The rosary in my grip, I could feel the beads begin to crack from the force at which I fisted it. “I bet you’re laughing at me, aren’t you?”
Of course he was.
How could a crispy head on a pike do anything but?
In France, I had been standing in the deep of night. Now, moments later, I was dumped in a pile on the soft grass of a balmy garden at dusk. Back in Manhattan where I’d once been so sure all my dreams might come true. Where I’d had a window.
The sun set at my back, warming my skin, leaving my shadow stretching over the drooping eyelids of a grotesque familiarity.
It didn’t matter if I was in France, or my golden city, or walking dusty roads, or begging strangers for scraps. I had been born in hell.
I had never left hell.
And hell would never leave me.
I, the damned, whose slit ached with unsatiated need, sloppy with spend. A backward body buzzing with irritation at having not reached climax while totally unaroused by the horror before me.
Darius.
The pike jammed into the stump of his neck was layered with what seemed to be an endlessly dripping crust. The head juicy, despite its scabbed and hideous burns.
What should have been shrunken from the rigors of the sun and starvation still possessed form. Cheekbones, sharp but identifiable. Burnt hair leaning toward the deepest brown. Lips.
I knew the sting of those lips.
The sun fully set, drooping eyelids twitched.
“Yes. You are laughing.”
So loud it almost felt as if my ears bled.
“I know this place.” Turning, humidity leaving torn, red silk to stick to my skin, I took in the jutting stone edifice that seemed to erupt from the ground itself. A cathedral. A cloister. A monastery. A place where screams had seeped into the stone.
My screams so small in the cacophony.
I was home.
How I knew that—considering not once before that night could I recall my eyes setting upon the outside of the terrifying warren—was utterly beyond me. But I knew. This was where I had rotted. This was where I had begged God to redeem me.
This was where I had sold my soul.
There was very little I could pull on from my memory, but I remembered the abject pain, how it was twisted up inside me as if it were pleasure, and how the little of me left splintered and let evil in just to make it stop.
Lying in my own blood and shit, I had begged. I had begged.
The ground had shaken.
Darius had left me.
And here he must have been since. Head on a pike in a garden outside his usurped kingdom now controlled by the child we’d created.
While I wandered a room, frightened and alone.
While I uncovered the secrets of my tomb. A Coney Island funhouse of horrors written in my own hand. Beautiful things too. Paintings, jewels, indecent nightwear. Tiny forgotten flecks of blood on the stone.
In that room, before I had extinguished the last candle, I found myself.
And found that I was nothing of worth.
Forgotten.
There would never be salvation. So I had sang the same songs I had heard mothers sing to their young as I journeyed from place to place.
And I had dreamed of nothing.
Yet still sang.
Though my bones were brittle and my mind was rotted into mush, I heard another pick up the fading tune.
Hideous life dripped down a withered, resisting throat.
That first hacking cough, trying to expel not only the music but succor.
I fought each part of me as it came slowly back to life. I could not take a single further second of myself.
All of it had been….
I knew the bible back and forth, and no scripture burned into what was left of my mind might assuage whatever I was. My very life was a cancer on the world, one that grew roots into it as I’d desiccated.
The little hairs from those roots, I still felt them tugging me into the ground. Or maybe they were tugging me back into the ground.
I had no idea how I had even appeared in this place, in a heap of skirts and weeping. One moment, I looked into the eyes of a monster I had mistakenly trusted. The next, those fuzzy roots—those spreading incessant roots—snapped me back where they had grown.
Home.
That is what I had longed for.
And this.
THIS!!
This godforsaken ground was my home.
Darius rotting on a stick. But alive and hungry—the eyes in his ragged head glowing as he drank me down under the rot of drooping lids.
What was left of him was famished.
Slack jawed head twitching.
Even so, Darius began to heal before my eyes as if such a state could be made beautiful. His eyes, those terrible eyes, looking right at me as if to say that, yes, he laughed.
Not that he didn’t also beg.
“Come to me, treasure.”
Damaged as he was, despite blaring, continuous pain, the demon was dangerous.
And so familiar in the way he picked at my thoughts, indelicately scratching at each memory he fingered through.
I should have gone screaming into the night.
I should have done anything other than meet his eyes and feel.
All my pain.
ALL MY PAIN.
Wrapped in a pretty bow of desecration and disappointment.
That thing on the stick hated Vlad. Burned with the blackest bubbling oil of greasy animosity.
I might have hated Vladislov in that moment too, but I hated Darius far more. “I enjoyed lying with him in a way you could never inspire me to enjoy you.”
What was I saying? Never had I heard that level of spite in my voice.
