Page 6 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Six

“ T he rain’s washed away the blood. Mine and hers.”

Morrigan crouched in the deserted alley beside me, her boot sloshing a puddle. She had changed into a fresh tunic, black underneath a silver brocade waistcoat. Cutting an imposing figure in a high-collared, black overcoat, the pockets were embroidered with claret-colored flourishes, the waning moon glancing off her copper buttons.

I had borrowed someone’s wool-lined cloak, though I hadn’t needed it for any purpose other than the familiar comfort and a layer against the wind coming off the sea. Morrigan had explained—sometime in between my frenzied blood-drinking—that we ran at a higher temperature with sorcery in our veins, and fledglings were often impervious to the cold after such frequent feedings. I found myself warm despite the wharf’s frigid and misting breeze. I would’ve already frozen to the marrow if I’d still been human.

Morrigan’s frown creased the spot between her brows. “She was injured?”

The horrid memory of her fangs ripping me apart made the next breath tangle up in my throat. I pressed the heel of my palm to my forehead as it came rushing back. “I wounded her,” I remembered, and Morrigan rose slowly to her feet, mouth parted in silent interest. “Before she got her fangs into me, I… I lashed out at her with the pair of scissors I kept on my chatelaine.”

“Memories are imperfect, even when recollecting them with a sorcerer’s touch.” She tugged on the lapels of her overcoat, swept its ankle-length hem away from the murky puddle. “But I remember you worrying over your chatelaine when you came to us.”

“I must’ve lost it in the alley, or elsewhere—I don’t know for sure.” I paced around the cobblestones, kicked aside weathered broadsides, a glass bottle, and a pile of soggy, fraying leaves. “It’s been a week…I hadn’t expected to find my embroidery scissors. They were fine silver, after all. And my wages…those are gone, too.”

“You stabbed her with a pair of embroidery scissors,” Morrigan mused, and I noticed the smirk on her lips, delighted in that dangerous, sinister way of hers. Every bit the blood sorcerer those stories had painted in my imagination. “And so, presumably, that angered her enough to abandon Sonia’s plan. Instead of Turning you, she went straight for murder. Quite a leap for a mortal slight—it would’ve healed with her next feeding. But I’m willing to bet she disliked you before Sonia gave her orders.”

“Well, I hadn’t been invited to their house to make friends,” I replied, sarcasm drenching it. “Most of the coven hated me. They would leave the castle an unholy mess out of spite, thwart my efforts to keep a tidy house at every turn. Boredom made them monsters.”

“Did you ever think about opening the curtains?”

“It was tempting,” I admitted with a shy, guilt-ridden laugh. Morrigan’s tone told me I should’ve seized the impulse while I’d had it. “So, how are we going to find her? She’s had to have realized by now that her bite didn’t kill me. No one’s found a body. If I were her, I’d be panicked. ”

She started down the alley, a gust of wind tugging at the edge of her coat. “A hunter like this one would’ve watched their prey for some time, tracked your movements. We’ll begin at your home and work from there.”

I halted a few paces behind her. I was afraid it would come to this. “ Home is too generous a word for where we’re about to go.”

“Stay close.” She let me take the lead, her hand skimming the small of my back, her scent quelling the nervousness that fluttered in the pit of my stomach. “One of her coven-mates might’ve been sent out into the night to retrieve her, if they’re worried enough about where she’s disappeared. Keep your senses sharp and your wits about you, darling.”

Even with Morrigan’s endearment to warm my heart, I couldn’t find any comfort in her words.

This place looks more miserable than when I left it.

It might have been my keen vampiric sight that made me aware of things I’d once overlooked. The elements could be severe this close to the wharf and buildings were ravaged by the wind and sea, not to mention the lashing ice storms that battered the coast during the winter. The squalls sometimes left a glacial veneer on brick and clapboard siding, and you’d almost wish to freeze to death trying to heat your home until the icy coffin thawed. The sea’s natural salt also had an unkindness to it as the years set in.

The boarding house where I rented room seemed as though it was begging for the sea to take it. Shoulders hunched toward my ears, I was embarrassed to be standing here with Morrigan. The narrow street was littered with whatever roof shingles had flown off during the last storm. A sputtering gaslit lamp beside the front door shed no helpful light for mortals to see anything. The decrepit brick had no fortitude left. More of it had withered in my absence, and two of the windows on the basement floor had been boarded up.

“It might be a better idea if you stayed here on the street.”

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” Morrigan insisted. She had already followed me up the front stairs, the two of us crowded on the tiny portico. The struggling gaslight was noisy in my ear. One floor above our heads, a neighbor’s cat yowled from their windowsill, pawing at the filthy glass. “If we go anywhere, we’ll go together.”

Patting down my skirts for a pocket that wasn’t there, I remembered I had been borrowing clothes for the past week. “I kept my keys in a little purse on my—oh, I really have lost everything. All right, then. New plan.”

