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Don’t touch me, he said too late, for already there was a knife in his gut, a crack in his skull, and cobblestones rushing up to meet him.
Don’t touch me.
It was a plea; a prayer unanswered for centuries, steepled fingers torn asunder by grasping hands and bodies too keen to writhe against him, by a master’s dull blade carving scripture across his spine. He screamed it as humid digits peeled back his eyelid, as the worm slithered beyond his vision and shadows closed around him. They were useless words; ones that mildewed in silent lungs, crept sluggishly through disused veins and died and died in a corpse-pale throat dripping in carmine too dark to be vital; in scratches too shallow to claw them free of the rot of truth festering in his ruined chest:
It would not matter how loudly he cried, if no one cared to listen.
♦
The death knell of a brain-creature wakes him from torpor as it falls, smoking, to its side. She’s a stormcloud, a blur of white stained red crossing the room to nudge the beast with her boot; seems satisfied when it doesn’t move. The ship lurches, knocking his head against the glass. When his vision clears, his shred of hope is gone.
Dimly, he finds himself shocked to have hoped at all.
He meets her again by the shore, skin warmer than sunshine where he holds a knife to her neck. He can feel her pulse fluttering; can smell the head-blood dripping from her scalp and forgets, for a moment, why there’s a dagger where his mouth should be. But then the blade burns in his hands and her eyes burn in his mind, and talk turns to the monsters they will be rather than the one he is now. Come with us, she says, and he thinks her a fool.
When he follows, he wonders if he is, too.
♦
He keeps his distance from the others—if they notice, they do not care. Perhaps it should hurt; that he could disappear, and no one would look for him. But for the first time, he only feels free.
So away he goes, though not wholly unseen—as he slips out of camp, he’s met with the barest brush of a mind against his:
Stay safe.
A feeling more foreign than the last wriggles in his chest.
He vanishes into the woods.
♦
Their days are long, and the dark offers no respite. Instead, sleep eludes him; a silk ribbon slipping through fingers clumsy with fatigue, trembling in fear of that clawed hand closing around his collar once more. Hunger gnaws at his ribs. He dreams of vermin; of fur in his throat and cruel laughter in his ears, of chain against stone and flesh against flesh and he gasps awake, choking in the clear night air. There is no laughter; there are no chains—but there is her, watching him from across the fire, brow raised in a question she does not ask. Can’t sleep? he deflects, eyes on the knife in her hand, on the stripe of red snaking toward the ground as her blade parts flesh from skin, a crone in shadowed flamelight with his bloodied heart raised to her lips. He blinks again and she’s a maiden, grinning at him around a bite of apple.
His teeth ache, wondering if she’d be sweeter for it.
♦
He does not need a friend.
He does not want a lover.
He does not want her—not like the rest of them do.
He wants the power that crackles at her fingertips; wants the inexplicable charm of her barbed tongue, clever enough to make men fight for the honor of opening their own throats.
He does not want to play this game, but when has that mattered? Never less than now, when the means to break his chains stands before him, haloed in moonlight and laughing at something he’s said.
She is beautiful. It should be easy.
He sets the board.
He plays his hand.
But when she smiles and pushes away from his chest, he does not mourn the setback.
Returning to his tent alone, he feels a curious sense of relief.
♦
Asking for her trust comes naturally.
Believing she’d actually give it does not.
It unsettles him, how easily she would part with what she cannot live without; more than her legs astride his hips or the weight of her in his lap that’s too like the lies he spun for centuries. But it’s different, isn’t it? She knows. She knows, and yet allows him to cradle her head in his palm, to hold her like a lover while he draws the life from under her skin, the depths of his hunger revealed only now that it might for once be sated. She’s warm—against him, inside him—spilling across his tongue to drip down, down, down into desires long-buried in that cold, forgotten grave. And buried they should stay, he thinks, yet leans into her touch; lets her slip between his ribs and feels that blackened mass tremble when she brushes against it, blood-slicked and taut and he should push her away but he pulls her closer, closer; licks at the mess he’s made of her and arches into the breathless question that scratches across his scalp:
Why live, if death can feel like this?
His chest heaves. He rips his fangs from her skin, strands of glistening pink shivering, stretching across the crumbling edge of the chasm between them, ephemeral tethers to a gift offered by too willing hands.
Would she regret him taking it?
The thought that follows is stranger still.
Would he?
In the forest, he will not think of her face, flushed like a bruised sky and streaked with tears he cannot afford to examine. He will not think of the hand he stroked through her hair; of the bloodless cheek resting fever-warm against his own; of the glance he stole as she at last drifted off to sleep.
In the forest, he will drown out the taste of her.
Or, at least, he will try.
