It was truly winter by then, and darkness had descended over Threoo like a flock of crows onto the treetops. The sun seemed a fantasy, a sweet lie to ease the cold night, appearing only in the hint of dawn that teased the horizon around noon. Thorn was always so, so cold, but that smooth ache was familiar by now. The years had been long, and the old skugabor wasn’t afraid to face another winter. In his veins, however, an itch was brewing. He’d awoken strangely elated at the prospect of not dying, but it was muted by the tingling of his bones. His nerves were on fire, the burning progressing too fast, and it unsettled him.

It was saturday morning, and Thorn was debating how to ask May to leave for the night - he could not have his band realise he was hosting a murder suspect on his couch - when his phone rang. It buzzed angrily against his thigh. It had to be Abigail, and Abigail’s calls always spelled bad news - they weren’t exactly on friendly speaking terms. He picked up.

‘Abigail,’ he said, ‘Morning.’

‘Thorn,’ she greeted him. She sounded as if she had a stuffed nose. ‘We found the girl.’

For a moment Thorn didn’t understand which girl Abigail was talking about.

‘Oh,’ he said then. ‘May’s sister?’

‘Foster sister, yeah.’

Silence.

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ Thorn asked. He was pacing the apartment, restless like a caged bear, eyeing the frozen forest outside his kitchen window. In his veins an itch refused to be silenced, too hard to ignore despite only being ignited hours ago.

‘Skygge found her, Thorn. She’s miles away from the house, under half a meter of snow.’

That surprised him. ‘Skygge found her?’

‘Walking his sister’s dog out in the woods, apparently.’

‘Skygge? In the morning? On a weekend?’

‘I know, it doesn’t sit right with me either,’ Abigail said. ‘But they’ve got her, at least. Can put the poor thing to rest. Tell May, will you? I don’t think I’ve got her number.’

With that, Abigail hung up on him, and Thorn cursed. She hadn’t even told him where they’d found the girl’s body. It would’ve been frozen, he imagined, blue with blackened bloodstains around her throat and wrists. Had she fled so far from the house even the dogs couldn’t find her? It hadn’t snowed yet, in September, not deep enough to hide a body. Where the fuck had she been?

May. May would want to know. But he had no way to reach her. He hadn’t seen her all day, despite her restless yanking at the shadows in the shower. Was she okay? He should’ve spoken to her. Asked her what had happened - but the dark had not allowed him to. Frustrated, he started pulling knots out of his hair.

When she got home, Thorn’d been staring at the clocks hands for over an hour, something he otherwise didn’t do until the day before a kill. Usually he tried to force time backwards, but today he was willing it to go faster, willing it to hurry the fuck up and get it over with.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he said, and immediately regretted it. May walked into the kitchen, soft flakes of melting snow covering her hair and shoulders. She raised her eyebrows.

‘Can’t I go out anymore?’ she said, and Thorn could almost hear the sarcastic dad? at the end of that sentence.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He stood up. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. They got Asrun, May.’

‘They what now?’

‘She’s dead. Skygge found her body somewhere out in the woods.’

Slowly, May took her gloves off, placing them perfectly side by side on the countertop.

‘What are they doing to her?’

‘I don’t know. Abigail didn’t say,’ Thorn said.

May opened her mouth to ask something, but she was cut short by the sharp ringing of his doorbell.

The two skugabor stood staring at each other for a long, terrifying moment, until a voice Thorn recognised as Skygge’s came, muffled, from behind his door.

‘Thorn? Mate? I need to talk to you. Thomas isn’t here and I found someone in the forest this morning and - I don’t know what to do. ’

‘Does he know?’ May mouthed to Thorn, but he motioned for her to shut up.

‘Coming!’ Thorn yelled back, and said to May in a softer voice, ‘Hide in the bedroom. Be quiet. He doesn’t know.’

