Days piled up like playing cards, with only occasional distinctions to separate one from the next: an unusually hot bowl of gruel, a new regimen of vitamins, a rainstorm against the windows, a heavy, dreamless sleep. I had given up my fantasies of Rafe trying to cure me. Surely by now those intentions would be clear. I had become the model captive, and it had not been enough. I had fooled myself again, working so hard to be what I thought Rafe wanted. I was finished with that now. I had done more than enough pandering. I had only enough energy to blink my eyes, to sigh a bit, submit to Coulton’s bloodletting. But just as I was losing myself, becoming the four walls of my prison, my warden’s tactics took a turn. Coulton came to me one day without needles, without food. He stood by the door, his eyes appraising.
“How much,” I asked him finally, voice hoarse from lack of use, “have you been making off each vial of my blood?” The most rational motivation I had landed on was money.
Coulton chuckled and removed his goggles. I thought of my father, removing his own. Maisie, have you come in with my tea?
“Not nearly enough, my dear accountant,” said Coulton. “If there’s coin to be had, I’ve been kept out of it, though I’m pleased to see you’re interested in profit.” His one dead tooth was shinier than the others, a magnet for saliva, fascinating in its rot. I wondered if my touch might stain it white.
“Serves you right,” I said.
Coulton laughed. He beckoned me closer, as if ready to confide. When I did not succumb, he sighed, and leaned back in the folding chair he’d brought to the room with him. It was blue plastic. It creaked under his weight.
“It’s been a strange few weeks,” Coulton said, straightening his shoulders, “for both of us, I reckon. Not a pleasant task, draining a living body, collecting the amount of blood your boy claims he needs. Not work I’d be a part of if it weren’t for his knowledge of some unsavory activities of my own.”
“Rafe is blackmailing you.”
“And so you likely wonder why it is I’m smiling.” Coulton had not been, but grinned widely now, displaying that awful front tooth. “I’m smiling because our friend here has gone off on some adventure. Left you all alone with Coulton, and we’re going to have some fun. Just like you, I’m interested in profit. I’m interested in what we two, together, can do to make a profit. Do you follow?”
I did not.
“You see, the other day I came across a mouse you killed some weeks ago. I’d meant to throw it out, but, well, you know how things go. Kicked it into the hallway, forgot it. Anyway, imagine my delight to find the thing had never rotted. No smell. A little stiff, icy corpse, just the same as I’d last seen it.” He waited for me to respond, but I held my face firm. “Now imagine: squirrels and foxes, kittens and dogs, lining the shelves at a place like your Holzmeier’s. Showing none of the signs of decay you’d expect—simply frozen. Like taxidermy without all the mess. No need to pay for someone to skin the beasts, to stuff them. Cut out the middleman, as they say.” Coulton crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, pleased. I hoped he would tip over.
“You mean you want to sell dead animals?”
“Frozen witch’s familiars,” he corrected, “for twice the usual price.” His dead tooth, I noticed suddenly, had a spot of remaining white at its corner, the white paw of an otherwise black cat.
“Let me see Rafe again,” I said. “Let me talk to him.”
Coulton laughed outright. “You think that would make a difference? Besides, as I told you, he’s long gone.”
“It isn’t good if I touch animals. You have to understand. It hurts people more than it helps them, will hurt you . . .” I realized that I was pleading with him, my voice rising, making me seem younger, as desperate as I felt. Coulton cackled. Changing tactics, aware that our time to talk was limited, that soon he would be gone and I’d be sitting here alone, I steadied my voice and continued: “Nobody thinks it’s real. The souvenirs you sell to Holzmeier’s. A joke, it’s all just silly.”
“Oh, no, little one, they’re set in their beliefs. The people know what they want. Who are we to deny them? A special thing, it is, is witchcraft.”
“I’m not a witch,” I said.
“So say they all.”
PERHAPS THIS WAS how I would die: mauled by some wild animal, or starved to death as I barricaded myself behind my cot. I swore that I would not play Coulton’s game, that I would hide from any beast that he brought me, no matter how vicious, no matter how sweet, no matter how much I craved touch after weeks without Marlowe.
Coulton brought his sacrifices into my underground chamber, and from the look of things (his red-rimmed eyes, his claw-scratched hands), the task of collecting them had not been pleasant. The animals cried, scrabbling in their boxes, and Coulton grimaced when he dumped them in with me, seeming almost sorry as he double-locked the door behind him.
My first was an angry dog, a stray, from the look of it, roughly the size of Marlowe. Snarling, maybe rabid, it bared sharp yellow teeth. Saliva gleamed like spiderwebs, slid slowly from its jowls.
“I won’t hurt you,” I whispered, aware as the words left my lips how unlikely they were. I held out my hands, palms open in surrender.
Unfortunately, the animal saw this as a sign of aggression. The dog lunged toward me. For a moment I debated holding to my word, simply sitting and submitting to its bite, but an image of what Coulton might do with my injured body flashed through my mind. I was gripped by a rage as intense as if the damage had already been done.
Our collision was a frenzied burst of action, a firecracker popping and then hissing, sizzling still. I left the encounter with a tooth mark at my shoulder, scratches across my chest, a purplish-yellow bruise budding just beneath the skin. The dog left as a corpse.
I stared at the dead animal. The dog seemed smaller, once stilled, less enemy than comrade, afraid and abused, not so different from myself. Perhaps all it needed was a thorough grooming, some affection, and it would have become a companion comparable to Marlowe. Or perhaps this dog had been content to roam the moorland, to be citizen of crags and grass and sky. Who could know, now, what its life might have held, had it not intertwined with mine?
I forced myself to sit with these thoughts. I had killed, with aim to kill and kill completely. For the first time, I had tried to end a life, and with success. I’d have imagined shame and guilt, a sense of failure, but as I looked on the stilled animal I felt only a full-body numbness. I felt tired, and centuries old.
I THOUGHT OF another story, one every child of Coeurs Crossing knew by heart. I’d heard it first from Mother Farrow, and after had perused our library at Urizon, looking for some mention in a history of our region that might further flesh it out. I’d found several references that could make the tale true, though Peter cautioned me that it was legend, and as such embellished and altered over the years, like an old car whose parts have been slowly replaced until little remains of its initial model.