Bedding the Vampyre

The annex is a living thing, and Ravenna feels its eyes upon her.

The wind claws at the broken shutters, rattling them with skeletal fingers, and the damp windows weep slow tears of condensation that streak down in dark rivulets. Beyond the window, the moor stretches endlessly grey. It moans through the chimneys like a lament for all lost souls.

Shadows twist across the cracked floorboards, crawling like wet serpents. Ravenna presses a trembling hand to the cold plaster, listening to the sighs that rise from the floorboards and the whispering drafts that carry the faintest echoes of her husband’s voice.

A candle flickers on the small writing desk, throwing her reflection across the cracked mirror. For a heartbeat, she thinks she sees another figure there—a tall, dark silhouette with eyes like aged whisky, staring at her from behind the glass. She whirls around, but the room is empty.

“Mordecai…” she breathes, her lips barely moving, yet the word echoes as though the room itself carries it.

Mordecai—her husband, her anchor—is gone, leaving her bereft, clinging to memory as one clutches a candle against the wind.

Her thoughts flit to the portrait upon the mantelpiece where her husband gazes out with a serenity she knows to be a cruel mockery. She cannot look upon it long without feeling the pulse of the past thrum beneath her own heart.

“Must one endure this world without him?” she whispers.

A sudden heat rises within her, and her gloved hand lashes out with a trembling violence. Books topple from the shelf, an inkwell shatters across the floor, and one of her candles rolls, guttering and spilling wax upon the boards. The room seems to groan beneath the weight of her rage, and in that moment, the evidence of her descent becomes plain.

Strewn across the desk and pinned to the walls are countless drawings of pentagrams, depictions of devils with coiled tails and clawed hands, and sketches of animals laid prone in sacrifice. Among these horrors lie stacks of meticulously penned manuscripts, each page addressed to Mordecai, her careful, looping script a testament to love and grief twisting into obsession.

Ravenna seethes, pacing a small circle around the overturned furniture before finally collapsing into the chair at her desk. The cradle in the corner rocks gently, its small occupant wailing in plaintive protest, awakened by the clatter, but Ravenna scarcely hears it.

She is absorbed entirely in the fevered scratch of her quill upon parchment. The remaining candlelight flickers over her drawn features as she pours herself into letters that are at once love notes, curses, and confessions of despair. To Mordecai, she writes of undying devotion, of nights spent shivering in the empty bed that once held him; of the cruel agony of his absence, and of the loathing hatred that burns within her for leaving her so utterly bereft.

Her mind betrays her with visions of Mordecai as he had been—his hand entwined in hers during twilight walks upon the moor, his breath warm against her ear as he murmured her name with a tenderness that made her tremble, the unguarded fire in his eyes when he drew her near in the privacy of their chamber. She remembers the weight of his body on hers, the scent of smoke and leather upon his coat, the roughness of his unshaven cheek brushing against her skin in hurried, stolen kisses.

Each is a dagger to her wounded soul.

In a sudden flurry, Ravenna gathers the scattered sheets of parchment to her chest, pressing them against her heart as though through ink and paper she might once more feel the heat of his embrace. Her lips move silently, shaping words of devotion, apology, and plea, her hair tumbling forward in dark disarray.

But the moment breaks with the sound of footsteps in the corridor.

Ravenna stiffens, clutching her papers more tightly as though they are sacred relics. The latch turns with a cautious hand, and the door creaks open. Her cousin, Alistair, enters, his countenance grave, his black coat cut in the somber fashion of the day, and behind him, his wife Evelyn, her gown modest but finely kept, her manner composed with a blend of gentleness and quiet authority that cloaks her disapproval.

They have been dwelling in the main body of the estate since Mordecai’s death, presiding over its affairs and assuming, without resistance, the authority that had once been Ravenna’s husband’s. It was Alistair who now received tenants, signed ledgers, and gave commands to the servants, while Ravenna was relegated to this solitary wing. It is but a gilded prison, furnished yet forsaken, where her grief and her fancies might burn themselves out unseen.

