offer it a soul

In February, the Hagbeast comes.

It is early morning, and last night’s snow powders the ground. The worst part of winter has mostly blown over by now, but they still get snow almost every night, blanketing the buried corpses and whiskering the corn stubble with a nickel-shine frost. In the mornings, it snap-freezes: a flawless shell of ice has already formed over all of the ramshackle, run-down houses in the village overnight, and they gleam sharply in what little light there is, drawing the eye along their collapsing edges. Everything is quiet and still-sleeping.

Including the monster.

It landed in the corn field late last night; everyone had heard the crash, and bolted their doors. Usually the abominations leave if they can’t get a good meal, and people have learned to hole up whenever they come, locked in their houses with their oil-stock guns and rattling boxes of ammunition; the creatures never stay longer than a few hours when everyone hides. They all expected it to be gone by now. Off to hunt easier prey.

At dawn, however, Evangeline steps onto the porch with the bucket of chicken feed, and it is still there: a hulking, mutated figure, slumped in the snow like a slain colossus. 

A dusting of white has covered its shoulders overnight, flakes tumbling whenever it breathes. (And it is breathing , slow and heavy as a sick hound dog.) The incomprehensible shape of it has been twisted and blurred by the cold air. To Evangeline’s wind-stung eyes, it appears as a lovingly-kept collection of human detritus: spliced bones, sections of skin peeled from muscle, six disjointed spinal cords jutting from a humpback and trailing a flayer’s ornaments. In the breeze, they ripple oddly, like flags. Where there is skin, it’s an irradiated and lesionous grey, the color of a metastasizing brain tumor—where there isn’t, the muscles are lumpish and strange, as if bubbled over from some malignant fungal colony. 

Taken altogether, it looks more like a pile of parts than a creature, an unholy mutilation spliced together by an insomniac scientist with troubling dreams. The only thing denoting it as one organism is the ragged rising and falling of its side—and the flesh effigy of a woman sprouting out of its back.

Evangeline sets down the bucket of chicken feed. 

The sound doesn’t even stir the creature. She’s never seen one stay still this long—clearly it’s hurt, badly, and trying not to move too much for fear of reopening some fresh wound. That in itself is new. Usually the abominations just keep shambling until they die; last year, farmer McGillicutty shot one in all eight limbs, and the creature dragged itself along the ground with its face until its skull wore through—after that, it smeared brain another three feet. So to find one not only wounded, but resting , as if to regain its strength… it’s highly unusual.

Fascinating, even.

Evangeline, who is often whispered about in the village, the girl with the dead father and the sick, sick brain, takes her first step towards the monster.

Up close, it’s worse. The flayed muscle and gangrenous flesh are overgrown with a rancid sort of mold, which smells of the grave, and the creature’s side is completely riddled with bullet holes. Evangeline has to wrap her scarf around her nose and mouth to stop from retching at the stench of it. With the toe of her boot, she lifts the creature’s head: it looks almost like a tumor itself, a swollen growth lumped upon the shoulders, but the mouth more resembles a collapsed flower—a black, reeking orifice, surrounded by layers and layers of muscular jaws, tessellated over with teeth. If it has eyes, they are buried somewhere in the welts that cover its misshapen head. Or missing. 

After examining the monster’s skull, Evangeline is much less concerned about the figurehead, that peculiar woman’s body coming from the ridge of its spine, which is shriveled and old and seemingly of no consequence. If it’s anything, it’s some kind of lure, like an angler-fish might dangle for its prey. Otherwise, it’s the carcass of whatever this creature had come from. Neither pose any threat to her.

Evangeline runs her gloved fingertips along the abomination’s shoulder, relishing the shiver of fear and disgust that passes through her, fascinated despite herself. 

“Where on earth did you come from?” She asks the motionless creature, with a kind of sick wonder—because this thing is much, much bigger than the ones that come in from the woods, and its structure is much more complex. She remembers the story that Old Man Stilton used to tell, about the monster from his old village that he called the Hagbeast , who in the early days had come down from the castle and crushed ten houses, had sucked virgins and children into its many-jawed mouth and chewed them up like flesh-candies—but no one ever believed that story, not even the young’uns. Still. “How did you get here? And where did you get that old hag that you wear on your back?”

The monster doesn’t stir.

The air is nipping and very cold. Evangeline straightens up and looks around, wiping fungus from the wool of her gloves onto the burlap of her smock—there’s nobody else around, not even any faces in the windows. It’s just after dawn, so no one else is awake. It’s only her: Evangeline , the girl with the dead father and the empty house and the sick, sick brain. And the abomination, slumped in the snow.

She wonders what the others will do when they find this creature. If they will kill it; how they will kill it. If they’ll want it to go quickly or if they’ll want to make it hurt. She wonders how they will dispose of its body.

Alone as always, she drags the Hagbeast into the barn.

----

Evangeline, my girl, my darling girl, you have to help me. Evangeline, you must help me. Oh—oh, it hurts so terribly, Evangeline, it burns and burns me up, it rips into me, it is so hungry, it hurts—Evangeline, you must stop the pain, you know—you know what I would do if it were you, my girl, Evangeline—haven’t I always fed you? Haven’t I always taken care of you? Haven’t I always? Always, always, always—oh—Evangeline, please, my darling girl, my baby girl, please, please just make it stop—

----

For weeks after that, Evangeline is a thief. 

Every night, she dresses in her father’s hand-me-downs (almost too moth-eaten to be any good) and sneaks into the fringe fields, where other farmers have been known to dispose of the sheep and cows that don’t make it through winter. In February, it’s usually a good-sized boneyard. Evangeline walks silently through the bodies, takes whatever she can carry on her skinny shoulders; she rips the legs off worm-infested sheep and hacks into heavy shanks of rotting beef and brings it all back to the barn, where the creature waits, wounded and dying. Poor thing, she always thinks, despite herself.

If she gets the meat fresh enough, and pushes it with trembling fingers into the great slavering flower of its mouth, the Hagbeast will eat: a horrible process, jaws closing in an off-kilter rhythm, folding and crumpling, shoving the bloody flesh down its throat in torn-up chunks. If she’s waited too long, or the cold has withered the animals too much, the Hagbeast won’t even move. For such a pitiful creature, it certainly seems to be picky about what it eats.

Over the course of several weeks, Evangeline watches it, and cares for it, and learns—learns that it likes the blood, not the meat, and never the brain—and in doing this, she develops a kind of sick attachment to it. She learns to care for its hulking shoulders, its muscular spinal wings, and the tonguelike flagellae that sprout all over its body, which ripple in excitement when it eats. The Hagbeast is the closest thing she’s had to company in years. Sometimes she strokes it, idly, and doesn’t even mind the sticky moistness of its exposed muscle: “There you are,” she whispers, listening to the horrible crack and crunch as it chews. “What a good Hagbeast you are.”

They are all alone out here—not even a peep from the woods recently. No one in the village comes by her farm anymore, and she is glad for it; with this newest development, they would finally have a reason to call her insane.

Which she is, she thinks. Truly. 

Maybe she has been for a long time.

The Hagbeast only speaks to her after the third week, when the snow has stopped falling and the boneyard pickings are beginning to dwindle. Evangeline is working on mucking out the back half of the barn where it sleeps—the Hagbeast doesn’t produce any waste, as far as she can tell, but sometimes it vomits up skulls and some of the larger cattle-bones, and the fungus on its back is always trying to colonize the wooden siding in the night, so she has to scrape it off with a heavy bristled brush—and she is reaching up to reach a particular corner, when she hears, from behind her, with absolutely no warning:

“Turn around, girl.”

Evangeline’s heart stops .

The Hagbeast’s voice is nothing like she would have expected. It is dark and guttural and ravaged , weakened to a whisper, hoarse enough to blend in with the wind. It seems to be made of a thousand people, most of them vaguely female but many of them not, all of which have screamed themselves raw as if in agony: it is an ancient and decaying sound. It crawls over the skin, taps at the inside of the ribs, rewires the entire body so that it is pale and paralyzed and ready to run— because the Hagbeast can speak, and by all things holy, Evangeline should be running for her life.

But Evangeline does not run.

Instead, she swallows hard, and turns around.

The Hagbeast is awake. Not just conscious, as it usually is when it eats, but awake : its eyes have emerged from the welts on its head, and its jaws are parted but its throat isn’t fully flexed open. Somehow, being perceived by such an abomination, such a cosmic mistake of ruined flesh and bone, is more terrifying than any of this, more terrifying even than that first day that she found it crashed in the corn fields. Evangeline has cared for horrible things before, things more horrible than this—but never ones that perceived her. 

In that moment, it is the most terrible, intimate thing she’s ever felt.

“You,” the Hagbeast rasps, or whispers, or screams, like a rock being dragged over stones. Every word seems to be a great effort for it, something heavy it has to dredge up from the very center of itself. “You’ve been feeding me.”

“Yes.”

The flagellae on its shoulders begin to wriggle. Not violently, as they sometimes do, but slowly, almost gently, as if agitated by her answer. “Why,” the Hagbeast scrapes, and its voice—the absolute wreck of its voice—makes Evangeline’s heart crawl into her throat. 

Mistaking her silence for confusion, the monster tries again, sharpening the one syllable to a point: “Why.”

“I—I don’t know,” Evangeline stammers.

“Will you continue?”

Feeding it, she fills in, her thoughts disjointed and slow . It wants to know if I’m going to let it die. 

It is not a loaded question, even though it could have been, coming from such a desperate creature. She can hear neither hope nor fear in the words. To her, this is oddly reassuring—it seems the Hagbeast genuinely wants to know what she means to do with it. ( Oh, Evangeline, my girl, my darling girl, please make the pain stop, please—)

Evangeline lifts her chin, wills her hands to stop shaking: “Yes, I will,” she says, as if she’s rising to some sort of challenge, rather than pledging her services to a mutated monstrosity. “I’ll—I’ll keep bringing you food.”

The Hagbeast lets out a great, fetid sigh, which smells of bloated bodies, rank and rotting. Evangeline can’t tell if the sound is one of relief or just sheer exhaustion.

“I am tired now,” it says. 

One by one, the tiny, strange eyes shut across its skull, until only one remains, and it adds, almost as an afterthought, “I will need human blood to change back.”

The final eye shuts, and Evangeline is left alone.

----

—Evangeline—come here, baby girl, come here, darling. My precious girl. Oh, it hurts—it rips me apart, pulling me to pieces. I’ve never felt so—but never mind, never mind the things you can save me from. This won’t be permanent, I can promise that, not if you do what I—oh, God, oh sweet and merciful God—not if you do what I tell you. Listen very closely, Evangeline, darling. I will tell you what to do. I have never led you away from—please, oh, please, oh, it burns, it feels like—Evangeline, please, don’t make me beg you—

----

Another week passes. The Hagbeast grows stronger. 

Its eyes are open most days, now. Evangeline keeps bringing it meat; sometimes she even dares to steal live chickens from the other farmers, having given the Hagbeast all of her own. There are rumblings in the village of a wolf pack, or some sort of fox—they are wary of Evangeline, always have been, but they don’t suspect that she would ever steal from them. So she keeps her head down, buys milk and bread at the market and stays away from their children, and in the dead of night she dresses in her father’s clothes and lifts the fattest chickens out of their coops with her bare hands, a wild animal, a cruel and righteous girl.

