8. Chapter 8 #3
The chair groaned as I pushed it back and stood, despite Logan calling after me, followed by his grandmother’s soft words, “Let her breathe for a moment.”
The water ran in the sink for long minutes as I stared at myself in the mirror. They’d all laughed back then. They still did. Why wouldn’t he laugh? He should have laughed. I’d laughed with them, too, back then.
The bitter taste of sickness stuck to my tongue no matter how many times I rinsed my mouth. Shame filled every cavity in my teeth. And every time I bit down, I could feel it radiating to the front of my eyes.
I took shelter in the corridors, listening to their quiet chatter and Piper’s loud screeches and giggles while she enthusiastically told them all kinds of silly stories, mostly about Thomas.
Noise from a room far back in the corridor pulled my attention.
The deep blue curtains fluttered back and forth from the stormy wind blowing from the open window.
It was a child’s bedroom. Simple in its layout.
Blue walls, a bed, a dresser, a pianoforte, and many toys lining the length of the walls.
A portrait was mounted above the pianoforte. A well-dressed little boy sat on a toy wooden horse. His hair was a fair blond, eyes a golden colour. He’d not changed all that much, and Piper was an almost identical copy.
I smiled, reaching to drag my fingers down his face.
“I see you have found your husband’s old room,” his grandmother said, her cane hitting the floor sharply as she came to stand by me.
“He was such a lovely child. So much quieter than his rowdy brothers. Always in his head, dreaming away.” Her pause was somber.
“My daughter was not an easy mother to love, but he loved her so dearly, so easily. Such a tender boy he was.” Her sigh was heavy, weighed down by sorrow. “It’s such a shame.”
“What is?”
“That she never loved him back.” She lifted a hand to his face. “But he never blamed Agatha for it.”
I stared at the young boy, wondering what had been so hard to love about him. Wondering if my own mother had thought the same. If she’d taken a look at me and had found me hard to love, too.
An unknown heaviness weighed my lungs. I didn’t think of her often.
But I did think of her. Everyone thought of their mothers.
What was this earth if not just mothers and their children?
The fact had often brought me comfort—that I’d come from a mother.
That I’d always and forever be someone’s child regardless.
I wasn’t nothing, I was someone’s daughter.
My heart had once beat next to hers, her lungs had once shared a breath with me—I’d been part of someone once.
I’d been something. Something unwanted, but something.
Morgana’s diamond-adorned hand brushed against the surface of the small pianoforte, dragging marks through the layer of dust. “He used to stay with us for long periods of time when Agatha kept getting sicker and sicker. Edmund, Logan’s father, would come here without her knowing to see him nearly every week.
He’d ride for an entire day back and forth, just to see his boy. ”
“Why?”
“My daughter wanted nothing to do with him.” She angled her head in my direction. “You should say it’s cruel and horrible, it’s the right thing to say.”
Was it? Was that the right thing to say? “My own mother didn’t want anything to do with me either. I was left at the steps of an orphanage when I was just a few days old. I don’t like pity. I’m sure he doesn’t either.”
Her attention bore into me. “At least you were free from her resentment.”
A warm tear trickled down my cheek. “I would have loved to be resented by her. I think I understand him, for loving her despite. We’re born with the insatiable need to be loved and we’ll take it anyway we can. Even if it is poison.”
What would someone know about the deeply disgusting desperation to be loved if they’d never gone to sleep on an empty stomach that craved something they were born to need.
What would they know about feeling filthy when asking for it?
That expecting affection felt like chewing on rocks until all your teeth broke.
That it felt like suffocating with my face pressed against the soil, needles digging into my heels with each step, ribs crushing with each breath.
“He doesn’t know, does he?” she asked, and I turned to her then. “That you’re dying. At the dinner table, I was trying to grasp how much of your condition he’s aware of. I didn’t mean to pry so hard, but I am glad I did. Turns out he’s not aware at all, is he?”
My fingers dug hard against my thigh, and I fought to inhale without choking. “I’m not sure what you are talking about.”
“My mother was a witch, you know. I can sense these things.” Her wrinkled old eyes softened around the edges for the first time since she’d set them on me. “You should tell him. He’s a good man, he deserves to know.”
I shook my head, desperate and struggling to find words.
“He’ll be free to marry whoever he wants after I die.
