May - unable to speak and wide-eyed - evaporated from right between Thorn’s fingers, and at first he thought she’d died. It was a long, horrid moment before Thorn realized he could feel her in the dark, travelling steadily away from them. Skygge was still standing in the bar’s doorway, leaning onto the doorframe to support himself. He looked as though he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just seen.
‘What was that?’ the bassist said, and Thorn shook his head. ‘Is she going to kill someone?’
‘I’ve never seen that from the outside,’ he said. ‘But I never lose my mind like that, either.’
The dark had spread May thin, thin enough that he could hardly feel her, and soon enough she was gone too far for his mind to follow. He cursed, and climbed to his feet. His jeans were soaked with molten snow, but he hardly noticed the cold of it.
‘Come on,’ he told Skygge, ‘She’s going north. You’ve got a car, right?’
‘Yeah,’ the bassist said, and Thorn started down the street. Skygge had to hurry to follow.
They rushed north. The snowflakes were thick on the wind, and Skygge couldn’t drive as fast as Thorn would have liked him to. He was fidgeting with the holes in his jeans, tearing at the seams - the past few days were breaking him up, fast. He’d seriously begun to question how much more he could handle.
The roads were almost deserted, the street lights unable to illuminate the asphalt in the snow storm. There was nothing, north of Slakshaven; nothing but fields and farms and cliffs.
‘Do you know where she’s gone?’ Skygge asked, and Thorn shook his head, tying and untying his hair just so his hands had something to do. He closed his eyes, pushed his thoughts out as far as they could go. There was nothing except the thumping of Slakshaven behind them, not even the morbid excitement that had terrified him on that dark hill.
‘We’ll have to get off the main road,’ Thorn said.
‘That’s mad,’ Skygge said, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. ‘You might be immortal, mate, but I sure as hell am not.’
Thorn swallowed. ‘I’m not any more, I don’t think.’
The bassist raised his eyebrows, asking something Thorn pretended not to notice.
‘The main road bends off towards the west,’ he said instead, ‘And they were dragging her north - we’ll never find her there.’
‘Fine,’ Skygge said, in such a tone that Thorn knew it was very much not fine. Well, then. The bassist had decided he wanted in on the skugabor secret - he’d have to deal with the hell of it, too.
They found a single lane road, leading towards the cliffs and perhaps a lone farm. The few tire tracks didn’t do much to break up the snow, and Skygge drove slow enough to drive Thorn mad with worry. He still couldn’t feel May in the dark around him - not even the smallest hint of her, of anything unusual in the shadows. Had they taken her to punish him, for daring not to die? Was it his fault, had she just dissolved, never to be seen again?
‘Thorn, there’s nothing here,’ Skygge said.
They drove beside the cliffs now; the faintest hint of sunlight visible at the horizon. He wished the day would just come, but it was november still - the winter wasn’t even close to being over.
‘It’s not like we can turn here,’ Thorn said, and the fidgeting with his clothes had turned into messing with his skin, his nails less sharp than he’d thought they’d be. Were it really these fingers that had murdered Petr, nights earlier?
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Skygge said beside him, ‘I know where we are.’
The bassist had turned pale, and pulled over.
‘This is Slaksfórn,’ he said, slow, ‘This is where people used to do their sacrifices, Thorn.’
And the old skugabor understood. ‘Human sacrifices?’
Skygge nodded. ‘Gran told me stories.’
A near endless list of all equally horrid possibilities thundered into Thorn’s mind, each demanding immediate attention. He opened the door, bracing against the wind, and marched into the dark. The snow had cleared up a little; and now that he expected to notice her, he felt May’s erratic patterns - softly, too quiet- right on the edges of his consciousness. He didn’t care if Skygge followed. The blonde could drive back to Slakshaven, if he wanted. Thorn had fucked up too many things these past days not to go towards that faint, terrified rhythm that came from somewhere in front of him.
