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Here we go again!

Notes:
* Francesca’s death is violent. I mean, it is no joke, but I tried to show restraint. There’s also some animal deaths here and the typical vampire-appropriate gore. Just a fair warning!
* “Such games we’ll have now” is blatant thievery since the line comes from Penny Dreadful.
* I make an allusion to Yeat’s “The Second Coming.” That’s intentional and not, in fact, a blatant theft.
* Annunciation is supposed to happen in March and mark Gabriel’s visit to Mary. Do churches have festivals for this occasion? No idea. I’m making this up as I go, people!
* There’s so many similes throughout this thing. I don’t know why. I’m not usually simile-crazy (I don’t think?) but whatever.
* I tried (as much as possible since I just love to write in 3rd person omniscient) to keep this Gideon-centric so that other aspects of the piece could be written from Mena’s perspective.




“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer—both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.” ― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs





The old Victorian on Carnaby is opulent, so richly adorned that the insides are worth a fortune, almost as much as the home itself. Gideon always thinks Hadassa’s presence is a stark contrast to lavish velvets and furs and silks. Although her skin seems to glow from within like molten copper, she reminds him of a grim desert. Her body is an ominous landscape, the flash of her fangs and angles of her cheeks, the reach of her sharp fingers, so harsh and full of the potential to harm, the need to threaten, that most wither into skeleton dust beneath her dark gaze. She is the epitome of eternity—futile, cold, merciless. She is his mother, and everytime Gideon comes before her, watching the way his siblings preen and fawn for any scrap of affection or attention, the monster inside of him chafes.

His youngest brother, Laith, is a meager 80 years dead. He has thin lips perpetually caught in a sneer, bright weasel-eyes, and a tawny receding hairline that he must now wear until the end of days. There are too many features fighting for attention on his face. They’ve been crammed together, and it’s made him all the more unattractive: the hawk nose, the peevish mouth , the deep wrinkles connecting both on either side of his grin, the heavy brow, the jaw drawing his face down into a pointy square. Even his ears are a little too big. He’s nearly as tall as Gideon but slim with little air of command because of his habit of hunching his shoulders and chewing on the side of his thumb, a mortal quirk he has yet to shake.

Laith trails like an oil slip against Hadassa’s shadow, the stink of his lingering humanity an assault to Gideon’s senses. Out of all of his siblings, Gideon loathes him the most. He had never understood Hadassa’s decision to turn him since she had always desired soldiers over sycophants, but Gideon presumes that the older she becomes the more like a god she must feel and thus the more deserving of worship.

In the master bedroom, the electric lights turned low so that the creamy magnolia pattern of the thick drapes shimmer invitingly, Vida brushes Hadassa’s inky waves in long strokes. The hum and whisper of each stroke is like a lullaby. Laith reclines on a chaise lounge pushed up against the bottom edge of their mother’s large featherdown mattress, his feet bare and white against the plush plum fabric. He watches his sister with a mix of longing and disgust until he catches Gideon noticing and then he flicks his eyes away. Gideon does not see his three remaining siblings, so he knows his summons is a low priority.

“You have decided then?” Hadassa asks by way of greeting, her depthless eyes finding Gideon’s in the mirror’s reflection.

“I have. I will stay.”

“It’s dangerous to be alone in a city,” Laith reminds him in an annoyingly sing-songish way. He has a voice like rusty nails.

“Perhaps for you,” Gideon retorts. His younger brother’s mouth curls into his trademark sneer. He looks as though Gideon’s a fool, and he’s happy for it.

Hadassa ignores the chatter and lifts her hand in a gesture for Vida to stop, which she does, placing the brush on the vanity before moving to sit beside Laith. She crosses her ankles demurely and picks at her nails, disinterested in the conversation, and instantly made all the smaller beside her lanky brother and the large furniture.

Turning in her chair to face him, the upholstery the same rich velvet as the chaise lounge, Hadassa rakes her eyes over her middle progeny, each moment of lingering inspection like the cold stab of an ice prick against Gideon’s body. She assesses him coolly, an arm draped over the chair, and sighs. The sound seems tinged with what Gideon assumes is disappointment.

