Burns Night

by Amy Hoff

  Inevitably, Robert and Desdemona found themselves paired together in the dance. Desdemona smiled up at Robert, a red other than mere lipstick staining her mouth and the tips of her white fingers, where her talons had been retracted just moments before. She gazed up into his warm whisky-coloured eyes, and above the rosy cheeks standing out from his pale white skin. The high colour unique to Robert always seemed to return whenever he’d fed well. It reminded her of when he was an innocent young man, flushed with colour and whisky in a small, inconsequential Ayrshire pub. The promise of the sweet blood beating beneath such pure rose-coloured cheeks meant he had nearly met his death by her hand. One day, that little pub would be famous all over the world because of his name, and not its own.

  Good God, that man is beautiful, Leah said aloud, absolutely transfixed by the scene, but her words fell all around her as if they hadn’t been spoken, like she could not create sound in the room. She wasn’t actually there, after all, but she’d lost the plot when it came to where Robert was, when he was, or what he thought he was doing. She suddenly began to feel concerned that these memories were drawing them deeper and deeper into a mire they couldn’t see.

  We need to get back to Glasgow, she thought. Time to intervene.

  As it turned out, intervention wasn’t necessary.

  “That was a brilliant idea,” Desdemona was saying as the two of them danced together. “We should do that more often. Take only what we need. Keep the humans alive. The same way I bottled their blood to help the people escape after Culloden.”

  Robert smiled down at her, dizzy with the dance, the blood now in his veins, the warmth of the evening, the wine, and the woman-shaped creature in his arms.

  “Did you just pay me a compliment?” he asked, cocked brow and cocky, the ghost of his former self returning to him.

  “Must be the wine,” she said, and returned his smile, green eyes glowing in every facet, reflecting the warmth of the candlelight – and maybe something more.

  They held each other’s gaze for a long moment. Robert held her close, and then dipped her as he went in for a kiss.

  A loud bang interrupted the dance.

  The cool September air blew in, as the door bounced back from the wall.

  “The James Gang’s robbed the Northfield Bank!” shrieked the woman standing in the doorway.

  The band stopped playing. The people turned toward the door, resolute.

  The dance was over.

  Robert hadn’t moved, and still held Desdemona in the same position, as if he were willing the dance to go on regardless. Desdemona stood, disengaging herself from Robert’s arms.

  She started walking towards the door with the rest of the townsfolk. She stopped, and glanced over her shoulder at Robert, who followed her with sad eyes.

  “They’ll live to regret that,” she said, smiling. “I like this town.”

  Robert stood alone in the ballroom, staring after her, the strains of Mary Morison – which he had written for her – playing in his head, and outside of it, louder in the empty ballroom than the waltz had ever been.

  This was his dream, after all.

  Yestreen when tae the tremblin’ string

  The dance gae’d thro’ the lighted ha’

  Tae thee my fancy took its wing,

  I sat, but neither heard nor saw:

  Tho’ this was fair an’ that was braw

  an’ yon the toast o’ all the toon;

  I sigh’d, and said amang them a’ –

  “Ye are na Mary Morison.”

  “So,” said a familiar voice at his shoulder, shattering the illusion. “Almost.”

  Robert looked down at Leah and nodded.

  Apparently, the spell had been broken. For now.

  “Aye,” he said, hearing the morose note in his own voice. “There were a lot of almosts and maybes. Or maybe I imagined it all.”

  “Could be,” said Leah.

  “Anyway. We hunted them down. All of us.”

  “What, the whole town?” asked Leah.

  “Yes. They were a very determined people,” said Robert, smiling at the memory. “Des loved that place.”

  “What happened?” asked Leah.

  Robert just looked at her with his wide, strange eyes.

  He walked to the door, to follow the other townspeople out into the night. He stopped on the threshold, and hung his head.

  “I miss her,” he said fiercely, suddenly. Leah started.

  “She is my whole existence,” he said, “and I found her again. Again, and again, I found her. She hated that.”

  Leah ventured to ask.

  “How?”

  ***

  Desdemona knew, before she saw her. All the air went out of her lungs and she sagged against a post. Her horse nipped at her shoulder and she pushed its head away.

  “Nour.”

  “Hi, Desdemona!” squeaked the phoenix.

  “You’re doing this, aren’t you?” she asked, turning to look into dark brown eyes.

  “I don’t know what you mean?” she said merrily, as if she was only lying to see if it was fun.

  “Damn it, Nour, you can’t meddle in my life like that!” Desdemona said.

  “Why not?” she asked, honestly curious.

  “Because it’s my life, that’s why!” said Desdemona, “How would you like it if I sicced some lovesick human on you?”

  “Ooooh!” cried Nour, clapping her hands, “Do I get one too? Are they difficult to get? I wouldn’t want to put you out. Oh can I have one with your hair, I love your hair!”

  Desdemona stared at her friend and shook her head.

  “But–” Nour said, puzzled, “He isn’t human, Desdemona. Not anymore.”

  Desdemona turned.

