Dead on Revival

The first time she died wasn’t the last time.

She had the same hands. The scarred knuckles that glittered when she gripped things too tightly. And the quiver of her crooked pinky whenever fear set in.

The knock echoed through every crack in the walls at midnight.

Fable ignored the peephole. She knew who it was, just as she knew the weight of the old ring in the safe below her slippered feet. Or how she knew the exact temperature of blood on her tongue.

The familiar shape of her grief—jagged, fractured, a mass she couldn’t purge. She’d carried it for three centuries. Yes, she knew it all.

This was a dance she’d never forget: the steps out of time with the music, the ending lift always a bone-crushing crash in which nothing was ever the same. She held her unneeded breath, forced more steel into her spine, and opened the door.

And there she was. The foundational steps of this waltz had at last started.

Those hands, exactly the same, and Fable barely hid a wince at seeing them alive once more. Her scarred knuckles had turned purple; she wrung her fingers too tightly.

Her crooked pinky trembled in the humid August air that spread the reek of rotting garbage, exhaust fumes, a bouquet of sweat from many bodies, and the stench of the vermin that crawled the gutters.

She wrinkled her nose. The smell masked the scent of the girl’s blood on her doorstep. She had dirt caked under her fingernails. A bruise the color of spoiled plums graffitied her cheekbone.

Her insubstantial, frothy blue dress had a tear at the shoulder, and her feet were bare, for fuck’s sake. Standing on Fable’s stoop like a stray cat that had forgotten how to meow for help.

You took longer this time, her mind supplied as her mouth refused to open.

She wanted to say it. The words sat on her shriveling tongue like broken crystal, but she choked them off, swallowing the sharp pieces. She leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms and examined the girl.

The silence stretched out and out, shuddering, until it rubbed her skin raw.

The girl, no, the witch—she always was a witch, every fucking time this damned dance picked back up—shifted her weight, blinked up at Fable with a frown of severe confusion.

Her crooked pinky curled against her chiffon’d thigh. Her eyes, the color of the sky before a brutal summer storm. Grey, a hint of lilac, and a tinge of blue-green swirled in those unsteady irises.

They roamed over Fable’s face as if she were trying to recall her name, read a language she had lost touch with. Fable dared not so much as twitch, inhale, holding herself stiffer than the lamp post flickering across the street.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, sounding hoarse, as if she’d screamed or cried for hours. “I don’t—I’m not sure why I came here. All I remember… I was walking. Then I stopped here. And the cat—”

The cat. Of course, the ageless creature came with her again. Fable bit back a groan, a glare in her eyes as she looked down.

There, between the girl’s dirty feet, sat a black cat, tail flicking her ankles. It gazed up at Fable with the particular disdain of a creature that had done this dance for centuries and was sick and tired of it.

You’re welcome, the cat’s venom eyes said. I led her across three disgusting Burroughs. The least you could do is offer her a drink of water. Or might I suggest something stiffer?

Fable remained still in the doorway as a sigh leaked through her nose.

The girl’s throat bobbed, her eyes turned wetter. A pulse lived in her neck, delicate and frantic, and the blood’s scent broke through the city’s reek. Fable almost rocked back as the sweet, potent smell, like honey and iron and flame and home, hit her.

It was a right hook straight to her solar plexus as her throat burned and her gums ached where her fangs wanted to drop.

Don’t do it, she ordered herself. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

“I can leave,” the girl whispered as the cat sighed. Fucking sighed. “Say the word and I’ll go. It’s just… you feel safe somehow. Is that strange? You feel like somewhere I’ve been before.”

It was as if an invisible sledgehammer slammed into her chest; it cracked open so violently. Sending waves of glacial, throbbing pain through her entire body. She tensed and breathed through it. Fable punched the crack closed again, locked it behind layers of spite, grief, and unbridled rage.

“Get inside,” she said, the words flat, her tone cruel as the universe forcing this on her again. The voice she’d perfected watching this woman die repeatedly. “You’re bloodying my stoop.”

The girl flinched, eyes widening. Crossing the threshold with the cat trailing behind her. Tail high, wet nose in the air, and as it passed Fable’s ankles, pausing with one paw inside the door as it muttered—actually bloody muttered.

“Smooth, really smooth. You’ve had centuries to rehearse your welcome and you still choose the worst one.”

Fable rolled her eyes and slammed the door shut, locking it, engaging the deadbolt, and the chain just in case any of her beloathed sire’s insipid spies lurked nearby. She led her unasked-for guests down the shadowed hallway.

And deep inside her, a part of her that had slept since the last funeral woke up and started howling. The sanguine stains of that day had never fully washed away.

She made no offers of food or water, or a bath, or a bed. She directed the girl to the couch and didn’t get too close as she left to grab a blanket from the hall’s cupboard.

