by Heather Knox
The one defending their position on the Council may instead participate by champion, if another on the Council will take up the cause. This allows a Council within a territory to demonstrate the solidarity of their bond.
As it is written, so shall it be chosen.
IV. The Privilege of the Eldest of the Council of Keepers
It remains the privilege of the Eldest of the Council of Keepers to veto or hand-down a decree, so long as it upholds the vision of the First Ones and the purpose of the Council of Keepers.
As it is written, so shall it be.
I TAKE A DEEP BREATH BEFORE SLUMPING TO THE tile. I trace the paths of grout. Probably this had been beautiful once, before the cracking and the mold. Caius returns early, bends down to offer me a mug of hot Earl Grey with his one good hand. For a moment I think Zeke has returned, that it’s all part of one of our elaborate personal rites.
“Zeke said once that it soothes you.”
I nod, staring into the mug. I inhale. Though we can’t eat or drink, the ritual of making a cup of tea helps me burn nervous energy. Holding the hot mug between my corpse-cold hands and inhaling the steam helps me focus. Sometimes the steam scalds. I welcome the sharp pain. I never told Zeke that it reminds me not of my Becoming or my Binding, but of the time before, the life I can’t remember living.
I try to ask What do they want with me? but I haven’t spoken in so long the words become a sort of growling bark. Caius chuckles and tosses me something he pulls from his worn leather jacket: a blood donation bag. O-. The universal donor—though it doesn’t matter for one of the Everlasting, some develop specific tastes as a mortal might with wine. I wonder where he got it but don’t ask. I bite one of the valves and take a long sip, feigning, for a moment, delicacy. Then the hunger overtakes me and I drain the bag, licking my lips. Cold blood, as it is called, satisfies only the need for sustenance and does not sate the Beast’s more savage impulses. My pupils dilate. My fangs emerge from my gums. I sniff the air. Their takeout containers, their garbage-filled alleyways, their sweat, gasoline. I think for a moment I can smell the stars. Zeke taught me how to rein in the urges that now bubble to the surface, a gamble Caius shouldn’t have made unless he and Zeke were indeed close and spoke of my training. I’m breathing heavily, a habit from my mortal days now taken the form of the predator. I will my fangs to retract. I close my eyes, unclenching the empty PVC bag.
“You need to hunt,” Caius scolds.
“Why have you returned?” I cough a couple times before I’m able to finish the question. My voice sounds like ocean echoing in a sea cave, though I’m sure only to me. Before Zeke’s death, Caius hadn’t visited the city for at least a decade, preferring quieter surroundings less steeped in the politics of the Everlasting.
Caius considers me before answering.
“A long time ago Zeke asked me to look after you if something should happen to him.”
“Because I need to be looked after?” I challenge.
“Because you have not been granted autonomy,” he explains. “It was not meant as an insult. Zeke knew you were more than capable of looking out for yourself. Besides, this was a long time ago.”
“When?”
He sighs and sits in the overstuffed chair.
“I really didn’t intend to have this conversation right now, but if you insist . . . Shortly after your Becoming.” Shortly, of course, being relative when you are one of the undying.
“So you were close?”
“Like brothers.”
I study him a moment before continuing, skeptical. “If you were like brothers—”
“—why didn’t you see more of me?”
I nod.
“He loved me like a brother, but his love for you was even deeper. He was deep undercover in the Praedari pack but seemed to trust them more with you than he did the Keepers. Still, I served as liaison between him and the Council, until the raid that wiped out that pack. Then he informed the Council of your Becoming.”
“Were you a part of the raid?”
“I was. I visited the two of you frequently during your Ritus Iungendi,” he starts, using the old Latin name to refer to my Rite of Binding. “I’m not surprised you don’t remember.” I shake my head, the truth feeling familiar despite evading memory—why he felt so familiar, why my Beast wasn’t rattled by the presence of another predator in my intimate space. He saw me at my most vulnerable, imprinting even through the haze of my Binding.
“But—”
“He trusted me with your secret, but only after trusting me with his life more than once. Still, he knew my Beast yearned to roam outside the confines of the city, that my being here too long would erode the predator in me.”
