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In the end, it was easy to leave her life behind.
When Ellen chose to wed Death, she had known she was choosing to walk hand in hand with the shadows, to inhabit all the liminal, crooked spaces of the world, in stolen moments between dusk and dawn. But she hadn’t expected how efficiently she could sever all ties with Wisburg, with Germany, the country of her birth.
Her only binding tie to the city had been Thomas, and once those strings were cut, there wasn’t much to keep her anchored here. Her family – her father – had been of no consequence, hardly worth considering and frighteningly easy to forget, and so she embarked for Transylvania, ready to discover a new version of herself.
Yes, she was used to transformation, to taking a match to her past selves and leaving ashes in her wake.
And so she burned. Both for herself, and him.
~
The carriage, drawn by four soft black horses and manned by no driver, deposits her at the front of his castle – half hers now, by pledge of troth. It is snowing as she approaches, the doors swinging in the wind, beckoning her inside in an echo of how she’d once called to him, with arms wide open.
Countess, the witch-wind seems to whisper, stirring the hair at her neck like the caress of impossibly long fingers, icy and deathless, tipped with vicious claws. Bride. Mine.
She crosses the threshold alone, unsurprised to find the castle every bit as crumbling and dilapidated as the chapel at Gruunewald Manor where they’d exchanged their unholy vows. Her new husband, it seems, is quite the opposite of her last – entirely unconcerned with material possessions.
All he wanted was her.
When night falls, drawing like a funereal shroud over the castle, Ellen rises from the opulent black four-poster bed, floating to the window. In the wilderness outside the window, the macabre song of the wolves stirs her blood, her hair standing on end as she waits to receive him.
Once, she would have convulsed in a symphony of ecstatic horror at the coming of his shadow; now, in this blue reverie, she feels only joy as the temperature of the room drops and his spirit climbs the walls.
“Where are you?”
Somewhere on the Black Sea, he replies carelessly, reaching for her. It matters not. I am with you always.
Ellen sighs, leaning into his touch. Shadow-kissed, they lie down together, and he pulls her beneath him, drowning her in his undertow. He is here and not here, hands and mouth indistinct and everywhere, a seductive reminder of how once they were before she knew his flesh so intimately.
Ellen feels shadow fingers slipping beneath her nightgown and shivers, her hair fanning out in a black crown against the pillow. He holds her body immobile while his incorporeal fingers twist inside her, conjuring up a terrible affliction that only he can cure. Ellen fists the sheets as her mercilessly draws her orgasm from her, before curling over her body to kiss her throat, to press the sharp points of his teeth there, a promise she eagerly anticipates.
Ellen strokes his cheek with a shaking hand. “Hurry to me. Your spirit is not enough.” She moves to wrap her arms around him, to pull him down onto her, into her, but he is too quick - he slips through her hands like water, gliding down the bed to lick at the juncture of her thighs, making her gasp, her head thrown back.
Until then…
She sighs again, luxuriating in him. “We have the night.”
~
When he finally arrives, their relationship takes on a new daylight form. Often, while his flesh rests in grave dirt in the crypt, his shadow self curls up beside her in the castle. As above, so below. In these alchemical moments, they talk endlessly. Of spirits. Of magic. Of what he remembers of his life before.
There is precious little; he does not recall his mortal name, nor anyone else who might once have borne it – a family, a wife, a child. He remembers mostly scents and flashes of taste. Wine. Meat. Winter fruit. The way the earth smells after a storm, for it is always storming here in these eldritch mountains.
And lilacs. Always lilacs. From the first time he tasted divinity, in the dirt by the flowering lilac bush. Ellen quietly decides to find some way to grow them here, if she can cultivate a green space in the midst of all this snow and death. It will soon be spring, and the rime of ice will melt from the undergrowth. Perhaps then she can encourage something to bloom.
~
Her moon-blood is an endless source of fascination to him. Those nights, her womb responding to the pull of the sloe-eyed moon, when he comes to her as flesh and finds blood between her legs, he drinks from her as a supplicant might drink ambrosia from the chalice of the gods. Devoted and reverent.
Afterwards, when he crawls up her body and penetrates her, they are both surprised at the way she responds – softer and more pliant than before, and quick to climax under his fingers while he moves inside her. By the end of his ministrations she is breathless and spent, and he mouths at the scar over her beating heart before withdrawing, her blood scattered like pomegranate seeds over the sheets, slicking him like a sacrifice.
~
The castle is empty save for the two of them, but Orlok must have thralls, those who bargained with him like Herr Knock, immortality in exchange for servitude, because whenever Ellen does mention the need for something – new bedsheets, since they ruined the others; books to keep her occupied in the brief hours he sleeps; gardening tools – they appear within a day, as if the castle has some wish-fulfilment magic like the children’s book of fairytales she’d loved as a child.
She wants for nothing, and as spring breathes life into the soil outside, Ellen spends her days digging and sowing, her fingers blackened and cramping, trying to coax seeds into blossoming.
~
One night, in the gloaming, Ellen pauses astride her monster, puts a hand to his chest to halt their rhythm, and asks the question that has hung over them like a sword, a reckoning unspoken for months. She invokes it now.
“Why have you not turned me?"
Orlok’s eyes shine like moonstone from beneath her. He is quiet for a time, considering. Then-
Because you do not wish it so.
Ellen scoffs at that. “Liar,” she accuses, a night-eyed queen, imperious above him. “You know that if you make me immortal, you will lose access to your blood supply.”
