you're too young & eager to love (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impertinences) wrote2019-01-21 01:21 pm
impertinences) wrote2019-01-21 01:21 pm
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Writing! Woo! It's been so long.
Ignore the flashback where I clearly struggle with the correct tense. Fuck it. I proof read, but there's probably still some typos. You know how it goes.
Heeereeeee we goooooo!
“And yet we think
the greatest pain’s to die.” - Keats
“Tell me something,” Lene whispers with her head against your chest. She likes to talk softly when it’s just the two of you; she’s learned this particular kind of vulnerability.
“Something?”
She shrugs one of her shoulders, buries her face into the crook of your neck. Her mouth is wet against your skin. “Something I don’t know about you.”
“You don’t know much, kid.”
You sense her annoyance, how it coils into her muscles, and you stroke one of your palms down her spine, rubbing small circles into her lower back. This is how you compromise, these small moments of affection you parcel out in her mountain bed. These acts of physicality that can never replace your secrecy.
“What’s your favorite place?” She tries again, wandering a new path, hoping to arrive at a different location other than your silence. She pushes her nose against the underside of your jaw.
You settle your arm more comfortably around her shoulders, let your hand crawl to her hip, fingers still circling.
“Your favorite memory? You must have a thousand after all these years.”
Nails, blunt, on the dip of her waist. You turn your face, pressing your mouth to the top of her head. Your beard scratches against her skin.
“Favorite scent?”
You look past her. Into the shadows that crawl across the cavernous wall, candles flickering low light around your bodies. You don’t say it, but you think of plums - a scent that has lasted in you for years.
Her skin had been the smell of plums, a sticky, dark kind of sweetness. She’d been ripe, ready to be plucked, and when you had taken her into your arms, she was nothing but soft, yielding skin. Your thumb dimpled the skin at the base of her throat when you pressure above her collarbone. You had sunk your teeth into her, sharp, slicing her open so that even in her confusion she had the bestial instinct to keen and whimper. One of her delicate little hands had clutched at your chest. Her fingers had wrinkled your shirt.
The blood that had spilled into your mouth was salty, coppery, impossibly warm. It was all the heat of the girl's life, and it had made quick work of your own icy skin.
You would have drank her into death, and then you would have kept drinking. The hammer of her heart had echoed in your ears. Each pulse beat a splash of blood on your tongue. There had been only that - your arm curled around her waist, crushing her to you, her small legs dangling beneath her like a doll's, her eyes fluttering beneath her thin eyelids. Her lips had turned blue, following the line of her cupid bow mouth. Her heart had struggled.
You remember Adira. The lace handkerchief, so unsuited in her hand, blotted with blood from where she’d wiped her own mouth. The mother lifeless, slumped against the wall near the door.
"Not a feast at all, children,” Adira had said. Her voice full of wonderment.
You’d barely heard her. You were still circling the maddening, slowing pull of that hammering heart. You liked children because of this, the refusal to give into death, the constant will to survive. So much stronger than adults whose petty, short lives almost always made quick work of their tenacity by the time your thirst did the rest.
Reluctantly, you’d pulled back when Adira touched your shoulder. The girl in your arms was drained by then, dying, and she was as insignificant and as light as a feather. The plum smell of her had faded. Her satin hair was turning to straw.
"Do you want her?" Adira had asked then, her smile taunting. "There is still time."
You did.
For one horrific moment, you did.
You’d stretched your hand across her chest, dropped it down from her small neck. Beneath your heavy palm, there had been the faintest of beats. There had been one more breath on her lips.
You’d dropped the body. You may have kicked it away, disgusted, the tip of your boots digging into small ribs.
Adira had simply raised her eyebrows and turned up the collar on her coat. She had been careful when she stepped over the child, careful to close the hovel’s door after you’d followed. Outside, the smell of sickness had been replaced by the smell of war. Those days, there had been nothing but death in the air. A stench of killing, as clear and definite as the stench of rats or battle-rage.
“Where’d you go?” Lene asks softly, pulling a shirt over her head and then a jacket over that. She shimmies into a pair of jeans, all her pliable skin quickly covered. “You do that a lot, you know. Wander off. All secret like.”
You follow her with your eyes, stretch, then fold your arms beneath your head, staying put. “Do I?”
“And that. You do that a lot too, thinking questions are somehow answers. Roman the spy. So mysterious.” She says it while rolling her eyes, her hands coming to rest on her hips. “Or is this just a dead man thing?”