“How long will you stay?”
“As long as I am needed. I’m here to look after you, as I promised.”
I sob, his presence amplifying the absence that’s consumed me since Zeke’s death. Embarrassed by the sudden show of emotion, I turn my face away. Caius moves to the bed, putting his arm stiffly around me. He is silent for several moments, letting me sob and cry tears of blood onto the shoulder of his jacket.
“He died a good death, Delilah.”
No matter which of the circulating rumors surrounding Zeke’s death he speaks of, I know Caius to be right. There aren’t many ways to kill one of the Everlasting, but often plenty of reasons one might be killed. Whether he infiltrated too deeply into the Praedari ranks or unearthed an ancient secret no one was meant to unearth, he died fighting. By Caius’s statement, I know he knows this, too.
The tea has cooled considerably, my hands having sapped the warmth from both the water and the ceramic. I catch my reflection in its surface. This face that once was beautiful now bears more than the few years I’ve been one of the Everlasting, my countenance, knit of the tortuous Ritus Iungendi and my Becoming, concealing my age.
“Don’t . . . ” he says quietly, cupping my chin to gently tilt my face up to meet his gaze. “You are more than what you’ve been through. You are more than this.”
Some of the Everlasting took to the shadows centuries ago, calling themselves the Keepers and concealing their nature to protect humanity as much as themselves. Why Zeke never mentioned our relationship to Caius I’ll never know—to protect me? Caius? Himself? But because he didn’t, I assumed Caius, like most, did not know why Zeke chose me for the Becoming. Did not know that Zeke miscalculated my strength, or something like it—that he never intended me to survive.
I BREATHE IN DIRT. DARKNESS AND DIRT. IF I AM TO live I have to find up. I claw and claw. Nowhere to move dirt to because I am surrounded by it. I kick and kick and claw and kick. Except dirt holds me in place. I writhe and claw. I think I scream but dirt eats the sound. I eat dirt. I breathe dirt. I become dirt. I am dirt.
Somehow I move in a direction I only pretend to know as up. I think I see a flash of something outpace me. Then dirt. I realize I am seeing, so I keep clawing in the direction I think is up. My fingers graze something soft and cold, a different soft and cold than dirt. Flesh. Another buried like me but unmoving. I scream but the dirt absorbs the sound. I tear at the soil, the musk of earth and decay in my nostrils.
My hand reaches through and past. Cool air. Space. Open. I claw and claw and emerge gasping, coughing, choking except I’m not and somehow I’m alive and not. I do not feel my heart racing though I hear the thump-thump of it. I do not feel fear. Screams, my own, another’s. I cannot tell which screams echo in my head and which resonate in the night. I cannot tell which are my own. I lunge towards something warm and slow. That is the heart I hear.
Hot liquid rushes past my lips, caressing my throat. Some drips down my chin onto my chest. I hear droplets hit the earth, the fresh-tilled soil, like tears on a pillow. Shapes move around me. I feel them but do not see. Only darkness and the liquid which now burns my throat as it fills me. I keep sucking but this vessel yields nothing. I turn.
I lunge but this something is the temperature of night, and fast. I
am aware that someone speaks but I do not understand. A part of me, not me—but, at the same time, all of me—growls and lunges again. I hit the ground hard. No heartbeat but I smell blood. My own, another’s—and his. Everything echoes. I breathe deeply and attempt to focus, pushing down this new part of me that growls and lunges and isn’t me. Swallowing instinct, impulse, I sputter, coughing up dirt. I am lying on the ground on my side. How did I get here? Particles of dirt and droplets of blood spatter the dew-soaked grass.
Someone speaks. I groan and roll onto my back. Echoing turns to spinning. Darkness. Stars. Night. A man’s voice. A man kneels next to me. How long has he been there?
“That’s it. Focus,” the man says. He chuckles, shaking his head. “I didn’t think I’d see you again, Delilah. You’re full of surprises.”
I blink.
“Can you hear me?”
I nod.
“Delilah?”
