you're too young & eager to love

Here we go, the final set of shorts, the second half of the thank-you gift! daintiestmartyr, I hope you enjoy!

Notes!

* There’s some repeat kiddos in this second set of shorts, but I intentionally tried to make them differ completely in tone, mood, and, well, even the subject matter. Also, it’s okay to have favorites. There, I said it!
* The Haven and Luke short is toxic as hell. It’s essentially a drunk fight-and-fuck scene, but things get nasty and violent. I also begin in the middle of it, so there’s not much context as to WHY they’re fighting. I just wanted them to fight. Fair warning.
* In an effort to not write sex scenes for every single short (I have to practice writing something else, damn it), I accidentally get Margot and Jasper into a bit of a tiff. So sorry. They deserve better. I don’t know how to write happy scenes! They're so boring! I said that too, okay!
* Harper and Oriol’s short is set a short time after they’ve started getting physical as a trio with Zane but before they’re going behind Zane’s back together due to their ~pair bonding~.
* Introspective!Palmer is the hardest thing to write. He really doesn’t get enough time/attention in my brain, so I struggled to, well, think about what he’d think about.
* The final short introduces a new set of characters! As a surprise! I kept it all vampire-centric to avoid stepping on fleshing out the nun’s personality and details and all that creative licensure. I’m also really digging the idea that older vampires “claim” territories, so Gideon gets to claim Linemell, running off lesser vampires and defending his turf until some bigger baddie comes in. If that ever happens.




7.


She’s hungry. She tells him this incessantly. She tells him with her brown eyes, eyes that were once deep with childhood mirth, eyes that were once as bright as the sun cresting over the mountain’s edge, eyes that were once more man than animal. They’re nighttime eyes now. Hunter eyes. They ought to be red.
Becks sucks her bloody fingers and complains for more. She is petulant, twisting her limbs impatiently, rocking back and forth from foot-to-foot as Roman attempts to remember the meaning of the word patience. He has his fangs in the neck of a pretty barmaid, and Becks is ruining the pull of the woman’s heart, the way it calls and thunders and cries in his ears while the taste of her memories, all her happiness, all her pain, collides with his own inside of his veins. The Titled Oak is a poor place for a hunt; it’s the last inn before the mountain pass, the sole establishment offering food and a safe spot to rest one’s head for miles. Now, the bodies will rot for weeks and the travelers will be cheated out of their last safe haven unless some vagabond takes it up for his own or they head south for the Isle. But a child is a child and Roman had had no tolerance for her demands when he’d awoken with her fingers in his hair and her pleas in his ear. Lene was always telling him he was too doting, but the way she said it made him think she thought it was dangerous rather than charming.
Maybe she was right. He concedes that she usually is.
Becks whines, high-pitched, like a nestling. Roman unconsciously tightens his grip on the woman’s waist, tight as a noose, and the blood splatters, pulsing, into his mouth when one of her ribs breaks. He pulls back reluctantly, red-mouthed, and glares over his shoulder at the girl. She looks at him expectantly, hopefully, and gives a joyous yelp when he sighs and holds out his arm, the barmaid slipping, half-dead, down to the dirty floor. He lets her fall unceremoniously where Becks, dainty as a dancer, tiptoes around the outline of the woman’s body before crouching. She avoids the wound in her throat and plucks up an arm instead, her small teeth clamping down so fiercely at the wrist that she rips away a wide chunk of skin.
The inn stinks of death, the coppery acid smell of blood and fear.
Roman wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and lets the girl relish in the newness of the kill. He steps around them both and heads to the bar where he takes the coin from the register and a bottle of tequila. He puts them both into an old duffel bag, throwing in a pack of cigarettes, a loaf of day-old bread, and three ripe oranges. There’s little to scavenge, but he takes what he can since the Moray pack always complains about his lack of contributions. As if meager paltry offerings could ever rectify what he was, what he’d done. He shoulders the bag and when he returns Becks is licking the blood from her mouth, her skin flushed with warmth. She’s as dewy as a rosebud, brimming with unbridled life.
“I want to run,” she says, jumping up and tugging her long hair back into a ponytail. She stops when Roman grabs her shoulder, his hand a heavy iron that tugs her down. Becks fights the urge to roll her eyes at him.
“We have to clean this up first.”
Becks sighs, her entire body slanting and tilting with reluctance.
“Fine. Go run with Lene. She’s waiting outside.”
“Yeah?” She’s thrilled, the creature inside of her fueled with pure vitality, and she’s almost out the door in a gallop before she stops and hesitates. She struggles with the words, one hand on the doorframe as Roman grabs the now dead woman by the shoulders and begins dragging her towards the back of the inn. When he sees Becks waiting, he stops, an eyebrow raised expectantly.
“She doesn’t … Lene … She doesn’t really like me anymore, does she?”
“It’s not that.”
“Do you still like me?”
“Yes,” he says simply and finds that it’s true.
“Maybe I could give her something. Remind her that I’m still, you know, me. After everything.” Becks thinks about this and looks at the delicate silver necklace on the barmaid’s neck, blood-stained from where Roman had torn into her jugular.
Roman follows her gaze and laughs. “Trust me. She won’t want that.” He nods towards the door. “Go on now.”
She hesitates for a moment longer, wiping her mouth once more on the sleeve of her shirt, then darts out of the door. Roman doesn’t take long. He moves the few bodies into a pile behind the bar and covers them with a tarp he finds in the makeshift kitchen. He does this because he thinks Lene would appreciate it not because he’s compelled by his own morality. Duffel bag in hand, he heads out the side entrance, the night air clean and cold like the stars.



