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Cleo bursts in through the front door giggle-drunk in a way that isn’t exclusive to overdrinking but, let’s be honest, it usually is that. Eloise gets up slowly from her armchair by the fire.
“I think I might’ve done a bad thing,” they declare to the house at large. The heavy front door, stolid and oaken, shuts out the autumn’s evening chill behind them. Cleo’s eyes dart to El and they grin. “There you are!”
Cleo isn’t ever not pleased to see Eloise — incredible, Eloise has always privately thought, given how long Cleo’s been around for, old since before even Scott has memories of — but bright with fresh blood and moonlit hunting, they are certainly more demonstrative.
They sweep her in a circle, as if beginning a dance, and pepper her face with kisses. Their orange hair wisps behind them like they carried the wind in with them.
“Hello, Cleo,” Eloise says, giving them a squeezing hug and then skipping the few extra steps out of their arms. “Where’ve you been?”
“And what did you do?” Scott chimes in, barrelling down the main staircase to the foyer altogether faster than is safe or human. He has to do this every time, pretend to be chastising like he’s in charge around here or something, as if he doesn’t come running like an overexcited puppy whenever someone comes home. “That smells like way more blood than the one person you promised.”
Cleo’s eyes are glittering-bright. “It’s exactly as much blood as one person, if you drain them dry.”
“Are you going to share?” Scott demands, pressing into her space as if to take up the next part of her halted waltz with Eloise.
“Oh fine,” Cleo sighs, not looking put out at all. She sweeps her blazing hair over one shoulder and tilts her head. “Have some, then.”
Scott grins like a kid with candy and brushes a brief, appreciative kiss to Cleo’s neck before he sinks his teeth in. Cleo holds him in place. They look just like two dancers intertwined.
Eloise rubs at her forehead, where Cleo kissed her, and gets back the smallest smear of blood herself. Well. Waste not, want not, and all that. She sticks her fingers in her mouth and licks at them idly until Cleo decides they’ve had enough and taps Scott at the base of the skull to get him to let go.
“Can I have some?” Eloise asks sweetly, rocking back and forth on her heels.
“You’re not fooling anybody,” Scott mutters, tugging gently on a lock of her hair while wiping red blood from his mouth. It’s entirely ruined by the way his hand drifts down to take hers. He pulls her back over to her armchair, sits her down, and perches on the armrest.
“Who died and put you in charge?” El grumbles at him.
“Cleo did.” He grins, eyes so green they beat out the glow of the fire.
“I did not,” Cleo retorts, searching her pockets for something.
The hunger and subsequent feeding has made him clumsy, which El would be more worried about if she had time to think before he very nearly smacks her in the face lifting his wrist to her mouth. As if she’s some kind of baby or something. El makes sure to stick her tongue out at him before digging in.
Scott rolls his eyes and leans over to rest as much of his weight as possible on her shoulder.
She squeaks, muffled and busy swallowing down metallic mouthfuls of blood.
“Think how much easier this would be if you weren’t rude to me about it,” Scott says haughtily.
Eloise pulls off with an angry gasp. “You’re the one feeding me!” She grabs Scott’s arm before he can move away, and laps over the wound — not apologetically, but just to make sure it seals over, the skin unmarked as if it was never opened.
Scott shakes out a handkerchief and does the following things, in this order: wipes his own mouth, wipes El’s mouth, and kisses her on the crown of her head. “And I can still make your life miserable while doing it. I’m talented like that.”
“Children,” Cleo says, which would be warning if they didn’t sound like they’re laughing when they say it.
“Who was this?” El asks, batting away further attacks from Scott’s handkerchief. (It is also green, though faded, with a misshapen little skull embroidered on the corner. A present-prank, courtesy of El’s needle and Cleo’s tutelage.)
“Oh, a doctor person? Something like that.” Cleo waves their hand and heads for the back of the house. Their dress is colourless, trailing like a gauzy wake when they move. (It, too, has been marked: a tiny half-circle on the shoulder, a sunrise on one side and a moonset on the other. Obviously, El practiced that one beforehand.)