When you grin, she chucks your shirt at you. It hits you in the chest. You let it lay there, unperturbed, as is your natural state of being.
“Come on. The kids.”
“What about them?”
“You really think I don’t know?”
When you stare, Lene smiles, amused. “Rebecca said you’ve been teaching her how to track. Which really means you’re teaching about six others too, since Rebecca always has a group tagging along after her. That girl. You can’t really keep a secret here, just so you know, what with the grapevine and all.”
After a moment, you make a big deal of sighing, of rolling your large body out of the warm sheets. You dress slowly while Lene throws supplies into a backpack and complains about the Moray pack dynamics. It’s been three months, but the majority of the group is still uneasy about Lene’s decision to return with an outsider, let alone an outsider as threatening and strange as you. She finds it unfair. You let her complain, lacing your military boots up. The fact that some of the children have taken such a strong liking to you only urks the parents more, a side effect that makes you smug. You don’t much like kids, but you like dissension.
By the time you get outside, hair pulled back at the nape of your neck, sleeves rolled up to your elbows, the night is clear, dark, and cold. There’s a chill in the air. You lift your face to the moon, eyes sharp beneath your heavy brows, and frown.
Over a hundred years later, and the air always smells the same: blood and bullets.
Rebecca is the first one you both see. She’s half-heartedly tugging at the peeling bark of a tree, watching it shred away like ribbons, waiting. When she sees the two of you approaching through the woods, she trots over, eyes bright with excitement.
In a gesture that Lene will later admit to surprising her, you reach out and cup her chin once she’s close enough. Rebecca stands still for this appraisal, lifting her face towards you. You study her high cheekbones and the eyes in deep hollows, eyes that watch with a wry amusement that doesn’t quite mask her desire to meet with your approval.
“You have a good face,” you say without preamble. “But you need better eyes out here in the dark. Stop looking for trouble and start looking for signs.” You give her chin a squeeze before you let go, and she laughs, rolls her eyes. “You should have heard us approaching a mile ago. Lene’s as loud as a troll.”
Lene smacks your arm. “Am not, old man. I just didn’t want to startle the kids. Speaking of, Becks, where are they?”
“Hiding.”
“What for?” you ask.
“So we can find them. Obviously.”
“Right,” Lene agrees. “Obviously.”
“I don’t know many horses that are trackers.”
Rebecca looks back at you with bold eyes. She’s an uncharacteristically brazen girl, overly confident, and she’s used to you and your ways by now, but she likes to make sure you aren’t pulling her leg. She’s seen the way you pull Lene’s. Finally, shoving a low-hanging branch out of her way, she shrugs. “I don’t wanna be like my mamma.”
“Meaning?” Lene asks.
“You know. Difficult. Useless.”
You bark a laugh, the sound loud, lingering above the sound of your combined footsteps. Lene shoots you a disapproving look.
“Your mother isn’t useless. She carries her weight, just like everyone else.”
“Ahuh.” Rebecca agrees in the manner of most adolescents - by consenting in a tone that suggests anything else.
After a moment, she falls back and tugs on your arm. It’s the action of a much younger child, one far more shy. You look down at her. “What kind of horses do you know?” she asks.
“War horses.”
“What were they like?”
“Dependable. Steady in a crisis. Quick.”
Rebecca looks proud, but Lene gives you another uncertain look. “You have to remember, Becks, those horses were just animals. It’s a little bit different than us.”
“But we are animals.”
“Speak for yourself,” you say, ducking below another low-hanging branch. The forest is thinning as you walk, the giant oaks being replaced with more humble saplings. The terrain is evening, making it easier to walk.
“The devil help us if Strauss Roman is the most humane of us all,” Lene says good-naturedly, sending a wink over her shoulder in your direction.
When you grin, it’s with a predator’s teeth.
What reason there was defied articulation.
That is what Lene will tell Anders when they are in front of the pack, when she’s come home alone with her clothes bloody and her face pale.
In the privacy of her brother’s quarters, she’ll pour them both a shot of Roman’s whiskey and ignore the way her hands shake. “It was the only way. You weren’t there.”
Anders sweeps a hand back through his blonde hair, agitated, brows drawn together. “The only way.” He sighs, takes another stroll around the perimeter of his room, staring up at the ceiling rather than at his sister. “And you are certain of that?”
“Yes.”
“It must feel fucking good to be so certain all the time.”
“You would know.”