Lene has her hands shoved into the pockets of a thin grey jacket, one of Anders’ old hand me downs, and she’s kicking at the rubble by the start of the mountain pass with the tip of her black boot. Her pretty face is fixed at nothing, but Roman sees the worry as tension in her shoulders, the straight line of her spine, the grim set of her mouth.
“Didn’t feel like running?” he asks, lifting his eyes to the trail above them. He can hear hoofprints in the distance, but he can’t see Becks.
“No, I ran. She’s faster than me now.”
“Probably faster than me too. Or change into a rabbit. I hear they’re quick.”
“That will be great if we ever need to stop her.”
“Why would we need to stop her?”
Lene fixes him with a look that says he can’t possibly be so stupid. She’s suddenly exasperated and then she’s angry, and Roman reminds himself that this woman, this petite blonde who barely reaches his chest on tiptoe, isn’t really a woman at all and far more capable than this current shape suggests. As if on cue, she punches him in the arm with such force that he skids back and scowls, a growl rumbling out of his throat.
“You told me to do it!” he says, fangs sharp in the moonlight, a little punchdrunk still from the human blood in his veins. “Remember?”
“I know!” Lene yells back, throwing her hands in the air.
“So what?”
“If you ask one more stupid question, I swear to—”
He looks down at her, hands on his knees, his hair loose around his face and laughs. Lene both loves and hates that laugh. It’s smug and self-assured and defiant. She considers punching him in the face, but Roman cocks his eyebrow at her as though he knows what she’s thinking, and she’s sure he actually does. Her teeth grit together.
She breathes out slowly and curls her fingers at her side. Flexes. Curls again. “I heard it. You two. Back there, at the inn. The screams. I thought it would be …” She shrugs emptily, uncertain.
“You think death is silent? We can call it what it is if that’s easier. Murder is rarely quiet.” It’s his turn to look incredulous. When she doesn’t respond, he stands up straight and says more gently, “It will get easier.”
“You don’t know that. This is unchartered territory for us both, however much you like to pretend otherwise. We’re in terra incognita.”
“I didn’t know you could speak Latin.”
“Shut up.” She rolls her eyes, and Roman laughs again.
“Lene.” He grabs her by the shoulder, not unlike how he’d earlier grabbed Becks, and pulls her reluctant body closer. He dips forward and presses his forehead softly against hers, his hands, still warm from someone else’s blood, cradle her neck. “It doesn’t matter.”
“That’s your answer to everything. Some things do matter.”
“I know, liebchen,” he says and strokes his thumb softly across her jaw.


8.