Scott’s eyebrows go up, and he exchanges a look with El. “That’s not—” he starts, jolting into motion after them, a disbelieving smile already starting across his face. “Cleo! They need those!”
Cleo’s laugh carries back to Scott and El — giddy, reckless. “It’ll be fine!”
Eloise likes Cleo’s playful moods. Eloise likes the way those moods suffuse the whole house, as billowy and light as Cleo’s favourite dresses.
“Good enough for me,” she sings, as Scott hops off the armrest with that same lightness.
El curls into her armchair, content in the knowledge that one or the other of them will carry her up to her room with fond mutterings later, if she manages to lie very still and look especially peaceful and angelic when they walk by.
El appreciates the company Cleo and Scott offer her. Life-that-is-not-life always feels sort of the same once you’ve died, an unremarkable but basically pleasant cool. She likes the closeness. It still feels like something. The sharpest of her enduring memories, the ones of snowy nights under dripping overhangs, have faded like old scars.
I used to have this mark over… here, I think, Scott told her once, brushing his hair to one side to tap at the spot. Hit my head as a kid. It’s completely gone now.
Well, that explains a lot, El replied. Surprised it didn’t kill you.
Scott looked puzzled. Should it have? Kids get hurt like that all the time.
Do they? Oh.
No, the way he tells it, Scott was always going to die of a broken heart. Bit cerebral of him, but that’s Scott for you, Eloise supposes.
El doesn’t try to keep track of her scars, figures she doesn’t want to remember anyway. She shared this thought with Scott at the time, who nodded like he didn’t agree but wouldn’t stop her.
So when she can, she finds someone to spend her days next to. Some mornings Scott slinks out of his own bed to join her, sinks under the covers with Eloise if she reaches for him, or picks her up and carries her to Cleo, or says nothing and looks at neither of them and wakes up between the two of them with another’s name like a strange smell on his breath.
There is nothing else.
Here’s the thing: Cleo doesn’t scuffle. When she gets into fights, her motion is too perfect for that word — smooth like a fairy tale figure, all the excess cut out. She dazzles and disappears the way humans flick flies from their hands. She has found the marrow of vampirism and drained it with absolute efficiency.
And the other thing: Scott doesn’t do it much either. He’s good enough, as any vampire is in any fight with a human ungifted with supernatural protection. He’ll even pick a fight for nothing but his own amusement if it’s really that sort of day, but his vices are usually getting quiet or getting lonely.
So Eloise misses it sometimes, getting down and dirty in the spitting-teeth, black-eyes, yanked-hair sense. She doesn’t get to indulge it often.
She falls on the man with her teeth already bared. She knocks him over into the squelching mud and leaf litter and smears the ugly brown of it over his clean grey shirt. He shouts, eyes huge and dark and desperate, a cow that has seen the slaughterhouse.
His terror makes him vulnerable. The dim pricking light of far-off lamps makes him vulnerable. The fact of his loneliness, the fact of his empty doorstep and empty home, the fact of the despair she can very nearly smell on him. These things make him vulnerable. Eloise has a distant recollection of vulnerability. It has been subsumed.
She slaps a hand over the man’s mouth and counts. She grins into the lightless air. One flailing blow to the side of her head — not much use though she lets it push her — and one nail-sharp scratch down her cheek — just missing her eye — one muffled, howling cry. The moon overhead is a sliver, a closed-off witness. The trees, cold black lines, look away.
Eloise rolls away from the punch he aims at her throat and leaps to her feet before he’s even crouching. She kicks him harder then she means to. He tumbles from the roadside and she figures this is as much fun as she’s going to get from him.
It’s a lovely evening. The stars are out, winking their bleak little jokes, the dark sprawling like a cat engaged in a truly luxurious stretch. There’s something about the quality of the night in the fall. It’s like time itself knows the whole world is dying.
When she comes up for a breath she doesn’t need, Eloise is heavy and warm with the taste of salt in her mouth. The road is deserted as Cleo and Scott, engaged in their traditional bout of evening gossip, trail their way over to her. The body is bleeding from where Eloise bashed its head, but there is no mark on the neck, despite the broken angle.
