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The cage as physical reality is the first thing Tara learns, and those sense-memories will never leave her. None of this is skipping ahead; Tara knows it within her first full day, knows it just as soon as the initial disorientation and thought-stopping terror fades and leaves her with nothing but her body, physical, and the cage, physical, too.
She knows it like this:
Metal bars. Concrete floor. The musty stink of bodies that were there before her and met a different end. The cage is welded metal, uncompromising, the joins thick and shiny, hasty and new; the body of it is bolted into the concrete underfoot. The concrete floor is finished, but not well; it’s particolored with stains, urine stains, other stains. The smell isn’t as bad as it should be, except in the corner where a covered bucket hides her waste. A drain near enough to the center of the floor says, maybe sometimes it gets washed out. It takes her a little longer to learn the size of it; eventually, three paces by six paces becomes a familiar rhythm, but in those first few days she’s afraid to stand, to make herself any larger or more visible.
Early, she learns the sore press of the bars into her back. The ache of her butt against the concrete; the way her legs grow numb.
The first time Willow leaves, Tara tries to convince herself that the roughshod feel of the cage means hope. She tries to convince herself that mortal terror can be motivating, because it kind of has to be, and sits in the center of three paces by six paces and focuses hard, hands clenched on her knees, head bowed. But she can’t manage it. Already too weak, maybe. The beginning took a lot out of her. The bars shake but don’t fly apart, and the bolts driven into the concrete hold.
Willow returns not long after Tara gives up. “Another earthquake?” she asks, not to Tara, precisely. Her head tips like she’s listening for something. Then she looks at Tara and smiles, barring a line of small, neat, white teeth against an immaculate red lip. “Or was that you? Oh, now that could be interesting. Don’t you think so, kitty-cat?” Her voice is slow, silk; curious.
This is when it starts.
The cage, it’s physical; Tara, too. As she comes to know the aches and pins and needles of the cage, she learns:
Her clothes filthier with each passing day—that knowledge comes quick. Her itchy scalp after a few days more. Her body growing weak with blood loss and then with hunger. The plasticky taste of tepid water that promises only to prolong the suffering—but going without is worse. Senses, memorized, every one.
In the cage there’s no privacy, nothing to hide behind except her skirt, crouched over the bucket, pee coming in stuttering stop-start streams. There’s no company, either. Overhead she hears a bustle: the scrape of chairs or something dragged, the murmur of voices. Of course she thinks to call for help; but someone else’s screams make it clear, quickly, how useless the attempt would be. And when the floor above is silent, when Willow comes back down the stairs:
Coming out is worse.
***
Tara ended up here by sheer coincidence. She was walking home, late, from a midnight double-feature. Any excuse not to go home.
Tara thought her father’s house was a cage—and it was. Coming back for summer break was even worse than she’d imagined, and she did imagine, dreading it all though spring semester. When she stepped back in, the walls of the house closed in on her, and then opened to the night sky.
Tara thought grief was a cage, too; it was, locked around her heart. After her mother died, she did this: wandering into parts of town where she felt compelled to walk faster, she let the grief unlock, opening doors inside her. Late nights, staying up until sunrise at the 24-hour diner, learning things she already knew about herself, about the way she looked at the waitress with fishnets and Docs under the skirt of her apron.
Back to old habits, with school out and nowhere to stay in the town she picked off a map called “anywhere but here.” A quiet desperation and too many bad memories and her father’s warnings looming over her as nineteen grew towards twenty pushed her out, out, out. Nursing coffee at the diner and reading ahead for her 209 Lit class; rereading her mother’s books, hidden behind the copies of this or that young adult novel on the shelf in her childhood bedroom. And double features, and, on one particular night, the girl sitting beside her at the theatre—two girls cleaving to each other the way girls sometimes do in an unfamiliar place. From there something small and shy grew between them, Tara offering up her popcorn, hiding behind her hand at the whispered jokes, feeling the electric tension of fingers brushing in the bucket.
Tara wandered the streets after the credits, working her way home. She didn’t see the figure in mostly-black until an arm closed around her, a hand pressed to her mouth.
There was no fight, no chance. Her feet lifted from the ground and her head spun, blood rushing in her ears and pounding against her skull. She thought about the girl at the theater, indeterminate features in the dark, the awkward parting under the lobby lights, and thought, uselessly: I wish she had kissed me. And then the bite came, a sharp and sudden shock, and drove all thought from her mind. Took the rushing blood, too.
She woke again, locked safely behind metal bars, curled on grimy concrete, bloodstains on her collarbone, her favorite cardigan a poor protection against the chill. Already, she ached and shivered. Her throat was dry. The world beyond the bars seemed dim. At the edge of the cage, just within reach, were three bottles of water in those flimsy, ridged plastic bottles that crease so easily.
The cage stands in some sort of basement, below a warehouse, maybe, or an old store. There’s no windows, no natural light, but the electricity works. The space is lit by lamps on extension cords and by candles, never the overheads. Outside the cage, the basement stretches on, More concrete floor, concrete walls, concrete pillars, concrete ceiling with support beams and metal pipes running its length. A long, low room, narrow, the far side swallowed by darkness, the lights and the restrictions of the cage creating pockets of space. This one is hers.
Someone installed the cage, obviously, welded it and drilled it into the floor. Someone also carried a box spring and mattress and a whole bedframe, a dresser and an improbable armoire, a fancy sort of chaise, down the stairs. The bed is luxuriously unmade, the dresser neat with stacked books. The armoire often yawns open, draped in perfect, capricious chaos, blacks and reds, latex, leather, tufts of lace, the gleam of chain. There’s a desk, too, and two chairs, the chairs wood, beautiful, turned legs and spindles; the desk an ugly industrial thing camouflaged by layered scarves. These spaces, Willow’s spaces, Tara has a lot of time to observe, in those first few days. Nothing to do but watch:
Red-haired. Pale skin. Lounging half-dressed on the bed or pacing back and forth, reading, the dim distance obscuring the book covers. Spending long chunks of time dressing, undressing, primping. (No mirror, though, which is information Tara finds weirdly reassuring, because it means that Willow is a probably an actual, real vampire, not just some sort of weirdo, a delusional kidnapper—it’s not better, really, but it’s something to hang on to.) Painting her nails, painting her mouth. Tearing offending pages out of what might be textbooks.
When she catches Tara looking, Willow asks, “Do you like what you see? I don’t mind if you do.”
Tara looks away.
In the long hours of being in, particularly when Willow is gone again, Tara has endless time to think. That’s when she starts to put together the knowledge of cages. Not as a list, like this, but as a knowledge in her skin and bones and bad sleep, in the itchy crust of a scab, for the ache of hunger, the gnaw of fear, the dull and constant awareness of her body. She learns the cage as tactile (concrete grit, tepid water, the metal-spike scent of her own blood), theoretical (home was a cage, heart was a cage, this is certainly a cage—so all cages are real, but some are more real than others, and this one has bars which are cold, firm, and very, very real). She learns that a cage is for going into, for hours. For long boredom, cut down the middle by a terror which is unsustainable, exhausted by exhaustion; Willow’s comings and goings become events, time markers, although her schedule is unpredictable.
And cages are for being dragged out of.
The first time out, Tara loses a handful of hair, a sharp tearing pain as Willow hauls her out and across the room by the roots. Tara tries to kick, tries to scramble, but she’s too weak and Willow is so strong, and her head is as empty as a screaming cave. It ends with Tara pressed to a support pillar, Willow’s arm across her chest and neck, holding her there, while her teeth find a fresh spot on her neck, a new vein to pierce, and the bite goes right through the fear and makes Tara’s mind go deep, dead quiet.
Cages are for being dragged out.
One more thing. This last lesson takes much longer to learn, exceeding those first strange days by a good while, although she saw glimpses of its truth years ago, in the way her mother would avert a question like the answer held some secret shame. Tara learns early that cages are real. That they differ, shape and type, strength and purpose. She learns they’re for going in; for coming out. It takes her longer to learn this:
A person can put themself in a cage and lock the door and swallow the key.
***
“I used to have a puppy,” Willow says, mournful. She rests a shoulder on the bars and strokes them up and down; every touch of hers is sensual, intentional. “Puppy was a vampire, like me.” A head tilt, like a shrug. “Well, not quite like me. But he was resilient. Sometimes he had a collar just like yours.”
Tara tugs the sagging edge of her cardigan up, trying to cover the bruises and dried blood at her throat, but the gesture just makes Willow laugh.
“Don’t be shy, kitty-cat,” Willow says, fingertips slipping through the bars, half wave, half beckon. “I know the difference. Puppies like that, they can last for just about forever. They get all grumpy, but they can do it. Humans, though,” with a sigh, “when I play with them too much, they go and die on me. I don’t like that. Not when it’s on accident, anyway.”
Tara presses back against the bars, like they can hold her up, like she isn’t already kneeling, weak. She’s not sure how long she’s been down here. How long since her last meal. No clock, no sunlight, and only Willow’s erratic habits to measure the passing time.
But, all guesses being equal, Willow feeds on her every other day. Which means this is day (night) five.
Willow turns the corner of the cage and reaches through the bars. Tara tries to shy, but the touch lands, brushing her cheek, pushing hair from her face, a caress that sends a shudder through her, stomach-sick, skin crawling.
“My last one made it almost ten days before he went all gray,” Willow says. “You’re doing a lot better. What’s your secret?”
Tara can’t meet her eyes. She watches the toes of Willow’s boots and tries to ignore the roil of stomach.
Willow stills, staring, and then turns on her heel with a huff and, “Bored now.”
***
Day seven (give or take), Tara knows, certain as stone, that she is about to die. Willow reaches again for her mangled wrist and Tara tries to pull away—not that it helps, not that she has any chance, but it’s a reflex, animal instinct: not this, please, no more. The bite there throbs with a sickening pulse, but that’s not it. It’s the chill in her fingertips, the thinning of each heartbeat. Certain as a stone is as stone, as the sky ought to be blue, as the stars wheel and the seasons turn, the next time, the next drink, the next pull at her skin will kill her.
Unerring, Willow snags Tara’s wrist. She tsks at the wound, the half-clotted mess, red as a mashed cherry. Then she presses a rag against it.
An impossible breeze flairs and spirals through the basement, tangling in the so-straight tips of Willow’s hair. “I haven’t been a vampire that long,” Willow informs her. “I still remember how to fix a boo-boo. Don’t squirm.”
Willow binds the bite in contemplative loops, studying her own hands like this second half of the process, hurt and then help, is unexpectedly interesting. Instead of patting Tara’s hand and shoving her back into the cage, which is more than the best that Tara can hope for, Willow cracks open one of the water bottles and wets another rag, wiping old blood from Tara’s forearm, her collarbone, the space where her neck meets her shoulders. It’s the first tender touch since—
Since—
“Please,” Tara says. “Please, please, let me go. I want to go home.”
She doesn’t want to go home, exactly—a cage is a cage, even that cage—but begging is incoherent that way. At least she doesn’t cry, “Please, I want my mommy.” Now that would be foolish.
Willow cups Tara’s face, turning it, wiping away tears—and so Tara learns that she’s crying. Willow’s hands cool the fevered heat of her cheeks. What comes next is inevitable. There’s no shock. Only soft red lips, first on Tara’s jaw, her chin, the hollow beneath her ear.
“Pretty kitten,” Willow says. “Don’t be sad.” She licks at Tara’s neck, a long lewd stripe, and Tara flinches away and then comes back, drawn in by cool palms, by inevitability. “Let me help,” Willow says, and wipes away the blood and the tears. Under the copper tang, Willow has a spicy scent, cinnamon, carnations, clove.
When the real kiss comes, Tara doesn’t pull away. She (hates herself, she) leans in.
Willow’s mouth opens against hers. It’s not Tara’s first, or her second, but it’s one of the first that feels like something grown, known, Willow licking in, invading deep.
And the taste is wrong. Copper-sharp. Wrong.
Tara pulls away now but Willow’s hand is tight in her hair. She tugs Tara back and burrows her face under Tara’s earlobe, and Tara feels the change come on, skin to skin, Willow’s brow morphing, angry; the threat of teeth brushing her pulse.
“Please,” Tara says.
“I could make it fun,” Willow says, voice ever so slightly changed, accented by fangs. “For me, anyway.”
Willow lingers. Tara can feel the cool breath against her skin, and she can imagine, easily, the puncture. The pain. She’s lived in that pain. Seven days, give or take, and she hardly wants more.
