by Amy Hoff
BURNS NIGHT
Any Hoff
Caledonia #3
Erebus Society
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First published in Great Britain in 2019
Erebus Society
First Edition
Copyright © Amy Hoff 2019
Editor: Joy Demorra
Cover & Book Design copyright © Constantin Vaughn 2019
For my cast & crew -
and Robert Burns, for a’ that.
Oh wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
PROLOGUE
“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
He thought he’d known hunger. Until he’d known her. But hunger – like love, like passion, was a poor little word compared to the intensity of his feeling. There wasn’t a word in the known world that could describe it.
He’d been in love before. He’d first made a career out of it, and then a legend.
But this was nothing like in love. It was nothing like obsession. It was both, and it was beyond.
It wasn’t a base desire, wasn’t lust—although that was there too, in spades. It was something deep beneath the earth, something in the stars, something beyond time. Love was too small a word.
Green eyes, yes, he spoke of them fondly and often. They were like gemstones, glittering like emeralds. Like the shattered scale of a dragon, startling against stark white skin too pale to be real, and a shock of ginger hair too vibrant for this world. A solid body, a soldier’s body, strength and supple muscles moving beneath the skin. The body of a succubus, metaphorical and literal, invoking every curve of the 8.
But Robert Burns had seen beauty too, and marked it often, written it down for the passing of ages; from the plight of a mouse to the shelter of his plaid in the wind, to the sweet arms of a maiden, to the wonders of whisky and friendship, to the hope promised by hard-won equality, a hope now nestled in the breast of everyone on earth. Oh yes, Robert Burns knew beauty. And hers blazed like a star in the centre of his universe. But her beauty was only a sliver of the whole, and he knew this like any supplicant understood the awe and might of the thing he worshipped.
She was brilliant and shining, hard like diamonds, but soft too, sometimes, in her heart. Or what she had of one. She’d gone to war for centuries, advancing up the ranks until she became the commander. The Fae, it must be understood, had no need of an army until those times; since the beginning of their existence, only skirmishes had been fought, never wars. The Fae Opium Wars were the equivalent of The Great War of the humans, the War to End All Wars, in the world of the Fae. For the first time, monsters had to find common ground. For the first time, monsters had to slink out from underneath beds, out from closets, slithering from their hiding places in the alleys and the haunted houses of the earth.
And she had been a part of it, perhaps even the cause of it; a monster never much concerned with the mayfly lives of the little humans rushing to and fro, as she sat enthroned in her dress of green silk and chiffon, uncaring and timeless, lichen growing under the rocks of the waterfalls in the high Highlands where no human had set foot in generations. She was eternal and forever, a memory of what once was Scotland and what might yet be.
Of all the world’s monsters, she was one of the eldest. She, and one other.
She’d breathed the Smoke that would lead to war with little care for its effect on others. What were they to her, these little human creatures? She was timeless, ageless, ancient; an old god.
And yet, when she did join the War, the great Fae war over the Smoke, she fought on the human side.
Oh, she would say it was entirely selfish; without humans, without the young men she kept in a clutch around her, writhing and helpless in sexual pleasure while she fed, there would be no more food for her, so why would she want to see that race die out? It would be a sort of painful suicide, but no real release for a creature that could not die.
She was not good, not on the face of it. But there was something else in it, something else that lie beneath her giving up the Smoke for good and replacing it with human forms of tobacco, something in the reason she smoked incessantly because it was the best way to assuage her addiction, poor replacement though it was.
She did not have a reason to feel genuine affection for humankind, like the selkies or the merfolk.
And yet, she was the greatest general of the Great War, steely-eyed and strong, ever watchful.
She had no reason to fight on the human side other than a conviction that fighting to keep the humans safe was the right thing to do.
He’d first met her when she was a soldier; she said she couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t. By that time, the Great Opium War had raged for human centuries.
He’d discovered, then, that she wasn’t human; that she wasn’t even really she. He knew the thing that called itself Desdemona was only human-shaped when stared at directly. He’d caught glimpses of her eldritch self out the corner of his eye, monstrous-dark and smoke-scented, great tendrils easing into the air. She was Death become mortal, danger beyond human ken. And he’d turn quickly, to catch a proper look, and there was Desdemona, all still like a pond at night, waters hiding horrors below, but so like a woman in grace and form he doubted his own senses, as she quirked an eyebrow at him, arched over one green eye.
The terror he felt when he saw her true form in only the vaguest of outlines told him he would not survive the full view. He knew all this, and yet he was drawn to her, bound to her, body and soul, in a way that promised to devour him while he enjoyed every moment of it, in a way some might call a curse, but he called a blessing.
