BORN UNTO TROUBLE

by brombones

Caroline has gone dark for reasons left unexplained, maybe reasons she refuses to remember. After spending the summer with her friend Jesse, she travels to his hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana on a matter of personal agenda. Appalled at the mistreatment of the witch community, she finds more reasons to stay than she'd like to admit. Klaroline. Rated for sex/violence/language.

A/N: So this took me eons to write, lol, and if I even managed to grasp 1% of what I think dark!Caroline is capable of I will be satisfied with myself. I am really trying to get back in the writing game - I've had some tough years past, with the health of my mother in the vices, and other health scares, and it took a toll on my heart so heavily. I really thought all of that deadened the part inside that wrote through notebooks and scribbled on napkins and leapt at the sound of colors in words. I thought I lost all that. But then I met these two absolute lunatic jerkfaces, Klaus and Caroline, and their horrible horrible devil souls and their tragic tragic devil love and it brought all of this out of me again. I am so grateful I have this back.

This is part one of a three part story. As I said, I'm getting back up on the rails, so if you hate it go ahead lol. If you like it, drop me a line, I am sinnerlikemoi on Tumblr. Either way, let me know what you think, I would really appreciate it.

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BORN UNTO TROUBLE

For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. Galatians 6:8.

A tragedy told in three parts.

PART I: HEEL ON THE SHOVEL

---

She came up the back way, through the alley and up the stairs like she always did.

There was a tightrope somewhere below the sand, under her burrowing toes, her bare little feet. She mocked it with those wide tequila swaying steps, lime-puckered lips breaking open like waves, and her teeth the frothy whitecaps, the yank of tart stifled laughter below the shadows as their hands were interlinking.

Madam Zadie's next door, it was still open, spilling yellow punk glow-stick light onto bare caramel backs, bums shouldering boards to their cars which ran on fumes. You could go on in if you wanted to— Caroline wondered if anyone ever did, for reasons beside asking the directions to the waterfront, saying which way to Kirkpatrick's or, how long does the Singing Flamingo stay open on a Thursday? She figured most people got their fortunes without even knowing it.

The kaleidoscope pinks of her toenails flashed like neon in the stoned aqua light of the streetlamps. Her salt-licked seaweed hair, her torn t-shirt and floral bikini bottoms, the anklets that weren't her style, that belonged to a pretty girl who came here two summers ago to find herself and ended up losing something instead.

Caroline remembers that girl's cartwheel chameleon smile, how she didn't know just quite who she was, how she always said those words, but one day—

Caroline had kissed the upward angle of her harp string soliloquy, licked the cool running words from her throat, and she had put fingers in Caroline's hair, had said kill me kill me, oh and those were dangerous words to drown in. Caroline remembers how she looked, with no throat, drowning in that strange place surrounded by air but unable to get to it. Caroline imagined this girl was her, and she let her go.

But now, it is night, it is the cucumber sweet curve of broken California. It is the melon relief against your forehead, dizzy eyes on bar signs and the smell of hibiscus hookah and seawater—

And the surf down the hill was so close, kissing the muted lips of night, sighing against her silver-toothed touch. She dragged her palm up the warm crook of his jeans, that Marlboro curve under the rebel runner thigh, and his face was a shadow, a lunar anomaly, waning into the dark, but his smile, oh—

The white line of his teeth like a chain of jagged shark jaw.

"Kiss here," she demanded, but turned her face away. Always doing that, always tricking you, laughter seizing her little fish bone chest, eyes squinting, damning you away. Lemon, lemon, lemon said her acid bleached eyes, and her smile was light as driftwood, acerbic as the tide in your throat.

But still,—

A sizzle of red Kookaburra Licorice lips, lipstick that smeared out of her lipline like car grease, navy kohl-rimmed eyes which the sweat of dancing had smudged into a teasing Lolita blur. Still she was worth eating. She shook, shimmied out of your pounce, the way your arms had pinned her like a pier over the unpredictable sea, wishing for a view, finding something worth watching.

She was a video queen, killed the radio star with a shot of her fist, candy bracelet breaking over a jaw, sweat-slicked woman with her snake skin bra. Caroline snapped the elastic black wire of the bathing suit leeching the space below her hip, a milky pinch in the flesh, enough to make you want to grab.

Uh—uh

She slaps his hand away with a wasp lick, snaps her fingers around his broad wrist with its comforting tuft of wolf-like hair, but he is not a wolf, he is just a man, and she drags him into her bungalow like the beachfront catch-of-the-day. Yes, maybe she'll hold him upside down, put her head in his open jaw, take a picture, throw her name into the headlines of the paper—

They stammer up the loud tin stairs while he grabs a fist full of ass and pushes her inside, slamming the bead-dressed door behind him.

It sounds like a rain-maker— she says drunkenly, explaining the appeal, but her face is in his hands before the words twist off, she feels them like eels pressed into her cheekbones, and he is smudging his fingers over her skin like a sucking pink starfish, and her eyes are closed, lipstick, sugar and bitters, is grapefruit down her chin.

Her place is a mess, and she looks like it, like everything she swore she never would. There is a cross hanging on the wall, angling shadows over the bed, an ornament, it has pale blue jewels in the hilt which catch the moonlight whistling through the tiny window over the kitchen sink. She never found a reason to put curtains over it. She likes the moon, she likes its one blind eye, the big white nothingness peering into the sink piled over with ceramic dishes, the sandy translucent coffee table with its incense ash and empty Desperado beer bottles, stilled with the remnants of spit and warm yellow hops.

He shoves her back, the charge of a fuse box, pushes apart the pearl-finished handles of her double barrel gun, legs for miles and miles and he is the roadie, he is this mystic, this soothsayer. Her white legs, she's a ghost in this light, a ghost with cherry bomb lips and James Dean eyes, we are all impaled on the crook of conditioning. She slaps his belt buckle and he groans like a tiger shot between its eyes, they're over the sheets, the dyed multicolor comforter from the Discount Unlimited. She thought, what a fucking find, and here they are.

Scarlet fingers, Carolina—

Stay with me— he breathes, and he is so broad, so Olympian, she will demand he run a marathon for her, all here, all within this realm they have created, this tropic of Capricorn so achingly close to the equator, zinging, pulling, sour mango punch. She will make him draw circles in his breath, there he goes on her riptide, kissed out of existence, jumper cables snaring out. And he will remember apricot whipped cream Caroline, Jezebel, Nike, goddess of victory.

She grits her teeth, fangs expelled like jewelry in her mouth, an accessory, something she wears. The shadows from the crucifix wave, and the undulating of the water in the bed below her makes her feel like she is under the surf, breathing under glass, and she opens her cerulean eyes, glassy and dead and brilliant. She feels his rush in her like a storm against the window of someone who loves the rain.

How easy it would be to snap his neck. Tick away the cervical vertebrae. Pop pop pop, she hears his pulse in her brain, the rush rises into her like a tide, so hard, so good, so loud, and she tastes the roof of her mouth with her tongue. It would be like snapping the top to a Fanta can, crack.

He flattens his palm over her breast, sucks his thumb and presses her vinyl into skipping, and she's screaming, snatching it back, screaming, snatching it back. Whoever said that a song couldn't last forever.

Jesse— she says, name like a chorus of a classic that you just can't kick, and her legs are like the rabbit ears of an ancient TV set, and he is the Cadillac, might as well be, worth polishing over and over and over again.

Caroline reaches out like to grab something invisible, like to grab someone else's arm, her own flat like a plastic pole, heart the attached punch red wheel of a beach umbrella. Her fingertips smack the edge of the dresser, matches fall to the floor, the cross is knocked off the wall as if by the poltergeist of her body's Sputnik glare, at the edge of orbit, and it slams into the floor and makes the neighbor's dog hysterical.

The man downstairs is screaming shut up, Lucylou shut up! I only get five hours of sleep a night, for fucking god damnit – and Caroline is being fucked, and she has numb lips and liar Sphinx eyes, and she's moaning, and he has a stomach like a ladder, and she keeps scratching it, ruining it like a tabby against a good piece of furniture, and he is saying her name like there's even a chance she'll remember how it shredded his tongue tomorrow.

Would you people please shut the fuck up, it is a Tuesday night, some of us have to make a living—

Caroline is laughing, the sound is edging up through the black seabed of her pleasure like the backs of fluorescent orange urchins when the sand dries out, leaving the craggy graveyard of rocks behind.

A living—

He has to make a living.

Why is that so funny? What day was it? did it matter? Tuesday?

Tyr's day, Jesse would say. Norse god of war. Jesse and his graduate student History with a minor in Theology, his blah blah blah and then this happened. This happened. These soldiers suffocated clovers under iron boots here, no, no luck for the meek, and this person died with a flag through his brain, colors waving out from his torn open mandible like streamers in a parade. She, so and so, screamed across an empty hall as her lungs went drier than the imaginations of men—all, anything that was formerly a complete and total ignorance to her. How many entire worlds of people, billions, were only essence now. Did they remain as stamps? Carbon-copy, faded pink imprints of what has passed, we a shadow's, shadow's, shadow. Do we have to sign for this?

Sign here.

We're the receipt, he would say.

And fuck— it was trippy. Okay, okay stop, she'd say.

Let me think about this.

Let me drink about this, he would repeat. And that is how she got the collection of bottles on that wakeboard masquerading as a shelf. The painted glass green, and the rich carmine, and the elitist deep blue. Dozens. Her own little church window, praise.

Jesse the cute jackass that she finally whipped with her lasso of truth, you're going out with me. Let's fuck. I'm so high right now. I'm lost, oh god. What is wrong with me. I think I love you. Caroline, the tumbling dice.

Suddenly it's not so funny anymore, that Tuesday thing. The making a living.

All those people, those ghost people, fighting and fucking and talking to each other. It's so loud. So many lifetimes, a purse shoved full of those receipts, and you weren't ever planning on returning anything were you? So why did you keep them? Throw them out, for fuck's sake. She is losing her groove.

She gets it, she thinks—

Would you people please shut the fuck up, it is a Tuesday night, some of us have to fake a living —

Caroline is the typhoon, he is her Atlantis, die, go beneath her sea, never rise again, you will only be myth, myth when she is done with you. He hooks his hands to her hips, sinking below her now, his station usurped. If he was ever king of anything he is regressed to base as coral, triton buried beneath her rollicking waves. She cries out, shuts her blackened monster eyes, it's the only way to hide them, but he has his closed too, he would be such a simple little lamb, such a drowned little thing praying for a life raft.

Here is your life raft.

Here is your ladies and children first.

She is both a lady and a child. A painted baby dollface figurine, impossible to break on that untouched antique-shop shelf. Freakishly young but gathering dust, like everyone else. Like everyone else.

She bites her own hand, he says something like hot, hot—and he has no idea that she is drinking her own blood, framed in an ego ecstasy, circulating internally and externally like a self-portrait.