She knows (stone) what would come next. Knows it as she knows the brown stain that clings to the concrete in one corner of the cage, a sweep that trails down to the drain.
She does not want to die.
She wants— But how to ask, in this stillness, this closeness? Willow, caught between impulses, and Willow is all impulses; her attention is Tara’s life.
The air is heavy. Willow breathes in unnecessarily and Tara, too, takes a shaky breath. Willow’s fingers comb, gentle, through the tangle of Tara’s hair. “Please” rises up the column of Tara’s throat, and then the thin walls of the bottle fold with a plastic crunch and it tips, spilling water over the floor. Willow turns her head and Tara watches her shake it off, the moment, the heavy weight of her brow, features settling, her smile small and crooked. “I got you soup,” she says, and the shift is so inane that Tara is left grasping.
Willow leaves her and crosses to a grocery bag, and Tara envisions a vampire at the grocery store—dressed to the nines, shoving away a patron who tries to pass her with a cart, debating tomato or chicken noodle. Impossible. Funny, in the distant place where emotions lie, the ones that don’t fit in the cage.
Willow comes back with a can and, “And a can opener,” brightly, holding it aloft. “No microwave. Oh well.”
The metallic of cold chicken noodle is a bad parody of blood and, after a week without, Tara’s stomach informs her that if she eats too much, too fast, she’ll bring it all back up, but she lets the coagulated broth seep into her spoon and swallows it, one shaking sip at a time. Willow sits across the table and watches her like she’s watching a favorite TV show, like there’s something very, very funny going on.
“Do you know you’re a witch? I mean, really.” Willow asks.
Tara’s fingers tighten on the spoon and she stares into the can, willing herself not to shake, not to spill. She doesn’t answer.
“You don’t know how to use it, though, do you? Mm. Me, too. Kind of. The other me, she’s a witch. I’m still not clear on the whole thing of, can vampires do magic? But I can taste it in you. A special little something. Sort of sparkly. Like Pop Rocks. The red ones. It’s interesting. Ever since I moved out here, nothing’s been interesting. I’m doing all the work he told me to do. Searching, searching. But it’s,” a sigh, “boring. Not you, though. I like you.” A tilt of her head, a wandering glimpse of tongue. “Pop Rocks.”
“I just want to go home,” Tara says.
Willow pulls the can away from Tara; it’s still within reach, but the message is clear, and it leaves Tara holding a useless spoon. “You’re being boring,” she says, and sticks a finger into the can and sucks it, making a face. “I don’t like it when people are boring.”
“S-s-sorry,” Tara whispers.
“Do you know you’re a witch?” Willow asks again.
“My mother w-was.” Although that’s not the word the family used.
“Can you do magic stuff?”
“Mn. Yes.”
“I knew it! I knew I could tell.” Willow beams, her smile bright and wide. She reaches out and catches Tara’s hand. “Show me.”
“I-i-it doesn’t work that way. I can’t. Always.”
“You don’t need to be scared,” Willow says, which is insane. “Just try, kitten. Just a little something, for me. I want to see.”
Willow squeezes her hand.
Willow’s nails are painted, a glossy black. She does them on her bed, polish balanced on the sheets. She paints her toenails curled like a pretzel, graceful in that awkward pose, limber, healthy, as well and whole as the undead can be.
Tara watches her because it’s more interesting than staring at the long shadows of the ceiling beams, the gray flat creep of the floor. Because she can, because there’s no escape and no point in not seeing. Because Willow is beautiful.
Willow squeezes until Tara’s knuckles hurt.
“What can you do?”
“Lift things. S-s-sometimes. Small things. Sometimes I can m-make things burn.”
Willow’s face lights. “Oooh. I like fire.” Tara’s breath comes short, her chest tightening like a fist is reaching inside her to grab her heart and squeeze. Willow’s grin is too wide and her teeth are so, so white. “Try for me, kitten. Try now. Here.”
Willow grabs the grocery bag, upsetting the last of the contents, unopened cans of soup banging down to roll across the floor, and thrusts it toward her. “Burn this.”
Alongside her breath, Tara ties up every instinct to protest that she can’t, that it’s impossible. Don’t be boring, the thought echoes.
“I feel it in here,” Willow says, hand under her bust, pressed to the busk of her corset top thing so that the leather creaks. “Magic. I think it’s magic, anyway. Show me, kitty-cat. What can you do with yours?”
Tara’s eyes close. She’s not sure that does anything, but maybe it will help her focus. She reaches for the magic. She’s never really understood how to describe it, and the one time she tried, her mother’s reaction was—well, it was a cage in its own right: Please don’t let your father hear you talking about that. It’s like reaching through the dark, fingers groping for something that someone else has moved a few inches to the left. The bag makes a shushing sound that could be movement or could just be it settling on the tabletop, the paper sides collapsing. Tara doesn’t look.
“Kitten,” Willow says, her voice a sing-song, teasing.
“Please,” Tara says, not sure what she’s asking.
Willow clicks her tongue and sighs; a creak of leather: Willow shifting in her seat. Boredom.
“No,” Tara says, and opens her eyes, and Willow holds her gaze like a physical thing, like the iron grip that dragged her out of the cage that first time, her scalp screaming, her throat screaming, her heels kicking. And the bag bursts into flame—just one corner, a flash that’s then gone, a curl of grey smoke.
“Oh, hey.” Willow sounds impressed, her surprise a tiny, genuine smile. She turns the bag, peering at the scorch mark. “I didn’t think you were gonna. Was that hard?”
Yes. A few swallows of salty broth haven’t done enough; Tara’s bound wrist throbs with her strange heartbeat. Tara nods and the basement spins around her, the lamps smearing warmth over the grey walls. Willow, too able, much too quick, catches her before she can fall, the smooth line of the corset pressing against the curve of her upper arm.
“You’re a good kitten,” Willow says. “I think you should stick around. Sound fun? We can stay up all night, talking spells, practicing magic.”
Tara’s head rolls, resting on Willow’s shoulder. The basement has an extinguished candle scent. Willow has a carnation-spicy scent. She’s tired. She’s been tired since the first bite. She’s still hungry. She’s still scared, but in a distant, worn way that’s oddly satisfying, her emotions finally small and quiet enough to fit inside the cage.
“I like you,” Willow says. “You know ... hey, kitty-cat: I don’t think I caught your name.”
“Tara.”
“Tara,” Willow echoes, and from inches away Tara hears Willow tasting her name, eating it up from the tip of her teeth to the back of her throat. “We’ll have fun, Tara.”
Willow scoops Tara up in her arms, an effortless motion. She carries her to the bed, and lays her down, and Tara lets it happen. What else could she do? The mattress is plush, soft, feathered—a mattress to drown in; or maybe it’s just that it’s not concrete, not the hard floor of a cage.
Tara closes her eyes.
When Tara wakes, Willow is watching her. “You smell awful,” Willow says, picking at Tara’s clothes, the sweater, the skirt, the bloodstains and the dirt. “I guess that’s my fault. But. Still. It’s kind of rude.”
Tara flinches, but Willow only rolls her eyes. “Oh, relax. You can have a bath. I won’t watch. Well, okay. I might. Bath, clothes ... keeping a pet is going to be so much work. In you go, kitten. I’ll go shopping again. Do you like black?”
And so Tara goes right back in the cage. She goes in with a new can of chicken noodle soup and a spoon and the can opener, and a change of clean, borrowed, too-small clothes, a black skirt, a red blouse, ruffled at the sleeves, and a new, empty bucket. But she goes back in, and sits on other people’s stains, and eats the soup, one slow bite at a time.
The coming out part becomes gentler, in some ways, but no less inevitable; the going ins stay long.
***
The bars say this far but no farther. They say, can’t leave but can’t come in. Tara has had the time to learn them, their shape and size. Now she memorizes the join of cage to the perpendicular rectangle where four bolts anchor metal to concrete, a weld which is slick and smooth under her thumb as she rubs it, rubs, back and forth. Certain and steady; comforting, almost, almost.
Outside the cage, a big guy grunts and heaves a tub off a dolly. It’s difficult work, but not as difficult as it should be: the tub is a clawfoot, regal, heavy, and that means he should be struggling. Instead, he lifts it with a quiet grunt and eases it into place, out of Tara’s view. There was a bathroom here the whole time, one of two closed doors on the other side of the basement, Willow’s side of the basement, and that means Tara was been squatting over a bucket when she could’ve used a toilet. That means she could’ve washed in the sink. But neither: bucket still stinks and she’s still dirty, her hair greasy, the smell of herself clinging, waxy and thick, to the insides of her clothes.
“Should take me a few hours to get it hooked up,” the guy says. “You know, never thought I’d still be doing this as a vampire. Seems, I don’t know, weird.”
Silver-slick, little ridges, like a ripple frozen in metal. Tara almost smiles at her folded knees, at the silence that means Willow doesn’t care. Almost knows the blank sigh that follows, the theatrical way Willow rolls her eyes.
“I’ll, uh, let you know when I’m done. And then I’ll get right back to tracking down—”
“Bored now,” Willow says. “Just do your—whatever. Job. Thing. Go.”
“Yeah, can do, boss.”
Metal scraping concrete. A low-voiced curse, intermittent banging and squeaky sounds, pipes and wrenches. For a long, long time, crowding into the echoing space of the basement. This is one face to upstairs voices, but in a muted way, because Tara is small and still and doesn’t want to know. The cage says “and no further,” but the gaps between the bars are wide enough for voices and clanging noises; wide enough for an arm.
But when Willow heads for the stairs, she stops at the pillar where someone has sunk hooks into the concrete, holding jackets, holding chains, holding the key to the cage. She plucks it from its hook, disappears it into the ruffles of her cleavage; she cranes around to call down to the shadowed far corner, the bathroom, the vampire-plumber at work. “I don’t like it when people touch my things,” she says. “Hands to yourself, okay?”
The bars say: you’re mine. And that’s a comfort.
The next day, the first bath is lukewarm, the water (or what sloughs off Tara) rust-gray and filmy, and Willow, of course, Willow watches. She sits on the toilet lid, incongruous in shiny leather pants, closing in a space already too small and never meant for a clawfoot tub, and watches.
Still, to be clean is a comfort, too.
***
Last time it was one fang pricking Tara’s thumb, so slight but too thick through meat, so deep that it felt like it touched bone, the blood bubbling up for Willow to lick clean. A proper bite, this time, pain and pressure on the crook of her elbow, crushing, piercing, deep but brief, one bruising swallow. The way Willow licks, seeking the last drop, could be tender if it didn’t hurt so much. The wound radiates, hot, sensitive. Bites overshadow all hurts, scabs and bruises and her aching back. Bites are deep red dives that stretch out of and through time, lasting far beyond their brevity. They linger.
They must for Willow, too. Or else why would she stop after a swallow, why would she chase the blood with her tongue, a wet stroke of borrowed heat? Willow eats others fast, Willow is voracious, Willow makes screams sound and the ground thump overhead, Tara’s heard it, heard it all; Willow is eating Tara slowly, little sips.
Willow installed a bathtub; that, too.
“Tasty,” Willow says. She drops Tara’s arm; Tara cradles it, elbow bent to keep it from bleeding. Echoing Tara’s thoughts, Willow asks, “What makes you special, hmm, kitten?”
“I don’t know,” Tara whispers.
“Uh oh, wrong answer.” But Willow’s not really angry: she rolls onto her back, arm reaching, and then tosses Tara a rag.
Tara presses a handful of cloth into the crook of her elbow and tries again. “M-m-my magic.”
Willow smiles, her head tipped back, eyes closed. “Maybe. Or maybe I just like having a pet again. Puppy... Mm. I used to play with him until he whined. But this is fun, too. Don’t you think?”
Tara can’t keep up. Against her palm, pain beats with her pulse. She’s heard bits, pieces. The Master, a title that would be laughable if vampires weren’t the ones using it; the Order of ... something, Willow searching for something else—these are the other, somehow better reason for footsteps above her head. Only Puppy feels like information she ought to retain, a warning in the cracks between Willow’s words.
Fear and exhaustion conspire. It’s hard to think of anything at all. She nods, uselessly.
“Aww, you’re tired, kitten. That’s okay. I can be nice. Show me one little trick. Then I’ll tuck you in.”
“I don’t know i-if I can.”
“But you’ll try. Won’t you? For me?”
