Venus in Quarantine
After the thirtieth entry or so I realized what was so familiar about the process; it was as if these unsuspecting people were being added to a menu, complete with their prices, and the intention was to serve them all to a solitary but reliable customer who would appear out of the dark and damp at the same time each day without the ring of a doorbell, like a fox fed once and then forever entitled.
And her name was Wanda Blasphemer Pelts. My Wanda. My whole world, to have her tell it and me experience it. She did not permit me what used to be the most basic knowledge of position spatial and chronological, which still prevented a precise understanding of both my location and the year, but I knew that she and I had recorded three months of paradigm-gnawing history together, written in an ink of sweat and a sensual but possession-gnarled hand, our bodies intertwined like two pages stuck together, the words of experience on her, still wet, transferred messily to my blank by rapturous spineless contact.
My name, kept off the menu I was writing purely out of privileged position, is Severin Molochi. If this document was a menu then the restaurant was called Quarantown, a cute name, chosen by a vote too informal to actually be counted. All who had come liked the sound of it, but a sign was never to go up, as any wandering by were not to have their curiosity indulged if relative secrecy was to be maintained.
The project of Quarantown was experimental, funded by some of the wealthy residents but largely by distant peoples, my tailor-magnate uncle Piotr included, who simply wanted the haven to be available if it looked like a diseased push would result in an infected shove. The mysterious illness known as Throng's delirium was still cracking across Europe, leaving feverish babbling victims in its wake.
Quarantown was free of it, isolated by its position around a craggy mountain like a broken molar, troublesome to circle and even more troublesome to climb. Further surrounded by a forest so dark as to be more black than green, the only roads in and out, serpents of dirt, often snow-cloaked, were further disguised by twists and turns that turned the firs into obscuring walls.
In a sense it was hidden from none more effectively than myself, for though I lived there Wanda kept from me the exact nation and year, though Europe and the nineteenth century were clear, and I'd wager the latter half as far as the century and somewhere near a northerly coast thanks to the ducks.
The ducks were domesticated, kept by the hundreds, their breed native to the sea but accepting of the freshwater lake sunk opposite the mountain's rise. Gorgeous, glossy, black creatures, with olivine bills, their eggs and meat were consumed regularly by us, yet they avoided my menu entirely. Their owner, a Miss Giselle Ulterrine, did not.
She was near the top, alongside her two teenage sons, their father having decided both not to marry the woman and to use her as his proxy in Quarantown, having her prepare a home and a business with a stock of his waterfowl, like a nest that may never be filled by migration.
This knowledge was built into what I would call Giselle's 'price': my best guess as to what it would take to convince her to give herself over to my Wanda as a disciple. In my initial surveying of the populace, most of them arriving, as the two of us had, three months prior by rail, I had a long conversation with the woman, who, while not widowed, acted as if she was, as if she'd lost the man she'd known entirely and saw the half of her children provided by him as ghosts.
Cynically I stored this information, as a variable in some future tabulating, an act that left me as cold and bitter as some of the frozen roots Miss Giselle's ducks sometimes pecked at before giving up and waddling away. Socializing is in my nature, and while I'd been known to use it in the course of my uncle's business (having been told I had charm enough to sell bedclothes to the cadavers at the morgue and make a second killing), that all involved merely the exchange of money among those with plenty to throw around.
What Wanda asked was far more serious. She was an heir of Cain, a fact that remained secret there in Quarantown, held in the confidence of our relationship. What is an heir? An heir is a person, but from the darker more violent lineage. Most of us are victims of murder, heirs of Abel, or the Abel-bodied as the other heirs bitingly joke, their tone suggesting we are as fragile as twig dolls held together with twine.
Heirs of Cain, of Abel's murderer, hold that oldest and cruelest authority over the rest of us as supernatural abilities. Do not say to their face that, since their primary characteristic is dominance of us, they are thus defined solely by their relationship to us, for they will disagree in a fashion that will typically spill you across the ground.
They have seen what the world serpent sees, and have denied the plucking hand that might put them in a cozy basket with the rest of us. They cannot pretend the world, and the worlds beyond, are just walls and the loving families within. They think they've seen it all, and the all of it is much harsher than the misrepresentation of the basket, of love that can only warm with proximity, with being so close it blinds the recipient to everything else.