It’s more rewarding work, now. The Hagbeast speaks to her more and more often. It never offers any explanation of what it is supposed to be changing “back” to, though she asks it every day, but it will comment on the meat she brings: “Three weeks old, and infected,” of the sag-fleshed cow’s head she brings back, the eyes eaten by worms. “Fresh,” if it’s a chicken, said with no surprise or appreciation, but rather as a single, exhausted observation. As the days pass, it becomes more and more like a single organism: Evangeline can see that it has legs, now, misshapen muscular trunks woven with ropy veins, and a long, thick tail, and knotty claws that sometimes flex and unflex like human hands. 

It’s unsettling, but oddly sweet, to see it forming into a more comprehensible thing. Evangeline finds herself going into the barn just to look at it sometimes, her strange and terrible secret. She gets the feeling that the Hagbeast doesn’t really mind being looked at. One afternoon, she even catches it shutting its eyes when she comes in.

Another thing that has grown, however, is the monster’s insistence that she bring it human blood. Almost every day now, it will growl, “Human, girl. It must be human,” as if she’s forgotten, like she somehow let it slip her mind like an item on her shopping list: ah, yes, I thought you said ‘dog blood;’ thank you for correcting me . More and more, the Hagbeast wants to change back into whatever it was before it came here—and again and again, Evangeline will tell it, not yet.

Because…

Because there are some lines she still can’t cross. The village may trust her now, but if someone turns up missing, she knows who would be blamed. Besides, the Hagbeast eats more in a day than Evangeline eats in a week—already people are growing suspicious, the boneyard dwindling, their animals disappearing in flocks. There is nothing for her here, but the village is all she has. Evangeline cannot be displaced.

“Why don’t you just eat me ?” She asks one day, when she has failed to bring the Hagbeast human blood once again, and she’s feeling particularly brave, sitting cross-legged on the floor and feeding pig’s legs into its maw. “I’m human, aren’t I? You’ve had a hundred chances to get me between your teeth. You could probably swallow me if I got close enough.”

The Hagbeast sighs again—Evangeline has grown used to the smell of it. “I could,” it admits. “But you could have killed me, too, when I first came here, and you did not—for better or for worse, you kept me alive.” The sightless figurehead, the withered hag-torso on its back, stays motionless and empty. “And I reward loyalty.”

I reward loyalty.

Evangeline thinks about that for the rest of the day, and well into the night.

It tortures her. It makes her skin itch, makes her want to tear her hair out—makes her want to kill someone, rip their throat out with her teeth, so she could give the Hagbeast what it wants, what it needs. Evangeline, my darling girl, make the pain stop. You have to make the pain stop. If she is loyal, let her be loyal, let her prove her worth. In bed, she has to dig her fingernails into her palms and bite into her wrist to stop herself from screaming—to stop herself from doing something terrible. Because yes, she is in the service of this creature—she has given herself over and now it is her duty to bring it back to life. If she cannot do that, then she is nothing. She has learned nothing. 

Then, in April, Hank Preston’s wife keels over in the middle of her cross-stitch pattern. 

Heart attack, people are whispering at the market, and Evangeline’s blood runs hot and quick, her hands freezing in a barrel of apples. Poor dear. They buried her this morning.

(People are easier to lift than cow-parts.)

Evangeline carries Ada Preston for three miles, limping the whole way. They bury women and children in the cemetery, and she has to take the long way home so that she won’t be seen with a body draped over her shoulders, rubbery and black with decay. (The smell has become familiar to her these last weeks: the smell of the Hagbeast.) While she walks, stumbling under the weight of the fouled corpse, she thinks to herself, Why am I doing this? but the question only prickles at the borders of her subconscious—because of course she was lying to the monster that day. She knows why . There are some things that not even Evangeline can make herself numb to. The dirt on the front of her smock, yes; the shovel she left in Mrs. Preston’s grave, yes. The sick-in-the-heart feeling of bailing soil off a dead body, exposing the left half of the face, grotesque and blue and wrong , yes—these things she can forget.

But not him.

Not her father.

Evangeline, my girl, you have to make it stop.

Evangeline drags Mrs. Preston into the barn just as dark is beginning to fall, the sun slipping below the horizon and spreading cool shadows over the corn fields, the sky turning the amniotic lilac of a chicken embryo. The Hagbeast is curled up in a corner, its heavy tail wrapped around its hulk of a body. Sleeping. Evangeline heaves the corpse to the floor; there is a sickening thud as the skull hits the dirt. 

“Hagbeast,” She says. “I brought you something.”

The sound is the worst part.

There are a lot of terrible parts, but the sound… 

Evangeline will never forget that sound for as long as she lives.

Most of it is the voice. As the Hagbeast changes right before her eyes, its voice undergoes a similar metamorphosis: it becomes more singular, more human, its thousand different tones wrestling and overlapping and coalescing until the cacophony has resolved into a single, plaintive, distinctly feminine voice, low and heavy and absolutely in agony—and, oh, Evangeline has never heard screams like these. Screams of such wretchedness and misery, a thing abandoned by hope. In the darkness, the Hagbeast screams like something being torn apart. 

—Evangeline, baby, please, please, you’ve always been so good to me, so good— you have to do just one more thing for me, please baby—

And it is, in a way, being torn apart. As Evangeline watches, the Hagbeast’s wings are violently shunted into its spine, segment by segment, until only a moist and rippled humpback remains—twists of organic matter unwind from around its body, and new skin grows over the exposed muscle and bone with a sound like something blistering on the stove. Underneath, its half-melted skeleton bubbles, twists, and reforms, like a moth liquefying in its cocoon, until the surface of its skin almost appears to be boiling with the agitated bone. The monster’s many jaws fold down over the center, tuck in, and shove down its throat, teeth raking furrows in the damp corridor all the way down to its stomach. It looks more painful than anything Evangeline's imagination could have come up with. All over, things are haphazardly packed up and put away like a flesh-tent being collapsed, and its spine cracks and the Hagbeast howls.

(Above it all, the figurehead sits, passive and silent.)

The process is almost unbearable to listen to, after a while. The sheer torture in the Hagbeast's voice dredges up old memories, splays them out in the moonlight as it they were happening all over again: the snap and pop and squish of a body transformed. I will give you anything, my darling girl—the spring cicadas screaming—I’ll never hurt you again, I’ll never touch you again, I’ll—please, I’ll do anything—please, Evangeline, my baby—

Evangeline watches, clawing at her head, and wishes she could do something—anything—to ease the Hagbeast's pain. 

Underneath her sympathy, however, curling at the nape of her neck in the sweat-prickled and terrified blackness of the night, there is also a thrumming line of fear. A fear beyond even her darkest memories. After all, despite the desperate and terrible love-pains that are trying to completely take her over, Evangeline still doesn’t know what exactly she’s done to this creature, in her unwavering devotion to it. What she’s done to herself. 

The thought has crossed her mind before. At the market, in the dead corn field, in the nauseated space that comes between cutting up dead cows and dragging them home, she has… wondered. Evangeline knows how likely it is that the Hagbeast is just the weak and wounded form of something far older, and far more powerful—something that could mean the end of not just her, but the entire village, the houses and livestock and families all devoured by a creature hungrier than anything she has ever known, restored to its full power by a foolish, sickhearted girl with skinny fingers. She knows that by digging up Mrs. Preston’s blue-faced corpse, it’s entirely possible that she has just ushered in an apocalypse: the end of all things.

If it comes down to that, she has told herself, over and over, it will have been worth it. The bizarre closure of the thing would have been worth it.

It doesn’t come down to that, though.

An eternity passes. Eventually, the screams turn into sobs, into breathless whimpers and gasps, and the cracking, crunching sounds stop altogether, replaced by the kind of aching and exhausted silence that follows something terrible. The shadows have folded down over the poor creature: Evangeline can no longer see it, not even its outline. 

But she can hear it.

(Evangeline is ready to die, she thinks. She sometimes suspects that she’s been ready to die her whole life.)

But when she steps into the darkness and looks, her eyes pinned wide to behold her own undoing, (Evangeline, my darling girl, just a taste, just a—please—you have to) Evangeline realizes that the Hagbeast—the massive, shambling Hagbeast with its stinking bulk and its many-jawed maw—has turned into…

Her spine locks up.

The Hagbeast has turned into a woman.

Not exactly an ordinary woman, to be fair. Even in the oily darkness of the barn, with the creature’s back to her, she can tell that this thing is enormous—twice Evangeline’s height, some kind of freakish giantess—and its skin is the sickly grey of spoiled milk, but its face is normal enough, despite the mess of blood. Its features could even be... beautiful, in a strange sort of way: the beauty of a fresh suicide.

A slice of moonlight cuts the creature’s hand into cross-sections: smooth, long-fingered, perfectly formed. 

Human.

Human-shaped, anyway—not that it makes much of a difference what’s under the surface anymore.

It’s unmistakable what form the Hagbeast has taken. 

Evangeline takes another step, and the Hagbeast whimpers, pitiful as an amputated dog—clearly the pain hasn’t finished with it yet, even if the transformation has. If she looks closely, she can see the aftershocks: runnels of skin rippling up and down its back, the occasional pop of a bone spur locking into place. The creature’s blood is everywhere. It looks oddly vulnerable like this, curled in on itself, massive and naked—it looks like something to be protected. 

Evangeline’s brain is a mess of static, but she hasn’t forgotten her duty.

When she sits down beside the creature’s head, it stirs, opens its eyes to slits. Up close, Evangeline is finally able to see their true color: a deep and predatory gold that she can feel all the way down in her kidneys. Human eyes. Although the pupils are dilated and the gaze is murky from pain, Evangeline feels the same claustrophobic squeeze of being perceived, seen in a way that she rarely is, anymore—the Hagbeast is looking right at her for what feels like the first time, and she is grateful for the darkness. It hides her shock, and her fear. And the little voice in her head that whispers, What have you created, mad girl?

In the dirt, the creature’s hands twitch, as if it wants to reach for her. 

“You,” it manages, in a voice that is hoarse and scratchy and somehow even weaker than before—but so impossibly singular. It’s strange to see a mouth moving with the words. The Hagbeast’s voice had come from somewhere deep inside its body, some rippled and vibrating tract that the human body couldn’t possibly support, but this creature, this woman, speaks with its own throat and lips and tongue; there is only one voice inside of it now. Only one person. It seems that every aspect of the Hagbeast has changed in just one night, down to the strange anatomy it contains. 

At least the smell is the same: that pervasive, overpowering, cadaverous reek.

Trembling, Evangeline runs her fingertips over the curve of its skull. “Me,” she repeats, and her voice is just as unsure as she feels, shell-shocked and shaky at the edges. “Yes, I’m—I’m here, Hagbeast. Hush, now. I’m here.” 

The creature sighs, and the sound rattles around in its massive ribcage.

Its hair is very soft. Even though it's frizzy from sweat and fear and night air, crackling with static, it's still one of the softest things Evangeline has ever touched: like black, detangled silk. Completely different from the Hagbeast's lumpish eye-mounds and misshapen skull. Evangeline is careful to be gentle with it, touching it only lightly, but her touch doesn't seem to be causing it any pain—and after a few long minutes, its breathing deepens, and Evangeline realizes that it has fallen asleep beside her, lulled into complacency by the way she’s stroking its head. It must be completely worn out from the metamorphosis, the poor thing. It’s spent the last month preparing for this night.

