by Krista Walsh
“You demand my trust and then try to poison me?”
Confusion cut through Gabe’s panic, and he pushed back on her shoulders. “What are you talking about?”
“This swill you gave me. It burns!”
Gabe stared into the glass and swallowed down a laugh. “It’s not poison. It’s alcohol.”
Ligeia hesitated, then her face smoothed into porcelain again, although her eyes remained wide with shock. “It’s not fitting for a lady of my status to drink hard liquor.”
He pressed on her shoulders to ease her into the futon and held out the glass. “Times have changed since you’ve been away. Besides, I think your situation calls for something unconventional, don’t you?”
She stared into the glass, her shock fading into curiosity. He raised the glass and she took a second slow sip. Her face scrunched with displeasure that soon transformed into wonder. “This is not as foul the second time around.”
“Good,” said Gabe. “It’ll sort out that shiver of yours in no time. Although I don’t understand how you’re cold. Wasn’t this whole storm because of you?”
She raised her chin and said nothing, but Gabe spotted the fear deep in her gaze and realized her trembling didn’t come from the temperature. Was it only because of John? What could she be afraid of?
“I don’t understand how the storm is this bad,” she said. “I’ve shifted temperatures before, but never to this extent. I don’t know how it happened.”
He said nothing as he helped her finish the glass, then he topped it up, set it aside and crossed the room to his collection of boxes. Although she hadn’t responded to his earlier offer, he assumed she’d rather have less weight on her limbs.
He rifled through the boxes for a small leather pouch. He’d kept it near his hunting knife, but so many photographs and papers had collapsed inside the box that he had to tip the contents onto the floor to find it.
He opened the pouch flap and ran his fingers over the contents lined up within. The pouch once contained the small tools that his father used for the more finicky jobs in his workshop, like detailing the birdhouses he crafted from scratch. The smell of sawdust lingered in the leather. Now it held various lockpicks and accessories from Gabe’s less-than-angelic teenage years.
He brought the pouch over and set to work on the old rusted shackles around Ligeia’s wrists. John had said they weren’t meant to be removed easily, but Gabe didn’t let that stop him from trying. The rust on the hinges told him the metal was susceptible to time, so maybe it would give way under some good old-fashioned manipulation.
Ligeia said nothing as he worked, but her gaze bored into the top of his head. He wondered what she would do if he relaxed his guard for a single moment. Would his kindness earn him mercy, or did the new chains he’d trapped her with earn her hatred instead?
He didn’t know where he sat on that question, himself.
After a few minutes of fiddling, he released the shackle around her left wrist, and she hissed as he tugged it free. Underneath the metal, her skin was raw and scarred. Blood beaded on the surface where some skin had come away with the rust, and Gabe cringed, his stomach turning.
“I’ll clean that up after,” he said.
Careful, he told himself. Pity won’t do you any good if it sucks you into her trap. Listen to what she has to say, but remember what she’s done.
He clung to that advice as he moved to her right wrist.
Once her wrists were free, he rearranged the new chain to offer her hands a bit more freedom. He handed her the glass and said, “Now, hold out your legs and I’ll get these shackles off your ankles while you drink.”
Ligeia drew in a sharp gasp. “You wish to see my legs?”
Gabe stumbled over her objection, which was so out of place with what he expected to hear from a bloodthirsty siren who had just attempted to lure a parade of men to their deaths. His mouth opened and closed, and he pressed his lips together to stop the movement. His mind scrabbled for an answer that wouldn’t offend her sensibilities, but the fact that he was dealing with a woman who had essentially stepped into his world from two hundred years ago was too surreal to wrap his head around.
“I promise my intentions are not untoward,” he said. “I just want to unlock these chains.”
After another long hesitation, she nodded. He knelt down in front of her and slowly moved his hands toward her feet. She did nothing to stop him. He noticed a subtle tension when his fingers brushed her frozen stockings, but she clasped her glass against her chest and watched as he slid a lockpick into the mechanism.
As soon as the chain fell to the floor, its rattle echoing through the small space, Ligeia gasped and flexed her toes, rolling her ankle in a slow circle.
“The other one,” she said in a rushed hush, and Gabe set to work, pretending not to notice as tears pooled in her large eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
Finally, the whole chain tumbled to the floor with a clatter, and Gabe set it aside so he wouldn’t trip on it. Even for him it was heavy to carry; he couldn’t imagine the pain she had suffered being caught in it for so long. A hint of guilt trickled through the back of his mind that he had done nothing but replace her old chains with new ones, but he pressed that voice down.
Seven men are dead and hundreds more were about to join them. She left me no choice.
“Lean forward and I’ll take the collar off, too,” he said, and he realized that in spite of what he was telling himself, his tone remained gentle and soothing.
Ligeia kept her gaze on the window as Gabe bent forward to get a better angle, making sure to come in from the side so he didn’t crowd her. If she lunged at him, he didn’t want to be within biting range. His wrist was still throbbing from her last taste.
The final chain fell away. To keep his thoughts away from the devilry of what John had done,he splashed a bit more whiskey in her glass and watched her take a few more sips. Only then did he gather the chains up to dump them into the large trash can beside the front door. They landed with a dull clang. Once they were out of sight, he ran his fingers under the hot water in the kitchen sink, his skin feeling dirty from the contact.
