Chapter 10
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The feast was over. Gunnar had returned to his asylum of the deceased, kneeling among the skulls like a priest before his reliquaries. Ophelia remained in bed, the blood tracing down her in tenebrous rivulets.
Today, she was not in a good mood. She had already been tense, and the fact that this one had died so quickly only spurred her irritation.
She had tried to take it out on Gunnar, riding him so fiercely that she never found her own release.
He had lost patience, flipping her over to claim his own.
He hadn’t looked at me once, and he had left right after.
Wanting to comfort Ophelia, I crawled between her legs. The space was slick with her own juices and Gunnar’s thick, musky seed. I pressed closer, careful, and latched myself onto her, tasting mostly him.
My tongue strained over the small, firm curve of her bump. I tried to gain momentum, my fingers already reaching for her, but before I could settle, she caught my hair in a grip and wrenched me back. I looked at her in surprise.
“I’m not in the mood,” she said flatly, pushing herself off the bed before moving to the bathroom.
Now, the room smelled like a desecrated cathedral of flesh and flame. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked down.
There he lay, mutilated and discarded.
I had seen him alive, if only for the briefest of moments.
He was rude and handsy with Ophelia. And then, I watched him die.
Somehow, he had never been human to me. The moment he crossed the threshold of the room where I had waited for him in a dim corner, I had already unmade him in my mind.
Something inside me had decided he didn’t matter long before he was gone.
Perhaps it was the only way to survive—sever the person from the corpse before the corpse had even cooled.
The smell of his innards was hot sugar—so unlike the others.
I crouched, knees cracking, and slid the folded sheet beneath him. I moved mechanically and without emotion, as if I were cleaning a table after a meal or putting dishes away.
My only concern was that this one was heavier than its predecessors. The rigid mass resisted my manipulations. Dragging it was a weary burden.
I stopped halfway, gasping, hands slick. I wiped my face without thinking and tasted salty syrup at the edge of my mouth. Blood.
It had smeared across my skin, blossoming on my tongue like the first flower after a long winter—sweet and bright. It did not taste wrong. Instead, it almost reminded me of a milky liqueur, and I had the faintest recollection of gulping those under the shelter of the gazebo.
Saliva pooled. I began to ache. And then . . . I didn't spit. I swallowed.
The substance lingered on my tongue like salt along the rim of a glass, stinging, strange, and exhilarating. It was making my head spin. I almost giggled from how good it felt.
For a moment, I forgot it had come from this corpse.
In my mind, it had come from God. And God was telling me to take another sip.
I didn’t resist.
The next evening, I forced myself up early.
It was easy, the energy still bubbling through me.
I lay there with my eyes closed and recalled the taste of blood.
I toyed with the memory, trying to summon it, until a sudden burn and a harsh, chemical tang made me spit.
Blood coated my lips, and I realized I had bitten my own tongue.
Why did my own blood taste so foul and acidic?
But never mind that now. Drawn by the same strong pull, I reached the room with the skulls and entered without hesitation, fueled by this newfound power.
The house was quiet, the world outside sinking into sleep, and Gunnar and Ophelia had not stirred.
When they awoke, there was always music, the friction of bodies, or Ophelia’s endless preaching about Gunnar’s indifference, or her ceaseless chatter about her misery with her parents, and then her husband, and the asylum.
I could not believe they had lived so long, and yet so little. It was all death, and sex, and eternal ruin.
But this was my time. This was when the world belonged to me.
Settling in with the warmth of a single candle, a tentative brush of my hand over the skulls and bones sent shivers through me once more. It felt as if they were returning the caress, accepting me as one of their own.
I lingered over étienne. Something in him called to me. I carefully plucked the skull from the shelf and settled with him on the floor.
He told me how Gunnar had found him, how he had been seduced by the shape of his face, the mysteries in his silences.
Gunnar had welcomed him into the night, and they had spent an eternity together, watching the world drift by in its chaotic rush.
étienne had wished it could always remain like that, unchanging. Endless.
But life rarely offered such grace.
Gunnar had grown restless, weary of the same hunting grounds, the same shadows.
Staying in one place became too risky, and he decided to cross into the new world.
étienne had refused. He couldn’t fathom spending months on a cankered boat, surrounded by salt water and hunger.
He loved his homeland and swore he would never leave. Never.
And then he did. Though against his will.
Voices and music curled upstairs, spreading through the house like smoke. There was a snap, a fleeting moment of freefall, and then I broke from my trance. The boy disappeared, his blue eyes replaced by a piece of bone, the empty sockets staring at me with infinite sadness.
étienne slipped from my thoughts, his story left unfinished.
I hesitated with his skull still cupped in my hands.
I silently pleaded that he not make a sound, to keep our meeting a secret.
In return, I would share nothing of what he’d shared with anyone.
He agreed, but no one was coming. I set him back on the shelf among his comrades, and stepped outside.
I wanted to vanish into my room, but Gunnar and Ophelia were right at the base of the stairs. One step, and they would hear me. So I stayed fixed in place.
