Page 1 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter One

F og escorted me home most evenings, a ghostly veil draped across the harbor, a frigid kiss goodnight. Mist glazed the cobblestones under my worn boots and mottled the tree-lined streets, dewy water shimmering with October reds and rusty oranges. The flames within the gaslit lamps had all but disappeared behind the sea’s dense nighttime shroud. Luminous yet hazy, the light held an eerie, gilded cast, an uncertainty, shapeless as levitating phantoms.

My chapped fingers curled underneath my cloak. Hour after hour of endless scrubbing and washing had left my skin chafed and pink. Every touch of the air felt raw, fragile enough to tear at the slightest whisper. I’d figured my hands would be sturdier from all the work by now, but the harbor’s changing seasons weren’t kind.

The wages were, at least.

The silver weighing down my dress pockets kept time to my steps, the pleasant jangling almost enough to make me forget the aches and pains of a long day’s work. In my mind, I’d already spent it. I’d save a little, of course, for a better room, one not so drafty, reeking of pungent seawater. One where it did not rain on the inside whenever storms overtook the harbor.

Storms aside, the roof leaked more than it sheltered, leaving me beholden to its every whim, every weakness. I fell asleep to the rush of the churning waves, the patter of water slipping in through the cracks, the fierce wind howling at all hours. The sea wasn’t the only one restless and angry by the time dawn awoke the harbor. More than once I’d been pulled from the blankets’ warmth by the drip of briny water on my head, pillows soaked from the ocean’s slow encroachment.

I drifted to cozier thoughts to distract from the unpleasantness that awaited me at home. The suppers I’d indulge in over the coming days—warm bread, hearty stews and chowders, perhaps an expensive cheese—the silver watch for my chatelaine I’d been after for months now, and the warm cup of spiced tea that would warm my aching bones before I finally crawled into bed.

Closer to the wharf, the air was heavy with salt and ocean brine. Glittering sea spray clung to my eyelashes and beaded in the wisps of dark gold hair that had been swept from its careless knot. Shadows drew near, unease following behind them. I had lived all of my twenty seven years in Dreadmist Harbor, but my world had once been far away from the narrow, crumbling alleys of the dockside. Though they sheltered me now, the dangers after nightfall persisted, the feeling of home never quite reaching the hollow spaces of my heart. Something within me still searched for it despite the quiet comforts I’d earned. A part of me waited, like the lonely old lighthouse calling the ships back to shore.

Darkness prevailed where the street lamps’ hazy glow never dared to touch. The muffled echo of hooves and carriage wheels had become a distant thought, the streets half-deserted. The fog stretched so thick I could hold it between my palms. Fear curdled, unpleasant and shivering, deep in my gut. Above me, the looming silhouettes of the ships’ masts were spindly giants, ancient and sleeping, the towering watchmen waiting to see if the tempest would roll in.

A few lanterns posted at intervals on the end of the docks struggled to pierce the starless sky, nothing more than a dim orange flicker. I slowed a little, listening to the sea as it tossed itself against the shore. Boats and tall ships bobbed against the windy surf, the planks along the wharf shuddering. Waves rushed in and out beneath the docks. The distant threat of whitecaps, sharp and silver as the edge of a blade in the night.

Rickety wood groaned with the weight of light footsteps. A shadow fell before me, blocking the murky glow from one of the lanterns. An outline of a draped hood and slight, hunched shoulders as fog eddied around their cloak. I thought it was only one of the longshoremen come to oversee a late shift until the shadow’s feline gait hastened the fear in my veins.

They were watching me beneath that cloak. I could feel it, their gaze prickling my neck like late autumn frost that feathered window-glass. Perhaps they’d been watching me for some time, concealed by the fog.

Perhaps they had been following for longer.

I quickened my pace and dragged the hood of my own cloak over my head as if it would protect me from whatever danger that wanted to follow. The shadow trailed me with ease, their footsteps barely striking the ground. They were elegant, precise—a deadly waltz.

I knew at once that it was a vampire who stalked me.

