Washington was burned to the ground in a sea of blue flame yesterday.
We’re moving again.
ChapterThree
November 1870 - Meadow Creek Homestead
While she had always beena prisoner, Josephine had once been able to imagine herself away from fear. She could watch people on the street and imagine they knew her. She could paint the figure of the ice man as he pushed his cart up the sidewalk. She could open her bedroom window the three allowed inches and listen to people talking, to the women thrashing their laundry in the alley and the cats scrapping at night.
Now, there was only the green waste of the prairie all around her, foreign and loathsome.
Before they moved, her only exposure to greenery was through the glass of their parlor window, which overlooked the garden she had never been allowed to explore.
Josephine had grown up in cities. Her earliest memories were of the crowded, narrow streets of Boston. Then there was their towering, absurdly narrow house in Baltimore with its maze of rooms. And then, for most of her life, she lived in Washington.
That city was a smoking ruin now. What was left of it was overrun with vampires, who had swooped in to claim ownership of the rubble as soon as the shadows of dragon wings cleared the horizon. Their home escaped dragon fire by inches, and by sunrise the next morning, her father’s mysterious benefactors came to extract them. Into a wagon she went, her wrists shackled and every one of her precious belongings packed into a trunk at her feet.
The shackles went on whenever they were forced to allow her outside. Her father had never forgotten her first and only escape attempt. He never forgot anything.
It was some small solace to know that her mother hated their new home almost as much as Josephine did. There were no parties on the Meadow Creek homestead. There were no Coven events, no galas nor ceremonies for her to bask in. Even as the war made luxuries scarce and events somber affairs, she hadn’t seemed to notice.
Evangeline Wyeth didn’t notice much of anything — including her daughter.
She had eyes for her husband, the glory of her Coven’s name, and whatever it was she sipped from her dainty silver flask every day. If ever they accidentally landed on Josephine, the situation was rectified immediately, so as to end the discomfort of perceiving her existence as quickly as possible.
Josephine had long ago decided it was a blessing that her mother believed she was beneath her notice. Her life, such as it was, would be made a thousand times worse if she had to endure both of her parents’ scrutiny.
As it stood, she could only just survive her father’s.
In the city, it was easier to find refuge from his notice. He was always busy in his lab, and he had less use for her when he had a fleet of assistants to help him. The only times he needed her were when he intended to use her. When she wasn’t recovering from the pain of his work, she was free to paint or read in solitude.
That ended the day they moved into Meadow Creek.
It was her father’s boon and her great misfortune that the homestead came with a traditional orcish barn made of sturdy stone and timber. While her father’s lab was set up inside the half-buried stone home that made up the main structure of the homestead, he ventured out to the barn when subjects were delivered by those same glamoured beings who provided everything else he needed.
Prior to their move, she did not think that she could loathe a place more than her father’s lab. After two years of regular visits to the barn, she now understood what it meant to hate and fear a place so profoundly, just the sight of it through a window made her sick.
Her respites between visits had grown shorter as her father’s success rate increased. Once it’d been a trial endured every handful of months; then it became something to suffer through every two months, then one, then three weeks. She’d begun to fear the moment when her periods of rest shrank to days, hours.
The barn had only been empty for a week when Josephine’s bedroom door was thrown open.
She flinched under the cover of her blankets. Moving sluggishly, every joint aching, she dared to peek over the edge of her quilt.
Harrod, the only one of her father’s assistants to make it out of the devastation of the battle of Washington, stared at her from beneath his brows. Like her father, he always wore neatly pressed suits of heavy wool and crisp cotton — no matter the hour or the season, Harrod always looked as if a seamstress might stick a pin in his side at any moment.
“You’re needed in the barn,” he announced, enunciating with the tip of his tongue and sharp edges of his teeth to cover the thickness of his country accent. “Up, Miss Wyeth.”
You’re needed in the barn.
She heard those words in her nightmares. Even in sleep, she couldn’t escape them. Drowsy and sluggish from her monthly exertions, Josephine still felt them land like fists against the flat of her sternum —thump, thump, thump.There was hardly space to breathe between each blow.
For a moment, she drifted on a wave of disbelief. It had only been a week since the last subject was taken by the benefactors. They never made another delivery so soon.
Except Harrod was too straightlaced to bother with mind games. If he said she was needed in the barn, then it was the truth, as horrible as it was.
The wave of disbelief crashed. In its place rose a choking sort of resignation tinged with a terror so visceral, it made her teeth rattle.
All the while, Harrod stood there, straight-backed and cold, the toes of his shoes just over the edge of the door jamb — the farthest he had ever come into her space.
