Chapter I
I
Charlotte has so much to learn, and Sabine is there to teach her.
How to kill, of course. But also, how to live.
How to travel, skipping like a stone, never landing in one place—or stop, and sink into the pattern of a life.
How to draw out the hunt for weeks and savor the reward—or condense the game into a single night.
And if Charlotte cannot bring herself to take much pleasure in the kill, at least Sabine never lets her wallow in the aftermath.
And since those first years are happy ones, they blur.
It does not matter where they go.
They are an island, alone together in the vast wide world.
And they are happy.
Perhaps that is what makes them monsters—the fact their love is marked by violence, and death, and yet.
And yet.
She would not change a thing.
By night, they are like children, set loose in a garden of delights, the darkest hours turned into a playground of the senses, a festival, a ball.
They dance. They drink. They dream.
And in the morning, Sabine pulls Charlotte down into the sheets and whispers poetry against her skin, lines about midnight soil and soft red petals and sharp white teeth.
And every time, Charlotte drifts off surrounded by the scent of her lover. Like damp earth and dry bark. And in the circle of her arms, she feels safe.
She feels home.
How easy it is now, to trace the fractured path, follow it back to the moment when the first crack formed. How easy it was then, to pretend that it was nothing.
They have stolen into an empty German castle, a hundred rooms left shuttered and unused, and there, Sabine teaches Charlotte how to lay claim to a space and make it hers.
How to draw a threshold using nothing but her will.
Later that night, when they are running barefoot through the halls, chasing each other in some made-up jest, Sabine fast on Charlotte’s heels, she runs into an empty room and declares it hers.
Dances backward into the middle of the chamber, each step announcing This is mine, this is mine, the way Sabine just taught her.
Sabine, who tries to follow her into the room only to be rebuffed, as if the air has turned to stone.
They both freeze, surprised by how quickly she has learned, how well she keeps her lover out. Charlotte laughs, delighted, and Sabine smiles, flashing teeth.
“Well done,” she says. “Now let me in.”
And Charlotte, so proud of her new skill, says, “No.”
Just like that, the balance tips.
Charlotte has seen Sabine annoyed, and bored, frustrated and impatient, but until that moment, she had never seen her mad.
She is startled not only by the rage, but by how much it frightens her.
The way Sabine’s whole demeanor shifts, the smile dropping from her face as her amusement dies.
Anger strikes like flint behind her eyes.
Charlotte abandons the game, and her hold on the chamber. She forces herself to smile as she says, “Of course, my love, come in.”
The threshold dissolves, the room no longer hers alone, and just like that, Sabine’s good humor flickers back, the offense seemingly forgotten as she lunges forward.
Charlotte lets herself be caught, laughing in relief as Sabine pins her down against the floor.
Charlotte loves Sabine.
How can she not?
This woman, who is a force of nature. Who bends the world instead of bending for it. Who looks at Charlotte with such open want, and touches her without an ounce of shame. Who never steals a kiss, but instead lays claim to it, as if it is already hers.
Sabine, who proves a master gardener.
And Charlotte, so eager to be tended.
So grateful she has found a hand that makes her bloom.
For years, they live in stolen houses.
Sleep in other people’s beds, the heavy curtains drawn, the days spent buried in the dark. Most nights, Charlotte stays up long enough to watch the black give way to dawn, and wakes in time to watch the sun go down again, though even those pale filaments are hard to look at it.
If she had known she’d never be able to enjoy the light of day again, she would have lingered that last afternoon, savored each and every hue.
Charlotte asked once if that was why Sabine wore shades of goldenrod, and burgundy, and Prussian blue—because she missed the vibrant colors of the day—but Sabine only chuckled and said she’d never been so sentimental.
She merely liked the way they looked against her skin.
Sabine is not one to dwell.
But Charlotte cannot help it.
Just as she cannot seem to shed the grief, or guilt, the weight of things she’d felt in life, her new hunger expands as well, finds the curiosity she had before and makes it ravenous.
