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VIII

The night they die, the world is white.

It snowed, sometime during the day, just enough to coat the dead grass, and skim the gravestones, dust the roofs of the small crypts that sit like houses off the path.

In the distance, chimneys heave smoke and the windows are all shuttered, bodies drawn in against the winter chill. Nearly the shortest day of the year, and so the darkness falls early and lands thick as they make their way up the road to the waiting church, the promise of another slaughter.

Hector and Renata stroll arm in arm, ahead, while Sabine drifts in their wake, her hood drawn up against a cold that brushes her skin, but never settles there.

She passes beneath the low branches of a tree at the same time as a breeze, its limbs shaking off a fresh layer of snow.

She pauses, holds out a bare hand, watches the flakes settle without melting on her skin.

There is a strangeness to the air, she thinks, but cannot place it.

A held-breath silence that could simply be the snow.

She lets her hand drop.

Renata and Hector have drifted farther ahead, or rather, she has fallen farther back. They have nearly reached the church. She is about to follow, when something makes her look over her shoulder.

There is no twitch of movement, no sudden sound, no warning in the air, only the subtle tap of someone’s gaze. She glances back down the path and sees a window with the shutters thrown, a small face pressed to the fogging glass.

A child, watching.

Sabine tips her head in question, and the child lifts a finger to their lips. Eyes flicking past her. To the church.

It is her only warning.

She turns at the sound of wood doors groaning inward, sees Hector and Renata step into the empty church.

Only it is not empty. Voices erupt, shouting not in fear, but rage, and Sabine’s body takes a single lunging step forward before her senses drag her back.

For a second, she’s pinned, caught between the two forces, the fact she cannot leave Hector and Renata, and the knowledge she cannot save them either, not from what waits inside the church.

Instead, she darts sideways, into the shadow of the tree.

Presses herself flat against the trunk and watches as a crowd spills out—ten, twenty, thirty men—wielding torches, pitchforks, spears, and shackles, Hector and Renata thrashing in their midst. Metal chains wrapped tight around their limbs, their throats.

The night air thick as smoke with the sudden rush of rage and violence. Calls of devil, demon, monster.

Sabine watches as Hector is forced to his knees. He springs back to his feet, throwing off his captors, fighting with all his feral strength—but then he is brought down again, blades driven into calf, and shoulder, the chains tightened and locked.

A man thrusts a spear into Renata’s side, and she cries out, less in pain than fury, fear, her eyes searching the night, her mind open wide and calling for Sabine before a hood is forced over her head.

Sabine watches, coiled.

She cannot leave them, even now, but she stands transfixed by the scrape of wood on stone as caskets are dragged onto the path before the church.

Three caskets, not two, and that detail is enough to make her come unstuck. She pushes off the tree, and flings herself, not into the town, whose doors are flying open, but into the cemetery lot that runs beside the church.

One step between the graves, two, and suddenly she gasps, and buckles to the frozen ground as if impaled.

Twists round, expecting to find an attacker, but there is no one there.

And yet, the pain rolls through her. Brighter than the pitchfork, or the wooden stool, pain that wraps like a fist around her fragile heart.

She scrambles forward, body going weak, hands shaking as the skin begins to wither on the bones.

Death calls to death, Renata warned.

Renata, who is now being forced down into a coffin, while Sabine drags her own failing limbs over the ground.

Renata, who showed her how a body could bloom in the right hands, how welcome the right company could be—back when it was a choice. Before she tricked, and trapped, and bound Sabine to herself, and Hector.

Hector, who’s clawing and screaming oaths as he’s nailed into a box. A gruesome end. And one Sabine refuses to share.

She forces her body forward, through sickness worse than sunlight, vision blurring as she claws her way to the nearest crypt.

She fumbles at the frozen bolt and forces in the rotting wood, stumbles into the tomb, gasping, her lungs straining for air they have forgotten they don’t need, and slumps back against the door.

There is a body with her in the crypt. Long dead, she thinks, just from the age of the tomb, but death calls to death, and the corpse calls to her, the slab of stone between them providing only scant relief. She imagines rot rising, reaching up, trying to drag her down.

After everything she’s been through. After all that she’s endured.

Sabine curls against the stone, presses her hands against her ears.

There are no windows in the crypt, but she can hear them calling for her. She can hear the crowd’s voices swallowing Hector’s and Renata’s, can hear the jostle and scrape, the anvil swing of hammers driving nails.

And then something else.

The crack and snap of fire catching, chewing its way through wooden boards.

After that, Sabine stops listening.

Lets the sickness fold over her like sleep.

The men stay with the burning coffins until dawn.

And so, Sabine stays hidden in the crypt.

She drifts in her fevered state, curled on that stone floor, dying, but not dead.

Weak from sun, and sick from hunger and grave soil.

Sometimes she is there, and sometimes she is somewhere else.

Back in Santo Domingo, perched on the stable roof and spitting cherry pits onto her brothers’ heads.

But when she leans back to look at clouds, she finds Andrés looming over her, his weight squeezing the air from her lungs, crushing her beneath him, the way she then crushes the widow in her arms, one of them turning to ash and the other to stone.

On and on it goes until at some point, she comes back to herself.

It is dusk. The sun is gone. The voices have gone with it. Somehow, she finds the will to rise and stumble out of the crypt, but then, her legs give way, hands splayed against the frozen ground. The dead calling her down.

She tries to stand, and can’t, and wants to laugh, or rage, at the idea that she has survived so long, so much, only to be felled by dirt.

It is not right. After all, her heart is still inside her. It has not been ruined or removed, wrung dry or cut out, and so, she tells herself, she will survive. Somehow. If she can just get up. But her limbs refuse to listen. To obey her mind. She sits, growing roots in the dead ground.

From here, Sabine can see the church.

The coffins on the ground before it, reduced to mounds of smoking ash.

It is a bad way to go, she knows. After all, the heart burns last.

She felt it, when Renata died. She felt the binding break between them, felt the promise sever, slough away. She is no longer bound, and yet, here she is, unable to leave.

And Sabine is tired.

For the first time in her life, she thinks, too tired to go on.

The earth feels oddly soft beneath her. She imagines herself sinking.

Bury my bones, she thinks as her body topples over, one cheek pressed to the soil, as if listening. And there. There it is. The steady beat of a heart. She shuts her eyes and listens as the sound gets closer, and closer and—

“Senora?” She drags her eyes open, and finds a boy, his voice barely dropped, his limbs stretched long by later youth. “Are you all right?”

Sabine struggles, finds just enough strength to sit up. “No,” she says in a raspy, hollow voice.

He kneels beside her. “Who did you lose?” he asks, taking her for a mourner, her body bowed by grief.

Sabine looks to the smoldering ash before the church and answers. “Everyone.”

“Come,” says the boy, offering his hand. “It is too cold to grieve tonight.”

She meets his gaze. His expression is kind, the air around him humming with concern.

“You’re right,” she says, taking his hand. But when he goes to pull her up, she pulls him down. Against her. Fangs slicing down to bone.

The blood pours in. His young heart hammers boldly in his chest. And then in hers.

And by the time it stops, Sabine is just strong enough to reach the cemetery’s edge, to claw her way out of this realm of death.

As soon as her feet land on the path, the graveyard lets go its hold, and her strength comes rushing back.

Her senses sharpen, and her world steadies, and the night around her flares into stark relief again.

She looks one last time at the remains before the church, her mouth twitching with the ghost of a smile.

Hector and Renata may be dead, but Sabine is not.

She has been resurrected. Alone, but alive.

Snow begins to fall again, dusting the fresh corpse as she turns, and disappears into the dark.