And so they seek goals more like that gargantuan serpent of legend did: immortality, magics, and mastery of the Earth and its lifeforms. Heirs are long-lived, bear powers unseen yet frequently felt, and see themselves as gods and goddesses.
Which isn't to say I'm immune from admiration of them, far from it. Wanda is my goddess, my Venus in furs, my lover who would pull me into the brambles and transform me one scratched-out streak of blood at a time, but the most powerful way she is my goddess is the way I chose her to be so.
In so doing I have become her chief disciple. Her greatest treasure. Her emissary in Quarantown, the esoteric qualities of which she has deemed perfect for raising a small civilization in her name, so that she might achieve the demigodhood that none of her kind have fully embraced for some centuries now.
To achieve it she must master the two dimensions of Quarantown, its substance and its citizens. So far she has focused almost entirely on the former, patrolling its borders to reinforce her territory, ritually ingraining her presence in select stone and tree, and establishing herself among the wildlife as a supreme being by way of apex predator.
On the opposite end of the spectrum stand the duties she has allocated to me, tasking me with getting to know the people and warming them to her presence, a series of errands she does not understand the difficulty of, given that I have so far mostly gestured at the idea of her, attempted to convince them of her warmth with nothing to offer but the cold wind standing next to me.
I am afforded a most wonderful thing; it is the ability to call Wanda Pelts my wife. We are not married in the eyes of the law, but under the eyes of the world serpent, and rather than try to explain all that I have abbreviated it to Mr. and Mrs. Pelts. Yes, we have taken her name here. It was not acceptable to her to be called anything else, while I don't mind being called anything as long as it is not 'nuisance'.
Several times I had attempted to explain to her the importance of her presence, but it remained low in her priorities. By her negligence I was forced to misuse my social skills, taking stock of the people rather than getting to know them genially, constructing that menu upon her request so that she might 'purchase' them when the time came with gifts, threats, or coercion.
Rather than sympathize with Miss Ulterrine my Wanda would prefer to sweep in on one of the deathless widow's loneliest days and offer her a new partner, or a caregiver for her sons, or bewitch the black sea ducks so that they waddle and paddle according to her schedule with no supervision whatsoever. These things might ease her burdens, but they would never make her happy. Nor would they incline her to worship will a full heart at the idol of Wanda, as I do.
So on I toiled, writing my menu for her to peruse when her appetite turned back to mankind. People became entrees, described with more gourmet terminology the greater their estimated power and position within Quarantown, often with exorbitant prices to match. See for yourself:
Porter Montbel - A vibrant but stringy young man, come to us fresh from a more southerly location, who never intended to stay after helping to transport construction materials for our new homes and shops. He received a telegram via a most ingenious method perhaps unique to Quarantown where electrical signals were passed through the tracks of the nearby railway and decoded at the station. Its contents stated his entire family was down with the delirium, and he best remain for the time being.
Price? Porter and I have become fast friends, almost competitors, as neither of us has clear employment in Quarantown. We flit about like crows and magpies, doing favors in exchange for seemingly random baubles, treats, and trinkets. He could be bought for any permanent position or purpose, as long as the task does not veer too monotonous for him to flourish.
Mlle. Legraff - Almost certainly a pseudonym, and she hardly pretends otherwise. This tight-lipped septuagenarian could be called a mischief maker if she still had a top speed greater than a shuffle. Usually dressed in the loudest orange, served on a bed of self-satisfaction, she has taken it upon herself to manage our subtle telegraph station and expertly transmit, decode, and deliver our messages to and from the rest of the world.
Price? Tattle on her. Despite her advanced age, it's clear she's in no position of power with her family back home, and could be recalled if they hear about all the responsibilities she has given herself in Quarantown. She underestimated how much I could discern from idle chatter, and in the process of skirting around certain information revealed to me its entire silhouette. Never skirt with a man who knows how to make them, I should start saying.
