Chapter XI
XI
Charlotte wakes the way the sun comes up: not all at once, but by degrees.
The world resolves around her, line by line and shape by shape, and at first she thinks the curtains must have been thrown back—but when she looks, she finds them drawn, the room still dark. And yet, she can see the stitching on the bedspread, the pattern on the papered walls.
A change, not in the room, but in her sight.
Then she remembers. The hand pressing her down into the bed, the teeth against her throat. She gasps and sits upright, twists round in search of Sabine, but she’s not there, and suddenly the dark, weak as it is, and the stillness of the room strike her as ominous, unsettling.
Charlotte scrambles to her feet, and goes to the window, throws the curtains back—
And recoils.
It’s dusk now, the sky above streaked pink, the sun vanishing behind the line of roofs, and yet, the light sends pain lancing through her head, along with a sudden wave of dizziness. She forces the curtains shut again, backs away until she meets the bed, her mind racing, and her heart—
Her heart.
It should be rioting against her ribs. Instead, it sits silently inside her, the stillness unnatural, and frightening. Because hearts beat. That’s what they do. Sometimes soft and steady, sometimes loud as fists against a door. So long as they’re alive, they beat.
A word forces up through her panicked thoughts, like a lighthouse in a storm.
Sabine.
She will know what’s happening. She will explain.
Charlotte goes to the bedroom door and draws it slowly open, braced for more assaulting light. But the hall beyond is mercifully in shadow.
“Sabine?” she calls out as she searches the top floor.
“Sabine?” her voice echoes on the stairs.
But even as she looks, Charlotte knows she isn’t there. Somehow, she can feel the absence in the house, as if her senses now extend beyond the borders of her body, her mind a wave, rolling outward, washing through each room, crashing up against wall, and furniture, and floor. And finding no one.
And yet, she cannot bear the thought of sitting idle, waiting to be found, so she searches, room by room, has just stepped into that secret study where they played cards, when she hears the front door open, the sound as loud as bookshelves falling, despite the many walls between.
Charlotte rushes to the foyer as Sabine comes striding in, sets a parasol aside, and if her heart were working, it would stop again, as her new senses take in the woman in the doorway, her hair now bright enough to burn the air, her eyes no longer candlelit but hazel flames.
Sabine looks up and smiles, and Charlotte feels a blanketing relief—there is no other word for it—the sudden certainty that she will be okay.
Until Sabine steps aside, and a second shape comes through the door.
George Preston.
Her stomach drops like a stone, but he is all relief.
“Oh, thank God,” he says, rushing toward her.
“We have been looking everywhere. If Mrs. Olivares hadn’t found me—” Charlotte looks past him to Sabine, betrayal and confusion wicking through her.
Why? she wants to ask, but George is already reaching out.
“She told me to come at once. Said you were not well.” He takes her hands and gasps. “My darling Charlotte, you’re so cold.”
When did she become his darling Charlotte, instead of just Miss Hastings?
Sabine nudges the front door closed, her face a mask of placid calm, while George’s worry hangs in the air around him like a bad cologne—Charlotte swears that she can smell it—and when he reaches up to cup her face, she can hear the rushing of his pulse through the veins at his wrists, and the sound makes her dizzy.
Her stomach twists, her mouth goes dry, begins to ache, and too late, she makes sense of what she’s feeling.
Hunger.
Stranger, and stronger, than she’s ever felt.
Sabine’s smiles twitches in that private catlike way, and horror washes over Charlotte as she understands why he has been led here.
“No,” she hisses, pushing George away, and even though he’s taller, broader, he stumbles beneath her strength. He might have even fallen, if Sabine weren’t there to steady him.
He looks between the two of them, confused, but Sabine simply shrugs and says, “I’ll make it easy.”
Charlotte doesn’t see the barber’s blade until the edge slides like a kiss along his collar. She gasps as George reels, his hand going to his throat, blood welling, ruby red, against his fingers.
The wound is deep. Not deep enough to kill, but he stumbles, pulls his hand away and seems surprised to find it slick with red. “What the devil . . .”
“Go on,” says Sabine, sounding impatient now.
But Charlotte shakes her head. “Not him.”
“Who better?” She wags the blade side to side. “They will think you have eloped.”
George does not seem to hear them. He sways, frowns, blood dripping down his shirt front, flecking the marble floor, and Charlotte can smell it, she can taste it, the way she tasted sugar on the air when she was young, and snuck into the kitchen while the cook was making cakes.
Like sugar, and not like sugar at all, thinks Charlotte as she clamps her hands over her mouth.
She locks her jaw, only to feel two of her teeth prick her bottom lip.
The taste of her own blood is nothing to the smell of his, and yet, she might have been able to fight the hunger off, if George hadn’t staggered toward her, then.
If he hadn’t come so close.
If he hadn’t put his bloody hands on her arms, his bloody cheek by her face.
But he does. And then, she is pulling him against her, and her mouth is at his throat, and his blood is on her lips, and the foyer disappears, the whole world disappears, as Charlotte drinks.