♦
She does not touch his scars. Perhaps he wants her to; wants a reason to snap and snarl and bite, to reveal those ugly ridges mirrored on his monstrous heart—to make her leave him alone.
Alone, he does not ask for her help.
Alone, his breath does not hitch as her fingers ghost over his spine; as he sees through her eyes just how wretched his master made him.
The palm on his back is gentle. When her anger spikes through him, it is anything but.
He dies, she whispers, and he does not know what else to do.
He kisses her.
♦
A potion is pressed wordlessly into his palm. Before he can decline it, she returns to the fray.
Sunlight filters through the glass as he holds the bottle aloft, casting his face in flickering red shadow. He lowers it slowly amidst the chaos; uncorks it and brings it to his lips.
He pauses.
Nothing is given for free.
It is a truth he’s known since it was carved screaming from his skin, the blood-welled epitaph of a man choked to undeath by the lying hand that would save him. The cost of his own life had been steep; a centuries-long due paid on silken sheets, in dark alleys—in the scraps left hanging from pockmarked bones picked clean by the pleasure of carrion crows, content to gorge themselves on what rotted inside him.
What would she claim, when she exacted her price? A pound of flesh he’d offered, and despite her thrumming pulse she’d declined him. She’s a nuisance; more a puzzle each time she gives without taking—each time he tastes his own ruin in the curve of her neck and feels an echo of her cackling laugh in the flutter of his worm-riddled heart.
What would she claim?
He might have laughed himself if not for the corpse of the assailant now lying at his feet, still sizzling with her magic. Instead, he tilts the bottle down his throat with shaking hands, lips and chin soaked in too-pale red. When her eyes meet his, the hunger in his gut is threaded with something unfamiliar.
He buries his blade in another creature’s chest rather than untangling the mess in his own.
♦
In.
Out.
In again.
Blood glistens on slick thread, nearly black in the low light as he draws it gently through her skin.
Why were you there?
There, between him and a blade. There, where she had no reason to be.
There, when no one else had ever bothered.
He tries to focus on the needle in his hand; on the rise and fall of her ribs beneath his fingers; on anything apart from the traitorous heart that slavers for what he cannot allow this to be—for what it is, he knows, when his long-dead pulse jumps beneath the brush of her thumb, beneath the weight of a once cold stare that now sets him wholly aflame.
Why are you here?
He does not know why he takes her words for a challenge; does not know if the way she gasps when his lips meet her skin marks his victory or his demise. Perhaps both, he thinks, and then he doesn’t; laves his tongue over flesh ere sundered and loses himself in the taste of her, red and alive and writhing beneath a touch he fears shakes with relief—with something that blooms when she breathes his name; when she offers an escape that he can no longer convince himself to take. He is deaf to reason; dead to all but her, to her blood on his tongue and his tongue in her mouth, to the tears that prick his eyes as she unravels around him—to his own little death, close behind.
It was nothing like this, he murmurs against her hair.
If you were the grave I was buried in, I’d have had no cause to leave.
♦
Violence lives in him. It curls in the promises behind his teeth; in the whip of his blade through throats made to sing that wet, red song more common than the tongue itself. He’d thought to hide it, at first—to soften his edges with honeyed words; to murmur pretty falsehoods that would make her want to keep him safe, a snare set and sprung countless times and yet one he could not catch her in. She saw him too true—saw the silken rope that would bind her and cut it away with knifelike honesty, blunt in his ears and sharp where it scraped at the edges of his cloying sweetness with determination that betrayed a fondness for what he knows is rotten beneath; for the coarse fur of a blood-starved beast bristling under the fine wool he would have her believe is the whole, shallow depth of him.
She is no fool, and yet here she lies—throat and heart exposed as she curls into his side, seeking a warmth he cannot provide and another he finds himself foolishly desperate to give her. Her fingers slide beneath the cuff of his sleeve, trace the tendons of his wrist; a touch alien for how he craves it, too much and too little and far more than he deserves. Sometimes, he wishes she would kill him; grant him the finite pain of a stake in his heart instead of flaying him slowly—instead of the weakness that creeps through his chest when she looks up at him with eyes like clear glass, mirrors enough that even he can see himself reflected there: can see now that when she pulls at the laces of her blouse and nods in assent it’s because she, too, has long been marked for death.
But he would claim her where death has not: with lips and teeth and hands that map her scars, trace her knife-sharp edges and welcome the sting of being cut apart; of being hideously, wondrously known. You’re a gift, he whispers, fingers ghosting across her skin. He wants to tell her so much more. Wants to split her chest open and crawl inside it; tangle himself in her ribs and die next to her pounding heart.
He loves her.
He is terrified, but he is not alone.
She is beside him, always—a sliver of moonlight in the dark.