Maybe it’s the sarcasm in her voice, or maybe he’s all too aware of the powder keg of an issue they’re facing, but he grabs the shot from the table before Lene can stop him and launches it across the room. It smashes against the wall, glass bursting. Lene does a good job of hiding the way she flinches. She feels an overwhelming urge to roll over, to show her belly.
“You brought him here,” Anders says, eyes fierce, a finger pointed accusingly at her. “You are responsible for him.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m responsible for you. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What you’ve let happen? What this means?”
“She would have died,” Lene says softly, trying for calm. “Anders. She would have died.”
For a moment, she thinks she knows what he will say:
Better to have let her.
Instead, he makes a sound like a growl, bunching his hands into fists. He has to take three deep breaths before he can calm down enough to sit. By then, Knight has come in, his knowing eyes flicking between Lene and her brother with concern.
Outside, they can hear Rebecca’s mother crying, a wail as painful as an owl’s screech. Beyond that, there’s the rattle of hushed voices steadily mounting. A rumble of discord.
“This way!” Rebecca shouts.
Lene cringes at her loudness then hides a laugh, watching as the girl darts off into a patch of thin trees. Horses, she decides, really aren’t much for stealth, but there’s something to be said for sure-footedness and enthusiasm.
You pause, craning your head in the direction Rebecca ran. Lene pauses too, watching your face while listening to the night. You both can hear the girl’s footsteps, every crack of branch beneath her shoes as she runs, every rustle of leaves and dirt and stone.
“This isn’t right,” you say. “We should have turned east half a mile ago.”
“You’re supposed to be the one teaching, oh master of the hunt.”
“They need to learn from mistakes. She’ll figure it out sooner or later.”
“If you ask me, I think she’s just out here to be with you.”
“Jealous?”
Lene laughs, rolling her eyes, then playfully lifts her shoulders. She scans the terrain, her face settling into a mild frown of caution. “Let’s go back. We’re too far down, and it’s late. Her mother will stage a coup if she finds out what Becks is down here doing.”
You’re about to tell Lene to go collect the girl when the thunder of bullets splits the night like a storm.
You feel the air thicken, and you know Lene has shifted. She’s a massive, dreadful shape in the dark, hurtling towards the chaotic noise with a fearlessness you’ve learned to associate with her character.
You smell blood in the air long before you find them: the mountain rangers with their guns, the headlights of their utility vehicles glaring, the metal of their cages polished bright. It isn’t a full ambush, there’s not enough men to suggest that; rather, it looks like Rebecca stumbled straight into a trap. You see her first, picking her out amongst the group of seven or eight men. She’s curiously silent, thrown over the shoulder of one of the rangers, her breath hitching and her left arm streaked in blood.
There’s so much blood in the air. Too much. It’s all you can smell. Your eyes are like pinpoints in the dark, and your fangs detract. There’s a deafening roar from Lene and a scream of anger and fear from the group before she crashes through the thicket, one giant claw slicing across the nearest ranger’s chest and sending him up into the air. She shakes her head, teeth on full display, and catches another by the shoulder.
Lene carves a path easily, heading directly towards Rebecca.
Two of the rangers flee for their ATVs. You grab one by the neck, your hand an iron shackle, and shove your open palm up, making the man choke as his windpipe collapses. Blood bursts from his mouth, and then you rip out his throat. By the time he drops to your feet, you’ve snapped the second man’s neck in one clean gesture.
Bullets scatter near your shoulder. The headlights of a vehicle wobble in the dark, as though something huge has barreled into it, causing it to tip. There’s a sound of screeching metal.
When a ranger with a Bowie knife rushes you from the left, you duck easily under his arching arm and grab him by the collar of his shirt. It such an easy thing, lifting him off his feet. He manages to stab up and into your ribs - a sharp, searing pain - but you’re eyes are the black of death, and you’re too overcome in the frenzy of the moment to care. The man stinks of fear and piss; he gives a guttural scream when you tear into his throat, his blood a hot spray filling your mouth, tasting like panic.
You pull the knife from your side after you’ve drained him, the wound already healing. You manage to steal one more ranger before the remaining group flees in a hurry of motors and curses. You have your teeth in his jugular, your hands breaking his ribs as you pin him to a tree, and you’re learning all of his secrets as they spill on your tongue when distantly, from miles away, you hear Lene’s frantic yells.
She’s calling your name. She’s never sounded this way before.
Something’s wrong.