“Fuck you, you fucking cocksucker,” Haven snarls at him, more beast than woman. She spits each word at him, hurling them like rocks.
Luke grips the sides of his head in frustration while she seethes, yells, teeters on her stiletto heels then jerks a bit to the right when Haven throws a second bottle of beer in his direction. It lands, crashes, shatters glass across the apartment floor and Luke sees red as the sour smell of cheap beer hits him in the face. Better the smell than the bottle, he thinks, and is grateful for Haven’s poor aim with projectiles.
“You’re a fucking bitch, you know that?” He rubs his eyes, pressing his fingers into his brows, feeling a headache the size of Alaska building between his temples.
Haven’s laughter is sharp as electricity and her eyes wide in their wildness. He can smell the alcohol seeping from her pores, the scent mixing with her jasmine perfume and making a stink of the whole cramped living room. She steps towards him unevenly, almost twists an ankle, and points a pink-nailed finger at him as though she could cut with it. “Better a bitch than a pussy.”
Luke lets his hands fall from his face and clenches his jaw. His one hand, the right one, forms a fist, and he thumps it against the side of his leg.
Haven notices. She purses her mouth, her glossy lips slick and spewing one insult after another. “Oh, are you gonna hit me now? Gonna be like dad? Gonna be a big man? C’mon now, Lukey, show me what you can do.”
Luke thinks he should. For a moment. Just a moment, while his temper gets the best of him. One hit across her cheekbone is all it would take, one hit right where the bruise would blossom up close to her eye and ruin the fine, clean symmetry of her face. At least for a few days. Just to remind her that he isn’t, has never been, a pussy. That he was the one who took all of their father’s drunken hits and rescued her from the boys who were too eager with their looks and, later, their hands. The one who bandaged her knees and dried her tears and made sure she was fed everyday, made sure she had a warm place to sleep at night, made sure she passed her classes and that no one but Haven herself muddied her reputation.
Luke thinks he should, but there isn’t even an ounce of fear in Haven’s red-rimmed eyes. She wants him to do it, her face eager, waiting. He takes a second too long to respond, so she slams her palms against his chest then slaps him across the side of face in a flurry of several rapid successive hits. He curses, ducks, his arms coming up to take the brunt of the slaps. She tries to shove one of her sharp knees into his groin. He catches her wrists, breathing hard, and twists, taking the knee painfully to the back of his right thigh.
“Fuck!” he snarls and clutches her naked shoulders. She’s a slip of a thing, tall, like him, but thin as a reed. Her sleeveless gold dress, nearly transparent in its sheerness, bunches against her waist and chest when she struggles against him. It’s cut at the thighs and more meant for a teenager than her and for some reason this makes him even more furious—her inability to change, her rampant sexuality, how she throws it in everyone’s face and preens beneath the adoration.
Luke shakes her like a ragdoll, her many copper and silver bangles clattering, and Haven laughs, her hair a flurry of pearl-blonde waves whipping back and forth around her face. Finally, she jerks against his hold and shoves against him, the force of her body throwing off his center of gravity so that the two of them tumble to the floor. He lands on his back and she falls on her stomach beside him, losing one thin-heeled shoe in the process. All of their bones instantly protest the sudden impact against the hardwood, but Haven is still laughing.
She pushes herself to her hands and knees, her palms flat and hot against the old floorboards, her nails scratching at the ridges. Haven turns her face to look at him, the last bit of laughter shuddering out of her mouth. Her eyes narrow and before he can collect himself, his head snaps back, a burn of pain splitting against the side of his face. His teeth cut his tongue and the taste of blood between his lips is bitter. She punched him. Hard. Haven’s knuckles scream at the impact, but she ignores it.
“Pussy,” she repeats then spits on his face, the saliva smacking across the bridge of his nose where his cheek burns.
Haven scrambles to her feet, takes one step before Luke’s hand closes around her ankle. His blunt nails dig into the notch of bone and dip of tendon before he yanks, and she tumbles back down, barely able to bring her arms up in time to shield her face from cracking against the floor. She feels the force of the fall regardless and her teeth clack together painfully, her knees and elbows and hips shrieking. There are shards of glass digging into her forearms, her shoulders. Instantly, the tears come, stinging her eyes and smudging her eyeliner, making her mascara blot against the tops of her cheeks like misplaced black freckles.
She lays like that for a minute, breathing rapidly, feeling the shock and throbbing, aching pain as it spreads, setting tiny fire after tiny fire, throughout her body. Her hair sticks to her mouth, hides her face, and Luke sees her shoulders converse from where he’s kneeling behind her. He still has a hand on her ankle. He loosens his grip and she pulls free, the movement eliciting a small, fresh groan from his sister. He watches her shoulders convulse and hears the groan shift to a sob.
Luke’s immediate response is to reach for her, to comfort her, but he stills the impulse and wipes the spit from his face instead. He’s still seething, that nasty, deep dark part of him hungry for more violence. “Nice try,” he sneers, “but I’m not falling for that anymore.”
Haven stops crying. It’s as though someone dropped a cue card and filming has ended. Luke can’t help but laugh although it’s full of cynicism, a bark of a noise that seems loud against the sound of her staggered breathing. He stands slowly, hoisting her up by one arm, ignoring the bruises that are already blooming in places. He ignores, too, how she struggles against him but he recognizes the look she gives him, a look as though she might try to bite his face, as feral as a rabid dog. It’s a look she reserves purely for him.
He walks her backwards, letting her stumble, until the backs of her thighs hit the frame of the couch, and then he smooths her hair away from her face as she snarls and twists and eyes him with all the anger of the furies of myth. He’s caged her with his body, pinning her with his hips and his arms; he lowers his calloused hands to hold her throat, his face only inches away from her own. She can smell tobacco on his breath and whiskey and what she thinks is the taste of another woman.
“Say it again,” Luke murmurs, voice pitched low, eyes bright in their intensity.
“I said you’re a pussy,” Haven tells him, each word catching against her breath. She’s stubborn, more stubborn than he is, and her pride is a mountain inside of her that dwarfs all else.
Luke’s fingers begin to close. He can feel her swallow, the rise and dip of her throat, and she clutches his wrists, her nails digging in where the skin is thin. Her eyes are nothing but fire. There’s blood on her arms from where the larger bits of glass from the broken bottle have cut her, and he doesn’t care.
Pussy, she mouths then arches, one foot on tiptoe, the other lifting from the remaining stiletto. He clutches her throat even tighter. Another notch, like synching a belt. Her breath stutters against her teeth. She tilts her hips and feels how hard he is inside his jeans. When he looks at her mouth, she’s grinning, her eyes thin hazel slits that flutter beneath her eyelids. Her pulse thuds against his grip, once, twice, and then he kisses her, a crash of his mouth against hers that's meant to bite and bruise. He tugs at her bottom lip with his teeth and breathes in her gasp when he finally releases her neck, one of his hands dropping to twist her nipple painfully through the thin fabric of her dress.
Haven whines and even that noise is wicked. She lets go of his wrists, a hand anchoring itself behind his head to help keep his mouth against hers, and the other reaches between their bodies to palm at his cock. Luke groans impatiently into her mouth and shoves her hand away, freeing himself from his jeans. When he reaches between her thighs, he isn’t surprised to find her skin bare and wet, and he tries knocking her ankles open with a swipe of his foot but she’s already struggling back against the couch, using it for leverage, her hand reaching behind her to help balance awkwardly against the tops of the cushions.
He fucks her like that while she’s drunk and angry and jealous, while he’s still reeling from the fight. It’s the desperation and the ugliness that he likes, that she wants, that coil them together as a pit of snakes.


