn the others together, forced some degree of order from chaos in the cape-population explosion after the purges had ended.

You knew that both of them understood.

---

Days later, you are waiting in a room decorated in pure white.

The room is quiet, and you can hear the distant roar of an ocean that is not yours. You sit in the dark, one leg crossed over the other, pretending not to be bored.

When the light flips on, the woman in the doorway stiffens, but tries not to show any other signs of distress.

You lift your head, the black shine of your helmet giving her nothing to work with. Another dark-clad figure waits to one side, a third (though in blue rather than black) is keeping watch outside. She has not noticed them yet, you think. She will be furious about that.

"My dear Tallflawes." You drawl, leaning forward. "We need to discuss some of your more recent... investments."

[And so we come to the end (for now!) - thank you to everyone who's made it this far, whether you've been here since the beginning or are only recently catching up. My goal was to finish this during Pride Month, and I have succeeded! Sum total, VNR is just over 34k words, with Call Me Menace sitting at about 8.5k.]

[And a shoutout to 'daddythedragon' and Daphanae for correctly guessing the show Alexandria was watching last time, which was Murder, She Wrote! (Columbo and Magnum P.I. were good guesses too).]

#synovus #Synoverse #Villains Never Retire #It's Done #The End #Roll Credits #Trying to write this kicked my ass. #But we here now #I have an idea for something else I could do in the Synoverse #But I want to try a different prompt or two first #The goal was variety and writing exercises #not another serial #I say having written a novella.

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

was anyone going to mention that lost gods is EIGHT THOUSAND WORDS LONG??????????

#HAHAHAHHAHA well. short story my ass #we are quite literally writing another novella boys #I had already accepted my fate but wow. #and might I just point out that that's like... just what happens when writing on my phone/notes app #I have literally only written 1600/8000 in the document #EVERYTHING ELSE WAS NOTES APP AND HANDWRITTEN WAITTT I'M SO PLEASED #the project is in a bit of like a ?????? moment rn bc it's just disjointed scenes bc I'm not writing it as a complete narrative #I have officially compiled everything finally after drafting bits and pieces on and off since october and WOWWWW!!!

[adorascake]

got nostalgic and reread some of the renegades books. a little part of me will always love them<3

#renegades #nova artino #Adrian everhart #nodrian #been a while since ive thought about them #or interacted with the fandom but #those were amazing books #I would 100% read a 4th if mm decided to write another #it definitely feels unfinished after the 3rd one #even a short story or novella like she did with tlc would be nice #also have that series to thank for inspiring me to get back into fanfic so #definitely still have a soft spot for them

[essektheylyss]

I am writing a thousand words of this wip a day and ONLY a thousand words of this wip a day, dammit. This year I will enforce some goddamn moderation if it kills me (and frankly, it might).

#love I say this as if I am enforcing moderation in any other aspect of my life or even with writing otherwise. #I also need to go read fifty pages before bed so I can keep chipping away at my absurd book goal #I am a VERY REASONABLE PERSON WITH ATTAINABLE GOALS (lie) #but anyway uwu I'm making this work and also doing insane things while I'm at it #gotta finish this book gotta write another book gotta write some short stories gotta write a novella #WANNA WRITE SOME FIC ALSO BUT WITH WHAT TIME #I will actually feel a lot better once I have more of a backlog of original stuff built up again. #like I have a SHIT TON but it's all mostly shit? like it's old lmao #and a lot of it I am not interested in anymore for genre reasons (namely I am just not really planning to go back to writing YA) #like unless it was for something commissioned. that's a different subject. #I can WRITE that but that's not really what I'm working on anymore. #ANYWAY toddling off to go do some reading about the deep sea. cool cool cool cool

[neonsbian]

thinking abt the way i got into thai bl...im literally not normal 😭 like i was working on my stupid honors program project (a novella abt a heavy subject matter) and the stress of not only writing it but having to think abt said heavy subject matter AND having to finish it in like 2 months was killing me so bad so i decided to unwind by watching a cute little romcom and i go on my pirating site to see what romcoms are popular now and notice that my school president is always trending and i was like man i dont wanna watch a high school show but i watched it anyway bc i was like well i just need something dumb to take my mind off things for a bit and ended up loving it and then i watched mlc and bad buddy immediately after and was like wow these are all great shows what other thai dramas are out there and then ended up watching 13 full dramas in the month of march 😭

#not counting my rewatches of bbs and msp... #i dont think i posted abt any of them besides bbs msp and mlc #maybe like a gifset of a few others #but my mental health during that period of time....genuinely one of the worst periods of my life #and i have no one to blame but myself lmao #if ur wondering i did finish writing that novella and then i wrote another draft and then passed my program and graduated somehow #i actually did watch a couple thai dramas pre this mental health crisis but i didnt get invested till p recently #thats how they get u lmao #vinnie talks

[bam-stroker]

Ok, but idk in what AU or original work I might pursue this.