Fear and exhaustion. A thin, dizzy feeling down to her fingertips, her toes, like a Halloween sugar crash that goes on and on, endless on. Or not endless at all. Little sips—but Willow is eating her. Every time the door swings open, it could be the last time. And the last thing she’d know would be the sound of Willow’s heavy heels, the smell of carnations and copper; pain.
“No” is right there, volunteering itself. It’s an old habit. She bites her lip and holds it back. She isn’t in her father’s house anymore. This is a different cage. “I’ll t-t-try,” Tara says, and closes her eyes.
Her hands shake, and the rag slips, and she feels a tickle of hot wet on her forearm.
“Concentrate, now,” Willow says. Tara nods and reaches for her center, reaches for a goal. A breeze, an earthquake. Knock down a book. Feel for the air pressure, the movement, the thump. At her side, Willow turns over in bed and reaches for the rag. She presses it to Tara’s arm, firm, steady, cool fingertips bracketing cloth, and the thump isn’t a thump but a crash: a whole stack of books hitting the ground.
Silence, then, and Willow’s hand frozen on Tara’s arm.
“Oh, kitty,” Willow breathes. “You’ve been holding out on me. I want to know all about you.” She licks a streak of red from her finger and smiles.
It’s hard to carry on a conversation—with a come and go stutter, with her head still reeling from the blood loss and from the burdensome relief of having something, anything to occupy Willow’s attention: not just a blood bag, not just a pet, but a witch. Untrained, unreliable, uncertain she can pull the trick off twice; but anything for bandages and bathwater, anything to stay alive.
For a mattress, lying down, trying not to fall asleep.
For cookies, store-bought, brittle and crumbly and so sweet that her teeth ache; they’re delicious, in her desperation; they revive her.
She tells Willow more in an hour than she’s ever told another person, maybe even her mother. She tells Willow about her mother. About not quite being sure, but knowing anyway, that her mother had magic; knowing that she wasn’t supposed to have it, and that she tried to teach Tara ... something. If not what, or why, or how to use it, then where it was, locked inside her.
She’s surprised she has the energy for tears, but they come, gritty and hot.
“But I don’t know why. Why did she tell me if it’ll just ... make me like you? It doesn’t f-feel evil. It’s just m-magic. I wish she were here. So she could e-explain.”
“Get a ouija board,” Willow says, and it’s not funny, but Willow seems to think it’s a quip. “Or get over it.”
The opening part in Tara wants to iris closed, but that Willow is wiping away those tears with a fingertip, Willow is taking a breath just to exhale it, Willow is looking past Tara, at some distant part of the basement, the smirk gone from her lips—and Tara knows a little, now. This is her life and breath, this is bigger than grief and fear; Willow watches her, and it’s essential that she watch back. Watch, and listen. Not to the rare clear words that filter through when strangers stamp about overhead, but to this. To Willow’s moods and the rhythm of her breath, and to the words that she says so soon after the insistence that it’s just that easy to forget grief:
“Xander and I, we used to play. You wouldn’t have liked him very much. But I did. He knew me. He gave me toys; he liked to—watch.
“And then he was,” a flick of her hand, fingers spread, “poof. Dust. Bye-bye, Xander. No one wants to play anymore. Maybe the Master is right about lying low. After the attack? Who knows what could happen. But go fetch this, Willow; try to be discreet, Willow... Can I tell you a secret, kitten? His plans are boring.”
She leans forward, conspiratorial, and Tara, still sniffling, still reeling, still meets her halfway. Her life, her breath, lips painted the same red as her blood. “He wanted to turn people into Capri-Suns. I mean, they’re tasty. But it’s no fun if they just let you drink. I hope he never gets around to the whole apocalypse thing. If his gods are like him, they won’t be any fun, either.”
Tara can’t follow her, not all the way. “Apocalypse” ought to ring like a bell, but it’s already happened, hasn’t it? The world is over. Monsters are real. Her own god is petulant with wanting. Willow can feel, perhaps not guilt, or remorse, but if she can feel pleasure, if she can feel boredom, if she can want and enjoy then she can also feel losses, she can feel lack. Grief, it makes you go crazy. Maybe it makes you a monster. Tara ought to know.
“I’m sorry Xander died,” Tara says, because it’s important, somehow, that Willow know that.
Willow smiles without much smile. “Oh, fuck Xander. In fact, I did. And now he’s dead. And I have you.”
Both, at once, without much conflict:
Tara leans in, lingering in the gentle moment, the moment where they’re both lonely, and Willow gave her a rag to help stop the bleeding, and brought her cookies, and wanted to talk about magic. And fear like rictus climbs her spine and locks her there, because that’s a threat she can intuit without understanding.
But if it happened now, it would be so forgivable. The moment, mattress, forehead to forehead, the cooling tears. She wants to brush her teeth. Maybe she does want it to happen. Instead, she falls asleep.
Willow lets her.
***
No. This is when it happens. Tara wakes still in the bed, a blessing, not knowing any idea of how long it’s been, these sunless rhythms counted only by Willow’s passage; by bites. A few hours, maybe; maybe less. Willow is still there, of course; it wouldn’t do to leave her pet unattended. Willow is on the other side of the bed, on her side, paging through one of the books that Tara knocked to the ground with her clumsy magic. This one is a phone book, open to a familiar page: natural medicine, New Age. She stops when she notices that Tara is awake. She pushes the book between the rungs of the headboard, and it hits the floor with a heavy slap.
“I’m hungry,” she says, with that chest-deep sigh that opens up the word, wide enough to fall into.
This, finally, is the time for: “I c-can’t,” Tara says, trying to sit up, to be awake again. Too soon, two days too soon. But we bonded over loss, Tara thinks. You let me sleep. I still would rather not die. “It’s too—”
“Don’t be silly, kitty. If I eat you up, the mojo might go. Also, you might die. No fun.” Before relief can penetrate, Willow’s eyes roll up to the ceiling like she can peer through it; seems unlikely, but for all Tara knows, maybe she can. “Maybe I’ll pop out. Grab a bite.”
Slow, like someone else is explaining it to her: another victim, flesh blood alive, all because Tara is nervously guarding what little she has left. “Please don’t,” she says, the plea out of her before she can think better of it, but she’s thinking, thinking. Thinking: another life, and all her fault.
Willow sits up, that sensual joy spreading across her face, her grin wide and bright. “Is the kitten volunteering?”
“I-I—” Another denial, as impossible as the first. “I can’t. I just—please don’t—”
“Don’t want one, don’t want the other. What is it that you do want? Do you even know?”
“Please.”
“‘Please what, Willow?’ Even the other me, she knew what she wanted. I heard about it. Way too much. Stupid human things, high school drama. Boys,” huffed out with a sneer. “But you. You don’t even know that.”
I want, but nothing follows it, except, I don’t want. I don’t want this. I want to leave. I want to go home.
I want to live.
“I can think of a few things,” Willow says. “Actually, I can think of plenty. Psst psst, here, pretty kitty.” But it’s Willow that comes to her, fluid, a shift of leather and skin. She straddles Tara’s hips, she holds Tara’s cheek, she licks, tongue, saliva, a line up Tara’s throat. Not a bite. A different message, clear as the slick in her panties in the movie theatre, a lifetime ago.
The same message.
“Tell me what you want,” Willow says.
She doesn’t know. “I don’t know.”
“No this, no that. Don’t eat me, Willow. Don’t eat them, Willow. How boring. Tell me. What do you want?”
“I don’t—”
“I do.” She always does. Envy it, fear it, hunger for the way her hunger is so uncomplicated, so sure. Borrow it, choice subsumed by the will of her, the pressure of her mouth on Tara’s throat. Tara hasn’t been small since thirteen; she’s not small, now, a few weeks wasted away—but Willow’s strength is inhuman. It’s easy to feel weak. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. It helps.
The first time Willow rapes her, it’s almost a mercy.
Willow touches her, and Tara feels her body betray her: the wet heat between her legs, the shaking in her thighs, the tightening in her belly. And feels the shame of it, the knowledge of how easily her body responds to Willow’s, even as her mind fights, the struggle like the struggle to use the magic, groping through the dark for something not quite there.
Lipstick and an eyeliner pencil topple off the nightstand. Aimless, tense winds stir the stale basement air. The mattress creaks, and Tara’s wrists ache—that’s not the magic, that’s Willow pinning her down.
Willow doesn’t burst into flame above her. She doesn’t fly backwards or break apart. The magic is stronger with Willow than anything Tara has ever known, and Tara makes the armoire fly open, clothes toppling out; and can’t use it to push Willow away, or make her stop, or kill her.
When it’s over, Tara is shaking and wet, tears on her cheeks, slick deep between her legs, sweat in the crease of her thighs. Willow’s embrace is as cool as flipping a pillow to the other side, and Tara buries her face in Willow’s chest and shakes and cries.
“See?” Willow says. “Wasn’t that fun?”
***
From inside the cage, Tara watches Willow hold up shirts, one by one. “Xander used to tell me how pretty I was. Do you think I’m pretty, kitty?”
“Yes,” Tara whispers.
“Should I wear the black? Or the red?”
“B-b-black.”
“The black, you think?” Pulling it on, over her head, shaking her hair out, turning to show it off. “Xander and I were each other’s mirrors. It was almost as good as the real thing. What do you think, kitten?”
“It’s pretty.”
“Aww. I know.”
Black lace, framing the stretch of pale, unblemished clavicles. Tara will wonder, later: if the red, then—what? Would red signal danger, would it scare away? Would red have made a difference?
But not yet. She plays Willow’s talking mirror. After Willow leaves; and after thinking, briefly (holding it and then putting it aside: too much for her current abilities), the word, rape; and after eating some cold canned chili and a not-quite-stale piece of plain white bread—after all of that Tara sits cross-legged in the middle of the cage, eyes closed, breath forced slow and even, and tries again to shake the cage apart.
Without Willow, the touch of her eyes or, keener still, her hip, her hand, her lips, the magic sits low and sullen, a lump, unwieldy. Guilty. Tara’s exhausted. She hurts, her shoulders and her lower back. And maybe that's why she feels herself fail, the air empty within the cage; the bars, unmoved.
Her family fears what she will become, but the answer seems more likely: nothing at all. The fallen books, the spill of clothes, half the basement’s disarray is her temper tantrum, a plea, useless either way. But she cannot sway the bars.
Tara lies down and curls up, but she doesn’t cry. Too tired, now, and she’ll need the tears later.
Willow returns with two things—both gifts, by her particular logic. One Tara sees later, when she can sit up again, focus her eyes again; when she has the attention to turn on spell books, half a dozen of them. One turns out to be an art piece, novelty item, dolled up with hand-tooled leather and fancy cream paper, but the text itself is pure invention. But the rest, backroom oddities, know to ask sales, stored where people who have a vague idea about demons and real magic come for answers and find only half-truths, those books with their yellowing pages and their paling ink—those books are true. Willow and Tara will spend hours, long, long hours, bent over them together.
The other “gift,” such as it is, is a person.
Tara never sees her face, but she recognizes the voice. How long it takes, how no one hears, why the blood doesn’t paint the floor and all of Willow’s fancy clothes, so many things Tara doesn’t know. She retains, instead, sensory fragments: The cold of metal bars in her fists; in the aftermath she finds a big slice on the edge of her palm that she maps to a raw bur on the horizontal rail. Her ears aching, pressed flat, hard flat to her head, sore and hot under her palms. The smell of copper, like a penny held beneath her nose, and the stink of fear, the sweat of it. She doesn’t watch the murder, and the black behind her eyes is no memory: just a shame, a blank space where a moment should be.
And the voice. Tara had heard it before, saying, “That incense is imported directly from Tibet. It’s real, not the synthetic stuff.” Saying, “Quartz is my favorite for amplifying magical energy. There’s a few larger pieces in the back if you’re interested.” Saying, “Come again!” In screams it’s nearly unrecognizable, but the “please please let me go I won’t tell anyone I promise I won’t tell” lingers like the healing cut, like the stench of fear; Tara hears it a hundred, hundred hundred times in her head, until she recognizes it, places it alongside patchouli scent and showy clutter and a weirdly infinite variety of candles, in pillars and jars and cast in the buxom shapes of Venus figurines.
Not even the owner (would that have made it better?) but, Tara thinks, just a cashier. She never knew her name.
When it’s done, Tara curls on the concrete, the hard floor pressing sharp into her shoulder, her knees pulled up, trying to hide behind the flimsy cover of her skirt. Willow crouches at the bars and smiles and smiles. “Did you enjoy that, kitty?”