Evangeline keeps petting the creature until her arm begins to feel sore. For a moment, she considers getting up. She’s certain that people all around the village heard it screaming as it transformed. With any luck, they’ll assume it was coming from the woods, but she knows that their distrust of her goes all the way down to the bone—it’s possible that someone is skulking around her property right now, trying to get a good look at whatever had made those horrible noises down by the Spriggin farm. But, although she thinks about it, she can’t quite bring herself to leave the poor Hagbeast here. So exhausted and sick and in pain. 

It’s alright, she thinks, running her fingers through its dark hair. I’m here.

That night, Evangeline falls asleep draped over the Hagbeast—or, what had once been the Hagbeast—with darkness pressing in around her and miles of soft skin against her cheek and the smell of corpses in her nostrils. Beneath her: a creature transformed, but still alive, still whole. In pain, but still breathing. Beneath her: her own absolution.

She does not understand it all just yet.

But she thinks, with time, she will.

----

—Evangeline, Evangeline, Evangel—please, darling, please, my baby girl, please, I only need a little bit, just a little bit—she won’t feel it, she—please, it hurts so terribly, it tears my body up—burns and tears my body up—bring her to me—if you were loyal, if you loved me you would bring—if you were worth a single thing—I’ll never hurt you, I would never hurt you darling, please—she won’t feel it—Evangeline—

----

The creature is sitting on the barrow when Evangeline wakes.

In the morning light, it is no longer a creature exactly. Though its skin is still that same bloodless grey, like a cross section of spongy brain-ganglion, and its eyes have retained their strange golden color, it’s immediately clear that the Hagbeast is no longer an it in any meaningful sense of the word. 

Evangeline rubs her eyes, her first full night’s sleep in weeks still weighing heavy in her brain, spangling filmy light-patterns on the inside of her skull. She has the vague, distant awareness that she should be afraid: the Hagbeast may not be a pile of person parts anymore, but all of that—that piecemeal beast with its thousand gnashing teeth, that monstrous, devouring fungal thing—is still inside this woman, somewhere, packed away and waiting to be brought back out. There are echoes of it in her eyes: a kind of ancient, feral hunger. Evangeline knows, deep in her bones, that this woman is entirely capable of breeding the exact same kind of nightmare horror that the Hagbeast was, the kind that gets into the blood and rewires the brain, the kind that knows nothing but the chemical sting of fear. 

But that’s one of the advantages of madness—instead of flinching away from the woman’s gaze, Evangeline is drawn to it, in a desperate and primal way. It's the way she imagines lots of people feel about God. The soft, subterranean murmurs of terror and awe, obliterating all the selfish parts of you.

The woman tilts her pretty head. “I’m not what you expected,” she says.

It it isn’t a question, which means it must be a test: one she isn’t eager to fail. Evangeline swallows. “I—I don’t know what I was expecting,” she admits.

“Another creature, I assume.” 

“I guess.”

“Another monster.”  At this, the woman smiles. It's predatory and horrible, full of far too many teeth. “What is it you’ve been calling me, girl? I can't seem to remember. It was some kind of beast.”

Evangeline corrects her without thinking: “The Hagbeast.” 

“The what?”

The playfulness falls from the woman’s face with whiplash suddenness, forcing Evangeline to remember that Hagbeast is not, in itself, a compliment. Especially not for beautiful ten-foot women with eyes like paraffin lamps. “I mean—” Evangeline starts, and shakes—she can’t help the way her heart squeezes at the prospect of this woman’s anger, so soon after she’s arrived. “That’s what they used to call you, a few villages over. Back when you flew down and took people—if that even was you,” she amends quickly, afraid to assume. 

The woman’s mouth tightens, as if she finds the suggestion indelicate, but she doesn’t deny it. 

“Not the most flattering nickname, girl,” she says, eyes narrowing, “but I suppose I can forgive a little bit of rudeness, given the… unusual circumstances. After all—one might expect any number of distasteful substitutes to arise when they aren’t even given the courtesy of a name.”

Evangeline swallows, catching her meaning. “Evangeline.”

(It feels strange to give her name to the Hagbeast. Like telling a secret she should have kept to herself.)

“Evangeline.” The woman rolls the single word around her mouth as if tasting it, or trying it on. Evangeline remembers how the rotting cows legs had been churned up in the Hagbeast’s gruesome maw, and shivers. “That’s a pretty name. From the Latin evangelium, yes? Gospel?”

A pretty name. 

“I wouldn’t know.” 

The woman looks her up and down—obviously cataloguing the skinny legs, the wheat-chaff braids, the faded and freckly face. 

“It suits you,” she says, after a moment, and Evangeline can’t tell whether or not she’s lying. “As for me, I don’t think Hagbeast quite measures up, do you? Charming as it is, of course. From now on, you may call me Lady Dimitrescu.”

Evangeline considers this. Dimitrescu.

It’s a lot nicer than Hagbeast.

For that sole reason, she distrusts it. There is a part of her that flinches from this creature, this lovely and frightening woman, in a way that she did not from the simple fact of the Hagbeast: a part that is wary of the things to come. What all of this might mean. But while she lays there in the dirt, propped on her elbows and trying to think of a more polite way to ask When, exactly, do I get to die for you, the woman—Lady Dimitrescu—just keeps staring at her, head slightly cocked, as if trying to formulate a particularly complicated thought.

“You are a curious girl, Evangeline,” she finally says. “Do you know that?” 

What she calls curious has been called many other things. “Yes, I do.”

“You held me as I lay in agony—touched me, when I was in a form that would make most mortal eyes melt from their sockets. I might wonder how you didn’t lose your mind.”

“I…” Evangeline hesitates. “I don’t scare easily.”

Lady Dimitrescu’s eyes gleam gold. “Yes—that you've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

As if to emphasize the intensity of her gaze, a sudden breeze picks up inside the barn—Evangeline inhales on reflex, expecting damp soil and fresh flowers, tokens of spring. Instead, a strange, rancid smell invades her nostrils, nearly blocking out the death-smell of Lady Dimitrescu herself: it’s almost indescribable, layer upon layer of rot, decay, putrefaction, and something distinctly sour that reminds her of bile, and after the first, overwhelming few moments of trying not to empty her stomach into the dirt, she’s able to identify it as some kind of vomit. It takes a quick scan of the interior of the barn to see the source. In the corner, an enormous pool of somebody’s stomach contents has mostly congealed: ripped-up chunks of old meat, oily gristle, a ropy mess of wriggling white parasites. The stench is unimaginably foul, caught in this sudden breeze. Evangeline’s stomach flips inside her, threatening to uproot yesterday's meals.

When she looks back to Lady Dimitrescu, the woman grimaces in sympathy, though the expression doesn’t quite fit on her face—a little too ordinary, too human. Not quite genuine. “I am sorry about that,” she says. “The—the body you call the Hagbeast, it has less... refined tastes than this one. Matter above all, you see. But I’m always forced to reckon with the things I eat, in the end.”

Evangeline may still be unsure of this new woman-form, but the thought that the Hagbeast might have woken early, her guts in knots, to vomit up fifty pounds of grave-robbed meat, gives her a pang of guilt. 

“Oh,” she says. “I—I’m sorry, I didn’t realize...”

“Don’t be. It’s this weak human stomach—can’t handle even a spore of rot.”

Rot. Evangeline eyes the pool, remembering all the unspeakably ruined animal-parts she had dragged home. The guilt doesn’t abate. Of course a week old cow’s leg infested with botfly larvae wouldn’t stay down, even in a creature like the Hagbeast—of course she had pumped the monster full of poison in exchange for an easier walk home, all so she wouldn’t have to sacrifice what meager reputation she still has; of course, even in this, she hasn’t learned her lesson. A kind of sick, tingling revulsion begins to swirl up from her stomach: Evangeline, baby, if you were worth anything—if you had any use at all— Evangeline—Evan—

Lady Dimitrescu mistakes her expression for disgust. “I know it’s a bit of a sight,” she says. “I would have dealt with it myself long before you woke up, but I… well. I wanted to get a good look at you first.”

“At me?” 

Evangeline forgets, sometimes, that to outsiders she must look shockingly normal—as unremarkable and underfed as any other village girl. Lady Dimitrescu seems to find her disbelief ridiculous. “Yes, at you,” she says. “Can you fault me, for wanting to see what sort of girl you were? What sort of girl would drag me home and... revive me, simply out of the goodness of her mortal heart?”

(Not goodness, Evangeline thinks. Not at all.)

“And... what sort of girl am I?”

Lady Dimitrescu studies her carefully. “I’m not sure yet,” she says, and her tone is casual, but her eyes are raking Evangeline up and down for what feels like the hundredth time—a sharp, searching gaze, as if she expects wings to sprout from Evangeline’s back and teeth to start bubbling out of her mouth as long as she is patient, as long as she doesn’t look away. Like all of this is some kind of trick.

Of course, nothing happens. As with all ruined girls, everything wrong with Evangeline Spriggin is hidden just underneath the surface, and after a moment, Lady Dimitrescu looks away.

“I will need to stay here a few more days, while I heal,” she says. “I trust you can accommodate me for a little while longer.”

Evangeline nods. “Anything,” she says, and means it—means it all the way down to her bones.

----

—Evangeline—you cannot be afraid—please, baby, please, my baby girl—darling Evangeline, haven’t I always loved you, haven’t I always cared for you—if you ever loved me at all, if—oh God—Evangeline, darling—oh, God, the pain—it never ends—she won’t feel it, she’s only a child, only a child, and I am so hungry—

----

Evangeline cleans up the vomit herself.

It’s good to have something to put her mind to, really. Because the pool is mostly limbs, strung together by the sagging loops of bovine intestine and half-digested sinew pulled cat’s cradle between the piecemeal skeletons, she has to use her rake, dragging the mess out through the barn doors with her shirt pulled up over her nose. She buries the regurgitated parts in the woods. Even then, the smell lingers on her smock: she has to strip out of it, down to her linen undershirt, and leave it hanging on the clothesline. She’ll wash it later, if she has time. Evangeline is good at keeping things clean.

Last night, to her, feels like a fever dream.

It was only yesterday that the Hagbeast was still… the Hagbeast, but it’s so easy to forget—so easy to neatly package up and swallow the memories of heaving, muscular flanks and sticky, flesh-gummed talons raking furrows in the dirt, so easy to ignore the blood smeared over her face. The only thing Lady Dimitrescu shares with her previous form is the smell, which Evangeline doesn’t even notice anymore, and that ancient, all-knowing look in her eye—everything else has been completely reshaped, twisted into flawless skin, fine features, wicked and well-shaped teeth that only carry points at the canines. If she weren’t so tall, she could almost pass for a high-society lady, a woman of castles and carriages and tiny golden forks. Someone washed up in the village by circumstance, rather than by a fatal gunshot wound.

It makes Evangeline uneasy. Somewhere, deep down, she knows that this woman, Lady Dimitrescu, is more dangerous than the Hagbeast could ever be—more dangerous than even Evangeline’s most marrow-deep nightmares can conjure up—simply because she comes in a body that makes it so very easy to forget what she was. What she is. 

Not that Evangeline knows, in any certain terms, what she is.

It’s clear now that the Hagbeast was no ordinary abomination, like the ones that live in the woods, slavering and single-minded and hunting for flesh—that much is obvious. Evangeline suspects it may have been obvious from the very beginning, and she was just unable to see it. Even when the Hagbeast was still a hulking, tumorous beast, there was a certain horror to it: a visceral wretchedness, a skin-crawling, gut-twisting nightmare-terror that clung to its every corpuscle and spore. Like something not quite ordained by this world.