But like - chronic illness/disability experienced through a robot. Of like, woah sorry buddy rust has settled in to that coil in your leg and actually manufacturers don't make it anymore. So you're just going to have to deal with that or find an ill fitting coil that will cause issues with how you move around : /

And their human counterpart who has their own chronic illness/disability where they completely understand. Able bodied people will constantly be getting short tempered or annoyed at the setbacks the robot faces, but this person is like... Yeah, no worries take your time. Bodies? Am I right!

And the robot is just big old heart eyes at them and low key kind of falls so hard for them. And if they have a mobility aid tells them how cool it is and wants to like decorate it will little stickers or something (if said human is alright with it)

IDK people... robots with disabilities is kind of starting to scratch at something for me

#robots #possible romance novella? #are robots and monsters about to become my things #i mean they always were #but i really enjoy writing them so i might have to add this to the pile of ideas #spooky rambles #i might need another pen name for the robots #cozy robot romance

[the-way-astray]

holding out hope . . . don’t act like it’s set in stone . . . it’s not . . . yet . . .

(much ranting in the tags)

#kotlc #yes this is about the POSSIBLE keefe short story collection or book or novella about his time in the forbidden cities emphasis on POSSIBLE #i can’t deal with anymore keefe content guys i can’t do it anymore there’s already too much #let me OUTTTTTTT shannon i just wanna be done with this series stop holding me hostage let me FREEEEE /hj #if it's keefe-centric and away from the main story why can’t she just release it AFTER the series is finished? like this is SOPHIE'S story #obviously with the baby and whatnot i’d be cool with her not releasing a book for another year but releasing extras IN PLACE of a REAL book #i don't understand /gen #if she has the energy to write a book why doesn't she just write the next one #it might not be that tho that's just a possibility obviously i'm just curious #in the case that this extra is going to be released in the place of book ten this year it's like well. why doesn't she just do book ten #i wish i could say 'i'm not a keefe hater but this is too much keefe content' but i am a keefe hater so #IT'S FINE IT MIGHT NOT BE THAT MAYBE WE'RE ALL SUPER WRONG AND SHANNON'S JUST HAVING A SILLY GOOFY TIME #also even if this IS a special announcement we could still get book ten news? along with the announcement? mayhaps? #manifesting book ten news along with the special announcement please shannon #sigh hoping praying manifesting anything not keefe #if it is a short story collection i cannot tell you how BADLY i want it to be the adults' backstories #like i'm rereading unlocked rn and grady edaline alden and della all have so many blank spots in their registry files??? #an extra could fill those in . . . just saying . . . #also the ancients #the ancients are super interesting . . . just saying . . . #luzia's pyrokinetic friend! fallon and luzia's mom! fintan (possibly) throwing vespera in the dungeon! luzia and vespera light experiments! #fallon and the other two on the original council! bronte and fintan's relationship! fintan and luzia's relationship! #bronte working under fallon as an emissary! them going to meet the ogre king! luzia and orem's relationship! why orem doesn't like his mom! #so many possibilities . . . come on shannon . . . please . . . #give us this . . . just this . . . #throw a great gulon incident short story in there to keep the keefe stans happy and then get into the juicy stuff #begging pleading imploring shannon to hear my prayers #anyway #if we manifest no keefe content there won't be keefe content <- lying

[ghostbustermelanieking]

i can't believe they're making a big little lies season 3. barring the fact that there's pretty much no where for the story to go... how the hell are they gonna explain the fact that all those kid actors have hit PUBERTY now??

