Such a strange name for an herb and one that I do not know. I’ll have to ask Ayla the next time I see her. With Silas dead, I don’t think she would have many customers, as the majority of the town’s problems seemed to disappear overnight. I lifted my head, his hand outstretched. Slick blood trailed from where his arm had been under his body.
I returned the corpse among its companions and cautiously approached Silas’s unmoving body. I lowered my fingers to his neck. Still no pulse. With acloser look, his arm had appeared to have moved from underneath himself, a silver locket clutched in his right hand. I wrangled the locket out of his fist, careful enough to not disturb his body much more than I needed or wanted to.
The locket was circular, the front bearing a crest design that struck me as faintly unusual. I ran my thumb over the image. The gold had faded to a soft rose from time. Two dragon heads eating their tail, Ouroboros style, with twin blades slicing into their long bellies. Their great bat-like wings frame the background in an odd heart shape, with stenciled letters long since faded.
I have a gift for you! Turn around!
It’s gorgeous, but are you sure?
Of course it is to remember me by. See, you can put images into the glass casing and carry me with you.
The vision ended abruptly as I kneeled over Silas’s body and not staring into the rich blue eyes of the mystery boy who haunts me.
The locket opened in my hand to the graying worn image of a woman, her figure slender and delicate, as if she were a doll. She was regal in beauty, with voluptuous lips stretched high into a stunning smile. A Roman nose scrunched in a few lines marking her face. The mystery woman, the ghost appearing to haunt me and the section of the castle, was vividly alive, smiling into the camera. Eerily, she looked familiar to the image in the reflection that has stared back all my life.
To the left was the blue-eyed boy in the same dark, sweeping raven hair with a silver crown on top of his head. His clear, warm eyes greeted the camera.
I nearly dropped the locket to the floor.
Who was Silas, really? Did he know the couple in a previous life?
I turned to leave.
Blood soaked through the trimmings of my dress and dripped down my arm as I carried the locket to the table to clean and examine closer. Mind wrapped around the mystery before me, I did not notice the slow corpse moving at my feet.
I fell forward, head slammed into the hardwood floor slick in blood. A warm hand grasped my ankle, tugging me back several paces as nails dug into my flesh.
I whipped around to gold orbs, wild and frenzied, with blood trickling from them. From the wide-set mouth, the horror of fangs protruded from faint lips.
Silas’s harsh rasp revealed to me only three word before descending into madness.
“Please, help me.” Silas’s hold shook, nails biting into my ankle and drawing blood.
I tried to shake his hand off, but his nails dug deeper. Warm blood trickled down my legs.
I kicked. I flailed. I fought. “Let go of me!”
His hand flew free, while my leg made contact with his head, sending him back down onto the hardwood floor. Silas grunted, fingers trailing to his mouth. A pale pink tongue flickered out, lapping up the blood trickling down his exposed arm and turning the sleeveof his white blouse red. A mix of horrification and pleasure etched his face as he cleaned his hand of my blood.
Hunched over, wrenching blueish purple fluid all over the hardwood floor, he slammed his fist onto the ground and finished the ugly display. Shuffling his body away from me, he leaned against the stone as firelight danced off the gold of the black sheen mask.
Silas’s stare flickered to the locket. “Where did you get that?”
“Clutched in a dead man’s fist. Where else do you think I got it?” I said. I found the countertop of the table, hoisting myself up off the floor about twenty paces from Silas, not that it would help much if he wanted more blood. “The other question is how the hell are you alive, and what the hell were you doing that you were using nightingale?”
Silas averted his eyes to the small inlet window, a wistful longing pained expression drawn across. Eyebrows knitted together, he opened and closed his mouth a few times and rubbed at his chin. He shifted to the floor, stilling as if a statue trapped in a memory of mourning. “I have told you that, in order for you to win your freedom, you are to guess my name. A name that keeps me bound to this castle and to my curse. A name I do not even know nor remember it ever being mine.”
“I am aware.”
“I have been alone for centuries. There had been many before you who died tragically to find the truth or stupid enough to not heed my warning. The cursehas made it so I cannot die from old age. It also binds me to the castle, and with each passing year as the stone is worn away, so am I.”
I crossed my arms. “So, you thought, what, killing yourself was a better option? I thought you just said you cannot die. Tell me this was not the first time you decided poison was the best choice.”
“No.” He cleared his throat, chest rising and falling in stagger breaths. “It had been the sixtieth attempt. At first, I tried fire, nasty smell if you can believe that. Bloodletting, that one was an interesting one, severing my own limbs—poor Ebony having to clean all of that up only for me to come back from the brink of death—every medieval torture method one can use to inflict pain. Poison happened to be twentieth on the list, in which there had been many recipes and attempted each with their own nastiness.”
My arms kept me from slinking down onto the floor thinking of the different ways he had tried to kill himself. No wonder the town feared him. He was an insane beast andunkillable. My thoughts drifted to the knife. Was that even an option? Could it kill him, as Ayla claimed, or was it as much of a shot in the dark as the torture scenarios the man had concocted?
Silas continued to recount about the different poison variations that he had used, his eyes squeezed shut.