Tara keens into her knees, arms wrapped around herself, holding herself together and in. “Go away. Go away, go away, go away.”
“Pretty kitty. The first time is special. That was your first, right?”
Tara’s shaking, uncontrollable, violent, like she’s coming apart, and she wants to crawl away, hide somewhere else, a darker place, a quieter place. But there’s nowhere to go. In the very middle of the cage, Willow can’t quite reach her; Willow pets the bars, a sound like “shhh, shhh, shhh.”
“Oops. I forgot about your mother. Did you watch her die?”
Bloodless. Chapped lips. Unwashed body smell, cleaning product smell. The nurse, the beeps, the whirs. The gradual silence. The full house feeling so empty. Her father’s eyes at her cracked door (“no closed doors in my house, girl; I don’t need you getting up to any mischief”) until she fled to diners, to the streets.
Is the fact that she can barely recall it now a blessing? At the time, it doesn’t seem so.
“Please go away,” Tara says, but she’s losing her voice. She did too much of her own screaming, earlier.
“But I like looking at you like this.”
And, for a long time, Willow does. She strokes the bars and studies Tara’s pain.
Then: the creak of leather, the click of key in lock, the single low whine of the door swinging wide. Tara tears her skirt, her new skirt, scrambling backwards; her fist hits a can and it spins out between the bars of the cage.
“Please,” Tara says. “P-p-p-please.”
Willow stands above her, the heels of her boots giving her height. Tara has seen a dozen, hundred expressions: the sullen, the bored, the pouting, the delighted, the cruel, the joyful, the hungry; the hard folds of her forehead before she bites, and the long red line of her lips in a smile. Willow’s flat-ironed hair, her straight part, are disheveled, giving her a wild look. And her expression is nothing but waiting.
“P-please,” Tara whispers.
Willow reaches a hand towards her, palm up, fingers beckoning. Tara’s gaze fixes on the glossy black nail polish.
“Pretty kitty,” Willow says. “Let’s play.”
Tara shakes her head, a frantic, silent no.
“Promise I’ll make you feel better.”
Tara can’t look up, but the hand waits.
“Don’t you trust me?”
No. No. No.
Tara puts her hand in Willow’s.
The bed smells like sex and carnations and blood. The second time Willow rapes her, Tara can’t slip into that other space, can’t lose herself in a physical sensation; she goes stiff and still, her body locked in, fighting. Willow’s fingers sting as they push inside her. Willow’s teeth scrape her ear. Willow’s hand lies over her throat, such a gentle pressure.
Abruptly, Willow rolls away. “You’re no fun.”
“S-sorry,” Tara says, but she can’t bring herself to do whatever she’s supposed to do, to not be boring, to be entertaining. She keeps hearing the dead girl’s voice, and it’s too loud, louder than Willow’s.
“If I knew I’d be doing all the work, I wouldn’t have bothered.” Willow sits up, reaching for her blouse, the black one, lace, clavicles, dark enough to hide blood stains. “Cage, now,” she says, and something unlocks (locks) in Tara, a burst of energy without thought; Tara doesn’t know what her reaching hand is doing until it closes on Willow’s wrist. Willow turns to look at her, eyebrows rising.
Tara doesn’t let go.
“Kitty’s being awfully bold.”
Her hand on Willow is a stranger’s, pale knuckles, tendons shifting. But she doesn’t pull it away. What do you want? A few hours, a failed spell; screaming—no revelations there beyond the same pile of negatives: I don’t want this, that, here, now, anything to do with you. That’s no good. Tara is staring, still, at their hands. Willow’s is so pale. I don’t want to go back in there. And isn’t that the same as— “I want to stay,” she says, her voice small, thirsty. “Here. With you. Please.”
Willow looks curiously at her, at their near-joined hands, at the sheets and pillows and the wall behind Tara, taking it all in, thinking, thinking, the silence stretching until Tara is compelled to fill it but for the utter absence of anything, even a stammer, any words more. But Willow is never shy with her opinions, once she settles on them. “It feels good,” she says. She turns her wrist, palm to palm, fingers lacing. Those fingers were inside her. Tara can feel it still, a raw, hot stretch on a tender seam, like the corners of her mouth when she yawns too wide, a split and sting. Willow says, “Being wanted.”
“Please.”
Willow smiles. “I’m a bad liar. It’s too much work. I won’t be all soft and sweet and— You were so fun, watching her die. Like you’d never seen anything so bad in all your life. I liked it. But I like this, too. Lie down with me, kitty cat. Let’s cuddle.”
Said with a mocking little smirk, a tease. And against the satin sheets, Willow’s hands grow restless, finding Tara’s hip, her chest. And there are no lies: no promises in the cocoon of her arms, no whispers of sweet nothings, no apologies, no “it’s okay,” no “you’re okay,” no “it’s over,” because it’s not. Willow isn’t even particularly warm; Tara misses warmth. But the press of her small, high breasts, the weight of her arm, the quiet between them after the girl’s screams: a reprieve is still a reprieve. Tara closes her eyes and counts her own heartbeats; Willow, too, seems to listen, her face pressed to Tara’s breast.
And when Willow grows bored with it, Tara goes back in.
***
Tara is going to miss the start of the school year. She can only approximate (she hasn’t been certain of days for a while now): this is the longest, and worst, summer break ever. Runway girl. Dropout girl. She wonders what her father thinks. She almost—almost—wishes he would come and drag her home.
She was looking forward to that Lit course. Psych, too.
But she has a different education, now. When Tara can compartmentalize, and forget where they came from, the books are her favorite thing in the world. The pages are thick and textured, substantial, important. The gilding on the bindings has faded with age, on most of them; the embossing cups her fingertips, soft dips, smooth ridges. They smell like vanilla gone musty in a dark room.
The books themselves aren’t magical; not as far as Tara can tell. But what’s in them is real.
She and Willow sit cross-legged on Willow’s bed, the silky sheets spread neat and taut beneath them, a tray, a candle, an open book between them. Clasped hands, between them. Together, they chant the words, stumbling and then gaining confidence. The air changes, the light changes, prickly and charged. Willow’s skin glows, pale, translucent, like porcelain, lit from within; her hair flies. But Tara knows it’s her words, her own words, her lips her tongue, “O ignis, potentia ardentis, in tenebris, tuum lumen adfer, ex profundo, nos—” Latin bulky in her mouth, but it’s her efforts that spark the golden-yellow glow, the candle lighting; and then the candelabra and then the standing lamp, which doesn’t make any sense but happens anyway, every light in the basement flaring to life before, with a pop and crash, the bulbs shatter and the flames blow out.
In the sudden dark, between their heavy breaths, Tara’s heart pounds; electric, herself; alight.
“Whoa,” Willow says, and Tara giggles. “That was some serious magic. I’m going to need new bulbs.”
“Sorry,” Tara says, the giggle dying, caught for a breath between that flutter of true joy and a paranoid fear, the growing-familiar fear, of Willow’s fickle moods.
But Willow only reaches back over the gap, her fingertips on Tara’s, her skin cool, her touch a shiver. “I told you. You’re special.”
They try another, a cantrip for good luck, a silly, harmless thing. Tara knows it works because a gold sparkle, like a handful of glitter tossed by no one at all, drifts through the room, carrying a smell like champagne, dry and sweet and bitter. She knows because she helps Willow sweep up the broken bulbs, and never cuts herself, not once. She knows because when Willow feeds on her that evening, before she puts Tara in the cage, it’s all but a love bite, tender (excruciating) on the flesh of Tara’s thigh, and Tara only feels a little woozy, afterward.
A few days ago, Willow devoured a life, entire. She’s not polite; she’s full.
But, O ignis—the magic burned in her like flame. Tara never had a focus for it, before: words to say, components to arrange, symbols, sigils (for luck, draw a U shaped upward from the caster, on a surface, or in the air; a curve to catch the luck and hold it), never had a teacher, those leather-bound volumes, one annotated by some other witch’s cramped hand.
Like calls to like, calls it out. The sound of Willow’s footsteps brings fear over her, in her scented bed are nightmares, and Willow doesn’t seem to mind, finds it amusing as all the rest; but through her touch, real magic. Real magic. The nights spent side by side, their heads bowed over spell books, their shoulders brushing; and then stripped to skin, satin warming under Tara’s back, Willow cool above her, her lips, her fingertips, her hips.
She’s learning. And she's not sure it's evil, after all.
Tara is allowed to use the real bathroom (sometimes), to nap in a real bed (sometimes), to eat, although the food never gets any better. She doesn’t ask what’s behind the basement’s second door. She gives the stairs a wide berth. Sometimes it’s safer in the cage, where she can stare at their concrete risers and yearn, indulging the futile urge to sprint their height, her calves tensing, toes curling, the long, cool beam under her hand hemming her foolishness in.
The peace holds for days. A week. Willow sips from her. Sits with her. Tara practices a spell that makes the water that comes tepid rust-red from the squealing old pipes that feed to wherever this is, this basement that Tara knows as a bedroom and a cage, turn warm and pure. Tara closes her eyes and lets the steam rise around her, the water’s edge like a caress.
Willow’s lips at her temple. “Nice, kitty-cat.”
It can’t last.
When Willow leaves again, she doesn’t explain herself—doesn’t stand at the foot of the stair and declare her intentions. But Tara knows. Willow dresses with particular care, discarding one outfit, and then the next, finally settling on the red, red laced with leather, red to match her hair. She paints on her lip with an unerring hand and then bends close to the cage, turning her face this way, that, saying, “Did I do a good job, kitty? Is it perfect?”
What would happen if Willow missed a spot, if the answer were, “There’s a little on your teeth?” Could she sway with the correction, take it with a smile, wipe the error clean with her finger?
“You look beautiful,” Tara whispers.
“Thank you.” Willow kisses her forehead through the bars, and leaves.
And Tara knows. She sits in the waiting, not touching her food, not hungry, not at all. Scabbed bites ache on her thigh, the insides of her elbow. The magic books are on Willow’s desk, stacked neat, the one they used last sitting on top, the crimson ribbon in the spine marking their page.
If there’s a spell to shatter a cage, Tara hasn’t found it. Levitation, telekinesis, those powers feel stronger, day by day, the winds she kicks up are smaller, more controlled, eddies of air; the power focused where it belongs, lifting things: a leather shoe, chunky heel, big black buckle, rotating in midair—falling, precipitous, sharp—pausing, a hover, a held breath, and then landing, sweet and soft, on the bed. Tara can do that.
She doesn’t know that she can pull the books to her, or rip the cage from her, and she doesn’t know when Willow will return or what will happen if Willow comes home to find the basement in half-managed disarray, Tara on her knees in the middle of the cage, spell books and candles scattered across the floor, her hair wild, her eyes wild, her mouth shaping the words.
The cage has a pillow, now. A blanket, a fleece thing, soft but getting dirty as the days go by. A can opener. An array of cans: peaches, chili, soup, tinny mushy green beans. The bucket, emptied regularly. No mattress—not quite enough room, not for mattress and cans and bucket.
Tara tucks herself into a corner, steel bars hugging her on two sides, a familiar ache to the left of her spine, and shoves the pillow between her head and her shoulder, and pulls the blanket around her, and she waits.
She dozes, but not for long; not long enough to dream.
She waits.
She hears Willow’s laughter, Willow at her brightest, most seductive, most normal. She hears Willow’s shoes on the concrete. She hears a soft thump, and silence; and then someone else’s laughter, throaty and feminine and low, a stranger.
She doesn’t move. She can’t.
She waits.
She hears voices, indistinct, weaving. Growing distinct: “...much further?” “Right down here. You’ll like it. It’s my little hideaway. All secret and cozy.”
Footsteps on the stairs, and Tara should have tried to pull the books towards her and should have found the perfect page and should have torn the bars off the cage and she should have killed Willow before and she should have done a lot of things—maybe just screamed—and now it’s too late.
Halfway down the stairs, a scuffle, a tumble, and a mop of dark hair over a cute black dress comes skidding down the last few steps. Willow, in red, in black boots, in perfect hair and perfect lip, comes a step behind. “What the fuck,” the dark hair says, and scrambles back, her hands skidding on the concrete. “What the fuck. What the fuck. Oh my God.”
“Don’t be scared,” Willow says, and, oh, how pretty she is, how sweet, and the girl on the floor sees Tara, who can’t bring herself to unknot from her little ball. “On second thought,” Willow says, “Be really scared.”
“Oh God oh God oh God oh God.”
