Page 10 of Mortdale

I was bleeding again.

I pulled my hands off his shirt. “What now?” I asked, sniffling as I held my white sleeve to my nose.

“Your rites,” he said, and his eyes dropped to the blood stain soaking and spreading across the old cotton sleeve. “Unless you don’t want to.”

Clearing my throat, I dabbed the sleeve to my nose one last time and quickly grabbed the red string from the table. He just looked at me, his pale eyes tracing my frantic attempts at tying it around his ring finger and then mine. After quickly reciting the vows under my breath, I hesitated over the wedding bands. Silver would lock in the vows, making both our souls bound for this eternity and all the others beyond. As it was spoken in both the Compendium and the Chronicles, mine and his holy books.

His shadow fell over me as he reached to grab the rings.

My teeth dug hard into my bottom lip when he slid the first ring over his wedding finger and then mine, sealing both our fates.

As he left the chapel, he reached for his necklace, briefly pressing the pendant against his lips.

It was done. My eternity was now also his.

And he had no idea that we were doomed.

His men were clearly anxious to leave, but he’d said ‘you have half an hour to pack up your things’. If only he knew I never had connected to anything long enough to consider it my belonging. Clothes, furniture, books—they were things I’d touched, things I used, but they weren’t things that belonged to me.

I glanced across the distance of my cold room one last time. The ugly paint job Ethel had given the charred walls a long time ago now was peeling along with the many words we’d written across them. When Ethel would leave without seeing me, I’d come back to her note on the wall. When I’d leave, she’d come to find mine waiting there for her. The walls had amassed the story of our entire lives on them.

Ethel stood at my doorstep, eyes red and angry—at me. “Why are you doing this?”

I shrugged. “Why not?”

“Cut it out. I know you, Willow. What did she say to you to convince you to agree to this idiocy?” She was breathing fast, wide eyed and livid. “Tell me you didn’t really marry the vampire.” Grasping my shoulders, she shook me. “I heard the girls talking. Logan Duncan’s name is known in the Eastern Continent and the Fair Isles. He was a naval commander. The ‘take no hostage’ type. They said he’s the one who straightened out the Farseer pirates. He makes his hostages confess their sins and lets them kill themselves as mercy. No Mortdale ship has been stopped by them in sixteen years. They call him the Blood Reaper, for Hell’s sake! You can’t marry a man—” She sucked in a sharp breath, trying to calm herself. “A vampire whose name is the Blood Reaper.”

A horrible man who killed other horrible men? Why would that scare me?

“Does he also hold a scythe, perchance?” The cartoonish image I conjured in my mind made me giggle.

“This isn’t funny, Willow.”

I grabbed the jar of sesamoid bones I’d been collecting for years off the bed; the only thing I had in my possession that was worth anything, even if it was mostly in memories. The best of my days had been spent sorting through bone flea markets with Ethel constantly ankle deep digging through the piles for exactly what I’d described despite the constant ‘ews’. “I want you to have this.”

“Are you insane?” she hissed, limbs trembling as she held back tears. “They’re your favourite. I can take—” She swallowed, pointing her finger over the row of jars lining the top of my dresser. “Whatever one of those are.”

“I love you more than any bones,” I told her, handing her the jar. “More than all the bones in my body.”

Her head dipped down, one of her tears hitting the jar, sliding down the glass wall and striking the dark floor between us. “I love you more than all the bones in my body, too.”

“At least you won’t have to watch me—” My throat was all glued together. “You don’t have to watch me die now. I never wanted you to.”

Silent tears slid down her sunburnt cheeks for long minutes. We’d not nearly exhausted all the words in this world. There was so much more I wanted to say. So much more of our story to be left on these walls. But we both knew the inevitable end was near.

She said nothing more as she backed away from me, clutching the jar against her chest. If I gave her anything else, there would be a high chance she would smash that jar on Agnes's head.

The corridor echoed with heavy footsteps a while after Ethel had left, and a horde of burnt witches that had crowded and haunted the corner of my room peeled from the mass of bodies and vanished into the cracks of the floorboards beneath me. Whatever they’d seen had terrified them because their shrieks made my ears ring.

He stopped at the door, and I noticed it only then, the total absence of chaos, the profound stillness that followed him in. Even the grains of dust had paused mid-air, the ringing in my ears vanished. What was so terrifying about him that even the wind itself went catatonic?

I shrank back as his eyes roamed over my space. When his attention lingered on the empty mattress and the blanket and pillow laid under my bed, I stepped in front of him. “I don’t think you can even be in here. No outsiders can enter the covenstead.”

“Thirty minutes were up fifteen minutes ago.”

“I don’t wear a watch.” I got on my toes to look down the empty, charred hall starting to fill with noises, already disturbing the restless dead. “And you really can’t be here.”

The cindery floorboards creaked heavily under his weight as he walked up to a shelf lined with books and my collection of jars filled with mostly flat, short, and irregular bones, studying each one of the labels closely.