Despite what most of Melancholy called her, the girl did have a name, even if its tongue was forgotten by the most eldritch and old of all the inhabitants in the sky and the earth. Dahlia.

Her mother had chosen that name, before she let the sea claim her that opulent, celestial dusk and wrap her in the enticing throes of its vicious, accursed death, not even leaving behind a nightmarish corpse of her moon-caressed, otherworldly body for her darling husband and her weeping daughter to bury. Now her mother twirled in the cold winds of the star's periwinkle lullaby song, all that alluring, nubivagant beauty ensnared by the moon and snatched away from her nymphal rusalka body in an instant.

It was an hour after the nightmare boy had approached Dahlia with his Italian-tainted British accent and his pretty face, and well into the night.

As she passed the tall, ancient townhouses, the colourful paint faded and chipped in the wake of the salty tongues of wind that had caressed the bricks since this accursed town emerged from the earth, she took care not to look at the flea-ridden, ruinous corpses of dead children strewn about the deserted alleyways between the houses. Dahlia was in the poverty-stricken slums that fringed the center of the town, the crepuscular, liminal places infested by nightcrawlers and gangs and such, so much so that amidst the salt-eaten, canal-rotting brick townhouses painted brighter than the wispy sun and the MISSING posters that crowded every small, dingy shop's window, wooden boards across grimy broken windows, sharp sticks, and barbed wire that had been threaded through fences like a traditional tapestry dotted the labyrinth of tall, fortified houses like aaszia, Mells who loathed creatures, around a rusalka as they beat her to death.

Mells had names for these parts, although they were crude and demeaning. Like Le Piazza di Deij. The Plaza of Death, for how many corpses of diseased, blood-splattered children were tossed into the alleys from starvation, to be burned on Saturday while all the town slept or given over to the wild hounds that some kept chained to posts to ward off the night's beloved creatures.

Dahlia wrung her hands nervously as she hurried home, feeling how stiff they were, as they always became as the days neared winter's cold lover's touch. Doll's hands. Corpse hands. When she got home, she would ask Uncle Father if he could rub them with the herb oil that made the touch of death and the taint of pain's fingers on her skin flee back to the realm of the dead, if only for a few precious minutes. Or what if he said no? What then? She would suffer all winter long, then, she supposed.

She would never dare do it herself - Daddy would hurt her because since she was his, only he could do it for her. And he would hurt her all the more now that summer had bled its way to autumn. Uncle Father always became more angry in the cold winter months, when his limbs were stiff and his arms could not hug his beloved, precious Dahlia the way he wanted them to. Wringing her hands once more, she could not help but wonder desperately about how she would keep his anger at bay. Jealousy over her was a delicate, flowery, ghostlike thread that he always sought to sew deeper and deeper into her silken doll flesh, weaving it around her skeleton and letting it devour the pits of her thrice-damned, otherworldly soul that was a blight, a terrible abomination, upon this realm of luminous, dreamy human folk so much more different from her monstrous self who she did not deserve to feel the mortal embrace of. She was a monster, and saints forbid she ever forget that. Remember, Dahlia, she told herself as she passed a smoking vampire with his earbuds in, was it not you who cheered at your mother's funeral as she was lowered into the earth forever?

Monster.

⋆ ⭒ ⋆

Uncle Father was waiting for her when she arrived at the small cottage house.

"Daddy," Dahlia gasped when she saw him standing at the door, his blood-streaked, grotesque rabbit mask sharp in the misty fog that besieged the dark town. She'd never seen his face before.

What could he possibly want? Was she in trouble?

No, she only worried too much.

She could hear the sound of him sniffing her even through the song of the sea and the whisper of the rain's light, fine mist upon everything like a blessing. If he found the taint of the nightmare boy's voice on her, she knew his righteous hands would spill brutal, screaming sins into the twisted, rotting abyss of his mindless soul, till the fink folk who had dared to touch his precious eijschlos would fall into the cold, unforgiving, ever-greedy fingers of the underworld's deepest parts and would only have his screams echoing on the winter's most harsh winds as a reminder that his soul had ever been drawn toward Dahlia's. She'd done her best to brush it off of her frilly, puffed clothes and colourful merchant-folk skirt, leaving the remains of the voices and the tainted touches that had stained her that day in the dirt of the Plaza of Death. But Uncle Father had a very good nose.

