Chapter 8: Dust and bones

(GUNS ’N ROSES)

Her heart is a cold stone. Dry bones rattle inside Blaire’s head. A sudden flurry of the past wants to be heard. She sighs, relenting to the call with a heavy heart. Sometimes things are so easy. All you need to do is just to let go. Let it happen naturally.

It was a sweltering hot day, ten years ago. One of those where everything stuck to everything else. Sticky days. Draining days. Blaire was at her son’s grave in the midday heat, swatting at the flies around her face. She longed to release her tears. It felt as if an ocean of tears were trapped inside her body, ready to burst forth. She longed to cry. There was a kind of comfort in such an act. She learned this during the mourning process for Red King. From the depths of her soul, she wished to cry over her boy’s grave, but none came. Tears belonged to the dead. Blaire spent all of her days there, morning, noon and night. Kneeling by the child’s small mount, screaming into the sky above, she begged for the tears to come.

Nothing happened. The sun rose from behind the horizon. The wind cried through narrow passages between trees, sweeping her hair into her face. She wiped them away with a sigh. Drops of rain fell as the sky mourned for her boy, her Gavin, her little bird. These heavenly tears dried on her skin, but her own tears never entered the world where her son no longer breathed, or cried, or sang. The sun dove away, leaving her in a sea of darkness, unable to breathe.

“Please,” she begged, “let me cry for him.”

Not a single tear emerged. She beat her fists on the rocks that covered her son’s tiny body like a blanket until the knuckles bled. She smeared the blood all around his grave as a kind of protection, hoping he would forgive her dry eyes, even when she couldn’t forgive herself. She laid next to him on the grass, placing one arm over the grave and talked to him as if he was still alive, laying in his crib, able to hear every word. Sometimes she sang to him. Lullabies. Nursery rhymes that used to calm him down. The first song that she and Luka danced to on their wedding day.

She didn’t eat, and hardly slept. Red King came to the grave in specter form to give her some sweet, sticky syrup to drink. She didn’t ask what it was, and he didn’t offer an explanation. Only later did she learn it was to cleanse her from destructive energy. To restore her health and heart. Then he told her she stank and should go home to bathe and change clothes. Suggested that she burn the clothes she was wearing, because they would never come clean. Not once did he say she shouldn’t be at the grave, or shouldn’t be grieving.

When she was at home for a bath or a forced meal, Luka told her she didn’t want the child, anyway. He couldn’t understand why she pretended now that the boy had died. Why did she stay at the grave? Why was she pretending to care?

“You can’t even cry for the boy,” he accused her one late night in the dark kitchen. “Your mourning is as fake as our marriage is.”

On the day when Blaire Nathara went ballistic, Red King’s specter visited her again, insisting she went home for food and a bath. She rose with creaking knees, tottering down the path leading home. She rounded the corner of their house and heard whispering. Two voices talking. The thump-thump of wood on wood, like a door banging in a frame. It took her a moment to identify the origin of the sound. It was their bed’s headboard slamming into the wall. Thump-thump-thump. Nothing out of the ordinary. Luka and she had made that sound on the wall a million times before. Maybe even more than a million. It took her at least a minute before the realization hit her tired mind.

Someone was fucking in her bed. She stopped to listen closely to the whispers.

“It feels like I’m losing my mind,” Luka said. “I don’t think she even loves me anymore. I don’t think she loved me in a long time.”

“Don’t you still love her?” Catriona’s voice drifted outside for her to hear.

Blaire froze, bit down hard on her bottom lip, and moved to stand with her back against the wall. She closed her eyes, inhaling slowly. She wanted to run into the house, into the room, but held herself back. Her Snake blood boiled within the veins, spreading hot, angry fire throughout her body. She fought her nature, and the curse of the name her mother blessed her with.

Thump-thump-thump.

Blaire’s hands felt numb, cold, and dead. Even more so than before. The feeling spread up her arms, past her elbows, into shoulders, neck, and took over her brain. She wanted to shout that she still loved him, but the cold paralyzed her throat.

Thump-thump-thump.

The fire overtook the cold. It blazed within her like a horde of bulls on a rampage. She burned with righteous indignity as the bed thumped against the wall. Her husband. In her bed. In their house. Freaking fucking her sister. The double betrayal seared through her heart like flaming poison, infecting everything in its wake.

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“I don’t know,” her husband answered.

“May I suggest you don’t?” her sister suggested. “If you did, you’d be weeping with her at the grave, not here banging me in your marital bed.”

“I want a son,” he said, voice harsh and cold.

“You have a son.”

The banging stopped, but only for a few moments. Blaire held her breath, overcome with the insane thought that in the silence, they would detect her presence on the other side of the wall. That they would come out running to her before she was ready to face them. She didn’t know what to do at all. Should she walk away and pretend she didn’t hear and doesn’t know? Maybe go to someone she trusted for help? The shame of it all washed over her like a wave. She lost a child. Now she has to go tell people that… Well, that this happened. They’d say she’s cursed and never come to buy her potions again. Who’d trust a woman that lost a son, a husband, and a sister in one week?

