Smooth legatos and high notes empowered the piece, with Mary’s fingers working the strings furthest from the pegs and occasionally moving down the neck to deepen the sound.
After some time, Mary set her violin aside and sat quietly with her tears.
“Lord, please relieve me of this curse,” she prayed. “These voices, these thoughts—they do not belong to me. Even my husband has abandoned me in knowledge of them.”
Ivory covered her gasp. Her fingers went numb, and her breath, cold in her chest, rushed from her lungs. For a moment, she thought even her heart had begun beating again, but it was only a memory of a feeling she’d once known.
Ivory considered going to Mary and telling her everything, telling her all about her grandmother and helping her where she had once failed Elizabeth. But Ivory couldn’t risk exposing her darker nature, so instead she slinked back to the shadows.
...
Savannah, Georgia, 1854
BETWEEN 1732 AND 1854, Ivory’s tolerance to the sun grew, though she was still unable to walk outdoors when the sun was at its highest and brightest. A small bronze amulet on a leather cord around her neck—a depiction of Sól, the sun goddess, riding on her chariot—wrapped her in a protective barrier from the sun.
The charm and its magic had been given to her by one of the Ankou in exchange for her turning a young woman—Ophelia—so that she might find a place with the Maltorim.
Though Mary’s husband had soiled the souls of Mary’s children with his surname, the Parsons’ lineage hadn’t ended at Mary’s death. Ivory sought out Mary’s brothers instead.
Ivory’s sire implored her to stop returning to Parsons’ homes. They needed to keep moving; staying in one place for too long would risk their exposure as Cruor. As though she cared. Of course he wouldn’t understand.
But as he’d never been one to make demands of Ivory, she stubbornly kept watch, his suggestions of moving on little more than an annoyance. Soon, she hoped, another Parsons woman would be born. Perhaps she might be like her ancestors, Mary and Elizabeth, and Ivory might finally have her chance at redemption.
In 1834, after three generations of boys, Rachel was born into the Parsons lineage. Now an adult, she was burdened with shopping at the market. One day, on Rachel’s way home, as the setting sun began to purple the sky, she stopped at a bookstore. Ivory followed, watching Rachel through the shop’s window as she traipsed between shelves that sagged beneath the weight of books. Rachel squatted to read titles on a lower shelf but kept sliding book after book back into place.
Rachel reached on her toes and tugged down a book from a higher shelf. The cover read: The Rebellion of the Beasts, by Leigh Hunt. Ivory stared from across the road as Rachel turned one crisp page after another.
Rachel got carried away with her reading until the shop owner cleared her throat—a sound all too audible to Ivory’s supernatural hearing. When Rachel looked up, the shop owner crossed her arms and raised her brows.
“Of course,” Rachel said, tapping a fingernail against the book’s cover. “This really is excellent.”
She dug through a small pouch and placed her coins in the woman’s waiting palm.
When finally Rachel departed, the book sticking out from her basket of goods, there was little light to travel by. A shadowy figure skirted the deadened light of the oil lamps, following Rachel with a knife flashing in his hand.
Ivory rushed up behind him, snapped his neck before so much as a breath could leave him, and whipped him into an alley. She peeked around the corner just as Rachel was taking a final, nervous glance around, her cloak clasped tightly over her trembling body.
Three mornings later, Ivory rested near an embankment a short way into the forest where a stream whispered between the trees. She stared beyond blades of grass, seeded with red poppies that yielded beneath the breeze, waiting for Rachel to take leave from her home. The early morning sun glowed between the oaks with a sweet-tempered light, and shadows fell with an almost kindness to cool Ivory’s skin. Even dawn felt hotter to her than it would to a human, but at least the sun’s rays no longer burned her flesh.
She plucked a spider crawling across the fruit of a gooseberry plant to feed to a nearby praying mantis but dropped it when Rachel stepped outside. Ivory trailed her to the market, where Rachel perused the courtyard as she picked nuts off a muffin top. Not at all on accident, Ivory bumped into her and sent a loaf of bread tumbling from Rachel’s basket to the ground.
“How clumsy of me,” Ivory said. “Please, allow me to buy you a fresh loaf.”
Rachel’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. Finally, she said, “If you’re certain it won’t be any inconvenience?”
Ivory, with sallow skin and trapped in the frame of a young woman from the 17th century, must have looked as though she couldn’t afford to replace Rachel’s bread.
She smiled. “My pleasure, Miss. Wait here.”