The pair enters the annex softly, as though they fear startling a creature both fragile and fierce. Their every motion betrays caution, fearing that any sudden motion might shatter the delicate boundary between Ravenna and her madness, yet it carries with it the weight of reproach.

Evelyn’s gaze drifts at once to the desk, and she catches her breath at the sight of the scattered pages: neat scripts addressed to the dead, furious crossings-out, desperate pleas, and, among them, crude sketches of pentagrams inked with such precision they might have been drawn with compasses. Across the plastered wall, Ravenna has tacked depictions of horned figures with hollow eyes, beasts slashed open upon altars, and symbols that seemed to writhe in the wavering candlelight.

The look he and Evelyn exchange across the dim chamber is brief, but it speaks with the force of months of shared silence. It is the look of resignation, of two souls acknowledging what could no longer be endured without intervention. Once again, the priest must be summoned. Once again, Ravenna’s ravings and blasphemies had to be restrained beneath the guise of holy authority.

“Cousin,” Alistair says, “you must not let grief consume you. There are safer ways to honor his memory than this. The child…the household...There are duties that require your presence, if not your will.”

Ravenna’s eyes, fevered and luminous, fixate on him. “Safer?” she echoes, shaking with a mixture of rage and despair. “There is no safety where Mordecai is not! I will bring him back, Alistair. You know not what it is to love as I have loved, to be abandoned not by choice, but by fate.”

Evelyn’s gentle hand brushes her sleeve, an attempt at solace that felt only like an intrusion. “Ravenna, you risk yourself to evil. Come back to God, to life, to reason.”

Ravenna’s answer is as bitter as the autumn wind. “Life without my husband is madness. Reason is a chain upon the soul. You speak of solace, yet you cannot know the pull of a love that death itself cannot silence. I shall find him, and he shall be with me once more. Even if it costs me my mind, my body…everything. I will bring him back!”

“You frighten yourself more than anyone else, dear lady,” Evelyn cautions in a rare moment of bravery. “You have become lost in shadows and Devil’s whispers.”

Ravenna laughs a hollow, echoing sound that bounces off the walls like the caw of a crow. “It is in shadows that he waits for me. And it is through shadows that I will find him again.”

The chamber falls still, but not with silence. The air thickens, pressing close. Upon the walls, the drawings tacked in frantic devotion begin to stir. They rustle like dry leaves, though not a breath of air moves within the annex. Evelyn recoils, stepping instinctively back into her husband’s side. “The Devil is here,” she mutters, her gloved hand clutching his sleeve.

“Do you see?” Ravenna hisses, her lips curling into a smile both triumphant and terrifying. “Mordecai lingers still. Death has not claimed him wholly. He waits for me to deliver him.”

The couple watches, stunned, as Ravenna savors the proof of her conviction.

In the mirror above the mantel, her reflection wavers, the surface trembling like water touched by an unseen hand. She watches the shadows dance across her face, the fraying lace at her throat casting patterns upon her pallid skin. Her hair, once carefully arranged in polished ringlets, now tumbles in loose waves down her back, streaked with the faint silver of sleepless nights and grief. And next to her reflection, another face blooms, pale and luminous against the glass.

His eyes fasten upon hers, filled with the terrible weight of love stretched beyond the grave. Ravenna’s breath catches, her entire body seizing with recognition. A shiver runs down her spine as a cold hand brushes the nape of her neck.

Her lips part in a soundless gasp as her knees weaken beneath the sensation.

When she turns, of course, he is not there, yet the cold hand of longing seems to linger upon her shoulder.

Ravenna sinks upon the floor beside the cradle, her hair falling about her face in a dark curtain. The child whimpers, and Ravenna feels a strange kinship in their shared vulnerability, suspended in a world that has denied them the warmth of her husband’s living presence. She presses her lips to the baby’s brow, murmuring, “Fear not, my love…for I shall not rest, and I shall not waiver. He shall come to us again, I swear it.”

Then, as though seized by some unholy impulse, she bites down upon her lower lip until it splits, a sharp pang of pain mingling with the iron tang of blood. Her finger traces the crimson welling there, and with a shuddering sigh, she touches it to the child’s brow, smearing the dark line across tender skin in a blasphemous blessing.