“Does it involve scaling a drainpipe and breaking in through your window?”

“If we must.” I looked Morrigan up and down as she leaned against the brick that framed the portico, clearly giving its integrity more trust than I had. “Reach up to the lintel, would you? There’s usually a spare if the last person who used it remembered to put it back.”

“And if it isn’t,” she said, stretching to glide her long fingers across the top of the doorframe with ease, “you’ll have the pleasure of watching me climb up the drainpipe in a pair of trousers that are too tight for such an undertaking.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned anything about the spare key.”

Morrigan laughed. “Would you like it better if I lied and told you it wasn’t there?”

“I don’t want to be held responsible for delaying our hunt by gazing up at your ass while you break into my room. Leaving me down here to imagine all the ways you could take me in my bed. You’d have to take those trousers off for me to fix the seam, you know.”

“ Elspeth .” Morrigan almost dropped the spare. She shook her head, wearing a crooked grin as she deposited the brass key into my palm. Her touch lingered on the metal. “No, we wouldn’t want that.” She moved into me, her gaze darkened, lowered to my lips. “You’re getting hungry again, aren’t you?”

“Yes, and you’re not helping.” I elbowed her away, the look in her eyes far too tempting.

There wouldn’t have been enough light dappled across the portico to see the rosy blush that warmed my cheeks if we’d been mortal. But I knew Morrigan had felt it from how she hovered near, her hand grazing lightly over my hip. It especially did not help that I’d been fighting the urge to pull her to my mouth by the lapels of her gorgeous overcoat ever since she’d donned it.

I couldn’t delay our entrance any longer, though I would have much preferred tasting Morrigan’s kiss instead of showing her around my bleak accommodations. The key halted in the lock after I heard the rusty click. Nothing remained other than my own reluctance. I turned, as if draping myself across the doorway would shield her from the grubby little foyer and keep her from noticing the desolate state of my meager living arrangements.

Regret transformed into shame. This wretched place wasn’t fit bear her footsteps in its dust.

I sagged against the door. “I apologize.”

“What for?”

The sigh that escaped pushed my spine into the creaking wood, likely sheering off flakes of weathered paint. “This gutter dwelling is possibly the furthest cry from your hilltop estate, and I’d rather we didn’t stay too long.”

“Elspe—”

Eyes shut in a grimace, I lifted a hand to interrupt her. “Please. The last thing I want is your pity. It’s already enough that I don’t feel worthy of your sorcerer’s blood. Just…all I ask is that we don’t…linger.”

Morrigan’s eyes narrowed, then softened, the red blazing in the shabby, grey-dust interior when she followed me over the threshold. “I meant no harm,” she offered. “The misery you’ve endured here is no fault of your own. It’s not pity, it’s anger. The injustice that such dilapidated places are allowed to exist. It seems the High Council has rested on its laurels.”

“People often can’t see beyond their own comfort,” I said, turning the key over and over in my fingers after the door closed behind us. Locking it from the inside, I left the spare with the mums that had wilted beneath one of the front windows. “Until that comfort is ripped away. I once learned that lesson, too.”

She took the rebuke in stride. “You’re right.”

A fresh layer of cobwebs had taken up residence in the stairwell, clouds of silk snagging on our clothes and hair. Morrigan dusted it from her coat as she went. My nose itched from the coating of dust that floated in the air after our steps, and I fought back a sneeze.

The proprietor of the boarding house was too cheap to employ housekeeping services for the common areas, so the chore often fell upon me or another charwoman who lived in the building. Other than the lamp posted outside, they did not spare any of the income they earned from overcharging for their dreadful rooms to have gaslights. The stairwell was a stomach-roiling mixture of cheap tallow candles, mildew, and rotting fish.

The stench was much more pungent to my fledgling immortal senses.

“In all the haste, it slipped my mind to ask if there are affairs you need to get in order before you settle in with us,” Morrigan was saying while we made our ascent to the third floor. I had to warn her about a few unreliable steps, forgetting that our movements were faster, lighter, and less clumsy. At least for her. “You’ll be joining us, won’t you? ”

“If you’ll have me.”

Morrigan turned mischievous, cornering me once we came to the third floor landing, using her height and the subtle press of her body to hold me against the nearest wall. Her knee settled between my legs and suddenly I lost the will to focus. “I already have, darling.”

“I meant,” I laughed through a shiver, “if it’s not any imposition to your coven.”

“You were part of this coven from the moment you chose the path of undeath,” she said, drawing in closer, nudging my nose with hers. “And there is more than enough room in my bed. I much prefer you in it.”

“Come on, we have to get moving.” After a playful shove, Morrigan relented and trailed me down the hall, our arms bumping into one another. I could tell she was having difficulties keeping her hands to herself. “As you can plainly see, there’s no need to worry about my prior arrangements. I have close to nothing. A musty little room and a handful of personal belongings. A rather unremarkable, threadbare wardrobe.”

