Astrid

“Astrid?”

The door of my bedroom creaks open. Heavy shoes make the wooden panels squeak, and I can envision my father poking his head around the door, the way he usually does. “Darling, are you awake?”

I have been awake for hours. I lay still, my back turned on him.

“Are you awake? I’m taking Alfeir with me and will meet Sir Rotwell by the carriage station. I will be returning a week sooner than him, so you need not fret so much, love.”

My eyes flutter close. There is a stretched pause.

Slowly, the door creaks until it clicks shut.

The weeks go by far too painfully. It's as if time has decided to drag my anxiety out into an eternity. Still, no news is better than bad news. So I keep myself preoccupied with Katya’s bland tales of how her mother has convinced her father to search for a husband on her part, and to choose a respectable man of good station who will deign to marry a maid.

Sometimes, we run into Damian, and he more than willingly turns our duo into a trio. It makes our peers talk, but I would be fibbing if I were to say that I do not enjoy the image of the two of us each having his arm as we stroll down the marketplace.

Today, Katya has left for the mill early. It leaves me with too much time for thought and nothing to do with my hands. I have already spent too many days tinkering with my father’s inventions and attempting to reassemble some of them.

So today, I resort to searching the marketplace for something to prepare for my father when he arrives home.

He is scheduled to arrive in exactly two days. What a relief it will be, to finally stop attempting to decipher the void of the unknown.

Just as I turn a corner, someone whistles to my far left. I stop and turn.

“Bringing the day’s fill home, are you?” Damian is leaning against a wall casually, eyeing the bread in my basket. “You know, hard work is a common trait found in the best homemakers.”

I pull a grimace. “I have no immediate intention of becoming a homemaker.”

“Why not? Isn’t that the ambition of every woman in this town?”

He says this to bait me, I know it. So I lift my chin and shrug. “Perhaps I do not belong in this town.”

“Oh?” his eyebrows lift in amusement. “Where will you go?”

“Someday, wherever I please.”

“Then perhaps, until then, you might want to meet me four hours past midnight.”

My eyebrows shoot up in genuine surprise. “Tonight? After...after midnight?”

He grins. “Are you afraid of the dark, Your Ladyship?”

“Nobody ever leaves their houses past midnight.”

“Correction: no woman leaves their houses past midnight. I join some friends for whiskey and whist every Tuesday.”

This shouldn’t shock me, but it does. The old curfew was a thing of history and has long been lifted – when the townsfolk were certain that the serial animal attacks had ceased. The horrific news that used to be whispered in the taverns and marketplaces stopped coming a good ten years ago, but people only regained their faith two years after everything stopped.

Now it has become mere folklore, a story meant to scare children into tucking themselves in before ten.

“Why do you look so scandalized?” Damian laughs. “There’s no law against it.”

Still, those who wander in the Mirkland Woods at night and do not return are rumored to be hunted by the beast. Of course, the more logical explanation would be wolves.

I shake the thought out of my head. “I’m sorry, I’ve just never heard of anything so sexist in my entire life.”

He gives me a sideways look. “Are you saying you’d like to come along next Tuesday?”

And let the leers of drunken men linger against my skin until dawn? Absolutely not.

“I do not toy with boyish ideas. And my father will never let me see the light of day if he finds out I’ve gone out past midnight.”

“Then make sure you don’t get caught.”

His eyes dart about the road.

Then, in a motion so smooth and unexpected, he grabs me by the wrist and yanks me into the shadows cast by the roof, away from the public eye.

I barely regain control of my footing before he advances towards me, forcing my back up against the wall.

He leans closer. But he is stopped by the basket between us.

My breathless laughter holds a tinge of surprise. I turn my head to peer at the sparse road.

“People will see,” I whisper hoarsely.

“No one will see.”

I turn to look into his brown eyes, turning into molten honey under the daylight. His mischievous grin causes me to giggle again as he anchors one hand into the wall, right beside my ear. His other hand brushes a lock of hair out of my face.

“You know,” my words are barely audible. “Katya won’t be pleased to see us like this. She fancies you.”

“Does she?” he murmurs, eyes trailing to my lips.

“Verily so. Pesters me each day about it, too.”

“Hmm. I’ve never noticed anyone but you.”

A smirk escapes my lips. Glancing to my left to make sure nobody else is around, I tilt my head and dare myself to look him in the eye again. To dare him.

“I know.”

His grin widens.

“Take a risk, Astrid,” his breath tickles my chin. “Just for a few hours. You, me, without the prying eyes of these dull folk.”

I giggle again. “Where will we go?”

“Anywhere. Here. I’ll wait for you here.”