And of course, it had trusted her. Had let her stand, trembling, before its enormous toothflower maw and feed it rotting cows’ legs like a mother feeding her palsied child. The Hagbeast had shown her mercy, even gratitude—had waited for her even in those last days, when her blood must have been singing to it whenever she got close, the perfume of its own sheer and wanton desire, the irresistible black oil of life. It—she—could have killed Evangeline a thousand times.

But instead: I reward loyalty.

Yes, whatever Lady Dimitrescu is—whatever she came from—is something much older than all of the other monsters, and much more powerful. Something born of death and dust, fed on the milk of fear and sustained always by the singular human legacy of suffering. If Evangeline looks closely, she can almost see it, seething under her skin: a great, wrestling hypodermic power of grief and exhaustion and rage that could only come from centuries—eons—of existence, of living and loss, of being dragged through the mortal world in a flesh-cage, unable to die.

Evangeline is loyal—will be loyal, will continue to prove herself as many times as it takes—but she is more wary of Lady Dimitrescu than she ever was of the monster. 

Below that wariness, though, in the scummy cavity behind her sternum, she can feel the dangerous tingle of elation twice as strong. It’s a new feeling, sinister and seductive, rippling from her heart to her fingertips, threatening to take her over completely. She remembers, unbidden, her last moonlit cross-sections of the Hagbeast: the sounds it had made as it transformed, the strangled, wrenching screams and sobs, and how when it was all over, there had been no lesionous flesh, no rotted musculature, no mess of blood or guts the way there had been, once—just a soft giantess curled up in its place. Whole and alive. Whole and alive.

Evangeline is a girl with debts. Dark, half-buried, darling girl sorts of debts—the kind that simmer always in the worm-eaten jelly of her brain, curling up from the black earth every night to whisper in her ear and remind her of the things she’s done: the things she wasn’t able to hold on to. It’s plainly visible to other people, she knows. Anyone who touched her would find her skin humming, radioactive, contaminated by loss.

But this time, she did not flinch. This time, she was not weak.

That alone gives her a kind of tremulous hope.

Over the course of the next few days, Lady Dimitrescu grows stronger, as the Hagbeast once did—only now, Evangeline no longer has to sneak into the other farmers’ yards at night: the Lady can hunt for herself.

Mostly, she goes after roebuck and other big game, killing them in the woods and then dragging the bodies back into the barn so she won’t risk being seen. (Evangeline is not permitted to join her on these nightly escapades, but she has caught her coming back once: between the trees, she was colossal and wild-eyed and white as a chord of moonlight with wicked-sharp teeth.) Now that her wounds have mostly healed, she is insatiable: the drained corpses pile up two or three at a time until Evangeline comes in to dispose of them, lifeless and pale as ghosts dredged up from the river. It seems that her appetite hasn’t lessened much since she transformed; sometimes Evangeline comes in in the mornings to find her still eating. 

And it is still unspeakable, the way Lady Dimitrescu eats. (Less openly violent, perhaps, but still... unspeakable.) Where the Hagbeast was indiscriminate, stuffing corpse-parts down with a visceral, ravenous desperation, Lady Dimitrescu’s delicate mouth has the fine tools to be selective, to take only what she wants—and Evangeline was right about her preferring the blood.

The blood. She has seen the process once or twice, and will remember every detail of it until the day she dies: the way Lady Dimitrescu latches her mouth to the limp corpses and suckles, practically nurses the bloody flesh like a baby at the breast, her eyes going lidded and lazy and the corners of her lips beading black; the way she gulps down the thick dark ooze like mother’s milk. When she eats, all of the rosy color visibly drains from the meat in her hands, the precious blood slowly being pulled out of every capillary and corpuscle—millions of red cells fleeing their venules like an army retreating. 

When she’s done, the slab of muscle is still there, but it’s pale and strange, an alien fetus laid out on the ground. Completely drained of blood, clammy and pearlescent like nothing that ever was—or ever could be—living. 

Evangeline has never seen anything like it. The familiar tingle of fear ripples pleasantly up from her stomach: the disgust and fascination of seeing a once solidly-knit piece of animal desecrated, removed from itself, rendered incomprehensible. Whenever she comes in early and sees Lady Dimitrescu settled in to feed, it reminds her of the sheer gravity of this thing she has done, this thing she has created. Because where the Hagbeast was enormous, and starving, Lady Dimitrescu is pure cruelty. Where the Hagbeast sought only to fill up its own emptiness, it seems that Lady Dimitrescu wants to find, consume, and utterly destroy—to make grotesque the only thing that can still be trusted in this world; namely, the body. 

It’s both repulsive and strangely exciting, the idea of that. (Evangeline has learned to stay away from the barn whenever she hears those horrible sucking sounds.)

Still, every day she visits Lady Dimitrescu, dragging away the bleached corpses with their shriveled eyes, and she keeps the giantess company when she can. No matter her reservations about this new woman, with her lycanthropic yellow eyes and her predatory smile, she has to give her credit—Lady Dimitrescu does not ask her why ever again, even though Evangeline can feel the eyes on her whenever she comes to take the bodies, can feel the question burning its way through both of their skulls. (Why do you feed me? Why do you keep me hidden? What's in it for you?) Instead, the Lady engages her in lighter conversation. She asks after the name of Evangeline’s village—which after all these years still tastes bitter and acrid in her mouth—and the village that Old Man Stilton had come from, which Evangeline learns is the village she once lorded over. She asks after the livestock in these parts. She asks after the woods, and what sorts of things live deep in their intestinal coils.

Once, while she’s sitting in the corner, sated, smeared with blood from nose to chin, she even asks, “Are you afraid of me, Evangeline?” with a kind of playful, satisfied smile spread over her face. As if she expects a lie, or a performance.

But Evangeline just looks at her and says, shakily, “No.”

Because that is the truth, she thinks, despite it all. Most of the time, the feeling that clutches her is not fear—not real fear, anyway. She cannot look at the grey-skinned giantess, ancient and all-knowing and pushed up from the gnarled root of the Hagbeast, without remembering how pitiful she had looked that first night: curled in on herself like a bellyshot animal, so vulnerable and in pain. How she had fallen asleep to the feeling of a farmgirl stroking her dark hair. Poor thing.

Besides, the weeks have softened her, too. The Lady is less intimidating now that Evangeline has learned her, the way she once learned the Hagbeast: her love-affair with languages, the explosive temper that she keeps half-buried under her genteel manner, her sizzling, lip-curling hatred of men. The way she plays with her fingertips when she thinks; a woman accustomed to wearing gloves. And most of all, the hard, hot kernel of grief that she carries in the very center of her chest at all times, almost visible behind her sternum, like something she swallowed and can’t work back up. Because something did happen to her, Evangeline thinks—something that left her half-dead and buried in February snow, something that makes her clutch her ribs when she’s angry and scream unfamiliar names into the night, sometimes, sounding like she wishes she could pull her own guts out, her howls akin to the mournful, echoing cries of an underwater creature: my babies, my sweet babies . 

It is harder to distrust her, in the light of that grief. 

(Evangeline never asks about it: about what happened to this woman. This creature. She thinks that the loneliness of her own property, the extra bedroom that squats at the back of her house like an infected wound, says more than she could ever say herself. I know what it feels like to be left, suddenly, alone. )

So nowadays, their relationship is different—Evangeline less frightened, Lady Dimitrescu less helpless—and the horrors they make together are fresher, less mired in the sweat and fear of winter, Evangeline’s penance a blood-blister on the long, mild, flower-filled spring days. At least the people in the village don’t seem to suspect anything. Now that Evangeline has given up stealing their chickens, they seem to have settled down a bit: the whispers have calmed down at the market, and the boneyard stays untouched, left to the vultures. Some of the mothers still watch her when she walks through town, eyeing the lone figure in its oversized wool coat and burlap smock (Do you see her there? Never go near her. You hear me? Never.) but mostly she’s left alone. 

It's strange—in all the ways that should matter, she is more isolated than ever before. But in a strange, new way, her heart has opened to a changed world.

When Lady Dimitrescu isn’t draining deer or brutally castrating handsome young bucks, leaving the genitals mangled and pulped in the dirt for Evangeline to find, she can be a surprisingly good conversationalist. She enjoys toying with Evangeline—running her cold fingers over her shoulder, leaning in too close to whisper, saying her name like it’s something filthy—but that’s more of a form of entertainment than anything else, and Evangeline doesn’t mindit, really. (Even if it gives her a treacherous, wriggling feeling in the depths of her stomach.) Sometimes she’ll sit in the dirt beside Lady Dimitrescu, telling her vague snippets of what she remembers of her childhood: harvesting the sweet corn every fall, the thick scent of black locust flowers, the snow and sweat and poverty of winter. The one January when the well-water froze and they had to walk two miles through the snow to get to the river. Lady Dimitrescu seems utterly fascinated by her, and although she can’t understand it, there is a small part of Evangeline that keens and blooms under the attention. She forgets that it’s been nearly two years since she’s had a conversation with anyone.

Sometimes, Lady Dimitrescu catches her staring at the bodies as she drags them away. That’s when she is most talkative herself. “That one was particularly enjoyable,” she’ll say, gesturing carelessly to the doe in Evangeline’s hands, pretending like she isn’t amused by her repulsion and curiosity. “I managed to trap it in a snarl of tree roots, so I could... take my time.” Or else: “That one put up a fight.” Or else, in a clipped and snarly sort of voice: “That one was filthy. Male. It tasted like violence and spunk.” 

To Lady Dimitrescu, anything even vaguely male tastes like violence and spunk.

Except, oddly enough, the humans.

It only happens once. Evangeline comes into the barn to find a human man heaped unceremoniously in the corner, still-dripping, chunks taken out of his face and neck like he’s nothing more than sweetmeats, bones for somebody to suck clean. His throat has been splayed open, the esophagus a bloody gutter. Lady Dimitrescu has left more of him than she ever leaves in an animal (there’s blood left, and she hasn’t gone for the soft parts of the arms), and yet the body is somehow more defiled : the eyes gone, the intestines coiled wet and sagging in the dirt, the jaw broken open and the tongue ripped out at the root. Chewed on , it looks like . From what she can see of the man’s face, she can see that he was once handsome. Maybe even beautiful.

(Evangeline has never seen a dead man before.)

When she points at the corpse, unable to speak, Lady Dimitrescu doesn’t wrinkle her nose the way she usually does. Instead, she actually smiles : wide enough to show the points of her incisors. “Don’t worry, girl,” she says. “I’ve kept my promise—no dipping into your village men. I found this one skulking about in the woods, circling the edge of your property, and I just couldn’t resist.”

There is a strange edge to her tone. Although she sounds mostly like she usually does after a good meal—languid, satisfied, her voice like plum silk—Evangeline can hear a kind of sick, victorious anger underneath; it just barely registers through the buzzing of blood in her own ears. (Because oh. The dead man's body is so much smaller than she imagined it would be. So much more pitiful. In his ruined face, she can see the outlines of the infant he once was: crumpled and red. Desperate for a comfort that would never come.) 

“He was in the woods?”

“Poking his filthy nose around.”

That in itself is frightening; even more so than the body. April is boar season, when the men usually go out to hunt—earsplitting gunshots and the squeals of sweating, bleeding, terrified pigs, the bloodthirsty shouts, the boots thudding in the dead leaves—but even at this time of year, nobody dares go near the Spriggin farm. Everyone knows who lives here. Ever since she went to market without incident, Evangeline has assumed that the other people in the village hadn’t heard Lady Dimitrescu’s poor, metamorphosing screams, or that they were ignoring them, but if they know—if anyone suspects—  

Lady Dimitrescu reaches out and docks Evangeline’s chin. “No need to be afraid,” she says. Although the strange edge is still there, that hushed and feral rage, it’s as close as she ever gets to sounding gentle. “Look at me, girl. I can handle a nosy man-thing or two.”

