I glanced at Alex, but he was frozen in his stick-straight position, his own tea untouched and sloshing over onto the chair arm. Several things were beginning to coalesce, kept from truly sticking together by the heavy air, as if they couldn’t solidify at such a temperature.
As if the heavens themselves blew a cooling breath across the room, I noted the slightest touch of pink beginning to peer through the kitchen window. This was our cue.
“Well, Miss Moira, I must say I greatly look forward to continuing to work with your Alex, and I hope you rest well knowing what an extraordinary young man you’ve brought to Ashbourne.” I set my half-drank tea in a barely there nook among the cat army. “But we have a very early all-staff call this morning, and I’m afraid it won’t do for someone in my position to arrive late.” I took Moira’s outstretched hand in both of mine, clasping it meaningfully before pressing a chaste kiss to her knuckles. I grinned back at her infectious giggle. “Thank you for having us at such an hour. I hope to return soon.”
“Ach, charmers, the lot of ya. Anytime, love, my home is open.”
We said our goodbyes, complete with choking, teary-eyed hugs from Moira, and stepped into the cool dawn air with a collective groan of relief.
“So—” Alex started, but I cut him off with a sharp gesture, nodding to the rapidly lightening sky.
I squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you. The understanding you’ve given me is invaluable.” Turning to Rye, I took her hand in mine, kissing the back as I had so few hours ago. “I can’t go at your pace, I’m afraid. But I would also like to see you tonight, if you’d have me.”
“You twoarefriendly now,” Alex teased, disappearing at his lightning pace before I could swat at him.
“We’ll see.” Rye gave me a half smile, squeezing my hand back and jutting her chin at the dawn. My last image before I took off was the easy flick of her cigarette.
At the hotel, I caught Alex at the entry, staring at the stretch of pink along the horizon. I couldn’t see his face, but the stance of him told me he was lost in the same revered ennui I had been only a few days prior. I touched his shoulder lightly, jolting him from his thoughts. When he turned, bloody tears were streaking past the fringe of his hair—an unsightly quirk of our kind, crying blood.
“Do you see, now?” he asked, voice thick with an unshed sob. “I could never risk it again. I lost controlonce,and I nearly destroyed my only family. I know you say we have to feed, but—”
I cut him off, pulling him fiercely to my chest in a firm hug, letting him release with a terrified choke.
“To be so lost to hunger is a curse no young man should have to endure,” I said, voice thick with my own tortured memories—heavy regrets my long life would never allow me to forget. We carried these mistakes, these horrors, for the entirety of our immortal existence. And not even the gentle press of timeagainst their edges was enough to dull their aches. “I will give you every tool, skill, and method in my arsenal so that you are never in that position again.”
Alex pulled back, his curtain slightly parting to reveal one bloodied, hopeful, red eye. “You promise?” He sniffed.
“I promise.”
Seven
Idid see Rye the following evening, but in a much less intimate capacity than I’d hoped for. In a maneuver that must’ve required all of Billy’s charm and financial prowess, he’d arranged for the village records office to remain open past sundown, accommodating our private research efforts until the clerk “was ready for her pint at the pub.” That didn’t seem to be a firm hour, but one that the grey-haired wisp of a woman would announce on a whim.
As such, Rye and I wasted no time handing over a compiled list of documents from Ashbourne’s founders—journals, baptism records, meeting minutes, and the town’s original charter. The clerk disappeared through a low arch in the white-washed wall, the low ceiling barely missing her curly puff. Thick support pillars squatted in various points around the room—some wrapped in twinkle lights leftover from the winter holidays. The original support beams crisscrossed the low ceiling in stark contrast to the meticulously maintained white plaster.
We were seated too far apart for my liking—across a handcrafted dark wood table that creaked at the slightest suggestion of movement, stacks of documents like a labyrinthian city between us. Rye was well into her third journal from one of the town founders, scribbling away with pencil and pad, a pair of distractible horn-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose. Behind her, low rows of bookshelves sagged under the weight of what appeared to be the entire circulating library of Ashbourne, paperbacks and pamphlets crammed precariously on every free inch.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to drag my focus back to the monotonous daily doings of some human long since returned to the earth.
Although England’s era of constructing shelters against the elements in supposedly undiscovered lands had started much earlier than in the Americas, it was alarming how readily the physical memory of helping the Puritans rose to the surface. We’d haul and lift and pitch and bind until our bones broke and our spirits gave way to bitterness. And still, the home or hall we were erecting would not be finished.
Reading this founder’s journal, I found much of the same rhetoric I’d heard back then—their god would see them through, they were grateful for the work as it protected them from evil idleness, and then some blathering on about future goals and plans for the village.
Not a single mention of the supernatural, magical, or unusual. Not so much as suspicion of witchcraft among the villagers at the time, and I was well into the fourth volume of these meticulous ramblings.
“Any luck?” I whispered, nudging Rye under the table with my foot. Her gaze flickered in my direction but remained trained on the volume in her hands. I took that for what it was.
Hands beginning to sweat, I closed the journal and reached for a stack of village council minutes. Maybe there would be some neighbor accusing another of devil worship. But as soon as I flipped open the historical scan of the ledger book, my gaze drifted back to Rye. The low lamplight on the table bounced off the yellowed papers, illuminating her sharp features in a soft glow. The flicker of her dark eyes from page to page was mesmerizing, pulling me deeper with her every notation. I wanted to know how good it would feel to slap the volume from her hands and throw her face down on the table, working her to a frenzy with my fingers and tongue before the clerk returned to check on us.
Well-manicured hands snapped three times directly in my line of vision, breaking my lusty reverie. Rye arched both eyebrows at me meaningfully before tapping her own book and pointing at mine.
Message received. Reluctantly, I dragged myself back to the work at hand.
Ashbourne’s village council had been busy in its early days, funding public spaces, building the church tower Billy mentioned had recently been renovated, and installing a tidy system of streetlamps throughout the village. This last item gave me pause.
“To ensure safety of the public and to protect villagers against a certain villainy.”
Surrounded by meadow or forest, Ashbourne wouldn’t have been in danger of a high crime rate or marauding bandits at the time of its formation. So that left two potential sources of so-called villainy. They either feared one among them or an outside influence that had already made its threats known.