He waits for me to respond, but I do not. There is an elastic pull between us, urging me to squeal, “Yes!” which will inevitably lead to me waiting for six agonizing hours with my leg fidgeting under the dinner table tonight. Finally, finally, some excitement in this place!

But there is a small fraction of me that screams in warning. I cannot place it; there is no rationality. It just feels like...

Like a storm is coming.

That part, I lock into an obscure corner in my mind.

“Come now,” he coaxes again. His knuckle reaches up to brush down from my temples to my jaw.

As if his movements are a charming spell, my arms lower themselves. The basket drops to the ground by my feet in a soft thud.

His lips curl up into a victorious smile that dimples one cheek.

Damian does not hesitate. He dips his head lower, his hands moving in synchronization to snake themselves around my waist and pull me closer.

When his lips move against mine, I surrender. I let myself touch the base of his neck, and he takes the opportunity to move his hands inches lower down my waist. I hear an old siren go off in my head but then remind myself that I have been curious for his touch since we first danced.

In truth, all this is foreign to me, though I don’t act like it. All this is uncharted territory. But since his hands do not go very much lower – or higher, really – I am comforted by the fact that he is still a gentleman. Partly.

I part from his lips and turn my head, stepping free from his grasp.

He follows me suit and presses his lips against mine once more for a fleeting moment.

“Marry me,” he moans against my cheekbone.

I chuckle, but my heart jostles in my chest. “Wh-what?”

“Become my wife, and I will take you wherever you want to go.”

He is laughing quietly, so I am nearly certain he jests. Nearly. “I told you, I have no immediate intention of becoming a homemaker.”

“Then after I leave tomorrow and come back within a month, you will say yes to me.”

My smile falters. “A month? Where are you going?”

“To visit my uncle. And then I will come right back to ask you for your hand.”

“Do not joke about these things,” I say with a scowl. “Marriage is not a matter to be taken lightly. It involves families.”

His smile does not falter, though he stops grinning so much. “Why? Do you think your father will oppose?”

“On the contrary; my father has always wanted something out of my future marriage.”

This finally wipes the humor off his face. He puts a few inches of distance between us.

“What is it?” he asks doubtfully.

Satisfied, I lean in cryptically and arch an eyebrow.

“My happiness,” I whisper.

He rolls his eyes and smirks. “Then I shall make you the happiest woman in the world, Astrid. If you meet me four hours past midnight.”

“How unconditional your affections are.”

Damian winks. I smooth my skirt and bend down to pick the basket up again. Just before I can turn to walk away, he reaches down to steal a final kiss. For now.

“Beauteous thing,” he regards me with hungry eyes. He reaches up to graze my cheekbone with his thumb. “I must have you.”

And just as he leaves me, with words not so much a promise as they are a dream on a whim, I find myself breathless and giddy again.

Kieran

Something has been ringing in my ears. I don’t notice it at first as I’m getting dressed for midnight as usual. I don’t notice it until…

Until it starts to hurt.

My head suddenly feels like it’s going to explode. At first, I assume it’s because midnight is coming, but tonight the pain is different. It’s as if a thousand needles are jabbing my eardrums.

I clasp my hands over my ears, but the ringing grows louder and louder until I have to shout to relieve the tension weighing on my temples and jaw.

Then I see it.

A shift, a shadow’s movement under the moonlight outside my bedroom window.

I stumble to the window. The shadow solidifies into a man’s form, bent over one of the golden roses in the garden. My garden.

His arm extends towards one of the roses. The ringing intensifies. I start to scream, but nobody hears me.

And then he plucks the rose.

The starburst of agony doesn’t paralyze me the way it usually does. Tonight, it surges me forward, pushes me into a desperation to extinguish the noise, the pain, the irritation. The fact that midnight is nearly nigh doesn’t help me regain my composure, either.

I yank the window open without even thinking.

Tonight, I will not be the only one meeting the monster.

Astrid

Five minutes past four in the morning. Ten.

I stand frozen in the cool air. Behind me, the front door of my house remains ajar; the skin of my palm has already merged with the brass doorknob. Damian is certainly already there, waiting for me.

Yet I wait.

Surely, I am only giving pause because a presentable lady never waits for any man, and not because the hairs on the nape of my neck will not stop standing. And even if they are, they only do so because it is cold.

Then I hear it.

The sound of hooves slowing from a gallop into a rhythmic clip-clop. That familiar neigh of my mother’s horse.

I squint at the darkness until Alfeir emerges under the glow of my lamp. When he stops, his hooves kick and push against the dirt restlessly, as if his journey has not yet ended. He wears a saddle and reins, but nobody sits upon his back.

The horse’s rider is gone.