9.


Her jewel-toned hair in his mouth, sticking to his lips. The shiver of her nails, like talons, down his spine. The weight of her eyes meeting his, so unflinchingly direct. Oriol blushes more than she does.
Harper feels him inside of her, plucking at her feathers, needling with his teeth on her neck, and she wants to run. Or, more precisely, she wants to fly away. The more she endures the breaking, that sensation of being pulled by some bestial impulse, some bloodborne instinct that she cannot fully explain within the privacy of her own thoughts let alone aloud, the more caged she feels. It is not a feeling she knows well nor one she would ever have said to have experienced at the Steiner estate, but then she is not always honest with herself.
Zane is still oblivious.
Or he seems still oblivious. He’s fond of Oriol himself, finds him enjoyable, and if Harper has kissed Oriol longer, deeper, more often recently when they are a tangle of limbs in Zane’s bed together, then Zane does not seem to notice. Still, it feels like treachery, like cheating. Is it cheating? She’s not sure. She’s given her body, eagerly, willingly, to Zane for years. Adding Oriol to the mix is no different than another actor stepping onto the stage. He is not the star, but he can be support. So why then does she feel conflicted?
She thinks of Zane—a man she’s shared ten years with, a man who, despite his humanity, she’s been desperate to claim. She still feels a fluttering of lust whenever she smells his cologne or his aftershave, whenever he leans over her shoulder to look at the most recent file on exports, whenever the stubble across his jaw scratches her cheek. Harper is sure it is enough. She thinks it is enough. She sits with Delphine in the kitchen and helps to peel potatoes, keeping her hands busy until she can decide what exactly she’d rather be doing with them. Where she’d like to place them. Who she’d like to touch.