But the man’s heart is thundering still, calling to you, and you growl like a beast when a hand pulls on your arm. Lene has to punch you, hard, to break your attention, and even then you turn on her with a bloody, angry snarl.
She catches her breath, startled, unaccustomed to the ferocity of your unbridled nature, then finds her resolve. She shoves you in the chest, small now that she’s back in her human form, but no less bearish.
“Rebecca,” she gasps, and you already know what she is about to say.
There’s blood on all three of you, but there’s too much on Rebecca. She’s bleeding profusely from a number of bullet wounds. Lene has her cradled in her arms now, bunched up like the child she is. Rebecca’s eyes flutter beneath her eyelids weakly, her pulse fading, and a soft, kitten-like cry struggles out of her mouth.
“Roman.” Lene keeps saying your name, desperate, pleading, staring at you as she unconsciously rocks Rebecca back and forth.
You touch Rebecca’s neck even though the gesture is meaningless. You can hear her heart, fighting, inside of her chest. “There’s too much damage,” you say, shaking your head.
“Bullshit. Fix it. I’ve seen you fix bullet wounds before. Slit wrists. Gashes.”
“Let her die. She’s suffering.”
Lene stares at you, at your bloody face, at your cold eyes. She sets her mouth into a grim line of determination. “No. You have to try.”
“Lene.”
“For fuck’s sake!”
You snarl at her, but you grab Rebecca from her arms. Not with tenderness or care or sympathy, but with hunger and anger and dismay. Lene makes a strangled noise from her throat when you rip into the girl’s throat, her body already limp and stretched out at an unnatural angle between your hulking form and Lene’s crouched body. You have a hand beneath her small shoulder blades, one cradling her head, and you curve over her like a demon come to take her breath.
You make a senseless moan at tasting her fever-hot blood, at its youth, at the oceanique pull of her heart that pounds, relentless, rapid, in your ears, like crashing waves.
Rebecca, too, you think, smells like plums.
“She needs a hole.”
“Like a grave? Are you shitting me?” Lene looks as though she’s been the one drained. Her gaze is strong, but her body is starting to reveal her shock - the small tremor in her hands, the paleness of her mouth, the way her teeth want to chatter.
“She’s dying. Her body is dying. It takes time, this blood-work. She needs to be in the earth while that happens.”
“Why?”
You shoot her a look full of agitation. You don’t have time to explain. Or maybe you don’t fully know how to explain it, this process of unnatural rebirth, of death and then life and death again. You cradle Rebecca’s limp body in your arms where she looks pitifully small, her lanky, coltish legs dangling over your arms, her head slack, mouth red from where you’d slit your own wrist and pressed it to her dying mouth.
You choose a spot near a bristlecone to lay her down, careful where you place her head. Lene hesitates before turning to head back up the mountain.
“Lene,” you call without looking up, the muscles of your arms rolling beneath your skin as you shovel hard dirt with your bare hands.
She stops, breathing hard.
“She’ll be hungry.”
“.... Oh. Right. Should I …?”
You shake your head, hair falling forward into your face, and sit back on your heels. Rebecca is a pale glimmer beside you, her skin too white, her eyes closed. She still isn’t moving. Her arm looks tiny against the dead leaves and broken crust of the earth. “I’ll take her out, early, further down by the base of the mountain. Then meet you here. Bring her a change of clothes. She’ll smell like rot.”
“This is going to work, right? Because if I go back and tell them what has happened and she doesn’t get out of that death hole you’re digging right now, we’re both fucked.”
You laugh bitterly. It crackles out of your bloody mouth unexpectedly, and you can see the confusion on Lene’s face by the way her eyes draw together and how her mouth curls. She doesn’t know if you’ve done this before, you realize, and you suppose that you haven’t - not really, not like this, not with another preternatural. You have hundreds of years in your blood, but you have no idea if all that time makes you the losing or winning side. You don’t know what Rebecca will emerge as, or if she’ll emerge at all. You’re not sure which option is worse.
“Just bring the clothes, liebling,” you say, and you start shoveling again.
You crawl into the grave first. It’s more than six feet deep.
It takes nearly as much time to fill the dirt in around you as it did to dig it up in the first place.
You settle Rebecca’s delicate, cold body above your, her head somewhere near where your heart should be. She’s stiff, and she smells like death, like the decay of the earth pressing in around you. You feel revulsion crawl over your skin, but you ignore the sensation and close your eyes.
