A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood, #1)

by S.T. Gibson

There is no horror left in this world that can surprise me. Eventually, even your death becomes its own sort of inevitability.

I was so happy to be your marionette, at first. So happy to be chosen.

ven loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.

If I write it down, I won’t be able to convince myself that none of it happened. I won’t be able to tell myself that you didn’t mean any of it, that it was all just some terrible dream.

You taught us to never feel guilty, to revel when the world demands mourning. So we, your brides, will toast to your memory and drink deep of your legacy, taking our strength from the love we shared with you. We will not bend to despair, not even as the future stretches out hungry and unknown before us. And I, for my part, will keep a record. Not for you, or for any audience, but to quiet my own mind.

This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.

If you can still hear me wherever you are, my love, my tormentor, hear this: It was never my intention to murder you. Not in the beginning, anyway.

War is never valiant, only crude and hideous. Any left alive after the rest have been cut down do not last long exposed to the elements.

I was somebody’s daughter once; a village girl with arms strong enough to help her father in the smithy and a mind quick enough to recall her mother’s shopping list in the market. My days were measured by the light in the sky and the chores set before me, with weekly spoken mass in our tiny wooden church.

I wonder if you would have wanted me if you found me like that: vibrant and loved and alive.

You were supposed to be a night terror made of smoke, not a man of flesh and blood who left footsteps in the dirt.

I didn’t know who you were. I just knew I would claw the eyes out of the next man who touched me, if my fingers didn’t seize up and betray me. I had been beaten and left for dead, and yet it was not death that had come to claim me.

“I should call you Constanta. My steadfast Constanta.” I shuddered as the rain began to pool around us, streaking through my hair and filling my gasping mouth. I know I had a name before that moment. It was a sturdy name, warm and wholesome like a loaf of dark bread fresh out of the oven. But the girl I had been disappeared the instant you pronounced me yours.

“Please.” What else could I have said? I didn’t know what I was asking for, besides begging not to be left alone in the dirt to drown in my own blood. If I had refused you, would you have left me there? Or was I already marked for you, my cooperation merely a bit of formality?

I didn’t know what you were offering me; I just knew I was terrified that you were going to leave me.

The intensity of your attention was staggering. At the time, I would have called it proof of your love, burning and all-consuming. But I’ve grown to understand that you have in you more of the scientist obsessed than the lover possessed, and that your examinations lend themselves more towards a scrutiny of weakness, imperfection, any detail in need of your corrective care.

“Water your mother’s flowers with their blood.” I nodded, my breath coming shallow and hot. “Yes, my lord.”

You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world, you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night’s fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of debts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.

I have never felt more truly alive in my waking death than when I am taking the life of another person.

There are no angels in this world to accompany the dying in their final moments, only pickpockets and carrion birds.

I knew then I would chase your tiny moments of weakness all the way into hell and back. What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with wanting?

death. You produced a nightdress of fine, soft linen for me and welcomed me into your bed. I pressed my body against yours, the house totally silent except the sound of my breathing and the slow, steady pulse of your heartbeat. Too slow, like your body was only playing at a process it had long ago stopped needing. I couldn’t get close enough to you to make the numbness creeping over my skin go away. I needed to be touched, to be held in a way that made me feel real.

think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.

Eventually, I emerged. Whole and new, and somebody else entirely. The village girl I had been was well and truly dead. She had died a dozen little deaths in that marriage bed, and I was your Constanta, your dark and unbreakable jewel.

I had become so accustomed to your company that I had forgotten how much it thrilled me to walk among humans, but Vienna brought me back to life. I could see it in my mirror, a new shine in my eyes, the ghost of a bloom in my dead cheeks. It was like falling in love all over again, only instead of falling for the lord of death, now I was in love with the seething, shouting mass of life outside my home.

In my mind, I was God’s lovely angel of judgment, come to unsheathe the sword of divine wrath against those who truly deserved it.

I wouldn’t realize until later that you were irritable precisely because I was in bloom, because there were suddenly so many sources of joy in my life apart from your presence.

Whenever we were apart, you left your essence caught in my hair, in my clothes. I scented the taste of it on the wind, I shivered and ached for it. I could think of nothing but you the entire time you were gone, until you returned to me.

I was happy to spend countless lifetimes chasing the warmth coming off you, even though the haze was clouding my vision.

How can I blame you for wanting her, my lord, when I wanted her so badly myself?

You lowered your mouth down by her ear, lips brushing the lobe as you spoke, something private and urgent. A slow smile spread onto Magdalena’s face as she clutched you closer. What were you telling her? Our secret? Or a more carnal proposition?

esire makes idiots of all of us. But you already knew that part, didn’t you?

aybe I was drawn to her because she was so fully alive. Even your bite hadn’t yet snatched the high color from her cheeks, the sparkle from her eyes.

I liked looking at her better than I liked looking at myself, for it became increasingly difficult to recognize myself in the mirror.

“Please, God,” I begged, my tiniest whisper echoing through the cavernous cathedral. “Make me strong. I’m so tired of being weak.”

“Love makes monsters of us, Constanta, and not everyone is cut out for monstrosity.

here was no huge argument that predicated my decision to betray you, no ultimate act of tyranny. I simply broke under the weight of a thousand tense nights, a thousand thoughtless, soul-stripping words. I felt like I was losing my mind in that place, and eventually my desire to do something about it, anything about it, outweighed my fear of you.

But, like Eve, I had taken a bite of forbidden fruit and been rewarded with all the knowledge I had hitherto been denied.

“It would be easier if he hated us,” she said. “But he loves us all terribly. And if we go on letting him love us, that love is going to kill us. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

was tired of being your Mary Magdalene. I was tired of waiting expectantly at your tomb every night for you to rise and bring light into my world once again. I was tired of groveling on my knees and washing blood off your heels with my hair and tears. I was tired of having the air sucked out of my lungs every time your eyes cut right to the heart of me. I was tired of the circumference of the whole universe living in your circled arms, of the spark of life hiding in your kiss, of the power of death lying in wait in your teeth. I was tired of carrying around the weight of a love like worship, of the sickly-warm rush of idolatry coloring my whole world. I was tired of faithfulness.

I made you into my private Christ, supplicated with my own dark devotions. Nothing existed beyond the range of your exacting gaze, not even me.

I was simply a non-entity when you weren’t looking at me, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the sweet water of your attention. A woman can’t live like that, my lord. No one can. Don’t ask ...