If there was a path beneath his steel-toed boots, he didn’t notice it beneath the snow. It didn’t take him very long to see the silhouettes of the Slaksfórn stones, askew against the horizon. There was a darkness pulsing around them, contracting and widening around the centre stone, tentatively as though it had only just woken up.
There, huddled on her knees in the middle of them, sat May - and he reached her before he even noticed the broken body on the centre stone.
‘What happened?’ he said, and kneeled down beside her in the snow. ‘What did it make you do?’
‘I killed her,’ May said, and after that first confession the words kept spilling out of her. ‘She was already here - someone tied her up there - it’s so fucking cold, Thorn. It took so long, and I don’t think I was supposed to kill her - she was just there - she’s just like Asrun, Thorn-’
It was true - she lay there just as he’d imagined May sister before she’d been found, half buried in the snow by now, black and blue and stained red in all the wrong places.
‘It hesitated,’ May said, ‘It made me walk here, and wait, and I - she was still alive and I thought maybe, maybe it’ll let me go and I can save her, but I fucking killed her.’
‘It wasn’t you,’ he said, and he half remembered that maybe he was supposed to try and hug her now - ‘It wasn’t you. It wasn’t you.’
May nodded, but he could still see the disbelief in her eyes, and Skygge came half-jogging onto the clearing.
‘One of the stones moved,’ May said, ‘I don’t think it really was a stone. I didn’t have the strength to follow…’
‘You’re not making sense,’ Thorn said, half to May, half to Skygge’s questioning expression.
‘There was someone else here,’ May said.
That thought chilled Thorn to the bone. ‘They tied up the girl?’
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‘I think so,’ she said, ‘It sure as hell wasn’t me.’
She tried to get up, pushing away Thorn’s hands when he tried to help. He looked away, at Skygge, who was staring at the broken girl on the centre stone.
‘She did that?’ he said, looking back and forth between both frail girls.
Thorn shrugged. He wasn’t about to debate the subtleties, not here, with the snow blowing into his eyes and melting in his neck, next to a half-frozen corpse.
May managed to stand up, on trembling legs.
‘Can we leave?’ she said, and opened her mouth to explain more, then shut it again.
‘Please,’ Skygge said, and began walking, a little quicker than May could handle at the moment. Thorn fell back with her.
‘I thought he knew what we were,’ May said. She didn’t have a coat, and was trying to drag the too-short sleeves of her hoodie over her hands. Was she cold or trying to hide the reddish stains?
‘It’s one thing to know it, it’s another to see it,’ Thorn said.
‘I suppose,’ she said, and Thorn considered a miracle that she wasn’t sobbing on the floor.
As they walked, Skygge dissapeared from sight towards his car. Thorn supposed they could have looked for footsteps in the snow, but the thickening flakes on the wind would have hidden them by now.
‘I’ll take that cigarette now,’ May said, the slightest tremble in her voice. He looked at her.
‘Are you sure?’
She shrugged, hugged herself a little closer. Thorn pulled his battered pack from his pocket. It was a miracle his prerolled cigs weren’t soaked through, and he lit one, inhaling a lungful of smoke before handing it to May. She took a shallow drag of it, but managed it without coughing. Her fingers were covered in the girl’s blood, still, and it stained the cigarette red.
He watched her inhale again, the tip glowing bright, deeper this time. She closed her eyes.
‘I didn’t think it’d actually help,’ she said.
Thorn lit one for himself too, wondering where he’d get the next batch now that Abigail had disowned him. He let the heat of it flow into his lungs, his blood. Finally.
May had saved the sobbing for Thorn’s shower, which was never hot enough but hid her tears wonderfully. She’d left the two men in Thorn’s living room, and was furiously scrubbing at her skin. The blood washed away quick enough, but her skin turned red with the friction of it, and that was somehow worse. When she’d woken up on Thorn’s couch, weeks earlier, there had been nothing on her body that reminded her of the murders - but now there were scratches and bruises and then the fucking blood.