Lucylou is still barking and her neighbor is cursing, opening the sliding glass door downstairs, taking the dog to go piss in the jagged brush of splayed palm leaves. Looking up into her one tiny window above the kitchen sink, he doesn't see anything, no life inside, but he can still hear them fucking.

The dog is happy and Caroline is happy, and she is pulling on a Japanese silk bathrobe, it's turquoise and hits her thighs at their Himalayan peak, it sticks to her chest and it's cinched at her waist like a jaw. Eat me, is what it says. She looks like water walking through the moonshine of the bungalow, sweat plastered hair, better than rain. Cleaner, somehow.

"Sometimes, I think you're going to kill me," Jesse breathes from the bed, his popping Coca-cola laugh like in the faded commercials, refreshing and cold and colored somehow like how she imagines 1975.

She has run him like summer wrings a thermometer, like mercury against the heat, up and down and overused and anachronistic. It's only good when she has a fever, and she is always sick.

Her eyes are so black, and she isn't facing him, what is the point of telling him that her body is still humming, an electric fence, DANGER HAZARDOUS VOLTAGE: HIGH RISK OF SHOCK, BURN, OR DEATH. What is the point of doing something to hurt him, because she is hungry and she could eat anyone, and she has worked to love with him.

But still she is thinking of blood, thinking of blood and killing and raspberry veins under her palms, and she needs a shower, her place smells like sex and jukebox lights, and she laughs, bare white feet kissing the cold aquamarine linoleum of the bathroom floor, "Me too!"

---

Caroline's stomach is pressed into the bendable plastic ribs of a white lounge chair. The sun is fifty spotlights on them, please no pictures, the absence of shade is most apparent. Everything burns, even porcelain.

Jesse is saying, everyone disappears, even if they are loved, and listening to Sublime on repeat, cardinal colors beating the air like tom toms. He keeps waving his hand, he keeps biting his stubbled bottom lip, moving his foot to the beat, off rhythm—she notes. She notes everything.

There is a tattoo on his foot, a stupid tattoo.

She is flipping through the pages of a magazine, sunglasses wrap around her eyes. It's too bright out. Not because of the peroxide sun rays, stripping the balcony of breath, but because she fed so hard last night she blacked out. She is hungover. She is sipping a fluorescent pink mixed drink made from a package. It tastes like the bad songs on the radio in between the new ones.

He wasn't home. Jesse plays in a band at a bar on the strip. Jesse is cool. Caroline doesn't go watch him unless she's stoned off blood, but he thinks she doesn't go because she doesn't care. That's not true. She does care. But she is hungry, too.

She looks over to him, the bridge of her sunglasses sinking into her nose and her stomach developing a zebra pattern across. She smiles, so drunk.

Jesse makes a spyglass with both hands, looks at her through them.

They are so happy, and Caroline takes up smoking, burns through every vice like poprocks in soda.

"You're gonna die from that," Jesse says, Jesse who is wearing orange flipflops and has his eyes closed under those dollar store piece of shit sunglasses.

"Don't ever tell me what to do," she answers, and she lights two, puts them in her mouth hanging upside down like a sabertoothed cat, neolithic. He is opening one eye, looking at her like she is some kind of high-heeled alien—

Caroline, seasprayed by a Ziggy Stardust supercooled ionosphere.

You look like an idiot, Caroline— he says, but he is staring at her in between his smoking Brando grin, his wide-rimmed coathanger smile, his cold carbine revolver tongue.

She is smoking like a Chinese dragon in the parades.

She looks wild, beetle-black eyed, cigarette cruiseliner breaking the waves of their Pacific. She smokes them both and winks. Rita Hayworth. All of the burn, none of the calories. Caroline, the bright roach ends of the Superkings burn hot.

Caroline, isn't it hot enough already.

I love you—

She blinks. Smiles, looks over to him.

He slides a finger against her white bleached leg. She is blanched. No color whatsoever. Nothing new. But he doesn't ask questions.

The one finger is enough.

And they are inside in minutes. The sliding glass door of the second floor still open, snagged on the beige shag rug. The long linen curtain moves with no real motivation in the hideaway wind. He curls his fingers into the orange nylon underband of her bikini bottoms, hitting nailbeds against her cunt, pulls them off and leaves a trail of wet footsteps to the kitchen.

Her hands are braced against the sink on either side of the tiny kitchen window, the one with no curtains. The one with the blind-eye moon.

She is staring at the ocean through the palm leaves. She is accidentally crushing leftover fortune cookies with her preoccupied fingers.

He is saying damnit, Caroline—

And she is saying nothing. Just breathing, blue iris, blue ocean, blue breath.

She and her black tar soul, with her man and his steam engine roller, his bear trap grip and the sun in her eyes.

It's a cocktail, and she feels like tangerines, punky kumquats and kiwis and aloof coconut-lime.

She feels citrus in her veins like someone should drink her, too.

She is buying and he is the special of the day, so special.

She might love him, Hawaiian barbeque baby, sticky and sweet with the pineapple juice porcupine prick.

Oh—

She doesn't even think of blood,—

Until she leans back, bends in the middle like a boomerang, and pops a kiss.

(The veins)

Oh, shit shit shit—

That's perfect.

---

Caroline has her white palm flat on the hood of Jesse's strawberry red Dodge Challenger.

It's over one hundred degrees out in the middle wasteland, the salamander tongue stretch of dust between LA and Vegas. The sun is directly above them, hanging like an anvil, gilt like the cover of a lawman's timepiece in the old John Wayne movies, counting down the minutes to execution, counting down the seconds until the furious mob of shadow bandits rains its inelegant chaos, wind-whistling bullets, into the pin-thin quiet of the west.

It is cutthroat bright in the blazing nothingness of this roadside pit stop, barren and timeworn on the side of a highway that's been forgotten for longer than Caroline has been alive. No one truly lives out here. No one could. It is only the dustdevil sienna billow of dirt jerked up behind the dry black licorice wheels of a car, only the archeological traces of here to there, not A or B, but the fabled acreage in between. The translucent nature of freedom, impossible to touch, only enough to breathe through.

She likes to drive with the top down.

She loves the heat. The skin on her palm is blistering against the fat-lip red metal of the car, the engine broiling beneath, the carbonators rough against the stilled and running motor. The air is spiked with the tang of gasoline and exhaust, she can taste the grease on the back of her tongue. Her palm is cold, dead. She lets it blister.

Jesse is overheating. He's shoved his face into the huge cooler marked ICE outside of the two-window trailer playing a makeshift gas station headquarters. The white paint is curling off of it under the heatlamp in the sky, its dry orange peel rays.

The color falls off. It is stained rusted ginger by the desert fingerpaints, the dust that is sticking to her calves, to the back of her thighs and her torn white shorts. She is sweating under the fabric of them, and the salted droplets of perspiration descend in one muddy line from her inner thigh to the back of her knee.

The pump jerks. The car is full, but she is hungry.

Jess— she calls to him. He is an ostrich, head buried in the ice sand.

She is across the way, against the car, ankle-crossed, a beige-and-eggshell cowboy boot respite against the car hood. She digs the heel of her boot into the dust. It is so dry. She is so thirsty. Let's go.

The gasp of the cooler is audible, a hiccup of cold, life-giving peppermint cut short by that lawman's tick-tock as the cooler door clicks shut. Woah— ah. Gone.

The desert air is static, the slightest movement of it causes one black-tailed scorpion to abandon its carapace, an overturned can with the label worn away. It scatters into the dry brush and parched rattlesnake weed behind the station.

Caroline has walked over. She is putting her hand on the back of Jesse's sweat-drenched shoulder and he is rubbing a hand over his mouth. The arm holes of his shirt are long and wide, down to his hips. He is as golden as the desert, his stomach as deleted of excess, his abdomen hard and sweet.

"Don't touch that," he says, walks over to Caroline. He bends slightly, putting a smooth almond palm around her forearm. She has bent to her knees by the exhausted shrubs, reaching to touch them. Something beautiful about them. How they have adapted to the extremes of heat. There is Devil's claw and dogsbane between the desert poppy. "They're poisonous," he warns.

Caroline grew up in fertile Virginia, where everything was worth touching. Every apple heavy enough. She is dried up too, looking for a fruit salad. She laughs, ooh, I'm really scared.

Jesse knocks her shoulder, turns around and heads for the car.

Caroline stands, pulls a sweaty palm over her dirty hair, bangs sticking to sparkle shadow gold, her yellow spun wheat tied up and away. She's not feeding you anymore.

The sun burrows into her shoulders like the scorpion from the can, making caverns in her, hot, dehydrated tunnels that line her insides like a maze, like a wordsearch. They den, populate into her back. Her dead back and her dead nerves and all the cauterized capillaries. It claims her, makes line art out of her. She should be a corpse, dried out amongst the spired cacti, pinned over them like a sacrifice to the sun.

But still she walks, survived.

She is the sun. Unkind. Look at how she burns, how these scales become her, strange incandescent beetle-backed sister. How they make armor over her, armadillo girl with her crown of pawnshop gold. She is the salamander, the desert hare. Sunstroked innocence, SPF suck my white ass.

Maybe more hazardous than cool, air-conditioned, bartop evil.

Maybe—

Bright desert butterfly, Cherokee rose Caroline in her snake fang boots with the delicate metal chains. She leaves panfried footsteps in those tumbleweed cowboy boots. The earth is sizzling beneath her like eggs in iron, like salt and peppered succotash.

Jesse honks the car horn and it blasts into the air like the engines at a drag race.

Caroline whirls, looks over.

She holds up her finger— one second.

Her one flagstaff digit is the gnomon of a sun dial.

She walks a clean line down to the door, a lean cinema lens with a Lionel Richie long tall Sally. Jesse is watching her legs through the sideview mirror in the Challenger. She breezes past the cool sucking ice chiller beside the tattered entrance. There is a sign WE DON'T USE 911 WE USE SMITH & WESSON nailed above the ruddy paint-chipped door. Caroline stares at it for a second, licks her thumb and traces a line down the dirty paint. Like blood, almost.

There is a tired bell that rings when she walks inside. No air conditioning. One metal standing fan slouching by the counter, circulating stuffy air in its attempt to fulfill its bygone purpose. You're pathetic, Caroline thinks.

Can I help you? asks the man behind the counter.

Caroline doesn't blink. Doesn't look at his eyes, doesn't register his careworn hands or his bleached out hair. His truck stop Powerade blue eyes and the snakebite scar on his wrist. The rattling lunge he survived as a child.

She puts a dust-stamped heel on the table, flashes up and onto it with the long-clawed predation of a puma. The collar of his unbuttoned plaid is suffocated in her little white hands like a rope over a cliff, and she is extracting him, her mouth as hot as the reading in the brightly colored thermometer sitting there, motionlessly in the window.

There is one minute, two, three. The sound of swallowing, her rigged gasps.

