But my baby is dead, and I can’t quite summon the energy to kill Clarissa.
So I turn to go, to pad down the rickety staircase and wander the streets of Othian until dawn, when I’ll let myself feel the sunlight on my skin once more.
But there’s something I wish to know before I die, something I don’t believe I can leave this world without knowing.
“Was it a little boy or a little girl?” I ask, thinking that perhaps I can name my baby finally.
Clarissa doesn’t respond, and at first I wonder if perhaps she didn’t hear me. But the question is burning inside of me now, except I think that maybe it’s always been burning me, not knowing.
“Clarissa.”
I’ve always used her first name; some quiet refusal to acknowledge her as anything adjacent to my mother, but the word on my tongue is different this time. It’s a command.
I turn to face her, and there’s a tremble bobbing in her throat. Her painted eyes are dead.
“I don’t remember,” she says.
“You don’t remember.”
I recognize the tremble now, and Clarissa’s fear calls out to me on the draft let in through an open vent.
Clarissa pats her skirts down, takes in a deep breath, and when she peers up at me, there’s the blaze burning in her eyes. For a moment, I think it might be regret, but when she speaks, I recognize it’s not.
“There was no time, child. You had passed out, but you could have woken any moment. There was no telling what you might have done, how you would have responded if you witnessed your child stillborn. I had to act quickly, and I told the maid where to hide the body.”
My breath quickens, the emptiness in my chest filling with something that burns. Not the burn of fire, but the burn of ice held against the bare skin, the type that threatens to numb, rot.
“You didn’t check,” I whisper. “You didn’t check to see if it was a little boy or a little girl.”
Clarissa steels herself, lifting her chin even as she’s on her knees before me. “There was no time. I had to do what was necessary to protect you.”
“To protect me.” The words fall flat, linger on my tongue like cough medicine. “And the midwife? She must have known. Must have checked.”
My voice is eerily calm. I think if it were a color, it would be the yellow glare of fog cast over the sea before a storm.
“The midwife is dead,” Clarissa says, “found in bed with one of your father’s servants. Her husband was a jealous drunk. She tried to escape town, but they found them both hanging from his rafters.”
My stomach should plummet at the horrible atrocity, but it doesn’t. All I hear is that the only person ever to see my child’s face is gone.
But I’m not far enough gone not to ask my next question. “And who informed the husband that the midwife had been discovered in bed with the servant?”
My stepmother looks me dead in the eye and says, “I did.”
There’s a haze that clouds the edges of my vision, sneaks into the pounding of my blood against my veins.
But then I realize it’s not my heart that’s thumping, grating against my ears.
It’s Clarissa’s.
There’s blood all over her, I realize. In the flush of her cheeks as her fear envelops her. In the arteries that eddy through the whites of her eyes. In the blue of the veins that reside just underneath her pale skin.
Warmth and lust rush over me, and I feel my skin heat at the pace of her pulse.
Something must have changed in my expression, because my stepmother backs away on her hands. “Blaise, please…” she says. “You must know it was all for your own good. So you could grow into the young woman your father always wanted you to be.”
There was a time in my life when I would have screamed at my stepmother. When I would have forbidden her from ever speaking of my father again.
There was a time when I would have been angry with her. When I would have hated her for what she did to me. To my child. What she took away from us both.
From me, she took my child. From my child, she took the chance to be mourned properly.
Yes, the human Blaise would have been enraged. Heartbroken even.
Maybe I am those things.
It’s difficult to tell, given I’m mostly just hungry.
I stalk toward Clarissa, and she tries to shoot to her feet, but I grab her by her throat and shove her back down.
She thuds against the floor, and instantly I scent her blood, a wound freshly rent thanks to the grading on the wooden floorboard.
The fog on the outskirts of my vision bleeds red.
My stepmother begins to whimper, and she even has the good sense to try to scream, but of the two of us, I’m more prepared for this encounter.
“Don’t scream,” I tell her, and I relish the weight of my words as they drip from my voice.
There’s a bit of pressure against my gums as my canines break through.