Oriol is in the yard with the gardeners. He has his shirt off, his long, lean chest exposed to the sun, his shoulders already turning copper from the attention. His hair is sweaty, flopped forward into his molasses eyes, but he’s grinning, dirt-smeared as he helps spread a fresh layer of rich soil across the rosebeds. Zane is away for the afternoon, and Oriol always seems to take advantage of his absences, busying himself with other affairs and offering to help. In this way, he seems unfit for the role of a companion, a pet. Sienna, sulking with her dusting rags, is confused by how he’d want to do anything else but lounge, beautiful and expectant, in Zane’s large bed. Unlike Harper, Sienna does not know that he’s the wrong brother, the wrong purchase.
Watching him, drinking her coffee on the veranda and picking at slices of a grapefruit, Harper can’t distinguish his age. It’s difficult for shifters, she knows, since, after the peak of their teen years they mature so slowly physically. She herself barely looks a day older than 30, and most days she might be considered still in her mid-20s, although she’s actually much older. Oriol? He has the boyish grin of an infant, a toddler, and there’s still a gangly youthfulness to some of his limbs.
In comparison, Zane can’t seem to stop aging. He’s still handsome, still roguishly good looking, but grey peppers his hair more and more. He has to work harder to keep the weight of middle age away from his belly, and every day she seems to be able to count a new line under his eyes or across his forehead. She wonders if that’s also why Zane’s so taken with Oriol, as though the coyote’s youthfulness revitalizes his own. They say humans trick themselves into believing such fancies, especially human men. The whisper of their mortality haunts their actions from dawn to dusk.
Harper turns at a sound from the northern entrance, her glacier eyes narrowing against the sun. She catches a glimpse of her reflection in the windows behind her and startles at her own severity. With her scarlet hair swept into a high immaculate bun and her snow-skin caught beneath the sun, she is a rifle of a woman: tall, slim, polished, and dangerous. Even the sleeveless sage dress she’d picked for the day does nothing to soften her. She frowns at her reflection, thinking of Sienna’s rounded hips and full mouth, her soft haze of honey-brown hair.
A murmur of action behind her makes her shift her gaze in the windows, and she can see Oriol watching her as he leans against a shovel a few feet away, staring up at her back.
Harper lets him look. For a minute, at least. She lets him watch, the sensation of his eyes alone sending pinpricks across her skin.


10.


“I don’t know,” she says, smiling her sad smile, while trying to stay very still as Jasper finishes swiping the last layer of Insta-Dri top coat on the toes of her left foot. “It all became too big. There were too many plot holes that I couldn’t parcel out. The more I tried to create, the more confused I became. Vampires, shifters, Holocaust references, mountain packs, a desert harem .... it’s just too massive.”
Jasper makes a hum of understanding then sits back on his heels. He’s shirtless, and Margot glances at the thin line of hair running from his navel downwards, under the band of his sweatpants. The nail polish brush looks tiny between his fingers, but he pops the cap back onto the bottle and twists it shut as though he’s had plenty of practice painting nails. She suspects he has since this was his idea.
Margot wiggles her toes and looks over her bent body from where her knees are drawn, pressed, to her chest. “How do they look?”
“My best masterpiece yet.”
She laughs. “I wouldn’t have picked emerald green. So ... bold.”
He shakes his head, a lock of his inky hair falling against his cheek. “Compliments your skin tone.”
“You would know,” she teases.
The ease between them is a problem. Margot knows this. She’s twenty years his senior, and she’s married. Once was a mishap, twice was a problem, and this? This was becoming an affair. It was an affair. Sometimes, while cleaning up after dinner or folding Kenneth’s shirts, she thinks she’s the perfect cliche: a housewife struggling through a midlife crisis, a one-hit wonder, clinging to the budding artist’s limelight, a desperate cougar clawing away at a college student, a boy barely old enough to be a man. More and more, she can’t recognize herself when she looks in the mirror, after she’s washed away the day’s makeup and the taste of his spit.
“You’re wrong though, you know that, right?” Jasper asks, stroking her ankle lazily, drawing her back and out of her thoughts.
“I said you would know best.”
“Not about the polish. About the series. It’s hard to see the tree when you’re staring at the leaves, I know, but the plot is compelling. The multi-narrative approach, changing character perspectives chapter from chapter? It adds to the complexity. I think-”
“I didn’t ask what you thought.” She cuts him off, her tone sharper than she wants it to be.
Jasper looks as though she’s slapped him. A blush of color crawls across his nose and he ducks his head, rubs at the back of his neck like a chastised school boy, which he technically is. “Right, yeah, sorry. I just meant that ... you’re so talented. I know you could-”
“You know? What do you know? I have receipts older than you. You think because you’ve memorized my book and heard some lectures that you understand it? Or my process?” She can’t stop. She doesn’t know why, but the anger in her chest has crawled up to her mouth and taken over her voice. She knows she sounds like Kenneth, that she’s being defensive, that she’s attacking simply because she wants to. “The New York Times said the novel was hopeful, a valiant effort from an emerging new voice. That was over ten years ago. I don’t think hope endures that long. So if this was about fucking a big shot writer, well, sorry to disappoint. I’m no Rowling or King.”
Jasper’s eyes are wounded. He seems to shrink into himself, and he moves from the bed, placing the polish on his desk gently. He turns his back to her, and she stares at the fine slopes of his shoulders as they fall, the notches of spine looking alien in the harsh midday light. The silence between them thickens into fog.
Margot presses her palms to her eyes. Finally, she says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. ... I don’t know why I said that.”
“It’s okay.” Jasper responds without hesitation, but his shoulders are still stooped.
“It isn’t. Come here. Please.” She reaches a hand out.
His hands in his pockets, he turns to face her, chin tucked to his chest. He looks at her from beneath his eyes, an eyebrow cocked. It is both boyish and sheepish and playful. She wiggles her fingers at him in the air; he relents, catches her wrist, then bends to kiss each fingertip. It makes her laugh, a sound like wind chimes, and the laughter helps to still the rest of her anger.
“I’m sorry,” she says again as he curls himself around her, carefully, his head resting against her hip. She brushes his hair away from his face and traces a finger down the length of his nose. “I’m ...” she doesn’t know what to tell him. Stressed? Conflicted? In love?
Jasper smiles up at her, the expression genuine and without barbs. “Hey, you don’t owe me anything. It’s okay. I’m grateful for what I can get.”
Margot knows he’s lying or at least telling a half-truth. He is grateful, but he’s also hopeful for the possibility of more. He wants her. Wants the taste of her lipstick and the weight of her body against him during the night. Wants the smell of her perfume on his sheets, his shirts, his towels. He’s built her a pedestal to keep her lifted above the common crowd, and he’s just waiting for her to allow him to worship.


