2. Chapter 2 #3
“Cut it out. I know you, Willow. What did she say to you to convince you to agree to this idiocy?” She was breathing fast, wide eyed and livid.
“Tell me you didn’t really marry the vampire.
” Grasping my shoulders, she shook me. “I heard the girls talking. Logan Duncan’s name is known in the Eastern Continent and the Fair Isles.
He was a naval commander. The ‘take no hostage’ type.
They said he’s the one who straightened out the Farseer pirates.
He makes his hostages confess their sins and lets them kill themselves as mercy.
No Mortdale ship has been stopped by them in sixteen years.
They call him the Blood Reaper, for Hell’s sake!
You can’t marry a man—” She sucked in a sharp breath, trying to calm herself.
“A vampire whose name is the Blood Reaper.”
A horrible man who killed other horrible men? Why would that scare me?
“Does he also hold a scythe, perchance?” The cartoonish image I conjured in my mind made me giggle.
“This isn’t funny, Willow.”
I grabbed the jar of sesamoid bones I’d been collecting for years off the bed; the only thing I had in my possession that was worth anything, even if it was mostly in memories.
The best of my days had been spent sorting through bone flea markets with Ethel constantly ankle deep digging through the piles for exactly what I’d described despite the constant ‘ews’. “I want you to have this.”
“Are you insane?” she hissed, limbs trembling as she held back tears. “They’re your favourite. I can take—” She swallowed, pointing her finger over the row of jars lining the top of my dresser. “Whatever one of those are.”
“I love you more than any bones,” I told her, handing her the jar. “More than all the bones in my body.”
Her head dipped down, one of her tears hitting the jar, sliding down the glass wall and striking the dark floor between us. “I love you more than all the bones in my body, too.”
“At least you won’t have to watch me—” My throat was all glued together. “You don’t have to watch me die now. I never wanted you to.”
Silent tears slid down her sunburnt cheeks for long minutes. We’d not nearly exhausted all the words in this world. There was so much more I wanted to say. So much more of our story to be left on these walls. But we both knew the inevitable end was near.
She said nothing more as she backed away from me, clutching the jar against her chest. If I gave her anything else, there would be a high chance she would smash that jar on Agnes's head.
The corridor echoed with heavy footsteps a while after Ethel had left, and a horde of burnt witches that had crowded and haunted the corner of my room peeled from the mass of bodies and vanished into the cracks of the floorboards beneath me.
Whatever they’d seen had terrified them because their shrieks made my ears ring.
He stopped at the door, and I noticed it only then, the total absence of chaos, the profound stillness that followed him in. Even the grains of dust had paused mid-air, the ringing in my ears vanished. What was so terrifying about him that even the wind itself went catatonic?
I shrank back as his eyes roamed over my space. When his attention lingered on the empty mattress and the blanket and pillow laid under my bed, I stepped in front of him. “I don’t think you can even be in here. No outsiders can enter the covenstead.”
“Thirty minutes were up fifteen minutes ago.”
“I don’t wear a watch.” I got on my toes to look down the empty, charred hall starting to fill with noises, already disturbing the restless dead. “And you really can’t be here.”
The cindery floorboards creaked heavily under his weight as he walked up to a shelf lined with books and my collection of jars filled with mostly flat, short, and irregular bones, studying each one of the labels closely.
“They’re just for collecting purposes,” I told him, grabbing the jar of vertebrae from his hand and lowering it back on the dresser. “I…I don’t cast magic like that.”
“Like what?”
His voice was nice on the ears, rich and deep. His accent gave his letters a bit of an incisive taste, it made me roll my tongue behind my teeth with each word.
“To inflict.”
“Ever?” he asked, and I hated how easy it was for him to just look at me.
“Only when I’ve done it accidentally,” I said, taking one step back, trying to slip away from his attention.
“Accidentally?”
“A long time ago. When I was younger, before I trained under Agnes.”
He picked up the stack of scientific periodicals sent by the Meridian Scientific Community. “Written by W.R.B.” He hummed, skimming a finger down the marked articles I’d written. “That must stand for Willow Ruby, Rory—?”
“Rose,” I said. “Willow Rose Briar.”
“Willow Rose Briar,” he quietly echoed, his lips parting slightly as his tongue rested against the sharp tip of his fang.
“You really can’t be here.”
He glanced down the charred corridor where a few young witches had poked their heads in to look at us.
There had rarely been guests up here. Everyone avoided this side of the coven like the plague.
And most who dared did it only to torment me; to set my things on fire, drench them in pig blood, shatter my windows, splatter tar all over them—and whatever other pranks they’d pulled over the years, I couldn't remember them all.
“What is here anyway?” he asked, swirling his head around the room.
“I like my privacy.”
“You chose to live here?”
I shrank back at his tone. “Does it matter?”
“Why would it not matter?” he asked, sounding angry rather than curious.
“Why would it matter?” I murmured under my breath, leaving him there as I rushed past the crowd of witches crowning the stairs. There was not enough air to breathe in when I finally burst outside, free from the whispering and the laughing.
When did anything I want ever matter?