After spending months cleaning and up-keeping their houses, their movements became familiar. I’d had no reason to dread them, save for a few outliers, but who couldn’t say the same of us mortals? They had employed me, paid my wages. Peace between humans and vampires had been established since they’d made the harbor their home generations on generations ago, centuries before my parents’ time. It was the vampires who’d laid the streets of Dreadmist, occupied its finest estates, and kept those with an immortal’s appetite from drinking mortals dead.

Why, then, did it feel like I was walking toward my own grave the moment their shadow claimed the light? Why did it feel as though I was being hunted by a monster?

Please, please, let me go , I wanted to beg. I’m nearly home.

A hand seized the back of my cloak. I ran, a shout dying on my lips. It didn’t matter that I’d never outrun them. I had to try. I had to hope.

The front clasp ripped apart from the force of their grip and my resistance, and my cloak spilled out behind me, abandoned to the wet cobblestones and the rats that liked to scurry along the wharf. Wind and mist lanced my face, tears stinging in my eyes. The chatelaine clipped to my apron clanged like a mourner’s bell. The dense fog parted around me as I dashed through a narrow alley so deserted that I had only dying leaves to bear witness, to hear my panicking gasps.

Crumpled broadsides scattered underfoot. I slipped on one, quickly recovered my balance, breath leaving me in a puff of cloud. I could see the corner just up ahead, just a few paces more—

The shadow slammed into my shoulder. Bruising pain scratched along my arm when we collided with solid brick. My spine was suddenly pinned up against the wall, the last breath forced out of my lungs in a wheezing sob. I heard the metallic clatter of my week’s pay falling like icy rain to the stones, the cramped alley too dark to catch where they’d landed. A chilly breath fluttered across my neck, and realized with a moment of terrifying clarity that it wasn’t the wall that had knocked the breath from me.

It was the vampire.

An arm tethered around my waist, one of my own held immobile. Painfully so, pressed against my side and nearly crushed between us .

“Please,” I begged at last. Flailing, I tried to free my arm, but it was a useless endeavor. Nothing I could do would break their vampiric grip.

Well… almost nothing.

Gritting my teeth with a rage that made my jaw ache, I stretched my fingers across me until they brushed the cool silver of my chatelaine. I wrenched the pair of embroidery scissors from its dangling chain and held it like a knife in my fist, thrusting backward, careless and wild. A few hysterical, vicious jabs and the vampire let out a cry of pain—a woman, perhaps, from its wailing pitch—and released me. Her blood splattered warm on my fingers.

I dropped the bloodied weapon and darted toward the alley’s archway. My head reeled from panic. Tiny wisps of ashen gold drifted in front of my eyes after each exhale, shallower, faster, while I flattened my palm to the bricks to remain steady. Just a few steps more toward salvation, then I can—

The vampire jumped in front of me. I hadn’t even heard her move, hadn’t felt her scurry like a wharf-rat, a blur of darkness in the night.

Clouds parted, enough moonlight cutting the dark for the shadow to reveal herself. A leering smirk, nostrils flared from the scent of my blood. A woman, as I’d thought. Pale, waves of long, dark hair, vampire-grey eyes. She scented me like prey though her blood was dripping onto the stones. A sob escaped as I turned on my heel, whirling in the other direction, dizzy from how fast my heart was beating within my chest.

She caught me by whatever tangles had been left of my unraveling knot, slipping her hand under my hair to the back of my neck. Her fingers were ice, frigid, imprisoning, halting my escape. A growl as she bared her fangs.

“Please, let me go,” I said again. “I have coin— silver coin —I can—”

But I knew the offer was empty. She had no desire to rob me of my wages, which were lost to the cobbles and decaying leaves, and likely to be stolen once she drank her fill of me. She wouldn’t be bartered with nor bribed into granting this small mercy.

What she wanted raced within my veins, alive and pulsing with terror. And much more precious than silver. I turned my face away, her nose skirting along my jaw to the throbbing vein in my neck. Lethal as she was, she smelled like a spring morning—dew and honey and light, fragrant flowers.

I whimpered.

The pain sunk into my neck, blinding and hot, forcing my eyes shut. The scream that exploded from the back of my throat shredded it raw, though I’d no doubt it had been swallowed by the sea’s rage. No one would’ve heard it.