“You are always there, with those bones.” Ophelia was shouting. “It’s like they’re more precious to you than I am! As though their company is preferable to mine!”
He didn’t answer.
I knew Gunnar’s silence. It was more terrifying than any words. His stillness was of a predator, poised to pounce.
“I know you only got me to replace your dear étienne! But he did not want you! I do! Haven’t I followed you everywhere? Haven’t I done everything for you? Why am I not enough? He is dead! I’m alive!”
The heat drained from my face. étienne. The name I had given the skull. But I had never spoken it aloud.
I had thought I had invented him, or perhaps hallucinated him, trapped in a prison of my own mind and driven mad by the things I had seen and done. But no. He had been waiting for me to find him, to hear him.
“This is why I wanted to keep her. Because you are not there for me! You cannot take her too! Please don’t take her! Let me have her!”
Foolish Ophelia. In all her long, sprawling life, she'd learned nothing.
Nothing! She did not understand that Gunnar was not a man to be moved by tears or the frantic discord of a plea.
She was unmaking the delicate peace we had carved, throwing her tantrums into the half-dark and ensuring that the merciless weight of his attention fell first and heaviest into the very thing she wanted to keep.
Me.
Sobs cut through the music, followed by the sound of approaching steps. Gunnar was nearing.
Panicking, I stepped back into the room with the bones, knowing well enough how idiotic the idea was. This was where he would come. He would find me here once again.
And now, with Ophelia acting as she was, discussions of ending me were bound to continue.
I gripped the handle with both hands, my knuckles white as I fought to keep the lock from clicking.
But the moment the door met the frame, it was ripped from my grasp.
I stumbled back, my heart hammering as Gunnar’s enormous frame loomed over me.
In the clotted dark, he was nothing but a silhouette, yet I found myself leaning into the space where his eyes—two black holes—should have been.
The thick scent of disturbed soil turned the room into a tomb, and every breath I drew felt like a mouthful of graveyard dirt.
The front door slammed with a force that rattled the house’s foundation. The jagged cough of a motor broke the night. Tires clawed over gravel. Then, the sound of the retreating car dwindled into the distance.
Ophelia was gone.
I discerned weeping.
Shaken, I turned toward the skulls.
It was them. The bones were weeping. For me?
I looked back at Gunnar, wondering if he heard it too.
He was approaching with a terrifying, measured grace.
I had nowhere left to run. When the space between us vanished, he seized my wrist and twisted my back to him.
He drove my face toward the shelves. A short scream escaped me, more from the shock than the pain.
My cheek pressed against the bones. I didn’t need to see them to know who they were.
One belonged to the woman I had seen before, the Viking. The only one who had chosen Gunnar, not the other way around. The bone was splintered, a serrated shard at one end where it had been snapped like dry kindling.
The other was also a woman, older, her gaze steady, knowing. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, the skin around them pulled taut as a drumhead. She seemed to watch me, slowly shaking her head, whether in judgment or regret, I couldn't tell.
I remembered the tale of Bluebeard and his curious wives, how each had entered the forbidden cellar only to find the bodies of those who came before. It had been a test, and their prize for curiosity was to join the collection.
My head was already positioned perfectly on the shelf; all that remained was for him to snap it from my body.
"They speak to you," Gunnar growled against my ear.
How had it not occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who heard them?
They spoke to both of us. It was why we kept coming here. The bones were calling to us.
But not to Ophelia.
I forced myself to relax, and as the rigidity left me, I felt his grip lessening too, his hand sliding from a shackle to an anchor.
I turned to face him, refusing to die without seeing my opponent.
In the same heartbeat, he claimed my lips.
It was not a caress, nor the crude force I had spent my life evading.
It was a harvest. A dark communion in which he did not merely take, but consumed.
He fed on the air in my lungs, drew the marrow from my bones, tasted something that felt like the root of my soul.
And yet he allowed me to take from him as well, offering something he had never given before: himself.
For the first time, I was held as something of terrible and singular value, possessed with an intensity that stripped me bare.
His hands found the hem of Ophelia’s gifted peignoir, bunching the fabric upward as he hoisted me against the shelves.
He pried my legs apart. The dead shifted faintly behind me, letting me take space among them.
A terrifying new sensation unfurled—a frantic, buried craving I had never known.
I wanted it. I wanted him. Body and mind.
He was the first person I had ever shared a secret with, the first to truly hold me.
And I desperately needed more. I wanted him to reach inside me and scoop everything else out, leaving only the sacrament of our union.
When he entered me, the stretch was sharp, tearing through the numbness.
I forced my thighs to loosen, to yield—to accept the thick, heavy weight of him just as they had before.
He filled me so completely it reached far beyond flesh.
He was reshaping me from the inside out, deepening the intimate knowledge between us with each brutal thrust, swelling until there was no room left to breathe.
The bones continued their wild dance, spurred by the relentless driving of a monster they no longer served.