Evangeline, look what you’ve done to me—look what you did—you let them—look—look at—

“They’re not as weak as you think they are,” Evangeline says, hoping her warning will shore itself up in so many words. Hoping that she can impart this isn’t so different from last time without having to say it out loud. Without having to remember, exactly, what the village men are capable of. “These people… they look out for their own.”

Lady Dimitrescu’s eyes gleam with a dangerous, furious something —it takes a moment for Evangeline to identify it as a kind of pain. The familiar kind: the not again kind.

“Of course they do,” she says. “But so do I.”

----

—Please, Evangeline, my baby girl, it aches, it burns—won’t feel it, she won’t even feel it—I just need—you have to make it stop, you can make it stop—just let me tell you what you need to do—Evangeline, baby—darling—sweet girl, please, oh, please—I know you will—if you loved me you would—please—

----

Another day passes. The woods are pregnant with corpses. The spring rains have started, churning up the dark soil, exposing the occasional ear or tail, the tip of a hoof. The dead man is buried deep beneath a twisted silver poplar and decomposing quietly. Evangeline is more sickheaded and more sickhearted than ever before, but for the first time in two years, she is strong, she is supplicant, she will deliver. She has not failed . At night, she hears Lady Dimitrescu hunting and howling, my babies, my babies, my babies, and although it hurts to listen to, it drowns out the murmurs of her own dreams.

More bodies, more bodies. The days push up between the nights like flowers. Evangeline has to keep sewing Lady Dimitrescu new dresses; they always end up filthy or ripped down the middle or soaked in animal blood to the point of being unsalvageable. She washes the ones she can and patches up the more reasonable tears, but she knows she’s eventually going to run out of bedsheets to sew together. She’s used the ones from her bed, and both sets of spares, and she refuses to touch her father’s. (They don’t smell like him anymore, but there’s still a crackle of static over them, a long-preserved sense of him having been here.) She's nervous about running out before the Lady heals. On the first night, her nakedness had been incidental, even pitiable—now, Evangeline doesn't think she could look at the pale, towering body without blushing.

To her credit, Lady Dimitrescu is very careful with her tent-sized dresses whenever she isn’t half-wild with blood frenzy. She even compliments some of the fresh ones, saying the seams are straighter than before, the cut more flattering. Evangeline can never tell what she’s talking about. She taught herself to sew when she was young, used to patch up her own scrapes when she took a tumble in the road, and she knows her stitches are crude, looping and coarse, knotted six or seven times on one end—every dress just looks the same to her. Like a child's construction.

Sometimes, when she washes the bloodstains out of the coarse white cotton, she imagines that she can taste what Lady Dimitrescu tastes: that raw, coppery, animal tang of blood, the rubbery way flesh might give underneath sharp teeth. Imagines gulping down blood like Lady Dimitrescu does. It makes her gag, but she keeps the image down—wonders, idly, if Lady Dimitrescu can smell the madness on her, the way she could smell fear on that man. If her brain reeks of mold like a dead animal.

(She thinks it’s possible. She sometimes catches Lady Dimitrescu looking at her… oddly.)

Evangeline has also started walking around the border of her property every night, now, looking for hunters. Looking for men. The discovery of the first one—from the patches of red hair that had been left on his scalp, she assumes he was a Mulligan brother—has left her uneasy and constantly on the alert. Lady Dimitrescu assures her several times that it’s under control (“I used to eat whelps like that one with my afternoon tea, Evangeline”), but Evangeline knows it’s better safe than sorry—three times this week, she’s seen the Lady wince when she stretches too far. The old wound is still troubling her. Although the shotgun scars on her face have mostly faded by now, the slash on her ribs remains a thick, ugly lip of white: she isn’t fully healed yet, and it’s making her impatient. 

Evangeline knows her village, even if it has no love for her. She knows that any sign of weakness—any hesitation—and these people will swallow you up. She can’t afford to take that chance with Lady Dimitrescu.

She dips in and out of the forest, raised since birth to avoid going too deep, despite the fact that her barn is currently housing a creature more dangerous than anything she’s ever seen coming out of these woods. She keeps her whole body taut as a bowstring. She searches for a flash of eyes, a section of rough flannel, the gleam of moonlight off the side of a rifle. Over the course of the next three days, she doesn’t catch anyone, but she does hear the occasional rustle in the darkness—man or monster, she isn’t sure. She isn’t sure which one she would rather find. 

What would she do if she discovered one—a man, hiding in the woods? 

The uncertainty terrifies her.

Because deep within her, there is the raw, thrumming chord of instinct: to protect what’s hers, to prove herself loyal. (A body crumpling—skull shattering—buckshot through the orbital bone, turning the delicate tissues of the brain into jam.) But there are also the dim echoes of her life before: before she was bad, before she was sick, before she was alone. Beneath Evangeline’s dedication, there is the vague but powerful awareness of the things she still stands to lose. And sometimes she thinks that if just one person were to touch her gently—were to say, I’m sorry, sweet girl —

They will never love you, Evangeline. They will not forgive.

— Daddy, I CAN'T — 

At the edge of the woods, Evangeline bites down so hard on the meat of her tongue that her teeth go clean through it: she hears the click of them meeting. It hurts so badly that her eyes water but it makes the voices quiet down, so she doesn’t open her jaw. 

After that, she doesn’t have to try to remember what blood tastes like.

Later, she comes home tired and filthy, and Lady Dimitrescu tells her that her blood smells good. “Malnourished, yes,” she admits, “but very sweet. Almost overly so—like fruit about to spoil. If you weren’t so pure, I might call the scent alcoholic in nature.” 

Evangeline knows that she should be frightened by this, by the contemplative declaration that her blood smells delicious, but instead she almost feels… flattered. Shy, even, like Lady Dimitrescu is a boy her age who’s just complimented the color of her eyes. “Did you eat many girls like me?” She asks, sitting on the edge of the wheelbarrow. “Back home, I mean.”

“Girls like you?”

“Village girls.”

Lady Dimitrescu’s mouth quirks. “Hundreds.”

Hundreds. Evangeline doesn’t think she’s ever eaten hundreds of anything in her life. One winter, she and her father had to trap field rats for dinner, having run out of meat stores. They skinned them raw, picked out all the lungworms, and roasted the little bodies over the kettle fire: there were still pieces of rotten, chewed-up corn inside the folds of their stomachs. “And are you—” she says, and hesitates, unsure of how to ask. “I mean, will you…” 

Lady Dimitrescu catches her meaning, and smiles. “I always keep my promises, Evangeline,” she says. “Even the desperate ones. There are few substitutes for human blood, but yours is safe from me.”

Evangeline chews on the inside of her cheek. “Isn’t it awful, though? Eating animals?”

“Well, it’s marginally better when they’re alive ,” Lady Dimitrescu says, her lips splitting to reveal those wicked canines. Then, a moment later: “Oh, don’t make that face, girl. I’m only teasing you.”

And that’s another thing that’s new and a little bit frightening about the Lady: she seems, in her own way, to expect very little of Evangeline. She hardly asks her for anything, and what little she does request is always physical, something to fetch and provide—a paperback book, a cloth to wipe the blood off her face. Even when her standards are high, she does not scream or rage or hit when they aren’t met. Evangeline is not used to that sort of gratitude—it unsettles her. It makes her think, with a dark shudder, of what will happen the day Lady Dimitrescu is fully healed, when she is finally able to leave the barn, the village, the woods. The day Evangeline is left, for the final time, alone.

There was a time when she thought that loneliness would be the worst thing in the world.

After her father died, she’d—well. 

To be fair, no one had thought to pull her out of the river. It had been early, early morning, and no one had even seen her walk in. (Rocks in her pockets like the woman from that old story. Like the wolf from a fairytale.) She’d been three feet below the surface, hair swirling in the muddy water above her head, an oily speckle-gleam of sunlight filtering down, and she had waited so patiently to die—for her oxygen run out and the hungry, strangling hands of death to wring her clean—but before she could get there, she had realized what a cowardly thing it was, to let herself succumb now. What a traitor she would be making of herself. Giving up.

Evangeline knew that if she suffered to live just a little while longer, she would get the chance to prove herself again. And when she got it, she would do anything— would cut off her own hands, would rip out her tongue, would dig her eyes out with her fingers—to show that she had learned, that she was not a coward anymore.

Only then could she finally rest.

Lady Dimitrescu notices as much, late at night when she comes home from her usual walk around the farm. “You’re very persistent, aren’t you, girl?” She asks, her voice lazy and gurgling as she sucks pheasant blood between her front teeth. It appears surprisingly filthy in her mouth, black as oil and teeming with bubbly particles. “You look like a dusty little slip of a thing, but once you latch on to something…” she tilts her head. “You’ll defend it with everything you have.”

Evangeline is unnerved by the comparison she’s trying to draw. Some kind of parallel between sheltering a monster and draining an animal’s life out through its jugular—penance and murder. Only rarely do they talk like this, their words so weighted and heavy. Evangeline usually shies away from anything that hits so close to that snarled knot in her skull.

“You didn’t deserve to die,” she says softly, as if that’s the question Lady Dimitrescu is trying to ask.

“That doesn’t mean I deserve your protection, either.”

You don’t know. You don’t know what I’ve done. “It’s not… it’s not about what you deserve.”

“I suspected as much.” Lady Dimitrescu sighs, but doesn’t push—leaving behind, as always, the why. The question that lurks always in her lovely, horrible head. She is such a cruel creature with her teeth and her claws, and so oddly gentle with Evangeline when it comes to the why. “Mortals, and their obsession with repentance. Acting like the heart is a tooth, with cavities that can be filled, cracks that can be repaired. Years of bad living, pried out by a filthy man with a hammer.”

“That’s not what I think.”

(It’s the truth. Her own scummy, blackrotted heart squeezed as if in rejection of the very idea. She knows that she cannot, will never be, absolved.)

Lady Dimitrescu ignores her: instead, she stares right at Evangeline, her eyes the soft, ravenous gold of the harvest moon.

“You’d do anything for me,” she says, more quietly. “Wouldn’t you, Evangeline?”

Evangeline hesitates.

“I keep trying to find the edges of it—of your devotion,” Lady Dimitrescu continues, and tilts her head, the picture of a predator sizing up its prey. “But more and more, it seems like they aren’t even there. That it goes on and on, forever.”

“I—” Evangeline says, but her voice catches in her throat. Lady Dimitrescu has never looked at her like this—not with suspicion, or interest, or even flirtation, but with a kind of terrifying, spine-tingling desire, bred from fascination and dominion, from a hunger that doesn’t have anywhere to go. The love you have for something you own. It is familiar to her, and yet somehow not—different in some unidentifiable way from the only love she’s known before. Evangeline, my darling girl, my baby. 

“I told you I’d do anything,” she manages. “That you could have anything.”

“Even you?”

“I—anything.”

It comes out more loaded than she means it, and for a single, paralyzing moment, Evangeline thinks Lady Dimitrescu might actually eat her—that she’ll break her only promise just because Evangeline is so very willing , open and heartless and pickled in her own self-hatred. In the same moment, she decides that she wouldn’t really mind being eaten. It would be the only death that she deserves—death in service of. Brief, painful, pitiless. Death in penance to.

