Page 21

VI

María looks up at the Olivares house.

The window she climbed out of, the pitched roof she crossed, the place she dropped, and feels no desire to go back the way she came.

Instead, she strolls up to the door and knocks.

Despite the ungodly hour, she swings the iron ring against the wood, shattering the quiet of the house.

The servants are roused first, of course.

She can hear them scurrying about like mice inside the walls.

Then the door swings open, and what a sight she must be, their viscountess, standing on the wrong side of the threshold, dressed for sleep and stained with blood.

Their eyes go wide with panic—how strange, that she can almost taste their worry, like sugar on the air—as they usher her inside, asking her what happened, is she hurt, where has she been?

“It is nothing,” she says, and it’s the first time María has spoken, since the widow, since the bite, since the hunger and the ash. Her voice is hers, and not, loud, and not, strange, and not. Calm, and not—stitched with a giddy thread.

She brushes the servants away and climbs the stairs as if nothing is amiss. As if she has not been buried and born in the same night. In her room, she finds Andrés, already on his feet. Half-awake, confusion painted on his face.

It quickly turns to rage as he takes in the open window and his disheveled wife, standing in the doorway and not beside him in the bed.

“What have you done?” he demands. “Where have you been?”

She shrugs, and says it doesn’t matter, delighting at the anger that sparks across his face. He grabs her arm, and yesterday his grip would have been hard enough to bruise, but now it feels like nothing, and María simply watches, curious to see what he’ll do next.

He’s spitting venom now, calling her a whore, saying he will teach her what happens to an unfaithful wife, but his pulse is louder than his voice, a drumbeat smothering the rest. It is all she can hear.

He drags her, roughly, to the bed, pushes her down and climbs on top, and that is when the moment turns.

She turns.

Rolls, and is on top, her red hair loose and pooling like a curtain around them. Lovebirds locked within their nest.

“Esposo mío,” she coos, the slender fingers of one hand curling round his wrists, pinning them over his head. Andrés stares up at her, furious, perplexed. He is twice her size, but it doesn’t matter now. In the intervening night, he has grown soft, and she has turned to stone.

And now, in her hand, he is bruising.

“María,” he gasps, calling her by her name—at last, little as she likes it.

She can feel the blood pumping in his veins, can see it at his temple, in the thicket at his throat.

Her mouth begins to ache, and she grabs his hair, the way he did hers so many times, yanking his head back to expose the column of his neck.

His life, right there, beneath thin skin, so close.

Her teeth prick her bottom lip, and the air begins to taste like fear.

His, of course, not hers.

She has done away with that. Left it in the ashes of the widow’s shop.

“ María, ” he pleads again, and all she can think is that she’s always hated that name. How it has never fit. And then she remembers what the other woman said, about being free to live as you please. To be who you please, take what you please.

If you see a thing you want . . .

And she has, hasn’t she? Turned it in her mouth a hundred times, just to savor the sound. So as María’s husband begs his wife to stop, she leans low and lays her face against his so they are cheek to cheek.

“María is no more,” she whispers in his ear. “My name is Sabine.”

Right before she sinks her teeth into his throat.

His skin breaks like ripened fruit, life spilling across her tongue, flooding her mouth, and if the widow’s blood was bread, then this is wine. Bright and dizzying and sweet.

The viscount thrashes, bellowing in rage and pain—how strange that she can taste them both, right there in his blood—but she has heard enough of Andrés Olivares. She wraps her hand over his mouth, and drinks, and drinks, and as his heartbeat slows, her own begins to quicken, or so it seems.

She doesn’t yet know that her own heart has ceased to beat.

That what she feels now is nothing but an echo of a stolen pulse, a rhythm borrowed for the time it takes to drink.

That as quickly as it ends, she will be raked by thirst again, not only for the taste of blood itself, but for the drum it beats inside her.

She doesn’t know.

All she knows is that, at last, she feels alive.

Andrés has gone limp beneath her. She stares down at his corpse.

“Who is the empty vessel now?” she asks as she climbs off him, the pulse already dying in her chest.

She passes an iron lamp, candles burning in their posts, and tips it over, watches the fire meet the rugs and catch. Takes a lantern and trails the flame against a tapestry, sets it to the edge of a portrait.

The count appears, his hair askew, his face a mask of shock and fear. She knows she must be quite a sight, hair loose, and crimson spilling down her front.

“María—”

She presses the old man back into the wall, and smiles, showing her sharpened teeth. “Not anymore.”

His blood tastes like arrogance, like greed, his pulse barely a flutter in her chest.

How disappointing.

The countess stumbles from her room, pawing down a wall, squawking for the servants who have already fled. Her son’s wife, his murderer, his widow, stands and watches the countess reach the edge of the stairs, watches her trip, and fall, crashing down, only to shatter at the bottom.

Eight steps, it turns out, is enough to break a neck.

The fire spreads, licking the stone walls of the Olivares house.

And just like that, her old life burns.

By the time they put the fire out, she will be gone.

By the time the city guards search the ruined house for corpses, and find the young viscountess missing.

By the time the family’s bodies are buried, and the servants who fled begin to talk.

There is no point in lingering.

No, she has had more than enough of León.

The stable door is locked, but one swift push and the wood splinters around the iron, a second and it gives. She takes her husband’s horse, since he won’t need it anymore.

The massive mount stands in the farthest stall, but when she reaches out to pet its neck the beast rears back, as if she’s holding a hot poker.

Its eyes go wide, a feral panic taking hold, and she withdraws her hand, marvels at the way it knows, when Andrés didn’t.

Knows what she now is, and isn’t. Knows enough to fear.

Perhaps the horse simply smells the blood, but she thinks it senses something else —violence, danger, death.

Either way, it stomps its hooves, warning her away, and so the woman who was once María—how easy, to cast the old name off with that old self—abandons the horse and the stable and the burning house.

And Sabine never once looks back.