11.

He has a room at The Isle. This is not unexpected since all of the staff lives on the premises—the working girls and boys, the bartenders, the cleaners, the cooks, the bodyguards. What is unusual is how seldom he seems to occupy his room. It’s dark and masculine and clean, smelling of oaks and embers, and one of the few places where the desert sands seem incapable of infiltrating, but Palmer never seems to be found there. If he samples the help, he does so in their rooms, charmingly and by invitation. Eda’s room, the largest of all the staff’s, is warm and damp, a carved stone archway marking an entrance to the wading pool. Palmer has fucked her in that entrance way, their legs half in the water, the smooth granite and marble edges leaving ghost-prints of their palms, and he’s fallen asleep in her rosy quartz colored bed on numerous occasions, but she’s rarely placed her pretty head on his own pillow.
Sunniva sleeps in his bed. She sleeps, her face soft in rest, her long eyelashes touching the tops of her cheeks, her mouth slightly open as her chest rises and falls, slowly, deeply. Beside her, his arms folded behind his head, half-propped against the oak headboard, Palmer does not look at her. He’d spent the last hour looking at her, holding her face, kissing her until she laughed against his mouth and pushed him away, pushed him to other places of her body. He’d scratched her thighs with the short stubble across his jaw and trailed his mouth across her knee until he’d felt her stiffen and, knowingly, he’d moved to the calf of her left leg before she could protest. He’d stroked his palms across the length of her sides, over her hips, traced his fingers until she was arching and ready and pliant. Now, if he looks at her, he’ll want to brush her hair back behind her ear and kiss her eyelids. He’ll want to make her say his name again, low and syrupy, like molasses. He lets her sleep.
When he shifts, the goose down mattress dipping a little beneath the pressure, Sunniva stretches slightly and turns further into the pillow. The air here is cool and the light is dark, but Palmer can see her eyes fluttering beneath her eyelids, and he wonders what she’s dreaming of, if the tension of the day has abandoned her enough to let her dreams romp with pleasure or if she still sees blood and lost limbs in the darkness of her subconscious. He glides a hand up her spine, pulling the sheet with him, until it settles over her shoulder blades.
From down the hall, there is a bustle of activity, a clamor of friendly noises. He recognizes Ellery’s chittering laughter and Belen’s breathy voice as the girls gossip, their voices caught in the carrying breeze from the open windows lining the hall. Ellery is a tall blonde branded with the blue scars of her native lands across the seas, their winding, curving patterns roping across her arms and hips and legs in decorative claiming patterns that the clientele find exotic. Belen is plump and rosy-cheeked, a perpetual cherub, her hickory colored hair a startling contrast to her pale ivory skin. They both favor gossamer dresses as thin as spider silk, sleeveless, and knotted with gilded braids beneath the bust although the majority of the girls seem to wear such a style after Eda made it fashionable. Except for Sunniva. She fashions herself into a weapon until she’s sharpened and serious.
As Ellery laughs again while walking past his closed door, Sunniva cracks one eye, a slight frown disrupting the peacefulness of sleep. She waits until neither of them can hear the girls’ footsteps or their voices then rolls onto her back, tucking the sheets tighter against her sides with the action.
“It’s okay,” Palmer says. “The door is locked.”
“I don’t make a habit of basing anything off of assumptions. I’d rather not be seen here.”
“Ashamed?” he asks, unhurt, grinning as he tugs at the sheets, pulling them until the tops of her breasts begin to show.
She rolls her eyes at him and throws the sheet back, letting it hit against shoulder and face. “It’s business. The girls don’t need to see me—”
“In the throes of pleasure? Why not? You’ve seen them. Fair is fair. But I’d worry more about them hearing you than seeing you.”
With her back to him, Palmer can’t tell if she’s blushing. She’s not a blusher, not by nature, but he sometimes manages to bring color to her cheeks even if it’s a flush of anger. She huffs, something like a laugh and a scoff, and begins to dress, her body tilted to hide how she deftly attaches the prosthetic to her bad leg.
“Really, Sunshine, it’s not as though you’re the first woman to be dazzled in this bed. Why, just last week, Damaris—”
One of her hands cuts across his flat stomach, her fingers stinging sharply against his skin, and Palmer exhales a surprised grunt. He laughs at her, letting the blankets pool around his waist and tugging his hair back, out of his eyes, as she finishes dressing. She stands in the middle of his room like that, stiff-backed, not looking at him.
After a minute, Palmer says teasingly, “I think the coast is clear.”
She leaves without saying anything, without looking back over her shoulder, without an air of affection.
The pewter sheets will smell like her for days after. Palmer will find strands of her dark hair in the linen. He’ll grin at her from across the gardens, his eyes dark and amused, and be hungry for the hint of a smile.