You doubt me, lilac? He runs the tips of two claws from the scar between her breasts down over her abdomen, as though slitting her belly open with a thought. Then those same claws dip between her legs, making her arch against him suddenly, clenching around his cock still buried inside her. You doubt my intentions?
“Of course – I do. They are never – pure,” she pants, flushing at how obviously she’s cracking apart atop him, at how easily he still pulls all her puppet strings.
Pure, he repeats, voice lilting, an edge of laughter in it as his fingers circle, bringing her closer to the inexorable crush of climax. Ellen writhes against him, increasingly desperate to make him move, but he is already sated from their earlier efforts, and is in the mood to toy with her. He always did exult in cruelty. Perhaps purity is of the essence here. Perhaps I cherish it too much to condemn you to this torturous grave.
She tips over the edge with a shudder and a cry, burying her face against his bruise-blue throat, where no pulse throbs. She is his heart.
It takes her a moment to register what he’d said. “Are you... are you saying that you love me?”
He growls impatiently, then, and it is as though he cannot get out from under her fast enough. I am not, he hisses, turning away from her to replace his furs. I told you once, love is inferior to you. What is between us is possession. I am yours and you are mine. Is that not enough?
Ellen cannot hold back an incredulous laugh, rising from their bed, a wraith in the moonlight. “You sound as if you are afraid of it.”
His eyes burn, venomous, snakelike. You ascribe emotions to me that I cannot feel. You forget, lilac, that I am not a man. I spent lifetimes in the pit before you – any mortal parts of me have long since withered.
“Like your heart?” she asks, needling.
Yes, he spits. Like my heart. Do not confuse love with possession. You will only break yours.
He sweeps from the room, returning, presumably, to the sarcophagus with hours left until sunrise, leaving Ellen with the half-hilarious feeling that they just had their first marital spat.
~
Neither of them mention it again the next night, when he pushes her legs apart and fucks her with a violence she had forgotten he was capable of, a feral kind of vengeance that once would have frightened her but has become thrilling. It is an invitation for her to shed her human shell and unite with him in the abyss, where they rut like animals together, filthy and depraved, all claws and teeth and soft white underbelly. They have struggled for the upper hand for so long that Ellen suspects neither of them know how to handle surrender.
He is relentless in his taking of her, and she meets every punishing thrust unflinchingly, staring into his face until something cracks in him and he slows, becoming tender, eliciting a shivering pleasure in her with softer touch and deeper strokes, an anguish sweet enough to make tears well in her eyes, spellbound.
He has conceded something, Ellen knows, but she doesn’t speak, just twines herself around him, pressing him against her heart.
~
One day in late spring, she entreats his shadow form to accompany her onto the castle grounds, into the courtyard, where she has something to show him.
Over months, she has painstakingly carved out blocks of stone, dug them out of the dirt, breaking her nails down to the quick, eking out a patch of uninterrupted earth where she can garden. She had worried that the ground was cursed, as the people in the town below had whispered, but she persisted anyway, planting seeds and dutifully watering, waiting to see what might take root.
And she has been rewarded with a riot of blooms, in various shades of night – black hellebore, blood-dark scabiosas, black star gladiolus, rich violets, and a single, small lilac bush. She has felt like the maiden Kore, growing flowers in the underworld.
“Do you like them?” she asks shyly.
Orlok is quiet for so long that she doesn’t think he will answer. They are beautiful, he says finally, haltingly. There has never been a garden in this castle before. He turns to her, his body language wracked with something that resembles worry. But will you not be grieved when they die?
His concern touches her heart deeply. She leans up on tiptoe to kiss him. “I will plant more,” she replies. “It is, after all, the nature of all things to die.”
Mm. He says in lieu of agreement.
~
She is up late, reading a book of Grimm’s fairytales by the firelight, when he comes to her, freshly risen from his grave.
Will you come to bed?
Ellen smiles, closing the book and following him to their chambers. He studies her silently as she undresses, combing through the braids in her long hair, but when she moves to go to bed, he seizes her arm, turning her to face him.
I do, he says abruptly.
“Do what?”
I do love you, he admits. I wish to spend eternity with you in this form - to cheat death. Death has taken much from me, but he cannot have you. Only me. He releases her arm, a muscle twitching in his jaw as he looks away. I think, then, that must be love. It is not different from possession. Whatever remains of my heart is a jealous, covetous thing, but it belongs to you.
Ellen grins in the dark, triumphant. She reaches up and takes hold of his face, bringing his gaze back to her, seeing herself reflected in his eyes, a night empress, a crown of stars. “So you will turn me, then, my purity be damned?”
She could almost swear, in this half-light, that he smiled too. There are some things, my precious, that can never be fully corrupted, he says dryly.
~
Ellen takes him to bed, where they take turns taking eachother apart in the dark.
They have always been mutually assured destruction, but only they know the secret at the heart of this bloodied bedchamber – that flowers can bloom in hell.
~
They waited many years until she was ready. He was more patient than she had expected, but then, he had waited centuries for her. Her short mortal years were nothing to him.
As they lie tangled together in his coffin, the foul dirt welcoming her limbs, he uses his teeth to open his own veins, rotten blood sluggishly weeping from his arm.
Are you certain?
“I am yours and you are mine,” she reminds him of his words all those years ago, then sobers. “That is enough.”
He offers her his blood, that deathless ichor. Then let us be as one, for not one moment less than forever.
Ellen brings immortality to her lips and drinks.
~
In the end, it was easy to leave her life behind.