“Messy,” Cleo murmurs. “But you were quicker this time, I’ll give you that.” They tie their hair back, the smallest smile just for Eloise. They seem to like playing teacher. When El wants to flatter herself, she thinks Cleo likes playing teacher just for her.
“Ooh, and still warm,” Scott hums approvingly, hand settling on the body’s throat. His hair, too short to secure, falls over his eyes like a solid block of shadow.
“When you think about it, drinking blood is basically just like drinking lots of juice, isn’t it?” El muses aloud. She brushes off her trousers, which is a pointless exercise because all the dirt is on the slaughtered man’s corpse. “Doesn’t seem very healthy, now that I think about it.”
Scott snorts, raising his head to lick blood from the corners of his mouth. “Do you want to try eating him? Round out your diet?”
“Oh, don’t,” Cleo sighs, finding the man’s wrist when she crouches, twisting it back and forth consideringly. “We’re not made to digest that stuff, and I’m just going to point and laugh when you get sick.”
“Well, I’d make you soup,” Scott offers magnanimously.
El narrows her eyes. “If we can’t have anything but blood, wouldn’t that just make me more sick?”
Scott grins, face lit up as it only is when he’s plotting mischief. Cleo has given up on the two of them and is gnawing their way into the veins on the corpse’s arm.
“How do you know we can’t digest it, anyway?” she presses. Somewhere in the underbrush, the soft hum of insects, which do not try to touch them. “Have you tried?”
“Do you want to try it,” Cleo drawls. Having had their fill, they sit back on their heels soundlessly. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“You two have no scientific curiosity at all,” El chides them. The trees shuffle nervously; a breeze is passing through and threatening to pick up into a proper wind.
Scott’s expression flutters a little. “No, I— I tried once. It’s… No, yeah, don’t actually do it. It doesn’t— It doesn’t do anything good.”
The trees, rustling, absorb that while Eloise yelps. “You ate someone?”
Scott throws his hands in the air immediately, voice rising in disbelief. “Oh, I can brutally kill a man in the middle of the road and drain him of his blood but I draw the line at eating people? El! Why is this the hill you’ve chosen to die on?”
“I’m not dying on any hill, thank you very much, I can’t die anymore—”
“It’s symbolic,” Cleo interrupts them both. “The blood is symbolic? Like, you need to borrow someone else’s life to keep yours going. It’s sort of like telling the world to stop erasing you, because your story’s not done yet.”
“That’s depressing,” Eloise says, thoughtless. Something rattles amid the mulch where the forest has undressed itself, then thinks better of it.
“Yeah,” Cleo says.
“Vampires aren’t real,” Scott adds, some echo of a long ago conversation. He leans back on his hands, the heels of his palms going into the mud where he’s sitting.
“I’ll show you unreal,” Eloise mutters, following that echo. She digs the toe of her boot into the mud near Scott.
Cleo inspects their fingertips.
Then the memory fades.
Under their more-or-less methodical hands, the corpse is taken to pieces. When it comes down to it, the three of them have teeth for a reason. They spit little chunks of the man into the grass.
Once they’re done, they stand, all three, and Cleo and Scott fold El into their conversation as if there was no interruption at all. (Three whole pouches of moths’ wings? Please tell me they got her back for that.)
All is well. The night is chilly, but El, in this moment, is warm and alive and real. El, in this moment, is beaming proudly with blunted teeth, sandwiched safely in the middle of her coven. El, in this moment, is so sure and true, the world nearly forgets to wipe away the tracks she leaves on the road behind her.
Time is thick, honey-sweet, languid and slow. It’s not a troublesome truth, most of the time. Most of the time, the house’s dining room goes unused.
El doesn’t really… like using it. But sometimes you have to do things you don’t like, even if you are a vampire. You’re compelled to it.
Cleo doesn’t insist. When they get distracted in that particular way of theirs, they hardly seem to notice her and Scott there at all. But they find the freezer and dig up jars of blood and pour them out in a bowl like so much melted ice cream. Eloise is no good at talking them out of it.
Instead, she joins them at the table with her own bowl and spoon because it tends to make at least one of them feel better.