This is like the sea, so good against burning skin. It is Jesse's cooler in the desert. All better things than those, and she is gulping down arterial blood, it is burnt firepit meat and dime store chewing dip and unclean gas stop bathrooms. It is nothing refreshing, nothing clean—

It is colossal, it is better than living.

Uagh— she pants, awakened, pulling her head up, removing her hand from its bruising clasp around his mouth, freeing his breath. She swallows like this is her only water in a year, like ripe summer sparkling lemonade, twirling ice cubes against her teeth in the grill propane sear of August.

Thank you— she breathes, heavy. She climbs back off the table, drags a forearm over her mouth, sets him down face sideways against the laminated lottery tickets that decorate the counter. For being so helpful.

She stumbles, hip meeting the corner of the counter, mind like a tilt-o-whirl, like those rides on the pier that made her vomit into bags of candied pecans.

Her chest is swelling, exploding with the influx of new blood. They never explain that to you, when you turn. How it's going to hit you to get a real meal, even cheap gas station food, after days of surviving on gum and baby birds. Her heart is lurching like the reels of a clock, click clack – arteries shuddering and mitral valve spitting back into the ventricles. She grinds a hand into her chest as arrhythmias jerk through her system, making her dizzy, causing her to cough violently as her body readjusts, pooling her dried out veins with the canyon river inflow of blood.

Oh, it is agony and she feels electric in it—

Then the peace, the power, the wholeness. Her brain saturated, arteries fattened out like pigs, the migraine gone.

She is breathing hard, right, after two days, chest shaking and then it's dead quiet except for the sound of her boots.

Caroline goes to turn, stops herself.

She picks up a pack of Big Red, picks up a map, a water bottle that is sweating condensation.

"I was pump number four," she says to the prone and cataleptic snakebite survivor, fanning herself with the out of date map. Eyes burning, living, close enough. "Hello?"

Caroline drops a Jefferson on the counter top for the gasoline, steals a penny from the communist jar for her gum.

She meets Jesse in the car, gets into the driver's seat.

What took you so long—he asks, slunk down against the black leather, lifeless and languid, absorbing the heat like tanning oil does. His eyes are shut. He is something else, his seagreen gaze and his full anchor lips, they suck her down to the sea floor, they swallow her, she desires him so hard. She wants to be drowned. He is bow-licking wavekiss in this parched blanched sunscape.

Full time baby, splash mouthed hiss. His laugh is an ice sharp chlorine pool surrounding you all at once.

"Needed something to wet my whistle," she says, and throws the water bottle into his lap. The cold plastic slams into his dick from over his jeans and he groans, what the hell, Caroline.

Shut up—she answers, glancing into the rearview mirror as she high-tails it out of the wasteland gas station, the little peeling white trailer disappearing in a bright orange smokebomb as the tires wretch against the gravel and the radio picks up signal again, crackling out the Zombies.

She is thinking she should have taken the tabby cat too, the one by the door that stared at her judgmentally as she walked out. Snapped its neck and tossed it in the back seat. Roadside food was never classy.

Her eyes switch to the amnesty-blessing road before her, like changing the channel, it's there and wide like the years that stretch out. Time to kill.

Funny.

The song on the radio keeps on trilling she's not there, she's not there, but she feels there. Feels like she maybe never wants to get there, then. Doesn't want this to end.

The car eats the black ribbon road and the snake tar burn of it feels like cinnamon and chili pepper and lime.

She drives past exit after exit.

She chooses not to stop.

---

Three days later, they're in Yuma.

He is broke from the slots, and she is rich from the bodies. They thought they'd go around, make a circle, stop in Tijuana before hitting the excess of the Angel city once more, flecks of gold sticking into the tire grooves on the sunset strip. Caroline liked living there.

They arrive at the motel in the airless heat of night. Things are still. Locusts scream. The glass in the sky is amethyst. It is deep. A deep color that seems to murder sound.

The sign for the motel is neon turquoise. It is burning and humming into the night with the shoe-scraping poverty of the roadsters. It is a blue-tipped flame for road dogs and daddies and sugar cane women with their long liquid lashes. Moths.

Caroline tells Jesse she'll meet him upstairs, tosses him the keys, and they linger in a kiss which deepens until Caroline shoves him off. Stop with your eel heat in her sea sponge heart. Go away.

I'll meet you in the room. Get ice.

Vegas has done nothing for her self control.

She supposes it's like that for everybody. At least that's how it is on TV. They say this is bat country.

She closes her eyes. Tightly.

She could feel a swarm of bats. Warm leather wings everywhere, surrounding her like chewing tobacco clouds, closing out the sky.

See, the thing is—

Caroline has screwed up, but she can't tell anybody. There is something in her hawkwing-free heart, some vestige residual of that which has triggered this hapless casino abandon.

And every time it ticks in, there it is, when she sees her reflection in the shiny metal framed plaque against the far wall of the motel check-in lobby, it edges back. Filthy like the pictures on her phone.

It edges back like a certain minute of the day, continually passing, never ceasing, showing up on the clock every hour even if you don't look. And if you look—

Hold your breath. Count to ten. Make a wish. Say your mantra five solid times.

It doesn't mean anything, it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't mean anything.

"Are you waiting for something?" the old woman appears again from the tiny back room with its sole fizzling bulb. The burning filament is assaulting. Caroline starts to say oh, no, no— with her simpering little smile and her friendly down turned hand, but then she remembers. What was she talking about before? There is always something now. There is never freedom, always something, and this woman was right—

Caroline's thoughts hit a wall. It's like a leash that was so long you thought you were unrestricted, and then choke, cervical vertebrae cracking, and you stumble, and gasp, and gag, bring your hands to your throat and yes, there it is. The collar. Tied to the dog house back at the yard and your owners are laughing. Oh, my god she is so stupid, they always laugh because you are fooled every time.

Yes.

And her eyes lose all concept of light, repel color, suffocate with the density of ink.

She mauls the woman behind the counter, closes her eyes to the obnoxious green and yellow patterned wallpaper and drinks, and drinks and drinks. She is measuring the pulse in the artery with her finger, she is swallowing each time there is a heavy beat, sucking rollercoaster tart kool aid, swallowing as the woman squeals, shoves a hand against her cheek, fighting with canary strength. Caroline is ignorant to it, blacking out for a split second as the consumption attacks her body with the needles of diamorphine, smacks it like dope. She sees firehouse red targets and kaleidoscope pinwheels spin on the backs of her eyelids, and then for a moment she sees nothing, she feels nothing, she only eats.

She eats with rouged teeth and smack daddy lips, and for a second she dreams of the dark black highway blood in the thighs, the dragsters, she dreams of the hard hooked membrane of the heart frayed at her teeth, how it might feel to taste it stop beat, beat, beating against her candypop pretty magazine gloss tongue.

She opens her eyes, the flow too fast. She is gagging, realigns her lips.

She drinks to spite that wallpaper and the musty stench of the mildew in the walls. The heat everywhere outside, she misses it. She hates the artificial air conditioned staleness, this dry-throated machine made cold.

Oh, she misses Stefan. This reminds her. This hunger reminds her, and in turn that makes her feed harder.

Go away.

Go away, she sobs, pushes the woman from her mouth, lets her slump in the spinning chair at the abandoned desk. Caroline is not crying, not with tears, but every other piece of her instead. Her fingers and how they are rigid on the curling yellow linoleum of the desk, the birdcage thinness of her ribs, how it seems so difficult for her to keep air inside. Stop, she thinks. She wipes her mouth.

She shoves the heavy, motionless women further away in the spinning chair.

She brushes her hair back, dyed lips sticky like thick port wine. She swipes them clear, sucks the stain from her teeth.

She rings the front desk bell politely.

When the next attendant arrives, she compels her to put the body away. She'll wake up soon. She'll wake up, she repeats. She repeats it too much.

This is super important okay, and I love your earrings.

Caroline takes the earrings.

She is wearing them, pressing them through the holes in her lobes as thinks this girl has the most alluring lips she's ever seen. There is a memory mixed there. A channel that cable no longer pays for. And, this might be something that could soothe, yes with their pillow plumpness, like a good night sleep. So red so worth eating. Maybe tonight, Caroline needs a good night sleep. Maybe that's all she'll ever need.

She kisses the girl, bites her bottom lip hard and there is a kitten moan in her mouth, she is sucking on the blood and the smooth softness of warm skin, licking against the swelled tender wound. Caroline pulls away. Tosses back the blood like a shot of Deep Eddy. Bubblegum dollar store chapstick, fois gras metallic iron, salt and blackberry plum.

She asks which time checkout is, and says thank you and heads out of the empty lobby.

The earrings suit her.

Caroline heads back upstairs. She climbs the outdoor steps and sees the indistinguishable lines of identical red metal doors. It is all the same path, they seem to say. She is squinting under the awning of perched lights, it's too white, too pure, and her stomach is full of blood.

She opens the room 813 and enters into the hushed Tilex-scented darkness. She shuts the door behind her and notices Jesse isn't there. She glances over to the nightstand.

The ice is there. Jesse is a good boy.

She decides to take a shower.

Caroline strips.

She unbuttons the cargo shorts, slips curling thumbs into the black patterned tights she was wearing beneath. They glide over each leg, too white, too stainless, disappearing like darkness fended away by a torch, dropped to the tile silently. She drops the chains around her neck into the sink, the drain could take them. She pulls the shower on. The steam assaults the air like in a dark alley, overtakes it, fog in the lens of a horror film.

Caroline's breath is loud in the bathroom.

The mirror shows the blood in her hair, the stained fingertips, the crusted earrings with the topaz stone.

She is already wet, bare feet on the floor outside the shower. The scorching water makes the bathroom humid, it is rain from Io on Jupiter. It is a volcanic tomb. A black g-string is strapped inside the contours of her ass, pulled up on her hips, smooth against the bow of her Artemis sling, but she is all blonde, all alabaster, it is an unforgiving contrast. Like foul words graffitied across a holy building. She likes being a canvas.

Next comes her hair, sweaty wax strips of blonde painting her shoulders in wide strokes, thick like the sticky wrappers of taffy. And the bra, snapped off, laced fighter's armor for pink petal breasts. She is naked. True. It is the best feeling in the world.

She steps into the shower, her fingers piercing through the water like spears looking for fish. Water too clear means no life inside, but that is fine. That suits her.

Her skin is clear, it will always be, she, the living memory. She will look back on her highschool yearbook picture for the rest of eternity. The picture is her mirror with its soft birch frame.

Her eyes will age though, what's inside of them. She has noticed that. In Stefan, angular Stefan with his javelin thrower's arms and his thin boyish hips. His eyes look like caskets. He has died and been buried many times. He lives in a grave, with his black earthworn pupils. His worm-eaten dirt, his quiet maggot trench.

Claustrophobic.

She scrubs off the makeup, open mouth against the stream of water. It steams around her, as if she is too hot for it and not the other way around, like it vaporizes on contact, like she is the burning pavement to your new rubber soled shoes.