She raids the libraries of every house they pass through, greedy for language, philosophy, novels, anything she can touch, and take, has to restrain herself to only one book from each place, and leaves the last she’s finished in her wake.
Most nights she stays up reading long past dawn, then climbs into bed beside Sabine, who rouses only long enough to fold her in.
Even then, tired as she is, Charlotte sometimes lies awake, her mind brimming with questions.
About life. About time. About them. Until Sabine strokes her hair and bids her hush, as if the volume of Charlotte’s mind is keeping her awake.
If Sabine herself has ever wondered about such things, she does not say.
There is so much she does not say.
Charlotte often wishes she could feel the contours of her lover’s mind, read the outlines of her ideas, her hopes, her dreams, but Sabine’s thoughts are always guarded, her head is always closed.
A matter of age, Sabine says when she asks, but Charlotte swears she is being kept out.
More than once she tries the door, prying at the mental locks, but every time she is rebuffed, met by a warning look, and nothing more.
Rarely, Sabine will offer up a glancing mention of her past.
An absent comment dropped like a breadcrumb in her wake. Charlotte hoards them hungrily. A boat docked in Seville. The Carnevale in Venice. A church. A pair. A painter. A friend. But when she asks for more, Sabine withdraws and says, “It does not matter now.”
Once, early on, they pass through an empty villa in the hills of Spain, and Charlotte finds Sabine standing on the balcony, looking over the night-soaked grounds at an olive grove below.
“What is it?” she asks softly.
Sabine inclines her head. “An echo,” she murmurs, and when Charlotte tells her to go on, she shakes her head and claims she can’t remember, and Charlotte knows then that it must have been a place she lived before.
Before time stopped. Before she changed.
Those are the only years she never talks about.
One night, when they are strolling arm in arm down a Paris road, Sabine notes the date, and casually reveals that she is twenty, only to add that she has been that age three hundred years.
Three hundred years.
The mind boggles at the size of such a life, the scope, the scale. Charlotte gasps, and Sabine crooks a brow. “What is it?”
“Think of all the books that you could have read!”
And Sabine laughs, a lovely, earnest sound that makes Charlotte feel like she is falling in love all over again.
“We have to celebrate,” says Charlotte, and Sabine steals a kiss, and assures her that they will.
Charlotte is full of questions, but Sabine does not seem to mind.
It’s true, she teases Charlotte when she thinks too loudly for too long, but she always seems amused when she voices them aloud, as if charmed by her persistent curiosity.
Until Charlotte asks if there are others.
They are walking arm in arm, the strangers around them reduced to shapes and shadows by a late-night fog, when she wonders casually, almost to herself, how many of their kind are out there.
Sabine goes stiff beside her.
“Am I not enough?” she asks, and there it is again, an anger so sudden and cold that Charlotte shivers, fights the urge to draw back as she says, “Of course. Of course you are. That is not the point.”
But Sabine is staring at her now, the light behind her eyes gone out.
So Charlotte lets the matter go.
Sabine was right.
Everything gets easier with time.
Even killing.
And if the horror of it never truly disappears—every time Charlotte takes a life, the guilt is there to greet her—then at least it is mercifully brief, fading almost as quickly as the heartbeat in her chest.
She decides early on that she will only take the lives of men.
She even goes so far as to seek out the ones with meanness in their thoughts, violence in their air, tells herself it is a kind of virtue. As if one life is worth more than another.
Sabine teases her, says it is like choosing tonic over wine, that women taste far sweeter.
But Charlotte insists, even though she knows deep down there is no difference in the end.
Regardless of their sex, their innocence or guilt, the last thing these men will ever feel is fear. And it will be her doing.
Charlotte tells herself she takes no pleasure in the act, that it is a means and nothing more. But that is not wholly true. She craves that moment in the sun, the borrowed heart, the flush of heat, the power of the blood. But there is another piece—the way she feels when those men are in her arms.
When they are weak, and she is strong. When they are trapped.
And she is free.