She’d looked like Asrun so much. At least she’d known Asrun’s name - this was just a faceless girl with simular hair and frame, as if whoever had tied her up at Slaksfórn knew May’s demons specifically. That was a thought too dark to entertain - that would make it her fault, somehow, and May wasn’t ready to face that. She turned up the heat of Thorn’s shower, but it wouldn’t warm her up. She started at her hair, as she did every shower, and the knots stopped her in her tracks. Maybe she’d chop the whole lot off; at the very least it would mean she didn’t become Thorn’s clone. The taste of his cigarette still lingered in her throat, but she didn’t regret taking it. Another bit of the old her gone. She started working at the invisible dirt on her body again.
It was no use. The stains she was trying to scrub off were tattooed beneath her skin, thick yet invisible, and soap wouldn’t do anything to them. She sobbed in frustration. May dug her nails into her palms, wishing she could scream, wishing Thorn and Skygge weren’t in the living room.
No point in staying here, then; May turned off the shower tap, and dried herself off with harsh motions. She understood Thorn’s self-destruction, now. Staring into her own bloodshot eyes in the mirror, she prayed to long-dead deities that she’d never go that far.
She took a long time to dress, in the vocalist’s well-worn clothes. Her own wardrobe had been the same, before she came to Slakshaven, when she still lived with her mother. Everything frayed on the edges and oversized; every shirt well-loved but near broken down. In her mind’s eye, she could see the girl tied to the centre stone still, and her shirt had been the same - black and too large and old. May dried her eyes with the back of her arm - she would not blame herself, not like Thorn did.
She did, however, swear a quiet oath of revenge as she walked out of the bathroom, the soles of her feet colder than the tiles on the floor. She wasn’t sure if it was for her benefit, or for the nameless stranger she’d sacrificed at Slaksfórn this morning.
Skygge was perched on the couch when she entered the room, and Thorn was pacing. They’d been talking, but stopped silent in their tracks when she appeared in the doorway.
‘I really,’ she said, eyeing Thorn in particular, ‘do not want to talk about it.’
He returned that stare for a little too long, perhaps having guessed how hard she was fighting not to break down, even if she pretended nothing was wrong. Yet he said nothing, and sank down in a kitchen chair. May folded herself up in Thorn’s desk chair, one leg dangling to the floor, wet hair clinging to her face still. Silence stretched out between them. May turned circles on her chair. The others would not meet her eyes, now, and she realized it’d be up to her to pretend nothing happened.
‘So, Skygge,’ she said, ‘someone’s been in your house?’
It was that easy - they were that grateful to ignore the whole ordeal. Particularly Skygge, who still didn’t look her in the eye, and seemed to think she’d jump him at a moment’s notice.
‘Yeah,’ the bassist said, ‘Thorn offered to take a look at the place, when you were, eh, in the bathroom. It’s not my house, though, it’s my grandma’s, but I lived there when-’
He was making intense eye contact with an old band’s tour poster Thorn had stapled to the wall. Gods, May thought to herself, he really wasn’t prepared for the reality of this.
Neither was she, but she was damn good at faking it.
‘We can go now,’ she said, and hit her hands in the pockets of her borrowed hoodie, so that she didn’t have to look at the guilty nails and tendons.
Skygge agreed, and it surprised her - she’d thought he’d want to get out of the skugabor’s presence the moment he could. She swallowed. If Skygge was more afraid of whoever had broken in than of murder, perhaps she shouldn’t have offered.
Too late, now - they were leaving, and Thorn stopped her by the front door while Skygge went ahead.
‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ he said, and she really didn’t want to have to deal with his sympathy now, too.
She shook her head, then nodded. Nearly told him I’ve had worse, but she’d just decided she wouldn’t become a female version of him. ‘I’ll be fine.’
The disbelief radiated off him, and she knew she was a fucking hypocrite - hadn’t she told him to talk after Petr? But she pushed past him, and he didn’t stop her, and she was halfway down the stairs before he followed.