And,

Does she still have one? A soul—

She slides hands down a thin porcelain abdomen, scrubbing cheap flaking motel soap against skin so fair. The soap smells old.

If she died by wooden absolution, truly died, would what is left of her now meet again with that which she has lost? She wonders sometimes if human Caroline is well, if she still exists in some way, on the other side, with her father. That is the girl her father preferred. That is the girl he still did not love enough to stay, that October afternoon when she was eleven. When she said please—

Don't leave me.

How silly she had been to ask him again, with these predator canines, this feline crystal rock candy coldness.

Second place was better than third, is what her mother said.

Her mother always said that, when she'd come home crying after cheer meets, with the silver ribbon in her hand instead of gold, burned into her palm like a stigma and not a trophy at all. Like people would know her by the mark. Fugitive. Liar. Pirate. Second place is better than third. I don't know what you're crying about, Caroline. I don't know what you're dying about, Caroline.

As if each one of her missteps were a lily at a wake.

—she wanted, don't you get it?

She wanted something, she wanted—not second, or third, or even first, you see?

Caroline wanted and she did not even know what.

Wanting was always enough.

Second place is better than third, would never understand that.

She wonders who she is now, like she was birthed from that human and was maybe never that person at all. How does that work? No one ever explained it to her. Stefan never sat her down and said it. Stefan with his militia of demons, his sieged wall hope, his battering ram heart. Stefan had been a good teacher, but he was from a small town in Virginia. He had a southern Baptist soul.

Caroline is not sure what hers is. Maybe before it was plastic. Plastic soul—pink carnations and bold colored banners and her pageant-queen-on-a-magazine smile. Expensive shampoo and expensive Evian and ironed out clothes. Curled eyelashes that were big as curtains over a bright and tall Antebellum window. Now it felt chemical. It felt molten. Cleaner through science.

Caroline is glad the old one was recalled. Recalled like it was never meant for her in the first place. It was small, and tight. It was painful for her. Plastic melts. Maybe that was the manufacturer's error, not this. Maybe there was something to that. Maybe she was born cursed, died free.

She hears the bathroom door open, and senses Jesse.

He smells like sweat and sunblock and the bothersome wind at the beach.

Where were you?— her voice echoes, and he climbs in the shower behind her.

He presses against her. He presses against her like the Bible presses the top drawer in the nightstand in every room of this motel. She feels the cool tile against her stomach, his lion paw in her wet hair, pulling it aside like seaweed. He is her glass of water, the only thing worth touching in this scorching summer sauna.

He is kissing her neck, and her china soft fingers are tightening against the slick shower walls.

She reaches back, holds his thigh, pulls him into the linear tightness of her aim like an archer with an arrow.

---

"Caroline?"

Jesse is talking to her, the room is silent. Silent and closed the way motel rooms can be, with the vault curtains drawn over the windows. A grave.

"Caroline?"

He is asking, expecting her to come up from sleep.

Caroline is in a dream. In the dream she is drinking from a gold chalice. The liquid inside is clear, but the person who hands it to her is some dark matter, a person? Tendrils of smoke like tassels, keening around like a carousel with dead-eyed animals, plasticine creatures in bland stagnation.

Not the absence of light, but a new thing entirely.

dense, so cold, so infinite, like space—

Like the searing blood-steak pewter of space and the frigid arctic flatline below the icecaps.

No rules to it, dark shapes casting darker shadows only.

Caroline!

The chalice in her dream spills over, knocked from her hands. It hurtles to the floor with a riotous smash and Caroline awakens—

Her eyes are big as coins, the whites petrified fossil dust, she is agonized, something has happened and she feels stiff, powerless, embalmed.

She gasps—

No air.

Jesse is above her. His heavy knees straddling her body. She can see the undersides of his chin, phantom, like a gargoyle curled over the archways of a church. He is weight, the definition of it. He is lead, a poison resting on her chest. A radioactive insert, eating her cells.

His hands are clutching a wooden spire, he has it buried in her chest. Her ribs have collapsed inwardly, she is breathing barbed wire. It is a flock of ravens with their black sharp beaks mining inside of her thoracic cavity, and he is the specter-faced scarecrow.

She screams, alive?

Alive?

Still alive?

She remembers what it looked like to waste away. To turn to jade paper leaves and dry autumn wax.

She is still here. She shoves him off, no parachute, he is a doll, and he has never felt this strength from her. He is a mess of bones against the far wall, a buried body down by the highway side, and Caroline has one minute.

She grips the sheets to haul herself up, and oh—

This sterling silver sword in her lungs, Arthur, or no, this Toledo steel, this foreign body, this intrusion. Caroline puts her hand against the wall, tongue hanging like poached species, and gaping like a cod for breath, she tears it out from her, rips apart her organs once more, burns in the anguish of the aftermath.

No one will ever invade her again.

She doesn't say, please, understand—

She presses him into the wall, on her knees, strangling him with the blunt side of the stake.

How did you know?—

Her pied piper voice, her sweetness turned to gravel.

He has a swollen eye, black, he is a confused baby, blinking, wounded and soon he will be bleeding. He and his human cotton ball heart. His paper bones and his blueberry blood. Shallow-grave-sorry reaping what he's sown.

Caroline presses harder, his air is the narrow eye of a needle.

She is a forest fire, deadly, a sight to stammer at, something worth never seeing.

Smoke in her eyes.

(Enough wrath, now end it—)

"Did you know this whole time," Jesse is beautiful. She liked Jesse. She hadn't planned on losing him. She jolts her hold, jerking the answer out of him.

My mother taught me how to recognize people like you— he bites, and his face is not the placid course of the Pacific waves, the cool cerulean at the Santa Monica Pier. He looks so weak, so defeated already. His breath is braying like a horse. "You killed that woman, Caroline. You killed her."

He and his Jack whiskey accusations, his bitter bartop spilled glass words.

Caroline blinks, the strength in her straining pale arms is unimaginable, her shoulders are flexing under the ribbed white tank top. She looks from side to side, into his eyes. Which one? Which girl? Like a part of her really wants to know.

And now you're going to kill me— he says, sheriff gaze, like her mother, court of law verdict without any parole. He says it like a man on the TV reports a school-age girl was kidnapped and killed.

Like he already knew it. Like it happens every day.

Like he expects the worst of everybody—And suddenly he is breaking into the torrential wet season storms, cataclysmic in the wide sky, kind-hearted Jesse with the summertime soul. What happened to his summertime soul—slipping so fast, gouged out like a canyon by some inconceivable flood.

(Amen, amen. Blame it on the rocks and blame it on the weather.

Never blame it on me, blame it on the heather.)

Who is this person, this man beneath her, how had he disguised this all below tinted sunglasses only.

Will she ever be quick enough, fast enough—

Will she always be the hare, running running rabbit heart?—

And she feels her fingers tighten around his trachea. She feels her clear mind blurring with this taste of defeat, anger censoring the reels of her memories like propaganda flooding into her cinema: and gone is how he told her I love you, how he was there for her and not the other way around. How he made her forget files she wanted deleted but couldn't erase, she'd destroy the motherboard if she did that. She'd have to shut down.

They were more like viruses.

And he was on the verge, now. Go to sleep little baby—

She might have done it. Like a Fanta can, remember. And something great inside of her, greater than the creeping blackness in her mind, the tempting wine of near-midnight, the hive of venomous things that kept on clawing in, it was saying fall. Take.

It said, I'm not that patient when her honeysuckle heart said wait.

She jabs her hand closer, closes it in, she can see him turning blue, even in the dark. He is a blue-capped ocean in the dead of night, with one spear-sharp bolt of moonlight, a stark rectangle down his face.

She can see the six foot drop—

He starts to wither, his eyes absurd and big, seagreen, and periwinkle innocence flickering like the lights in a storm. He coughs. His hands are latched around her arm, she is stronger. But there is something else there. He is keeping this lighthouse in the eye of her rage.

"You're all exactly the same."

She breathes, only stares.

"Terrible people, doing terrible things."

You're terrible, she thinks.

She opens her mouth, but there is only air.

You're terrible.

He watches her, the glass dulling.

He watches her.

She opens her mouth, but stops. Snaps her fangs down on her own lip.

You're terrible, her mind screams.

She almost says it.

But there is something else inside, it ricochets, (sweetheart—

sweetheart—)

It is a pathogen, get it out.

White blood cells, consume it.

Pure white cells on their white- footed horses, white knights and no darkness and lamplights only—

And when it rings again her mind calls back, never and a day.

He watches her.

She lets him go. He gasps.

She shoves him, and the veins in her eyes retract.

And her fingers feel sick, like she is getting old. Like she is aging, but she isn't. What will prove it to her? Only a human could, with their expiration date written plain across their necks. They have a sense for this. Take me to the fire, take me down, down, down.

She is standing up, staring him down, down.

She is pacing with bare feet on the old dark carpet, with her daffodil petal hair and her torn white top with its hideous red stain where her ribs are still healing.

What are you talking about, Jesse?— she asks, voice pure lemon yellow and sugar confusion. She will always sound so young. "You're the one that just tried to kill me."

She accuses him, but her eyes they say: how do you know about us

They say: Do not try to drown me, you will fail

Jesse is still coughing, he feels the paws of a lab rat scratching his throat. He is sitting up, long runner's legs curled to his chest, registering the suffering of his joints and Caroline stands there. Caroline should help him but she doesn't.

And you weren't going to kill me? He stresses, hacks up blood. He looks so tired. He looks like he needs an ambulance.

Caroline's eyes are narrowed. Denial strikes her lips, but she breathes it back. No, she wants to say.

No.

He doesn't know anything.

(oh and you do, you do, Caroline?

the bones of Caroline, Caroline Forbes?)

"What do you mean we're all exactly the same?" she presses, where are the others. She wants to be alone. "Why did you say that?"

He isn't talking to her. He is inwardly focused, so she feigns a lunge towards him, and he spills so fast she thinks she might have touched him anyway.

"I'm not from California," he barks out, he isn't looking at her, but then he is, he is staring at her with all the accusations in the world, with the brimstone of every pastor's sermon, with the marker of the damned, with the red slap-handed fury. All of that: how you know you have fallen, the bells sounding cracked in the amber orange sky, the pews empty. Oh, sweet Caroline it is time to go.

It is something only guilty people can see.

She stands there, like a statue in a part of the city people just walk by.

"I'm from the south," he gesticulates angrily with his hand, still disoriented, breathing heavily, feeling frightened. "'m from Nawlins, Caroline. I'm from fucking New Orleans."

Caroline's eyebrows parry against one another. "I don't get it, what so you're like, some amateur hunter or something? Some freaking Batman bullshit, Jess? Do you have any idea how freaking stupid that is? Do you have any idea? I should just kill you right now!" her voice is shrill, girly, she is surprised at herself. She is surprised at how vehement she is, how much oil there is inside of her depths to burn once she courts this offal-bodied suitor, once she taps that well, sinister black oil drills, pulling, pulling, pulling against the orange flaming sky. "I don't get it, what are you trying to do? What have you been trying to do?" what have you been pretending for.

