Chapter 11 #2
Ophelia pinched the wick, killing the flame with two fingers, and her devilish smile extinguished with it. The man broke. He bolted up the stairs in a frenzied panic.
The tremor in him—I could almost taste it, feel it!
The way his power slipped through his fingers made my head spin. He still didn’t know he wasn’t leaving this house alive. But I did.
And I could hardly wait.
He brushed past me. I didn’t stop him; I only turned and slowly followed him into the ever-darkening hall.
The game had begun. He could run if he wanted. We would chase him down collapsing stairs and into hollow rooms. But he would never escape.
I should have felt terror. I should have felt guilt. But the human responses in me were long dead. My only way to survive was to join the horror.
I laughed quietly to myself, jittery with excitement. His panic lit Whitmore like fire. He pounded down the hall, hands outstretched, fumbling for doors that would not open, walls that would not give way. It all filled me with unnatural joy.
Maybe it was Ophelia’s doing, pushing it into my veins like poison. Or maybe it was just me. Maybe I had always been this way.
He rounded the corner and vanished from view.
The secondary staircase lay in that direction, and Ophelia and I followed, our pace quickening even though there was nothing to fear.
Every door leading outside was sealed shut, save for the main entrance, and there was no way he would make it back there.
He was a cornered animal, stumbling into the anatomy of a house that was preparing to eat him.
We froze when we rounded the corner.
Gunnar was holding our meal by the throat, his fingers digging into the bulge of his neck.
It didn’t matter that the pair were equally built. Gunnar hoisted him from the floor with no visible effort. The man’s boots kicked uselessly, but no one paid him any mind.
“I told you not today,” he said to Ophelia.
She howled. “He is mine!”
Gunnar did not flinch. His eyes were embers. “Nothing here is yours.”
The neck snapped like a twig.
The writhing stopped.
For a moment, the man stiffened, muscles trembling as if every fiber fought to stay alive. Then his body went slack. Gunnar dropped him to the floor and stepped over the remains. He passed Ophelia and me, and melted into the gloom, leaving nothing but a trail of cold contempt.
Ophelia stood perfectly still, her frame trembling slightly. She pressed the cold knife to her chest as though she were hugging it for warmth.
The game was over.
We didn’t touch the body. Gunnar’s tone had been absolute, and not even Ophelia, wild and untamed as she was, dared to disobey. Her punishment was hunger.
Mine too.
As I laid turf over the body, hunger clawed at me.
I hated this man. I hated how his death was useless and purposeless. He hadn’t lost any blood; he had died for nothing.
Ophelia paced along the edge of the grave but wouldn’t speak to me. She was erratic, already making plans in her mind. It was in the way she would stop and freeze, then continue pacing—back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum.
Finally, she lost her patience. Or perhaps she wanted to speak with Gunnar alone.
Apologize?
No, that didn’t sound like her.
She tossed over her shoulder, “Finish here and then come help me in the bath.”
I was left alone in the wide expanse of the garden.
I could have run. I could have gone as far as possible, called for help, or called the police.
But I didn’t. Frozen in place, I watched her disappear into the house, and the second the door closed behind her, I threw the shovel to the ground, fell to all fours, and started clawing with my hands—digging and digging until they found the body.
An arm. I pulled back the sleeve of his shirt and brushed the dirt from his skin. Without a second thought, I sank my nails into the flesh.
There was a reason Ophelia and Gunnar used knives. The skin was thick and rigid. My teeth couldn’t break it. I tugged and gnawed, desperate, but it barely gave.
I licked my tears.
I was so hungry.
But there was no way I could bite through the skin and get to the blood in time.
The night had been relentless, and my mind buzzed with the fever of it all. Now, all I wanted was to eat.
Yet the moment I was done, I was back in the room with the bones.
étienne waited for me. His skull sat on the shelf, polished smooth from my fingers. As soon as I touched him, he flooded my mind. He was hungry, too. He starved for communication, and no one else would answer him.
Gunnar wanted only to talk about himself, his endless stories of the old days, each tale a mirror of his own pride and longing. étienne had grown bored with it, sick of the ceaseless recollections of wealth, conquest, and eternal nights.
He wanted me now. He wanted someone who would listen.
I cradled him like a lover, and spoke softly, though no one else could hear.
The room pressed in around me, the shadows of the skulls leaning toward me to listen.
étienne told me stories of the world before the new world, of smells and sunlight and colors that did not exist now.
He spoke of love and loss in tones I could almost feel as if they were my own.
Not all the bones spoke to me. Some remained stubbornly silent. Like the skull with no teeth, blackened with age—it had never whispered a word. But others, I met in fleeting breaths of memory, voices curling like smoke through my mind.
Isolde, Gunnar’s lover from the 13th century. A daughter of a knight from a small village in the Holy Roman Empire. She ran away one night, slipping from the strict watch of her mother as the household slept.
She met him at a fair, a stranger cloaked in night and charm, and let him lure her into the woods, let him drink her blood. Like me, she didn’t die. When he was sated, she raised her hand, cradled his face, and offered a weak smile despite the torture and abuse.
She became so much more than his companion. She hunted for him, luring people—mostly women, as she was too intimidated by men—for him to drink and use as he pleased, even if it hurt her. That was what Gunnar did to all his lovers. He made them serve.
Their love, if it could be called that, lasted only thirty years. She grew tired quickly. The hunting was eating away at her. She hated seeing them suffer and longed to grant them a painless end.
But not with Gunnar.
Whenever he discovered a fear that you could not conquer, he made you endure it until you lost all sensitivity, until every spark of life was drained from you.
Torturing of an arachnophobe with spiders.
Forcing a claustrophobe in a coffin.Whether he did it for growth or simply because he relished the sight of his lovers’ suffering was unknown.
Isolde tried to run. But no one outran Gunnar. Born a Viking, he took pride in the fact that no enemy, no companion, had ever slipped from his grasp.
He killed her, and like all those he claimed, he kept her head. A trophy. Another piece in his harem of death.
There, a single bone, unmistakably from an arm.
I picked it up, pale and cold, and held it against my own, trying to imagine how it had once fitted, how it had moved, how the flesh and muscle must have stretched and bent over it.
I traced its curves and ridges, reconstructing a ghost in my mind.
It had belonged to Helvig, someone far older than Isolde. Much, much older.
She had met Gunnar at a frozen fjord, a place he would return to centuries later, drawn by sudden homesickness. She was captivated by the power radiating from him. He was nothing like the other men in her village. She went with him willingly.
After decades, Helvig grew restless. Something in the world beyond Gunnar called to her.
She fled one night, and what happened next remains unknown to her.
Gunnar hunted her relentlessly, following her scent, tracing her trail.
Her death had been so absolute, so final, that she had no recollection, no clue as to what had happened.
All that remained of her was the stiff knowledge of who had done it.
These bones were loud. They screamed. Not with sound, but with emotion, with the weight of everything they had endured and were forced to relive every day, unable to rest in peace.