“I had forgotten what it felt like not to have those on,” Ligeia said, rubbing her neck. Her skin was covered in pale white lines where the collar had worn through her flesh, but it didn’t bleed the way her wrists did. She clutched her drink tighter and gulped the rest of it.
“You might want to slow down,” he said. “It’s not like you’re working on a full stomach, and I don’t see you as the get-drunk-and-party type.”
Her lips turned white with anger, and when she spoke, her words came out as barely more than a growl. “Perhaps it’s time I step into that role. I have spent my entire life being proper, and my only reward was to be punished by the people who taught me to be so.”
“How did they punish you?” Gabe asked. He returned to the living room, grabbed his whiskey, and sat down on the floor next to the radiator. He leaned his head against the wall to stare at Ligeia and appreciated how different she looked now that she was away from the ice and those old rusted shackles were gone. Her shoulders were drawn back, and she’d raised her chin with a dignity she retained even after all that time underwater. His curiosity to hear her side of things grew, but he reminded himself not to trust everything she said. She knew the stakes and would no doubt spin her story to try to turn him to her side.
“What did the jinni tell you?” she asked.
“His version,” Gabe replied. If he was going to gauge the truth of her story, he wanted her going in cold.
Ligeia held out her glass. Gabe leaned forward to fill it with a finger, then returned to his place against the wall and rolled his own whiskey glass between his burned palms.
She sipped the drink and hugged her blankets around her shoulders.
“I arrived in town in 1783,” she said. “New Haven wasn’t much at the time, but it was growing. I’d heard about the quarry and the men coming to work it, w
hich is why I came. I’d stayed too long in my last town by a number of months and didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I’m not normally…ravenous,” she said, flicking her gaze toward his. The blue had faded and now swirled through her natural white irises. “I only take what I need and can go months between feedings. I’d even trained myself to enjoy human food and drink, so it would be easier for me to go undetected as I passed from town to town.”
Gabe narrowed his eyes, wondering where that supposed restraint had shown itself over the last couple of weeks. For now, he sipped his drink and kept his mouth shut.
“I intended the same for New Haven,” she said. “Usually I only stay in one place for two years or so, but this time…” Her pale cheeks flushed a soft pink, and she dropped her gaze to her hands. “I met a man. Unfortunately, someone else had already grown attached to me.”
She delivered the words as though revealing a scandal or a great epiphany, but Gabe took it in stride. When hadn’t love thrown a wrench in the best-laid plans?
“By necessity, I live a solitary life, so relationships are far from ideal, but the second of these men asked me to marry him. He promised me riches and told me that all of my dreams would come true.”
Although she spoke of dreams, her tone was flat and bitter. Gabe tilted his head to watch her as she stared into her glass, her gaze hardening with anger. Her knuckles turned white as her grip tightened, and he was halfway to his feet to take the glass away before she smashed it when she set it down on the coffee table and intertwined her fingers in her lap.
“That was the jinni,” she said. “John. He’d fallen in love with me, you see, and wanted me as his own. The problem was that I had already fallen in love with someone else. A strange experience, something I’d never felt before — never even imagined I could feel.” A faint, sad smile touched the corners of her lips. “The trouble was this man didn’t love me back.”
“A classic love triangle,” Gabe said. Although the pop culture expression was familiar on his tongue, he had no personal experience with it. Or any kind of love, for that matter.
He took a sip of his drink to wash down the bitterness.
“Other women might have leapt at the chance to marry the richest man in town, but it was hardly an ideal situation for me,” said Ligeia. “I was heartbroken, but I couldn’t let Robert go, no matter what John offered. I held on to the hope that he would change his mind and realize I was the woman he wanted.” She huffed a dry laugh. “But as it usually happens, wishes rarely come out the way you want them to.”
She rolled her gaze toward the window and Gabe’s attention followed. The snow had begun again, but now without the raging wind and flying ice. Would John have noticed the difference? He thought of the messages on his phone and wondered if they weren’t all from Percy.
But checking could wait a few more minutes.
He looked back to Ligeia as she sagged against the futon cushion. Her hard stare softened with memories, and when she spoke again, her voice came across the layers of time as she sifted through them to remember.
“At the time, I had taken on a job nursing for the quarry men. I found it the easiest way to claim meals without people looking at the deaths too closely, and I could feed on those who would likely not have survived anyway. Then one day, it was Robert that got sick. It should have been a simple illness, the kind that only lasts a couple of days, but for some reason it gripped him hard. He had no one else. I nursed him, but nothing I did worked. John came to me one day while I was caring for him. He stood over my shoulder and promised me he could save Robert if I agreed to marry him.”
She grimaced, as though the decision were as fresh in her mind as if it had happened yesterday.
“I couldn’t deny him. As much as I loved Robert, I wanted him to live more than I wanted to be with him, so I agreed to the arrangement. And I would have held true to that deal. I might be many things, but I’m not an oath breaker.”
“So what happened?” Gabe asked.