Striding back into the parlor, and tossed her a mothball-scented maroon blanket that frayed at the edges. All given in total silence, jerky movements that felt like Fable had to break bones to make them.

The girl took it all without complaint, a wan smile that cut deeper than any insult curling her full mouth. She immediately curled up on the emerald velvet chaise, which Fable’s mother had bought back in 1668, and Fable kept it out of spite, and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. She stared up at Fable with those thundercloud eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

Fable’s eye twitched. “Don’t thank me.”

“What should I do then?”

Leave, Fable thought. Run away. Disappear from here, so I can go back to being dead inside. It’s better that way.

“Go to sleep.” And she walked away before the girl could catch the shake in her hands.

Fable couldn’t sleep. She ended up in the basement, crouched on the floor, arms around her bent knees as she drew them to her chest. Her chin rested atop her knees as she ignored the urge to open the safe just above her head.

This city had stopped keeping secrets, so she trusted nothing except herself. It would be so easy to open it, shove aside the passports, money, and the gun that she hadn’t fired since 1943, to get to the worn black velvet box.

Which would be warm from the summer heat, its weight familiar in her palm. Open it as the witch who kept dying and coming back and tracking Fable down no matter how far she ran. The ring inside that box—she didn’t need to open it to see it clearly.

Her memory supplied the images with vivid, vicious clarity. Gold, a small, imperfect emerald with a chip at one corner, set in a fine band. Fable’s hands tightened on her knees, nails biting her olive skin.

She’d bought it in London in 1687. Had planned to give it to the witch during the summer solstice after the sun finally retired and darkness veiled them. She wanted to gift it to her under the oak tree that a parking garage had replaced now.

Her head thudded back against the fake wall. Her mouth filled with a bitter, moldering taste as her eyes burned in their sockets but stayed dry. The coven came first.

Their ultimatum and the betrayal that wasn’t really a betrayal, but bled like one anyway.

It felt like a knife sliding and twisting between her ribs. The reason you shouldn’t love things, why you should remain alone and not allow it to repeat. Fable told herself this again and again, but she kept the ring. All this time.

And she still carried that damned ring from state to state, continent to continent, from this life into the next, probably. It was nights like this when she usually took it out of its faded box.

When she couldn’t fight off the loneliness and it grew so loud it screamed and she couldn’t think. To remind herself why hope was the most lethal weapon to wield, and that it was safer to expect the worst.

She swallowed thickly, head pounding in place of her beatless heart as she flexed her hands and tried to reel herself back in. The thoughts wouldn’t stay sealed now that the girl had returned.

You came back. You always come back. And you always leave. I have to bury you once more.

I can’t do it again. I can’t. But I’m a coward, a glutton for punishment. Because I can’t send you away either.

I love you; I hate you, and I hate that I can’t do the right thing and tell you to find somewhere else to go because I do not know who I am without all this waiting—this bleeding.

Upstairs, the girl dreamed on, oblivious to the turmoil raging through Fable.

She stood in the doorway to her dusty, dark parlor and counted the breaths the witch took. The blanket had slipped at some point, revealing her hands—the same hands that had healed and hurt and soothed and teased so many times.

Her scarred knuckles caught the streetlight outside, fingers twitching like a rabbit’s busy nose. Fable wanted to tear her own hair out at the sight of her sleeping in this room. Wanted to run, flee somewhere the girl could never find her.

She doesn’t remember. It’s the same every time. She never remembers. But the day will come when she will.

And she’ll leave, or die again. Or I’ll push her away, break her to make her leave, so I don’t have to wonder how she’ll die this time.

The cycle is unbreakable. It gets heavier with every spin.

The cursed cat opened a yellow-green eye from its perch on the back of the chaise, an indolent air to its tail as it flicked the air.

“Well, she won’t remember if you just stand there brooding,” it said. Murmuring so the girl wouldn’t hear. “Why don’t you try talking to her like a person this time? Treating her like a tombstone has never worked.”

Fable scowled at the cat, lips thinning into a white slash reminiscent of the girl’s scars.

The cat heaved a sigh of a beast that had suffered burdens mere mortals could never comprehend. “Three hundred years, Fable. Three hundred years of this dance. You still need to learn to use your words.”

“Go to sleep, Este,” Fable said, blinking a phantom salty haze out of her gaze.

“Make me.”

Irreverent to the end, but the cat closed its eye, and Fable haunted the doorway until the sun began its daily climb out of the concrete forest. Her hand rose to her neck, flattening over the necklace hidden beneath her silk shirt.

The one that had cost her everything. She waited until the first rays of light spilled like molten gold on the hardwood floors before turning away. Fable had plenty of practice walking out of rooms and lives.

It never got easier.