Doppler Burstyn - A bloated old beast out of Austria I think. Aged in dry underground conditions, I might guess this pale and boastful creature to be a vampire, if I hadn't already met and temporarily slain one on the train to Quarantown. He and his mustache, like a broom inexpertly smashed against a dusty floor rather than swept, are among the only financiers of the village to actually live here themselves at this early stage, where many homes are still only half-constructed.
Price? More than his weight in gold. He is a simple man who likes treasure, though not evilly so. The money he fawns over was made in mining, and he has already torn a shaft in the mountain simply to have a few workers poke around in search of profitable minerals. Sometimes he goes in himself.
Many of the citizens can be called his, his workers, his servants, his wife, his lover that she tolerates, and his nine children, several of whom have golden teeth that their father may have placed in there for decoration's sake rather than medical necessity. Of course they will eventually be Wanda's citizens, not his, but any number of shiny and heavy things could assist in him getting over the loss of things less permanent.
'Giggles' Terroir - Now there is a treat. One grave of gravel younger than myself, she is a vintner by trade, also here as a representative of a family that couldn't think of anything better to do with her. She is ripe to be given a purpose as I was, to have something expertly made of her. For now all she does is flit about, organizing socials and gifting bottles.
I imagine she delivers compliments and slights by the vintage of those bottles, but my goddess's all-consuming aura, which sacrifices me to a whirlpool of bed sheets each night, prevents my mind from labeling the year, and I haven't the skill to identify wine by color or bouquet.
Price? Appreciation. She wants to be seen, and I fear she will fall in love with the first person who does acknowledge her as more than a wine rack, as one falls down a dry well. Again I press the need for Wanda to make herself present, for Giggles is already desperately outstretched.
Martin and Irving Foster - Here is a smudge on my menu where the metaphor breaks down, for these two elude me thus far. Cousins, they live rather privately in one of the earliest houses to be completed, with but one window on the side facing away from the rest of their neighbors.
They also stand completely opposite the dwelling Wanda secured for us, a gorgeous two story and twelve room home with a miniature tower on one side grasping at a third story so that it might overlook the rest of Quarantown. Placed on a hill near Ms. Ulterrine's pond, always peppered with ducks, we hardly have a view of the Foster home, which is tucked between Burstyn's blasted hole in the rock and the dark treeline.
I have visited Martin and Irving but once, and found their living space both disorganized and unloved. Securing an invitation over the threshold was most difficult, dismissive as they were of a man who had no official business with them. Darting eyes, like they were looking for the scurrying cockroaches I brought with me, and deep, almost reflexive, scowls convinced me the housewarming gift in my arms would go most unappreciated, as if I was asking them to prominently display a giant stinking owl pellet, so I quickly concocted a lie that it was actually for the next people I would visit that day.
Perhaps the answer lies in the shadows they cultivated and churned like butter, for they busied themselves all throughout my friendly introductions by... busying themselves. Not once did they sit down, or pace without urgency, and always they were bending over to pick something up and returning to their full height with nothing.
Quarantown was isolated, and at this point in time had no official constabulary or courthouses of any kind. It would be an ideal place for the criminal element to hide, and it would not benefit them to give their life stories to the people who could potentially report them to distant authorities.
Obvious paranoia bolsters this theory all the more, for when my irritation with their gruff behavior overcame my manners I intentionally dropped the books intended as gift, just to make the less attentive Irving acknowledge me.
It succeeded, but I got more than his gaze. A yelp came out of him, and a great shudder of his wrists, and a mouse-dodging dance of the ankles. I've found that such responses come mostly from people struck often as children, so I regretted it a moment later and made my apology, then my exit.
So I could offer no price for the Foster cousins, but it hardly mattered, for While Wanda looked over the menu she asked me to create as I updated it, a ledger bound in black and embossed with silver, I could see she did so mostly to pretend at effort with the citizens she claimed to desire as subjects.
Already our schedule had become rigid and grating, but she sensed little of that, for I couldn't help but be overjoyed by her presence when I had it. Always the sun would be setting before I saw her, as if its orange and purple tail filtered through the trees and coalesced to make her.
