She stands at the mansion window, watches the snow fall and fall. The glass is cold to the touch and her reflection in the pane is pale, ethereal. She feels like a ghost.

A cup of hot green tea is forgotten on the sill, steam rising in lazy and sinuous streamers. A thick book opened to the last page casts a long shadow.

He’s there too, of course, standing just behind her. He’s seven feet tall, clad in a crushed velvet doublet the color of dried blood. Silky lace as white and pure as the soul of an angel oozes from cloth of gold cuffs and his fat, pale fingers are bejeweled with rings. Half his face is a skinned ruin, a scarred galaxy whose dark heart is a sightless eye the color of curdled milk.

“Windows into the soul,” she says softly, surprised her breath doesn’t fog in the chill. “You only had half a mask.”

The man in the window’s mirror frowns. One of the scars starts to bleed and his gaze takes on a flatness, an animal calculation. She feels like a lame doe watched by a lone wolf. She can almost hear him think, almost see the dark gears of his mind grind and turn. He wants to hurt her again, oh yes.

Almost a minute passes. He doesn’t speak. He can’t, though, of course. He’s been dead for almost a year. She killed him after all.

“Go away, James,” she whispers, turning away from the window. One slender hand flicks the silken curtain closed with practiced ease.

There’s no one behind her, just candle-lit opulence cloaked in shifting shadows. She smiles a small, sad smile and draws her cloak more tightly around her, but her cheek twitches unbidden and one fist is clenched. It’s almost as if it remembers the feel of the dagger, the cool leather of the hilt, its weight and its hotness and its wetness as she-

“Leave me alone,” she snaps at the empty air.

There’s no answer, naturally.

-

She sits before the fire in a throne like chair, wrapped in furs and memories. One of her handmaidens appears and curtsies, trembling and doing her best to hide it.

“Does m’lady wish a bath to be drawn?” she asks, staring at the cloth of gold carpet. Her cap is askew, and she smells…red.

“I hate red,” Lantrin whispers, shivering. “I don’t want red.”

The maid’s eyes widen and she freezes.

“Go away, girl,” the countess commands.

And then she’s alone again.

It’s only a day until the moon waxes full. Her pale, gray eyes find the ornate hourglass that shines in the light of the fire. It seems protean, that little piece of glass and precious metal. It has no fixed form, not in this world and not in her dreams. It’s all black sand and poisoned gold and clouded crystal, full of broken promises.

-

Dinner that night is laid before her alone, in a hall fit to seat fifty. A gargantuan table carved by a master artisan has thin, slender and snarling lions for its legs, and its top is world history, from the Birth of Christ to the exodus of Dan to Cloudcrack, when the old ones fell and poisoned the land and sea. The fire roars ten feet tall in a hearth of marble shot with threads of silver, and wondrous tapestries hang still and dark, black and limp in the peripheral gloom.

No meat graces that table. There are salads, piled high with crisp fruit preserved in frozen cellars and sparkling with glazed nuts. There are bloated mushrooms and leviathan loaves glistening with garlic and butter and exotic spices. There are layered pastries stuffed with every vegetable imaginable, potatoes drowning in olive oil and rosemary, deserts of cold cream and chocolate and cinnamon and vanilla…but not one sliver of flesh.

She feasts, as she has every night for years, and for a precious handful of moments she forgets the hour glass and its accursed, slithering sands and the almanac too, the phases of the moon and James and the world itself.

The wine helps as well, of course. She went through the oldest vintages her father had hoarded long ago, but fine wine sipped and savored is the same as young and sour after a glass or two anyway, and she deems it no great loss.

-

She goes to her bedchamber, slips into a silky shift the color of a cloudy pearl. She likes the way it feels against her, its softness is surreal and sensual, its weave warm yet so fine its almost wet.

Her bed is better. It’s nearly perfect, so comfortable the doorway to oblivion opens almost at once.

She rarely dreams. Maybe her life is one, long waking dream, and perhaps that’s why. On the rare occasion that she does they make no sense, they’re just muddled garbage, a drowning mind grasping for rotten straws in a sodden sump of subconscious confusion.

Some darker part of her insists that there’s nothing beneath the surface, that her soul is just a gray and faceless nightmare.
Faceless…no, that wasn’t right. She was gray, yes, and maybe she had no soul…perhaps so. She knew what she was though.

She curls up, savors the coolness of the silk as her body slowly warms it, feels consciousness start to slip. She used to try to lucid dream, without success, and the impulse to try to keep some part of herself awake comes and goes. No…just let it happen. She needs her rest. There’s just a day left and-

For now, for then, oblivion.

-

Alyson had always been the favorite. She was ash blond, moved like a cat and her mind was razor sharp.

Poor Lantrin was dusky, had trouble sleeping…her eyes were always ringed with dark circles like a raccoon and at times she seemed slow. Around ten she developed a stutter. At thirteen Blight took to her right hand, turned it into a gnarled horror, and after that she always wore a black glove soaked in healing salves brewed by her father’s healers.

Even so, she and Alyson had always been close. Sibling rivalry never found a roost.

They were playing in the woods one day when they found the wolf skull.

The skull was massive, as big as a wagon wheel. The sun was shining though, and it was entwined in weeds and wild flowers. It didn’t seem scary, despite the finger long fangs bared forever in fleshless death, not then. The way the day played across it one could have easily believed that it had been made of marble. It was all soft white-gold and bright color, a rainbow of roses and pennybright and lilac.

Neither of them possessed the imagination to envision what it had once been, or what its existence had meant for a mythical once upon a time.

Alyson took twine from the pocket of her blue dress, put her small hand around a tooth.

“What are you doing Aly?” Lantrin asked, suddenly nervous.

“I want to make a necklace,” her sister replied. “Scared?”

“No!”

“Help me then.”

She did. She knelt beside her sister. Try as they might they could not pry the tooth loose.

Alyson started looking for a rock. She found one. The ground beneath it was swarming with beetles and worms.

Lantrin wrinkled her nose and her bad hand started aching as she watched the bugs squirm and scatter. “Gross.”

Alyson swung the rock at the skull. The sound of bone on stone was hideous. It was a sound Lantrin would never forget. The first strike had no visible effect, so her sister tried again.

Two canines flew, lay dry and sharp as razors in the grass.

“One for me, one for you,” Alyson said brightly, clearly proud of herself. She picked them up, dropped one into Lantrin’s twisted right hand.

Afraid of losing it, she closed that hand into a fist and-

-

“Blood,” she murmurs, feeling a sliver of sunlight play across her pale face.

The snow is gone…for now. Old Sol hasn’t shown itself for weeks, and she rises with her skin tingling. She’s going to throw open the shutters, bask in it. It’s what she needs, what she’s been waiting for, and-

The bar of light darkens abruptly, and the wind howls.

She hugs herself, leaves the curtains hanging in their funereal shroud, presses the slim, pale and perfect hand that was once a horror to her twitching cheek. “Silly woman,” she lectures. “Did you really think you deserved to see it?”

-