“Hush.” Willow crouches. She puts her hands on the girl’s face and turns it away from Tara. She looks over the girl’s head and locks eyes with Tara, and Tara’s hands freeze on the hem of the blanket, everything freezes, the bars are cold, the concrete cold, Willow’s eyes a warm scattering, blues and greens and browns, agate eyes, familiar from locked gazes, from shared secrets, from shared power. Tara watches the long, slow lick that Willow traces from jaw to temple. “We’re going to play a game,” Willow says, and the girl has gone silent, her bent legs at awkward angles, skinny out the bottom of her cute black dress. “A fun game. It’s called, ‘here, kitty, kitty.’”
“Please, no,” Tara whispers.
“No,” the girl agrees, and Willow shushes her, and Tara can’t look away, can’t blink, can’t stop watching the way Willow’s fingers stroke the girl’s jaw, tilting her head up and back, neck bared.
“Come here, kitty, kitty,” Willow sings.
Tara’s hands shake.
Willow tosses her hair and her face does that thing—it’s never not ugly, the way the change comes on her, heavy furrowed brow and deep eyes gone uncanny, wolflike, yellow; demon-like, fangs, protruding, red lip stretched over too many teeth. “Kitty,” Willow snarls, and Tara watches head bowed, watches her partline and white scalp; Tara closes her eyes just as the bite comes, a sick wet sound and a choked scream, and Tara presses her hands to her ears, pressing, squeezing, the heels of her palms against the sides of her head, listening to her heartbeat, to the blanket, scritch-shhht, plastic fleece staticky where it brushes her hair, her cheeks, her ear; listens to the sound of her own breathing, fast and shallow, and not the rest. Not the sounds that Willow makes as she drinks, the slick, sucking, gulping sounds, the slurp of her mouth and the wet of blood.
It would be easier if it were like the first. Wouldn’t it, kitty? If it were a miserable few minutes screaming, no, please, stop, and a miserable few more, curling up tight enough for cramps, muffling her own cries, shaking apart; and then the quiet.
But it’s not like the first time. The silence comes on creeping; the scritch-shhht of the blanket pauses and there’s nothing underneath, no flailing, no wet.
And then footsteps, and the heavy sound of dragging, and the scrape of metal. Tara keeps her eyes shut, her hands over her ears.
A click, a whisper-squeal, a drag, a thump, and Tara is forced out from behind herself when a warm body crashes into her. And then the door closed, locked.
Tara’s vision is fuzzy, her face wet, but she can make out the dark hair and the black dress. She struggles in her cocoon, half-pinned by the blanket and the dead weight, and manages to get her arm free.
Tara touches the girl’s shoulder, her neck, her mouth, her hands shaking too hard to feel for anything, pulse, anything, the warmth deceptive, the warmth could be deceptive, but then Tara feels slow breath on her fingertips and sobs into beautiful black curls roughed into tangles.
“I’m sorry,” Tara says. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
She pulls the body, the girl, her arms under the girl’s armpits, and heaves and shoves and pushes her until she’s propped up against the bars. She uses her own rags and own water and tends, as she’s tended to herself (as Willow has tended to her), to the wound: a messy bite, worse, somehow, seen on another body, a different girl.
When Tara’s finished, after the bleeding has stopped, she curls around the girl and pulls the blanket over both of them. Shock. Both of them. She presses their bodies together and she shakes and she cries and she tries, as the tears dry, as her breath calms, to feel the magic, the air pressure, the energy. The magic’s always there, somewhere inside her, and Tara reaches and reaches, but the warmth slips through her grasp, just when she needs to hold it. Needs to hold it and press it into the girl’s wounds: heal, knit the flesh, repair, please, please.
There must be spells in the book. Light, luck—Tara hates herself for, oh, as many reasons as she has, and the shame is a familiar thing, a thing that’s been growing, like the bruises and future scars; and she hates herself for being so stupid as to not look for useful spells when she had the chance. Healing. A spell for healing.
“I’m sorry,” Tara says into the girl’s hair. She’s beautiful, Tara thinks. She’s alive, Tara thinks. “I’m sorry,” she says, again.
On the other side of the bars, sitting cross-legged, the inseam of her tight pants stretched taut, Willow watches.
Tara doesn’t sleep. She watches, too, her eyes burning, dry. She waits for the girl to wake up.
When she does, it’s with a start. Her hands flail, but Tara’s ready for it and the girl doesn’t hurt her. Tara takes her hand, rubs her knuckles and says, “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.” These are the lies that Willow never gives her, but they’re what the girl needs. “Shhh, it’s all going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Where?” the girl asks. “Where am—”
Tara realizes, sick and low in the back of her skull, that she’s hoping the girl can tell her that. Tell her where they are, and what Tara might find up those stairs, and how far it is to help. Maybe she can try, later; maybe, if Willow gives them space, if Tara’s desperate questions aren’t too suspicious, maybe the girl can tell her something.
But Tara only shushes her, and soothes her hand, and says, “Shhhh, you’re okay. My name is—” kitten “—Tara. What’s yours?”
“Billy,” the girl says, her voice hoarse. “Billy, I’m Billy. Where am I?”
“Billy,” Tara whispers, and she can’t cry again, not with Billy’s panic in the air. “Hi, Billy. You’re p-p-” the stutter Willow’s doing, not that Willow’s doing anything, anything but sitting there, watching, “probably thirsty. There’s water.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“Okay. Okay.” When Tara is reaching for a bottle, Billy pushes herself up and looks up and finally sees Willow, and that’s when she screams.
“Shhh,” Tara says, but it’s no use, and Billy screams, and Willow leans back on her hands, her smile wide and her teeth still red and, like they’re sharing a joke, her bright gaze moves to Tara.
Tara puts her hands on Billy’s shoulders and turns her around. “Billy,” she says. “Look at me. Don’t look at her. Just look at me.”
“Oh God oh God what is she she’s a monster, oh my God.”
“I know,” Tara says. “Just look at me. Drink your water. Okay? Take a drink, it’ll make you feel better.”
It would be easier if it had been like the first: brutal but quick. It would be nicer if the long, slow process of soothing Billy, coaxing her, giving her sips of water, holding her hand, rubbing her back, ended a different way. Tara entertains the fantasy over the next few hours, the next day, the next two days. The care comes too easy: Tara takes what she knows she needs, after, (warmth, rest, liquids, sugar) and turns it outward. Body heat. Food. A steady voice, a soft touch. The words, the lie, “You’re going to be okay, just stay calm, I’ll figure something out, just hold on.” The daydreams come when Tara tries to sleep, or when Billy’s panic wears down to exhaustion, or when Willow, bored, leaves them to go do whatever it is she does.
Billy (“Sabina, but everyone calls me Billy, ever since I was little”) is a college junior—older than Tara, although Tara feels older, in this place—studying anthropology, and she’s supposed to be on her flight tomorrow, I guess today, this was my last night out before—oh my God. She has a brother named Caspian and parents who will be missing her because she would have said goodbye, would have called before getting in the air and after landing, too, just to say she’s safe; but she's not safe, anymore. In one fantasy there’s a manhunt, parents coming and police, and Willow’s dragged away, and Tara sits in an interview room, an officer asking, “What did she do to you?”, and Tara’s answer is where the fantasy cuts off, scissor-sharp, because what could she say?
Billy says upstairs is, “Some sort of warehouse, I think. It didn’t seem totally abandoned, but, I mean—I mean, I wasn’t really paying attention. She was so...”
She doesn’t say what about Willow was so distracting, but Tara understands.
At least Billy can tell her the date. Her guess was pretty good, given that time goes strange, down here.
In another fantasy, holding Billy’s hand has the same effect as holding Willow’s, and, hand in hand, the magic flows between them, and they rip the cage from the concrete, and they find the stairs and the front door and burst out into the night and the moon. Tara tries. She tries in secret, under the blanket, when Billy’s asleep, just trying to make water move inside a half-empty bottle. And it does, swirling, a little whirlpool, but not the wall-climbing, bottle-shaking Charybdis it would be if Willow’s cool hand, black nails, were closed in hers. She tries again when Willow is asleep, rousing Billy in hushed whispers and trying to explain: “I know it seem s-s-silly. Just try. Try to focus on the water.” But Billy (a comfort, warm—how Tara has missed human warmth—gripping hard, obviously trying, despite some understandable skepticism) might as well be the concrete floor for all the magic that comes from her.
The fantasy: The two of them can comfort one another and somehow make this bearable.
The fantasy: The two of them can overpower a vampire, and Willow will open the door and in an ill-imagined flurry of activity (the wooden chair, smashed to a point, and Willow, dust) the two of them are free.
But the reality is that when Willow pulls Tara out to feed on her, Billy watches with dawning horror, big dark eyes raccooned with long-lost liner locked on Tara’s body as Willow reveals the old bite marks, and then the new one. Tara watches, her body numb, as Billy cringes and then looks away, sick with Tara’s own shame.
Willow takes a lot, that time.
Billy is, in reality, just a girl. She helps Tara staunch the bite, but her touch is tentative, skipping clear of Tara’s breast, and she can’t quite meet Tara’s eye. There’s no harm meant in it—probably nothing meant in it—nothing more than Billy’s terror for her own life, her own breast, which is untouched, still, her own thigh, which is pristine, unblemished, unbitten. But, somehow, that look on Billy’s face is harm upon harm; to Tara’s dull surprise, it makes her angry. The anger is almost impersonal, almost a moral outrage: how dare she turn away from the ugliness of what’s happening to them? How dare she pretend, even to herself, that she can’t see?
Oh, Tara. How ironic. Listening to the cashier’s last breath.
That anger lasts a while, but it doesn’t survive waking. Tara splits a can of creamed corn with Billy, and then she crawls back under the blanket, knowing the chill in her extremities, the irregular flutter of her heart, knowing just like she knew it before Willow’s first kindness:
Another bite now would kill her.
She feels Willow’s approach, quiet on bare feet, black nails, glossy as river stones. If you think someone’s nails look like river stones, maybe some part of you loves them. Loves enough to see every tiny detail, and remember.
“Look at you, kitten,” Willow says, a hand running thump, thump, thump, along the bars. “You’re all pale and clammy.”
Billy looks between them, eyes darting, lips parted.
Willow sighs, soft, plaintive, that pure innocence that’s in her when she’s at her most cruel. “I’m hungry,” she says. “And you don’t look so good.”
“Please,” Tara manages.
“Please,” Willow mocks, her voice soft, sing-song, the repetition two syllables: “Please.”
There’s a pause where it almost doesn’t happen, and then, “I’ll do it,” Billy says. She doesn’t see the trick, doesn’t know Willow, not like Tara does. But the words are still so brave.
When Tara reaches for her hand, Billy reaches back, sisterly squeeze, it’s okay, I got this, and the anger was never there; it was just a hopeless, miserable pride.
Tara tugs Billy back and struggles to her feet. “I want it,” she says, letting the blanket drop. “Not her. Me.”
“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” Willow calls.
Tara’s knees shake, and her hands, but she pulls open her shirt and the buttons go, clattering, scattering, a handful of spilled pearls. She reaches up and pushes her hair behind her ears and she faces Willow.
Willow gives her a smile like oh you poor thing, but there’s pride there, too.
“Kitty, kitty, kitty.” Willow lets Tara reach for her, and when their fingers twine, the magic goes between them, and the cage door clicks open. Was it that easy all this time? Willow steps forward; Tara, locking her knees, manages half a step. They met in the doorway, and Willow, strong and cold and solid, holds her up, an arm around her, a hand on her hip, pulling Tara chest to chest, skin to ruched satin and soft leather. A dizzy wave spins Tara’s head, and her blood pounds, her pulse a dulcimer hammer.
Willow kisses her so tender, and Tara kisses her back, and the tears come, hot on her cheeks.
“Shhh,” Willow whispers against Tara’s mouth. “That was really something, kitty. That was something special.” A delicate lick, a hint of tongue.
“Please,” Tara says. “Willow.”
“Pretty kitty,” Willow says. “You don’t have to watch, okay? I promise I won’t be mad.”
It takes a second—there isn’t a second—to penetrate. Tara flies backwards, pain ricocheting off her hip and shoulder blade and upper arm, bone hitting metal bars. The floor’s a shock and her breath flies out of her, and she probably tries to say something, like “no,” like “Willow,” but the word is airless and Billy’s scream fills the room, fills Tara’s head, knocking out everything else. Tara lifts her head to see Willow bowed over Billy’s body, hands claws, red hair half hiding teeth bared, and Tara turns from the ugliness. She has to.