She drinks, and that horrible stillness gives way as her own heart begins to beat again, George’s pulse quickening inside her chest.
She drinks, and feels like she is falling, dropping, not into the dark this time, but into light. It blooms behind her eyes, unspools through every vein, a sun-glow warmth.
Charlotte tries to stop. She truly does.
When she feels him struggle. When he fights with all his strength. And when that strength goes out of him. When the pounding of the pulse becomes a ragged thing, weak, and fluttering. When the liquid gold slows inside her throat.
But by the time the world flickers back, and brings her with it, Charlotte finds she’s on her knees on the marble foyer floor, George Preston laid out beneath her, and he isn’t moving. The heartbeat begins to slow inside her chest, and she looks up to find Sabine looming overhead.
“There,” she says. “Was that so hard?”
As if they had not just killed a man. And he is dead, that much she knows.
His blue eyes are open, empty, the razor’s cut glaring at his throat, but as she stares, the place where she bit down, bit in, vanishes without a trace.
Her part in the violence brushed away, as if she was never even there.
And for an instant, she thinks—hopes—he will come gasping back to life, as she did.
But then the instant passes, and George Preston is still dead. And until that moment, Charlotte didn’t know if she believed in souls, but now she has no doubt—the body is a different thing, when life has fled. At once too heavy, and too light. A vessel she has emptied.
A horrible sound bubbles up inside her, half-laugh, half-sob, horror, guilt, and grief, not just for George, but for herself—what she has done.
She doesn’t realize she is crying until the first drops land on her hands.
And stain them red. She reaches up, touches her cheek, and it comes away wet, not with tears, but blood.
And the worst part is, she has to fight the urge to lick her fingers.
Because the hunger is still there. She digs her nails into her skirts, into her skin, and feels—nothing.
Sabine kneels down beside her, and Charlotte opens her mouth to ask What have you done to me? or What have I done? But the question that comes out is only, “What am I?”
Sabine leans in, kisses her cheek, and says, “You are free.”
Before Charlotte can say that this does not feel like freedom, Sabine draws her to her feet, and tells her to go upstairs and find another dress.
And it is absurd, of course, to worry about such a thing right now, but it is something to focus on, besides George Preston’s body, and the blood, and the way her heart has stopped again, that horrid stillness returning in its wake, and so she goes.
She turns her back on the gruesome scene and hurries up the stairs, and turns through Sabine’s closet in search of something that will fit, focuses on the silk, the chiffon, tries not to hear the sound of a weight being dragged across a marble floor, tries not to hear the way it topples down the cellar stairs.
The dress she picks is winter green.
Charlotte sheds her own, and draws this new one on, wrestling with the clasps. When Sabine arrives, she is struggling to reach the last few buttons, while avoiding the mirror, frightened of what she’ll see in the reflection.
“How do you feel?” asks Sabine.
Such a simple question, such a complicated answer. Horrified, of course. Fascinated, too. And confused. But the loudest one of all: “Guilty.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “It will fade.”
The words are clearly meant to comfort, but the idea, that she could do a thing like that and feel nothing at all, is somehow worse. So instead, she tries to focus on Sabine.
Her hands, as they skim Charlotte’s back, steady fingers doing up the last buttons of the dress. Her lips, as they kiss Charlotte’s shoulder. Her arms, as they slide around Charlotte’s waist. She lets herself lean back into the steadiness of the embrace, and for a moment, she feels safe.
At last, she braves the mirror, if only to meet the other woman’s gaze. On the way, her eyes glance off her own face—how can she look so normal, so unchanged?—before escaping to Sabine.
“What do we do now?”
“Now,” says the woman in the glass, “we leave.”
It’s dark by the time they step outside.
The sun is gone, the dizziness gone with it. In its wake, Charlotte feels alert, alive—and hungry, though she tries to force that last one from her thoughts, along with the knowledge that she is not simply leaving behind a handful of dresses, or a house, but an entire life.
She cannot wrap her mind around it, and so she doesn’t try. Instead, she lets Sabine lead her to the waiting carriage.
They have no trunks, no change of clothes, her possessions back in the house on Merry Way, Sabine’s left behind as well.
“Better,” she says, “to travel light.”
And yet, as Charlotte climbs into the carriage, she cannot help glancing back at the grand and empty house. “Won’t you miss it?”
Sabine settles beside her on the velvet bench.
“I miss the last cherries of the season. I miss chocolate melting on my tongue. I miss the way sun used to feel against my skin in spring. I don’t miss walls and doors.
Besides,” she says, sliding her arm through Charlotte’s, “others stay put, and wither in their boxes. We draw up our roots, and find new ground in which to grow.”
“How many times have you done this?” asks Charlotte. “How many lives have you lived?”
“Enough, and not enough,” she answers as the driver snaps his reins.
The carriage pulls away onto the road, and Charlotte looks back—or starts to—but Sabine catches her cheek, the gesture gentle yet firm, a silent command to let the past stay where it is, firmly in their wake.