7. Nicholas
Nicholas
Ineed her.
The moment I see her, something in me answers before I do, wrong and familiar. Inevitable. Her blood beckons like it recalls every sip I've stolen. The power in it, the rightness—
She’s mine.
The curse remembers before I do. My body reacts like it has already decided what she is for me. The beat of vitality in her veins makes it worse, pushing the scent at me, forcing me to acknowledge it.
I meant to reach her first this time. Before the others. Before they can get inside her life and start naming what I am to her again.
She’s mine, except she never survives being mine.
Evening trickles away into the soothing balm of full night, and I step from the tree line, drawn toward the ruins of the Longship Festival.
The celebration shuttered after the troll attack. Yellow and black tape bites into the rubble like a warning no one will respect. The humans call it hysteria. They always do. Anything too large for them to survive becomes a story they can digest in tiny pieces.
Features schooled into stone, I slide my hands into the pockets of my high-collared jacket. The ground squelches underfoot but the din of the news crews absorbs the sound.
Helene is as beautiful this time as she was in her first life.
My eyes shut, and her face is there, her eyes, the light fading from them over and over and over. Whatever face she wears, whatever color those eyes, the chronicle ends the same.
It is her underneath, and she always dies.
I slip away from broken tents and ruined pathways. Away from noise and life and the thick pulse of blood calling like desire.
All paths rise to meet main street. Cobblestone snakes up to reeking asphalt holding desperately onto the heat of the day. The town pretends at normalcy with burger shops, antique malls, names that mean nothing to me except the distance between her and everything else.
Helene lives in a rickety, leaning Victorian held together by habit more than structure.
The raven’s trace lingers, but he’s gone now, always out of reach. He takes the scent of human food with him, though the rustle of night black feathers is close.
He won’t go far. He never does.
Helene’s shadow cuts across the cluster of windows in her living room. Wistful, wanting. She’s longing for something she hasn’t been able to identify this time.
Wren is always the first to draw her. How long has he been watching and waiting in this place, this time? I’m the last and the latest.
Better if I don’t find her at all.
Her silhouette disappears from the window and minutes later, the front door yawns open, and the woman with the sunshine hair traverses the steps to the sidewalk. She sniffs, hunching in on herself, checking left and right on the street.
“It's not safe to walk alone,” I mutter.
This town has more to worry about than predators on two legs. Or trolls. The weight of history and loss drowns on the entire county, a thin place none have recognized yet.
Helene shrugs her jacket into a more comfortable position and takes off from the Victorian. The light is still on from her apartment, her sister tucked in for the night.
So where is Helene going?
I trail her on her lonely stroll, stopping when she does. She bends down at the side of a yard and picks several late season annuals, mums, and New England asters from a dying bed.
A swift yank tugs the blooms free.
There’s only me to see the theft. And the bird. Right now, even his energy signature is distant and distracted.
A hint of a smile peels my upper lip over fangs. “Perfect.”
Helene clutches her stolen bouquet against her chest. The sidewalk cuts in two different directions and she jaywalks to the overgrown grass on the opposite bank.
Harsh, cold spikes of wrought iron cordon off the graveyard behind it. Helene vaults over the gate without rattling the chains locking the entryway for the night.
Here, the stench of must and rot combine with the dull dryness of aged bones. The citizens of the Nightshade Hollow Memorial Cemetery rest, most of them easy, some of them not. I’ve found that the only souls who walk through life uneasily are the living.
Soon enough, she will join them.
It was never supposed to be me. And yet it always is.
Fangs lower and prick my lip, sharp and eager.
She cuts through the burial ground on the same worn path as hundreds of other feet. Leaves and lichen cover the stones, obscuring the winding way between gravestones. There are no lights here to show the way over the River Styx.
Wrong mythology.
My senses lift to high alert but it’s only the two of us, and only one is aware of the other.
She kneels beside a simple grave, the stone small compared to the behemoths around it. The rounded top of the marker makes it look as though it’s already been chewed, worn down to a nub.
I stop alongside an obelisk, my eyes tracing familiar lines. I’ve never met her. And still I know her too well.
Not just because I’ve loved her but because I’ve ended her. Again. And again.