***
Tara turns her face away and hums to herself, as if that will block out the sounds—the wet rip of teeth, the aborted scream, muffled. Not muffled enough. And then, footsteps.
“Come on, kitten, open your eyes,” Willow says, her hand under Tara’s chin, and Tara tries to pull away, but her body’s weak from blood loss, and Willow’s stronger, anyway. “It’s no fun if you don’t watch,” Willow says, ignoring Tara’s stuttered protests.
Across the room, the girl watches. Not Billy. Billy’s been dead for some time—at a guess, maybe ten days. This one has a lower voice, a bigger girl, maybe; Tara hasn’t looked. Tara can feel the weight of that inverted gaze as Willow kisses her, as Tara lets her: the girl’s eyes fixed on her, terrified, pleading, blocking nothing out.
“Look at it this way,” Willow says, her thumb tracing Tara’s lip. “It’s gonna happen regardless. I mean, either you enjoy the show, or you can—” Willow’s shoulders curl in, her hands clap over her ears, her face twists up into a cruel parody, and Willow hums; no, not a hum, a high, desperate whine.
Abruptly, Willow drops the act. “It was amusing at first, but, come on, kitten. Don’t be boring. I get cranky when I’m bored.”
“I’m sorry,” Tara says, the words a whisper, a ghost, barely formed. “I’ll pay attention. I’m sorry.”
“Good kitty,” Willow says, her expression softening. Behind her, in Tara’s peripheral vision, the newest girl is starting to crawl, silent as she can, towards the stairs. She’ll make it, Tara thinks, her mind a strange place, empty of anything but the girl’s movement, Willow’s hand on her cheek. She’ll make it. Willow grins at her, red lips, bloody teeth. And a new thought: now, the magic, now—
But Willow turns and the girl shrieks and Tara’s body won’t obey, her hand won’t reach, the spell, which spell?, won’t shape, everything in her head is gone. Willow crouches and grabs the girl by the hair, yanking her up. “Don’t leave before we get to the best part,” Willow says, and the girl’s body arches, a horrible shape, a bow drawn tight, lifting into and away, and is this what Tara looked like at the beginning? Because it’s not what she looks like, now, when Willow feeds.
But then, Willow hasn’t killed her yet.
Tara watches.
After, when the girl (the body) is gone, when the basement is empty and echoing with the memory of final breaths, stinking of fear and pain; when Willow takes Tara’s face in her hands and turns it to her, Tara’s cheeks are wet with tears. Willow wipes them away with her thumbs.
“This is why I didn’t want to play without you,” Willow says. “The pretty look on your face. It’s too good. I like the screaming part. And the crying. And the begging. And the ones who don’t quite think it’s happening until, uh oh: it is. But you? You remind me that it’s not just the blood and how good it tastes.”
She kisses the tears. Saltwater on Tara’s lip is bitter; the copper scent of blood is rich.
“Every single one is one whole life. I know that. The Master, he forgets. But not me. And not you. Selfish little kitty. You take every single one in here,” Willow taps her temple, “and here,” her chest. “You eat them up, too; pretend it’s all about you and how much you care and how you’re so sad and so, so sorry. And you know what? Silly, selfish kitty: it is about you. It is now, anyway. I like watching you watch. You make it matter.”
“P-p-please.”
Willow laughs. “Poor kitty. Do you even know what you’re asking for?”
But, surprising but: Yes. A little, yes. Her body knows what she doesn’t want to know. Her body strains toward Willow, her fingers curl, grasping at Willow’s wrists. Still, the impossible things: let me go home, please; don’t, please. But also—
“Oh. Brave today. Come, now. We’ll have such a good time.”
Willow flips like a light switch: when she loses interest she’s gone, but when she’s here she’s so fully here, the silky-cool touch of her fingertips straying just over every line, her voice soft, her mouth close, the press of her lips to Tara’s neck, the curve of her throat, the jut of her collarbone, and down.
It is good. That’s selfish, too.
Tara lifts into her, wanting the contact, the cool, the comfort. In the dip below her left rib, Willow says, “You know. There’s something else I could do to make it better.” Bruises mottle Tara’s hip. Willow presses into them, a low ache to counterpoint the slow, hot rise of want, and Tara hisses. “And all the fear—I could take care of that, too. If you want.” Willow cups Tara’s pubis and holds her there.
Tara shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No.”
The smile she doesn’t see but feels, pressed to her belly, so familiar that Tara knows it though her skin, behind her lids. “Not ready for that? Hmm. Okay. I can be patient. I guess some things might be worth waiting for.”
When they fuck (if that’s the right word, and Tara knows it’s not, but if it’s not, what is?), they light the basement, golden flicks of light. It’s not the magic that Tara practices over a spell book. She’s gotten better at that magic. Stronger. More controlled. Each point of focus helps: she commits the sigils to memory, and Willow has disappeared and come back again with a bag of supplies, dried herbs and candles and chalk, and more esoteric components, a jar of graveyard dirt, dried chicken’s feet, pickled rabbit’s eyes. But when Willow licks into Tara, it lights a different kind of magic, something less practiced, which could break the world apart.
Willow can’t cast. Tara has her theories, thought over in the quiet hours in the cage: Maybe magic needs a soul. Maybe Willow’s casting is her strength or her sly seduction, maybe her magic is something more innate than incantations.
Tara has pieced together this much: Willow was tucked under the Master’s wing, his favorite child, when she had just been turned. All that Tara knows about vampires is Willow, Willow and distant voices and the vampire plumber (pretty silly, in retrospect), but if the Master is as old and as powerful as Willow says, then he must have seen something in Willow, something special, to grant her that position.
And Willow is young. Her body says fifteen, sixteen, small and taut with cheeks still baby-round; she says, few years since she was turned, and less since he sent her out here.
“A codex is just a really old book.” Willow says that, too. (A little later, pillow talk; they're busy, right now.) “From back when they used parchment, not paper. Don’t look at me like that. You’ll hurt my feelings. Other-me doesn’t have all the brains. I can still do research. Actually, I’m pretty good at it.”
But those details, unearthing the Cuul Codex, the Master’s plans and motives, those things don’t matter.
Willow does.
Willow can’t cast. But she has something, some sort of potential—among other qualities an evil vampire overlord might value. Maybe she’s young, new, still learning. Maybe her magic takes an alternate route, through her body, deep in and through Tara—no need for the candles, for the sigils, the words, when Willow is between her thighs.
When they fuck, Tara feels better.
***
Willow brings home another. A woman; girl is the wrong word this time. How does she get them here? How does she dispose of the bodies? How did she get the magic supplies, did she go shopping? Tara has a lot of time, in the cage, or let free to roam the basement, keeping a careful, performative distance from the stairs, to think. To speculate. To worry if she supposed to be worrying it out, Willow’s plans, the Master’s plans. Not all of her thoughts can be bundled into the corner of her mind reserved for things not to think about; that corner is too full.
But she tries.
Tara has learned, by now, to look. This woman is older, she’s broader; she has Tara’s hips and shoulders. Not quite old enough, or she could be the shape of Tara’s mother. But her skin is dusky, and her hair is dark with thick waves.
If they die anyway, and they do die, and if Willow will be annoyed if Tara shies away, and if it’s what she needed Billy to do, then it feels almost respectful to watch.
Willow keeps the woman for a week, so Tara has plenty of time to watch. A week of the two of them locked in the cage together, much of the time. The woman is, “my name’s Inez, Inez Moreno, please, I have a family, they’ll miss me.” Her name is, “Call me Inez. You poor thing. How long have you been down here?” Willow doesn’t always keep the others long enough for Tara to learn their names or to sit with them, hip to hip, sharing body heat. Inez’s hands shake, but her dark eyes don’t waver. And it’s wrong, so wrong, that comfort; wrong to watch when Willow feeds on her and wrong again to want Inez’s steady gaze as Inez tries to mother her.
Inez has two kids, five and just-turned-three. Inez is married, Inez works at the Mexican place down on Center, Tara knows it, she’s eaten there.
Inez is pragmatic, kind, and smart enough that she asks, “What are my chances?” almost as soon as they’re alone together. Tara shakes her head, and Inez nods, quiet in her understanding, and presses a warm hand to Tara’s forearm for the length of a sigh.
When it’s Tara’s turn—
Tara knows the rhythm, now: when there’s two of them in the cage, Willow alternates, halving the burden, the blood loss; when it’s the others, the girls she drains in one greedy rush, Tara gets a few days off as Willow, satiated, gives her some time to heal. Replenish—and heal.
So when Tara knows it’s her turn again, and Willow is back and wearing a restless look too familiar, Tara cozies up to the bars, tucking her hair behind her ears and resting her forehead on the steel. “Willow?” she calls. “Can I come out and—” Inez’s gaze hitting the back of her neck pulls the stammer out, the shame, a blush “s-s-sleep with you?”
“Why?” Willow asks. She comes around the pillar slow, tilted face half hidden by her hair. She holds a folded piece of paper between two fingers, moving it, flick, flick, flick, against her thigh. “Did you get tired of playing house with your new mommy?”
“It’s been a few days,” Tara says. The desire is transposed, but not manufactured. Inez’s gaze burns on her.
“I’ve been busy with your new friend. She’s tasty.”
“Please?”
Willow’s eyes narrow, her chin lifts, and a smile curls where the curtain of her hair falls back. “All work and no play makes Willow such a dull girl. I finally found it, you know.” Flick, flick, thin white paper sliding against leather, and then Willow lifts her hand, flick, flutter of paper scrap to the ground. “If it’s the real deal, and hasn’t been replaced. The good guys can be so,” a “pfft” scoff, an eye roll, “clever.”
The Council, the White Hats, the whoever she means, distant, mythical figures, as unlike to break down the door as a knight or a superhero or her mother.
“I’ll have to go fetch it. Work, work, work. But, kitty, you’re right. This will be so much more fun.”
Tara wants Inez to see. Not the glimpse of a scab over the neckline of a shirt, or the wince of sitting on a tender new something, but this: the way that Tara knows to go to Willow, and the bite marks that wreathe her thighs like garters, the bruises and the scars, and the way that she doesn’t protest, that her body doesn’t resist, and the way she flushes, the sounds she makes, and the way her hands pull, clumsy, at the laces on Willow’s shirt. If the judgment is going to come, Tara doesn’t want it to be a surprise this time.
After, Willow spooning her, one hand propped on her bent arm, Willow tips Tara’s head so that Tara can see across the room, to the cage. Tara’s eyes aren’t as good as Willow’s must be. She can’t pick out the intricacy of every expression. But Tara can see enough to watch Inez watch back as Willow licks a stripe up Tara’s neck, slick and disgusting and unsubtle. Inez’s posture is tight and she doesn’t look away.
“Good kitty.”
Back in the cage, Tara is weak and Inez is still here. She helps Tara clean and dress, hands pleasantly callused, brusque in a kind way, like this isn’t a shocking intimacy shared between strangers. Inez helps her eat, too, sorting through the cans for something that appeals to Tara’s roiling stomach.
“I’m sorry,” Tara says, no longer sure what she’s apologizing for.
“Me too, mija.”
***
Willow is gone for a long stretch which might be a whole night—bracketed by, overhead, noises, footsteps, voices, some grand flurry of activity. Tara wastes this absence waiting, and trying not to think of waiting.
And on her return:
Willow carries it slung against one slender hip the way that Tara’s mother, that Tara, used to carry the toddlers. It thumps on the tabletop. The Cuul Codex is that big. Metal filigrees the cover, long tarnished; each page was part of a life, a calf, maybe, or a goat. Water and rot has eaten half of it, as if the text itself could be consumed, but what remains is enough to make Tara’s fingers itch. Magic, and not the clumsy tricks that Tara performs under Willow’s watchful gaze. Something different. Something vast and dangerous.
Willow doesn’t look at the book; Willow watches Tara unerringly until Tara looks up, fingers still on an old, old page, and meets her eyes.
That could still be a test, but Tara knows Willow: the lift of her brows, the sincerity of the question. “So. Is it the real deal?”
“I th-think so,” Tara says. Her tongue is dry and clumsy and it’s not because of her stammer. It’s the book, the book that smells like magic, like old earth and new fire. This is when to remember some overheard detail of the Master’s plan and the Codex’s place in it, but Tara doesn’t know vampires, she barely knows where Sunnydale is on a map (her high school had brochures for the state school there but didn’t hand them out, something about a recent closure) and she can never quite remember, the Order of Aureli ... the Order of... It doesn’t matter. Willow matters, and Willow is what she knows:
The beam of pleasure. The possessive hand that lands beside Tara’s in the heart of the Codex. The curl of fingers, taut and pale, nails digging into parchment. The growing furrow of her brow that on anyone else (not wearing such dark makeup in a lamplit basement across the table from one of two kidnap victims) would be almost childish, an overacted moue of concern.