  “Don’t you do that,” she said, “Don’t you dare put that on me. He wanted it.”

  “And you gave it to him,” said Nour gently, “Why’d you do that? You’ve never done that before. And there have always been...plenty...of young, handsome men.”

  Desdemona cocked an eyebrow at the insinuation, but Nour just watched her earnestly.

  ***

  Leah joined Robert at the door and silently nodded to him.

  They trailed after the townsfolk in the pitch-black darkness of a Minnesota night. Robert led the way.

  And the world turned again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE NORTHFIELD RAID

  The woods were dark and deep.

  The townspeople walked through the forest in silence. Leah hurried to catch up.

  These woods belonged to them, to the settlers and to the Anishinaabe. They knew how to walk, toe-to-heel, as their Anishinaabe friends had taught them.

  They knew the value of silence when closing in on prey.

  Ahead, the spark and crackle of a fire. It was loud in the silence, the only sound in this forest that had known nothing but myth and mystery for its entire existence. Wild was not word enough, unless ancient married with it.

  There were things here, in this wood.

  Robert finally came up alongside Desdemona. They exchanged glances. Neither spoke.

  Desdemona was the Thing in the Wood, at least this time.

  The James-Younger Gang was well known throughout what would come to be called the Wild West. The small group of men huddled around the licking flames, trusting to the deep of the forest and the dark of the night to keep them well-hidden from prying eyes.

  Here, alone in the forest, Desdemona and Robert reached them first.

  Desdemona had warned Robert. She said they would regret the choice to rob a bank in her favourite place in the New World. Little did the townspeople know the favour Desdemona gifted them with on that night.

  Desdemona had also warned Robert not to watch.

  Of course, with this instruction, Robert could do nothing but watch, breath gracing his open mouth, as Desdemona changed before him.

  White, and pale, and wrong, she disrobed and put her dress aside. Her body shifted wicked monstrous
, the ends of her fingers extended to hard, cruel claws and he knew – a truth that only occasionally swam to the surface of his soul – she wasn’t human. He might have said she wasn’t of this earth, except she was, and of this earth so fiercely, so much more than all other creatures that crawled along the planet’s surface. She was the earth, that eternal destination of all living things, she was every faerie story told to children about why they shouldn’t wander into the forest alone.

  Her body elongated, her teeth sharpened, a skeleton changing beneath stretched-over skin, eyes glowing that unnatural green in a hollowed, skull-like visage as she sank to greet the earth that was one with her. She no longer looked like anything, not outside of the kinds of nightmares cavemen might have. And yet Robert knew that even this form wasn’t quite real, as he thought of those tendrils around her, that version of her he saw in his peripheral vision and turned quickly to catch, but always in vain. Those strange tendrils that were like smoke, but not smoke, and something far darker. She was the death all men feared, she was shadow and light and doubt and terror on the moors, the shape of unknown things from the dawn of time. It was not the first time he had seen this, but it was the time that he held in his memory and his heart, a reminder that she was all thorn and no rose, a reminder that his addiction to her, much like his addiction to drink, was a pyre upon which he would destroy himself, and yet he drew ever nearer to the flames.

  The baobhan sith in Desdemona’s place – or no, he reminded himself, this thing was his Des – tore through the men as if they were paper dolls, and the blood ran so fast out of them he was reminded of something he read somewhere, the blood flowed in the streets high as the horses’ knees. Vampire or not, he had never realised just how much blood there was in a human body until that night.

  America, they often say, is a young country. Too young to have monsters.

  The Anishinaabe, and indeed all the other native nations of the country, would heartily disagree.

  Even those settlers who did not listen to the tales of the native people were still immigrants from foreign lands, and places like Ireland and Germany had monsters enough. No child, regardless of background, grew to adulthood without hearing some tale of a monster living deep in the wood.

  And America is an old land, deep roots in the water, for those who understand. Ancient land does not always mean castles in the sky, but forests that never knew a human footstep, a world far removed from the hand of mankind.

  The James-Younger Gang were criminals, and they were also clever. They knew when to cut their losses and live to rob another day. They needed no further warning than the half-glimpsed attack of their companions in the firelight of the deep wood. Those who had survived ran off through the forest to save their skins, no man among them fool enough to tempt fate.

  As it turned out, the monsters weren’t needed, this time. The townsfolk, led by a single desire, had tracked their progress through the wood and found them.

  Gunshots rang out before the weird horror of a pale creature could be seen scuttling away into the underbrush. Desdemona wanted the people of Northfield to claim a victory all their own. The townspeople cheered when they saw the fallen bodies of those who had dared steal from them. This was a story Desdemona would ultimately leave to them, but she wanted to be certain.

  She liked that town.

  Moments later, it was clear that the leaders of the gang had escaped, but not everyone had been so lucky. Desdemona stood next to Robert as though nothing had happened, her stern female shape beside him as though she were any other kind of human, the high-necked lace barely covering the pinkish stains seeping past the fabric, faint evidence she had been rolling in blood.