“You are still quite young to claim a city such as Linemell on your own.”

“Old enough. You can look at it as an investment, a procurement of your legacy.”

Her full mouth twitches at the corner with mild amusement. “You will miss us. I will miss you.”

“None of us offers pleasurable company, Mother.”

At this, Hadassa’s little grin breaks when she laughs, the sound of a hundred vipers hissing. She tilts her head, acknowledging the truth of the statement.

“I would have—” his voice falters uncharacteristically. He steals his shoulders and does not look away from his mother’s piercing gaze. “I would be released from you.”

Vida’s eyes shoot up from her nails. Laith sits forward, his face falling with a strange mix of shock and delight. When Hadassa’s smile disappears, her laughter leaving a thick silence in its wake, Gideon can feel the tension in the room like electricity.

When his mother stands, Gideon does not move. He is stoic, a column of marble, but he lets his sire take his hands in hers. He is taller than her by a few inches, and yet he feels small. Touching her is touching icy polished gold, a richness that he’s rarely enjoyed.

“I have never mistook you for a fool, Gideon, until this moment.” She does not yell, but she places her mouth close to his ear, and there is not even a sliver of heat in her voice; hers is the voice of funeral songs, of countless deaths, a wraith-song. Gideon pulls his hands away from her or at least he tries until her fingers become claws and the blood inside of him submits to its sire and her greater strength and he can feel her, suddenly, pressing against the inside of his skin, raking across his mind, scraping at his immortal bones. He grits his teeth against the invasion.

“You are mine,” she says simply, her lips like broken glass against his skin. “You will always be mine, and I will not have you forget in three meager centuries how much you yearned.”

When she releases him, her hands dropping from him at the same moment she gathers her influence back into herself as spiders gather their silk, Gideon is angry. Vida’s warning gaze stills him, but his fangs press sharply against his tongue.

Settling herself once more at the vanity, Hadassa turns her back to him and rummages through the assortment of jewelry before her. Her nails pluck through the pearls and diamonds with more concentration than what she had bestowed upon him only seconds ago. Finally, she says, “I will forgive this momentary insolence, and you may still take Linemell … if only so the family can see if you will keep it.”

Behind him, Laith glowers, snakishly scornful.




The brood’s absence does not send any quakes through the Earth. The nights become and remain his. Alone with his rampant rage, Gideon is almost disappointed.




Ravenstone’s midnight bells chime on an evening much like most others when he first sees the nun scurrying out of the garden gate. She is wrapped in a nondescript robe of mudwater grey, but Gideon catches flashes of burnt orange from beneath, the color of the woman’s dress reminiscent of ancient clays and dark citrus. It is not this alone that piques his interest but the whole curiousness of the scene: the late hour, the hint of color, the hurried footsteps, the fervid glances cast over her shoulder. It is the actions of nervousness, of guilt, and not the devout.

“Another blasphemer in Linemell,” Gideon muses to Basque. The crow hops from his shoulder onto the garden’s stone wall, his sharp eyes following the retreating figure with the same focus as his master’s.

“Shall we see just how far the good Sister has fallen?”

Basque caws sharply, so Gideon begins to follow.

Sister Francesca’s Christian name is Anna, Gideon learns, and she was raised in Linemell by the church. She was hardly any better than the street rats having been born into impoverishment and pain, blessed with little more than a forgettably pretty face and a decent wit. Anna had been a sinner from the start, enjoying her little acts of wickedness―stealing an extra roll from the basket at dinner, forgetting a prayer, even hitting another orphan in a tantrum―but she had turned towards the Faith and Ravenstone out of gratitude for giving her a bed each night and keeping her belly full of food while others suffered on the streets. When it is time for her to take her vows, she chooses the name Francesca not because of the many great and humble women who have borne the name before her but because it means freedom, a luxury she has always, however privately, longed for.

Gideon learns this because her blood is thick with her memories. With his fangs buried into her skin at the tender, painful spot where the shoulder and neck meet, where his teeth must rip into the muscle, she flows into him like a river. She had been easy to coerce into the alley, easier still to press against the wall slick with damp algae. She had wanted it like so many of them usually do ―the danger, the excitement, the pain.