No one. That’s who.

“You will give me another son,” Luka said in their bedroom. “A better son.”

Catriona snorted. “I’m not here to breed with you.”

“Why are you here, then?” Blaire heard the indignity in his tone. She could imagine the expression of pain on his face without even having to look at him.

“You are just a great fuck, Luca. That’s all.”

“Sometimes you are just as cold as her.,” Luca whined.

“It runs in our blood. Snakes are cold-blooded. I don’t know why you always complain about something that is in our nature. It’s not as if you didn’t know what you were getting married to. Red King made Blaire his preferred successor.”

“Fuck you,” he said, anger tainting his voice. “I want a son. You owe me a son.”

“I don’t owe you shit,” Catriona shouted. “I’m not your wife.”

“That’s the reason I’m fucking you. Because you aren’t Blaire. You aren’t fire and brimstone, like her. You are more tempered. Calmer. More like what a woman is supposed to be. You aren’t fighting me day and night, twenty-four-seven, like she is.”

Blaire’s fingers curled into palms, cutting deep half-moon shapes into the flesh.

“You know what? You sound like a spoiled little brat,” Catriona says. “Always wanting your own way and thinking the world owes you everything.”

“You make it easy for me. Blaire is so cold now. Like stone. Like a mountain of ice. But you… you are warm like a heath in winter. A mountain on fire. I swear you don’t have reptile blood in your veins at all. You make me want to fuck you. Fuck you all the time. Until I planted a million seeds inside your womb. I want you, and I want a healthy son.”

“I don’t belong to you, Luka,” Catriona answered. “You are not mine either. You belong to Blaire.”

“If that bothers you, I’ll leave her,” Luka said. “Just give me the word and I’ll do it today.”

Catriona laughed aloud. “She’ll kill you, dumb fuck. You’ll meet your ancestors before you even have time to mourn Gavin properly.”

He snorted. “Well, maybe I’ll kill her first. It’s not as if she’s the only one who can be murderous just because of a name her mother picked before she was even born. I’ll kill her, and then we’ll be free from each other, and she can be with the child forever.”

“Dream on, idiot.”

“We can leave,” Luka suggests. “My family will welcome us.”

“I’m not running away,” Catriona said. “And if I ever do, it won’t be with my sister’s husband. Get that thought out of your head right away.”

“Then why are you in her bed?” Luka asked the question that was on Blaire’s mind, too. “If you don’t want to be with me as a couple, why are you having sex with me in your sister’s home?”

“I told you already. You are a great lover. I’m here for sex. Nothing else. When we started this two years ago, great sex was also the only interest you had. We were good friends-with-benefits before Gavin died. Now you want to change our agreement. I don’t want more, Luka. If you can’t handle only sex, then I think we should stop meeting up.”

Thump-thump-thump. Two years of thumping in her bed. Two years. The words echo through Blaire’s brain, ricocheting off her skull. She inhaled through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. She closed her eyes, hoping to wipe away the image of the two most important people in her life fucking in her bed.

Then the old sound of rattling bones returned. The bones only she can hear. Constantly moving, banging against each other. Rubbing her the wrong way. She shook her head, disturbing the bones even more. She opened her eyes and closed them again. Said a prayer, but the thought that her life was beyond anything that a prayer could heal slipped into her mind soon after. She opened her eyes quickly, ready to face the reality.

Thump-thump. The sound of her feet on the porch, matching the rhythm of her husband’s thrusts.

Thump-thump. Her bed’s headboard hitting against the wall.

Thump-thump. The banging of the door against the wall when she flung it open.

Thump-thump. Her heart beat wildly as she lifted the gun from the kitchen drawer.

Thump-thump. The bullets slammed into Catriona’s brain, throwing her head against the offending headboard. Blood on the walls. Blood on the bed. Blood on Luka’s surprised face. He rose, turned to face her with hands held high in surrender. Blaire blinked once, twice, thrice.

Thump-thump. A bloody flower bloomed on his chest.

Thump-thump. A wild dance around the room. Grabbing her purse, her jewellery box, clean underwear, a coat. Then the thump-thump of her running feet, carrying her away from everything she loved. Thump-thump her feet slapped on the floor. Thump-thump down the porch steps. Thump-thump as the gun dropped to the last step. The gate slammed closed. The car door closed with a noise that sounded like another gunshot in the quiet late afternoon.

Thump-thump beat her sinful heart as she started the car.

Thump-thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Sometimes things are so easy. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. So easy that you don’t even have to think about it. Thump-thump. Sometimes you just have to switch off your brain and let things go the way it’s supposed to go. Let instinct take over. Thump-thump-thump.

The sound of her memories, long buried, knocking to be released. Thump-thump.

And above it all the sound, as always, the rattling of bones.