I stare at him. The name rings in my ears as familiar, but only distantly so.
Delilah. Delilah. Delilah.
I furrow my brow. Why does he keep saying that name?
“Your name is Delilah,” he says, answering a question I did or didn’t ask. “You’re one of the Everlasting now.”
He extends his hand to me to help me sit up. I hesitate, then reach out. When my skin meets his, the world spins again. My eyes widen. He shifts and I feel his arms wrap around me. At first I feel that I’m trembling, becoming earthquake. Then I see myself trembling in this stranger’s embrace. I’ve stepped outside myself.
Then the world shifts again. I turn. Behind me I am trembling in this stranger’s arms, but in front of me four teenagers lie sleeping, tubes like IVs in each of their arms. I cannot see to what they are connected—beyond them I see only the dirt I’ve climbed out from and a mangled shape slumped, surrounded by a dark pool.
I walk towards the wet and smell a familiar metallic tang. In the mirror-like surface stars appear as tiny flecks of light around my face. They flit like fireflies. My hair matted with dirt and my face caked with dark; nausea washes over me. The reflection swirls and changes to that of a beautiful woman, pale, sleeping like the four teenagers but with a thick tube down her throat rather than in her arms like IVs. She feels familiar. Bound at the wrists and ankles. I want to touch her. I think of Snow White. Then of the poison apple.
Time passes.
Her eyes open.
I can feel her hunger.
Where I was embraced I’m now restrained. I snarl. The man restraining me shows no strain, as if I’m made of paper, a weightless thing. Through my anger—anger? hunger? fear? —I think that a strong enough night breeze might take me far away from here forever. An emptiness sets in, yawns on endlessly in only an instant. I snap my jaws at the stranger.
I can hear his voice, but I can’t make out the words. Still, something inside of me calms and I am left babbling about Snow White and the Huntsman, that old fairytale, how he took my liver and lungs. When I breathe in I feel hollow. The smell of soil and blood and cologne, earthy and decaying and metallic and spicy and woody, all emanate from this stranger. From me. From this place. My focus shifts to what I can see: a cemetery, freshly clawed-up soil in a few places, just a few feet from one another. The discolored fingers of a rogue hand poke up from the dirt like pale crocuses, another like me but who did not emerge from the mass grave as I did. A few feet away another mangled shape slumps against a low mound of dirt, into which a shovel has been plunged so it stands erect, a sort of flag. I get the sense I’ve conquered something but I’m not sure what. A dark pool has gathered around the slumped form. My eyes linger here.
“There,” I say in a voice much more my own. “That’s where I saw her.”
“Who?” the man asks.
“Snow Wh—a woman. She had a tube down her throat and someone bound her to a bed.”
“What else?”
I shake my head. He loosens his grip on me, shifting to kneel beside me, no longer looming, a less imposing posture.
“Delilah, try to remember.”
Tears sting my eyes.
“I—I can’t!”
“Okay! Okay,” his tone softens as he cradles me. “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re here. You had a vision. It’s not here. It can’t harm you.”
Somehow I am soothed, like a child who’s skinned their knee: it still hurts, or the memory of it hurts, until the Band-Aid. The rational part of my brain screams—He’s a stranger! You just climbed out of a grave! He buried you alive! You killed someone! What is going on?—but something in his voice quells the noise. I look up at him with questioning eyes and am lucky that I needn’t form the words.
“I’m Zeke, your Usher—the one that made you a vampire, one of the Everlasting. Tonight was your Becoming. My Usher had visions like you.” Before I can say anything, he continues. “We should go. The others will return soon. The rite is not over.”
He helps me stand.
“Will you let me keep you safe?” he asks, eyes holding my own in their gaze.
“Do I have a choice?”
THE BACK HALF OF THE ART ROOM SERVES AS THE workroom for the school newspaper. Kiley sighs as she enters the empty room, accustomed to only meeting Monday, Wednesday, Friday but as this week’s editor, she wants to get a head start on copyediting. She’s always been a bit of a perfectionist. Not, like, unhealthily so, but enough to irritate other people and always end up the leader in groupwork. That’s why she’s drawn to paranormal investigation—there’s nothing perfect or foolproof when you’re looking for ghosts and sometimes it’s nice to take a break from yourself.