“What are you doing Robert?” she’d ask, when she caught him staring. Nervous, he’d fiddle with the frayed edges of his sleeves, a smile playing at the corners of his lips, unable to meet her eyes. Despite his confidence with most women, Desdemona always made him feel like an awkward, shy teenager again. She spoke in a deep, rich voice that hid both smile and sarcasm, never using the diminutive Rabbie he’d gotten used to after all these centuries, and she was always puzzled by him, this strange creature whose devotion she could not understand.
“Away with the faeries,” he’d reply, and smile, because wasn’t that the truth?
And here she was with him again, after all this time, smoking calmly and regarding him with that same quirked brow, that same cool emerald gaze, cold as the facets of that gemstone. And he fell again, as he had never really stopped falling. Years and years, miles on miles, a yawning chasm between them, and the wound of losing her closed over as if he were as impermeable in heart as he was in skin, in the dead blood of his unbeating heart, and his great moon eyes beheld only Des.
Des, Des, Des, thrummed the heartbeat he didn’t have, this creature of his eternal affection, this horror that dissolved into smoke at the edges of his vision, this monster he kept trying to catch in his peripheral so that he could see the thing to whom he would sacrifice his undead life. Despite knowing any real glimpse of it would destroy him, he persisted, like a moth to a flame, helpless, wanting, waiting.
“Hello Robert,” it said, she said, Desdemona said; smoke-breathing and solid and real and waiting for his reply as his heart broke once more, even as it mended.
Robert found that he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
It was laughable, really, for a man who had charmed his way into the beds of so many women, first over his human lifetime and then over the centuries, to be at a loss for word
s.
“Desdemona,” he said, finally finding his voice, speaking the only word that mattered. It came out strangled and cracked.
“Yes.”
He watched her, unsure if he was angry, upset, relieved or disappointed. The club around them was loud and raucous, but to him it was as silent as the grave. He took in everything—the long red hair she should have had when they first met, her white face, her bright green eyes and the contours of her cheekbones, the clothing she wore. He drank in her presence and could not believe she was close enough to touch, the same woman, but not the warrior he’d met and fallen for.
Now that the war was over, she returned to what she’d always loved. Dancing. The baobhan sith loved nothing more than the dance.
She drew long on her hookah pipe and exhaled like a dragon.
“You never came back,” he said, half question, half accusation, the anguish raw in his voice.
“I know,” she said. A small smile touched her mouth.
“It’s been years,” he carried on, reaching for her hand. She did not offer it to him, and he withdrew.
“I searched everywhere for you,” he said, the fire lost from his voice, tinged wild with desperation, “Countless years. No one knew what happened to you.”
“I assume you know now.”
“Yes, Dorian told me,” he said, and saw her eyes flash at the mention of his name. “Arrested and exiled for running opium during the Fae Wars.”
“I didn’t,” she said simply.
“I know,” Robert returned.
He watched her with enormous eyes, wide and bright, lit somehow from within.
Desdemona lapsed into silence again, returning the favour, as she smoked.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he asked, “It’s been so long.”
“I’m glad you’re still alive, Robert Burns,” she said quietly, and shrugged.
Her green eyes flickered to meet his, and he was staring at her with adoring eyes.
“Oh for God’s sake, don’t start that again,” she said, dismissive.
And in that dark forest pool of soft, still water within him, where her presence at last had calmed him, suddenly came the rage of the waterfall, and of the flood.
“There is a statue of me on every corner, across this entire country,” he cried. “You knew I’d be searching!”
Desdemona just smoked at him.
“I – I stayed in the Highlands,” he went on, “in the mountains, away from the sun! I tended bar, I guarded the door to Faerie, I – I took precautions! Just in case!”
He put his face in his hands, miserable. He would not cry in front of her. He refused.
When he composed himself, he looked up, only to find himself falling, again.
“I’m not human,” she said.
Robert reached across the table for her hand. She removed it.
“Neither am I,” he said gently. “Not anymore.”
“But you never changed,” she said, amused, and Robert’s eyes narrowed.
“I mourned you!” Robert said, a terrifyingly desperate note in his voice again. “For years!”
Desdemona’s exasperation was tangible. “Well, that was foolish. It’s not like I left you for a long time. Just went round the corner to the shops, as you’d say.”
“Thirty-seven years isn’t going round the shops, Des!” Robert cried.
Desdemona leaned forward.
“I owe you nothing,” she snarled, and Robert, unable to respond, hid his face in his hands again. Desdemona relented a little, her bright green eyes flashing amidst the smoke wreathed around her shoulders like a shawl.
“I’m here now,” she said, a bit more gently. “I have to close up.”
Robert lifted his eyes to hers again.
“Can I see you again tomorrow?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound pathetic.
He did.
Desdemona sighed out in a column of smoke that faded with the stars.
“Sure,” she said, “why not.”
Robert stood up and nodded to her, and she watched him walk away.
He left Desdemona’s club, singing to himself, light in the heart for the first time in decades.
And full of ancient hunger.