Fingers clench, and I hold my breath, not needing to breathe.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Helene whispers. “I can’t keep fighting, Mom. Especially not when the fight is compounded by supernatural things.”
The sound of her voice does something wrong inside my ribs. She pauses, sniffs, and sets the stolen flowers in front of the gravestone.
“There was an attack today at the Longship Festival. And I know you would have laughed your ass off if you saw the spectacle, but this was a troll. I think it was a troll. And I... shit, I fought it.”
Hell, yes she did.
My mouth waters, bloodlust curving fangs lower yet.
Her tone, the lovely tone of it, higher than I’m used to hearing but somehow more melodic than it's ever been...
Helene has the sort of flowing mezzo soprano people stop to listen to.
I did.
She rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet.
“I signed up for self-defense classes because it was smart. I thought I'd capitalize on everything you taught me even though I fucking hated every second. But today, I wasn’t clever. I didn't think about anything except protecting Audra, and then these...instincts...took over. But she’s safe. So you’d be proud of that, at least.”
She stops again, her hands knotting on her lap before she sighs and drops to her hip.
Leave her to her grief.
It’s not fresh but the kind of old pain you tear open to remember there’s love beneath. And damn me, despite the hunger, I can’t walk away.
The dew will seep into her jeans and chill her. She’s mortal; things like heat and ice bother her. Where is the thought of her safety?
I step forward. Stop with my weight suspended over a curled dead leaf. Watching her is wrong. Approaching her is worse.
“Everything I do is for Audra, and she’ll never get better.” Helene stares at the flowers, but there’s no answers from the ragged stems. “She didn’t leave when I told her to, either. She was right there while I strangled a fucking troll with a banner.”
Her laughter is bitter and beautiful. My chest tightens, a restlessness pulling through me like a thread tugged from fabric.
“When do I get a break? When does it all start to feel lighter, Mom? Did you ever get to experience it or did you die too soon?” Her voice goes wet, her throat clogged. “The fight today was the first time in years I’ve felt alive. How fucked up is that?”
Helene lifts her hands and turns them from side to side, the gore caked into the cracks, too deep for soap to reach.
“I don’t know. Maybe I want to prove to myself it happened, and there’s something more to this life than struggle.
You know? I go to work and break my back for Barnes and his minimum wage paycheck.
Not that money is the most important thing; you taught me better, but it sure would help.
It would make a huge difference with Audra’s medical bills. ”
No, there is no assistance for the younger sister. Whatever bad blood she got from the father, a different sire than Helene, the girl suffers from progressive muscle weakness, a loss of tissue and mass, and difficulty walking.
I’ve seen it in humans before.
The problems will progress, worsening over time until Audra experiences respiratory issues as well. Physical therapy and medications will only go so far.
Muscular Dystrophy will be her cross to bear for the rest of her shortened existence. As it will be Helene’s as her caretaker.
“I’m sorry I haven’t done a better job, but I’m burned out,” Helene rushes to say. “I’m tired, Mom, and I want a break, but there’s no break. There’s only robbing one bill to pay another. On and on. Into eternity. Today I felt alive. And I had to kill something to feel it.”
Her words fracture me, and I step back, hand to my silent chest. She feels aware and vibrant through violence.
I cause violence.
I am, have been, always will be, part of what makes her alive.
Her vulnerability destabilizes me, an insult to the cycle.
I’ve stayed too long.
Oh, the sound of her voice. It plucks the chords of hunger until I’m aching for a taste. Learning about this life, about the struggles carving her into the strong and wounded woman...
And I will take it from her again.
The way I always do.
The way I never choose.
Loathing bubbles up hot and aimed somewhere inside myself I refuse to name. I turn my back on her, shrugging the collar of my jacket higher.
“Tell me what to do. Give me a sign, Mom, please. Things have to change. Something has to change? It's time for life to relent! Tell me the troll coming here wasn’t some break from reality,” Helene pleads, and the distinctive scrape of fingers drawn through dirt is an assault on my heart.
“Tell me it’s real, and there’s something happening. I need a way out.”
If I were Wren, I would know how to soothe her. I’d say the right thing at the right moment, and all those raw nerves of hers will be forgotten.
I’m not Wren.