When her heart begins to fight, he stops. He lets her fall, woozy and disoriented, against him as he licks absently at the wound he has created. There had been something inside of her, some spark of jealousy and insecurity attached to a bright thought, an image of red hair, hair like cherries and fire and blood. He hums in thought then cuts his tongue with his fangs and laps again at her neck, letting his blood stitch her skin back together. When Francesca comes to, she has her hand in the crook of his elbow, and he is holding the gate of the abbey garden open for her.

His smile is the smile of a gentleman as he ushers her forward, steadying her when she struggles on her feet. A wave of nausea surges over her.

“Remember, Sister, that the city streets look different at night.”

“Yes,” she says and blinks in rapid succession. A hand goes to her head. “What was―”

“To bed now, I think. This is enough of an adventure for one evening.”

“Yes,” she agrees, pleasantly enough, before another wave of nausea makes her groan. The sudden confusion and inexplicable horror that accompanies it almost makes her cry out, but his hand is there again, steadying here, holding her arm, pushing at the small of her back in gentle insistence once she gathers her barings.

In the morning, she hardly remembers anything except his face.




“Eavesdropping, Sister?” he asks the second nun, unperturbed, when he is caught leaving Francesca’s room in the middle of the night only days later. Her blood is still hot in his mouth when he notices the thick braid of fiery hair hanging over the nun’s shoulder and her name rises from those red memories unbidden. Sister Philomena. He can taste Francesca’s envy.

Gideon grins and steps closer.

He thinks of murder, of rampage, of what her blood would taste like in comparison, of painting a hallway in horror, and then hesitates when she tells him she will not divulge Francesca’s secrets. They banter although it is not so much true bantering as him lashing at her with his words, appreciating both her mild discomfort and her unwavering stare. She does not yield. More interestingly, she does not desire.

When she closes the door between them, he lays one of his cold hands against the firm oak, feeling the remnants of her body heat, then presses his cheek against it. When he breathes in deeply, he can smell the way her innocence trails behind her.

It’s the smell he follows, he recognizes, when they talk in the humble abbey kitchen. When they walk the garden and she plucks the ripe fruit from the rich soil. When they disagree about theology and she defends God’s presence with all the grace of the saintly. She does not waver. She keeps her eyes on his, alert, unabashed, dignified. For every hole he pierces through the fabric of her faith, she stitches it back together, sometimes with a gentle laugh at his cynicism and, at other times, with a thoughtful and amused smile. Her lack of judgement at his pessimism―no, his nihilism―baffles Gideon.

Philomena, he knows, thinks theirs is a budding friendship. It is not merely, she thinks, one of the devout preaching to the damned (she would not view herself with such pride, such esteem, just as she would not view him as irredeemable in the eyes of the Lord), but it is not romantic.

“You would not even recognize the stirrings of romance though, would you?” he asks one night as she finishes sweeping Ravenstone’s front steps.

“Must one know something intimately to recognize it?”

“In one’s self, absolutely.”

She pauses, using the thin handle of the broom as a leaning stick. “I could argue that those devoted to worship know themselves more, better even, than those who are consistently tampered by the brutalities and obstructions of the world. Our seclusion, our purpose, gives us clarity. I do not know the Lord intimately, and yet I know my love for Him and I recognize His love at work here.”

“Here? Now? With me?” The left side of Gideon’s mouth arches tilts into a playful grin.

“I often find that the Lord is where most people do not expect, so, yes, even here.” There’s a playfulness in her voice, but she does not elaborate further and instead continues her sweeping.

Gideon makes a noncommittal sound.

He sets a lure and waits for the trap to trigger.




He comes to her in the night with blood on his face, soaking his shirt, covering his hands. He comes to her like a fiend.

“Gideon!” Philomena startles. It is dark, and she cannot fully see. “You’re hurt. Who did this to you?” She is pale with fear, and when he steps into the light, her burnished eyes become as large as a rabbit’s. It makes Gideon all the more hungry.