"Of course you don't get it," he roars back, he has a fearsome howl. It startles her. What happened to her full time daddy, what happened to her sea swept July, his Junebug kiss, his dragonfly smile. "You're one of them. You don't get it because you're on his side."

I don't know what you're talking about – she says, nearly turns. Nearly disappears, nearly speeds from the door into the nothingness of night. But he has a gospel choir in his eyes, a haunting hymn, the shuddering cries of three hundred humming people, and it does not let her go, it does not let her down, it pulls her to the river. It shoves her head in and makes her inhale water.

Your kingdom must come down, it says.

The voices, it shakes the walls, it vibrates and echoes and her eyes dilate.

She stares at him.

"What are you?" she whispers, the realization finally piercing like a snake concealed in the leaves underfoot.

What are you— she repeats.

And he is staring back, red eyed.

Silent.

---

Yuma is dead.

Caroline feels interrogated under the blinding fluorescent lights of the diner. It's bright like stoplights against hungover eyes. It's an inquisition in a dead town, no more defendants left to hang.

They are off highway 80 and a lone car glides across the dark star-way into the night. The magenta neon outside caresses the window like a prostitute, presses its warm flash dance core, its raspberry kiss lips, its twenty-for-a-touch smile.

Inside it is stark. Like a hospital.

They are in a petri dish.

The tables are made of masonite and they look old. The tiles on the floor are mismatched. There is no one else in the parking lot. Jesse looks bad.

The waitress is staring at them, she is staring until Caroline glares and then she turns away.

They are unmoving figures in a picture, all the hopefuls crouched across Mexican-border could look in to the blaring windows and watch every movement if they wanted. No one wanted.

No one is awake and this is the desert.

Caroline is wrapped in a jacket, her hair is in knots. She hasn't touched it since the hotel room. She's staring at Jesse whose eye is swollen shut, whose lip is broken at the corner. She wants to kiss it off, but that is her scar. Her kiss might leave worse, her kiss could be a bullet.

So— she says. She demands. She is tired, antsy. She has bug bites on her ankles.

Jesse is still shivering.

He doesn't touch his coffee.

Caroline thinks—this song again. She looks at him. He has been trampled. He will never buy her Standing Room Only again. He'll forget her melodies. She was stupid to write them.

But apologize—?

To who? She has a composer's brain, she assaults the air with her time, her notes. It is not her fault that he listened, that he wandered in. Jesse with his wounded silent lips.

"Are you gonna talk to me or are we going to sit here all night like two weirdos who just got mugged by the probably population: 1 person who lives here?" she stares. "What're you gonna do? Call the police?"

He throws her a scathing glance. She bites her bottom lip. There is still something cold about her, even behind her jokes. It makes them sound hollow, lethal. Blue.

She guillotines his foot with her rubber sneaker under the table,"I'm serious."

She is pressing, still pressing, wait until his threshold—

"What do you want to know?" he grimaces, tongue caught between his teeth. He is not really asking. He is distancing himself from her. He is leveling his answers like rocks in a sling shot, he will lead her miles away. He will run. He is sweating cold sweat, like a rainmaker. His chest is shaking.

Pain.

How simple it is, how powerful. There is something to be said about pain. Something to be said about simplicity.

Caroline leans on the table. Her elbows are skinny. He can see their pink hide against the tabletop. She looks so much like a girl now. He has fucked her so many times, why did he do that when she looks so young. But then, there are her lips. Red heels in a church.

She edges forward, closer to him, and her brows lift, they lift like hands on a trampoline, like people on a rollercoaster drop. "How about, if you don't spill your guts right now, then – I will," Caroline smiles, pageant rose poise.

Devil's claw at the gas station.

(Don't touch that—

it's poisonous)

Jesse looks at her. He is tall. Too tall for the table. Long, athlete arms and legs like the skeleton of a house.

He is a totem pole with so many faces. They are all big and red and angry. "My mother was a witch," he says.

He knows it doesn't matter anymore.

"So you're a witch?" Caroline tips her head, eyes bulging, expecting the statement to expand. "Sorry I skipped my witch genealogy lessons to fuck you, hello?" she is impatient.

"I was," he says quietly. He is holding the arms of his jacket like someone who has lived in the cold, in the cold in the corners. He is a bruised plum beneath it.

He glances to the side and back to her, the ghost of those words on his lips. There is something stone inside of his eyes, something saying I've accepted. Caroline doesn't know where it came from. What it means. But in those eyes she sees his heart, she hears it beating brokenly beneath the coat. This is her Jesse, something gentle. A lamb with its breast flayed in a field where a wild wolf a lay.

"I had a friend. Her mother lost her magic—" Caroline doesn't know if she's trying to console him, maybe she just wanted to say it. Has she ever said it— (had a friend, had a friend). Maybe she is the lamb, maybe she had something eaten out of her. Maybe her stone empty words would sound better in stereo.

No— he says, he cuts her off midstream. It's so final, the closed back cover of a book over a sentence you were still reading, and she looks up. "It's not like that. It's different."

Caroline shakes her head, what.

"Why should I tell you any of this?" he seems disgusted, and there is a memory: she was the worst at listening out of all of his students to begin with. That is why he liked her.

"Because if you don't I'll use you as a spare tire and get the heck out of dodge before your witchy friends come to turn me into popcorn chicken," she finishes gracefully.

He stares at her, thick-lipped and assaulted. He is unimpressed with her verve.

She smiles, small, concise.

Succinct.

She figures she might as well start on his coffee.

She nudges his foot again under the table—

His breath hitches so he takes the threat to heart. Not so bad, Caroline thinks.

She thinks she could do better.

Jesse is exhaling, he has bruised blackberry gums and a battered slice of hate above his brow.

But the truth is—

Something else is hurting. Caroline is beautiful.

The truth is Jesse has been the stupid one. The truth is he knew all along, and still he stumbled in front of her. Caroline's amber front door with the molasses doorknob, you will stay, you will leave fingerprints on everything you touch, and she will always find you.

He fell for the brunt of the buttercup blow and the harsh burn of her sunshine herb, the peach-kissed curve of her smile and the bright confetti curse of her laughter. Jesse is the one that failed. Jesse is so sorry, Maman. Because the truth is, against it all, he never wanted to hurt her.

And isn't it strange? How we love the ones we hate the most – how the serpent-faced fire burns in the hearth of us, how the dice pick two, they say, here are your numbers, they say you won, you lost, you try again next time. They lead you to the slot machine where it turns up Caroline, Caroline, Caroline, and you don't even know she's a monster, you don't even know she bites, all you see is gold, gold, gold, and you think 7, 7, 7 and you spend it all so fast and then you realize—

She's crazy like the strip, like the traffic in Atlanta, like the price of gasoline to fill up your red Dodge Challenger.

Caroline is looking at him. She has wan pearl skin, sunflower yellow hair. She is whiter under the lights. She is pale as a ghoul and as empty as one. She is smiling.

"Where I come from we practice a different kind of magic," he says, he won't tempt that blank baby grin. She was his lady luck once, and now this is the heel of her stiletto, oh he kissed the red lips of her magic tables, he danced along her roulette smile, he chanced it on her black jack soul. He knew it was there all along, he kept playing, jack and queen, 10 and queen, thinking he could get her 21. She has gone cold, has been cold. He once thought the sun and the sea went well together.

And if he did love her? so what if he reached for a figment, an idea of her—

So what if he needed a lie, needed it like some people need the truth.

He presses his lip, sucks the salt blood back from his teeth.

"What, like expression?" says Caroline, the coffee is scalding against her palms.

Jesse's brows twitch, "No."

His voice is a cello, the notes are somber, strange, questioning. They echo.

Caroline's eyes say nothing.

"Well, don't stop because I scared you," she prods.

He frowns.

Jesse is expressive when he speaks. His mouth is the wide open bowl of the sky, his eyes shoot with rifle powder. He has power in his words. Some earth-thrumming power that said, listen, listen, listen.

Caroline had liked that.

"It's called ancestral magic," he turns the syllables over in his mouth, long caramel fingers rotating with his words. His swollen eye is purpling. "It means— I can only practice where I can draw energy from my ancestors. The ones that came from Benin, the mother continent, stopped in Haiti, escaped during the revolution."

She is breathing slower. He looks like a professor who has gotten in with the wrong people, who went digging in the wrong country, who has been kidnapped by grave robbers, but can't help his tongue and all his beloved knowledge from saying hey—

Don't touch that!

That should be in a museum!—

"There was a war, a great war, so much death, girl—" and the whites of his eyes are cloudy, glassy. And Caroline is wondering if he was there, if he was there he seems to feel it so, like he acted in it, like he is still part of the grief. "The early 1700s. It was all new, and worth stealing for the slippery-souled. And the gris-gris fled. Our grandmothers, our keepers of the Spirits. They found safe haven, or so they thought— in Louisiana."

"What happened to them?"

"They were buried with our other relics and talismans from Africa. The powerful elements, three amulets, from our kingdoms, our people, our gods, Caroline. Hiding them was meant to keep no one witch from ever harnessing too much power, from using the la magie noir – black magic. To prevent the atrocities of war from ever happening again amongst us."

Caroline's eyes are narrowing into slits. She is looking at him in the bright artificial light. She sees something so true in him regardless. That this is real. That there is more, and so she exhales, waving her hand, saying well, go—

"So why can't you practice? These amulets were sold on Ebay?" Jesse levels her with a look, and Caroline says,"Sorry, auctioned on Ebay."

"They are sacred, Caroline. Hiding them, it was meant to keep our souls from the chains of the colonists during the diaspora, to prevent them from stealing what was truly ours, even if they took our bodies, took our blood, took our loins, girl. Our sacred valuables hidden, but at the same time, because of those actions our culture, our essence was also buried. You see, we had to die to live. Live to die," he exhales.

His eyes, oh those wise centuries inside, they say what kind of world is this.

"Our grandmothers preformed a powerful spell, they were buried alive in a ritual at the height of the solstice, the Devil's day, to keep the power of the amulets alive and… to keep it away from those who would use it for evil, entombed forever, melding into the earth."

Caroline zeros in, this is her Jesse. This is grad school keep you up all night Jesse, smoking over an open textbook Jesse (you're going to start a library fire one day, Jesse), leave the window open and smell the summer air while he turns the pages all night Jesse. She feels her mind stumble to the edge of her own pitiful knowledge, she has always craved this, she listens like for a penny in a well. Her mind feels black, cavernous. Fill it up.

She feels her heart skip, like a stone on the face of an entire ocean. Hardly there, but it was.