However, he only sniffed her for a few seconds before roughly grabbing her arm and dragging her to their rambling backyard, overgrown with weeds and cabbages gone rank, his breathing as heavy as though death had tightened its fingers around his lungs, his dark robe swishing about him in the sea winds like he was a gorgeous creature of maliciousness in a folktale.

Dahlia breathed a sigh of relief as she picked her way through the vegetables that refused to spin life from their roots and heed the call of the wild, despite her best efforts.

Yet Dahlia sang to them every morning all the same, because the wild roses listened when she talked of all her thoughts to them, and sometimes, sometimes they responded. They told her they liked being dead. They said she should stick Daddy's sewing pins into the scrawny boy next door, Philip. She hadn't. She didn't want to be sent to the local prison church, which had once been a magnificent splendour for the glory of the Lord inlaid with luminescent abalone shells from the fisherman's toils and marble domes that rivalled the flight of the birds, but was now nothing more than a place where criminals were sent to rot for one night. Dahlia had gone three times before - she boasted three scarred slashes on her left wrist to show. But, no, it wasn't her who had done it, was it? She would never have. It was the prison men. She was sure of it.

Yes, that made sense.

"What's wrong, Daddy?" Dahlia asked when she caught sight of him bent over a freshly-dug hole at the side of the cottage, his long, stringy hair trailing down his pale, sweat-stained neck like the fishing nets cast over the sides of the brightly painted boats.

Crows cawed behind her. The night was fast becoming cold, and soon Daddy would not let her out after 11:00 to do her errands for him, for fear of her catching cold and freezing forever in a cold, paralyzed death.

She knew what he wanted as soon as she saw him pull out the thrice-damned, bejewelled music box.

Her throat felt tight. Dahlia took a slow step backwards, limned in moonlight like an ethereal, darling eidolon, letting the wind whip her dark hair about her pretty cherubic face as Uncle Father pried the box open. A tear fell down her cold doll skin as her hands shook. Doll's hands. Corpse hands.

"Please, Daddy. Please," she begged as she shook her head desperately. Why were there so many tears in her ghost eyes? Saints, she hated it when she looked so weak! Especially in front of Daddy, who she so desperately wanted to please.

He didn't listen.

He wound the music box up and let the haunting, ghostly melody spill out onto the wind.

⋆ ⭒ ⋆

Callum Machio was notorious within Melancholy for his fair, gorgeous looks and how charming he was, though he was but a wee little werewolf lad of eighteen. And he was a monster. Oh, folk didn't say that to his face - that would've been incredibly rude, even by the gruff fishermen's sailor standards. But he liked to lure women to his bed and play with them, then discard their broken bodies like they were nothing more than corpses already claimed by death, their minds stolen and twisted with terrible fantasy obsession over the man who was their ruination. And when they crawled home later that night, if they were lucky enough to even be able to move after the brutal trials of what Callum mockingly told them was love but was really only naive mortal foolishness, they wept with their families, known forevermore as a Machio girl who was claimed by Callum and would suffer terribly if ever another boy laid their hands on her.

He would never touch another girl again.

Dahlia was sitting on a creaky wooden chair in his room, staring at Callum's chipped, crumbling, blue walls adorned with aristocratic oil paintings, his rumpled bed messy as though he couldn't be bothered to make it again before luring his next girl in. Already she detested the smell of werewolf fur and cigarettes that seemed to have sunk into every part of this wretched prison room, and her ears had grown weary of hearing the seagulls and pigeons on the grimy window ledge fight viciously over the ripped-apart rat corpse that slowly rotted into the crumbling yellow bricks and weathered, lion-carved stone, amidst the wind chimes that nearly every house boasted. And could he not close that dirty window of his? The room was getting rather cold with the sweet honey air turning to autumn already. But no, he'd left it open, as if to tease her with the promise of blissful escape so near, yet so impossible to reach.

That cocky fink boy had tied her sore legs and hands to the chair with rope that bit into her skin and would surely bruise for weeks - rope meant for werewolves who were not tame enough to handle themselves. And he kept kicking the chair mockingly with the mien of an vain, absentminded aristocrat boy, delighting in the vainglorious, ravishing thrill that ran down his spine whenever she shrieked as it tipped too far. His moon maiden doll. His ethereal angelic nymph with tears that kissed her dreamy periwinkle face like stars painting the sky.

It was but a small mercy that he hadn't yet ripped off her clothes.

