Slaughtaverty, 1745

Mairead Doyle awakes from a restless, dream-filled sleep, opening her eyes to the watery gloom surrounding her. She's not sure if she is seeing her surroundings with her eyes or the other sense, the one that causes her to know things she shouldn't know.

She's not sure how long she'd been sleeping this time, just as she doesn't know how long she'd been here in this soft bed in the pretty room with embroidered sprigs of yellow and pink flowers on the bedding and thick drapes covering the windows. She cannot tell day from night or feel time passing.

Her hours flow between being awake, drinking strong herbal tea and savoury broth and sleeping. She's vaguely aware of using a chamber pot occasionally and being washed, but her only companions are generally dreams, visions and memories threading through her mind. Some of the memories and thoughts are her own, but most are not. Even when she is awake, she is still dreaming... and yearning.

Oh, the yearning...

Right now, the flower patterns on the fabrics are black against grey, and the world is framed in a blurry border of deep blue, embracing a hazy centre of washed light, as if she's looking through a cloudy round window. A tunnel of sight.

She has been floating in and out of sleep for so long, seeing and hearing things while awake and asleep. She is slowly becoming used to the fact that her heart and mind can hear and see things that her ears and eyes cannot detect.

Even in her weakened state, her mind still thickly woven with cobwebs from her troubled sleep, she is unable to resist the strong pull in the core of her being, drawing her from her bed. Placing her bare feet on the rug by her bed, she stands alone on shaky legs for the first time since she was brought here from the woods.

Propelled by a longing too intense to describe in words, she follows the sound of hoarse screams ringing loudly in her head, her heart drawing her towards it. She'd been hearing these screams for a long time. They've been ripping like knives through her soul, bringing tears to her eyes, even when she wasn't able to wake up.

She could never drown them out and not hear them, not feel them. They are part of her.

Her footsteps do not falter as she wades through the thick darkness in unknown corridors, her surroundings a blur of furniture in midnight blue shadows as she follows the light leading her on. It is not a light she can see with her eyes or the light that draws the deceased to their final rest. It's a light streaming from her mind, filling her heart with knowledge she could never explain.

She knows her little brother Uilliam is sleeping in a bed similar to hers and that he hasn't stirred or woken up since he was brought here many days ago from a terrible place where things happened that she'd desperately wanted not to see but couldn't stop from entering her mind. She clings with all the hope she can muster to the fact that, for now, Uilliam is alive and safe. For now, he is breathing and in no pain.

Soon, she might hold him in her arms again...

She doesn't hesitate when she leaves the comfort of the wooden floors and rugs of the hallway for the ice-glazed stone steps leading into the darkest recesses of the mansion, the bare soles of her feet treading solidly on the cold surface, not even feeling the sting. Winding her way from one non-descript grey corridor to the next, her white night dress fluttering around her naked ankles and her red hair trailing down her back, she finally reaches a wider corridor flanked on either side by rows of solid wooden doors, pitted and scarred by centuries of use.

The hoarse, tormented cries that brought her here are now filling her ears too, growing louder as it merges with the sounds reverberating deafeningly in her mind and soul. Raw sobs and cries of pain that go on and on, tearing at her heart.

She passes many locked doors, too focused on her destination to care about who or what might be kept inside the cells. She's not listening to the telltale sounds of hissing and growling coming from behind some of the doors, and she doesn't pause to peek through keyholes. Right now, they do not exist for her in this tunnel of hazy shadows and bright, wavering light.

She carries on through the barren hallways of the cellars, no longer dark but sporadically lit by torches in metal brackets mounted to the walls. To Merry, it feels as though she's walking through catacombs. Burial chambers of the living.

When she finally reaches an open door, she stops, remaining just outside the cell, searching the dusky interior until she sees him.

The duke's son.

He is lying pale and shivering on a linen-covered straw pellet against the furthest wall. Merry's heart lurches in her chest, contracting painfully with sorrow. She can feel his misery and anguish, both physical and mental, as if it were her own.

The screaming stopped when she arrived. He is lying still, listening, tasting her on the air.

In the hours and days she'd spent lingering between sleep and wakefulness, Merry had seen and heard and grown to know many things. She can no longer tell what she'd seen, what she'd heard and what she simply knows as if her brain has always held the knowledge and is only revealing it to her now.

Regardless of how she came upon the facts, one thing she knows with surety is that the boy is slowly dying. She can feel regret heavier than the chains binding him, holding him down, burying him in a tomb of grief. She can feel him resist her presence.

Her heart breaks for him.

She knows with that same indescribable understanding that the boy blames himself for things that were beyond his control. Some of the burdens he is carrying are not even his sins to bear, but he has locked himself away from those who love him. Their reasoning and pleading are not reaching his heart. Merry can hear their cries and feel their unimaginable pain too. It is more than she can stand.

The boy has locked himself in the welcomed embrace of a death that is slow and painful in its journey.

Merry learned that life has been hard for the Slatherties for centuries. All because of one young, foolish man and a bitter woman with an evil heart. In the thick mist of old revelations, she has seen the lifeless body of a newborn baby, wrapped in a blanket covered in an ancient curse written in his drained blood.

These were all nightmares swirling in her mind as she slept fitfully, hearing the desperate cries of the beautiful boy who'd held her in his arms in the graveyard, setting her mind and body free from their confines, wrapping her in warmth as he drank her blood.

She knew with a certainty beyond all understanding that if a Slathery baby survives the harrowing pregnancy and birth that moulds it, it has a fairly normal childhood until their bodies start to change from child to adult, then the curse strikes at the core of the child's very being. Most often, their bodies lose the impossible struggle with mental and physical pain, and they die.

The few who live generally follow one of four clear destinies, but the boy currently lying on the pallet, writhing in pain as he fights the overwhelming desire to turn to her, is carving a new path of his own. He has survived. He has not only fought the curse and broke through it but also survived the poison that was coursing through his body, killing him while robbing him of his mind. Poison that was deliberately forced into his system when he entered puberty and was at his most vulnerable.

Now that he has endured, incredible power lies at his fingertips, right there within his reach. It is his for the taking. He could be the strongest yet in the tortured line of Slatherties that led to his existence.

Instead, he is choosing death.

With a wisdom far beyond the 13 years she'd been alive, a wisdom born from all the memories and thoughts merging with her own, Merry knows that she can save him. She knows that it was her blood that drove the poison out of him and brought his mind back. She knows that he is blaming himself for things he did not mean to do and things he had no hand in at all, not even indirectly. Yet, he is burying it all in his heart, ready to die to make amends if reparations were even possible.

He bound himself in this cold, wet cellar with chains soaked in a solution of nightshade just strong enough to weaken him because Merry's sweet, pure, healing blood is calling to him day and night, and he has been fighting to resist it, screaming in pain as his body devours itself. He yearns for her with a profound longing, finding its twin only in hers.

Merry knows that only her blood can save him now. Only her blood can stop his beautiful silver hair from falling out in clumps and his skin from shrivelling like old parchment. Her blood can erase the dark bruises sinking beneath his hollow eyes.

She could make him whole again, bring the colour back to his pale eyes and the shine to his flaked, dry lips.

She could save him... if only he would let her.

~~~