Chapter Text
Hob hurtles through the moon-splashed forest.
It’s ancient, tangled, but he is at the height of his manly beauty, as they say, and he pistons his strong thighs, and twists his trim waist, and he vaults branches, and wades rivers, and makes it to the outskirts of the torch-lit, decidedly unsleepy village, exhausted, but unbitten.
If he thought he’d be safe there, in the tumult of taverns and teeming slums, he was wrong. The monster hunting him, apparently, can track its prey through urchin-infested streets just as well as through the desolate English countryside.
Interesting, Hob thinks, even as he realises that he’s scarpered right down a dead end, with no way out on three, high-walled sides, and has therefore done what the monster could not do in a whole day’s pursuit. Namely, he’s gone and bloody well caught himself.
There’s no sound of talons, raking through the mud, no triumphant slavering of toothed jaws, no swishing of a forked tail, or chittering of scaly wings. At least, not yet.
Hob tucks himself into a pile of trash in one corner, hoping the half-rot of it covers up his sweaty smell. And, he admits to himself, the scent of his undeniable arousal. He’s been so fucking bored lately. And this unexpected, supernatural chase has excited him, given him the best challenge he’s had, well, ever. His heart hammers and his prick stirs, now that he’s come to rest. It’s been a merry dance, from the moorland road where he’d held up a toff’s carriage, only to have the delicate young nobleman inside it positively beg for Hob the Highwayman’s roguish favours, during which dalliance Hob’s horse bolted, the ungrateful nag, and the consumptive lordling had a fatal attack of the vapours, to this final curtsey, with such a blood-hungry, worthy waltz partner.
Then he hears a strange, searching step, and thrills to think he’s been tracked as far as the fetid alleyway.
“Lawks. Fucking laudanum’s made me waste half the night.” A muttering, a yawning head pokes up from out of a pile of rags, opposite Hob’s own hiding place. The whore stretches, pinching her painted cheeks in preparation for the next few hours of turning her weary cunt into coin. “Hoi? Who the fuck’s there?” She directs her shout not in Hob’s direction, but at whatever’s lurking by the corner, and she changes it to a wheedle almost at once. “Is it a new friend, looking for a cheap tumble? I have a place right here for thee,” she lifts her skirts, “sopping, hot, and tight as a virgin nun’s clench.”
Hob stands up. “It’s the constabulary, pet, no customer of your’n at all,” he says, not bothering to whisper. The whore spins, confused. “They were after me, most famous cut-throat on the York Road, and it seems that they have found me. If you don’t want to get put in a gibbet too, be on thine way, and run fleet. If you know where it is, best make for the parish church.”
He doesn’t know if the monster fears God. Hob himself does not. But he has bravado, where others have belief, and he steps out from his privy-heap to a place where he is keenly on display, to show the harlot the truth in the marks of pursuit upon him; his swaggersome jerkin, now torn by branches, and his dandyish, now muck-spattered boots, not to mention the scratches where brambles have scourged his skin bloody, and ripped the ribbons from his hair. The whore runs off down the dog-legged main road, judging by the slap of her feet on the cobbles.
The shadow of a roofstack shifts, and is no longer simply a shadow.
“Well, Stranger,” Hob spreads his hands. “You win. More fool me for short-cutting through ruined old crypts, eh?”
“You trespassed. You woke me,” a thin, deep, voice accuses. “I had long ago determined to sleep until I was dust. Then humanity must come scrambling through my ancestral estates, like the rat it is.”
“Aye, ‘twas my error,” Hob concedes. “I got turned about in the mists, and came upon thyne bramble-choked mansion in error, hoping to simply rest awhile."
"You lie. You'd hoped for treasure."
"Well," Hob nods, blithely, "as one who values adventure, I'd say I'd found it. Verily, I ask thee, who could know the fells still held such mysteries, in these ages of enlightenment?" He puts his hands, cockily, on his hips. "But I gave you fair sport though, I’d wager? More than the average prey that comes picking through your fallen towers? I gave you the proper slip many times, although I admit the sunlight may have been my man-at-arms, today, for I had sweet, bright pastures to hare through, whilst from what I could gather, you had to slink along the lee of shady hollows and hedgerows.”
“You seek compliments at the moment of your death?” The monster steps forward, seemingly intrigued, which Hob finds flattering in itself. It is man-shaped, at least at this point in proceedings, and Hob looks in admiration at the tall, slender figure, cloaked in black.
“I’d as soon give them, Stranger,” Hob says, as the creature comes close enough to share Hob’s patch of starlight. The skin of his hunter is pearlish, its eyes like a window Hob once saw in a church of great wealth, where the glass of it was stained deep blue, to colour Mother Mary’s dress. “You are not as hideous as I’d pictured.”