12.


The first time Gideon sees Philomena, she is in the humble abbey garden with a basket of bread that she doles out to the waiting poor. Her face is mostly obscured by the linen hood covering her hair, the robe a meager defense against the chill in the air. A string of rosary beads is wrapped around her wrist, peeking out from beneath her sleeve, the cross dangling delicately near her wrist. The line shuffles impatiently, curling around the garden fence half a mile long, but the nun is patient. For each foul hand placed out in need, she offers a small roll and a kind smile.
He does not think of salvation.
He thinks of graveyard dirt instead. It’s what she reminds him of, the stubborn rot that sticks beneath his fingernails, the way blood does. She, like the rest of her sacrosanct community, is something to be scrubbed away.


Linemell is a vile city. It’s full of grime and horror and seeds nothing but nightmares. He is one of those nightmares, although he slips from shadow to shadow so deftly that even the alley cats don’t know to be afraid, which is how he prefers it. Here, he blends into the patchwork of petty crime and nighttime urges. Each night, it seems most of the streets are lined with pickpockets, prostitutes in ripped stockings, and urchins with their grubby hands held out for a few quid. Everywhere his predatory gaze falls, he sees desolation: squalid babies crying with hunger in the arms of too-young mothers, children with blackened faces from endless hours shoveling coal, and men, drunk, leering from broken windows or shouting at brittle wives. He doesn’t know, of course, he can’t remember, but he thinks the garish light of day serves only to highlight the brutality of this era where factory chimneys pump dark smoke while the cobblestones soak up the previous evening’s carnage. There is no beauty to be found, no purity anymore, nothing for the sun to shine upon.
Ravenstone tries, of course, as it always has, to cleanse and purge, to atone, to gather the masses and offer eternal salvation through penitence, confession, and holy duty. The cathedral is a massive edifice of stone almost at the middle of Linemell, tucked beside the Fen River, awe-inspiring in its stark beauty, a testament to man’s ability to create with its Gothic arches and rib vaulting angled towards the heavens. They hold nightly vigils, the organ music and thundering bells sounding throughout the evening while priests in heavy robes recite their Latin liturgies. No matter how many men and women bruise their knees by bowing for the holy sacrament or how raw their fingers become clutching rosaries or how loud their prayer, Linemell remains—a paradigm of vice.
Gideon passes the Church most nights. He ducks his head from the stench of their faith.