Willow is her primary occupation, above magic, above the other girls; Willow is her survival. Moods, whims; the art of wanting. Every expression is an answer.
“I don’t kn-know the spells. I c-can’t really read it. But. We could learn? Together?”
This is the answer: Willow doesn’t want to take this to her Master, his Order, to the plans to raise old, old gods. Willow wants to play with her food and be comfortable and engaged. The end of her world as she knows it would get in the way of her fun.
“It’s Latin,” Willow says, rising to come around the desk. Tara turns in her chair, looking up. She doesn’t flinch when Willow’s fingertips stroke her cheek, when her palm settles, cool, on her throat. “Mostly. I thought it might be. So I’ve been learning it. It’s not too hard.” So casual, so bright. Intimidating. And impressive, too, like borrowing notes from the head of the class. “I help with the words, you do the magicky bits. And we find out just what’s in this book that has the Master in a tizzy. That could be fun.”
“Fun,” Tara echoes. She can’t help the smile that pulls at her. It’s dark magic; the hot buzz of power against her fingertips says so and common sense agrees: an ancient vampire isn’t searching for a book of recipes. But better the devil you know. Better to give Willow the answer she wants to hear; better still, Willow, pleased, leaning close to lick into Tara’s mouth, tasting for a lie that isn’t there.
***
“So. Seems that magic is real.”
Outside of the cage, Tara buys time or perhaps just relief. It makes her head ache, trying to marshal her thoughts to coherency when, anemia-drunk, she feels incoherent, corroding. Willow doesn’t tire, Willow only gets bored; for an hour she can flip through a thick, fine Latin-English dictionary, pinning down each specific word, the declensions of a noun or the tenses of a verb (gibberish specificities to clutter Tara’s head) while Tara tries to imagine without enacting, finding familiar parallels from more prosaic spells: if these components, tethered to these meanings, to a slow rhythm and an opening of hands, then...
Tara stops caring about Inez for long stretches. Willow does, too. It can’t satiate Willow’s hunger; only a few things can do that. But she drinks and doesn’t play, and it feels like a victory, every day that holds without tragedy.
The Codex scares Tara more, not less, as she begins to understand it. But then, terror is familiar.
“Yeah. Um. It is.”
“Vampires. Magic. Wonder what’s next. Demons?”
Tara cringes but, turned away, tugging up the back of her shirt, she hides it. Instead, she offers, “Unicorns?”
Inez laughs. “They’d probably end up murder-corns. No, I think I’d rather not know.”
Inside the cage, Inez is a comfort. That simple truth scares Tara as much as the Codex; more, because rituals to stabilize the summoning of great forces are too large for the confines of cage or basement or even of whatever building stands overhead.
Inez is a comfort so keen that Tara is afraid to enjoy it, to acclimate to it, and that’s how she knows it will be taken away.
But she does, anyway. Enjoy it.
“This one’s not so bad,” Inez says. Without Inez, Tara would be operating blind, reaching just over her shoulder to touch, with gentle fingertips, the heat and raised edges. “I’ll rinse it out anyway. Nasty bacteria, in...” mouths; unless vampires are different, a thought that gives both of them pause. The silence isn’t strained.
Inez watches but she doesn’t rubberneck, and there’s no distinction, really—Tara knows that; Tara knows how to watch—but it matters anyway. Matters that Inez can be thorough but gentle, water dripping cold down Tara’s back. Inez envies the toothbrush, Tara coming back mint-clean; she pities the love bite on the back of Tara’s shoulder. She knows that there is and isn’t such a thing as “not so bad.”
Or maybe all that makes Inez different is that Tara has changed, and known her a week, and has never seen her die.
Inez presses firmly to encourage clotting that the washing has undone. “You’re getting stronger, right? I mean, I’m new to all of this. But the magic, it sounds like you’re making progress.”
“I think so.” The Codex is like the Spanish immersion course that she considered taking over summer—should have scrounged, begged, borrowed; could have been there instead of here. “It’s starting to make more sense.”
“That’s good, right?”
“I think so. It’s—it’s a lot. It’s a lot of power.” She can feel it, even from the other side of the basement. When she’s gone, Willow just leaves the Codex—not exactly propping open the bathroom door or anything, it has pride of place on a new side table. But not locked up or hidden away; Willow must trust that what’s hers, down here in the basement, will stay hers. Not a comforting thought.
“Scary stuff?”
“D-definitely.”
“It can join the club. All done back here. You should see about sweet-talking her into some bandaids or something.” Inez’s hand settles for a moment, squeezing the unmarked side of Tara’s arm. A small and possible favor. Maybe Willow will pick up ones with silly cartoons on them, just to mock.
It’s been long enough, cleaning up, pulling her shirt back into place, that it feels like Willow will stay gone—for another hour, maybe two. Tara makes herself eat a half-can of something, the food so much mash on her tongue, her thoughts abstracted, fuzzed over with unknown Latins, with the afterimages of sigils. She pulls into the far corner and pees the tight dark urine of the deeply anemic (Inez averts her gaze with a now-familiar briskness). Day seven. Inez’s hands on her back were growing cold.
Tara starts clearing out the center of the cage, pushing the rubbish out the bars and arranging the cans in a neat line along the wall.
Inez rouses from a drifting that Tara knows from within. “What are you doing?”
Tara’s been trying not to think about it, head full of the Codex, of Willow, of fear. As if looking at the idea straight on could scare it away, her own magic shying to her periphery, hiding in the shadows—but now she has to look. There’s not likely to be any other chance.
“I’m going to try s-s-something,” Tara says. “A—a spell. It might be easier if I can hold your hand. Is that okay?”
Inez puts the blanket aside and sits crosslegged across from her, and manages to make her grip strong. “What else can I do?” she asks. Her gaze is direct, unflinching.
“I don’t know. Trust me. And—do you ever feel something. Like a warmth? Right here,” her hand on her sternum, below her breasts. “Do you know what I mean?”
Inez starts to say something, bites it back, and gives a tentative nod. Magic is real. Down here, almost anything is possible.
“If you can reach that, and try to focus on it,” Tara says. She swallows. “Then maybe it can help me. We can work together. Okay? So ... don’t be scared.”
“I trust you,” Inez says, and at her words Tara almost calls the whole thing off.
But Inez’s grip is steady. And she trusts. She doesn’t panic or push to her feet when the wind starts, a sudden gust becoming a held breeze and then a tornado threading through the bars of the cage, swirling, pulling dust and grit into a spinning cone. It wilds Inez’s hair, and Tara’s eyes and throat sting, but she keeps her focus, then narrows it down. First:
A piece of chalk, flying across the room, fast and straight as an arrow; it catches in the air in front of Tara, vibrating in place, and Tara plucks it with two fingers. One hand in Inez’s firm grasp; with the other, Tara writes a sigil for spellwork increasing, for scale, for amplification. She turns to either side, craning over her own arm to scrawl reiterations, annotations, trying not to mess up. There isn’t a spell to break a fucking cage to shards, not that Tara has seen, not that Willow has let her find. But Tara can improvise.
Inez doesn’t let go of her hand.
The grave dirt comes to her next. It’s clumsy to open one-handed. Tara grabs a handful, dry and cool, and sprinkles it over the chalk.
Inez’s eyes are wide, her mouth slightly open, her chest rising and falling quickly, but her grip stays steady. The air in the room is hot, now, thick and hard to breathe.
Metal is harder to come by; Tara’s mental inventory of the basement skips over books and satin and stray pieces of clothing, and comes up short; considers and dismisses the weight of chains and of the planning she failed to do; and then she realizes, stupid kitten, the cans— “Can,” she says to Inez, who doesn’t hesitate, just reaches behind her and grabs a can and hands it over.
Earth. Metal. Amplification. And the heady pressure in the room, making Tara work her jaw, her ears popping, a weight on her skull and a heat in her belly.
Components are loci of power. Components, and sigils, and symbols; names and figures and gods are power, but Tara doesn't know Inanna or Persephone well enough to articulate a call; she should have taken a history course, a religion course, something, studied something more. (She should be brave enough to use the Codex. She’s not.) Gestures are power. Anything can instantiate intent.
Tara puts the can down on the dirt, and holds the magic, and then pushes—
Pushes her palm through the mess on the floor, knocking the whole thing, can clanking rolling, dirt scattering, her palm on the sigil that says, bigger, more, faster, and Tara’s head swims, and she gasps and feels the cage around them and pushes that too.
The bars are steel, and cold, and Tara knows them by heart. Her hand scarred from where she cut it on the bur: the cage is in her flesh (and it will stay there). She knows every post, every rail, each bolt; she knows the slick of the welds against her fingertip, and the sore way the bars dig into her back when she leans against them, knows the whisper-squeal of the hinge and the grit of the concrete and the Rorschach of old stains, of her own stains. Tara knows every detail. She holds the cage in her mind, and pushes, and the bars shudder and groan.
Inez finally gasps, and over Tara’s left shoulder, Willow says, “You can do it, kitten. Focus, okay? Push.”
Like a giant’s platter breaking, a deafening sound, a crack opens in the concrete at a corner of the cage. The bars twist and contort, the bolts ripping out, the squeaky hinge squealing high and sharp. Tara can feel Willow behind her, but she doesn’t turn, doesn’t move. She wants Willow’s hand in hers, not Inez’s callused fingertips. She can’t tell if Inez’s magic is with her—if Inez knows magic at all. But the line has been crossed, and then some; metal joins complain and the concrete floor gives another lurch; it is now or it is never, and Tara already knows which, but Inez hasn’t realized yet, and the magic is in her like her orgasms, building up, up, up, to a precipice.
Tara swallows and lets it crest.
The metal doesn’t shatter into silver dust, but the bars gape and the concrete cracks and the cage, not cleanly, but unequivocally, rips apart.
Willow, when Tara turns to look, is beaming. Tara feels a smile stretching her own cheeks, and her vision swims.
“Kitty. I knew you could do it.”
“Dios mío,” Inez says, “oh, oh fuck.”
Tara, in someone else’s voice, ventriloquist girl, here and not here, says, “Now. Inez, now, you need to go. Go, go!” She’s never yelled at anyone before. Unless screaming “please” and “stop” count.
Tara tries to stand, but her legs won’t support her. She collapses into Willow and into the hip-height remains of the cage. Willow catches her, a hand under her armpit and an arm around her waist. Tara clutches back and tries to grab for Willow’s center, Willow’s magic, dipping both hands into a second pool, still full, still rich and dark.
Inez makes scrambling sounds, muffled under Tara’s pounding heart.
Both hands full, grasping, wet to the wrist in magic like blood, Tara twists and tries to turn it against Willow, to pinion, to trap her, to shatter her into red mist, anything to stop her. To stop her from stopping Inez.
Willow’s grin widens, her teeth bared.
Tara pushes, and the magic doesn’t respond. And Tara will never know: can Willow’s magic not be turned against her? Or did Tara not want to turn it, not really?
“Sorry, kitty,” Willow says. She’s laughing, delighted. “Not this time. Maybe next.”
She pushes Tara away, ungently, and Tara’s hands can’t hold, and Inez has made it to the second step and never sees the third.
“Willow, Willow, please, don’t, Willow,” Tara says, pointless as prayer, and Willow’s face changes. V over her brows. Eyes. Teeth, teeth, teeth. It’s not a clean kill. Willow can be neat, when she wants to. Can make it fast, if she’s in a hurry.
Neither. But Tara has learned to watch—even if her eyes are blurry, her ears are ringing; even this.
***
Inez’s blood is everywhere, painting Willow from lip to belly (pretty clothes, and blood is such a pain to get out), and it’s on Tara, too, her clothes, her hair, her skin, in the wake of Willow’s roaming touch. Tara can barely feel it for sobbing, hot dry heaves that scrape her throat raw.
“Poor kitten,” Willow says.
She pushes overgrown hair from Tara’s face and pulls her close, cool skin to soothe Tara’s fevered cheek, and Tara clutches back, her arm wrapped around Willow’s waist.
“What a show.”
“Willow, Willow, why, Willow.”
