“If this is how my teen years were like, then it was fun. I’m so enjoying this,” she mumbled, wiping the blood from her lips. “I bet I’d be a superhero in school. How come they don’t let me go to school?”
“Because you’d end up biting all the yummy boys,” Cerené said from the end of the hall, still wearing her ragged clothes, ashes covering her face. She carried a bucket of water and a broom. She had grown to become a beautiful fifteen year old and still wore her mysterious slippers.
“Cerené,” Snow White found herself smiling.
“Let me clean up the mess, princess,” Cerené said, staring at the blood all over the piano keys.
“It’s not my fault. He was a werewolf, I swear.”
“I saw the whole thing, hiding in the fireplace,” Cerené said. “Let’s pull him out into the Garden of Graves.”
“What’s the Garden of Graves?”
“You don’t know what the royal graveyard is?”
“Oh, I was just joking,” Shew said. “Do you think we should do that?”
“There are a lot of people buried in the Garden of Graves already. I guess they are some of your mother’s victims,” she winked at her, implying she knew about Carmilla’s bathhouse slaughters. “There is room for one more hairy man. Hurry up before your mother sees us.”
Snow White made sure no one was coming and started pulling Mr. Oddly outside. “Let’s bury Mr. Dudley,” she said.
“It’s Oddly,” Cerené laughed.
The two girls struggled pulling the large man out to the garden through the servants’ backdoor. It was nighttime and the only light guiding them was the moon. The Garden of Graves was full of purple and yellow poppies. It was the royal family’s graveyard so it had to look classy, “so this is where I’m going to be buried when I die?” Shew mocked herself. Her family was immortal, so this whole garden was bogus.
“I want to be buried in a lovely place like this with all these flowers,” Cerené said casually then dropped Oddly onto a muddy spot and started digging with a shovel. She was unusually enthusiastic about it. Her smile was lovely, but wicked, and a little weird. The ashes sticking to her face and clothes made her look like someone who was up to no good.
That’s one disturbed childhood you had, Shew!
“I see you love burying people,” Shew commented.
“Werewolves,” Cerené corrected her. “I hate them,” her cheek twitched slightly.
Cerené had tied her blonde hair—with the fiery aura—into a reckless ponytail. It looked like she did it with strings from her broom. Shew wondered why Carmilla allowed one of her servants to look so poor and untidy.
“Next time if you want to scare a werewolf away, use red wine,” Cerené suggested.
“Really?”
“I heard it from an old wise woman in the forest,” Cerené assured her. Shew thought it was absurd.
Cerené sweat as she dug the grave. When she wiped the sweat from her face, she accidentally cleaned some of the ashes away. Shew saw Cerené had cute freckles buried underneath.
Then she saw something else that had been hidden under the ashes: a cut on the lower part of her cheek, running thinly toward her neck.
“What is that, Cerené?” Snow White asked, taking the shovel from her. The cut looked like a torturing wound.
“Why do you always ask about what doesn’t concern you?” Cerené stiffened angrily again. It was a brief but alarming behavior, but alarming. Shew had never seen such a sudden change in someone’s mood.
“I’m sorry,” Snow White said. “Let’s forget about it. I’m glad you’re helping me.”
Cerené’s mood lightened up again. She was missing half of one of her front teeth, but Snow White wasn’t going to ask about it.
The two girls finished burying Oddly Tune in the Garden of Graves then covered the soil with flowers. Snow White brought a log and used it as a tombstone, then wrote on it:
Dudley Tunes
He broke his student’s fingers,
And his favorite note was an A+.
“Great,” Cerené clapped her hands as if they had just planted a new tree. “I have to go back to work now.”
“Wait,” Snow White said. “Don’t you want to stay with me for a while?”
“I have work to do, Joy, and then I have to go back to my step-mother’s house. If I’m late, she’ll make me sleep in that horrible room again,” she said.
“What room?”
“Never mind, I really have to go,” Cerené’s lips twitched.
“No,” Shew said. “Stay, please. If you’re worried about the Queen or Tabula asking about you, I will tell them I needed you to help with something. Don’t worry. You’re safe with me.”
“Really?” Cerené held the broom and looked downward.
“Yes. It’s no secret that I have no friends,” Shew said. “Only private teachers visit me.”
“And you end up killing them, too,” Cerené giggled.
She seemed as if she was trying her best to escape the life that got her the scars on her neck and ashes on her face.
“Isn’t that fun, killing your annoying teacher and getting away with it?” Shew played along. “I’m not allowed to go to school or meet a lot of people.”