Basque pecks his dark beak against the top of the crumbling plaster bust of Hermes. The crow is hungry and he caws irritably when he spies his master strolling towards the condemned terrace house. Gideon has to hop an old stone wall and walk through a forgotten patch of cemetery south of the Melcaster station each night he comes home way of Commerce street, but he likes the journey, the old familiar paths from one bleak terrain to the next. His is the furthermost house in a short row of back-to-backs, their brick long since faded and collapsing ever since the neighborhood of Boyle Heights went from impoverished to destitute before the turn of the century. Now, this stretch of decrepit land isn’t even good enough for squatters. The rats and vermin have taken over. There’s no electricity or working water. It’s a ghost town, except for Gideon and Basque.
The front door has started to cave in while inside the dank, damp smell of mildew permeates. The furniture is fifty years out of fashion and mostly broken, stained from time and other uses. There are holes in the ceiling and, when it rains heavily, the already sagging couch, once a sage green, becomes a muddy swamp. Tonight, Gideon is surprised to see Vida occupying the couch, her perpetually bored expression shifting only by a lift of her thin eyebrows when she spots him sidestepping the doorway.
“I didn’t know to expect company,” he says, and Basque croaks another ill-tempered caw, seemingly in agreement. The crow’s talons scratch at Hermes’ half-broken face as it titters back and forth, ruffling its charcoal feathers. Gideon flicks his blue eyes at the familiar, and Basque stills.
“I’m not staying.”
“... And yet here you are.”
Vida sighs as though she’s been the one intruded upon and stands from the couch. She is thin and small, her hair two shades too light to be pretty in its brownness and too dark to be blonde. Looking hardly older than twenty, Gideon towers over her even from across the room. He leans against the wilting, stripped wallpaper and folds his arms over his chest, plucking disinterestedly at the white dress shirt spilling out from the cuffs of his coat.
“I’m passing through. Why you stay in Linemell is beyond me. Beyond all of us, really. We’ve all gone to greener pastures.”
“I know, I prefer that. The whole city is mine now.”
“Don’t be greedy,” Vida chides. “Mother wouldn’t like that.”
“Can’t be helped. I’m voracious.”
“Yes, well, elder brother and all. Appetite for days.”
They look at each other and slowly Gideon smiles. He sweeps his hand back through his hair, the top a little longer than the sides and curling, then pushes off the wall, gesturing about the room. “How do you like it?”
“Like it?” She scrunches her nose up. “It’s horrid. Why not pick off one of the gentlemen on Hyde street and take an estate? Or use the family name to purchase an apartment across from the Fen? It’s not as though money is an issue.”
He makes a hum of disagreement and looks up at the punctured ceiling. Above them, there’s the scatter of mice. Basque’s beady eyes follow the noise. “This suits me.”
Vida wipes her hands together, as though dusting away the stink of the place, and shrugs. “If you say so, brother mine. I do worry though. I haven’t seen you in, what, fifteen years? Eighteen?”
“Who’s counting?”
“You must get lonely.”
Gideon’s laugh is the creek of an iron gate. He rubs the back of his neck as though he can still feel mortal tension and tries not to think of their mother, of her nest, and the vampires that twine around her like vipers.
“Don’t pretend. You can get a little lost all on your own like this. Maybe it’s time you—”
“Be serious.”
“What? I’m always serious. Besides, I’m half your age and I already have two children.”
“And what a mother you must be.”
Vida does not respond to the jab, but she moves towards the door, pausing to touch the side of his arm. “At least find a toy. Something to amuse you. Take the dull edge off the long nights.”
She is unsurprised when he jerks his arm away.


He’s almost 300 years older, younger than any religion, but old enough to stake his claim to Linemell. He’d inherited, to some extent, from his mother once she’d lost any appeal for the city and left with her brood. The nest followed strength, and Hadassa was legendary for both her age and her supremacy; those deemed worthy or useful enough to join her blood legacy usually remained under wing for centuries. Gideon’s decision to remain, to stake his own claim, was less about dissent and more about opportunity.
Without the family, he feels limitless. The invisible boundaries of Linemell are his to patrol rather than prison bars. The smoggy night skies hold boundless opportunities in their depths. There is no matriarch to settle his hunger, to hold his elbow as he, a petulant child, bucks impotently against her greater strength. There is no one to chide his ruthless ways. He’d killed with abandon the first week, feasting on the city’s rotten spoils plucked so easily off the streets. An urchin here is as common as a river rat and missed even less. Now, when he tires of the smells of sewers and decays, he visits Piccadilly where the brothels are decorated in lush velvets and pristine lace, where the women wrap their plump white arms around his whiter neck and he breathes in their perfumes of jasmine and violets. Their blood is richer, fuller, but he steals only small amounts, leaving them dizzy and dazed and doting. They’re always eager for his next visit.
When the winter winds arrive, he takes walks through the cemetery and follows the train tracks to the edges of Linemell, Basque fluttering above and occasionally cawing out his discontent. He plucks nameless men foolish enough to try their luck at freight-hopping, the lone beggar or two waiting for the shifting of tracks unfortunate enough to cross his path. Sometimes, he drags them the long way back through the cemetery, crushing their mouths with his muddy boots heels when they make too much noise. They’re broken and desperate things by the time they’re hurled into the rowhouse’s basement, half-mad with pain and delirious from fear. He lets them scramble, if they can, against the wet walls and feel amongst the bones for stairs that have long collapsed. They’ll fester for days down there until their blood is churning with despair. Sometimes Gideon thinks, watching the latest man from the shattered opening above, that if hell were real, then surely this must be one of its pits. He flicks his tongue against the sharp tips of his fangs and grins at the grandeur of it.