On this day I have slain a blue-eyed stag and his mate in the woodland. They were fleet, like pale moonbeams dashing through the trees, save for the sanguine marks where their skins were already stained with blood. After cutting their throats, I partook of the crimson fluid and found it exquisite, as only the choicest of vintages are. It raised my blood as quite like nothing else and impelled me to seek congress with myself.
I have commissioned a trophy of the once-noble stag to be hung in the chamber that is to become the future bridal suite. The unicorn room, I shall call it: the place to house maidens, until they are maidens to me no longer. This token shall act as a reminder to my future bride of both my prowess, and the fate that lies in store for her there should she ever deceive my trust.
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“What the fuck,” Nadine whispered.
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May 11th, 188X
Today Evangeline came to court me. I invited her into my great library which, in addition to showing off my tasteful wealth, possesses the added benefit of locking doors. O, Evangeline. What beauty. What vigor. Like my former wife, she possesses a fair complexion and elegant figure. However before paying her bride-price, I desired to inspect her intimately, to ascertain her innocence. After settling with her guardian, I secured the doors and instructed the now-quivering sparrow to comply with my every command, starting with the removal of her vestments. When she was down to her shift, I looked my fill, pleased by the child-bearing fullness of her hips, and the pale pink rosebuds flowering so sweetly at her breast.
“Thou wilt be mine,” I declared unto her. “And even if love be absent betwixt us, my dearest, rest assured that the tie that binds us shall be one of the most profound depths yet—for it is that of hunter and hunted.” She tried to run, which whetted my appetites, and I soon had her on her back, burying myself in the farthest reaches of her paradise, until she herself was maiden no longer, and I had expended my seed to her desperate cries.
The very next day, we were wed. Her father would not meet my eyes beneath that glowering brow, and my beloved’s movements were stiff and reserved. But my heart was overflowing with passion. I had not felt such an emotion in ages. In that moment, I felt as though I were one of the heavenly hosts, a favored angel glowing in the sights of God.
Or Lucifer, perhaps, poised before his mighty fall.
But I—I will never fall.
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May 16th, 188X
Upon the conclusion of today’s hunt, invigourated by the bloodlust coursing through my veins, I bade my wife to my side. With an ardency in my voice, I beseeched her to accompany me into the wooded expanse. “Come with me, my sparrow, lest thy feathers commingle with the ashes and the bloods from whence thy lately stags once fated to tread.”
I beheld the hues draining from her visage, and it brought me gratification, yet not as much as observing her hasten from me, resplendent and graceful in the night, with her flimsy garment fluttering around her akin to the wings of a pallid dove until I tore it from her in a fury, like plucking feathers, until she lay bare before me, ripe for consumption.
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March 19th, 188X
I have begot a son.
I intend to enlist Ephraim Crocker’s aid in formulating a last testament, so as to guarantee that my son does not turn out to be a feeble milksop who grows faint at the sight of blood like his mother. He shall take pride in the hunt that shall usher him into manhood, and along with it, the keys to the kingdom shall be his.
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Nadine turned the pages desperately but there was nothing else about the mysterious will that Gideon’s ancestor had helped him write. The will that would prevent his son from becoming a “milksop” who grew “faint at the sight of blood.”
The portrait that this diary was painting of Caledon Cullraven was a dark one. Given the rumors of the townspeople and the house stuffed with all manner of dead things, Nadine hadn’t thought of him as a kindly man. Even the statue on the square that was meant to enshrine him hinted at the kind of arrogance that could cause an entire house to fall.
But this—oh,thiswas far worse than she had imagined.
This book suggested that he was a man who gloried in the pain of others, be they man or beast. A rapist, a sadist, and possibly a murderer, too, because Nadine was suddenly very sure that the stag and the doe he had hunted in May had both been human.
His late wife and her lover,murderedin cold blood.
And he hung that painting in here as a warning, she thought.A warning to his next wife.
A noise at the window drew her attention. She got up with a wince and went to it, just in time to see Cal, Ben, and Odessa heading from the house. They appeared to be talking as they went and Nadine opened her window to listen: it had settled into its grooves over the years, cemented by years of dirt and detritus, and the frame was surprisingly heavy.
Odessa was wearing pants for the first time that Nadine had ever seen her, which clung to her muscled thighs and added height to her petite frame. She looked like a sprite standing between her two taller brothers: an evil sprite with a gun strapped to its back, dressed for war.
Ben was wearing jeans and a wifebeater, which bared his thick, sturdy arms and clung snugly to his deep chest. Cal was a little slimmer, but no one would call him slight with those shoulders, or that solid build kept trim and spare with what was clearly rigorous effort.
Together, they looked like a beautiful, deadly flock of birds.
