Claiming Red (Once Upon A Monster #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Water filled my lungs.

Cold. So cold it burned through my chest and settled into my bones. I tried to scream, but the river swallowed the sound, pushed itself deeper into my throat until I could taste mud and rot and old copper underneath. The river remembered every body it had ever taken.

Above me, faces rippled through the surface. Mouths moving in words I couldn’t hear, eyes watching with patience, arms folded and heads tilted. They watched while a woman died beneath them.

My wrists burned where the rope cut into skin. Thumbs bound to toes — the old way, the binding that made floating impossible, that folded a body in half. I fought against it and the ropes pulled tighter, dragged me deeper into the black where the faces above became smears of light.

Someone was counting.

I could hear it even through the water, even through the roaring in my ears. A man’s voice. I knew that voice.

Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

The cold stopped hurting somewhere around thirty. My body surrendered to the dying, and warmth crept in where the cold had been, whispering that perhaps this wasn’t so bad. That I could just stop fighting. Just let go. Just sink into the dark.

Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

But no. I had to try one last time. So I opened my mouth to scream, and the river rushed in to fill the space where breath should have been.

I gasped awake. Cold. Water. Night.

I was standing waist-deep in the river. The water was black around me and cold enough to steal breath, and my nightgown clung to my body like a second skin.

The wet linen showed everything — the curve of my breasts, the soft roll of my belly, the thickness of my hips that no amount of hunger had ever thinned.

The moon hung full and bright overhead, silver light on black water. An owl called somewhere in the trees and a dog barked in the village.

The night wandering. Again. A curse that awoke in me when I was young.

I lurched toward the bank and my feet slipped on river stones, making me go nearly under. Water streamed from my hair and clothes as I dragged myself onto the mud, and I crouched there shaking so hard my teeth rattled.

Anyone could have seen me. The thought came to me like a nightmare, a thirty-eight-year-old widow wandering alone in the night, dressed in nothing but her shift, soaking wet from the river. If anyone saw me like this, they’d have questions I couldn’t answer. They’d call me mad. Or worse.

Witch.

I forced myself to move. Stayed low and kept to the shadows between buildings, my bare feet silent on the packed dirt. The village was dark and quiet, everyone was still asleep in their beds, lucky for me.

I ran the last stretch to my cottage, slipped inside, and shoved the door closed. I dropped the latch and leaned against the wood with my whole body while my nightgown dripped a puddle onto the floor.

Every door had stayed shut. Every window dark.

And no one would see me come home, either.

That was the thing about living alone, the danger ran both ways.

No witnesses to my shame in the river, but no one waiting with a lit candle and a blanket and the particular relief on a face that meant I was worried.

The cottage gave nothing back. Just the dead fire and the dark and the smell of my own herbs hanging in the rafters, indifferent as always.

I stripped off the wet linen and left it in a heap.

I pulled on a dry shift and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, but I couldn’t stop shaking.

I wanted someone to notice the shaking. I wanted a hand on my back, a voice asking if I was all right, even a dog lifting its head from the floor to watch me with sleepy concern.

I had none of it. Only the walls, and the dark, and the sound of my own breathing too loud in the quiet.

I sank down onto the floor with my back against the door. The river still coated my throat. That voice still counting down.

Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

What came after thirty-seven? How high did he count before they pulled the body out?

I pressed my forehead against my knees and stayed there a long time. Just me and the cold and the cottage that had stopped being a home years ago, when the last person who made this cottage a home went into the ground.

This cottage had been my parents’ before they died. I was too young when it happened, and I remembered them only in flashes now. My mother’s hands braiding my hair. My father’s laugh from somewhere far away. The smell of bread baking. The sound of a door closing.

After they were gone, Grandmother and Sophia came down from the cottage in the woods. Moved into the village, into this house, to raise me.

It cost Grandmother more than I understood at the time.

Her gift was seeing spirits, the dead appeared to her as clearly as the living, and where there were people, there were ghosts.

The village was thick with them, all those lives ended, all those souls lingering.