Now he reclined back against his messy bed, his brown hair mussed as he sipped coffee from cups that had already left countless stains on his dresser. A heating pad sat on the rumpled plaid blanket beside him, for the cramps that would come with his full-moon transformation.

Dahlia strained against the ropes again.

"Please, just let me out," she pleaded despairingly, her voice raspy and hoarse from the searing poison he'd made her swallow, watching with a smile as it burned its way down her ruined, scar-riddled throat. How she wished those stupid tears hadn't fallen so quickly from her traitorous eyes! Would he keep her here for long? What desperate, majestic feats would she be forced to perform before he released her, the obsession and love that poured forth from her foolish, disloyal soul strung up and woven into threads with which he would play her like a puppet?

He gave her an unconcerned, haughty smile.

"Oh, don't worry, mio angelo," Callum hummed, leaning forward to run a cold finger down her arm. "I'll let you out eventually, darling." He paused. "Just not now. I need to know you really love me first, yeah?"

Callum pushed off of his bed, his smooth skin tanned from long, rugged sea years spent on the fisherman's boats. Standing up, he was far too tall for her liking, a hulking, dominant giant who worked his magics of control and lust over her, till she was scraped clean and hollow and had nothing left for herself except for her broken soul and the threads of her pride. She could smell peaches and honey in his dark, wavy hair. This close to him, she trembled, about to fall apart and collapse from how close this seductive creature of provocative, languid grace and beauty was as he positioned himself standing straight over her legs, slowly leaned down, and pressed a leisurely, devastating kiss to her pale neck.

But his hands - oh, they were like the calloused hands of a fallen angel, the touch of the dead, as cold as they were.

"How do I prove my love?" she whispered fervently amidst his kisses. "Anything. I'll do anything you ask, if only you'll have me." Dahlia's voice broke as she said so.

Callum smirked idly and retreated, leaning on one shoulder against the wall as he pulled a small, shiny object out of his jeans pocket as he did so.

A bright red cigarette lighter.

"I want you to burn yourself," he replied, and this time, the smile left his face.

"What?" Dahlia choked out in disbelief.

"You heard me, darling. It's only a trick. A small thing to show your adoration."

"You're joking." A nervous laugh that was more shriek than a sound of joy escaped her traitorous, secret-betraying mouth. Her hands began to strain desperately against the ropes again, even though she knew it would be to no avail.

"You love me, yeah?" Callum asked, mocking and untouchable as the statues of saints who adorned the carved stone fountains in the tiled squares. "Don't look at me like that! It's only a small trick! Just a li'l sweet something as a token of your desire, mi angelo." That stupid mocking smirk was back again as he pretended to think long and hard. "And I want you to hold it for...one minute."

Her jaw dropped.

Disbelief spiralled inside of her. One minute! Surely he must be crazy, there was no other explanation.

Dahlia's terrified face went pale at the dead, hungry look in his ravenous eyes, the eyes that she loved so much, as he grabbed a carved, marble-handled pocket-knife from his coffee-stained desk, knocking over a small, delicate glassblown wizard as he did so. In one fluid, graceful motion, he slashed the biting rope around her sore, bruised wrists. He knew she would not strangle him, or do anything that would disfigure his luminous, alluring seductiveness. She loved his face. She would die before she was the one who ruined those sharp cheekbones and clouded, sinful eyes, freckled with the screams of every girl he'd ever ensnared and brought to his house of nightmare dreams, his prison of his lovely fallen angels, his motley collection of blossom virgin girls who would always be his.

"Take it, beautiful." Callum waved the lighter in front of Dahlia's face, and, shakily, she took it from his cold fingers, fumbling with the smooth case. It was cold. How many others had he wounded with this?

"One minute. Or you'll never leave. It's nothing compared to the love we share." He was so calm. "Cry some more - that'll do you a whole lot of good. I like how you look when you cry. Like an angel of sorts."

"Callum," she implored again, sobbing. But he only watched with a lingering smirk.

After a moment's terror-stricken hesitation, Dahlia angrily raised the cigarette lighter to the skin of her finger. They were already dead. A bit more stiffness and ruin would not do much harm.

But Callum grabbed it.

"Not there," he whispered into her ear with a wink, lips brushing the outside in just the right way to make her spine curve deliciously with ecstasy and pleasure. Then his hands moved ever so slowly to her thigh and went under her colourful skirt. She gasped as his cold hands crawled up the inside of her leg.

