Page 33 of Veil of Blood and Bone

I slip away from broken tents and ruined pathways. Away from noise and life and the thick pulse of blood calling like desire.

All paths rise to meet main street. Cobblestone snakes up to reeking asphalt holding desperately onto the heat of the day. The town pretends at normalcy with burger shops, antique malls, names that mean nothing to me except the distance between her and everything else.

Helene lives in a rickety, leaning Victorian held together by habit more than structure.

The raven’s trace lingers, but he’s gone now, always out of reach. He takes the scent of human food with him, though the rustle of night black feathers is close.

He won’t go far. He never does.

Helene’s shadow cuts across the cluster of windows in her living room. Wistful, wanting. She’s longing for something she hasn’t been able to identify this time.

Wren is always the first to draw her. How long has he been watching and waiting in this place, this time? I’m the last and the latest.

Better if I don’t find her at all.

Her silhouette disappears from the window and minutes later, the front door yawns open, and the woman with the sunshine hair traverses the steps to the sidewalk. She sniffs, hunching in on herself, checking left and right on the street.

“It's not safe to walk alone,” I mutter.

This town has more to worry about than predators on two legs. Or trolls. The weight of history and loss drowns on the entire county, a thin place none have recognized yet.

Helene shrugs her jacket into a more comfortable position and takes off from the Victorian. The light is still on from her apartment, her sister tucked in for the night.

So where is Helene going?

I trail her on her lonely stroll, stopping when she does. She bends down at the side of a yard and picks several late season annuals, mums, and New England asters from a dying bed.

A swift yank tugs the blooms free.

There’s only me to see the theft. And the bird. Right now, even his energy signature is distant and distracted.

A hint of a smile peels my upper lip over fangs. “Perfect.”

Helene clutches her stolen bouquet against her chest. The sidewalk cuts in two different directions and she jaywalks to the overgrown grass on the opposite bank.

Harsh, cold spikes of wrought iron cordon off the graveyard behind it. Helene vaults over the gate without rattling the chains locking the entryway for the night.

Here, the stench of must and rot combine with the dull dryness of aged bones. The citizens of the Nightshade Hollow Memorial Cemetery rest, most of them easy, some of them not. I’ve found that the only souls who walk through life uneasily are the living.

Soon enough, she will join them.

It was never supposed to be me. And yet it always is.

Fangs lower and prick my lip, sharp and eager.

She cuts through the burial ground on the same worn path as hundreds of other feet. Leaves and lichen cover the stones, obscuring the winding way between gravestones. There are no lights here to show the way over the River Styx.

Wrong mythology.

My senses lift to high alert but it’s only the two of us, and only one is aware of the other.

She kneels beside a simple grave, the stone small compared to the behemoths around it. The rounded top of the marker makes it look as though it’s already been chewed, worn down to a nub.

I stop alongside an obelisk, my eyes tracing familiar lines. I’ve never met her. And still I know her too well.

Not just because I’ve loved her but because I’ve ended her. Again. And again.

Fingers clench, and I hold my breath, not needing to breathe.