Devils Never Cry (This Is Not a Love Story)

The Church did not like us, but the State tolerated us, and all the monarchs of the world adored us, which was enough to keep us afloat. Of course, we were known only by our names and not by our faces. The Masked Court, where the infinitely tiny Russian consort sipped at her vodka and the shaking Ti'anese emperor coughed up pleghm from behind his stained cloth disguise, was our haven. A pity, that this is what we have become, my mother would say over her coffee with sugar, a pity. Too bad this is the world you will inherit, so tired at its end, so ready to sleep and so empty of discoveries.

That morning as I dressed I thought mostly of Blair. Light-eyed like her step-father and with skin of sun-warmed bronze, like her mother — her hair falling in a shining curtain down past her bared shoulders. In a world full of beauty she was remarkable, moving with all the fluidity of a housecat in a too-small cage.

My father stood in the kitchen, straight-backed and quiet, soft black hair gleaming like water underneath the spotted lights. He was smoking. Teague was always smoking, especially when he was with Jonathan or Marcus. At Court events I would see them cloistered together, their hair shining and tousled and dark, exhaling cigarra smoke gently into the air. Women would watch them with an uncanny shrewdness; men would observe dispassionately from afar. There was nothing to see; all three were good at disguising themselves when they had to be. And that was often.

“Jacqueline.”

“Good morning,” I said, moving carefully. He smelled of something toxic and alluring, similar to power; it reeked like an expensive cologne. Astraea was gone, vanished into the morning — Elias was still likely asleep, dark hair thrown over his vivid face in slumber. Sometimes, I felt the loneliest when we were together.

“Are you ready for today?” The initiation. I didn’t reply, because I didn’t have an answer. We were told almost nothing about it, had survived on shadows and murmurs and mistruths for years, listening through vents and in the slivers of light through almost-closed doors. Of course we’d been taught how to discern true gold from false, how to brace the body against the recoil of a handgun, how to lie. There had never been strict lessons; it hadn’t been so elaborate as that. Instead we were coaxed into this cold and unfamiliar world with a kiss on the cheek and a promise of greatness, lonely daughters of violent men.

“Marcus and Blair will be here at noon,” my father continued, blithe in his misunderstanding. He stubbed out the cigarra in a spare emptied whiskey glass, lifted his keen dark gaze to me. “Your brother is coming, too.”

Elias had passed the intiation three years ago, but he’d never told me what occurred there. “This place changes you,” he’d confessed to me afterwards, half-drunk on blood-whiskey with his dark hair throwing his eyes into shadow. The alcohol inspired something contemplative in my brother, something soft and vulnerable as a foal’s throat. It was strange to see. “It’s hard,” he finished, simply. “Hard to live a life like this.”

So much of our world was beautiful. The molten spill of morning light onto the lonely city; sitting side-by-side with Blair in her father’s long car, her leg pressed up against mine; Gabrielle’s elfin profile, her mouth as red and shiny as sweet-apples. She tasted of autumn cherries; I knew because she’d kissed me once, breathless and drunk on overpriced cocktails at some downtown bar. The boys around us had cheered, some agape and stunned by the sight of her mouth on mine. I always wished that it could be like this forever; but it couldn’t, and never would.

It recalled so many memories, of Lana and Blair and Gabrielle and me, the wind running its fingers through our long hair as we bolted through the uptown streets laughing, open-mouthed and wild. Gabrielle with her perfect nose and perfect smile, Lana’s eyes so lovely and so mournful, so much like the sky after it rained. And then Blair, tilting her chin up a little to look me in the eye, her gaze darting away just as it met mine. Her hand would squeeze mine, shy and gentle and always cold.

Blair. It had been such a long time, since we’d both been young. I remembered those days with not a small amount of fondness -- little frilly pastel dresses and scuffed patent shoes, Teague and Jonathan and Lana’s mother Natalya casting long shadows in the gilded afternoon sunshine. The light always looked so dizzy and drunken that time of the day, elucidating everything it touched to an utter exactness, and I can remember Lana’s father Yakim bending at the waist to gather her into his arms. Their hair was similar — so pale and bright it put the snow to shame, nearly as white as a snow fox’s pelt. I didn’t understand how I could be surrounded by such compassionate killers, criminals so soft-spoken and kind. I loved them all fiercely, at least a little — even Jonathan, even Marcus. Even though they frightened me, too.

Turnabout (Alabaster Country)

She trod more carefully now. The men with the black coldness that reached their eyes; the leonine Isaiah, always too quick to touch and too slow to pull away; even Thomas, though she could not imagine him ever harming her. But his eyes were deep and unfathomable, eyes that one could grow lost in, and he dazzled Nadine with his infrequent smiles. She didn’t know why she cared so much for him, soulless killer from beyond the mountains, dark cropped hair and constellation of moles scattered along his left cheek. But she did.

“Where’s Liam?” Wren asked midway through the day, and something in Nadine sank, effortlessly as the cut of a knife.

“Went off to the spring to get water.” Isaiah yawned.

“I’m going to go with him.”