From out of the woods she came, witnessed from the heptagonal window of our little tower. Her feet were bare, and stones went smooth under her, fully aware their rough edges couldn't bother her anyway. Loaded up on her shoulders was a pinned gathering of her furs, brown and silver, and though I never found any such garments in her wardrobe they changed frequently; sometimes a fox's glass eye would peek out from a fold and then disappear again.
Creatures of the woods trailed behind her, sniffing at her furry coattails: squirrels, hedgehogs, weasels, and rabbits. Above them circled crows. The horde of them, already converted to her service as familiars I imagine, only retreated back into the wilds when she reached the edge of the duck pond, harassed as they were by a sudden barrage of territorial quacking.
While it may seem unsanitary to wash one's face in a duck pond, I assure you Wanda suffered no soiling as a result. The ducks knew better than to foul her waters, and just as with the stones, the weaker aspects of nature knew to clear her path so as not to suffer her efforts at it. Her kneel at the pond was my cue to descend from the tower, arrange our supper as it finished cooking, and set the table.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Only in the sanctity of our home did she ever remove her furs, tossing them to the floor before the crackling fireplace where they unfurled on their own into some flattened chimeric beast, like a bearskin rug slowly changing into a tigerskin rug.
Without them she was devoid of her ruffled pomp, her godly raiment, exposed as her true self. Those outer cloaks were the barrier between her and the world, the only one she ever humored, and only so something could bristle and more aggressively show her discomfort and distaste to those that offend.
Yet she was in no way diminished as she slunk to my set table and sat across from me. I served her, and when I leaned down to pour the wine her face traveled up my neck in one inhaling sweep so that she might identify by scent what I had been doing all the day, and to revel in it, and be lightly amused by it.
Before the first course I would show her the menu, naturally. She flipped through it, one page per sip from her favorite pewter goblet, also taking a glance at me each time, each one praise for my obedience. If only she had praised the substance rather than the raw effort. Some nastiness may have been avoided. Some lives may have been preserved.
But, timidly, I did not air the grievance, so as never to spoil the aromas of the meal. Even as her eyes, green and electric, like bottled lightning overflowing, darted between me and the menu, its contents were the furthest thing from my mind.
For I was in love.
And surrounded by it, since she was in the land, the house, the cookware, and the silver in each tine of the fork I slipped into my mouth. She smirked at me as I took a bite, knowing what sensation she put there. Not the end of the fork, but a few of her fingers, pressing on my tongue, drawing out the saccharine dew drops that were my affectionate words for her.
How could such a scene not pass wordlessly? As mated animals we were sated in every way. Any distant dissatisfaction was nothing but the nagging of our humanity, like a parent's shouting turned to incoherent barking through closed doors. We were fed, and warm, and together.
In her face was everything I wanted to see: fans of freckles constricted and pinched on the bridge of her nose, impish teeth glittering, tufts of auburn hair draped over her ears as if they wore furs of their own, and those vivisecting eyes.
Following the meal was a mysterious blur, a memory fogged by the throaty lust that came immediately after. Things came into focus once more in the bedroom. For her lovemaking was no duty, no chore, not even an act of maintenance though I'm sure it reinforced her divine investment in me almost mechanically, each thrust a piston.
The center of mass is a familiar idea, but my Wanda has also a center of heat, a molten core, and when she was pressed against me I found it below her heart, below her navel, underneath strong layered thighs like old growth trees and exuding from her pelvic cradle.
When we first kissed on the train her breath poured into me and taught my lungs to breathe anew. Entwined with her in twisting sheets I sensed her center of heat could tip and pour as well, from the spout of life, washing me in the white-hot swelter, a waterfall somewhere in a ravine of a star far more remote than the sun.
One cannot be more present for an experience than I was each and every time with her, but she deliberately obscured one aspect of the process to heighten the sensation. I could never tell when it had ended, like a dream.
Wanda was always there when I awoke, but some nights she subtly removed herself and went back to the woods, for an hour or three, presumably to recruit owls, wolves, and bats. When she was gone but I was awake I reached out and felt her heat on the depressions she left in the bedding. But my curious hand would keep going. Feel it over the side. Feel it near the window. The heat in darkness.
