2 Disheartened
DISHEARTENED
The sun was a damn traitor.
It didn’t wait before rising, mockingly bright as Esme threw herself over the back gate of a modest townhome.
A small garden of greens lined one side of the back plot, and a fenced-off pen of goats wreaked havoc on the other.
As soon as her shoes hit the dirt, the natural disaster of a creature she called Fuck-eyed Francis bleated bloody murder.
“Shut up or I’ll eat you!” Esme hissed. The bastard piped down.
Esme snuck up to the back door and slid into the home. There was a plate of food left out of the coldbox, and Esme smiled when she saw it.
She swept the kitchen. A trio of hooks on the lilac-and-sage walls held two adult-sized aprons and one smaller one.
A coldbox, an oven, and a cauldron lined the far wall and a fresh loaf of golden bread basked by the windows facing the back plot.
A host of misshapen fruits sat on a wooden table in the center of the room because Esme had a soft spot for the crooked ones and always brought them home from the market.
But most important, the home was still silent.
That meant she wasn’t totally screwed. She’d left Nathan’s heart in a pig trough a few houses down, but her shirt was ruined up to the forearm and she didn’t know how to explain to a twelve-year-old that she’d—
“Gia! Gia, if you’re late, the carriage will leave you!” The motherly urging snapped Esme out of her thoughts.
So much for not being screwed.
Esme sped for the opposite wall, peeking down the lilac-and-sage hall that led to the front of the house. There, Willimina stood in her morning frock, arms crossed below her chest. Her hair was done up in a million curlers.
Esme’s heart warmed. In a most un-Wraithlike tone, a contented little sigh rushed out of her, and Willimina’s curled head snapped in Esme’s direction before she could even try to hide.
“What are you doing hiding in the kitchen?” Willimina whispered as she rushed down the hall. Esme just barely remembered to grab her with her non-bloody arm before snatching Mina and spinning her round. Mina pursed her lips and cocked her head. “You’re covered in blood again, aren’t you?”
“Covered is a very dramatic word,” Esme drawled, using her Wraith strength for the only valid reason to have it: hoisting her wife high on her hips and walking her over to the kitchen table. Esme held up her bloody hand. “It’s just this.”
Mina raised a brow at the bits of bone under her wife’s nails and crossed her arms. “Spleen?”
“Try again.”
“Liver?”
“Closer.” No, it wasn’t.
“Stomach?”
“Well, now you’re not even trying.” Esme leaned on her clean hand and loomed close to Mina’s nose.
She was the single most beautiful woman in the world.
At least, according to Esme, who was the only person whose opinion mattered.
When her hair was not wrapped around little wooden trinkets and powdered, it was warm brown with streaks of silver Esme liked to pick out on her laziest mornings.
Her skin was tanned, one half thanks to her maternal grandparents, the other thanks to that meticulous garden out back.
She was a touch shorter than Esme, and a few good meals fuller bodied.
Her eyes shone the halfway color between brown and green, a little too knowing for her thirty-eight years.
“Let me guess,” Mina leaned back on the kitchen table, letting her robe fall open just enough to have Esme’s eyes stitched to the valley between her breasts. “Turiel made you rip some poor bastard’s heart out? What an evil thing to do.”
Esme hummed, sitting her chin on Mina’s sternum. “Nothing compared to what you’ve done to me. At least I left his heart in a hole. You’ve stolen mine and refuse to return it.”
Mina failed to squash her smile at the shit line. She shook her head, and one of those curls fell loose.
“Perhaps because you stole mine first. An eye for an eye, a heart for a heart.” Mina brushed their noses before leaning in for a kiss. Their lips touched for all of a second, until a twelve-year-old stole their moment.
“Ms. Esme? Why is your hand all red?” Gia, Mina’s daughter, stood in the doorway.
The women split immediately, but Gia didn’t particularly care that her caretakers were smooching on freshly wiped counters.
Priorities. She was the spitting image of her long-gone father, down to the unruly brown-black hair and deep brown eyes.
Mina liked to say she’d stolen the poor man’s bones, too, as she was lanky for her age.
“Well, I…” Esme hid her hand behind her back, twisting away each time Gia tried to bend to look at it. “I was painting.”
“We don’t have red paint.”
“I bought some.”