“That was something special. I’ve never seen so much power. Did you write the spell yourself?”
Tara nods, or else the shivers make her neck spasm. Inez’s body is still in the room. Tara didn’t realize what a blessing it was when Willow made them disappear, up the stairs and into a different world.
“Incredible. I always knew you could do it. I had faith in you. Oh, kitty. Clever kitty. Good job.”
Willow’s cool touch is familiar comfort, but the blood, sticky and stinking, crawls on Tara’s skin, and the magic won’t answer her, and Inez won’t either. Tara’s body is a wreck—how she has survived this long with such an accumulation of harm is impossible, her skin bleached and scar-crossed and bruise-blotched, and Tara’s mind—
She did it: the impossible. And Inez died anyway.
In flailing motions, Tara tries to push from Willow. She can’t hope to succeed, so perhaps she doesn’t want to. Perhaps she wants what comes: Willow’s hands closing firm, pulling Tara close again, then lifting and turning.
The mattress is a haven, a soft, soft place to collapse, to curl up and shake, her legs tucked up, Willow’s body curled around her, Willow’s arms, the press of Willow’s thighs, Willow’s voice in her ear, saying, “Kitty cat,” her hand stroking Tara’s hair. “Pretty cat.” From the bed, facing this way, Tara can’t see the body.
Willow undresses the both of them. She would never be anything but sensual, the slide of her fingertips, pulling Tara’s shirt over her head and running touch down Tara’s bare ribs. Sensual, too, as she wipes away the worst of the blood and sweat and dust, murder and magic trapped in damp cloth and washed away. Willow is quiet for some minutes in her work, and then, “I could give you a present,” she says. “Do you like my presents?”
Tara doesn’t answer. The sponge bath has grounded her, but to what she’s not sure. Exhaustion pulls deep at her marrow, deeper than pain should go. No one closed Inez’s eyes.
“I can take away the pain,” Willow says. “All of it, forever. Are you tired, kitty? I can make you strong. Next time, who knows ... maybe you could take me.”
Carnation and clove on Willow’s clothes, on Willow’s sheets (and blood—and the scent of blood). A small amber bottle of perfume oil with a glass applicator, right there, on the nightstand. One detail, small and in focus, and the scent all around her; the rest of the world remains a blur.
“Not just the bruises and bites.” Willow’s fingertip presses to Tara’s temple and holds there. “All the pain in here, I can make it go away. Everything will look different. It’ll be easier. No more guilt, kitten; doesn’t that sound nice?”
Tara closes her eyes.
“No more not knowing what you want. You’ll always know. I do.”
Willow’s fingers move through Tara’s hair, and the touch is sweet.
“You’ll be strong, and healthy, and so happy, kitten. You know your magic. You know just how strong you are. What could you do? I wanna see.”
It’s not that Tara doesn’t have a choice. But the choice is between two impossibilities. Between death and death—in the end, it all ends the same way.
“What do you say, kitty? Do you want to come play?”
Tara lifts her face.
She kisses Willow.
Willow bites at Tara’s lip, a barely-there sting. Her thumb brushes the side of Tara’s throat, where, just under the skin, blood runs a frenetic, artless rhythm. Familiar wanting rises in the memory of each touch. It’s hardly a yes. But Willow, Willow who wants, Willow who lives in her desires with a singular devotion, Willow who wants wanting—Willow understands.
Anything but this.
When her mother died, the lady said to sit for as long as they wanted with the body—no need to rush, now—but it wasn’t long. Tara’s father rose with a stiff dignity and rang the silent bell to summon a nurse, and the moment was folded up and tucked away, and everyone went home. All the work of the body went to someone else. Who cleaned her mother’s skin? Who washed away the waste? Who closed her eyes, or combed her hair, or dressed her, or laid her out? The last time Tara saw her mother’s body, her mother was long gone. At the family’s request (Tara was the one who called the funeral home, when it became clear that, this time, it would end that way; Tara is the one who made the arrangements, a kind of caretaking that felt naturally, what, feminine? A daughter’s duty?) there was no embalming; the makeup was tasteful and discreet, the eyes closed, the face made serene. But the distant changes of time and a stranger’s hands had moved Helen Maclay from mother to corpse.
Willow finishes her work. At the tub, she washes clean the last of Inez’s blood, displaced by a lover’s lingering touch that Tara returns in starts and silences, a grasping hand and long lapses into something like calm. Willow combs her hair, too long, split ends, only tugging a little. She helps her dress in a long silky shift in a marigold color that Tara might have picked for herself, in another life.
Willow lays her down.
Willow could force this on her, the way she has most things. And, to be clear: she is. Remember what Tara knows about cages, their nature, their permanence. One cage stands a twisted ruin on the other side of the room, but the whole basement has always been a cage. Willow is a cage. If Tara said no—; if Tara made a break for it, would she even make it up two steps?
Maybe. Maybe Willow would break Tara’s knees and keep her—like this, but somehow worse, indefinitely, house pet. Maybe Willow would follow a fit of passion to Tara’s death; that would be kinder, but such a quick, clean end seems unlikely.
It’s been long enough that thoughts like that have resurfaced, but not quite so long that the impulse has lost its momentum. Not so long that Inez’s body has cooled. So call it grief, call it exhaustion, say that the blood will out, her mother’s blood thin beneath her skin.
Willow could force this on her, the slow slide of her teeth—and is. But she also reaches for Tara, and Tara, with long practice, goes to her; Willow proffers her own arm, wrist dripping, an exchange, an invitation, and Tara reaches, and takes, and—
How awful, the taste, that she does it at all, that she drinks. Willow’s blood tastes like the last few months: Bitter and copper, the scent of it sharp. Foul. Deceptively, impossibly alive.
Willow’s last bite hurts just as much as the first, a deep, sickening, radiating ache, but it doesn’t seal away Tara’s awareness the way that bites once did. She’s acclimated. She can hold this pain and remain. She can feel, and she does. The blood is hot in her mouth. When she swallows, it burns, a sear from her throat to her stomach. Willow’s teeth lean on her moving larynx, choking, pulling from the very center, most vital, of her.
Willow doesn’t have to do much. Tara’s probably been on the verge of death for a long time, now. The last few weeks have been forever, but this seems to take no time at all. There’s pain and bitter blood, and her head pounds, her fingertips go cold, regret (grief) wells up and chokes her, but the relief that follows is worth any cost: Tara’s breath fails and she folds up, falls backwards, into the hollow dark behind her eyes.
And comes up, out, at night, awake inside her shadow, a photo-negative of herself, suddenly and completely clear:
This was a mistake, and not a small one. If she’d hoped to escape this way, to be released, she’s miscalculated.
Perhaps, after long, ruthless years of grudges and making love, Tara finally kills Willow, a stake to the heart (even newly born, Tara knows she’s strong enough, now, to manage it). Say all of that comes to pass. Willow will still be with her, in her memory and her thoughts, in her flesh, her blood. The cage will never leave her.
Tara knows that from the moment she wakes.
She also knows that Willow has cleaned up a bit. Inez’s corpse is gone. The ruin of the cage is going to take some doing to fix, but a little order has been brought to the space, enough to make it temporarily useful. Tara can tell all this without really looking around: her senses are stronger, clearer. It’s as if her mind has been rearranged to fit new data, or, better: she can perceive the data without the interference of her brain. She is no longer a middleman, a translator. What a morass there was, the mess that was Tara, that was a soul, trying to know and think and judge and control information in, reactions out. How much simpler this is.
For the first time in a very long time, Tara is smiling.
Beside her, Willow says, “See? That wasn’t so bad.”
Willow is in red and black, clothed again, dolled up, beautiful. She stares down at Tara, head resting in one palm, propped up on her elbow, and the look on her face is a smile, a mirror, the same.
“I got you a present while you were sleeping.”
Tara sits up (Willow echoes that, too), and she doesn’t have to push through a headache and a roil of nausea to do it, but her mind is on the gift, not the process.
“I was going to lock it up,” Willow says, dangling a familiar metal key in front of Tara. “But someone went and broke the cage.”
Tara lets the key hang and finally looks across the room. Chained to the ruins of her old cage, to the wall and a half that’s bolted, crooked, to the cracked floor, arms bound behind her, the new girl watches the two of them. Tara’s ghost, her own blood-red reflection. Tara holds out her hand and Willow drops the key into her palm, symbolic, oh so small. Tara rubs it with her thumb and lets it fall, and the sound it makes on the concrete, a little click clink, is the sound of a lock’s tumbler before a door opening.
The girl can wait just a minute. Tara does what she’s always wanted to do. What she hated to want; what was done to her; what she could only ask for under duress, obliquely; what she can, now, simply have. She straddles Willow’s lap, her skirts bunched and tangled, and kisses her. It stretches long and deep, Willow’s hands on her hips, Willow’s mouth open and wet, and the heat that builds is lazy and self-satisfied and—not uncomplicated; things between the two of them have never been that. But it’s simpler, now.
“I knew you’d like it,” Willow says.
“Mmm,” Tara hums, noncommittal. She tucks Willow’s hair behind her ear, another mirrored gesture, and kisses her again, just because she can. She can do anything.
And then Tara climbs off the bed and stands, straight and sure, taller than she knew herself to be. Willow stays where she is, leaning back, watching, and now Tara knows why the length of the basement never hid a sight, a sound, because Tara can see Willow, the details of her, the fine mesh of the lace and the stitches in her leather belt, almost without looking.
Tara crosses the room and begins her new life. Despite the pretense, her father was right. She was due to become a demon after all.
***
Tara doesn’t do it cleanly. Maybe she will, later. Maybe, like Willow, she’ll have ways and moods: a victim kept for a week or so, a convenient blood bag taken in small sips, discreet if she needs it or fun if she wants it; a quick death, a deep drink, a message, maybe even a recruit for Willow’s entourage.
Or maybe it will be just the two of them, peeling apart the pages of the Codex, learning its secrets, playing with magic, playing with a few pretty girls. She’ll learn to keep her clothes pristine; she’ll learn to keep her hair out of the way. She’ll learn what do with the dead.
But not tonight. None of that, the first night. Tara doesn’t have the patience to do what was done to her, not a fraction of it; restraint, even less. She’s young, and hungry, and her strength is new, capable but clumsy. She makes a mess of it, and the mess feels right, artless and true.
After, Willow reaches for Tara’s cheek, crooning, “Aww, kitty’s gone and gotten dirty.” She urges Tara closer and licks, tongue a caress, gentle after the pulsing tension of feeding, easing away the thing Tara’s forehead did when her fangs popped, leaving her limp and languid and smooth.
Tara turns her face into Willow’s kiss, making it miss, Willow’s lips on the corner of her mouth. “Does it always feel like that?” Tara asks.
“Depends. Like what?”
“Easy. I never knew anything could be so—”
Effortless. Natural. The hunger, the want, the need. She didn’t have to ask; it just came. And the girl’s pulse, so close to her skin, a warm thrum, the blood, hot and salty-sweet, that came, too. Tara can’t even regret the years wasted, tucked inside her father’s house, fearing her monster self, fearing what might happen if she looked too long at a pretty girl, fearing the power that she knew was there, hiding in her mother’s averted gaze. How can she regret the context, the contrast, to what she is now?
“Easy,” Tara repeats, the word a sigh, and Willow smiles big like Tara’s said just the right thing and kisses her again, meeting this time, open mouths, lipstick and the lingering tang of blood. They fuck like that, slow, easy, languorous, while the body cools in the corner. Easy. Opening herself and letting her thighs fall, her arms, her mouth, open and waiting and wanting. Easy also to lift hands and sate the curiosities of hips, ribs, breasts; to find another mirror in the shadow between Willow’s thighs, and devour, like she did the dead girl, clumsy with the newness of it, the rich, enfleshed taste.
In the afterglow, the lights through the basement settle again and dim. Tara noses at the mark on Willow’s wrist: kitten, reluctant to wean. Willow lets her nibble the scab, lick at clotted blood. And in return Willow closes her teeth on Tara’s breast, a love bite in earnest, now, the pain tolerable, held, her body telling her already how easily this sweet ache will heal.
After, Willow licks over the spot, a slow, broad drag of her tongue. “I can still taste it,” she says. As if the incandescence of flame and bulb don’t give it away. “The spark. Pop Rocks. You’re special. You know that, now, don’t you? You’re special. That’s why I chose you. The two of us are going to do such interesting things.” And Tara, smiling, closing her eyes, stretches into the touch.
She lets the cage doors close behind her.
She locks herself in.