This is how three months passed blindingly fast, exactly how someone is momentarily blinded in climax. Some evenings, when she slipped off her furs, there was no clothing underneath, and she took to her meal as nakedly as her dessert. A spotty pattern, merely alternating thrills and greater thrills, was the most significant variation in our time spent together, and it did not vex me the way her morning ritual did, performed just before she disappeared for the day and left me to two-faced cavorting.
A shave. For it she needed all the usual equipment, razor, brush, strop, soap puck, and a willing participant. Yes, this shave was for me, though I told her many times I was perfectly capable of doing it myself and had been doing so my entire adult life.
"Of course you have," she told me patronizingly on the first morning she insisted, having already sat me down next to a prepared lather. The antler-handled strait razor glided back and forth across the strop. "But things have changed my love. You were shaving an unclaimed face, a precocious thing running around in fields that was not required to look its best.
This," she grabbed my cheekbones, turned me one way and then the other as if inspecting the freshness of a flatfish, "is now my face. It is accustomed to my touch, spoiled soft by it, and it will respond best to my knowing sculptor's hand."
"This is just a chore," I assured her. "I know you have more important matters to attend to. You can trust me to manage my own existence."
"You say that as if I don't enjoy having you here." She stood in front of me, waist swaying in the breeze of our repartee. Her full weight landed on my lap, but the wooden chair didn't creak. Stones rounding, water clearing... "Granted you're merely in a chair with a strap present, and not strapped to the chair..." Her expression cackled. "But I do have a knife." She said the word with an edge just as she placed the blunt tip of it against my Abel's apple. How she found a blunt portion was a mystery; it all seemed very sharp to me.
Her hand came up and started brushing my cheeks, but the razor was gone, replaced with the lathered brush in some sleight of paw that was among the least but more amusing of her talents. While I was certain she had the skill and knowledge to complete the task perfectly even through my blabbering, I added it to the list of experiences that went well wordlessly.
She allowed me the dignity of toweling myself off, but the razor and the supplies all disappeared into her furs; when she walked out the door there was no sound of them clinking against each other in a pocket somewhere. That evening I searched for them, to no avail. Of course that roused my suspicions, but getting part of the answer was as simple as waiting until the next morning.
It came, and there she was, dragging our lightest chair behind her. Whatever room I'd been in, she would've been there. The lather was ready as it came out of her furs, despite what a dreadful mess it would've made in any normal pocket.
"So you intend to handle this every day?" I asked as the razor glided across my throat. She couldn't harm me unless she wanted to, and I always knew when she wanted to. There was none of that about her then, just an undercurrent of concern expertly, but not perfectly, hidden under her playful insistence.
"If you would like it to change, stop growing your beard. Only that will convince me you don't need my hand." She kissed me to test the bristle on my lip, revealing as she pulled away a glance that suggested she'd missed something, but not something on my face. "You should enjoy this."
"I do!" Severin Molochi was no liar and neither is Severin Pelts.
"Yes, but you're enjoying me, not what I'm doing. You're tolerating the shave."
"I just don't understand what you're getting out of it, my Wanda. Intimacy? We make batches of the stuff every night, and far more intensely. Or have you ritualized this the way I have our supper? If this is your preamble, then by all means, but I'd rather you didn't waste your time. Much of my work for Uncle Piotr was predicated on me looking my best. Quarantown can be all the closer to its best if you attend to it instead of me."
The shave was finished while I was making my case, and the razor gone, but she still had the strop, so she draped it over my neck and played with the ends, pulling my head closer so she could kiss my forehead.
"Severin, do not question my judgment." She foresaw my quibble. "Or my whim. To you they are one and the same. You know I love your ideas, and have need of them now that we are bound, but any time you think I've done something lightly, or haven't given it proper thought, or weight, you are incorrect. You are too weak to know things the way I know them."
Her arms crossed, and suddenly the strop was tight about my neck. My breath watched its step, sidled through a narrow corridor. There was no need to panic. This was her true ritual. A regular test. All she wanted was to see how much of me belonged to her, and how much I kept for myself. Previously it had always been just my final breath, the edge of reason, the last word, and as none of those things got caught in my throat just then she knew things were as they had always been between us.