“Mother doesn’t let you buy things,” she said.
Mina snorted and Esme thinned her eyes at her.
Esme might have been the breadwinner, but Mina was the bread distributor.
When the North Amaris fashion houses dropped their autumn collections, Esme could often only be trusted with the thinnest of slices.
“I didn’t consult her.”
Gia’s own eyes thinned, and her lips pinched into a mischievous smile. She had her mother’s shrewdness.
“If I don’t go now, mother says the carriage will leave me,” she said, and cast her arms wide.
Esme bent immediately to hug her, her bloody arm still hidden behind her back. Gia squeezed her tight before giggling over her shoulder.
“I knew you had guts on you!” she yelled over Esme’s back, reaching for her gore-crusted arm.
“You sneaky little creature!” Esme gasped, hauling Gia up and over her shoulder as the little girl shrieked with laughter.
Esme delivered her to the front door, and Gia slid down to sit in the bend of Esme’s arm like she used to as a baby.
She was much taller now than she was then, twelve whole years under her belt.
“Have a good day at school, little love.” Esme grinned and pressed her lips to Gia’s cheek. The girl always giggled at the frosty mouth tingling her skin.
Gia hugged Esme with the strength of a grown man as Esme put her down.
“I missed you, Ms. Esme,” Gia told her with a final squeeze.
“Well, I’ll be here when you get home. Promise.” Finally, after weeks, she would be.
Gia grinned and turned on her heel to run out to the carriage stopped precariously on their busy street.
The girl was extremely curious, and too smart, and never trusted a lie from Esme’s mouth.
She loved them, though. Loved Miss Esme’s bedtime stories and dinner-table yarns—too much, Esme feared, for the girl wished to become a Wraith when she grew up.
Esme waved her goodbye from the window while Mina did the same from the porch. A neighbor grinned to Mina and the leaving carriage. When she found Esme in the window, she turned back to her garden.
She wasn’t rude. She was doing what Esme paid her to.
“We really must remember to wash the blood out before the child sees,” Esme said with a sigh, pulling the front curtain closed.
Mina rolled her eyes and snorted as she slipped back into the foyer and shut the door behind her. “Oh, to protect her innocence?” she said, pushing Esme up against the wall by the door. “As if she isn’t completely aware of what you are already.”
There was no sadness in Mina’s voice, but there was a twist of it in Esme’s gut.
Gia knew too much. She’d seen too much. Sure, they lived charmed lives now, but they were precarious ones.
Esme and Mina had been together for seven years, and married in a tiny, illegal ceremony in their back lot three years ago.
But before that, Esme had kept Mina and Gia tucked away in a manor a day’s ride from Amaris.
She and Mina had met, actually, when Esme was auditioning women to serve as her head of house.
Mina had gotten the job (completely on merit, and not at all on the fluttering of her lashes), and moved into Esme’s manor, where Esme escaped to a few days each week.
For years, they made a mismatched family in the countryside.
Of course, when word got around that Mina was working, the nearest village headman dragged her to jail.
It was illegal for unwed mothers to hold jobs—and no, a necklace exchanged with another woman didn’t count.
Esme had to leave Amaris to raise hell and have Mina cleared of the charges against her.
After that, she moved Mina and Gia to Amaris, enrolled Gia in a school for orphans at the Lap of Virya, and told Mina to tell everyone her name was Gwen and she was the girl’s aunt.
It was a thin lie, and it certainly didn’t help that a Wraith could often be found lurking around the home in frilly robes.
But when Esme supplemented the household incomes of their entire line of neighbors, not a whisper of the truth left their block.
As far as anyone knew, Gwendolyn Rahl was raising her niece, Giadonna, completely alone, and that Wraith-shaped object in the window was a collective hallucination.
“Perhaps innocence is worth protecting,” Esme said. Mina grabbed onto that thread of sadness in her voice and pressed herself up against her wife a touch harder.
“Do not feel guilty for providing for us.” Mina grabbed Esme’s chin and brought them eye to eye. “So she saw a little blood. We have goats out back, and one day they will be stew. She’s bound to see the inside of a ribcage at some point.” Mina shrugged and Esme rolled her eyes.
“Shouldn’t we be trying to give her a normal childhood?” One that didn’t include seeing the Wraith her mother married crawl through the back door smelling like carrion.