Instead, Lady Dimitrescu just puts her fingers to her own lips, pressing them very gently against the wet, bloody seam. They’re trembling only slightly.

“What a strange girl you are,” she says, fascinated. “Evangeline.”

Evangeline shivers at the sound of her own name.

Lady Dimitrescu notices, and presses further: “You deserve so much more than this place, girl. Do you know that? You deserve better than these people.”

And that word— deserve —is so strange, so new, so wrong— because oh, Evangeline has never deserved anything in her life, has never been worthy of a single thing—that it freezes her in place, locks up all of her muscles, and fills her head with the furious scrabbling of you deserve nothing you foolish little girl, you deserve nothing but pain, but Lady Dimitrescu is watching her so carefully, and she cannot let it show. Cannot peel back that final layer of her soul. 

So, all she does is shrug, feeling flayed and naked in the half-darkness. “I’ve always lived here,” she says. And then: “There’s nowhere else for me to go.”

----

Evangeline, Evangeline—please, oh God, oh please—it hurts, it burns, it’s all over me, it’s—it’s only you, my baby girl, my darling, only you can— but Evangeline wakes up halfway through her dreams that night, sweating and panicked, thinking of —baby, baby, baby, you must bring her to me, you must— thinking of Lady Dimitrescu’s eyes, their feral glow, their knowingness. Thinking about “deserve.” You deserve so much more than this place, girl—Evangeline—

----

After six days, the scar on Lady Dimitrescu’s ribs is gone. 

The April rains are in full force—at night, all Evangeline can hear is the drip, drip, drip of water through the rotted spot in her roof—and the forest, once dark and threatening, is sprayed with baby’s breath and white crocus flowers. The leaves are green and feathery and new. (Evangeline sometimes dreams that they’re strangling her to death.) And worst of all, a kind of horrible, stomach-churning, bone-breaking terror has descended upon the farm, over the dead fields and the empty chicken coop and the collapsed clapboard house—the terror of what’s to come . 

She’s leaving soon. 

The last days have been enough to wreak havoc on a fragile girl-heart like Evangeline’s. In her own pathetic way, she’s grown attached to the long, bloody afternoons of sitting in the dirt and talking, telling stories. She’s been numbed to the horrible slump and drag of deer bodies on the ground, and instead she can enjoy the physical labor for what it is: an act of her devotion, something as clean and pure and restorative as praying. Even her nightly turn around the property, although it still frightens her, has become comforting. These are rituals of care she hasn't performed in so long, and it feels so profoundly right to be able to go through them once again. Washing clothes, burying bodies, sewing sheets together. She is alive in a way she hasn’t been since her father died. 

What's more, she actually likes Lady Dimitrescu, with her elegant hands and her half-animal smile and her incomprehensible, titanic, poorly-hidden grief: where there was once distrust, now Evangeline feels a sort of keening ache. A kind of love, even.

Evangeline didn't even know she was capable of love. 

So of course, in what is probably the most authentically girlish thing she’s done since she was nine years old, she decides to give Lady Dimitrescu a gift.

It’s the only thing she can think of, really. Evangeline is as isolated and overgrown as her farmland, woefully inexperienced with these things. The only references she has for love are the books she remembers reading as a child: stories of women taller and prettier and kinder than her, who would give their handkerchiefs to titanium-plated warriors as tokens of good luck, and the handsome men who draped gold and jewels around their lovers’ necks— something to remember me by, my lady. My darling. Of course, those books are moth-eaten and tattered now, most of them burned to get her through the coldest parts of winter. Not to mention the fact that Lady Dimitrescu comes from an actual castle, used to gold forks and goblets, pearl chandeliers, candles guttering in copper holders and making the whole room glow like the inside of a music box—also, the very concept of something to remember me by, when applied to someone who, as far as Evangeline can tell, is immortal (at the very least, incomprehensibly old) is so foolish it makes the back of her neck itch—

But Evangeline wants to do it. For reasons she can’t even untangle herself, she wants to do it.

She wants Lady Dimitrescu to have the option of—of—some sort of remembrance, a trinket that recalls the image of the skinny, quiet farm girl that had saved her life. When she goes home, to the graves of her babies and the woman she calls Mother, it might be nice to have a little piece of Evangeline that isn’t bloated and twisting at the bottom of the river. A final promise of fidelity.

It takes her a while to dig up the Mulligan brother. He’s gone very soft, parts of him coming up on the shovel, and his skin is porridge-mushy and crawling inside and out with bugs, some of it smeared like jelly on the rough stones. What she could once recognize as a face is now a reeking black pit. The smell is a physical assault, most akin to a slap in the face—a cloying, pervasive, cadaverous smell, it gets into her mouth and sticks to her teeth, shoves its way down her throat. Evangeline has to wrench her head away to keep from dry-heaving into the grave. Now isn't the time for disgust. Like everything else that has ever frightened her, this is an act of love.

She sets the sharp edge of her shovel between his puffy, blackened lips, and presses her foot to the ledge. 

She only needs his jaw; the rest she’ll leave to the worms. 

She considered using one of her own teeth, but she wasn’t sure Lady Dimitrescu would catch her meaning quite as well. If there’s one thing the Lady has consistently failed to understand about Evangeline, it’s her tendency for self-punishment—it’s possible that no one ever taught her how to love properly, how it’s mostly just giving up parts of yourself to someone else. Letting them hurt you, hurting yourself in their name. Either way, Evangeline thinks a man-tooth might be better. Lady Dimitrescu had seemed so satisfied after she killed him—it's a good memory, if nothing else. Something to hold on to.

It’s surprisingly easy to pull the tooth out—the jawbone is brittle in her hands, the flesh sliding off like the skin of a rotten peach, and all she has to do is tug to get a good-sized molar out. It pops off like a dried corn kernel and tumbles into her palm: the root is ridged and sharp, but the top is flattened, ground down from years of chewing tough meat and overworked bread, and Evangeline rubs it once, twice, as if for good luck. She wants her energy to be inside it, nestled like a cavity.

It's a childish, sentimental gesture. Evangeline knows that. But despite the blotchy, embarrassed flush that creeps up her collar, she also allows herself to picture Lady Dimitrescu, sitting safe and well-attended in her massive, shadow-filled castle, with this tooth in her pocket. Perhaps tucked into her bodice somewhere. Like a piece of Evangeline that she can carry with her—like an excised memory of the girl who had saved her from the February snow, the weeks they’d spent together while she healed, the days hotheeled and arcane and the nights agonizing in the dust and dirt of Evangeline’s repentance. The idea is comforting—that even after all of this if long-forgotten, when Evangeline is dead and Lady Dimitrescu, whatever she is, lives on and on and on into the evermore, some tiny chunk of Evangeline’s life will still be with her, pressed against her, like a lover’s token.

Then, as she’s standing up, the sharp edges of the molar cutting into her palm, a voice speaks up behind her: a voice she hasn’t heard in two years.

A low, horrified, masculine voice. 

Farmer McGillicutty’s voice.

“Jesus Christ, Spriggin, what have they done to you?" 

They’ve been watching her.

Evangeline knows that now, with complete certainty—she sees it in Farmer McGillicutty’s eyes, in the posture of the two men flanking him: Jim Mulligan is on his right, along with another one she can’t quite place. A Pickett, maybe. They have fanned out halfway, covering all her exits, like she is a wild animal they’ve been tracking for weeks and whose throat they can finally slit—only they don’t look triumphant, exactly, or even proud of what they’ve done. Instead, they are wide-eyed. Hesitant. 

They’re afraid of her.

These are men that knew her as a child. Men that used to swing her up into the seats of her tractors, showing her how to till wheat and feed pigs, men that would compliment her braids and say, Did your daddy do those, Evangeline? They haven’t spoken to her in years—they must have seen her at market here and there, portioning out dirty coins and avoiding the glaring mothers, but this is the first time they’ve been face-to-face with her: this girl that used to play with their children, who used to giggle and tug on the cuffs of their jeans when she was very small. 

For the first time, she’s forced to imagine what she must look like to them. 

She can picture herself only vaguely: a filthy little girl only half-grown into a woman, eyes wide, crouched and trembling over an open grave. Hands covered in old blood, forearms smeared with jellied, reeking flesh, the corpse at her feet half-buried in the dirt. Stolen molar digging into her fist. Evangeline imagines that she looks positively feral, like she might bite them if they got too close—her muscles are animal-taut and she imagines that she has changed completely, that they hardly recognize her. From the looks on their faces, she thinks that might not be too far off. 

“Jesus Christ, Spriggin,” McGillicutty says again. His hands are shaking around the gun he has pointed at her, the barrel shuddering, his pointer finger kept off the trigger to avoid an irrevocable mistake. Evangeline has seen him shoot monsters down like they were pheasants; never in her life has she seen him shake

Mulligan is tugging on his sleeve, making the eye of the shotgun dance back and forth: “Marshall,” he’s saying, his voice distant and vacant, like someone else is speaking through his mouth. “Marshall, look. Look at the body.”

“I know, Jimmy.”

“It’s him, Marshall—”

“I see him,” McGillicutty says, and Evangeline is shocked when he looks at her instead—looks at her like she killed the man, like she was the one who rent him apart and defiled his body and broke him into strange pieces that didn’t quite fit together, that tumbled oddly into the shallow grave she’d dug for him. “He’s at peace now, Jim. He’s not suffering anymore.”

They are talking to one another without taking their eyes off of her, like she’s a fox they’ve managed to back into a corner. They are trying not to spook her with sudden movements. Evangeline feels trapped, claustrophobic—she is acutely aware of the poplar tree at her back, the way they have spread out to keep her from escaping if she chose to bolt. The urge to tell them that it wasn’t her, that it’s still me, I promise, presses down on her tongue and makes it difficult to breathe. I didn’t kill him. But she can’t tell them that, if she brings that up—if she tells them about Lady Dimitrescu—

And just like that, something clicks in the back of her head, a bullet sliding into a chamber.

Lady Dimitrescu.

Evangeline’s blood runs cold.

They’ve been watching her. 

And then, just as it hits her—just as she manages to put together the men, their guns and their trapper stance, the way they conveniently managed to catch her the very first moment she was outside the barn, just as her heart is beginning to clench tight, tight, tight—she hears it, distant but bellowing, agonizingly familiar, and coming from the direction of the barn. 

A scream.

----

Not again.

----

The first time they came, it was October.

When she scrambles underneath McGillicutty’s legs, the gun goes off. The sound is deafening, and Evangeline yelps, but the bullet goes wide and she hears it hit the dirt somewhere behind her. She isn’t sure she’d feel it even if it hit her. The blood roars in her ears like she’s been sucked under the surface of a river, boiling and churning: her mind is completely blank except for that sound, a kind of panicky static, a distorted heartbeat. Not again.

“Spriggin!”

Not again.

She runs. 

There’s no time to stand up all the way or get into any sort of rhythm: Evangeline runs with all four limbs, just trying to throw herself forward with every step. Go to her, go to her, go to her.  The world spins around her in a tangled dissection of dead leaves and white sky — someone snatches at her smock, tries to grab one of her braids, but she slips through their fingers like water, like winter air. There are no more shots. McGillicutty’s holding back on her—some part of him is reluctant to kill her, even if she is bloody and reeking and scrabbling through the leaves like a wild animal. The first shot must have been an accident, then. She’d startled him.