"I will give you a shave each and every day," she informed me. "You are not to shave on your own under any circumstances. If I am ever not present, then you will go unshaven. Should I vanish entirely, and you manage not to take your own life in despair, you will hold to this, no matter how many times you trip over your own whiskers."
"Yes Wanda." A moment later she was gone, and I slowly removed the strop, feeling her hand as it slid across the hairless back of my neck.
For three months I kept to my word, but then I started getting a little too clever for my own good, on top of feeling anxious over her continual delays with the citizens. Not one of them knew her nature, not even enough of her aura for light infatuation. People thought I was married to a bitter and hateful woman, one likely in the midst of an affair since she was so rarely seen on my arm. Hardly a good start for us as the premier couple of Quarantown. Throwing a soiree would've been an excellent way to catch up, but not without her, and she would not spare an evening away from the forest.
Cue the cleverness. Now of course I knew I was never supposed to use it in opposition to my Wanda, only in her service, but at a certain level of frustration I can't help myself. It becomes instinct. Were my leg locked in a trap in the wilderness I would turn not to the will needed to gnaw the limb off, but the guile to open it by disassembly.
Wanda told me I was never to shave on my own. Once that technicality had wet aged in my mind for those months it was ready to use; I only needed opportunity. It came knocking, as our neighbors should have been with housewarming gifts and introductory pastries, when Wanda informed me she would be gone one night, all of it, and then the following morning.
Mum she was on the reason, but a reasonable guess involved the full moon. Surely some of the speculations about its arcane powers, and its association with witchcraft, had roots in truth, just like the bible stories of Adam and Eve. My Wanda was out howling at the moon, or communing with the man who lives inside it tinkering with philosophy, or casting a spell that would cure Quarantown of all its ills every time its full light shone upon it.
Whatever the reason, she was gone. Of course she expected me to go one day without the shave, but there were still social errands for me to do in her stead, and while a man like Burstyn already knew I wasn't burstin' with funds myself, I didn't want to give him any indication I spent even single hours lazing around and growing chin hairs to twang like some yokel in a jug band!
Wanda kept the razor and the other supplies with her, so there were none in the house, but that was no obstacle, especially considering I needed to find a supervisor anyway. Couldn't shave on my own now, could I?
Since my better half (alright, better nine tenths) didn't make use of the thorny intelligence in the dossier I made for her, I did. Better than it going to waste. Porter was rarely home, so rather than borrow his shaving kit I made my way to our nearest neighbor, Miss Giselle Ulterrine, to ask for hers.
Surface logic dictated she wouldn't have one, as her sons weren't quite at the age where they needed it, and there was no husband in sight. But according to my menu, she wanted there to be. As such she would want everything ready for him, should he suddenly decide to join them. She had one.
"How did you know?" she asked as she brought it to me, smiling, nothing but curiosity in the question. That had become so unfamiliar. When Wanda had a question it meant there was something she did not know, and those black gaps held monolithic dangers.
Giselle was a charming woman, disarming and good-natured. Her troubles stemmed, I imagine, from taking up with men that kept far too many arms about them, so that the full effect of her personality only stripped them of a few weapons, leaving her entirely at the mercy of whatever device they held onto in their most barking mad paranoia.
Her long hair, often kept in a single braid down to her waist, wasn't graying, instead fading like a broom that stayed on the porch, leaned against the home, soaking up day after day of harsh sun. A long nose, terminating in a perfect bulb like a thermometer, helped to ground wandering daydreaming eyes. They were brown.
Slight of build, turned into a washboard by a boxy dress three sizes too large and a gray house apron over top, she looked at me expectantly, but still smiling. There were no dark plans between us, as far as she knew. Part of me wished to keep it that way. Another felt guilty for involving her in my cheeky little rebellion at all.
So much so that I decided the technicality could be stretched even thinner. Giselle did not need to supervise, for the many beautiful ducks in her pond could do it. The family would be nearby if I suddenly found myself bleeding and shrieking, razor jutting out of me thanks to the toddler's hand Wanda assumed I was shaving with.