Cleo says sometimes, to someone who is not in the room, Right. I’ll make tea. Like we had at home.
We are home, Cleo, Eloise says, less often.
Different home, Cleo corrects, quick like she’s still the same as she’s always been.
From when you were alive?
Not sure I’ve ever been alive, Cleo snorts. ‘S been a long time, if I have.
El measures the passage of time by the steaming of the tea: wisping into her eyes, then thinning, then into the unmoving atmosphere, gone too soon. Occasionally, she sleeps at the table, Cleo’s spoon clinking quietly in the cavernous space. When she wakes, she knows the passage of time only by the way entropy has crawled over and through their cups, leaving them cool, the liquid inside unrippled.
Scott and Cleo know what it’s like to sleep with corpses. To lie among them unmoving. To hover over the edge of death waiting for the glimpse of another, less lonely self. El catches whispers, when they curl up in the same armchair like small children sharing a secret. She hears stories, when one of them is in a playful or wistful or lonely mood. She wonders about it when she has nothing better to do with herself.
Heart to heart and breath to breath. Spine against spine, or lips against skull, or palm against chest. Fingers — those breakable little bones — lined up next to fingers, instead of numbed through and whistling hollowly with cold.
“You dressed up,” Cleo comments when El climbs into their bed. Cleo’s room is the biggest by a slight but obvious margin. The curtains, despite being the same faded red as they are everywhere else in the house, despite covering up windows that have been boarded up and sealed over, look strange and stately.
“It felt like a special occasion,” El mumbles in reply, snuggling down. “It’s sundown, you know.”
“Oh, but what if I don’t want to get up today?” Cleo stretches, a motion Eloise has memorized because she couldn’t stop doing it when she first turned, surprised over and over again that it brought no relief, the movement as ineffectual as clawing at frozen ground. “What if I want to just lie here forever, El, did you think about that?”
“I’d like that too,” El mutters, hiding her face against Cleo’s arm. “But we’ve been away from town for so long, and I want to say hello to the night florist — he’s only there twice a week, remember?”
“Didn’t know he still had the job,” Cleo remarks mildly. “I thought he would’ve been eaten by now.”
Mostly, people’s gazes move over them like a foot on rough ice — catch and slip, catch and slip. The average person glances at them, looks away, and the three of them are forgotten like a gasp in the crowd. The night florist makes Scott nervous because he notices them — and never mind that he always says hello all perfectly polite and unconcerned, El and Cleo have bets on how soon before Scott gives in and drains him.
“Oh, and Scott wants to go window shopping again,” Eloise adds.
“It’s called stealing, El,” Cleo says dryly. She brushes a bit of hair from El’s face, fingers lingering along El’s ear. “Don’t pretend like it was all Scott’s idea; what are you plotting?”
Eloise rolls over so she is chest to chest and hip to hip with Cleo, their noses close enough to share a grave. “Oh, all kinds of terrible things, of course. You know me, doer of crimes, terror of the marketplace, et cetera.” Cleo looks like they’re going to start laughing. “So, are you coming with?”
Turns out, they are.
The three of them successfully drop by the night florist’s shop — a miniature purgatory of moths and tender vines — without getting involved in much more fuss than the purchase of a few primroses. El tucks one gently in Scott’s hair.
“Look!” she exclaims. “Now you’re all pretty.”
“What, like I wasn’t pretty before?” Scott replies, imperious. Under the light of the nearby lamppost, the flower looks funny, the yellow of sunshine in storybooks against his rot-green eyes and black coat.
“Yes, yes, you’re always gorgeous,” Cleo calls over her shoulder, already walking away. Her hair tumbles down her back like fallen leaves. “Would you two come on?”
“I wasn’t even asking for ‘gorgeous,’ but thank you, you’re so right.” He smiles, forgetting the florist who has been watching them for a little too long, and lets El take his hand, willing for once to be the one being led.
The town is not without its nighttime occupants, and many of them even aren’t vampires. There is evidence, lining the streets, of a festival or a marketplace: banners in blocky patterns, paint washed up the walls by the coordination of little kids, people reminiscing and pointing out stalls for souvenirs. There’s a warning bite to the air. The cold slinks around Eloise’s ankles like a stray dog still hungry.
