Chapter II
II
Hampshire, England
It is easy to lose track of time.
After all, the days look different, but the nights appear the same. The darkness bleeds like watercolor, and time runs with it. A month becomes a year. A decade. Three. Then four.
And suddenly it’s almost Christmas, and Charlotte is stepping down from a carriage, her boots sinking a little in the English soil, and she knows, even with Sabine’s fingers like a veil over her eyes, that she is back in Hampshire.
She can hear the breeze through dry tall grass, can smell the hawthorn and the dogwood, the birch smoke rising from the hearth, half hopes, half fears that when Sabine takes her hands away, Charlotte will find herself staring up at Clement Hall.
Instead, when she’s allowed to look, she is greeted by a stranger’s stately house, the windows candlelit and traced in garlands. A ribbon of pale pebbles for a drive, a wreath of holly on the door, a rooftop laced with frost. It might as well be made of gingerbread, it is so beautiful.
“A gift,” says Sabine, leaning to kiss the slope of skin just beneath her jaw. “I know it’s not the same, but—”
Charlotte cuts her off, throws her arms around her neck.
“It’s perfect,” she says with every kiss.
All these years, and Sabine still manages to take her by surprise.
She cranes her head, studies the cobalt blue of early night, the winter sky she knows so well, and wonders how far they are from Clement Hall.
“A mile down the road,” answers Sabine. “I thought you’d like a taste of home.”
Charlotte nods. Sabine is always telling her to look forward, never back, but these last few years she has been longing for just that.
A taste of home.
It’s a turn of phrase Charlotte doesn’t fully grasp until they’re walking up the drive. Until she’s forced to face the fact that the house Sabine has chosen for them isn’t empty.
Yet.
But Sabine only smiles, looking pleased as a cat, and Charlotte knows there is no turning back. They knock, claiming to be carolers. It is the season, after all, for charity, for kindness. How quickly they are let inside.
The wife offers them tea—Charlotte will always remember that—and the husband takes their coats, the air around them unsuspecting, filled with nothing but the scent of pine. Sabine follows the woman from the room. Charlotte stays, and takes the man.
He doesn’t scream, or thrash, or plead.
She has learned how to make the killing fast, to bite down hard and deep, leaving them frightened but too stunned to fight.
But she prefers to take her time. To bury the violence in something gentle, sweet, only the tips of her teeth breaking the skin.
To take their life so slow they barely notice that they’re hurt until it’s far too late to fight.
So that’s what Charlotte does. She is as kind as she can be, lets him sink against her as she lingers in the sunlight, in the heartbeat, in the warmth, as long as she is able, and then when there is nothing left, she lays him down.
She feels the tears slip down her cheeks, brushes them away as she goes to find Sabine.
Strange, she isn’t in the kitchen.
The wife is there, propped in a chair, her head resting on her folded arms as if she’s drifted off to sleep. Charlotte touches the woman’s face, half expecting her to wake, when she hears the scream.
It comes from overhead, spills down the stairs, and Charlotte rushes up, the stolen heart still beating in her chest as she reaches the bedroom at the end. And stops.
Across the room, Sabine holds a girl dressed in nothing but a nightgown against her front. A child, no older than thirteen. Her terror, thick as paint, is splashed on every wall, and blood is weeping from her cheek, her wrist, her throat.
“Sabine,” says Charlotte, but she doesn’t seem to hear.
In her arms, the girl twists and pleads, trying to get free. Sabine loosens her grip and the girl tears away.
“ Help! ” she cries out, scrambling one step, two, before Sabine catches her again, pulls her back, and clamps a hand over her mouth.
“Who are you calling for?” she purrs. “Everyone is dead.”
Horror washes over Charlotte, brighter than she’s felt in years.
“Sabine, enough, ” she snaps.
The girl sees her and thrashes like an animal, eyes wild and afraid, as Charlotte starts forward, determined to put a stop to this, to end her suffering. But when she gets close enough to try, Sabine pushes her away.
Sabine, who until that very moment has never laid a hand on her except in hunger, love, or want. Never left a mark unless it was a part of pleasure.
That Sabine now pushes Charlotte hard enough to send her staggering. She stumbles back into the bed frame, the wood behind her splintering from the force. Charlotte’s vision flickers black and white, and she recovers just in time to see Sabine sink her teeth into the child’s throat.