When she finally makes it to the barn, the doors are wide open, and Evangeline’s heart stops beating. Just for a moment: between one breath and the next.

Inside, it’s a massacre—she falls against the doorway, gasping desperately for air, and it takes her a few seconds to even make sense of what’s going on, the chaotic mess of insides being thrown around like food at the dinner table. There are guts everywhere: plastered to the walls, swinging in slippery ropes from the rafters. It looks like at least two men are dead, but it could be more, and Evangeline can’t even count the ones that are still alive—a dozen, maybe, a confusing crush of bodies, slamming into one another and into walls, firing staccato rounds of buckshot that pepper the roof with tiny points of light.

And there, In the center of it all, is Lady Dimitrescu.

They’ve managed to get her half-hogtied in the middle of the barn, one wrist to one ankle, and two men are clinging to her back. Beneath them, she's raging like a goddess of war. She’s still yelling, but it’s a throaty, agonized howl than a scream, rolling off into individual syllables: Evangeline hears Get the fuck off, hears Filthy man-thing, hears I will devour you whole. 

The threats are clearly boneless. Maybe she would have been telling the truth, a long time ago. There’s no doubt that Lady Dimitrescu could take most of them on her own. But she’s not at full strength, still, and there are so many of them—it’s clear that she’s slowing down, the men gaining ground. One manages to wrap his rope around her free wrist, and although she smacks him away so hard that his neck breaks against the wall, the rope stays knotted there. Waiting to be picked up again.

Before Evangeline can even try to help, there is a hand on her arm, a face crowding hers: it’s McGillicutty again, with his bulbous nose, his pouchy, alcoholic eyes. “Spriggin,” he’s saying—he hasn’t called her by her first name since she was very young—“You don’t have to do this.” 

“Let me go!” Evangeline shrieks, struggling against his grip—she is dimly aware that she has lost all composure, her face flushed red like a blood moon, but she can’t bring herself to focus on anything but Lady Dimitrescu, who is trapped, and in pain, and whose dress is ripped and blooming with gunshot wounds, the bedsheet tattered and coming off. There are man-hands on the exposed skin, groping and slicing—every time one of them touches her, Lady Dimitrescu screams . “They’re hurting her!”

“You’re not in your right mind , girl!”

“GET OFF OF ME!”

Evangeline realizes, through her delirium, that she is shaking all over, like a dog left out in the rain. That her teeth are chattering and her brain is murmuring as if it’s about to start a recital. She feels volatile, permeable, like she is suspended between the past and the present—like one step back would send her falling through the flimsy gauze of time, back to that day , the one she’s tried so hard to forget. A smattering of buckshot hits the dirt at her feet and McGillicutty is yelling out, “Not the kid!” but she can hardly hear him, can hardly see anything. The ground beneath her is unsteady, could give way at any moment. Because it is all so familiar, down to the screams, the sprays of hot, sticky blood, the strong arms holding her back. It’s like moving backwards through time, being sucked down into the hungry mouth of my darling girl, Evangeline—

The first time they came—the first—

History repeats itself in these parts; the center holds. She was a fool for thinking she could fix it this time. For thinking she was anything more than a weak, cowardly little girl with shaky hands. 

She will die just like I did, Evangeline—she will die because of you.

(Not again.)

With the strength of a fallen angel, with a strangled, inhuman cry, Evangeline wrenches free of McGillicutty, and hurls herself into the fray.

----

not again not again not again not again not again

----

The first time they came, it was in October. 

I was supposed to be dead. 

Maybe I was; I couldn’t have told the difference, anyway. Death might have even been kinder than my life in those days. Every moment was a sickening somnambulist overlap between life and death, a fragile onionskin layering that I could have peeled apart but didn’t want to—because oh, Evangeline, it hurt —it hurt more terribly than you can imagine, like knives beneath my skin, always, always, always. On the first day, my tough man-skin split open like an overripe fruit, my bones cracking and reforming, my organs turning to dark slurry inside me and dribbling out hot and sticky from every orifice—you stroked my head while I screamed, offered me food, water, your trembling cunt. 

I didn’t know what to do with any of it. Food tasted like ash, like the burnt-oil stink that crusts to the top of a cookstove, and I could not swallow the water; with no tongue, I could only buffet at it, closing my great, ungainly teeth over it, churning it up and drooling. (As for your cunt—you tried it only once, and you limped out bleeding. That hadn't happened since you were very young.)

My body was no longer mine—a massive, shuddering homunculus, a great soft jelly thing. Some bastardly product of the creature that had bitten me and the man I had been before. 

And it hurt. All the time, it hurt. A constant susurrus of murmuring agonies which steadily built into something screaming and howling and destructive, all-consuming, unsurvivable—within days I was as mad as you, as mad as my own baby girl.

My baby girl.

(You were born blue, did you know that? Blue, and with the slippery cord still looped around your neck. I still remember how you slid out, silent as the grave, your face crumpled and lilac like a delphinium—your lungs were the size of my thumbs, and by the time they got air into them—you didn’t even cry, just sucked in your first breath, trembling and reverent—didn’t even cry—by the time they set you on your mother’s chest, she’d already gone cold. I’d wondered, when you were a child, if that wasn’t why—but I never blamed you. You were my baby girl. My precious baby girl.)

(You loved me from the start; I could smell it on you. You looked like your mother.)

I howled at you, cried out, Evangeline, please—please, make it stop, please, Evangeline —and although it made you upset, had you sobbing and clutching me, saying what, what can I do, tell me, you were rooted to the spot with fear. Made cowardly by your love for me. I was supposed to be dead; you wanted so badly to get help, you begged me to let you, but I knew if the others found out they would kill me—I’d done it before, been called in to dispose of an abomination. They didn’t die easily. I knew the procedure as well as anybody: the first immobilizing blow, and then the endless drawn-out ungodly butchering. At night, I saw it in my dreams. The fear of it consumed me. In that new body, there were times when I might have liked to die, but not like that—I remembered the screams, those eerie humanoid screams, and myself, oblivious, holding the axe—no, never like that.

—Evangeline, please, it’s only you—only you can save me from this, darling—my baby girl—

I started to smell you, the sharp edges of you. Not the oozing girl-cunt but the blood underneath, murmuring inside you, whispering through your veins—I wanted you, more than I ever had. My baby girl, my daughter. You came close to me, touching the ruin of my face, and I flinched from you, needing you, wanting to latch to you and suck the blood from your bony little body, tasting you in a way I never had. But no—couldn’t. Not you, precious thing. Sweet Evangeline.

I was starving to death on my own land, a mutilation of myself. You were letting me starve.

—She won’t feel it—she’s only a child—only a child, Evangeline, please—

You knew what would save me. I told you again and again, what I needed you to do. I begged you— begged you, like a whore—and you would not bring her to me: the girl. I could dimly remember seeing her face, back when I was a man, when the world was bright and clean and colorful and not just smeary shades of mud and gray. When there were other things, apart from pain and terror and the rank smell of my own body: I had seen a girl. Only one had been born that whole winter, when the cold tended to bring babies out twisted and wrong. Not her, though. I remembered that she was small and soft, the way you were as a child, so perfect, the only perfect thing, so beautiful. At night, the dreams tortured me: I imagined crunching her bones, sinking sharp teeth into her forgiving flesh. I needed it, needed it, needed it. I cried out to you, in agony: Please, Evangeline, please, I am so hungry—it hurts, it burns—it tears me up—oh, please, oh—

(You were a surprisingly normal child. Did you know that? Dusty face, scraped-up knees, pale blue eyes and a gap-toothed smile. You never played with the others—you were always on your own, looking at crumbling anthills, finding dead things to poke—but you weren’t shunned, either. They didn’t know the state of your brain, how it was foul and rotting inside. Only I knew that.)

—Evangeline, if you loved me—if you loved me you’d do it—please, Evangeline, my darling—how can you see me in pain and not—Evangeline—

Time slid by, unmarked by hours or days or weeks. It was a slideshow, a rotoscope, played on oil-spotted film reel projected onto the walls of the barn, sometimes with your shadow thrown across it, starving and afraid. You loved me—you reeked of it—but you could not save me in the ways that mattered. I told you over and over to bring the girl to me, that I would be gentle the way I always was with you, that she wouldn’t feel it. But you hesitated, and there were tears in your eyes always: you had given me everything, my baby girl, your food and your water and your cunt, and still you shivered yourself apart trying to help me. Foolish girl, you were so frightened. You were so weak. 

—I will never touch you again—Evangeline— please—

— Daddy, I CAN'T—

How long was it?

How long did you let me starve, your own father, rancid and dying in a pool of my own filth? How long did you watch, and do nothing? I don’t know. Every second of it hurt like a nail being driven into my skull; my bones rippled, my skin crawled and peeled. I had forgotten every name except yours, my baby, cowardly bitch, you selfish little cunt: Evangeline.

When they came for me—

It was October. I heard you screaming.

----

AIN NOT AGAIN NOT AGAIN NOT AGAIN NOT AGAIN NOT AG

----

She moves in a white haze.

To kill an abomination, you must first cut off its head.

There are men everywhere, men she knows: men whose faces she remembers from when she was a child, back when people still touched her, still thought she could be saved. The last time they saw her, they’d been killing her father—she still remembers the two that held her back while she screamed, while she sobbed and begged, Don’t hurt him! Please! She still remembers the blood that flecked her face when her father’s head fell—

Next, the hands must be severed from the wrists, which must be severed from the elbows. You must cut the creature apart at every tendon and joint. You must be sure that it will not come back.

She moves without thinking, for the first time since she was very young. The pit in the middle of her brain, where the faint, moth-soft things are always gibbering meaninglessly, has gone quiet and very still; Evangeline is nothing but muscle, nothing but a column of fierce, unstoppable rage. 

I remember every sound you made while they killed me.

Evangeline has never really considered the sheer, impossible size of Lady Dimitrescu until she’s climbing her, and she has to step on her thigh to get up to the soft hull of her back: she crawls along her like a rat, digging her nails into the gray fat on her sides. It’s hard to do with the Lady struggling underneath her. The two men have a rusty bone saw (Evangeline recognizes it from the butchery stall) and they’re trying to get through the Lady’s neck, pushing down hard until blood wells up in the sawtooth impressions. It must hurt terribly—she must be so scared. 

You were fifteen; it had taken me years to train the fear out of you. Baby girl, I fed you and fucked you and taught you to be grateful, and I never doubted that you loved me, and I made sure that when the time came, you would live only for me—you would not hesitate for your father.

You always were a slow learner.

Evangeline remembers blood—remembers screaming—remembers the people that abandoned her, the village that left her to die after they found out what she’d done. What sick, demented creatures lived inside her brain; what filthy things she’d done and had done to her. And how they’d known about the girl—about Lyra, the miller’s daughter, who was small and sweet and hardly three years old—about what her father had asked of her—

(Evangeline never knew how they found out about that. But they did.)

I didn’t, she’d said—no longer weeping, but entirely numbed—when they had finally let her go, when they had thrown her into the dirt and stood looking down on her in a ring of blazing eyes, like she was the origin of all the evil in the world. Which she was, in a way: Evangeline is that fell and fatuous creature, a daughter; a cruel and pitiful little girl. I didn’t do it, I didn’t. He asked me to, and I couldn’t—I was afraid.

(Not again.)

You fucking coward, you bleeding cunt—my darling girl—Evangeline—

Evangeline has always been too bad to be accepted and too weak to be loved. She has always been unforgivable, wherever she goes. 