Some time near early dusk, Rebecca’s fingers twitch, curling and clutching the fabric of your shirt.
Ignore the flashback where I clearly struggle with the correct tense. Fuck it. I proof read, but there's probably still some typos. You know how it goes.
Heeereeeee we goooooo!
“And yet we think
the greatest pain’s to die.” - Keats
“Tell me something,” Lene whispers with her head against your chest. She likes to talk softly when it’s just the two of you; she’s learned this particular kind of vulnerability.
“Something?”
She shrugs one of her shoulders, buries her face into the crook of your neck. Her mouth is wet against your skin. “Something I don’t know about you.”
“You don’t know much, kid.”
You sense her annoyance, how it coils into her muscles, and you stroke one of your palms down her spine, rubbing small circles into her lower back. This is how you compromise, these small moments of affection you parcel out in her mountain bed. These acts of physicality that can never replace your secrecy.
“What’s your favorite place?” She tries again, wandering a new path, hoping to arrive at a different location other than your silence. She pushes her nose against the underside of your jaw.
You settle your arm more comfortably around her shoulders, let your hand crawl to her hip, fingers still circling.
“Your favorite memory? You must have a thousand after all these years.”
Nails, blunt, on the dip of her waist. You turn your face, pressing your mouth to the top of her head. Your beard scratches against her skin.
“Favorite scent?”
You look past her. Into the shadows that crawl across the cavernous wall, candles flickering low light around your bodies. You don’t say it, but you think of plums - a scent that has lasted in you for years.
Her skin had been the smell of plums, a sticky, dark kind of sweetness. She’d been ripe, ready to be plucked, and when you had taken her into your arms, she was nothing but soft, yielding skin. Your thumb dimpled the skin at the base of her throat when you pressure above her collarbone. You had sunk your teeth into her, sharp, slicing her open so that even in her confusion she had the bestial instinct to keen and whimper. One of her delicate little hands had clutched at your chest. Her fingers had wrinkled your shirt.
The blood that had spilled into your mouth was salty, coppery, impossibly warm. It was all the heat of the girl's life, and it had made quick work of your own icy skin.
You would have drank her into death, and then you would have kept drinking. The hammer of her heart had echoed in your ears. Each pulse beat a splash of blood on your tongue. There had been only that - your arm curled around her waist, crushing her to you, her small legs dangling beneath her like a doll's, her eyes fluttering beneath her thin eyelids. Her lips had turned blue, following the line of her cupid bow mouth. Her heart had struggled.
You remember Adira. The lace handkerchief, so unsuited in her hand, blotted with blood from where she’d wiped her own mouth. The mother lifeless, slumped against the wall near the door.
"Not a feast at all, children,” Adira had said. Her voice full of wonderment.
You’d barely heard her. You were still circling the maddening, slowing pull of that hammering heart. You liked children because of this, the refusal to give into death, the constant will to survive. So much stronger than adults whose petty, short lives almost always made quick work of their tenacity by the time your thirst did the rest.
Reluctantly, you’d pulled back when Adira touched your shoulder. The girl in your arms was drained by then, dying, and she was as insignificant and as light as a feather. The plum smell of her had faded. Her satin hair was turning to straw.
"Do you want her?" Adira had asked then, her smile taunting. "There is still time."
You did.
For one horrific moment, you did.
You’d stretched your hand across her chest, dropped it down from her small neck. Beneath your heavy palm, there had been the faintest of beats. There had been one more breath on her lips.
You’d dropped the body. You may have kicked it away, disgusted, the tip of your boots digging into small ribs.
Adira had simply raised her eyebrows and turned up the collar on her coat. She had been careful when she stepped over the child, careful to close the hovel’s door after you’d followed. Outside, the smell of sickness had been replaced by the smell of war. Those days, there had been nothing but death in the air. A stench of killing, as clear and definite as the stench of rats or battle-rage.
“Where’d you go?” Lene asks softly, pulling a shirt over her head and then a jacket over that. She shimmies into a pair of jeans, all her pliable skin quickly covered. “You do that a lot, you know. Wander off. All secret like.”
You follow her with your eyes, stretch, then fold your arms beneath your head, staying put. “Do I?”
“And that. You do that a lot too, thinking questions are somehow answers. Roman the spy. So mysterious.” She says it while rolling her eyes, her hands coming to rest on her hips. “Or is this just a dead man thing?”
