Bitter Blood

Blind blind three blind mice see how they run who holds the carving knife where is the cat Dear God in heaven the cat and I am only a mouse, a blind and helpless mouse in a trap cheese if only someone would drop down a bite of cheese, or another mouse…

The oubliette, I was not a mouse, I was a vampire, I was a blind vampire who would heal, of course, eventually, and see again. Stop, I told myself. I drew in a deep breath and smelled ancient death, crushed weeds, rotting metal, stone. I had no idea where the oubliette was located. I was simply at the bottom of it, standing in cold, filthy water and thinking that this time, my favorite slippers were well and truly ruined. Such a pity.

All the whimsy in the world won’t help you now, fool. I could hear Pennyfeather saying it; I could feel the cold clench of his hands on my shoulders. This town belongs to the strong.

And then the fall.

Well. I was strong. I had survived. I always survived. Not this time never no one to rescue me no one to know I was so alone alone alone darkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.

The panic took some time to subdue; it lasted longer each time, it seemed; from a purely scientific perspective, I supposed I ought to have been taking notes. A monograph on the subject of terrors of the dark, with additions for the blind. I could write volumes, should I ever see again to be able to write.

Your eyes will heal, the rational part of me—a tiny part, at best, and by no means the best of me—whispered. Delicate tissues take longer to regenerate. I knew this, but the animal, instinctual part of me still shrieked in panic, convinced that I’d be left in this, choking nothing forever, doubly blind, unable to even make out the blank walls that confined me.

The evil tide of panic rolled over me again, and when it finally passed and my screaming brain stilled, I was crouched low in the water, huddling to the chilly walls and shaking in a near fit. My throat felt odd. Ah. I’d been screaming, again. I swallowed a trickle of my own precious and scarce blood and wondered when Claire would seek me out. She would; she must. I desperately believed she would. Surely she was not so angry with me that she’d spurn me and leave me here, in this awful place.

Please. Please come. I can’t survive this I can’t alone no no no not alone not blind no…

I was not used to feeling this horror, which combined all the fears of my mortal life in a toxic elixir; the closeness of the walls, the darkness, the filthy water, the knowledge that I might never leave this place, that I’d starve here to rags and bones until thirst robbed me of all shreds of the mind I’d struggled so hard to preserve, gnawing my own flesh until it was drained dry.

I have become my father after all.

My father had gone mad when I was only a very young boy, and they’d confined him…not in a well like this, but in a hut, a lightless and chained hovel, with no hope or memory of daylight. When I had nightmares—daily—that was my hell, that I woke dressed in my father’s filthy rags, chained and alone, abandoned to the screaming in my head.

In the dark.

And here it is, nightmare come real, in the dark, alone, abandoned.

Nonsense. Pennyfeather has always worked for Oliver. I tried to focus on logic, anything to prevent myself from sliding over that muddy slope down into the pit of despair again. Ergo, Oliver wished that I be removed. Why would he wish it? Because Amelie trusts me?

It did not feel right. Oliver was not randomly cruel; he enjoyed power, but mostly for what power could do. He’d had many opportunities to remake Morganville in his own image, but he’d refrained, over and over; I’d thought there was genuine respect, even an odd and grudging love, growing between him and Amelie. Yet he’d changed, and through him, so had Amelie. For the worse.

Amelie, my sweet lady, so small and shy and quiet in the beginning when your master and mine had met, when as fledgling vampires we had learned the joy of the hunt, the terror of being owned. I rescued you from your vile father, and lost you, and found you again. Do you remember me at all, as that young and tentative vampire, full of fear and vague notions?

Amelie wasn’t herself. Oliver should not have done this to me; he should not have been able to, without her consent. There was something missing, something I did not yet understand.

It was a puzzle, and I liked puzzles; I clung to them, here in the dark, a shield against all the pieces falling apart, crashing together in my head, crashing and cutting….

Another panic attack swept over me, hot as boiling lead and cold as the snows that piled waist high in my youth, and what little mind I had dissolved in an acidic frenzy, thoughts rushing as fast as modern trains crashing through stone, veering wildly from the tracks, turning and burning into chaos closedarktoodarktooclosesmoothwallsnonono….

It was harder this time, coming back. I ached. I trembled. I think I might have wept, but water dripped cold on me, and I wasn’t sure. No shame in tears. No shame at all, since there was no one to see me, no one ever ever ever again.

Come for me. Please, the lonely and lost part of me wailed. But no one did.

Hours crawled slowly, and I began to feel something odd…a pressure, a strange sensation that made me want to claw at my injured eyes…but I held off, hands fisted into shaking lumps, and pounded the hard, smooth walls until I felt bones shifting beneath the skin. It healed faster than I would have liked; the distraction didn’t last, and the pressure in my eyes built and built and suddenly, there was a breathtakingly lovely burst of light.

The glare burned so badly I cried out, but it didn’t matter. I could see, and suddenly, the panic wasn’t quite so desperate or overwhelming. I could manage this. I would manage it. As everything in my life, there was a way out, a single slender thread of hope, however insane….

Because that was, in fact, my secret. In an insane world, sanity made very little sense. No one expected me to live, and therefore, I did. Always.

I looked up, and saw a depressingly narrow tunnel closing into a tiny, dim hole far, far above…and the gleam of a silver grate above, a circle enclosing a cross. Pennyfeather hadn’t just thrown me blinded into a pit; he’d thrown me into one of the levels of hell, and locked me in with silver, on the terribly unlikely chance I might scale the heights to crawl out. And who knew what lay beyond; nothing good, I was sure. If it had been Oliver giving the order, he’d left little to chance when he was determined in his course.

Still. At least it’s not dark now, I consoled myself. I looked down, and in the faintest possible sliver of light I saw my legs—bare below the knees, since I had perhaps unwisely worn a pair of ancient velvet knee britches, and as pale as I had ever seen my skin. It was the color of dirty snow, and wrinkled to boot. I lifted one foot from the brackish water, and the bunny slippers were soaked and drooped pathetically. Even the fangs seemed robbed of any charm.

“Don’t worry,” I told it. “Someone will pay for your suffering. Heavily. With screaming.”

I felt I should repeat it for the other slipper, in case there should be any bad feelings between the two. One should never create tension between one’s footwear.

That duty done, I looked up again. Water dripped cold from the heights and hit my face in sharp, icy stabs. It was cruel, since it could only irritate me, not sustain me. Still, there must be rats. Every dungeon had rats; they came standard issue. Rat blood was not my favorite, but as the old saying goes, any port in a storm. And I was most definitely in a storm, a true tempest of trouble.

Water. Water water water falling cold in gray skies drowning the land gray dirt gray ashes gray bones of houses falling slowly into ruin gray eyes of a woman staring down with pity and tears so many tears mother so much disappointment in her face, and what I was now was not what I had been when she’d last seen me…the screams, the slamming door, no family left now, no one to care…my sisters, screaming at me to go away, go away…

I pulled myself sharply away from the memory. No. No, we do not think of those things. You should think of them, think of your sisters, think of what you did, something whispered in my ear, but it was a bad whisper, a vile and treacherous worm with the face of someone I had once loved, I was sure of that, but I didn’t want to remember who might have warned me. I hadn’t listened, in any case. I never listened.