When he grins at her, it is with the full force of his fangs, the blood of some urchin still fresh on his breath and starting to stain. Suddenly, he does not look human. It is not possible, she thinks, for such a creature to exist. She wants to pray, and she wants to shield him from himself, this man she’s come to know who is now wearing a demon’s mask. He snatches her wrist beneath the hem of her robe and pulls her towards him with such force that she stumbles and cries out in surprise, a foot slipping against the cobble path.

“This? I asked for this. Eons ago.”

“This is not you,” she protests, on the verge of tears. “This is some—some dark force— some—some—t-temptation sent to—you’re hurting me, stop, please, you’re hurting me.”

Her hood has fallen back, and Gideon reaches up, undoing the scarf hiding her hair with quick assaulting fingers until he can fist the burning length between his knuckles. She’s shivering now, trembling against the night chill and her own confusion and terror. She seems to be struck silent, but when he turns his face into the length of her neck, her hair brushing across his cheek and jaw, she gasps.

“Please,” she says again, her lips barely moving to form the word.

“You’re begging for the wrong thing, child,” he murmurs, ghosting his mouth across her virgin skin. “You’ll learn. Such games we’ll have now.”

He twists her wrist so tightly, pushing her thumb into the center of her palm until the bones of her hand shriek, that she cries out and bends to the pain, dropping to her knees in front of him, her arm held aloft and tight like a piano wire about to snap. He thinks she’s praying under her breath, soft little rotes of memorization pulled from her desperation, punctuated by gasps. Gideon considers breaking her arm briefly before a clatter of noise from the adjacent abbey changes his mind. He sneers, annoyed by the interruption, and drops Mena’s arm. She cradles it to her chest instantly as though it’s a wounded lamb. When she looks up, her face a pale milk moon caught against tousled red hair, he’s already slipping over the fence and into the night.




Mena wakes early the next morning, the light still weak as it filters in through the shutters, to sharp tapping at her window. Her wrist is bruised, as dark as sin, and her entire arm feels like raw meat. She fights against the urge to leave her bed, but the tapping continues. She pulls her robe over her night dress, but she’s shivering all the same, the winter air insidious in its ability to slip through all of Ravenstone’s cracks. Mena feels a little feverish as she opens the window; her dreams were lurid, terrible things that linger behind her eyelids.

A large crow is scratching and clacking, shuffling back and forth, its black beak rattling against the glass. She thinks the cold must have made it seek refuge, and she’s about to open the window before she sees the dead rat by its bloody talons. The rat is huge, even split open, it’s mouth agape in death. Its eyes have been plucked out along with its innards. There are bits of gore and fur caught in the bird’s beak.

Mena cries out in alarm and closes the shutters, her hands pressing against the latch, blocking the gruesome sight along with the light.

She thinks it’s an oddity, an unsettling but random occurrence with little meaning. She thinks it’s over until more rats, left like presents, appear on the windowsill, then outside her door, then across her bed.

“And you say the rats are unnaturally afflicted?” Father James asks when Mena seeks guidance.

“Plague?” Sister Mary Eleanor suggests, her arthritic fingers rubbing at her rosary beads apprehensively. Plague, after all, is any city’s great fear.

“I think not,” Mena says without providing any more insight. She is not sure what she would say, how she could explain her thoughts.

“It must be a warning,” Sister Francesca adds.

Father James tuts. “I do not hold to superstition, Sister Francesca, and I caution against seeing ghouls behind every unfortunate event of nature.”

Sister Mary Eleanor lifts one of her white eyebrows as though she disagrees with the idea that such an amount of deceased rats found in one location could be declared a natural event, but she keeps silent.

“We will have the vermin disposed of and, if you would prefer, Sister Philomena, we will provide you with a new room.”

“No,” Philomena says with little hesitation. “I will keep the room, thank you, Father. It is mine, after all, and the morning light comes in so beautifully.”

Father James nods with authority, and the matter is handled. For a week, it seems as though the situation truly was nothing more than an anomaly, but then garden cats begin to pile up, one by one, by the tomato plants. They’re split from chin to tail, and all of their eyes are missing.




The nights become longer, and the days fade, like all lovely things, too quickly.

She grows paler. Thinner. Shadows form beneath her eyes and her lips are chapped. The darkness stretches, grows thicker in the night, and beasts slouch towards Bethlehem.