When you grin, she chucks your shirt at you. It hits you in the chest. You let it lay there, unperturbed, as is your natural state of being.
“Come on. The kids.”
“What about them?”
“You really think I don’t know?”
When you stare, Lene smiles, amused. “Rebecca said you’ve been teaching her how to track. Which really means you’re teaching about six others too, since Rebecca always has a group tagging along after her. That girl. You can’t really keep a secret here, just so you know, what with the grapevine and all.”
After a moment, you make a big deal of sighing, of rolling your large body out of the warm sheets. You dress slowly while Lene throws supplies into a backpack and complains about the Moray pack dynamics. It’s been three months, but the majority of the group is still uneasy about Lene’s decision to return with an outsider, let alone an outsider as threatening and strange as you. She finds it unfair. You let her complain, lacing your military boots up. The fact that some of the children have taken such a strong liking to you only urks the parents more, a side effect that makes you smug. You don’t much like kids, but you like dissension.
By the time you get outside, hair pulled back at the nape of your neck, sleeves rolled up to your elbows, the night is clear, dark, and cold. There’s a chill in the air. You lift your face to the moon, eyes sharp beneath your heavy brows, and frown.
Over a hundred years later, and the air always smells the same: blood and bullets.
Rebecca is the first one you both see. She’s half-heartedly tugging at the peeling bark of a tree, watching it shred away like ribbons, waiting. When she sees the two of you approaching through the woods, she trots over, eyes bright with excitement.
In a gesture that Lene will later admit to surprising her, you reach out and cup her chin once she’s close enough. Rebecca stands still for this appraisal, lifting her face towards you. You study her high cheekbones and the eyes in deep hollows, eyes that watch with a wry amusement that doesn’t quite mask her desire to meet with your approval.
“You have a good face,” you say without preamble. “But you need better eyes out here in the dark. Stop looking for trouble and start looking for signs.” You give her chin a squeeze before you let go, and she laughs, rolls her eyes. “You should have heard us approaching a mile ago. Lene’s as loud as a troll.”
Lene smacks your arm. “Am not, old man. I just didn’t want to startle the kids. Speaking of, Becks, where are they?”
“Hiding.”
“What for?” you ask.
“So we can find them. Obviously.”
“Right,” Lene agrees. “Obviously.”
“I don’t know many horses that are trackers.”
Rebecca looks back at you with bold eyes. She’s an uncharacteristically brazen girl, overly confident, and she’s used to you and your ways by now, but she likes to make sure you aren’t pulling her leg. She’s seen the way you pull Lene’s. Finally, shoving a low-hanging branch out of her way, she shrugs. “I don’t wanna be like my mamma.”
“Meaning?” Lene asks.
“You know. Difficult. Useless.”
You bark a laugh, the sound loud, lingering above the sound of your combined footsteps. Lene shoots you a disapproving look.
“Your mother isn’t useless. She carries her weight, just like everyone else.”
“Ahuh.” Rebecca agrees in the manner of most adolescents - by consenting in a tone that suggests anything else.
After a moment, she falls back and tugs on your arm. It’s the action of a much younger child, one far more shy. You look down at her. “What kind of horses do you know?” she asks.
“War horses.”
“What were they like?”
“Dependable. Steady in a crisis. Quick.”
Rebecca looks proud, but Lene gives you another uncertain look. “You have to remember, Becks, those horses were just animals. It’s a little bit different than us.”
“But we are animals.”
“Speak for yourself,” you say, ducking below another low-hanging branch. The forest is thinning as you walk, the giant oaks being replaced with more humble saplings. The terrain is evening, making it easier to walk.
“The devil help us if Strauss Roman is the most humane of us all,” Lene says good-naturedly, sending a wink over her shoulder in your direction.
When you grin, it’s with a predator’s teeth.
What reason there was defied articulation.
That is what Lene will tell Anders when they are in front of the pack, when she’s come home alone with her clothes bloody and her face pale.
In the privacy of her brother’s quarters, she’ll pour them both a shot of Roman’s whiskey and ignore the way her hands shake. “It was the only way. You weren’t there.”
Anders sweeps a hand back through his blonde hair, agitated, brows drawn together. “The only way.” He sighs, takes another stroll around the perimeter of his room, staring up at the ceiling rather than at his sister. “And you are certain of that?”
“Yes.”
“It must feel fucking good to be so certain all the time.”
“You would know.”
