03|Three

Time had long turned panic into a buzzing undercurrent beneath the numb. Still there, still setting his heart ablaze in a frantic flurry, but dulled by a wash of unfeeling that left Hemlock immobile and helpless atop the duvet. He hadn’t even bothered with covering himself for some semblance of belated modesty. Movement felt too draining; it dragged him further down the spiral and beneath the suffocating waters. Breathing, too, almost became too laborious to bother with. Not for the first time, Hemlock wished to drown beneath it all.

The softest whisper of footsteps roused Hemlock from his half-asleep state just enough for him to recognize the pattern—scurrying, with just enough echo to betray the existence of two pairs. He settled back down and heaved a sigh. Even that pulled at his wounds to an uncomfortable extent. “One of these days I won’t be bare-assed in front of you two,” he mumbled into the pillow, already allowing himself a genuine rest.

Feather fingers ghosted over his back before combing through his hair. His exhaustion had overridden the instinct to flinch ages ago. “You men and your dignity,” Mora tsked. It was a gentle sound, with something akin to a motherly hush hidden within the words. Venette circled around to kneel to his level, chin and folded arms resting on the edge as she smiled and tapped his nose. Hemlock scrunched it mostly for her sake just to see her smile sparkle.

“Sleep, Hem,” she said, just as gentle as her twin, “We’ll take care of you.”

Hemlock hummed and closed his eyes, once again submitting himself to the hands of another besides himself. “You always do.”

**

While he slept, the twins worked their magic to patch him back up. Some part of him still felt the phantoms of their touch even in his dreams, which threatened to drag him down into an abyss that he’d never wake from. Claws and teeth sunk into his flesh and demanded he give more more more, give everything he had and then some. To give up his very bones and soul like he owed a debt he never asked to receive. They caressed the delicate stretch of his skin with nails sharpened into daggers and whispered for him to obey their unsaid demands under threat of peeling him open cut by cut.

Hands, all over his body. Grabbing and pulling and twisting him how he was wanted. Demanded. They held him down and lifted him up and power loomed over him like a shadowed threat all on its own. His fangs sunk into pillowed feathers in a bid to not scream, and hunger no longer stayed a priority. Only agony.

Then, he dreamt of blood. Smeared across the floor like a ritual and spattered inside bowls. Tinged the musty air with iron and crimson. Flickering torches lit up the room and painted stone walls in ever-shifting shadows and light. Claws continued to skate down his back as he kneeled over those bloody sigils, but these ones counted the bumps of his spine and kept their touch to a mild sting as they skimmed over his scalp. He dreamt of distant screams, the chill of fear—and the warmth of a hearth. The crackle of power more potent than even Dregan possessed.

A feral hiss chased the demanding whispers away until they skittered off into an unseen void. Hemlock trembled in place where he knelt. Evidence of cruelty splayed itself out in front of him, as if proud, and he would be next. His place on the smeared whirls of blood told him that, because what else could he ever be but a sacrifice for someone else’s wants? No binds held him down, though, and the clothes draped over his body were fine silks with glittering embroidery. He held out his hands and his wrists were bare of bruises and blisters. Not a fleck of blood stained him. “Where am I?” he croaked.

A torrent of voices flooded his mind, all screaming and whispering and speaking at once and converging into one overwhelming voice. Hemlock bowed under the force of it and clapped hands over his ears as if that would muffle the deafening onslaught as it spoke to him. “Blood-drinker. You sit at the site of slaughter.”

“Is—” He had to catch his breath. The echoes of the voice bounced around his skull and rattled his skeleton, knocking him askew even as he remained immobile on the sigils. “Is that what happened here?”

The answering rumble could’ve been mistaken as amusement, if he were a fool. “Not yet.”

Hemlock opened his mouth to ask what that even meant—he was kneeling in dried blood for fuck’s sake—but then the voice boomed through his skull before he could and rendered him immobile and mute. “Listen well, for I only speak once. Your future is not settled, blood-drinker, but the others’ are. Gnaw on your cage and see it open. Failure will deter; do not let it. When the storm breaks, find petals steeped in red. From there, you are on your own.”

Mind reeling, Hemlock stared at the sigils at his knees and watched them blur together. Nothing made sense. What did it mean, his future was the only one not settled? Who was this? Some kind of figure of fate? It offered no other explanation as to what it had meant, only let him spin the words through his mind and find a meaning to them on his own. Gnaw on your cage and see it open. Did this mean he could escape? Could he really be free?

“That doesn’t even make sense,” he blurted before he could get ahold of his tongue, and panic slammed into Hemlock before he registered the distinct feeling of being laughed at. No response chided him about his outburst, so Hemlock quickly covered up his blunder with a question. “Why are you helping me?” Clarification wouldn’t do him any good—it had made itself clear that it wouldn’t speak further on its disjointed prophesy—but he could at least solve that riddle.

Another rumble, and Hemlock wondered if it really was amused with him and his miniature interrogation. “My words are not help; they are ones you have already known but fail to acknowledge.”

“But you still chose to tell me.”

The voice hummed, a screaming dichotomy of a sound with the many voices mingling to form one. “I care not if you succeed. It changes nothing; I will still get something. Perhaps I simply wish for the better of evils.”