Not again.

The blood-rush rises to whitewater in her ears. The world bleeds away at its edges. Shotgun shells are scattering everywhere and men are howling all around her like a pack of wolves in the far-off mountains, echoing one another, their voices overlapping and indistinct—Evangeline shoves wildly at the two men on the Lady’s back, sends them sprawling out in the dirt, and it buys her enough time to slide down to where her feet are bound: she is not a coward anymore, but she can’t do this alone. Unbound, Lady Dimitrescu can fend for herself. Unbound, she will make these men bleed. 

The only sharp object she has is the Mulligan brother’s tooth. Frantic, Evangeline finds an edge and saws into the thick rope, which has been knotted over and over around a surprisingly delicate ankle—when she gets about halfway through the weave, the tooth difficult to hold and already starting to wear down, Lady Dimitrescu flexes her bound hand experimentally, twisting it taut—

And the rope snaps in Evangeline’s grip.

Everything... stops. 

Later, she thinks, she will remember this differently: as a god rising from chains. As the first moment of real relief she's felt in two years of her life. In the afternoon light, Lady Dimitrescu is pale and colossal, indescribable, ten feet tall and stippled with gunshots—glacially slowly, she stands up, titanic and unleashed, and all around Evangeline, the guns stop going off. The men stop fighting. The shouting dies down, and all of it is replaced by a kind of prickling, deadblanket awe—because in this moment, Lady Dimitrescu is nothing but magnificent. 

And terrifying. 

The fear hits, almost, like a punch to the gut. It races up the central line of Evangeline’s body, gripping her heart in its teeth and shaking: a feeling like little things crawling over her skin, the urge to rub at her face and shiver convulsively. The kind of fear that does not come from human survival instinct—or indeed, from anything human at all—but that is bred by the ancients, intrinsic to a single being, so old and inescapable that it does not need a name. Evangeline, who is not in danger, can’t help but stumble away from the emergent Lady Dimitrescu, afraid to even be implicated in the fury on that horrible face—the fury of someone who is unused to losing the upper hand, someone to whom subjugation at the hands of ten greasy, livestock-smelling farm men is the ultimate slight, an affront to be answered with only the most artless kind of violence. A debt to be repaid.

“What are you?” 

The question comes from Jim Mulligan, who has lowered his gun but not backed away—his eyes are huge and glossy with tears. Evangeline notices he’s tucked a lock of his brother’s decomposing red hair into his breast pocket.

“What am I?” Lady Dimitrescu mocks, and oh, the look on her face makes Evangeline’s bladder tighten. That look that says, there will be nothing left of you when I’m finished. Her voice fills the whole barn, vibrating between Evangeline’s ears and traveling all the way to her fingertips: her eyes are glowing coals, are struck flints, are the molten unknowable core of the universe itself, and when she speaks, it sounds like a ritual chant from the beginning of all time. Like the words are coming from the very marrow of her bones. “I am the unfit vessel, man-thing. I am the daughter of grief, sister of carnage, the parasite of death made manifest—I carry the endtimes in my body like a child in the womb. You could not have killed me in a way that would matter.”

Jim looks like he wants to say something, to beg for his life or ask for forgiveness or maybe just to cry, but his teeth are chattering so hard he can’t speak: his legs are shaking like a newborn fawn’s. He looks, for a moment, very young. 

Not again.

(Evangeline does not close her eyes.)

----

I told you they would never forgive you, baby girl.

I told you.

----

The sky is shifting and white, promising spring rain. There is a soft breeze rippling the heads of the trees. Inside the barn, there are thirteen bodies—though they hardly look like bodies anymore—and ten guns, and a thick length of snapped rope, and a bone saw. Slaughter tools. Evangeline can’t look at them without shaking. 

They were here, she thinks. They could have killed her.

But then: I would have stopped them.

It’s a thought that should frighten her—I am not a killer—but she’s too numb. Everything inside her is too quiet. Just to have something to do with her hands, Evangeline moves to start cleaning up the corpses: she reaches for McGillicutty, who had been calling out her name when his throat opened up, whose body is as twisted and bloody as an aborted fetus, everything at the wrong angles. It’s going to be a big job, she can tell. She’ll need to go in with the rake, most likely—so many of the bodies are just crunchy smears in the dirt, others torn to pieces—but before she can start dragging some of the more intact ones towards the open doors, Lady Dimitrescu touches her shoulder.

“There’s no use in that, girl,” she says, almost gently. “They’ll come for you no matter what.”

Every part of Evangeline wants to keep pulling the dead man—wants to bury him so deep that she can forget all about this, tuck it deep down inside her next to her father’s grotesque, mutated form and the thud its head had made when it hit the dirt—but Lady Dimitrescu is right: it doesn’t matter how well she cleans up this time. She’s had her last chance.

More importantly, though, Lady Dimitrescu is touching her, and taking great effort not to hurt her, and so she lets the comforting weight of the body drop to the ground. Her ears are still ringing from all the gunfire, but her brain is quieter than it’s ever been: no darling girls, no Evangeline Evangeline Evangelines. She feels like she’s been hollowed out, scooped clean. 

“You can’t stay here, Evangeline.”

I know, Evangeline wants to say. I know.

Instead: “They killed my father.”

Lady Dimitrescu hesitates, her hand tightening around Evangeline’s shoulder—her fingers are long and strong and cold. “Oh,” she says. 

“I was fifteen." It’s difficult to get the words out—Evangeline has kept them locked so tightly in her chest, clutched like the pit of a peach, and she’s forgotten their exact shape, how they fit together in her mouth. “He'd been bitten, and everyone thought he was dead, but... he'd... changed. Gotten all twisted up, like you. He needed something human, too, the blood—and he told me how to do it, how to knock her unconscious and bring her back to him, this little girl. It would have been over in minutes. But I was… afraid, and I was weak, and I waited too long." She shrugs once, hard, trying to shoulder off the weight of it all. You did this to me, my darling girl. "One day I came back and they had found him.”

It feels wrong, saying it out loud. Like she’s excising some sloppy cut of an organ and lying it out in the dirt.

Evangeline feels the Lady’s hand tense, and her heart aches —she prepares herself for the disgust, for the anger: you couldn’t even save your own father and you thought you could save me? You couldn’t even save your own blood? All this time she has wanted the Lady to see—to see her madness, her wrongness, the pollution clogging the deepest mechanisms of her body—and she thinks she’s ready, now, to face that horrible reckoning. To be left alone again.

Instead, Lady Dimitrescu says, very quietly, “I lost my daughters.”

Evangeline looks back at her.

“There was… a man.” Lady Dimitrescu's eyes are muddy and golden, not focused on anything; her face is still freckled with blood from the culling. “The same one that sent me here. He was marauding around my castle, doing... doing the things men do best, I suppose. Running around, taking things that weren’t his. Playing with guns. My daughters tried to stop him... and...” A ripple of fury passes momentarily over her face, a savage twist of the mouth, as if she's preparing to spit. “He killed them like they were animals.”

Evangeline looks down at the spot where her scar used to be, understanding. “He’s the one that hurt you,” she says.

“Yes.”

Lady Dimitrescu takes her chin between forefinger and thumb. It could almost be a motherly gesture, Evangeline thinks—but there is an edge to it, too, a kind of keen, sharp searchingness. “I should have protected them,” she says. “Do you understand that, girl? I am their mother, and they are my children. That was my burden to bear.”

“It’s different,” Evangeline says, forgetting herself.

Lady Dimitrescu’s eyes flash. “It’s not.”

It is, Evangeline thinks, remembering dark rooms, a greasy ruck of bedsheets—remembering my darling girl, my beautiful girl, the hard, hot rush of breath against her ear—remembering how he had loved her, what he had given up for her, her father.  Remembering how she’d watched him get ripped apart. He’d promised never to touch her again and she’d believed him—she would have forgiven him anything, if only for that pain she could hear in his voice, that endless, earsplitting pain.

“Come with me.”

Evangeline is numb, still, scraped clean of all her ghosts, and she is slow on the uptake: “Where?” she asks, allowing her chin to be tilted up by that blood-sticky hand. There are bodies at her feet but she’s lost track of them; there's a fleck of man-brain on her collar but she's forgotten about it already. For a moment, she allows herself to think, nowhere, we are going nowhere— like maybe they’re just going to disappear together, into nothingness. Somewhere they won’t be in danger ever again.

Lady Dimitrescu draws her fingers down one of Evangeline’s braids. “Home,” she murmurs. “To my castle.”

Home. The world rattles around in Evangeline’s skull like a lost tooth. 

“Is that where your mother is?” 

“Yes. Along with my… my... well, I suppose you could call them my family.” Lady Dimitrescu pauses, her face softening and opening. “I’m not sure how many of us are left, but… we can scrape something back together, from the remnants. A kind of life.”

Evangeline feels a pain in her chest at that, a sharp pang: a my babies, my babies, my babies kind of pain . Because Lady Dimitrescu is speaking so cautiously, like she’s walking over a sheet of fragile glass, but there is this tiny spark of hope in her voice, a longing, almost a homesickness, and Evangeline does not want this woman to lose anyone else. She knows that a heart, even an immortal one, can only take so much grief before it becomes heavy, waterlogged, sinking down into the muck.

But—come with me.

“I don’t—” she tries, and can’t quite find the words. It registers dimly that she has never exchanged this many words with Lady Dimitrescu at one time—it’s always her sitting cross-legged, telling stories of long winters and hot summers and scabbed knees, or else the Lady flashing and baiting her, nipping at her tender spots but backing off before she gets too close to something real. It’s never been like this: the last honest thing, something true. Both of them surrounded by corpses. 

“I’m not sure I know how to be anywhere else,” she says finally. “Anywhere other than here.”

Lady Dimitrescu touches her cheek. “You’ll learn.”

And those two words, so shockingly soft and tender and loving in a barn full of dead men, make Evangeline’s dry eyes well up unexpectedly—the promise, so freely and confidently given, that she can change. The revelation that there is someone on this earth who thinks she might be worth saving.

Evangeline can't help it: she cries. The urge to bite into her wrist rises and passes, and she lowers her head against Lady Dimitrescu's smooth bare shoulder and just sobs, gasping and choking like a newborn, clutching at her ruined dress. It feels like an immense pressure has been building in her head for years, a floodwall of sickness, and it’s only now beginning to drain. Her father is two years dead, the ashes from his burnt-up parts scattered all over the woods, and her barn is full of corpses , and she has been alone for so very long—she has just seen ten men slaughtered by this woman, this colossal, unfathomable woman, and she doesn’t even care , she will forgive it all if she has to. Evangeline has seen so much blood already, and forgiveness is the only thing she does well, anyway. It's like the only language she knows.

She is not worthy; she does not deserve this kind of comfort. She does not deserve better.

Lady Dimitrescu’s eyes are steady and golden when Evangeline lifts her head. “Come with me,” she says again.

Evangeline blinks away tears, thinks of blood, thinks of the tooth that she still holds in her fist—the tooth that was supposed to be the last thing she ever touched, a token of her death, and that ended up sawing through ropes instead. How she held onto it in the chaos, she has no idea—it could have easily been lost or damaged or stolen while Lady Dimitrescu was crushing skulls and spreading bloody ribs. But it’s still there, tiny and sharp, opening up new wounds.

They would have killed her.

There is nothing for her here, in this village that despises her. This house that reeks of everything she’s lost. There is nothing left to hold on to.

Not anymore.

“Okay,” she says quietly. “Okay.”