Chapter 21 #2
In one of her letters, she talked about strangling a man with her bare hands.
Was that her last act as a human? I’d assumed she did it maliciously, but…
if he was hurting children, and everyone knew but did nothing about it, I can’t find any blame in her actions.
“So, they stoned you. And you died down there.”
“I never said I died. I said I hoped for an ending. But my hopes were dashed in a way my brains were not. I lay in agony, paralyzed, broken and bloody and alone, raging against an uncaring God and his cruel followers. And that’s where he found me.”
A chill runs down me that has nothing to do with the impending nightfall. “Dracula?”
“I told you,” Diavola snaps, at last betraying a hint of impatience. “I don’t know this Dracula, and I don’t care about vampires.”
“Who, then?”
“The devil. He didn’t look like a devil, though. He crouched by my side and touched my face so tenderly. No one had touched me with kindness since I made my sister flee this vicious place with a boy who promised to love her.”
The sister she mentioned in one of her letters.
When Diavola said she was glad her sister was dead, I assumed she’d killed her.
And now it all fits together. Petra’s mother, who always looked toward the hills with longing.
Who lived to old age, loved and beloved, and died peacefully the way Diavola could never have.
No wonder Eleni was protective. Does she know Diavola is family?
She can’t possibly understand what Diavola is, though.
Diavola wraps her arms around herself, holding so tightly I don’t know if the low creaking noise is branches moving with the wind around us, or her ribs.
“I couldn’t speak, but I pleaded with my eyes for him to end me.
He sat with me for what felt like hours.
I wasn’t afraid until he smiled and told me he would free me.
And then he leaned close and breathed in deeply, so deeply, like he was filling himself with the scent of my blood and terror and rage.
He kept breathing in. For an impossibly long time.
It didn’t stop. I could feel it—feel him—tugging.
Ripping away something so woven into my very fabric that I’d never noticed its existence until I was losing it.
I thought I was dying. I thought it was my soul leaving my body.
I was only right about the second part.”
Her hand drifts up and rests over her heart.
“He told me, later, when all he could do was talk, that he’d never met someone suffering as much as I was.
That he couldn’t bear to let me go. That, of all his centuries wandering, I was the first one he’d ever wanted to keep. He said it like it was a love story.”
“Vrykolakas. One word for so many different things,” I whisper.
“Yes. The worst one found me, and made me like him.” Diavola starts walking again. I drift in her wake like a shadow. She could be lying, but if I trust my intuition like I always have, I know she’s not. She’d already given me so much of her story. I’d just interpreted it wrong.
“Someone abandoned him on our island,” Diavola says.
“They were supposed to figure out how to kill him, and instead they decided to trap him here like a plague rat, skittering unnoticed among us. He was walking across Lesvos in search of another way off when he caught my scent. After he was done fastening me in place here, somewhere between life and death, cut off from the passage of time, from smell, from taste, from touch, from whatever I was or could have been, he simply continued on his way. I stood, still covered in my own blood that would never flow again, and climbed back up the ravine toward my town. I wish I could say there was murder in my heart, but there was nothing left inside. I just wanted—”
Diavola stops. I stop, too. Her thick, dark hair cascades down her back, blowing in the opposite direction of the wind.
If she were standing on the edge of the ravine, about to fall, that’s how the wind would stir her tresses.
That’s the wind that she carries with her everywhere.
The last wind she breathed while she was still human.
She looks over her shoulder at me. “I wanted to go home. And so I came back to my town. To the people who tried to kill me with stones, and tried to kill me with cruelty all the years before that. I don’t know what I expected.
Maybe that they’d scream and flee. Maybe that they’d fall to their knees and weep at the miracle of my return.
That they’d beg forgiveness. That they’d take the priest who had taught them God’s love was punishment and wrath and judgment but only on the terms men decided, and send him down the same cliff they sent me.
Maybe even that they’d try to kill me again and the entire thing was a looping nightmare I’d be trapped in forever, the hell the priest had spat in my face for so many years.
But when I arrived, my devil was already there. And everyone was dead.”
The bodies, all fallen where they were. As much as the scene filled me with horror earlier, now that I know what Diavola had been through, I wonder how I would feel in her place. “Were you glad?”
“I wasn’t anything. Until I saw his head turn.
He looked down the mountain at the village far below.
The one I’d sent my sister to so she’d be safe.
Happy. Loved. And I knew whatever he was, whatever he’d done here, I couldn’t let him do it anywhere else.
Even if I wasn’t myself anymore, I was still a daughter of Lesvos.
We know what to do with vrykolakas. I smiled at him, and told him I had something to show him. ”
She points. To our right, hidden in the shadows so that I’d never have noticed it, is a cave.
I step toward it and then stop. The frozen scent coming from the opening is overwhelming.
The lingering stench of a dead body would be more comforting.
At least that’s familiar. At least that’s human.
This is so sharply wrong that I want to flee.
Diavola glides into the jagged entrance and is swallowed by the dark. Her voice beckons me to follow. “Come and see where your father damned us all.”