The thing arches an eyebrow, as if amused.
“Your choice of meat obviously agrees with you,” Hob grins.
“I have little choice in what constitutes my nourishment,” the monster hisses, now affronted, and Hob hears in the sibilance that he was at least right about the fangs. “We all feed because we must.”
“Indeed.” Hob is all agreement, because he ever was weak for pretty things. “Well,” he says. “It was a long life and an exhilarating end. I would only ask that you are merciful, at least in the matter of playing with your food?” Hob tugs on his earlobe. “Pain has never really been my fancy, unless it’s as a counterpoint to pleasure.”
The monster hesitates, as if unsure what to make of such a cheerful victim. He raises a comely, if clawed hand, and touches a ruby pendant that hangs around his neck. “You have stamina, and artfulness at evasion, and you neither panicked nor underestimated either of us. I do applaud thee.”
“I have seen all kinds of war, in my time,” Hob says. “Plenty of it, for many reasons. Picked up some skills, I daresay.”
“That is humanity’s lot,” the monster says, with pallid, aristocratic disdain, but then it arches its neck, in curiosity. Hob feels his bronzed and freckled face, that many have tld him is handsome, and his sun-tawnied hair inspected, by one that has not seen daylight for an eternity. “If you had not shown yourself, not warned the other human, thus allowing them to escape, you might yet have survived.”
“I doubt it, Stranger, for you are quick and cunning as a wolf that has no pack. And for all my many sins, I am no coward, to throw an unfortunate in the way of peril that’s earned by me.”
“No, it seems you have a singular regard for life, and not just your own.” The monster’s mouth is a lovely cruelty, curved in deepest rose. Hob wants to have it make a pattern upon him, an embroidery of ruddy suckings and ivory scars. “I find I am reluctant to take yours, in order to prolong mine. A man such as you is a blessing, whereas I am nought but a pestilence.”
Hob inhales, ever the sensualist, and is rewarded with a fragrance, not of mould, but of time itself. As he puffs back out, he winces at his briar-whipped cheeks. The monster stares at the fresh scabs with longing.
“I know that look,” Hob frowns. “You’re starving. I’ve been gnawed inside out by famishment too.”
“It is as well that I perish,” the monster says. “I have no desire to watch the world continually degenerate.”
“It’s true, there are new vices built up upon old. But there are wonders too.” Stubborn, even in the matter of his own demise, Hob sits down on a broken crate, and begins to regale the Stranger with all the marvels of the current century. The alleyway, miraculously, or magically, remains undisturbed, for hours, while they talk.
“And so, the New World awaits us, with open arms,” Hob finishes, half in love with the fae beast before him, that has shown such patience and perspicacity, questioning Hob with gentle intelligence and a dry, sly sense of dark humour. “I hope you don’t think I sought to trick you with my discourse?” He gestures at the lightening of the sky.
“Did you?”
“No. There’s still time for thee to seek the comfort of darkness. There’s even time to kill me first.”
The monster stands, with grace. A raven with red eyes scythes towards it, and lands lightly on one slender shoulder. Without thinking, Hob tosses a crust from the litter-pile at the bird, who snaps it out of the morning air.
There is a sigh that shivers like the soughing of worms in soil. “I do not think that I will.”
Hob looks at those incandescent eyes. “Truly?”
“Would you rather I change my mind?”
“On balance, no,” Hob says, then he hesitates, then unknots his kerchief, and offers the monster a deep cut at his collar-bone. “Have a lick, to speed thee back home.”
“Ah," the monster says. "So that is the wound I can smell on you.”
“Yeah. Well...That ravine? By the waterfall at the edge of the moor? I skidded down it, arse over tit, unfortunately. Bloody hurt, too.”
“I…flew across…” the monster confesses. “The sides looked very steep.”
And Hob laughs.
The monster looks disconcerted. But hungry. “You trust me to take only a drop? And not to drain you?”
“I think you can do what you wilt with me, Stranger,” Hob winks, then shuts both his eyes.
“Then…thank you,” a voice in his ear whispers.
It’s like being wrapped in liquid velvet. Or opium. Or decay.
His veins feel bounteous, as they are delicately milked, and Hob has the notion that they’ve been far too swollen, all along, and now this kind Stranger has come to graciously relieve him of his pathetic, plethoric engorgement.
“No, my Black Dove,” Hob mumbles, as he falls into an erotic, ecstatic swoon. “Thank you.”
When he wakes, it’s late into the following day, and he’s laid out on haybales, in a barn loft near to his own, original hunting-ground, half way along the old York Road.
His sullen mare is tied up outside. An old-fashioned cloak has kept him from the chill.
“Was it all a nightmare?” he wonders, but then he opens his hand, and inside he finds a ruby, strung upon a silver chain.