“Why?” And then a slow recognition, an uneasy silence. Isaiah looked slightly uncomfortable, and at once Nadine thought of the careless affection the two men shared, though not often among others; in the shadows of a box stall in the stable, in the rocky caves of the mountain stone, unraveling one another in the dusky forest. But Nadine’s heart was too full of beauty to admit fear; and she could no more pin down Wren, butterfly-winged, than she could try and steal him away.  He belonged to no one. Not even Liam.

Wren departed to find Liam and ten minutes later, Nadine followed. The dappled light fell through the arboreal land and the latticed branches, the nameless wildflowers blooming at her feet. It was lovely, effervescent and fleeting, and Nadine crouched to take an armful of blossoms into her hands. They smelled of fragrant warmth, of an endless, formless summer.

Soon, though, she heard voices cut through the pristine silence. Liam, and Wren—Liam with his low melodic tones and Wren’s shy and clever, a voice like a cat who had learned to speak. Nadine could hear the splash of water, her brother’s laughter like a clarion bell.  And then they were both laughing until that laughter went soft, turned into something else: something heated, something at the edge of an ache. She had never before come so close to the sight that she’d fought to avoid; though through the leaves she saw them now, shirts off, jeans unbuttoned, the flatness of their rosebrowned abdomens.  And at once it struck her, the things she would have to learn to live without.

There were so many different ways in which to want, and Nadine thought she could count them all. Frozen, she could not move away. Her brother had his palm to Wren’s cheek with a tenderness he had never shown her: sweet, gentle, soft. The skim of his fingertips along the feline cheekbones, one of his hands in Wren’s. The closer they drew the more devastated she became; clutching the wild blooms in her arms as tears rose to her red-rimmed eyes.

She didn’t know which was worse: getting what you want, or not getting it at all.

You should have known. She’d been played a fool. You should have known.

She’d thought that Liam’s feelings did not encompass anything more than Lydia, her blue-black hair and deep navy eyes, the full mouth always bitten to redness. She’d thought the flirtations between her brother and Wren had been innocent, the actions of two young men with little else to entertain them. Of course they were close, because they loved each other, and and love was all either of them needed. A kind hand, a soft word — it was enough. Or so she’d thought.

But now Liam was pressing Wren against the rough bark of an oak tree, hands traveling over the map of the other man’s body: hips, forearms, even a brief pressure to the pulse in his throat.

“Sick of hiding this.” Wren’s voice, muted.

“Sick of you saying we have a choice.”

In a blush of heat, Wren pressed his forehead against Liam’s. For a moment they were both quiet, still — more silent than the forest itself.

“No one gets what they want,” murmuered Liam, eyes closed as he said it. “No one.”

The world was sober and solemn around them, and Nadine’s eyes were fixed on Wren. The curve of his narrow neck and the profusion of his blue-black hair, the delicate wrists. When Liam ran his fingers across the other man’s abdomen, Wren inhaled sharply. And Nadine knew how he felt—because everything he’d done to her was now being done to him.

Liam tilted his face down just slightly, looked at Wren as if he’d never seen anything so beautiful. Nadine’s heart squeezed.

“I think I’ve loved you my entire life,” Liam murmured. And something in Nadine went still.

Turning, she stumbled through the underbrush, dumping the flowers from her arms and tears streaking her cheeks. The late afternoon light was heady and lush through the branches, pure molten sun. She wanted to hide; she wanted to disappear. But back at the camp there was Isaiah, Harris, Rion — no one with whom she could offer her secret, for she could not risk her brother’s shame.

all of the heroes are dead -- rivers running red

The man’s name was Jonathan, Sara’s mother told her. He was thirty-one years old, a veteran (of what war, Sara didn’t know) who walked with a limp and an ash-white cane. Hair honey-blond, eyes dark as polished jet, a mouth that smiled and frowned with equal ease. Jaime disliked him on impulse — Sara, the opposite entirely.

She first saw him standing with her father on the docks, shoulders sloped from his poorly-healed wound, the molten sun spilling a gleam onto the gold of his hair. There was a strangeness to his expression, a particular sort of cunning — no one would have ever called him beautiful. He was too curious, insatiable that way, and Sara knew by then that certain beauty was formed only by restraint: the poise of her mother as she stood cast in sleepy afternoon light, her father with his longest knife in one hand and the tormented carcass of an animal in the other. Throats slit neatly, effortless as sin, long days followed by longer nights and seasons abruptly coming to their inevitable ends. This was what she knew: the lush wild of the swampland and her parents’ temperate kindnesses, not this pale-haired stranger with eyes blacker and wilder than an animal’s. He fascinated her.

“You remind me of someone,” she told him when she first met him, almost shy.

“I hope that’s not a bad thing.”

“No,” Sara said. “She was my friend.”

Why he was allowed into their home went unspoken, as did much else. The first night was silent on the river save for the peal of her mother’s laughter, the unexpected tenor of the stranger’s voice threaded somewhere far below. Sara’s father drank nothing but water, observed Jonathan from underneath the dark cast of his lashes, this man merely ten years younger but decades behind.

“Who is he?” Her brother’s voice was clipped, almost impatient.