Better of evils. Site of slaughter. This voice spoke in riddles, and it hurt Hemlock’s head. But something about the way it phrased its answer, about how it won either way, set off alarms as particular pieces put themselves together. It couldn’t be, though—he was far beyond the reach of the gods, what influence could he have that made him a figure of interest in their own desires? Impossible felt too little of a word for what he had to be considering, but the bloody sigils stared back at him and dared him to deny it. The claws combing through his hair tugged and teeth snapped at his ear in a wordless hiss. He could almost hear the smile behind it.

His throat worked as his next question surfaced. He feared the answer, but he had to know. “Who are you?”

That voice shrank into the shadows, but he still caught the echo of its reply. “Death.”

**

He’d never had that kind of dream before, but it left him more ragged than the others, as if it had thrown him into a spiraling tsunami then expected him to keep his legs. Hemlock woke to the scent of metal and herbs and briefly couldn’t disentangle dream from reality; the two intertwined with one another too much for his tilted mind to puzzle out. But then he blinked away the flicker of a fire and the touch of reverent claws and came face-to-face with a goblet of blood held by familiar hands.

Venette swirled it around to let the scent of it get stirred up and more potent. “Thought you might be hungry,” she said. Hemlock caught a whiff of rosemary and something else tangy, and the image of a faceless figure standing in front of a cooking roast flashed before his eyes. Slowly, oh so slowly, he came back to himself as the twins pulled the frayed threads back together.

Rubbing away the sleep and the heavy remnants of the dream, Hemlock sat up and took the offered goblet. “Thank you,” he rasped, then winced at how destroyed his voice sounded. He took note of the sore points of his body as he sipped at the blood, savoring each drag over his tongue—for the most part, the least of his injuries were healed between his vampiric healing and whatever the twins did after each session. The worst of them pulled at stitches that would be removed in no time. All that remained as a full-body ache that radiated from within and out to everywhere else. Good enough, he supposed.

Mora appeared at the foot of the bed and set down a pile of unfamiliar clothes. “You were mumbling in your sleep,” she said. Hemlock raised his brows but didn’t stop drinking. “I mean, you usually do—I can’t imagine your dreams are really… sweet.” She and Venette shared a look, and Mora grimaced. “Sorry. I’m just saying that it was different this time. You weren’t… I don’t know. You weren’t as wound up as usual, but the things you were saying were…”

“Odd,” Venette piped in, taking the goblet he handed over after draining it. “Do you remember it at all?”

Did he remember it? How could he forget? Hemlock could still feel the claws that had dragged over his spine and scratched at his scalp without drawing blood. The echo of the voice still rattled through him. The warmth of the room he had been in. The cryptic ass words that had been some twisted form of advice, and the knowledge that this being of death didn’t care if he followed it or not. Yes, “I remember it.”

The twins leveled eerily identical looks his way, and he crumbled far faster than he wanted to. “It wasn’t a normal dream of mine. I don’t know what really happened, but it was definitely… weird. Felt more real than the others.”

Venette disappeared, then reappeared with a comb and started dragging it through his hair. “What was it about?”

“I don’t really know.” Again, another look, but he had nothing more to say about it. “I remember it, but I don’t know what happened. Nothing, really.” He refused to say that he suspected he was contacted by a god, because as common as it was in Kaskan, they would never help a vampire. They were godless beings, separate from the mortals that were practically living toys, so they had no business entertaining the idea that Hemlock danced around.

His explanation seemed to satisfy the twins, though, and they both shrugged it off and got to work once again. Mora left the clothes alone for the moment and instead came over with a plate of simple foods that she likely stole from the kitchen. He munched on those as Venette worked and chatted with them both about their day spent entertaining the pompous vampires that Dregan liked to bring around and impress. It mostly boiled down to a relatively boring day spent on their toes to avoid extra attention, and stealing bits of blood and food for themselves to share. Hemlock didn’t envy their job, but he sometimes wished he could serve Dregan in any other way than what he had been forced into.

Which meant he had to be prepared for his job yet again. It took a bit of expert weaseling on his part, but finally Hemlock got a hint as to what he was expected to do instead of going back to his cell. Unsurprising, it was Venette that caved to his subtle prodding, and Mora shot her sister a sharp look as Venette gestured to the clothes.

“The master is hosting a ball tonight—a masquerade.” She pursed her lips and fiddled with his hair, twisting a loose curl around her finger to avoid looking at him. Hemlock’s throat tightened. “He wants you to be his armpiece for the night.”

“Armpiece,” he repeated. Venette nodded, and one look at Mora’s tight expression confirmed it. Hemlock sucked in a breath and considered the revelation. “…It could be worse.” The twins made a mirrored expression of disagreement, but he ignored them. “If he’s going to be parading me around in front of a bunch of people, then he won’t have as much of a chance to do anything to me.”

“You don’t know what his events are like, Hemlock,” Mora argued. “He could very well use you as an example of how he keeps his newborns in check. He loves to entertain the other vampire lords, and he especially loves reminding them that he’s more powerful than them. He’ll eat you alive.”

He glanced at the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed, presumably his outfit for the night. “Then I’ll be on my best behavior and he won’t have to. Just stand there and look pretty, right?”

Their pinched faces remained, but Venette sighed in resignation and tugged at the curl in her hand. “You are pretty.”