Wondering how on earth everything that could’ve gone wrong had culminated at this exact moment right inside his apartment, he went for the front door. The moment May shut his bedroom door, the vocalist opened his front door to let Skygge in.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What the hell happened?’

Wordlessly, Skygge walked into Thorn’s house and sank down on the couch. His normally tied back hair hung unbrushed and loose past his shoulders, and Thorn could tell he was wearing the shirt he’d slept in.

‘I found that girl that went missing in September,’ Skygge said. Mud and snow clung to his boots.

‘How the hell did you manage that?’ Thorn said, walking past the bedroom where he knew May to be listening.

‘Went out this morning. Promised Ann I’d walk her dogs while she’s away. She was just… there. In the snow. Thirteen, fourteen, all torn up and frozen.’

Why was Skygge eyeing Thorn so strangely? Had he noticed May’s gloves on the countertop, the extra mugs in the sink, her bedding tucked away behind the couch?

‘Are you okay?’ Thorn sat down on his desk chair, and turned round to face the blonde man.

Skygge shrugged. ‘Just glad she’s found, honestly.’

So what was he doing here?

‘Shook me up a little, though, and with Thom being out…’Skygge said.

‘Yeah,’ Thorn said. An uneasy silence stretched out between the two men.

‘Didn’t you have to take pictures? For the cops?’

Thorn shook his head. Abby never called on him for skugabor kills.

‘What fucked me over, Thorn, it looked like some… animal had killed her. She was all torn up and yet mile and miles away from the road. She looked like hell. So I called the cops and they came and they acted like it was perfectly normal and nothing out of the ordinary and zipped her up in a body bag.’

Yeah. They did that, on these kinds of unnatural kills, the kind that needed covering up and forgetting. Thorn wished he could tell the bassist that, but he also knew that people who knew skugabor secrets rarely lived very long.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

So Thorn made coffee, and the two men talked, first about death and murder and then about band business and then about nothing, the way friends can. By the time Skygge got up to leave, promising to come back tonight with the rest of the band, Thorn had learned nothing interesting apart from where exactly Asrun had died. Only when Skygge was opening his front door, letting in the icy wind, did he speak up.

‘Who’s been sleeping here, Thorn?’ the bassist set, casual as can be.

Thorn raised his eyebrows. ‘Picked up some German girl from Dyst the other night. I think she’s forgotten her gloves.’

As he went to close the door, Skygge zipped up his jacket and smiled.

‘Why on earth are you taking home girls that want to sleep on the couch?’

Before Thorn could react, the younger man was halfway down the stairs. The vocalist swore under his breath and closed the door behind him, before turning around and opening the bedroom door. May was curled up in his bed, asleep.

‘Well then,’ the old skugabor said to himself. ‘See that, Skygge? She isn’t sleeping on the couch.’

He walked over to the bed, put his hand on her shoulder to wake her up. May opened her eyes and blinked against the light.

When May woke up, Thorn standing right next to her, she realized something was wrong. It wasn’t the usual tugging on her mind by shadows in the distance, or the cold that so easily crept into her bones and lungs. There was an itch somewhere between her heart and her guts, buried so deep inside of her that she couldn’t possibly scratch. It wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. She’d felt it before, months ago, sometime in September.

She streched, trying to shake off the unease.

‘You awake?’ Thorn said.

‘Obviously,’ May said. She yawned. ‘Gods, I haven’t slept in a bed in months. Is Skygge gone?’

‘Yeah. I think he noticed someone else is living here, though.’

‘How bad is that?’

‘People who ask questions don’t live very long,’ Thorn said. ‘And I’ve been itching like mad. I don’t know why it’s this extreme this time, but I’m not going to last much longer and I don’t know what I’d do to myself if I’d murder Skygge.’

May thought she knew. The vocalist was wearing a short sleeved t-shirt, and she could see lines and lines of old scars crossing his arms. She also knew she should tell him about the needles prickling her insides, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

‘Abigail knows, doesn’t she?’ May said. The man still hadn’t filled her in on why, exactly, Abigail got to know. ‘She’s very much alive even if she’s not helping either of us.’