"There," he said, tapping it.

"You're not serious," she begged one last time. "Please! I-I love you so much. You know that I do."

With his other hand, he viciously grabbed her chin. "I said there."

She swallowed and began to cry silently, tears falling from her eyes like angel tears from the heavens as it rained, as he slid her skirt up tantalizingly slow and exposed her legs to the cold, salty air of the sea. Not to mention his hungry eyes, so famished to see this majestic, cruel display of love. The cigarette lighter was cold when she pressed it against her pale leg. Terror engulfed her.

"Callum?" she breathed.

"What?" he asked with the barest hint of annoyance edging his words, leaning closer.

And that was when she grabbed the knife off of the dresser and stabbed him in the stomach.

⋆ ⭒ ⋆

Dahlia was usually nervous and worried, overthinking every single little thing and watching for signs of betrayal and hurt.

But that was only her before the music box played.

Now she had Callum tied up in his own chair, his sinful crimson blood and intestines spilling out for all the world to see through the small, grimy little window. His cries of agony tormented her mind. His Soul Reapers Wolf Pack shirt lay abandoned in the corner.

How deliciously good it would feel to carve his face with that knife, to hear his mirthless, wretched screams of agony as she disfigured him bit by bit, prying apart the careful lies and the skin of a bewitching, dominant woman lord that he had woven together for himself. That dark little fantasy made her breath quicken and her heart race.

"Dahlia!" he screamed hoarsely, straining pitifully against his restraints as the chair shook dangerously. "Dahlia, let me out! This is my house!" When Callum was enraged, the lad's voice was not the beautiful, silken purr that poured forth from his righteous throat when he was seducing his girls - high pitches and desperate snatches at the pride that had once become him like a striking cape became his new skin, the thing that he tried despairingly to stop from coming out of his throat as he retched, but that clawed its way out despite his desolate, forlorn little-boy shrieks. To her, though, he was still so pretty. Nothing could ever mar that angelic beauty, not even death. His scarlet face was oh so dark with murder thoughts, flushed with the effort of screaming as much as he could to gather the attention of someone through the window. They wouldn't hear him, however. Not through the music and dancing and laughter that rode on the night's dark, mysterious winds of salt and sea. And, to be doubly sure, she'd cleverly put on rather loud violin music and placed the radio outside of the window that stubbornly refused to close.

"Dahlia! Let me out, you whore! This - this is my house!" Callum swore colourfully in Italian at her back. "You love me, don't you?"

No, no, she didn't, not really. But he was the most beautiful boy she'd ever seen, and she liked playing with broken beautiful things.

"Shh," she said gently, placing a hand over his mouth with a sharp, sweet smile. He bit down fiercely on her hand. She didn't flinch. "I'll let you out." He relaxed, wincing with pain at the ruined wound that left his tanned, muscular stomach open for the pigeons to squawk at, and she drew backwards with a crazed, vicious tint to her sharp ghost eyes. "Just...perhaps not yet."

Callum inhaled sharply. "Don't do this to me."

He was so handsome.

Her fingers found the cigarette lighter on the floor, ignoring his screams and violent shakes that would surely tear a few holes in the dyed, handwoven rug that adorned his gleaming chestnut floors. She hummed as she did so. What a monster Callum Machio is, she thought as she carelessly threw open his dark wooden dresser's drawers and found, hidden amongst clothes and pamphlets warning against tricky fae, precious, treasured trinkets and pretty knick knacks, collected from every girl he'd ever enticed into adoring him. Crimson lipstick from a fourteen-year-old girl who he'd taken a few smeared, salt-eaten vintage pictures of. Headphones from a precious, roseate doll with, terrifyingly enough (but not enough to this version of Dahlia), her tangled auburn hair wrapped around the bloodstained cord and a hauntingly gory, black-and-white picture picture of the same blurry darling girl carving her own tear-stained eye out to shrieks of anguished torment, tied dangling to a roof over the treacherous sea on a freak show acrobat's tightrope. His stellaluna. His acrobata. She could feel how possessive his fingers would be as he gripped these things, whispering to the girls that he ensnared that it was only a few tricks to show their love for him.

"Let me out of here, you slut!" Callum screamed threateningly behind her.

Finally, she turned back to look at him, with a sigh as though he was wasting her precious time.

