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.

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

If I write it down, I won’t be able to convince myself that none of it happened.

I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you. To my own haunted conscience.

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.

I would carry that viper inside me for years, letting it out intermittently to rip the wicked to pieces. But that day, I had not yet befriended the serpent within. It seemed to me a strange interloper, a frightening thing, demanding to be fed.

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.

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?

Your hunger for me was always more apparent under the cover of darkness, when you didn’t have to arrange your face into any semblance of civility.

I didn’t know where you went when you weren’t with me, but you were almost always there. My savior. My teacher. My guiding light in the dark.

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.

Sure enough, I saw a flash of annoyance in your eyes. But you sighed and answered me, as though I were a pestering child. “Power, of course. To know oneself, one’s limits and abilities, is its own power. To know how one may best subdue another with similar abilities is another.” My heart lurched in my chest. Your words were like splinters of light through the darkness of a tomb, the promise of life in the world outside. “Another? There are others like us, my lord?”

Best to leave it to those who can manage the responsibility.”

Oh stfu

I was there to ornament your home and soothe your mind, not bludgeon you with questions.

I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until we two could no longer be told apart. You turned a strong-minded girl into a pulsing wound of need. I never knew the meaning of the word enthralled before you.

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.

I hadn’t been without you for a single day since you found me, and I realized with shattering terror that I had no idea who I was if you were not at my side.

Would I have failed another one of your mysterious tests, proving my fallibility?

I was happy to spend countless lifetimes chasing the warmth coming off you, even though the haze was clouding my vision. I still wake to the smell of smoke sometimes.

“We hunt together,” I corrected you. “We take lovers together, or find bedmates to amuse ourselves for a few hours alone. They have never been affairs.” “And neither is this. Nothing untoward has been going on between Magdalena and I, and I’m frankly surprised by your suspicions. You sound paranoid, Constanta. You need rest. Let our hostess show you the best of her hospitality and then decide how you feel about her.”

I had earned my right in your bed and I hadn’t been consulted on inviting somebody else in, no matter how beautiful she was.

Maybe it wouldn’t be terrible, a treacherous thought offered, to share you with another if you still looked at me like that when we were alone.

must have you close, Constanta. I want us to be the best of friends.”

Now I understood why you were so enamored with her. She was as cunning as you were, and as cold as a Transylvanian winter. Beneath the fripperies and the giggles there was a girl made of steel, one who would do whatever it took to survive. You could never resist a survivor. Or a mirror.

You were fucking her in our bed. No. Your bed. I was only ever a guest, every night contingent on my good behavior.

You did look at me then, dark eyes erratic with lust and irritation and some other, less pronounceable emotion. Admiration, perhaps. You showed it to me so rarely I hardly knew how to recognize it.

I was furious with you. You had manufactured my consent every step of the way, a mere formality.

But I was also delirious with want, and half-convinced that you had been right all along. It was so much easier to believe that you always had my best interests at heart.

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

agdalena sighed into my kiss and I knew I would kill for her, die for her, do it all over again and then some.

I fell in love with her quickly, even as my head railed against the stupid machinations of my heart.

“Who is that woman with her?” she whispered, as the two women held down Holofernes’ writhing body and completed the decapitation. “Her maid, I believe.” “Maybe they were like us,” she said, voice velvety and soft in the darkness.

“And what are we, Magdalena?” I asked.

I suppose I wanted to know once and for all if Magdalena really loved me, even if it was just in her way.

Having Magdalena all to myself was a special delight that I didn’t intend to waste.

Lying with her made me feel so vibrantly alive. It was almost enough to make me forget that I was already dead.

We all developed our tricks for dealing with you: my invisibility, her sweetness.

It always amazed me how you could play victim and aggressor at the same time.

I was shackled to you by iron bonds, and so was my darling Magdalena. There was no way for me to wriggle away without damning her to your anger, and so I resolved to stay. To watch and to listen, and to wait for a perfect moment sometime in the future where Magdalena and I could breathe the free air together.

I thought that she was simply fading the way flowers denied sunlight droop and die. Magdalena lived for her freedom, and with it taken away from her, life lost its luster.

liked the invisibility plainness afforded me, unlike Magdalena, who thrived when she was the center of attention.

“I didn’t sign up to waste away in some tower room while the world went on turning outside. You told me I would live. I want to live.”

hat slap snapped me out a reverie I had been living in for hundreds of years. It obliterated any grace I had left to give you, any lies I was still telling myself about your good intentions and your savior’s heart.

I lay there in silence for a long while, turning the treacherous beginnings of a plan over in my mind. It was only an inkling of a thing then, hazy and indistinct. But for the first time in a long time, I supposed that there was something to be done about our situation. About you. I tucked the idea away in a dark recess of my mind and let it ferment.

“He only fucked you because he was angry with me and Magdalena’s been sick for three days. You know that, don’t you?” Yes, I decided as I gasped for breath, run through with the rapier of your words even as you disappeared down the hallway. He knows how cruel he can be.

But they have other lives and other lovers now, I reminded myself as the girls fussed over me and kissed and complimented me. I’m not the sun in their sky anymore.

“You haven’t changed at all,” Constanta said, so fondly that I thought my heart might burst.

Magdalena was here with me, my stern, beautiful Magdalena with her heart like liquid gold. And so was Constanta, lovely, dreamy Constanta with her mouth shaped like compassion. My sisters, my most intimate friends. My girls, mine.