In the cottage deep in the woods, she’d had peace and quiet, just the trees and the animals and her own mother’s spirit visiting when she needed her.

Sophia gave things up too, old enough to resent being uprooted, she could have fought it, could have dug her heels in, could have refused to leave the only home she’d known instead of helping raise her sister’s child.

The village was hard on her in ways she couldn’t explain to anyone but Grandmother.

Too many people. Too many feelings pressing in from every direction.

She’d get headaches in the market square and go pale at festivals and sometimes she’d stop mid-sentence and tilt her head like she was listening to something the rest of us couldn’t hear.

Grandmother called it the Sensing, said Sophia had been born with ears for things other people were deaf to.

In the forest it had been manageable. In a village full of bodies and noise and want, it ate her alive.

She came anyway. Slept in the small room off the kitchen, taught me to cook and sew and tell one herb from another. Told me stories at night when I couldn’t sleep and held me when I cried for parents I couldn’t remember.

She was my aunt but more than that she was my friend, my favorite person in the world. Five years between us, but it had never felt like that much. We’d grown up tangled together, shared secrets and dreams and the small rebellions girls share when they’re learning who they are.

My fingers found the red ribbon tied around my wrist. Faded now, fraying at the edges, but still red. Still mine.

Grandmother wore red. Sophia wore red. My mother wore red. All the women in our line wore it. Grandmother said it was tradition. Her mother wore it, and her mother before that. It was a thread of color connecting us across generations.

That was why they called me Red and not by my real name, Talia.

Grandmother started calling me Red before I could walk.

She caught me pulling the crimson ribbons from Sophia’s hair, stuffing them into my mouth, and crying when she took them away.

“That child wants everything red,” she had told Sophia, shaking her head.

The name stuck. The whole village picked it up.

Now the village uses it differently. Red the widow. Red the healer. Red who lives alone, talks to herself, and walks strangely at night.

I am Red. The color and the woman.

The loneliness was nothing new. I’d learned to wear it the way you learn to wear a badly fitting shoe, always rubbing the same places until you stopped noticing the pain and just noticed the limp.

What was new was the fear sitting on top of it tonight.

The two together made a particular kind of terrible.

And this wasn’t even the first time sleep had walked me somewhere it shouldn’t.

The night wanderings had happened my whole life. I walked in my sleep and saw things, visions that came whether I wanted them or not. Sometimes they showed me the truth. Sometimes they lied. I never knew which until it was too late.

The first vision came when I was seven.

I dreamed of falling. Just the endless dark pulling me down and down until my bones knew the landing before it came.

I woke up standing beneath the old oak behind the cottage.

Barefoot in the grass, my nightgown damp with dew, the taste of blood in my mouth and my arm aching even though nothing was wrong with it.

A week later, I fell from the same old oak tree. Broke my arm in two places. Grandmother set the bone herself, her hands steady and her face calm. When it was done, I sat on the kitchen stool with the splint still warm against my skin and told her.

“I dreamed it,” I whispered. “A week ago. I felt it break before it happened.”

Grandmother went still. Her hands froze on the edge of the table. She looked at me for a long time, and I braced for the fear, the confusion, the pulling away that I’d already learned to expect when I said things other people couldn’t understand.

She pulled me against her chest and held me so tight the splint pressed between us. Her heartbeat was fast against my ear. She didn’t say a word for a long time. Just held on.

“You’re like Sophia,” she murmured into my hair. “Different, but the same blood.” She pulled back and cupped my face. Her eyes were wet. “You listen to me, little Red. What you have is not a curse. It is not a sickness. It is yours. Do you understand?”

I didn’t. Not then. But I nodded because her hands were warm on my face and her eyes were fierce and I wanted to believe her.

After that she watched me differently, like she was waiting for something else to wake up inside me.

The second vision came when I was ten.

I saw a man in the air. He wasn’t flying, and he wasn’t falling. He just hung there like a puppet jerked upward on invisible strings, no rope, no hands, nothing touching him at all. His body twisted and writhed, arms clawing at nothing, legs kicking against air that wouldn’t let him go.