He’s still very young and your kind lives a long time; I am sure some other woman will provide him with heirs,” I quickly explained.
“I won’t be any hindrance, I promise. I will be gone before he even notices. Please don’t tell him.”
Her hand rested against my chest. “What about him? Do you not care at all about him?”
“It’s not like that between us. He didn’t want this. I think you know that, too. I heard the king forced him to marry me. Would you care about someone who was forced on you?”
Her gaze searched mine for long, tense minutes. “Then perhaps it is for the better. If it is as you say.”
She put a hand to my shoulder, leaving me there alone again.
Wind beat heavily against the glass windows, branches whipping against the glass to compose a stiff ostinato.
And our old pasts felt so close to my fingertips, so conjoined, as I traced them over his belongings.
I stopped in front of another portrait. One much duller in colour.
Painted in a hurry as if afraid their smiles wouldn’t last. Cassandra held him on her lap, proud and joyful.
“Hello, Cassandra,” I whispered, tracing the small hand clutching her finger. “What happened to you?
I startled when the bulb overhead blew. Moonlight slowly seeped into the room from the dark windowpane and its glass surface turned ectoplasmic, like the waves of a speckled lake. On the other side of the milky surface, someone was watching me, fading in and out of sight.
She lifted a hand, resting it against the window. That’s when I noticed the deep cut across her wrist; it was still bleeding, blood gushing down her elbow.
“Run,” she whispered, flashing against the wind like candlelight. “Leave him. Leave him, please. Run, Willow!”
And then the milky waters dragged her back, and the glass reflection settled to frame the dark night outside.
An ice-cold breeze pushed the bedroom door wide open, shattering off the hinges with a groan.
Run, the wind echoed. You have to run. Leave him.
I followed that voice out into the corridors, searching the shadowy ends for any sign of her. “Wait!”
Tree branches hit the corridor window, shaking furiously from the summer storm brewing in the distance. With one last glance in the direction of Piper’s warm laughter, I followed the evanescent phantom outside.
Cassandra dragged a trail of blood down the dry parterre, heading for the surrounding woodland as thunder started striking the rocky cliff. She glanced at me over her shoulder from time to time as I followed her from a distance, flitting in and out sight.
“Wait,” I called, tripping over every branch and dip as I followed her deeper into the woodlands.
“You’re a witch, aren’t you?” I asked, losing count of how many trees I’d left behind.
“I saw your mark. And I read your letters. Did…did the same thing as the others happen to you? Is that why no one knows about your death, about what happened to you?”
Her floating body turned in my direction as she came to a stop near the edge of the cliff leading out to an angry sea crashing thunderously against the rock. “I am sorry, Willow Briar. I have to protect him.”
“Protect him from what?”
“You.”
What? I shook my head. “Why would I hurt him?”
She vanished into the wind along with my answers, and a pair of hollow milky-white eyes stared back at mine instead.
The hollow-cheeked vampire cracked his neck sideways, a rattle slipping out of his bloody mouth as he parted it wide open to brandish his fangs.
His hiss forced me a step back. And then another when he lunged in my direction, crossing the long space between us at a speed I could hardly rival or outrun.
“Shit,” I muttered, tripping a few steps backward as I quickly unravelled a long string from the lace bertha, twisting it as fast as I could between my fingers to lock in the paths of chaos. “Fires of Old—”
A rifle went off, and a bullet cut through the vampire’s glenohumeral joint, dismembering the vampire’s arm clean off his body. The severed limb spasmed all over the woodland floor next to the hissing vampire.
The red ashes of a lit cigarette were all I saw in the dim darkness, yet I breathed a sigh of relief. Logan stepped out of the shadows, cocked his weapon again and took aim at the raging vampire still crawling in our direction. “No. Spells.”
“I thought he was going to kill me. Burn me for wanting to summon a little fire.”
“Fires of Old?” he shouted, loading a few more cartridges in the rifle and shooting the creature’s other arm off. “That’s a little fire to you? Summoning fire from Hell?”
“That’s all I could remember!” I shouted back.
“You insolent witch!” he bellowed in return, blowing a wide hole through the vampire’s head.
“And what about it!” I yelled back.
His jaw was set tight as he removed his tie and lit it on fire before throwing it at the vampire’s twitching remains, watching it get enveloped by flames. “Walk.”
Walk? Walk? What was I, his dog?
“Say please.”