Chapter Seven
Hyacinth
A teddy bear is a fluffy, furry thing that I can hug.
Hyacinth squeezed it to her chest triumphantly as she followed Agatha up the stairs for bed.
Best of all, it smells like him. Like soil.
Like freshly tilled earth and dew drops on tree leaves and thunderstorms. Despite the shock of that memory that didn’t belong to her, she decided she liked the smell of Austin. Even if he doesn’t like being seen.
Hyacinth brought the bear up to her nose and inhaled deeply.
Calm after the storm, that’s what Austin smelled like.
It filled her lungs as she held the scrungly looking teddy bear close.
It was lumpy in the belly and one of the button eyes was bigger than the other, giving it a horrified stare, but the round ears were adorable.
And it was so fluffy. Like a bearskin rug, she could run her fingers through it.
Austin even braided some of it and put a bow on top of its head.
The lavender ribbon tickled under her chin as she squeezed the bear.
“Agatha?” Hyacinth asked, stepping up to the second floor. She followed the banshee holding the candelabra aloft, the flames making the walls glow. “Earlier, when you abandoned me in the lab—”
Agatha scoffed, huffing and puffing as she whirled around on her floating skirts. “Ah-bah-ah! I-I-I did no such thing!”
Her hair whipped back and forth aggressively as she manually stuffed her free fist into her skirts to keep them down. Like air was blowing up them and forcing her higher in the air.
“Why did you?” Hyacinth cocked her head to the side. Blink, blink. It wasn’t like she was here to argue if Agatha did or didn’t abandon her. She did. Her question was about the reasoning for it. Though I’d also like to know what she’d call it if not abandoning. My vocabulary needs expanding.
“I…” Agatha opened her mouth, voice trailing off to a low squeak. Then, with a quick lick of her lips, she answered. “Simply had other things to attend to and Austin is more than capable of answering your questions without supervision.”
“Why doesn’t he show his face?” Hyacinth lobbed the question at Agatha with a frown. “Does he only exist in that lab?”
“Oh, no, he doesn’t,” Agatha ducked her head, staring at her swimming skirts. The candles bobbed a little as she floated further down the hall, backwards. “Austin isn’t usually shy.”
It was the first time that Hyacinth considered that Austin’s nature was because of her. She slowed to a stop, her bare feet flat against the hard wood. Agatha watched her from five feet away, but Hyacinth’s gaze roamed away from the teddy bear to the walls. Then to the stairs they’d just climbed.
“I am the problem,” she croaked.
“No, my dear, that’s not it at all.” Agatha floated closer, placing a soft, spectral hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder.
Yet the pressure on her skin didn’t register.
Because I cannot feel, not in the way living creatures do.
Hyacinth was undead. But why was she undead.
She’d almost asked Austin a hundred times, but every time she thought it, another question seemed more pressing.
She asked Austin about the fur, about teddy bears, about thread and needles and fabric.
For all the questions, the most important one stayed on her tongue.
Why didn’t I ask him? Was I worried he wouldn’t know? Or was it because he is not my creator?
“Why was I created?” Hyacinth snapped as her eyes sharpened on Agatha. “What was I made for!?”
“Hyacinth.”
“Where is my maker?” she snarled. Warmth flooded through her veins sharply and she wanted nothing more than to storm up to Sebastian and ask him.
Why am I here? I am a person but what does that mean?
What is my purpose? Why did you make me this way?
She grabbed up the front of her skirt, cradling her bear in the crook of her arm, and twisting toward the stairs.
Agatha rushed after her, calling her name but Hyacinth didn’t stop.
She followed the soft murmurs through the dark.
As her foot stepped onto the bottom step, she heard the creak of a door.
“There you are, Agatha, I was just…hello, little one, why do you look upset?”
She found the bird faced man slipping out of an office door.
Darkness followed him like a cloak that billowed out into the hallway.
Hyacinth stormed across the main floor. Despite the fury that licked up her spine and the burning heat in her belly, something altogether new brewed in her chest. Her vision grew blurry as she rattled like a leaf in a storm.
Sebastian cocked his bird mask to the side, meeting her stride for stride till she lingered an arm’s length from him.
Her fist trembled at her side while she choked the bear with her other arm.
“Yoooou.” The sound wavered and fell out of her mouth. She sucked in a sharp, wet breath as something trickled down her cheeks. “You made me.”