  Robert tried to speak and found his voice had deserted him. Absently, he recognised the paralysed feeling in his marrow as abject terror.

  “Let’s get back to the bunkhouse,” Desdemona murmured, and it took everything in him not to turn tail and run.

  ***

  Some years before, Robert had accompanied Desdemona to the mountains. The craggy cliffs of the Highlands, far away from anywhere humans had touched in centuries. It was here he had truly realised for the first time that he was in love with a monster.

  Robert watched as Desdemona moved along the dark rock face. He steadfastly reminded himself that she would not appreciate any prurient interest he took in the fact that she wore nothing, and he kept reminding himself that she was not human, but a monster. He was already having a difficult time coming to terms with the fact that he, too, was no longer a mortal man.

  Soon, however, he needed no reminding. Pale white, all elbows it seemed, she slithered across the rock on her belly. He was startled to see other white heads raise in curiosity, long, sharp talons clicking upon the rock surface. Their eyes were whitish-black, and he realised they were blind. Desdemona crept toward them. They reminded Robert of the strange lizards he had heard of in the tropics that skittered along the walls at dusk, searching for insects. Desdemona’s long shock of ginger hair blazed out from the rest of the environment, and only her eyes remained green, of all her people. He realised how right she had been to hide her identity during the war. Centuries had worn away the stone, a waterfall of time pouring into eternity, and the monsters here were endless too, a part of the living land.

  Crablike, more of the strange creatures emerged from dark overhangs. Only Desdemona among them all even resembled a human being. Their black-blind eyes, their white skin, their long ginger hair were all a half-hearted effort to resemble those they once hunted by walking and dancing among their prey. Now, they were utterly monster. The scritching of their long talons against the rock, as they crawled along the precipice to speak in strange eldritch tongues to the creature he knew as Des, filled him with a deep existential dread.

  And yet he could not tear his eyes away.

  ***

  In the darkness of the bunkhouse, the conversation had taken a turn. Desdemona’s exasperation with Robert had kindled into a bright fire. It was not so long ago that she had cleaned her neck and arms of blood.

  And there was Robert, forever Robert, like the dolorous clanging of a bell.

  They circled each other, cautious like animals.

  Robert’s expression was, as usual, mournful.

  “I wish you’d stop looking at me like that,” he said.

  “Well, I wish you’d stop staring at me like a kicked dog, but we don’t always get what we want, do we,” Desdemona retorted.

  “Des.”

  “I’m not human, Robert!” she shouted, “When are you going to understand this? I am not human!”

  Robert blinked at her.

  “Neither am I,” he said.

  “You’ve been human,” she explained. “I’m not even a woman! Or a man! You had a human life.”

  “I don’t care what you are,” said Robert, “you can still be lonely. I think God is lonely and he’s older than us all.”

  “If there is a God, Robert – “

  “There is.”

  “ – you have no more idea what he or it thinks or feels any more than you do with me!”

  “Then tell me.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me what you think and feel. In all the years I have been with you, never once!” said Robert. “I haven’t heard you once actually tell me anything.”

  “Aside from go live your own life Robert and what are you doing here Robert and?”

  They were moving closer now, still in circles, a centripetal motion drawn in.

  Leah, still along for this ride, but off in the background, suddenly wished she had popcorn.

  “I don’t know what you are, Des,” Robert was saying, “but I loved you the day I saw you and I thought you were a man. I don’t know what that means but I never doubted it once.”

  And here, here he was, so close, close enough to touch her, like at the dance when he had held her in his arms. This was another kind of waltz, but no less familiar.

  “I have never doubted when I
loved.”

  Arrested there, like frozen time, he moved to capture her lips with his own. Finally, and she didn’t move away, and it seemed like she would let him, this time.

  And just as he was about to know the softness of that smile against his own, she slipped away from him again, like sand through his fingers –

  and to his startled confusion, cocked her gun and pointed it toward a dark corner of the room.

  A beautiful, slender young man stepped out of the shadows. Desdemona’s mouth dropped open, all tension with Robert forgotten.

  “Iain?!” she gasped. “How the hell did you survive?”

  The exquisite features of the most beautiful seal who had ever lived were still as arresting as they were on first viewing. His large dark eyes shone in the dim light, framed by long black lashes that were the envy of all seal-kind.

  It was Lieutenant General Iain Grey, Desdemona’s right-hand man.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DESDEMONA

  She had never told them, when she awoke on the side of the loch.

  She had dragged her body as far away from the battlefield as she could, collapsing in a heap in a nearby copse of trees. Occasionally, some forest creature would wander too close, and she would catch it, drinking its blood, slowly regaining her strength. It wasn’t human blood, but it would have to do. Desdemona had no qualms about drinking human blood. She was, at heart, a realist, and understood that her nature did not make her a monster. She did not favour the wholesale destruction of humanity as the Fae wanted it, so enamoured of their relationship with the Smoke that they had forgotten the reason that the Fae were tied to the humans forever, a symbiotic relationship that would suffer if either side were to fail.