Jesse colors his words eggplant and crimson, his seagreen eyes with their flecks of gold. "But this is the way of Ioa. Of were buried with the first mambos—"

"The who?" Caroline says, but she is sunk into this sand, she is listening with her eyes, she hasn't strayed from him and the indigo wind call of his ancient smoke.

"It means female vodou High Priestess in Haitian," and Caroline nods. "These relics," he continues, "were buried with the First of them, sacred, and hidden and so powerful, Caroline," he looks to the sky, his red eye shining. "So powerful that the burial site, the amulets' secrets and source, could not even be trusted with her children. Her children that grew so angry, so sick, so impoverished. Would they not use it for evil?"

Caroline has forgotten the bitter Ethiopian coffee. It sticks to the roof of her mouth like jagged glass.

Jesse rests his hands on the table, eyes locked with hers. "When our people fell to slavery, our religion slandered, our beliefs demonized, there was one of us, Elmase Debokur, who suggested to the mambo Voodoo Queen we yet again use our elements for revenge. That if we did not, our people would suffer at the whip-tongues, that we would be bound in chains for centuries to come."

Caroline's mouth is dry, and she is leaned over to the table, closer to him, sun eyes rising on him, pink lips parting.

"She was banished for this suggestion. Some say murdered. Some say Papa Legba himself walked her arm and arm down the road to the hanging post, grinning this false god grin. He is the crossroads keeper, and he did what our people willed him to do, what our spells asked of the spirits. We did not want a war and Elmase was persuasive, powerful. But we were wrong to condemn her, Caroline. That is the trick with our gods. The spirits are tricky, tricky, and you can never trust them. You can never ask. You see? There is always a catch, always an opposite. You can't forget. They will grant your wish but you will have all the consequences. They make you realize you should not wish at all, only have."

Caroline's brows bend. "So this… Elmase, she was right about revenge. People fell into slavery and subjugation because the amulets weren't used for protection."

"There would have been a price," Jesse shakes his head, laughs bitterly, leans against the back of the booth. "There always is."

"But you've suffered," she stressed, brows coming in, heat making a desperate slam on her chest wall. Something inside wanting to stamp those words red.

"What is better, to be the slave or the master?" he ruminates. He stares at her with kind burning eyes, kind broken eyes that are scabbed now from the lesions she dealt. "Which is worse? In which station does your soul suffer more—" he points, so softly, to her chest. "You have to wonder."

Jesse's mouth says, I do.

Caroline is stilled, eyes blue bassinette, oh she is a baby, isn't she.

She edges the coffee to the side, but doesn't drink it.

"So you can only practice if you're close to the relics, and the buried bloodline," Caroline says, bravado tamed. "The source of the power."

Jesse looks at her, tired, "Yeah."

"So you're just like, a regular guy then. When you're not home."

Jesse looks heavier, looks more pained, but it is not from the abrasions. His eye is throbbing, his chest viced between two metal bars, and his fingers tremble. But that not what weighs him down. "Yeah."

Caroline is staring at him. At her damage.

"That's a perfect lecture, Jess, but it still doesn't explain why you wanted to kill me," she tries so hard to hold onto the rails, to look past his raw sliced lip and his hammered jaw. And something inside of her says abandon yourself. This gargantuan heat in her, this always-burning, this pyre, oh sometimes it's even strong enough to warm her. Sometimes it dares her to hold her hands out, to do more than set metal trash cans alight in the dead of night. To look at Jesse, this human witch-not witch, and to be human vampire-not vampire.

But it is easy to forget.

Yes.

Forget it—

He stares at her, he swallows hard.

Caroline notices his quivering fingers, his nail beds that are discolored with her blood and his own.

She gets up and leaves the table.

Too quick.

She is outside, she is fumbling with a cigarette. Her pale little fingers are blind kittens at birth.

The air outside isn't cold, but it is missing something all the same.

Eventually the door to the diner opens, and it's Jesse. With his lean beanstalk form, his sanguine-stained jacket, his grey hooded sweatshirt. His dirty sneakers with the red laces.

"So, you're just gonna run?" he asks. His voice sounds far away, but he is right there. Right there.

Caroline ignores him.

"You don't wanna know why I tried to kill you?" he is talking to her like he is not talking to her, but something inside of her, and it makes her nauseous.

She turns around, "Fuck this," she says it over her shoulder. Her blonde hair is pasty in the light from the windows, her skin extra pale, extra translucent. Extra dead. How many times has someone tried to kill her? The explanations get stale. The discourse gets old. You forget why it mattered in the first place. You forget who was right, in the end. You don't want to forget that.

"Fine," he says behind her, calling after her. "Then answer me one thing. Why'd you turn it off, Caroline?"

She wheels around, assaults him with her monster speed, comes up on him like a wind at the rocks of the sea, the burning sear of a lamp against your eyes when you didn't mean to look.

"Shut up. You have no idea who I am."

"Girl, I'd like to."

She stares, unimpressed.

"There's something else there, I know there is. Caroline, I screwed up so bad doing this. Being with you. Just give me a chance to make this right. Please. I can't be wrong about this. You don't understand why, but I can't."

"I am not yours to fix, you tried to kill me three hours ago, and now you're going to be my knight charming? I'm not some girl with daddy issues writing in my diary, begging for a yellow brick road. Listen up," she balls her fist in his jacket, feels him flinch below her power. She will never get tired of feeling a man do that. "I am not yours. I am mine. I do things for me." She lets him go, looks him up and down, shakes her head pityingly, "And you were just one of them."

"Caroline—"

"You can't save people, Jesse. Do you know how pathetic that sounds? Do you? You look like an idiot and maybe one day you'll find some stupid girl who falls for it and guess what—she's going to be an idiot. And you'll waste your entire lives living idiotically together, pretending you're doing something good when you're not. You're both still lost and alone and miserable, because all you want is to find something to fix you, and there is no such thing as being fixed. I'm not going to help you save yourself, because that's what you really want, isn't it? That's not how it works. I'm nobody's redemption."

"Not even your own?"

"Just stop, you're boring Jesse. You're boring."

"I thought you weren't supposed to feel anything," he counters. She smiles, crosses her arms, looks away. "You are feeling something right now, aren't you? You are, and you know it. You can't stop. It's not real. The switch isn't real."

"Sure it is," she says, voice so sweet, roses on a grave.

"Then turn it back on. I saw your face when I said you killed that girl," she laughs, deriding him, but he chases her, "I saw it, there was something else. There had to be."

"Okay," she mocks, smiles widely, "let me set an alarm for that titled Times I Don't Give a Shit." She turns again, walking into the still desert dust without a glance behind. The empty parking lot rebounds her footsteps like shots being fired far away.

Jesse stops chasing her.

"You don't know how. Do you?" he realizes. "You don't know how to care anymore. That's the problem."

"Not knowing how doesn't mean I want to."

"No, it doesn't."

She turns, looks back at him. She is eclipsed, freed of the assaulting diner lights and their projection out of the empty glass windows like the reels of a film in a theatre, flick flick flick like frames playing out, and he is old, drained in their 35mm frame.

"But you have tried, and you're not in control, are you? You hate that, don't you? That's the whole point. Being in control. And this isn't that— it's the opposite."

She stares. Her footsteps are angry, short, menacing. "This is the only control. Freedom, Jesse."

"You tried and you can't," he talks over her, matter-of-fact. "Why? What happens?" there is some faint desperation, he asks like he genuinely wants to know. Like there is so much more to it.

"Maybe you can date another coed and make an outline with her," Caroline smiles, eyes turning up too brightly, lips curved like Icarus' wings.

"Caroline," he says, he reaches out and holds her arm. He doesn't cower when her eyes turn their black heat back on him. Their sun, their ninety-three million miles of distance, and then their nuclear fury disguised as picnic weather on a veranda. "I can help you figure it out."

She scoffs, looks at him like he's crazy.

He waits, like he has seen everything in here. Like his bold-faced words have hit every drum inside of her and could find no rhythm.

"Slave or the master," he says, sad eyes on her.

"Why do you even care," she asks, letting space be dark and silent between them.

"Because I knew what I was did tonight was wrong, I had a feeling, and I did it anyway." He nods, something in him so hurt, so weak. "I get it."

And there is more, that he loves her— he does, he is the boating day ocean and she is the beach ball sun. Warmed by her, cold and churlish beneath. She has inspired Aphrodite in him, from the foam, from the craggy rocks beneath, from the bitterness of hate, from the pits of sorrowed vengeance, from the black pews of an empty service, and he cannot let her go. There was so much less to him before he saw her, before he remembered how to be like her. And there will be no sonnets, not from his heart to hers, even though she has made him wise, hers that does not beat, that cannot feel. He understands. She still has taught him something, she has been a gospel.

Caroline smiles, oh she flashes her vampire grin—

Her blonde curling taffy locks, her citrus yellow waves, she shakes her head. "Tell me what they hell you meant by 'you're on his side' and maybe I'll consider it." Her fangs hang down in her mouth like pearls, and her eyes, onyx with a glint of heartless silver.

He takes out the keys to the Challenger, broken-feather finch.

Caroline snatches them from his hands.

"You talk. I'll drive. And don't even think about touching the radio Jesse, I will kill you."

He glances over to her, falls in step.

She says, "Seriously."

---

Jesse doesn't touch the radio.

It's been fourteen hours and he's said next to nothing. They're almost in San Antonio. He took over the wheel at Las Cruces. She said she didn't feel like driving anymore. That is was getting too hot.

The car feels smaller than it did before. Caroline has her knees up, her bare feet on the black leather. She is so small, and he vaguely wonders how old she really is. She's touching the glass of the window with her finger. He wonders what it feels like to live inside a coffin. He wonders if it's this quiet all of the time.

She hasn't offered to heal him and he hasn't asked.

He wonders if she forgot about it.

The car swallows pavement, the road seems empty, free, just how they always liked it. The engine is hungry. He wonders if Caroline is hungry. She puts her feet up on the dashboard, she doesn't ask where they're going. He wonders if she cares.

"I grew up just thinking you were all the same," Jesse says. He says it to the road.

It is a confession. The road is his religion, his sermon.

It listens better than Caroline does.

She's almost asleep.

The highway is flanked by long plains of sienna dust, tired prairie grass, open sky that aches to be pierced, like by a needle, by a thread. By a thread that will sew a flag into it. And what was it that James Dean said? I want to be a Texan twenty-four hours a day. Jesse feels the burn of the mid-state sun on the roof of the car. They're driving over the ghosts of militias, that Alamo resolution, the ironic promise of victory only through defeat. Jesse understands that.

He'd stand up on the Spanish stone if he could. He was never good at that.

He was better at talking.

But talking couldn't outwit a bullet, a fang. You can't talk to a monster, they don't hear words, only pulse. Talking was the last resort. You only talked when there were seconds left, and even then what did he say? Mom, maman. The light going out of her eyes before he could find the right thing—

Caroline blinks, looks over. "What?"

"Growing up down there. That's what we were taught. That you were all the same."