More tears welled in her eyes, but she blinked them away without letting them fall. “Robert improved daily. He got color back in his cheeks, and his eyes saw the world again instead of what the fever had shown him. He saw me. As the days passed, I knew that he saw me clearer and clearer, until by the end of the week, he told me he’d fallen in love with me. He asked me to marry him.”
She laughed ruefully, and Gabe’s heart clenched with the pain of it. He bit down on his tongue to anchor himself to the fact that her entire tale could be false.
She’s had a long time to rehearse this performance, he thought. But if she was acting, she was good.
“Everything I’d wanted had come to pass, but I’d made a deal with a jinni, and now my greatest wish could never be fulfilled. In a pathetic twist of fate, I turned Robert down. I was already betrothed to another. Everything should have ended there, but John learned of Robert’s feelings. He grew jealous knowing that there was a man who felt something real for me instead of a simple desire to possess me, and the fact that I returned those feelings made it worse. It didn’t matter that I had pledged myself to him and had no intention of running. He would only be satisfied if the connection between Robert and me was broken.”
Falling silent, she reached for her glass. She brought it to her lips, but lowered it again without drinking. Her gaze jumped around the room before landing on the coffee table, her stare so intense Gabe worried she would set it on fire.
He ducked his head to catch her attention, and her stare redirected to the center of his sunglasses.
“John killed Robert. To the end, he claimed he had nothing to do with it, but I know his kind and I understood the smugness of his regret when he broke the news to me. Robert was struck down by a return of his fever — something anyone in town might have believed, considering how ill he had been. But I’d witnessed his recovery. The fever had left him, his breathing had improved. I’ve seen people relapse in their illnesses, but never when they had come so far out of them. No, John killed him, and I accused him to his face.”
Gabe wrapped his fingers tighter around his glass to avoid the temptation of reaching out to comfort her. Her eyes burned blue and her teeth sharpened as anger swept through her. His heart jumped into his throat and jogged against his ribs, and his hands turned clammy against the glass. Instinct urged him to back away, but he remained still. Her anger was not directed at him.
“I attacked him, threatened to denounce him to the guardians, but he just laughed at me. He set his wolfhounds after me and bound me with magic. The chains came afterward. I fought, and my wrists and ankles bled, but he never let me go. For a while, he kept me in his cellar. He said if he couldn’t have me as his wife, he would keep me as a pet. He would train me to be his loyal companion and earn my treats.”
She shuddered, and Gabe’s stomach churned.
“But I didn’t stop. I was what I was, so I sang. Men from the surrounding neighborhood broke into his home and came for me. He killed some, sent the others away, and that’s when he brought me to the quarry.”
A shiver ran through her and left her trembling. Gabe rose off the floor, grabbed another blanket from the closet, and draped it around her. His fingers brushed against hers for a brief moment. She jerked away, but then wrapped her hand around his. He sank onto the futon beside her and allowed her to hold on to him.
This is stupid. Her words are playing you the same way her song did. Keep your distance.
But the pain in her voice kept him at her side, and he shushed the part of him urging him away.
“Maybe it had been his plan all along, or maybe he’d designed it in case his first plan failed, but the metal hoops had already been driven into the base of the quarry. He had his men stuff their ears with cotton so they couldn’t hear me. He told them I had been the one to start the sickness that had taken so many people over the last couple of weeks. That I was nothing more than a witch trying to ensnare them all. Foolish men, they believed him. The women believed him when
he said I was out to steal their husbands, to seduce them and take their souls for the devil. Women I had baked with and cared for in childbirth stood on the edges of the quarry and threw stones at me as their husbands chained me to the floor. Then they left me there, knowing I would die alone.”
She squeezed Gabe’s hand tighter. His heart raced as he lived through the moment with her, and fury set his blood on fire. He wished he had been there to tear them all to pieces. He pulled his anger back, binding it in its restraints.
“The men blasted the dam that divided the quarry from the sea. It wasn’t quick — the quarry was long and so large — and I heard the rumble long before I saw the wave. The earth shook as the ocean poured in. And then it hit me and everything went black. The water filled me, became part of me, and I was nothing more than a prisoner at the bottom of the river.”
She brushed her eyes with the pads of her fingers and raised her chin. “I wish that had been my last memory. That my life had been swept out of me with the wave. Unfortunately, my species was made to live underwater, so no matter how hard I begged for death, believing I would never see the sun again, it never came for me. I heard sounds overhead as the industry changed and the river filled with boats and logs and fish. Creatures came and nibbled at my skin and my hair. For years I tried screaming, hoping someone might hear me and let me out, but no one ever did. I forgot what hunger meant, my body was so wasted without any sustenance. If I couldn’t die, I prayed for madness so at least I wouldn’t be aware of passing time, but that escaped me, too. Finally, I just gave up and sat at the bottom of the river, unable to stand, unable to lie down. My muscles screamed for freedom as much as my soul cried for mercy, but neither was to be found.”
Gabe growled and released her to stand up and pace the room. Despite his best efforts, white hot anger burned under his skin. He’d always seen himself as the monster in a world of good people, but Ligeia’s story hammered home that humans were no better or worse than the other species they shared the world with. Any of them could become monsters.