***
The night, as always in Glasgow, was orange and black, red sandstone and sodium lights, a Celtic Hallowe’en in a city older than it looked. A shipbuilding powerhouse before that industry moved abroad, a city ravaged by the bombings of the war, the echoes of poverty and drug addiction in its old tenement halls, a sawdust-on-the-floor working man’s city, it smelled of breweries and industry and the tang of sick on the chill damp night air.
Despite lacking the romance of the Highlands or the old-lady stateliness of Edinburgh, Glasgow had a strength and power all its own.
The rain fell over the Glasgow streets, colouring the night black and tinting the red sandstone buildings the colour of blood, the scent of Tennent’s Brewery on the midnight air.
Down a narrow side street, a young man and a blonde woman were coming to the end of their relationship. After a final heated exchange, the blonde turned away, pulling out her mobile and tapping out a well-worn number. Her lips and fingernails were an exclamation of red in the darkness as she walked on alone, her umbrella merely an afterthought in defence against the weather.
“Yeah,” she said into her mobile, “Said he didn’t have time for me, or the baby. Yes, I told him. Guess he should’ve thought about that before he—”
A strange noise caught her attention, halting her step.
“O, wert thou in the cauld blast
on yonder lea, yonder lea...
my plaidie tae the angry airt...
I’d shelter, shelter thee.”
The soft song insinuated itself between the cracks and moss, the echoes reverberating off the walls until it faded into nothingness.
The woman took a step back from the darkness of the alley in front of her.
“Can I come by your place?” she asked into the phone, gripping the umbrella tighter. “Freaking myself out here ... thanks.”
She turned heel and marched back the way she’d came, knowing—as anyone knows—that blonde women and dark alleys do not mix. The young man, her former suitor, was unfortunately not a blonde woman, and therefore did not know any better. He only hesitated a moment, before he turned around, reconsidering taking this path instead of walking on down the broad, amber-lit street, before two long, white arms reached out to snatch him.
And so he learned the hard way that there are times and places where men hold all the cards, but they are only cardboard after all, and can just as easily be knocked away to scatter in the wind. The fierce whisper in his ear about abandoning women was the last he would ever know. He had time to register one more emotion—regret—before his blood was drained, and his body dropped in a heavy heap into the gutter, just another casualty of a dark Glaswegian alley, nothing much to see here, happens every night.
In the moonlight, for a moment, a man was revealed; handsome and pale, with shining jet-black hair and great moon eyes glowing whisky-gold in the silver shadows. He wiped at the blood on his lips, those lips so sensuously divine, lips that once spoke poetry to the world and in the shell-ears of the women, a man who decided his only victims would be men who did wrong by the fairer sex, as poetic an existence as he, vampire, could possibly hope for in a modern age devoid of lyrical living.
In the alley, in the moonlight, Scotland’s most famous son grinned to himself, and walked on into the night.
CHAPTER ONE
THE LIFE OF A PLOUGHMAN
There wasn’t much Robert Burns didn’t know about the life and times of an Ayrshire farm.
The eternal cycle of it, living, dying, harvest, ploughing, sun up, sun down, not much variety came to visit him in his life. The young women, bright stars in his sky, were the first inclination he had that he was not quite like other young men. Poetry, passion, love, certainly this was what the world was made for
; the world, to Robert Burns, being the Ayrshire coast to Mauchline. He’d heard of Glasgow and Edinburgh, of course; and even far-off London, but these places may as well have been in other galaxies for all that the son of a small tenant farmer would have use for them. No, Robert’s fate was this same unending circle of birth-life-death yearly until he too would die bent over the plough, like those from time out of mind before him.
It was Robert’s great and fervent hope that he would find adventure, and a love worth sacrificing himself for; after all, it was a sight better than sacrificing himself for the plough like his father and grandfather before him. He saw them, his ancestors, stretched backward and forward through time, as one does when holding a mirror up against another. The recursion of farm life made him shudder, but what else could he do? He was simply Robert Burns, dirt poor and destined to marry dirt poor to keep the neverending cycle going, to attract a plain hardworking wife, and never taste the other glories of the world. For it wasn’t riches or fame or gold or renown that Robert craved, but a love that he could drown in.
Little did he know, poor Ayrshire peasant, that some Fae or another with a sense of humour would grant his wishes in the manner all Fae grant theirs: with an irony both dramatic and literal.
***
Robert pushed the door of the tavern open. He rubbed his single sad coin between his finger and thumb in his pocket, where he clutched at it in fear of losing the coin through the holes in the ratty old fabric. It wasn’t much money, but it would provide him with a few drinks if he paced himself. He went to the bar to place his order.
Standing there was a man with bright ginger hair tied back tightly and a military bearing. He was still wearing his uniform, so definitely military, although Robert could not place the branch. Intense green eyes observed him, favouring Robert with a once-over that seemed somewhat lecherous on the face of it, but Robert thought he was probably imagining things.