He says it plainly, his voice is smooth like sugar dissipating into coffee.

"And what do you think now?" she asks, she's teasing him.

"I think Elmase is still around, somewhere. Doing her dirty work in the spirit world. Whispering in our ears." He looks over to Caroline, "I couldn't believe it when I met you. How— different you seemed."

Caroline scoffs, turns off her attention again. She rests her elbow on the window, looks askance. "Seemed. Keyword."

"Right," Jesse concedes, without belief. "Look, we're taught to fear him. To obey. Caroline, you don't get it, it's a different world. You're not free. Not this— not what we've been doing," he gestures to her so sincerely, so much blurred skyline sorrow in his eyes, so much grasping starlight wishing to touch her and say thank you.

She feels it like a plane in turbulence. She looks down. She looks away.

"Well, who is this jackass anyway?" Her mind turns it over, it says, try to be worse than the demons I've faced. Try to scare me. Creep out from under my bed and crawl over my comforter and dig your nails into my thigh. She wonders why she thinks this.

Jesse swallows. His hands tighten on the ribbed black steering wheel. Caroline watches him.

"Jesse?"

Marcel—he says. It is a gasp. The carbon monoxide from a car engine while he's locked in the garage, the fumes from a burning house while he's in the attic. It is everything inside of him that has been dying. It is everything that has suffocated him, turned his lungs to wet coal, blistered his esophagus up like boiling candy, incinerated the leaves from his bronchial tree. And there are tears on the rim of his Carolina-kicked eye, there is an animal strength to his jaw. And he says nothing else but, —The Vampyre.

"Some dick vampire took over your city?" she asks, her tone is like electricity along a wire. It lights him up. It excites him. It makes him afraid. He almost says, Don't though—

he's listening—

He retracts that thought. He's conditioned himself, but it never works, does it. It never goes away. He is supposed to be better than that. That's what she wanted. That's what she died for. He tries, but he only has a book and a pen, and what, what can that do for surgery in the membranes, for open heart intrusion in a freezing cold room. One that says, heal me, with instruments only to cut, not to engrave.

"It's been that way for centuries," he replies to push his thoughts elsewhere. Push them outside, starve them. "Since my grandmere and my mother, since my sisters. It's been a war, and for the past fifty years, he's won. When the rest of the world celebrated freedom, we were confined to shackles still."

"And no one's been able to stop him? I thought witches— I don't know," she waves her hand, an arm up on her knee. "I thought you guys were supposed to be the shit."

The blue sky passes behind her head, and when he looks at her, her eyes are there, the same blue, even if she doesn't know it. He almost smiles.

"No. Too bad, though."

"Seems apartheid for the twenty-first century," she says. "Why don't you all just take him down?"

"He's one of us," Jesse nods. "An outsider, but one of us. My grandmother said hundreds of years ago he lived on the fringes of the city. Eating horse shit, sleeping in barrels. The gris-gris turned him out, said he had the Petro in him. The darkness. The restlessness. They turned him out. We were supposed to be loving, but he was given no power. Marie Laveau, a Voodoo queen prophesied he'd amass the dark spirits one day. Rise as a zombi." Jesse glances over to Caroline, her dead body, her still heart. "And he did."

There was a price for leaving him behind.

(Always a price child,

do not ask,

only have)

"He was a witch—" Caroline says, brows rising.

"Bokor," Jesse corrects. "Voodou priest. Or should have been."

"So why'd he lose it?"

"He was cast out, so he found another means to power. He became undead. Grandmere says afterwards he tried to find the amulets. Tried to dig them up again, to avenge himself, to resurrect himself. To destroy his creator, because he knew he could never be more powerful. Not as a zombi – a snake spirit. Someone with no will of their own." He looked to Caroline, glanced as he drove. Like you—he might have said.

Caroline with her red lips, their ruby shine and their coca-cola burn. Caroline with her hemorrhaging hunger, her alley cat smile and its bone dagger hilt.

She is watching him, chin on her arm.

"He wanted what the ancient spirits had. What our ancestors buried deep in the sucking bayou and her filth. He wanted his destiny back," Jesse's brows come up, he looks out onto the open road. To the traffic. "He was too fast, too greedy. Too smart. Regretted becoming a zombi, but had to – see, girl, the price. The price."

"So now he's subjugating everyone, getting his revenge. His cockfight because he was kicked in the shins," Caroline hisses under her breath, almost laughs. It is all a joke she has heard before. And is she really that old—?

Maybe she is not so young.

She has wrestled with the lions of two millennia. She has been the gladiator. Oh, and would the emperor let her live—? No, something inside said. Not now. Never now.

She exhales hot pink cinders. She feels jaws on her chest, and she thinks just bite.

Her gaze turns dark, blue. Navy. She feels some pit inside, an echo from the bottom saying, I'm only getting deeper. It makes her lungs stop.

Jesse isn't looking.

"I guess you could put it that way," Jesse responds. "That was his price for our disobedience. For not sharing the burial site. Only one person knew."

But despite his oratory willingness, there is something living in Jesse, some brand, some marker of horror, and it is the trauma he has tried to out-study. The fear he has tried to out-live. It is what we are, what he is running from—like all. That indelible thing. That one terror that will not leave, that becomes. That births you. And fools only to run, each step away still marked by distance from it.

"Where are we going?" she asks for the first time in over a nine hundred miles. He forgets sometimes that it doesn't matter. That she is stronger and faster. That she can cross a state line and afford not to notice— that she'll have an eternity to try again.

"Home," he says, gravel in his voice. His mother's words in his ears.

[Ne jamais revenir, mon chouxchoux. Mon amour, il vous te tuera.

Il vous te tuera.]

---

What— she snaps. She pulls on the lock of the door, unrelentingly, open open open, nearly rips it undone over the highway . She reaches over, grabs the wheel in a blur of painted seconds and yanks it towards her like a hand on a leash.

Jesse's survival instincts are still intact, crying out something in French, he's desperately trying to realign the wheel but Caroline is the heavy pull of gravity to a moon. She is a moon and she is crashing into you. She has decided to drain your sweet, sweet sea, your tea and honey, it is spilled. It is spilled. The car skids sideways, rapidly spitting a sidewinding trail of dust, and the station wagon behind them is screaming its horn, its passing them in a frantic swerve, and they are on the edge of the road, where the dirt meets the blacktop, and Jesse is slamming on the breaks, heart ramming into his chest like the fists of a gorilla.

Caroline kicks open the car door, leaps out, shoves her hand back in — Give me the fucking keys, Jesse.

She rounds the car, impatient, pulling open his door. Get out—

"Caroline! Caroline," he's yelling, come to, and he's jumping out of the vehicle, holding the keys out to the side, dangling them like raw flesh to a lion in an exhibit. Hey—! Hey look, calm down. Wait. Just a second. Just a second. His knees are weak.

"Are you serious?" her eyes narrow, so much like scythes, so dangerous. "We're going back to Vampire Fun Land? What, you have a couple free tickets to the Death-go-Round you want to blow before summer's out?"

"Caroline, girl listen to me," he stresses the word to, it annoys her.

Give me the fucking keys or I will make you swallow them and then rip them out of you—her smile is fiercer and faster than the A1 racers behind them. She feels like she's at a track, like the engines are roaring in her ears, the bright primary colors shuttering in her vision like a children's book and she can feel their wind, the trail of their cyclical freedom, it's a field of atoms, the roar in her ears.

Just hear me out—he counters, he is still holding his hands up and out, like he will be arrested by her. He looks like shit out in the daylight like this. A victim to a crime. That jacket seems too big for him.

"You literally have ten seconds before I put you through Vampire Laundromat bulky cycle," she takes one delicate glass slipper step forward and he stumbles four back.

I have a friend who can help you— he says, he throws it out there like a fish pole, he shoves it off the back of his boat for the shark. His heart is a telegraph machine, beep beep beepbeep beep beep beepbeep

"I don't give two bat shits about turning my humanity back on Jesse, I. Don't. Care." She looks tiny out here, in the foreground of the huge Texas sky, she is so dehydrated, so white, so frail. Some kind of dried up sea sponge, some little monster that survives under the rocks of the Death California Valley, that slithers out of its tanning bed rocks, with pale, albino eyelids and burns. And is she? Is she something frail? "I am hungry, is what I am, and it's been a sweet summer Jesse but everything has to end – specifically you."

She rounds him, so fast, so violently and he is pressed into the car, against his stomach, his stomach burning against the heat of the magma, the engine. His ribs ache where her autumn-fisted red and orange and yellow punch had struck him the night before. He is the red tide, coming in, going out. You can't swim there.

She bares her fangs, rears up as the calligraphy clouds her eyes like an amorphous thing below the water, coiling behind a rock, pulverizing your eyes, blinding you, leaving you to inhale the char. This is the last of his sand and his sunshine, she is burning in the lone star heat, she is a musket on the Alamo stones, her parched hair and her dead eyes and her unforgiving stand. "This is for giving me that B-fucking-plus on my term paper. 'Interesting but I found your argument contrived and lacking based off your reliance on anecdotal evidence'? Did you see how many fucking citations I used? You asshole."

She won't help you turn it back on!—He bellows, he is cringing and his teal eyes are wide against the barren sky.

Caroline's lust, her craving for red-handed drunkenness, this smoke-deep cabernet, it is insatiable, it is the footstep of a giant, it is swallowing, and crushing and she is burning at her very core, her heart of hearts, her nuclei of nuclei, and yes, she is the monster's skin, the snake-faced narrow-nosed creature, and she is longing, and her chest is tight, rung together, and her hands are nails in his skin, tetanus in his body, and she is so completely over him.

And still he faces her eyes. Her nothing eyes with their nothing irises and their nothing nothing pit of lilac ash.

What— she says. Her fangs have pierced her gums and she bleeds from that, bleeds out her own monster blood, still it is the same color as yours (maybe it is yours), and then they heal, so perfectly, so flawlessly, and he is transfixed by it, even in the face of her absence, her utter absence, he marvels.

She can help you keep it off— he says. He stares. His hand in rigged into her hip, rigged like the lines of a sail, and he is gripping her and she is practically over him, and the passerby must be thinking it is a show, how her knee parts his with the rude confidence of a cheerleader.

She can help you keep it off, he repeats. He says it like they are the only words he knows. Forever, Caroline. Forever if you want.

She stares.

She stares so intently that her thoughts could eat through him, a pathogen burrowing into skin, and her mind pulses and her eyes dilate, and she says, Are you lying to me?

(Forever)

"No—" he stammers. No. He couldn't lie to her.

Jesse is an honest man.

(Forever)

A hammer on iron, a hammer on a railway that is yet to be built, and then comes the frantic, shrieking, roaring train of her idea, it is slamming off the rails, it is going so fast that its tracks bend under its radical hellscream, Forever, everywhere there are hissing sparks, and her cupidity is quelled, her starvation quieted, only a little bit but just enough, and she no longer covets his veins. She will no longer tear him open.