"Oh, don't worry," she purred, the strange, otherworldly light of thirst for murder dancing in her pretty ghost eyes. "I'll let you out. But you need to do something for me first." Dahlia flicked the cigarette lighter open and made a flame dance along her skin. "I want you to burn yourself for me, too."

He paused a moment, breathing heavily with his black coffee breath, his eyes bleeding murder. Odd folk. She was one of the odd folk, and she was crazy, and she loved it. She drank in the feeling, savouring the promises of her and Callum's destined, fated soulmatedness, how it would feel to hold his anguished, weeping body after she was done and finished with him, how his soul would tremble with horror at how dark hers was, tainted as it was with all the devastating, ruinous sins she carried as a burden forever on her unclean, bloodied hands.

"I'm not burning myself, darling. Let me out. Please. Please, I...I promise I won't ever do something like that again. You love me, don't you?"

She smiled seductively at him, tracing a loving hand through his soft tawny hair.

"You will if you want to leave, Callum," she replied with a nonchalant shrug. He inhaled sharply. Dahlia knew his parents were on vacation for two more weeks, and she was not above starving him while she left to talk to her cherished wilting roses and be held by Uncle Father as he writhed like a crepuscular, wild creature and tore more of her ruined flesh off of her bones for him to eat, punishing her for the monstrous stains of Callum's hands on her body. She could leave this boy chained in his room like a dog, and stitch his mouth shut like Daddy had done to her all those years ago so that he would not talk and scream. He was at her mercy. She'd locked the door and eaten the key already. And to be safe, she'd hidden his phone as well.

"I'll do it," he hissed, his shoulders sagging in defeat.

Dahlia smiled. "Don't even think about leaving," she purred. She doubted the flight from the blissfully mocking small, three-story window would be a painless one for Callum.

As she smiled, head light with sick, morbid fantasies, reverent, acrobatic fingers dancing over the sweat-daubed skin of his neck, Callum wrenched his hands free from the loose rope she'd tied and snatched the lighter from her hands. Lithely, Dahlia pressed the knife into his torn-apart, bleeding stomach that had made him whimper with weak mortal pain as he screamed at her with pleas and sick, bloodthirsty threats to let him go. His shoulders stiffened with pain. Just in case he decided to burn her.

"Mi angelo, you know that I love you," he pleaded. Lies. How his hands were shaking as he pressed the lighter to his shoulder!

"Oh, no," Dahlia tsked, her hand shooting out to grip his so tightly that her fingers would leave bruises for days. "Not there." She laughed like the idea was ridiculous. Then, as Callum watched with a swallow, licking his pretty lips nervously, she carefully traced his hand down his poised, monstrous body like she was playing it, till it came to rest over the shallow, bloodied knife wound that had marred the beauteous perfection of his abdomen mere moments before.

He licked his lips again, all atremble. "Dahlia. Dahlia, please."

She said nothing.

"Dahlia!" he screamed, jolting violently against the chains and ties that kept his legs on the chair. "Someone! Anyone!"

Dahlia said nothing, only watched with that same hungry, vicious look in her star-crossed ghost eyes that Callum had once foolishly fancied as pretty. He already knew it was pointless. She didn't turn her head when the trembling lad finally pressed the lighter into the disfigured crimson wound in his abdomen and burned the ruined edges of his mutilated, deformed skin, a cry of utter agony ripping forth from his maimed body as though he had watched the death of his most beloved darling. She smiled and cheered, clapping her hands as Callum devolved into anguished ruin, burying his head in his hands as his whole body shook. He wouldn't cry - his pride was too great for that.

But the way he'd screamed when the flame met his mutilated skin! It was no longer the cry of a cocky boy who lured girls to him as easily as luring pigeons to a bit of almond pastry. It was the cry of a broken boy at the mercy of someone else.

Dahlia stroked his hair as he whimpered, pressing soft, coquettish kisses to his stiff, trembling neck. Oh, how she loved this feeling! The feeling of holding a broken boy. Her shame had been thrown to the merciless, ravaging winds long ago, when she arrived at the Michios' exquisite, glorious estate of brick and stone and lions.

It was a while before he recovered, and when he did, he spat full into her face like the little boys did into the canals. He was far too tormented to say anything.

Dahlia pressed a finger to her full roseate lips, tracing small circles into the skin of his neck.

"Good," she said. Then she took his hand again, much more gently this time, because she hated to see beautiful things in pain for too long, and brought his hand between his jean-clad legs, to his forbidden parts. "Now do it again."