#they're gonna be like oh boy let third grade begin and then you'll see these fucking fourteen year olds stooping to try and look younger #big little lies #how was there money for THIS but not ofmd s3 #are they gonna get liane moriarty to write another unreleased novella #i would rather them just release the one she wrote for s2

[juroguro]

it has come to my attention that i need to write a memoir

#sigh #the strings of it have been bouncing around in my head for probably a year now so i guess i have to do it #*finishes writing a book* ykw. i think it is time for me to write another book! #im not really looking forward to it bc i don't really like writing nonfiction but ig i have to. bc it's important #at least i think it will be more novella length. maybe a series of vignettes. (what are terms for these in nonfiction land?)

[lionofstone]

started outlining my sapphic faerie story while at work today. i’m still a good couple years away from doing anything with it, but i do love my faeries and this is one that i’m really looking forward to :]

#ljs life #there’s still a novella & another short story in the world of faerie before this one #both chronologically and order of release #and I’m going to write space fantasy before some of that too #so it won’t be soon but i am enjoying the little bits I’m getting from these characters #ref wof

[blimbo-buddy]

if you could give ivypools super edition to another cat who would you pick...

No clue because the characters I have in mind are either A: Too irrelevant to fill up a 500+ page book or B: There is enough to write them with but the Erins would fuck it all up horribly

#blimbo rambles #ask #wc #like. I would love a darkstripe super edition or even at the very least a novella #but the erins wouldn't know what to write about with him and the few ideas they would have would be horribly written #also it would give those dudes who pair him with tigerstar more content one way or another #that will always be the fucking case and I am cursed with this knowledge forever #(can you tell I hate that pairing)

[fortune-maiden]

why are books so expensive T_T

#don't mind me having a moment #grabby hand motions at Emperor's Soul #so torn about this one #(when i say expensive i mean the same price as any other paperback really... but it's a novella and i have an ebook copy) #and to make matters worse(?) it's also included in full in another short story collection that is around the same price #but it's something i want on my shelf as a standalone even if it's not remotely worth it over the ebook or the ars arcanum collection #anyway this is my rec to read The Emperor's Soul because it's short but very good #and it's inspired me to write a fic which i will get to eventually maybe

[peacerisendove]

Writing fanfic really makes you realize that you can actually write! Shocking I know. But after seeing that you stuck to writing a forty-five page story or however long it is and actually completed it, you realize that you can do it and so much more.

#it's growth~ #I could potentially write a lil novella! #And once you have those realizations things look so much brighter. #Neil Gaiman is right. It really is just sitting down and writing one word at a time. #i also learned that I'm a person who lets a story grow organically as I'm writing though at times I plot things too #i doing a another pass over a fic I wrote and I just personally love it even if no one else does.

[shady-tavern]

Just wanted to tell you that I loved both of your hero stories. They made me cry and smile and the friendship between the hero and Silver is so warm and fun, and I love them so much!

Thank you so much! I'm very happy that you liked the Hero stories =D The friendship and interactions between Silver and the hero are just a joy to write and I am so glad that people enjoy reading them!

#answered #I've been thinking about writing another part for these two sometime soon #maybe dipping a bit more into Silver's backstory #it's hard to contain things to these snippets and short stories and not make it a full-fledged novella or something

[cetoddle]

is the girl who fell beneath the sea good / what is it about / how long is it? i'm trying to pick up reading again, the title intrigues me but i'm mostly looking for short books right now haha

i'm only about 50 pages in atm but so far i'm enjoying it! from my understanding of the synopsis and what i've read so far it's about a girl who sacrifices herself to the sea god in her land that's been making everyone's life a living hell for the past ?? forever ? but then she gets to the spirit world and this sea god guy is in a magical slumber so she has to go on some kind of an adventure to wake him up and get him to like. chill. before some demons? take her soul forever ?..like i said i'm only 50 pages in :')

it's about 320 pages so it's about average length! but if you want some really short books i'd recommend anything from the singing hills cycle series by nghi vo! there's i think four books atm but they can be read in any order. so far i've only read the empress of salt and fortune but i thought it was REALLY good and it's only a little over 100 pages

and if you like horror stuff i have to recommend nothing but blackened teeth by cassandra khaw. i'll admit that one's not for everyone as the writing is a little. out there. but it's only around 120 pages :]

#trying to think what other short books i've read... #this is how you lose the time war is 200 pages but if you don't like flowery purple prose writing that is NOT ! the book for you #what moves the dead by t kingfisher is also about 200 pages i rlly liked that one (another horror novella. more gothic horror) #hope that helps 💀 #asks