Kneeling before the crucifix nailed to her bedroom wall, her rosary clutched between her hands, she whispers Latin prayers. The louder she prays, the more she can hear him. His nails against the walls. His taunting. The crack of his familiar’s beak against her window, its lone mocking cry.

“Your hope is futile,” he tells her when she seeks the confessional. “Do you know why humans invented hope? Because they cannot live in the present, unlike all other animals. Let it go. Save us both this tiresome struggle.”

But she doesn’t.

She cannot.




During the Annunciation festival, Ravenstone is surrounded by shopkeepers in improvised stalls peddling their wares. The dark streets are alight with decorative torches to mark a symbolic welcome to the angel Gabriel, and the smell of freshly baked sweets and roasting meat permeates the air. The people of Linemell are unusually good-spirited. They wander around the makeshift market, gossiping, pleasant, their faces glowing beneath the burning lights. Even the downtrodden are smiling, their purses a few coins fuller as the holiday breeds charity.

Gideon weaves his way through the crowd slowly, his boots silent against the gravel road, and avoids the torchlight. He has his eyes trained on the backs of the two nuns twenty feet ahead of him, their arms linked in solidarity, one singular basket between them to hold the few purchases they’ve made: a bundle of rosemary, a braided roll of pastry still warm and full of cinnamon and cream, and a moth-gray headscarf. The shorter of the two leans into the other’s shoulder. It’s a gentle and affectionate nudge and Philomena’s body relaxes for a moment. Gideon knows that Philomena does not like the night anymore, that she has made Ravenstone as much of a prison as possible (although the walls seem incapable of protecting her, don’t they?). No, she likes the light and the warm fires and the solid doors and the presence of so many devoted priests and nuns. If she still likes the Lord, he has not heard. If she still feels His strength and wisdom, he has not heard. But he knows that she has not left the Church on her own accord, that Francesca has persuaded her to enjoy the night. He can tell by the way the other nun worries less about leaving the crowd, about ignoring the light.

When they turn right, closer towards the side of the market facing the stinking Fen and thus less populated, Gideon cuts through the neighboring sidestreet. The torchlights are spread further apart here and end abruptly near the waterway as though the street workers had decided that no intelligent citizen would approach the river at nighttime. The opening of the alleway is left in darkness.

He counts their heartbeats.

When Gideon snatches Francesca, it is with such sudden force and speed that neither of the women have a chance to respond. As terrible as a beast from a fairytale, he drags the nun into the alley, her feet kicking and scraping against the ground. She manages one scared shout, the shape and sound of Philomena’s name, before he shatters her skull with three violent stomps. He is inhumanly powerful, and it’s the equivalent of breaking an eggshell. The first stomp strikes Francesca with a crunch he can feel at the base of his spine. One of her eyes is on the pavement, the pupil rolling heavenward, and her teeth are scattered like gruesome relics in the dark. The second and third blow are not for the need of certainty but because he can, because he’s burying his foot into everything she has ever been—the child whose name was Anna, the Sister whose favorite hymn was Be Not Afraid, and the woman who had so unluckily let him into her veins.

When the slaughter is complete, the former nun is nothing more than a wet obscenity.

Gideon lifts his eyes to Philomena’s from across the remains, across the alley, and as bits of bloody splatters that were once Francesca dry on his skin, he winks at her.

She has her hands pressed into fists against her mouth. The basket the two friends had been holding between them only moments before is at her feet, its contents scattered like a trail of crumbs towards the alleyway. She is as bleached as bone; the purple splotches beneath her eyes make her look like a corpse. For a moment, he thinks she might scream, but then he sees her eyes roll up into her head and she crumbles like a paper doll.

When she awakes to Father James holding her hand in Ravenstone’s infirmary, he will say what the doctors told him: a fainting spell brought on from shock. No matter how he tries or how many questions he asks, he is unable to get her to speak. He does not know what she saw.

There is no body.

There is no blood.

Sister Francesca, they announce, has left. Disappeared. Absconded.

But Philomena finds an eye on her windowsill, dangling from a monstrous crow’s beak, and in the endless nightmarish weeks to follow, she will think Francesca was the lucky one.