My eyes strayed to my boots. “My stepbrothers stole my inheritance, left me penniless without a roof over my head—it was all sudden, unexpected. I had to seek employment wherever I could with my meager skills. I’d been raised to marry well, not scrub floors, but I’ve done what I can to survive.”

“Wait a moment,” she said with a melodic lilt, touching my arm. “You were high-born?”

My room was at the end of the hall where the window beside the door was clean enough to filter in some moonlight. I busied myself with finding the other spare room key I’d hidden. “I was.” Morrigan’s attentive gaze bored into the back of my head. “My father did clerical work for the High Council. He held a title and an estate, which I was set to inherit after he succumbed to illness.”

“I’m terribly sorry. ”

“As am I. There was nothing more the healers could do for him. If only I’d brought him to a vampire.” I plucked the key from its hiding spot, a hollow porcelain trinket in the shape of a fat pumpkin that sat on the windowsill. “The boys’ mother—my conniving stepmother—paid off a clerk to change the terms of my father’s Will while he was on his deathbed. I didn’t know until I lost everything. She’d given it all to her ungrateful sons.”

Morrigan’s sharp intake of breath drew my gaze while I unlocked the door. She scrubbed a palm across her face. “That’s dastardly.” Squealing hinges ushered us into my tiny room, where Morrigan looked immediately out of place. “An underhanded wretch of a woman.”

“We had a fond mutual hate for each other,” I confessed. “I didn’t care much about the titles or the wealth in the end, just that I had nothing of my parents left except their memory. And my stepmother abandoned me to figure out my own way in the world while the grief was so fresh. I had no time to mourn, no deathbed memento to keep.”

The key clattered onto my bedside table. “Watch your step, there’s water all over the floor from the leaks in the roof.”

Morrigan ducked her head, then looked upward at the cracked ceiling. “You had no one to take you in? No other family, friends?”

The buckets I’d placed about the room to collect the rainwater had overflowed in my absence. Even now, droplets rang against tin, the plank wood floor sopping and dank. Aside from that obvious nuisance, my room was well-kept after being deserted for a week.

“Friends in polite society disappear once they learn you’re penniless. Then suddenly you’re their teatime chatter, the subject of ridicule, ignored as if you don’t exist. They all abandoned me, too.”

“I never did enjoy the company of society mortals,” Morrigan agreed. “Their gossip can be vicious. But a fair number of them like a vampire’s fangs on their neck behind closed doors.”

“The high-born vampires have plenty of gossip to spare, too. I’ve heard a great deal about their blood brothels. It’s incredible how freely people speak when they think you’re as insignificant as the wall hangings,” I scoffed. “The first house I worked for happened to be a former friend. It was shameful, the way she treated me. She was the first to accuse me of theft.”

Morrigan side-stepped another overflowing bucket to reach the window. “If they only realized that all it takes is one misfortune. One betrayal to land themselves in your position. Wealth can be fleeting.” A loud groan of aged wood filled the room when she hefted the window open. “I was dirt poor myself when I was mortal.”

“I can’t imagine it…you, as a human.”

I took a turn around the room—same papered walls that had once had color but lost its will to live, same plain wood furnishings, same ugly bed linens and drapery. An empty tea kettle hung by the hearth, and I had a few mismatched cups and dishes and tin utensils for when I cooked on the fire. The closet door stood ajar, which I couldn’t recall leaving myself, though the days had stretched between, stealing half my recent memories with it.

“A lot of time has passed since, I can hardly remember what color my hair used to be.” She ducked her head out to have a look around, her long fingers splayed across the glass above. “I inherited our coven-house—and the coven leadership—from my bloodline. The vampire who Turned me decided she’d had enough of immortality. I felt I was too young for such a responsibility, but for whatever reason, she had confidence in me.” Morrigan cleared her throat. “Do you have family left in the harbor?”

There were many things I wanted to ask of Morrigan about her mortal life and her fledgling years. Had she felt this same fiery, insatiable passion with the vampire who’d Turned her? If she was not yet ready to tell me, it was her choice. We had forever ahead of us to learn everything until we were perhaps sick to undeath of each other.

“My relatives don’t live in Dreadmist anymore, and I didn’t want to leave this place. My parents are buried here.”

It had been some time since I’d last written to them, and letters often took weeks to travel down the coast.

“They sent me a generous sum to rent a room and enough so I didn’t starve for the first few months, and I—oh, I should write to them and share what’s happened. I have a—Morrigan…I didn’t leave my bed unmade like this, I’m sure of it now.” The new scent had stopped me short from my rambling. I recognized it at once. Dew and honey tinged with blood and flowers. “And there’s been a fire in the hearth earlier today. I can smell it.”

Someone else had haunted this room in the past week, their residual presence imprinted in the bed linens, the hearth-soot, the very air that Morrigan and I breathed.