Maybe it’s the sarcasm in her voice, or maybe he’s all too aware of the powder keg of an issue they’re facing, but he grabs the shot from the table before Lene can stop him and launches it across the room. It smashes against the wall, glass bursting. Lene does a good job of hiding the way she flinches. She feels an overwhelming urge to roll over, to show her belly.
“You brought him here,” Anders says, eyes fierce, a finger pointed accusingly at her. “You are responsible for him.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m responsible for you. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What you’ve let happen? What this means?”
“She would have died,” Lene says softly, trying for calm. “Anders. She would have died.”
For a moment, she thinks she knows what he will say:
Better to have let her.
Instead, he makes a sound like a growl, bunching his hands into fists. He has to take three deep breaths before he can calm down enough to sit. By then, Knight has come in, his knowing eyes flicking between Lene and her brother with concern.
Outside, they can hear Rebecca’s mother crying, a wail as painful as an owl’s screech. Beyond that, there’s the rattle of hushed voices steadily mounting. A rumble of discord.
“This way!” Rebecca shouts.
Lene cringes at her loudness then hides a laugh, watching as the girl darts off into a patch of thin trees. Horses, she decides, really aren’t much for stealth, but there’s something to be said for sure-footedness and enthusiasm.
You pause, craning your head in the direction Rebecca ran. Lene pauses too, watching your face while listening to the night. You both can hear the girl’s footsteps, every crack of branch beneath her shoes as she runs, every rustle of leaves and dirt and stone.
“This isn’t right,” you say. “We should have turned east half a mile ago.”
“You’re supposed to be the one teaching, oh master of the hunt.”
“They need to learn from mistakes. She’ll figure it out sooner or later.”
“If you ask me, I think she’s just out here to be with you.”
“Jealous?”
Lene laughs, rolling her eyes, then playfully lifts her shoulders. She scans the terrain, her face settling into a mild frown of caution. “Let’s go back. We’re too far down, and it’s late. Her mother will stage a coup if she finds out what Becks is down here doing.”
You’re about to tell Lene to go collect the girl when the thunder of bullets splits the night like a storm.
You feel the air thicken, and you know Lene has shifted. She’s a massive, dreadful shape in the dark, hurtling towards the chaotic noise with a fearlessness you’ve learned to associate with her character.
You smell blood in the air long before you find them: the mountain rangers with their guns, the headlights of their utility vehicles glaring, the metal of their cages polished bright. It isn’t a full ambush, there’s not enough men to suggest that; rather, it looks like Rebecca stumbled straight into a trap. You see her first, picking her out amongst the group of seven or eight men. She’s curiously silent, thrown over the shoulder of one of the rangers, her breath hitching and her left arm streaked in blood.
There’s so much blood in the air. Too much. It’s all you can smell. Your eyes are like pinpoints in the dark, and your fangs detract. There’s a deafening roar from Lene and a scream of anger and fear from the group before she crashes through the thicket, one giant claw slicing across the nearest ranger’s chest and sending him up into the air. She shakes her head, teeth on full display, and catches another by the shoulder.
Lene carves a path easily, heading directly towards Rebecca.
Two of the rangers flee for their ATVs. You grab one by the neck, your hand an iron shackle, and shove your open palm up, making the man choke as his windpipe collapses. Blood bursts from his mouth, and then you rip out his throat. By the time he drops to your feet, you’ve snapped the second man’s neck in one clean gesture.
Bullets scatter near your shoulder. The headlights of a vehicle wobble in the dark, as though something huge has barreled into it, causing it to tip. There’s a sound of screeching metal.
When a ranger with a Bowie knife rushes you from the left, you duck easily under his arching arm and grab him by the collar of his shirt. It such an easy thing, lifting him off his feet. He manages to stab up and into your ribs - a sharp, searing pain - but you’re eyes are the black of death, and you’re too overcome in the frenzy of the moment to care. The man stinks of fear and piss; he gives a guttural scream when you tear into his throat, his blood a hot spray filling your mouth, tasting like panic.
You pull the knife from your side after you’ve drained him, the wound already healing. You manage to steal one more ranger before the remaining group flees in a hurry of motors and curses. You have your teeth in his jugular, your hands breaking his ribs as you pin him to a tree, and you’re learning all of his secrets as they spill on your tongue when distantly, from miles away, you hear Lene’s frantic yells.
She’s calling your name. She’s never sounded this way before.
Something’s wrong.