“Yes, Hyacinth, we discussed—”
“Whhhhy!” she cried out. A hard sob turned her bones into shattered pieces as she did her best to jab a finger into his frilly ascot. Her whole body shivered as more hot tears spilled down her face. “Why am I here!?”
“Oh, little one, shhh,” he cooed, two hands to her rattling shoulders.
They fell still only because of the pressure of his touch.
More sobs spilled out of her as she struggled to breathe.
Her body screamed for air, like it needed to fill her undead lungs.
Except she worked with shriveled husks that refused to inflate, leaving her heaving and wheezing.
Sebastian tugged her in close, stroking her hair.
His arms wrapped around her. A hug. When she inhaled, it was something salty.
A brine that was some part fresh and some part murky.
Like seaweed in lemon or limes with a hint of seawater.
It sank into her lungs, forcing them open. Her tears dried.
A garden full of small plants. She closed her eyes and she was knelt in a garden.
Ripping out weeds with her bare hands. The sound of the roots tearing was excruciating loud.
She felt their resistance, and watched their little, white bodies stretch until a seam in them began to rip.
Then they’d spray the world in crimson, and she watched the weeds in her hands change from green to crimson.
And it’s no longer a spikey, sharp thing that stabbed into the meat of her palm…
it wasn’t a weed at all! It was an arm. Ripped off around the elbow, the skin in tatters.
She pressed her finger through one of the holes in it like it was moth-riddled fabric.
Something reached out of the garden and suddenly, she wasn’t in a garden full of weeds, but a yard full of bodies.
“Hyacinth?”
She stumbled out of his touch, hugging the teddy bear.
That’s a memory. It’s not mine. Swallowing was hard but it was the only thing her body wanted to do around the lump of tissue lodged in her esophagus.
Then the scent of freshly tilled soil, dew over leaves, and thunderstorms filled her nose and the lump softened.
It dissolved into a small pebble of limestone that fell into her stomach.
Sizzling, it made her stomach acid slosh, but it was manageable.
A silk piece of fabric was tugged out of Lord Rosemont’s pocket and used to dry her eyes.
Blink, blink. She glanced up from the blood-soaked handkerchief to his bird mask.
He pulled it away, showing her the face beneath.
Undead.
“Why do I see things that do not belong to me?” she finally managed to speak again.
“What sorts of things?” His scaley, dark green brow knitted down. Tucking the mask under his arm, he raked long, emerald hair out from behind him. It trickled down his side like a curtain.
“Hands,” Hyacinth confessed. “I keep seeing hands. They reach toward me like they might grab me. I keep seeing this garden, and when I pull the weeds, the hands come up from the ground.”
Agatha subtly slid into her vision, looming over Lord Rosemont’s shoulder. Both of them gave her confused, horrified expressions. Hyacinth grimaced, shrinking back into herself. Blink, blink.
“I will need to look into it,” Sebastian murmured softly. “In the meantime, I will get you something to help you sleep. Just in case these memories become nightmares.”
Agatha slid up to her side, clutching her arm softly.
The sweet-faced housekeeper stroked the side of her arm softly as her maker ducked back into his office.
Hyacinth caught the inquisitive look on his face mere seconds before he disappeared behind the shadows of the house.
Agatha whispered softly, “Don’t you worry, Hyacinth, we’ll get this sorted out. ”
“Was that wrong to say?” Hyacinth spoke in a rush of air. “Was that a bad thing?”
“No! No, it wasn’t bad,” Agatha cooed.
“It felt like a bad thing to say. It felt like you both looked at me like…well…bad.” She spoke rapidly, the words tangling up with her tongue as she tried to find a suitable reference, but she didn’t have one.
In her head she knew it was a horrified look.
But Hyacinth didn’t know anything horrifying.
Not until the next few words fell out of her mouth.
“You both looked at me like I were the person eaten by the tree and I was trying to grab your face.”
“Is that what you saw?” Agatha softened, floating lower to the ground like her feet might actually touch.
She was a ghost, so firm she was practically opaque from her scalp to her hips.
The edges of her hair were frayed dreams that slithered in and out of view while the end of her dress disappeared like it dissolved.
However, just for a moment, Hyacinth saw the edge of an ankle length dress and two feet in sensible slippers touch down beside her.