It is a shallow, brutal bite, not deep enough to kill, only to tear, to hurt.
The girl claws and scrambles, feral in her fear, but Sabine’s grip is a cage, unbreakable, and soon her thrashing turns to feeble twists, her screams to whimpers. She pushes weakly at Sabine, a final, desperate pawing until at last she slumps, the fight and then the life snuffed out of her.
Charlotte stands there stunned and angry as Sabine finally lets go, the body dropping to the floor. A heap of limbs that now will never grow.
Charlotte stares at her love—
And stops.
She has known Sabine for more than twice her mortal life.
Five decades spent in each other’s company.
Long enough to study every facet of Sabine, to learn the tones of voice that go with every mood, the way her limbs drift when she is tired, and drag when she is drunk, and dance when she is glad, but never stop unless she sleeps.
The way she moves and speaks and loves and kills.
Long enough to know that this is not Sabine.
Her eyes are black and bottomless, so unlike the burning hazel ones that Charlotte knows and loves. There is a stranger looking out. A stranger tugging at her smile.
“What’s wrong, my love?” she asks in a dreamy voice as she steps over the corpse.
“Why did you do that?” demands Charlotte. “You didn’t need to—”
“Need to? No . . .”
“You shouldn’t have,” she snaps.
“Says who?” The black eyes narrow, cold and angry. “You?” She reaches Charlotte, who tries to step back, only to find the broken bedpost in her way.
“Stop,” warns Charlotte, her voice unsteady.
Sabine reaches up to stroke her tearstained cheek.
“My fragile-hearted little flower . . .” Her hand slides past, into Charlotte’s hair.
“You want to know why I did it,” she whispers.
“Why I let her scream and fight. Why I stoked her fear.” She leans close, too close, and smiles, blood staining her teeth.
“I like the way it tastes. ” Her fingers twist, a stranger’s hold in a lover’s hand, the curls drawn tight enough to hurt.
Charlotte flinches, but doesn’t try to pull free, just looks into the stranger’s eyes and says, “ Let go of me. ”
And whether it’s the sharpness of the words, or the disgust and anger rolling off her, the stranger blinks, and disappears.
Sabine stares back at her.
The candles reignite behind her eyes.
Her body recoils slightly, as if burned.
Her grip loosens and lets go.
“Charlotte,” says Sabine, and at least her voice is hers again, but Charlotte cannot bring herself to stand and listen to it. The moment she is free, she turns and leaves.
Walks out of the room, and then the house, and then keeps going, her dress wicking up the night-damp grass, clinging to her legs with a chill she registers, but doesn’t feel.
She walks because she cannot bear to stop, let alone turn back, but at some point the balance tips, and she’s no longer fleeing one place, but being drawn forward toward another, the ground sloping beneath the weight of memory. Until she looks up, and there it is.
Clement Hall.
Not the long front drive and grand facade, but the sprawling gardens at its back.
The gardens, which she revisits every time she drinks.
In her mind they are unchanged, unchanging, but even in the dark she sees the subtle work of time, her mother’s wilderness pushed out, the edges tamed.
The patches where frost has killed a plant or tree, the spots where new ones have been planted.
But the bulk of it is just as she remembered.
Her steps crunch softly on the pebbled path as she takes in the same rose-covered trellises and ivy arches, bare in winter. The same fountain at the garden’s heart, the figure looming at its center, two fingers chipped from the time she played horseshoes with its lifted hand.
The same night sky stretches overhead, as wide as it has always been, though the scattered points now seem to her a tapestry of light.
A star shoots by, and she is fourteen again, and James is with her in the dark, arranging the telescope he received that Christmas, calibrating it against Polaris and murmuring the winter constellations to himself.
“Orion . . . Taurus . . . Auriga . . . Carina . . .” he says, swiveling the lens on its brass stand.
It is a crisp, clear night, and her nose and lips are chapped with cold, but she can’t bring herself to burrow down into her scarf, not when all the wonder comes from looking up, and any moment their father and mother will appear at the back door and call them in, out of the dark.
But then Charlotte blinks, and her brother and his telescope are gone, and she is alone again.
Her gaze goes to the house.
It is the middle of the night, and nearly all the shutters have been drawn, but ghosts of lamplight seep here and there between the slats, and she wonders, five decades on, what member of her family lives there now?
Her father is surely gone. Her mother, too.
But James? Could he be up there, in his bed?