But the man’s heart is thundering still, calling to you, and you growl like a beast when a hand pulls on your arm. Lene has to punch you, hard, to break your attention, and even then you turn on her with a bloody, angry snarl.
She catches her breath, startled, unaccustomed to the ferocity of your unbridled nature, then finds her resolve. She shoves you in the chest, small now that she’s back in her human form, but no less bearish.
“Rebecca,” she gasps, and you already know what she is about to say.
There’s blood on all three of you, but there’s too much on Rebecca. She’s bleeding profusely from a number of bullet wounds. Lene has her cradled in her arms now, bunched up like the child she is. Rebecca’s eyes flutter beneath her eyelids weakly, her pulse fading, and a soft, kitten-like cry struggles out of her mouth.
“Roman.” Lene keeps saying your name, desperate, pleading, staring at you as she unconsciously rocks Rebecca back and forth.
You touch Rebecca’s neck even though the gesture is meaningless. You can hear her heart, fighting, inside of her chest. “There’s too much damage,” you say, shaking your head.
“Bullshit. Fix it. I’ve seen you fix bullet wounds before. Slit wrists. Gashes.”
“Let her die. She’s suffering.”
Lene stares at you, at your bloody face, at your cold eyes. She sets her mouth into a grim line of determination. “No. You have to try.”
“Lene.”
“For fuck’s sake!”
You snarl at her, but you grab Rebecca from her arms. Not with tenderness or care or sympathy, but with hunger and anger and dismay. Lene makes a strangled noise from her throat when you rip into the girl’s throat, her body already limp and stretched out at an unnatural angle between your hulking form and Lene’s crouched body. You have a hand beneath her small shoulder blades, one cradling her head, and you curve over her like a demon come to take her breath.
You make a senseless moan at tasting her fever-hot blood, at its youth, at the oceanique pull of her heart that pounds, relentless, rapid, in your ears, like crashing waves.
Rebecca, too, you think, smells like plums.
“She needs a hole.”
“Like a grave? Are you shitting me?” Lene looks as though she’s been the one drained. Her gaze is strong, but her body is starting to reveal her shock - the small tremor in her hands, the paleness of her mouth, the way her teeth want to chatter.
“She’s dying. Her body is dying. It takes time, this blood-work. She needs to be in the earth while that happens.”
“Why?”
You shoot her a look full of agitation. You don’t have time to explain. Or maybe you don’t fully know how to explain it, this process of unnatural rebirth, of death and then life and death again. You cradle Rebecca’s limp body in your arms where she looks pitifully small, her lanky, coltish legs dangling over your arms, her head slack, mouth red from where you’d slit your own wrist and pressed it to her dying mouth.
You choose a spot near a bristlecone to lay her down, careful where you place her head. Lene hesitates before turning to head back up the mountain.
“Lene,” you call without looking up, the muscles of your arms rolling beneath your skin as you shovel hard dirt with your bare hands.
She stops, breathing hard.
“She’ll be hungry.”
“.... Oh. Right. Should I …?”
You shake your head, hair falling forward into your face, and sit back on your heels. Rebecca is a pale glimmer beside you, her skin too white, her eyes closed. She still isn’t moving. Her arm looks tiny against the dead leaves and broken crust of the earth. “I’ll take her out, early, further down by the base of the mountain. Then meet you here. Bring her a change of clothes. She’ll smell like rot.”
“This is going to work, right? Because if I go back and tell them what has happened and she doesn’t get out of that death hole you’re digging right now, we’re both fucked.”
You laugh bitterly. It crackles out of your bloody mouth unexpectedly, and you can see the confusion on Lene’s face by the way her eyes draw together and how her mouth curls. She doesn’t know if you’ve done this before, you realize, and you suppose that you haven’t - not really, not like this, not with another preternatural. You have hundreds of years in your blood, but you have no idea if all that time makes you the losing or winning side. You don’t know what Rebecca will emerge as, or if she’ll emerge at all. You’re not sure which option is worse.
“Just bring the clothes, liebling,” you say, and you start shoveling again.
You crawl into the grave first. It’s more than six feet deep.
It takes nearly as much time to fill the dirt in around you as it did to dig it up in the first place.
You settle Rebecca’s delicate, cold body above your, her head somewhere near where your heart should be. She’s stiff, and she smells like death, like the decay of the earth pressing in around you. You feel revulsion crawl over your skin, but you ignore the sensation and close your eyes.
Some time near early dusk, Rebecca’s fingers twitch, curling and clutching the fabric of your shirt.