12. Clara
CLARA
“You cannot, will not leave me,” I mimic in my worst impression of a seven-hundred-year-old baritone. “Cool. Very normal. Nothing concerning about that at all.”
Shmoo is already on the bed, because of course he is. He beat me here, which means he either knows a shortcut or teleports, and honestly, at this point, both options are on the table.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him. “I’m allowed to be mad.”
He tucks his paws under his chest and becomes a loaf. A judgmental loaf.
I drag the heavy chair from the fireplace across the floor, the legs screeching against stone. I wedge the back under the door handle the way people do in movies, then step back and assess my work.
It’s pathetic. The man carries bathwater up a spiral staircase like it’s a hobby.
He could probably remove this door from its frame with his pinky.
But the chair isn’t for him. It’s for me.
It’s a line on the floor that says this side is mine, and right now, I need a line more than I need it to hold.
“Barricade complete,” I announce. “The kingdom of Clara is secure.”
My voice cracks on the last word, and that’s when the shaking starts.
I sit down on the edge of the bed before my knees make the decision for me. My hands won’t stay still, so I press them between my thighs and stare at the fire I built earlier, now burned down to orange coals.
I chew on my lips. It’s not the glowing eye, and it’s not the piercings, and it’s not even the fact that I let him… That we… Nope. Not going there. Filed under Later, subfolder Never.
The thing is that three days ago, I climbed out of a bathroom window to get away from a man who bought me a ring I never asked for.
Marco made it so saying no would’ve required a hostage negotiator.
He called me his porcelain doll and meant it as a compliment, and everyone smiled, and I was drowning in plain sight.
And now I’m in a castle out of a fever dream, and the resident undead warlord looks at me with his one gorgeous eye and says Why would I ever let you go like it’s romantic. Like it’s a gift.
Marco tried to own me with a ring. Aldric is trying to own me with a curse. Special edition packaging of the same product.
“You know what the worst part is?” I ask Shmoo, because if I don’t say it out loud, it’ll fester.
“The worst part is that my body doesn’t care.
My body is out here acting like his possessiveness is a love language.
Do you know how humiliating that is? I escaped one cage, and my hormones immediately went shopping for a bigger, gothier cage. ”
Shmoo slow-blinks.
“Thank you for your input.”
I scrub my hands over my face. Okay. Feelings later. Logistics now. Thinking like that is what got me through the forest.
Inventory: I have food, thanks to the garden and pantry.
Water, thanks to the well. Fire, matches, candles.
A dead phone that’s now just an expensive mirror.
No signal even when it worked. No way past the gate.
And a landlord with abandonment issues and a jawline that ought to be banned by the EU parliament.
Escape plan: currently consists of ‘figure out the curse’, which requires a library, which requires being in the same room as him, which—no. Not tonight. Tonight the plan is: don’t cry, don’t open the door, don’t think about his hands.
Two out of three. I’ll take it.
The full absurdity of the situation hits me as I’m adding wood to the fire: I’m camping in a dead man’s bedroom.
This is his bed. His chair. His copy of War and Peace with the ribbon marking his place, because the undead warlord currently sulking in a turret like a Victorian widow reads Tolstoy by the firelight.
I pick up the book and flip through it, past the ribbon, until I find handwriting in the margins.
Little notes beside underlined passages.
One is underlined twice, the pen pressed so hard it almost tore the page.
Something about how we can only know that we know nothing. And beside it, he wrote one word: True.
“Great,” I mutter. “He’s got layers. That’s the last thing I needed.”
I keep flipping, and something slides out from between the pages and lands on the carpet. It’s a folded piece of paper, soft from age. I open it carefully, terrified it’ll crumble.
It’s a drawing. A child’s drawing in crayon or maybe chalk.
In it, a tall figure in black, almost as tall as the whole paper, with wildly scribbled dark hair and one eye colored a shinier blue.
Next to the tall figure, a gray blob with triangle ears and an enormous curling tail.
There’s a lopsided sun in the corner. The tall figure is holding the gray blob’s leash.
Actually, no, not a leash. It’s a ribbon. With a bow.
Underneath, written in wobbly block letters, is HERR ALDRIC UND SCHMETTERLING.
And beneath that, in an adult’s hand, Liesl insists you keep this, my lord. She says you never smile in your portrait. She has fixed it. —Greta
Because the tall black figure with the terrifying blue eye is smiling. A huge, ridiculous, banana-shaped crayon smile, taking up half his face.
I sit down on the floor, right there on the carpet, holding a drawing that some little girl made for a monster, that the monster kept, pressed inside his favorite book, for... decades. Maybe a century.
Shmoo hops off the bed and pads over, sniffing the paper like he recognizes it. Maybe he does. Maybe he sat on this exact carpet while a kid named Liesl tied a bow around his neck and a dead man let her. Just how old is this cat?
“Greta,” I say quietly. The last name in the ledger. The last servant. Or at least the last one that bothered to write in it.
Everyone in that ledger grew up in this castle and grew old in this castle and died, one after another, generation after generation, while he stayed exactly the same, in a bedroom with no mirrors, keeping their drawings in his books.
Liesl drew him smiling because she’d never seen it, and Liesl died, probably while he watched, and Greta died, and Konrad, and then there was nobody left to draw him at all.
Oh.
He wasn’t always alone.
But he has been alone for a horrifyingly long time.
I fold the drawing and tuck it back exactly where I found it. My throat is tight and scratchy.
“This changes nothing,” I tell Shmoo, and it comes out about as convincing as my don’t did earlier. “He’s still keeping me here. Sad backstory is not a hall pass.”
Shmoo climbs into my lap, heavy and warm, and starts purring like a small engine.
“It changes nothing,” I say again, softer, staring at the door I barricaded against a man who carries buckets of hot water up a tower because a stranger wished out loud for a bath.