‘Abigail has old blood even if not by birth. She has her role, even if she’s shit at it.’

‘Thorn, you shouldn’t be alive either with me here, should you? Things have changed. Maybe nothing will happen.’

Thorn shook his head. Had she guessed he should have died? ‘Get dressed. Skygge told me where he found Asrun. She’ll be gone by now, but I suppose you’d like to see the place?’

‘Yeah,’ May said. ‘I’d like that.’

Like wasn’t the right word, entirely; the thin girl still had a mountain of guilt eating away at her mind like a trapped animal gnawing at its own leg. There was a certain desperation in her hunt for knowledge, a faint hope that maybe she’d find some old book or manuscript that’d tell her she could stop this. Yet there hadn’t been anything interesting in the archives that’d never let her down before.

‘What do you hope to find, exactly?’ Thorn said as May slipped on a pair of his old jeans.

‘I want to say goodbye,’ May said. ‘And see if there’s any significance in where she died.’

‘She was fleeing, May, she was probably just trying to get as far away from you as possible.’

‘I know that, but why didn’t she follow the road? She could’ve gone into Slakshaven, found help.’

‘She was bleeding out, I doubt she was thinking straight. The kid was fourteen.’

‘I know,’ May said. ‘I’m grasping at straws.’

Outside, the forest was coated in a strange twilight, the ankle deep snow reflecting every bit of light the moon managed to produce. May enjoyed the crunch of it beneath her boots. There was no one else here, no dog walkers or playing children, despite the weekend. The skugabor didn’t bother following the path - they could find their way back if they had to, with the way the shadows produced a slow, steady heartbeat in the direction of the city. The dark seemed to move in rhythm with the itching in May’s body. She wanted to tell Thorn. She really, honestly did.

But May stayed silent, unsure why, and the two walked beneath the trees, each deep in their own thoughts. She looked at Thorn from the corner of her eye, wondering how often he’d had to kill, how many murders she’d be responsible for. The girl hoped death sentences weren’t doled out randomly on the freezing islands. She’d felt such a consciousness somewhere in the dark, in the creeping tendrils in the tunnels. Would a being like that kill at random? No; skugabor must serve some purpose, to that darkness, at least. Perhaps not so much to the people that lived here.

‘Thorn?’ she said, ‘Do you know why you kill the people you kill?’

The man didn’t answer for a long time. ‘Not always.’

‘But do you think there is a reason?’

‘I have to believe that.’

He didn’t say anything else, and May shut up too. There had to be a reason, although she couldn’t fathom what Asrun, fourteen years old and terrified, had done to deserve freezing in the woods.

When finally they reached the place where her sister had died, there was no trace of her left other than a chaotic display of old footsteps in the snow. They would be gone by morning. May didn’t know what she’d expected. There was nothing here, except the tall pines, and the soft moonlight that cast deep shadows among the trees. Thorn stayed back as she circled the small clearing. She reached out to the shadows, morphing them, making them dance for her; and yet nothing would betray to her what had happened here.

‘Maybe,’ May said, ‘It really just was me.’

Thorn shook his head, appearing beside her. He put his hand on her shoulder. The weight of it kept her grounded, and May sighed.

‘I have questions,’ Thorn said. ‘What was Skygge doing here, exactly?’

May turned around. ‘Walking his sister’s dogs?’

‘Miles and miles from the path? There’s nothing here; it was way below zero. And then he shows up at my doorstep telling me it fucked him over but not enough to even make him sound unnerved?’

‘Fair. Still, what’s he doing here then?’

‘Maybe he was going somewhere. Maybe he was looking for something.’

‘You’re worried about him, aren’t you?’

Thorn didn’t answer. May let it go, glad the man felt something other than the pain and frustration he radiated.