The vampire drank deeply from the wound. I shivered with a violence, the torn skin and muscle protesting each assault of her tongue, her rough mouth, her searing fangs. Hers hadn’t been a kind wound, not a delicate prick of skin to sate her bloodlust. The jagged, brutal ripping of flesh was made all the worse by my thrashing, the last attempt to flee.

Blood poured down my neck in deadly rivulets. The vampire’s bite was greedy, shameless, a claiming blow. She drank until my knees wobbled and my hands turned cold. Until she’d drained the last of my strength to fight.

Until she knew for sure that I’d succumb to undeath.

And then she was gone, the edge of her cloak snapping around the corner of the brick archway, disappearing through a sheet of silvered rainwater from an overflowing drainpipe. The tempest had begun to descend upon us.

The scent of my blood filled my senses so strongly that I hadn’t realized the storm was finally rolling in, weak as my pulse.

I took a few tremulous steps backward. It was all I could manage, shaking and gasping as I was, before I hit the wall and slid down the wet bricks. Dark red stains peppered the aged broadsides, the dying leaves, the coins I’d dropped. Shuddering with each exhale, I pressed my palm firmly to the wound, my skin slippery with harbor mist and cooling blood.

Another little whimper spilled from my blanched lips. Warm crimson pulsed onto my trembling fingers as my heart struggled with the inevitable creeping cold of Death.

No one would come to my rescue.

I didn’t know how much time had passed as I sat on the cobblestones under the soaking rainwater. I’d become terribly lightheaded—or perhaps that was just the steady loss of blood—thinking of how quickly the night’s fortunes had changed in between what seemed like the span of a few breaths.

A mortal healer would’ve been closer to the wharf, but what did they know of a vampiric bite? Vampires fed in the clandestine comfort of the blood brothels, not like this . And I suspected that most Turnings—rare as they likely were, though I didn’t know anything of their intricacies—did not happen with an undignified cruelty. They would not be able to stop this. They could not heal what had been stolen from me; no alchemy or bandaging would staunch the flow of mortal time.

I need a vampire, I thought, numb and chilled down to the bone. If I’m to become one of them.

The estate reigned over the cliffside, sea-swept and half-haunted. Abandoned, it seemed. The dramatic silhouette was trimmed with scrollwork and flourishes, black lace on sharp turrets and steep rooftops. The ancient vampiric style, like many of the old estates in the harbor. Thin, scattered moonlight cast an imposing glass domed ceiling in a pall of silvery mist, a frost-petaled flower unfurling at its heart. But there seemed to be a flicker of golden flame-light in the estate’s arched stained glass windows, and with nowhere else to run, I couldn’t back away now.

A strong breeze thundered across the walkway, drenching me and the slick paving stones with briny mist. It was dreadfully, bitterly cold as it tore through each layer of my threadbare clothes, sticking stray wisps of hair to my forehead and cheeks. My boots had already been splattered dark, and there was a frightful amount of red splashed on my apron, tinged pink from the mist. I must’ve made for a horrific sight, though there had been barely anyone out in this blustery cold to notice the pathetic state of me.

Staggering up the walkway’s gradual incline, I left a steady river of blood in my footsteps. Scarlet drops fell and rippled, blossoming in rainy puddles plastered with dead autumn leaves.

The bite of the vampire thrashed and twisted within me.

In the haste of panic and all that spilled blood, my feet had carried me to the front doors of perhaps the most prominent vampire in Dreadmist Harbor, as if they’d thought she would become my salvation from this waking nightmare. The vampire’s reclusive nature made it easy to invent rumors as pervasive as the harbor’s fog, and so few dared to venture up this hill.

Whispers often slithered into the taverns and parlor-rooms about this gloomy estate.

I’d been privy to them myself, the quiet warnings that made my heart reluctant to follow my blood-splattered boots. The violence I’d been told would greet me made every step heavier. And that I’d come from the ruins that had once birthed those terrible stories, haunted by the long-dead immortal monarchs, gave me pause.

Navigating the administrative buildings in the town center after I’d lost everything, there’d been a lot of waiting around. I’d heard idle chatter of a blood sorcerer who walked the halls occasionally.