“He was a soldier.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.” He was seventeen and drinking dry gin, the whites of his eyes brilliant in the lamplight. Sara sat beside him with her chin on knees. There was a wine glass of bottom-shelf vodka in her right hand and the world was spinning, incandescent, alive. When Jonathan turned to look at them both she went still, back straightening underneath the cutting gaze of authority, and she thought she — almost — could see him at the edge of a smile.

“Jaime, and Sara,” he said. His voice was inexpressibly pleasant, innocuous in its way, and Sara wondered what on earth he had in common with her hard-edged mother and father. Her bandaged wrist burned.

“It’s good to meet you,” he said. Jaime said nothing, but Sara was more receptive.

“You too,” she said. His eyes grazed over them both, and then he turned away.

The Half-Skinned Doe - Novel Prologue

It is simpler to end lives than to begin them—strange, then, that murder is not more commonplace than violent bloody births. Every single time her father would lift the knife to the pale belly of the moon, sharding it to pieces, and every time the blade fractured the light entirely. 

That was merely the pretty part. The ugliness came later: not the gleam of night on a switchblade but the spill of dawn on a body down by the dog-reeds, by the river, where the current of earth moved sluggishly against the spine of the land. The police assumed the animals had gotten to her but that was just being kind; the girl’s limbs and orifices had been ravaged by something far less innocent. The man who made the discovery pleaded her case, stunned by the awful look in her still-open eyes. “You can’t just throw her away like that,” he’d said, almost at the edge of a sob. “You can’t just do that.”

And on the river-boat, balanced on the balustrade, a girl with narrow shoulders and wide eyes observed, silent in her watching, as poised as a kingfisher before the swoop. Dark gaze vacant, features sweet and sharp with an animal’s blankness—when the police came later (which they would), she would deflect them with a mug of coffee, sweetened with chemical cream, the push of a plate adorned with shortcrusts and croissants, her mother’s low reassuring smile. And in her mind she would recall the nights spent in the cabin —her father’s fixed blades, the gambrel, the does gasping into cold open air—and smile, too, because this secret knowing was a power over them, an advantage that they couldn’t wrest away.

The family didn’t have names—not any ones that mattered. To their victims they were as shapeless, as amorphous as some monster in the dark; these things happened, certainly, but not due to people like them. They were faceless, their bodies unreadable, the stiffness of their shoulders and tightly wound spines a result of hard boat-work and nothing more. They drifted wherever the rushes took them, from one place to the next, never stopping for long but neither moving with any true purpose—innocent and quiet. Moving like a sea-hawk on the current, dipping their hands into the clear water.

The first, her father had counseled her, was always the hardest.

It would grow easier after that.

He called it hunting and her mother called it the harvest; these were euphemisms, her brother informed her slyly, eyes darting down to the little gray finch caught in the cage of his fingers. She was a swift-hearted thing, eyes glossed lustrous and black, sweet and kind and utterly unlike him. Yet he was exceedingly gentle with her—gentle to the point of absurdity—and that day he stroked back the down along her wings as she cocked her head nervously in his grasp. “She’ll never leave me,” he said then, exhaling softly. “She’ll always be mine.”

Later the girl would think, you show that animal more mercy than you show me.

They fit together strangely, three dark as Celts and the mother milk-and-honey, all tender long limbs and glacial eyes. The brother and sister, strangers often mistook for twins—they were close enough in age, narrow-hipped still in youth, and often traded poorly-stitched boys’ clothes to wear as they had no means of procuring any others. In such instances they appeared nearly identical, especially after the girl had sat with her legs swinging from the dock with a pair of dulled scissors and shorn her pretty dark hair. She had no interest in being a girl. She was a waif, she was her brother, she was something in between. 

They allowed themselves one dead girl for every season. It was inconsiderate to be greedy, her mother explained as she cooked dinner in the wooden belly of their home, rude to take too much. “And besides,” she’d explain, turning with fingers dyed purple from crushed black-skinned grapes, “We take the ones that won’t be missed. Know that, sweetheart. We only take the ones that no one wants.” Take. Another euphemism, whatever that meant. 

The girl’s father said it was economical; her stupid, passionate brother said it was a thrill. The girl herself was not so sure what it was, if anything other than another carcass laid face-down, partially skinned from shoulder to hip, on the weathered earth.

They did not eat meat because to consume another creature was repulsive, the act of an animal, a lowly sort of hedonism. The does they hung from the gambrel and relieved of their hides were left in the woods to rot. The family had nothing but their pride, and when pride is all you have it soon becomes all you need.

There were, then, moments of softness juxtaposed against a palette of blackest cruelty, a palm over the girl’s mouth as she shrieked and screamed and fought, her father’s brown eyes and her mother’s blue ones, missed birthdays and abandoned holidays and forgotten memorials, her brother bringing his hand down across her cheek in the privacy of the bedroom that rocked-rocked-rocked like the riverboat beneath them. He did not strike her hard—her cries would upset the gray-feathered finch—but instead with feeling. Her mother gave her ice for the swelling, makeup for the bruise.

They lived like this because they knew no other way.