Settling in to begin her edits, she rakes her hands through the thick mess of hair atop her head, wrestling it into something like a ponytail with wisps around her face refusing to be tamed. The corner of a bright pink sticky note sticking out from the stack catches her attention. The note is attached to an article she wrote on the story behind the cursed gymnasium, wherein she debunks the theory as a lame attempt at justifying the fact that their basketball team hasn’t won, or come close to winning, a single home game since 1990—and rarely an away one. They no longer have a cheerleading squad for basketball season because the cost of new uniforms and trips to away games just to cheer for a losing team couldn’t be rationalized as a proper use of alumnae-donated funding. She’s been waiting until her week as editor, knowing that’s the only way she’d get away with such an exposé. Plus her article doesn’t mention God once which is pretty much a sin in a private Catholic school like theirs.
The thing is, though, she never turned in this story. Why would she as the editor this issue? Layout is Friday. Yet, here it is, on Tuesday, attached to her article, in black Sharpie scrawled across neon pink sticky note: “Want proof?”
There’s another pink sticky note underneath this one: “113 Maple Drive. Midnight.” The old church with the schoolhouse across the street, another supposedly haunted site just outside town. People say that if you go there at midnight on the night of the full moon and lie across the street—lined up so that you serve as a sort of bridge between the church door and the door of the schoolhouse—a parade of ghost-children holding hands will walk across you from the schoolhouse into the church to pray. The children, victims of a field-trip bus accident or ritualistic murderers themselves à la Children of the Corn, depending who tells the story, will bring you with them, the parade pausing so the last can hold their hand out to you, beckoning you to join them in death. As usually goes with ghosts, you really don’t have a choice.
Kiley arrives early, having no idea what this proof might relate to—the curse? the budget cuts? the ghost-children?—but no journalist or paranormal investigator would write off a potential source without at least listening to them first, so she waits.
Both buildings long since abandoned and boarded up, only the church shows any sign of visitors. A shutter creaks, having been pried up. A couple beer cans sit on the steps. The schoolhouse, though, remains untouched, pristine save for a
little disrepair brought on by time: paint cracked and peeling, steps sagging and warped from years of sun-rain-snow-rain-sun. Apparently, despite the site’s close proximity to a parochial school, kids sneaking out would rather anger God than some ghost-children.
Not one to waste a good sneaking-out herself, she has grabbed the vintage Nikon FE film camera she got for Christmas and heads up to the church. She snaps pictures, multiples from the same angle, aiming for clarity rather than being artistic. Even if someone on staff is just playing a prank, maybe something interesting will turn up on film to justify her sneaking out at this hour. Especially since there’s a solid chance she’ll get caught and grounded.
She turns her head when she hears a sound not unlike the creaking shutter but from the rear of the church. Camera ready, she slinks around the side of the building. At the corner, she shoves the camera in front of her, angled towards the sound and snaps a picture. Then she follows, stepping around the corner.
Nothing.
She breathes out, relieved, and laughs a little at herself, shaking her head. Glancing at her watch, she notes the time and heads back towards the road. Still no sign of another soul, alive or otherwise, and no other vehicle but hers pulled over on the dirt shoulder. Given the time and distance from town, she doesn’t expect someone to happen upon her. She crosses to the schoolhouse to take more pictures.
Footsteps, not on grass as she is, but sidewalk. She turns to greet the sound, but no one’s there. Unlike most visitors to the site, she doesn’t give wider berth to the schoolhouse, using the same techniques she used for photographing the church. She finds a window where the boards have been nailed leaving a gap not thicker than an iPhone, through which she snaps dozens of pictures, zooming in and back out, adjusting shutter speed and aperture to maximize her chances of catching something on film. Her breath catches in her throat as she feels something move very quickly behind and past her. Spinning around, she scans the area behind her. Not so much as a blade of grass seems disturbed.