The only blood sorcerer in Dreadmist Harbor, they’d said .

I hadn’t known one alive. Not here, where we’d ousted those cunning, bloodthirsty monarchs from their thrones after a long and gruesome reign.

Of course that had been well before my time, and that of my mortal family.

But I’d heard that she kept order within the vampires’ social circles, and if she— stars above, I don’t even know her name; do I want a blood sorcerer’s help? —claimed to be the authority in these matters, then she was the only one worth seeking out.

A vampire attack wasn’t anything to ignore. I couldn’t waste precious time being scared of what lay ahead, but even my bones trembled.

The toe of my boot hit the edge of an uneven stone, throwing me forward a few wobbling steps. I caught myself on the walkway’s thick, black iron wall, leaning into one of its large spiked posts. The ragged wound across the side of my neck throbbed with each heartbeat, the night pitching like a rouge wave. Gasping, I blinked mist from my eyes to find a carved pumpkin grinning at me, its ominous smile guttering with a strange, bloody light.

“Oh, hello there.” His eyes continued to bleed flame. “And what’s your name?”

Why I had stopped to ask questions of a smiling pumpkin, I couldn’t say, but I half-expected it to come alive and shred the rest of my throat to bloody ribbons with its carved fangs. There was something uncanny about his crooked grin, its bright eyes.

My words had come out slurred, as if I’d gotten mind-rattlingly drunk. But if I were, it wouldn’t have hurt this much to speak, each syllable tearing through the holes bitten into my pallid flesh. What would I do once I collapsed on the doorstep? Shouting would likely kill me quicker. I almost retched into the autumn mums on the other side of the wall, a neatly tended garden blooming with color so vibrant it crept through the shadows of night .

The next wave of pain and dizziness was nearly enough to end me. The chill beneath my skin made Death feel intimately close.

Was there enough blood left within me to rush in my ears like the tide, or was it only the ocean waves spilling onto the shore below?

There was no telling how long I had now until the bite ravaged me.

Somewhere between the wharf and the foot of this forsaken, lonely hill, I’d become resigned to my fate. I’d be a vampire before dawn broke. Waiting for the Turn to happen in the shabby confines of my little room seemed rather bleak.

A legion of carved pumpkin-sentries watched me from either side of the walkway while I stumbled onward, their faces leering, stringy pumpkin guts veiling the crimson of their misshapen eyes and gaping maws. The eerie firelight turned my hands red as I gripped each post.

No—that wasn’t quite right. The red had belonged to me .

Drip, drip, drip.

Perhaps the vampire had cracked my head open on the bricks while she’d bitten me. I could’ve been a ghost already, fluttering in the sea’s gusty winds, hopeless and doomed to haunt the rocky shores for an eternity. There were all sorts of ghostly hauntings down at the wharf. What was one more lost soul?

I groaned up the first two steps, then stopped, bent over the black iron railing—just as drearily decorated as the rest of the estate—to collect myself. My legs grew weaker by the moment. If I stood straight, everything wheeled around me like a new-fallen autumn leaf in a stormy gale.

“Two more,” I told myself. “Just two more steps.”

Well, there were at least eight more, but taking them in intervals of two made the lying easier.

The dark stones were wet and coarse when I finally collapsed into the wide arched doorway. This close, the estate was even more petrifying, as though it had once been an ancient house of worship in its former life, perhaps occupied by demons instead of gods. Writhing lantern light slipped across the terrace. The flames, from a cursory glance, appeared to be normal.

Drip, drip, drip.

Blood began to pool onto stone, staining the water under my boots, leaving fresh streams down the front of my apron. The bite had been rather clumsy, I thought, for a vampire—she’d missed the artery but tore enough to keep me bleeding, enough to claim me as one of her own. Before I could even shout, she had fled from the wharf, uninterested in watching me turn at the behest of her unwieldy fangs. She’d left me. And I, a mortal with little more than a vague notion of how new vampires were made, was just simply supposed to figure out the next step toward undeath on my own.

How I hadn’t wandered into the sea, I hadn’t the faintest idea.

“Morrigan,” a woman called, her voice airy, almost dreamlike, a calming melodic lilt. “There’s a dying woman on our doorstep.”