“The first time…when Austin hugged me.”
“Austin hugged you?” Her eyes flashed red and lips curled broadly.
Hyacinth’s eyebrows nearly shot off her face.
Flinching backward an inch, she took in Agatha’s overly excited expression.
Long, spectral fingers like daggers held her in place as Agatha floated closer.
“Did you ask him for one or did he offer it organically? How did it happen?”
Hyacinth opened her mouth, but no words formed.
Blink, blink, blink. She scrambled for something to say.
There was a deep-rooted desire in her to make Agatha happy, but she was clueless how to do it.
Or why she cared. Caring seemed like something people do and Hyacinth didn’t consider herself a people yet.
Or am I a people? No, I’m a people. I’m just not a people’s people yet.
I’m a person who is conquering being sentient who hopes one day to be a people’s people, yes! That’s it!
“He offered to make me a teddy bear. I asked him what the teddy bear was for. He said cuddling. I asked what that was and he offered to show me what a hug was…then I saw the hand and might have ruined it.” Hyacinth squeezed the bear tight to her chest. Agatha listened to the whole explanation, slowly letting go of the undead woman’s shoulder to put her hands in front of her face.
When Hyacinth finished, Agatha was doing a weird frown smile that couldn’t be described as anything but aggressive affection.
Agatha squealed, zipping up to Hyacinth’s other side, shaking her shoulder tenderly.
“That’s so cute! He hugged you!”
“Who hugged who?” Sebastian reemerged with a glowing purple vial in the shape of a snake.
“Austin hugged me and Agatha squealed,” Hyacinth confessed like he’d pressed it out of her.
“Oh! And…did you…like? The hug?” Sebastian’s tone indicated he was curious. But when he reemerged, he was back to being a leather-faced bird person and Agatha was twirling around like a top to her side. Hyacinth’s gaze moved from one to the other in utter confusion.
“Does a hug mean something I am unaware of?” She scowled.
“No! No!” Both of them rushed to speak, waving hands in front of her. Hyacinth narrowed her gaze suspiciously on them. Lord Rosemont continued while Agatha laughed sweetly by his side, “It’s a simple embrace shared between two people.”
“Totally innocent!” Agatha chimed in with a sickly-sweet smile.
“Are you both being sarcastic?” She squinted even more, her vision nearly slits. They straightened, the banshee’s face softening while her maker’s impassive, ocular stare bore through her.
“Not at all.” Agatha shook her head.
Hyacinth huffed, “Then what is sarcasm.”
Sebastian offered with a sigh, “Basically, anything that comes out of Smith’s mouth.”
A distant ‘Hey! I heard that’ floated down the hall but it was quickly shushed and muffled by the rustling of fabric.
Hyacinth glanced in the direction the voice came from, but all she could see was shadows beyond the staircase.
When she returned her attention to Lord Rosemont and Agatha, they were studying her.
Something suddenly filled her belly, like that of a million moths or a handful of clumsy bats.
It made her flesh warm and her stitches itch.
She snatched the vial from her maker and steadily backed away from them both, never taking her eyes off of them.
“I am going to bed,” she declared.
“Sweet dreams!” Agatha called out, waving to Hyacinth sweetly.
“Or! Rather, no dreams! Sweet dreamless slumber, little one. Down the whole vial then right to bed.”
Hyacinth picked up the skirt of her dress with one hand, the bear and vial in the other, and climbed back up the steps.
Why are they looking at me so strangely?
I still don’t know why I was made but maybe…
maybe there is no reason. No good one that will explain anything, anyway.
With a sigh, she stomped petulantly the whole way to her room.
Once behind her bedroom doors, she pulled the cork out of the vial and drank it all the way to her bed.
Throwing herself into the duvet felt good, so she made sure to flop about a bit.
Really rough it up. And she even grabbed a pillow.
Stuffed it to her face, muffling the sound of her scream.
She learned earlier if she made a loud noise, people would come running.
She didn’t want them to come in and see her. She didn’t need their intrusion.
Hyacinth just wanted to scream. Pressing the soft cushion on her face, she unhinged her jaw slightly and let out a scream from deep in her dead lungs.
Shortly after getting it all out and rolling onto her belly so she could press her face into the pillow—for sleep screaming—she passed out.
A werewolf fur teddy bear curled up against her rib cage, choked in the pit of her elbow.