Out on the pond there was a small dock with two canoes tied up, and enough room for someone to set up an easel, with so little foot traffic they would also have time to paint every feather as each thousand glided glossy by. Perfect too for a peaceful shave. Winter had gotten long in the tooth, but it did so by extending the fang with an icicle, as the temperature was still remarkably low.
When I did remark on it, the statement billowed out of my mouth as harassed fog, but I took it as a sign that my skin would be as close to marble as it ever would be, practically inviting the polishing.
Sitting down on the dock in our lightest chair, which I'd been able to drag with me since Wanda's pockets weren't quite so expansive as to swallow any of our furnishings yet, I set out the instruments, barely protected from the biting cold by my nightclothes and the heavy fur-lined robe I'd thrown over them.
My supervisors, the sea ducks, did their part. Never was there a moment where less than a flock was watching me, and any disturbance would rile them and draw Miss Ulterrine or her boys.
Lather. Not so much as a quack. Peaceful as the grave. It allowed me to hear the blade across my own skin, every little tree felled in its follicle. After one pass I paused, waiting for whatever Wanda feared, and nothing came of it. The caution did not leave my hand quickly, but I took my time, and around halfway I was shaving just like I used to you, in whatever year was the last one where I'd done so.
A cup of water on the boards at my feet served to freshen up the blade. Everything was going swimmingly until I dipped to drench it again and got only my fingertips. Had I dropped it? Had it slipped between the slats and sunk? Having to explain that to Giselle could've caused me to die of embarrassment, but there was a greater threat to my life just then.
For it hadn't sunk. It was to my throat, and right where I'd left off, but whatever hand held it was unknown to me. That is, unknown in the sense that no name was attached, but as the moments rolled by heavily I was tighter and tighter wrapped in certain information. Despite my hairs being cut short, they still prickled in the fashion that had become all too familiar.
I was once again in the presence of a god. Not my Wanda. Not that bloodsucker Ruthven, who was now buried out near Burstyn's mine. This one was new. The one who came down from her cooled volcanic pedestal to let me kiss her hand and call her wife had been very clear: many were the heirs of Cain, and any could come calling, but it was practically fate that her siblings would do so. Wanda had only just beaten her undead brother Ruthven into town, and more importantly into a heart like mine.
Seven there were, in total, born over many miserable brooding months at the rainy Villa Diodati in the year without a summer. Names, aside from Ruthven, were unknown to me, with no more explanation needed than the one given. Wanda had warned that all the heirs invested their powers in various things, like the wisdom of a diversified financial portfolio.
They might have power in human and animal familiars, as she did, or in the grave like Ruthven, or in the weather, or buildings, or even something as insubstantial as a name. She had not divulged them to me in order to protect me from any possible influence. And now I'd blundered out of the safety fencing she'd erected like some blithering turkey, running straight into the finish line of the carving knife.
For I was the prize. As Wanda's chief disciple I had become a greater anchor of her divine power than even Quarantown itself, as I was to serve as the bridge between her and her people, the Abel-bodied who broke bread and bed with the Cain-staking. If any of her siblings could kill me, or even more meaningfully, sway my loyalty to them, all my Wanda's efforts would be destroyed and she would be supplanted entirely.
In my racing thoughts there was a flash of lip-biting bitterness. If she had listened to me and quickly formed a web of confidantes then Miss Ulterrine would already know who and what I was, and also know to keep an eye on me, and also have both her sons charging into the woods at that moment to fetch Wanda back so she might save me.
Of course, that was hubris. Correct, but not in the fullest context. This situation would've been prevented instead of addressed if I'd simply sat still like the statuette she wanted. I invited this invader, offered them a bite to eat in the form of my supple throat, shaved in preparation as if I were about to undergo surgery.
The time for regret was before, or after, or some other time. Now I needed strategy. My opponent had made their move, and was already being generous, giving me silence to arrange a response.
"Am I being robbed," I said as calmly as could be managed, "or is my Wanda?" This heir of Cain's first response was to slide the razor and continue the shave, as expertly as their sibling had done it, like a glass rod caressing my cheek. Then words.