They take a few turns. Cleo disappears somewhere along the way. El isn’t thinking about it, but she doesn’t think she’s gotten lost anywhere in a long time. One of those petty mortal problems, she guesses. The night bows for her kind, or they bend it for themselves.
“I could swear the lanterns get brighter every month,” Eloise mutters to Scott. Their shadows crease sharply where they fall onto a building. “One of these days, it’ll just be— columns of fire, up to the clouds.”
“Don’t make wishes you don’t want granted,” Scott murmurs, distracted by a window displaying all manner of fine and useless things.
“You don’t know what I want,” El says and leaves him to it. The ‘no reflections’ thing is— always a little worse than she thinks it’s going to be. She turns to the side and flutters her hands over the bare wall next to the window, making a bird of her shadow. At least that patch of fuzzy black is real.
“Shadow puppets?” Cleo asks, resolving from the gloom of an adjoining alleyway.
Eloise frowns consideringly at the wall. “I used to know how to make a dog, but I think I’ve forgotten.”
As if to answer, distant barking. Cleo’s eyes, a cloudy sort of green just light enough not to match Scott’s, roam up the facade of the shop.
“I can show you,” Cleo offers, already twisting her fingers thoughtfully.
“No, I—I don’t like dogs much.” More barking from somewhere she can’t pin, and Eloise winces. Waves at nothing and her bird dissolves. (Cleo makes a little sound at that.) “Just one of those things.”
“El,” Scott interrupts. “Want anything?”
But a handful of strangers glide past, speaking as loudly as if they’re in the full light of day, and the three of them fall silent. Eloise shivers, and no one sees her do it.
El returns at the end of the night and shimmies her way into bed with Cleo and Scott. She is learning it well now, how to sleep among the dead. Scott throws an arm over her, and Cleo starts telling them about someone named Frank, who wasn’t to be trusted, which is just as well since he’s dead now…
“Have you guys noticed people are staring at us more lately?” Scott asks, cocooned in the dark of Cleo’s room. It’s in the air, somehow, that the day outside is a lackluster grey, impotent and indulgent. None of them can see it, but none of them move to get up either. It’s one of those days.
“Might be time to go soon,” Cleo says. “It’s a shame; I liked this house.”
“Oh, don’t say it in past tense yet,” Eloise complains. She wriggles, trying to get an elbow under herself so she can sit up, and gets poked into submission.
“It is true, though,” Cleo says, remorseless. As if in apology, her hand finds El’s cheek and pats it, clumsily but probably sincerely.
They, all three, lapse into silence. Breath is unnecessary. Sound is unnecessary. El drifts as if she is disintegrating around the cold and hollow core of herself.
Scott must be unusually content with how the three of them are tangled together, because when El pulls his hand closer, starts licking experimentally at his wrist, he only says, “There’s not much blood in me to take. Are you hungry?”
They both know when El last ate. They both know she’s not seeking food so much as a touch of warmth on her tongue. “I don’t like winter,” Eloise mumbles, nose to the soft skin on the inside of Scott’s arm.
Scott huffs, quiet and fond. “Winter’s barely arrived, El.”
“Still.”
“Maybe if the snow comes early, the townsfolk won’t have any choice but to leave us alone,” Cleo muses. It’s a pipe dream, Eloise knows: snow doesn’t make people more forgiving. The best it can do is freeze their grudges until the banks flood with their ire come spring.
There’s the rustling of blankets. Eloise lifts her hand, unscarred, and Cleo understands her meaning, reaches over to tangle their fingers together.
“Maybe,” Eloise says anyway. “I mean, maybe they’ll just forget about us! And we’ll get to stay here as long as we like.”
She’s hungry. She’s always a little hungry, but winter makes it worse. She died in the cooling embers of autumn, and so it’s in her, a bit, the way her stomach churns with anticipation of the sleet and slush to come.
“That would be nice,” Cleo says softly.
She knows this. It’s the long terror of always being at the beginning of the horror, instead of the end.