"What's in it for you," she asks, the sound of locusts screaming in an open field.

Her cobra gaze, her fangs dulling. He eyes exhausting, blue, again.

Nothing—Jesse says. He is so quick to say.

Nothing.

Oh, oh, liar, liar tongue. Bare-winter tree truth, base puddle-jumping tick.

Beware, Carolina—!

She is too smart for that.

She is too close to his face, his wet sun-licked caramel skin and his warm stilted breath. And she breathes in herself for several moments, silent as a praying saint. A praying saint with her forever lost, her forever cast away, and that is the white light. That is the holy gate.

"Okay," she agrees, but she is far too smart for that.

---

It's raining on the last leg of their journey, and Jesse is crying.

It's over five hundred miles from San Antonio to that bayou hovel off the fringes of the gulf. Caroline is driving. Her foot is flush against the pedal despite the fact that the greyscale downpour glosses the highway like an endless mile maker of coffin bolt death, tempting every driver into the abyss. The clouded air is nylon pulled over the lens of the world, glittering taillights pulsing through the mist like flares, some kind of ocean storm possessed upon the land. Cars spit up steam from their bumpers like rocks obstructing riverflow, and they swim, they swim forward like fish in a current, and Caroline is the shark in their midst. Caroline with the many layered teeth in the wide hungry jaw, tusks under lips.

Her white hands hold the steering wheel and she keeps saying, are you fucking kidding me under her breath, and she sounds like a baby while saying it, she sounds like a songbird caught in the downpour of the northern forest rain.

Jesse is crying.

She glances over twice.

She doesn't say anything.

He is leaning against the window. He is looking bad, with his black eye and his split lip and his dirty hair. His eyes are enflamed, but maybe that is not from the tears, it could be those taillights, kissing the windows with their glove red glow. Making handprints. Red, red handprints everywhere, closing off all of the vantage points, so many hands, all trying to get in, saying, Caroline—

Maybe it is the opposite, it is raining in Jesse and crying outside, but what would it matter anyway, Caroline thinks, if it was. Caroline's hunger is getting the better of her, and she is driving fast, too fast, through the monochromatic deluge, the bullet-pattern rain that is ricocheting from the car roof like artillery (death death death today pat pat pat it sings). Reverberating back and forth through her ears like the long muted trumpet in noir-lighted film.

She sees the aggressive heads of pineapple palms peeking through the grey, the slog and smudge of clouded air. The windshield wipers are like paring knives, trying to cut through water. What a futile thing, Caroline thinks. Still she urges them on more mechanically, more viciously, more promptly computerized and obedient, and the car rumbles beneath her.

Jesse hasn't moved.

Stop crying— Caroline finally demands.

He doesn't move. When he sits up from his slouched position against the window he looks aged, how he had been hugging his elbows in that jacket and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up by his ears. His tears are the blue bodied rings around Neptune, and the rain is obscuring the windows of his abandoned dance house club, the windows of his teeth in his nonexistent smile. He swallows.

Caroline used to cry.

It was at night, always at night, after she had lay down in bed and pulled the covers up to her chin in her pastel yellow room with its macaroon-peach air freshener and shut off her light. Dark, safe dark. Safe, safe dark and its distant hands. It would pull across her like a chariot dragging the stars as the daylight died, and she would be in graveyard peace. It would say, shh sweetheart, it would say nothing. And nothing was enough, oh beautiful nothing she had come to trust, and no one was there, only herself, her dying, her little pink hands clasped together, saying here lies Caroline Forbes—

And after she was alone, only alone, she would weep her kitten sounds, her Stefan, and she would cover her eyes with her tight, tight palms and cry Tyler, and she would hold her own shoulders and catch her own racking hurdles and think Damon and it would burn, think Elena and it would descend into her nerves like the hot air of a factory on fire.

Daddy, she would say, she would moan it into the pillow, and how, how, was this Victoria inside of her, this roaring immovable falls, this frightening natural wonder gone utterly concealed. It was like trying to hide the moon. It was like trying to stand in front of rivers, to obscure oceans with nothing but an index card, and still, no one was witness, no one seemed willing to admit, to sign the death certificate of here lies Caroline Forbes.

And look, look into that dark and you will see hands there, behind hers. Shadow imprints of something else. When she grips her hair and rips it up by the roots and her face puckers so tightly and bruises so purple, when she is curled like a foal under her covers saying Matt stop Matt, saying Bonnie please Bonnie, when she is saying no no no no no no no stop please no please anything but this, god anything

Anything—

And she would tremble and exhaust her dead body, and she would feel dead for once, empty, and cold like a monster should be, and she would feel like she closed her eyes in a morgue, like there was a tag on her foot, and her mother had decreed the case closed and identified her body on a steel cold table.

Mommy she would wrestle the clawing coyote of her desperation, she would say, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy and wail, and her eyes would hurt like her own hands were searing brands and she had melted them out. Blind-eyed Caroline with her swollen salty tongue and her Pluto cold distance from the heart of herself.

Caroline used to cry.

Stop crying— she repeats. She looks over, steady eyes on him, leveling. She is trying to drive. Caroline hits the radio with the heel of her palm, annoyed.

"I'm sorry I tried to kill you," Jesse sniffs. Jesse is good, Caroline thinks. She tastes it against her tongue like something she remembers from childhood, Christmas cookies. She thinks what an army it could make, all of these good people, if only they had weapons. Little toy soldiers ba-rum-ba-bum-bum, drummer boys and nutcrackers with their unforgiving jaws, their fangless mouths that still go snap.

"I don't care that you tried to kill me, Jesse," Caroline says, staring ahead at the road. She is listening to the to the radio, Tu crois bien sûr me connaître mieux que personne, Marie colère existe aussi, fais bien attention, Je te l'ai déjà dit cent mille fois sur tous les tons. "It's not like you were going to, you know, actually succeed," she flicks on the turn signal and barely glances, red tail lights in her blue pool eyes, switching lanes.

"But I do," he charges on, noble Jesse with his heavy sword that he cannot wield. This strange attachment to the soulless girl. "That is what they told us to do. If you got one alone. That is what you were supposed to do."

"Who is we," Caroline asks, face contorted. "These people sound like they have issues."

"The coven," he says, he looks to her. It looks like he is dying from some disease. He looks skeletal and not bronze and gold at all, and Caroline's brows cross. Where is the seawater salt-burned Jesse, the beach side bum with his wide burning grin. She is not blind to this change. How at every mile he seems to grow more wary, more crippled. "It's like a council of witches, the leaders of our community," he explains. "But we never get one alone," Jesse says. He says it like it is law. "So I didn't exactly know what was doing."

"Yeah, your skills are lacking a certain, shall we say, everything. And believe me, I know about councils and they all need to suck a dick."

"Yeah," Jesse says quietly, gently. He settles back against the window like a plant bending under the weight of rainwater. "Their decisions are questionable. To some of us."

"Whatever," Caroline says.

The tires are wheeling over spit up tar and the hubcaps are spinning like silver quarters on a table and the hunger in her is rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling and Jesse is just sitting there. And does he have any idea how hard it is not to reach over and feed on his flesh warm neck as she drives, as she leaves her fucking life to chance, oh like a cat nine times nine times nine lives, and everyone else on this highway, and she'd drink.

She grips the steering wheel. Jesse is her key to this new determination, her Forever free and off and endless, and what was it that ceaseless adversary? Humanity always trying to creep its way back in and it was true, in a way, and Caroline would find another way to better that. A better, crueler, faster way. She always did. She would spear it through the heart like it would her, and she would be sovereign of her own body at last. Black-mouthed Caroline with her oil and ink dress and her burning blonde hair like an ocean on fire. Her blood blood red crown and the halo in her mouth like a bull with a ring.

Yes, she would finally be free.

"I need to stop and get something to eat before I decide you're the best option," she announces.

"Eat," Jesse asks. "Like a person?"

"No, some peanut-butter and cheese crackers and at least four bags of sour skittles."

Jesse is quiet until they find another gas station.

---

When they near the state line Jesse is seizing. Oh god, he says, and the storm outside is muted but there is lightning in the wake, blowing up like distant missiles in the far end of the sky, brought on by the wet heavy southern heat.

He is beating his fingers on the dash, and he is looking to that dead shell girl, and he is saying maybe, maybe we should turn around—

Caroline laughs, are you kidding me. She just fed, and she feels like a fuchsia bleeding bird that could soar above this earthly storm. She speeds through the rain and the radio craps out, it turns to whitenoise and she is pressing merrily on, on, on as the highway lights burn out one, then another.

What is your problem— Caroline says. She is looking over at Jesse who is rubbing his rubber sneakers together, whose seagreen eyes have gone polluted.

You don't understand, Caroline—he says, he stresses the words. He looks ashy. Like he could be the one who's died. We're not supposed to come here. I'm not supposed to come here.

"Says who?" asks Caroline, Caroline with her concrete feet and the spiraling tires and the scorching heat below her trail over this muculent tar road. Oh, everything she touches burns.

"My mother. Before she died," Jesse looks at her.

At this girl he would put before himself, and yes?

Was this something for himself, did this make him happy?

Maman, he thought, maman you can forgive that, can't you.

"Well, my father told me a lot of shit before he died," she answers, implying the worst.

"It wasn't like that," Jesse stammers, he inhales deeply, closing his eyes and swiping the pink-stained aqua green memories away. The rush of his flight, the empty goodbyes. The frozen lips and acetaminophen numb throats. He doesn't tell her if he goes back he may never rise again.

That is the chord deep inside, G-note somber and low, spinning around like the vinyl they craved so early on in this loose leaf summer. That is the truth and he once heard it said that things don't end well for people like me.

He once heard it dead, things don't end well for people like us.

But a coward, no.

Oh enough to die another day? so much inside still tells him so, so go!

"Listen," Caroline levels. She doesn't conceptualize the fear, but there is one thing she wants farthest from her plans, farthest imaginable like a satellite at the edge of her orbit, and that is the feeble net of human emotion. Yes, deny all that writhing mess of sea-deep sins like a gasping mass dying fish drudged up from the floor. "Nothing is going to happen to you so long as you stay on my bad side."

Jesse's heart is humming like the E, the guitar's thinnest string, and it's whining, vibrating like it could be played forever. Like it is played forever, like all music, all his music, living on somewhere, somehow, every note in all the world lived simultaneously by someone, somewhere, and the symphony of life belting out together in such confusion and so such clarity.

Jesse always feels it—

Such clarity in his sad song soul.

The spacious sky begins to fade away, piecemeal patched-off like flies, like buzzards picking apart the wholeness of a cadaver, and oh, in the darkness around the rain comes the wizened hands, the aching spikes and spires of the palms, shooting into the sky like catapults. And how they fold over, hunched like beggars against the petrified sky, black and white, white and black, in the lightning. Hairy wolfish creatures blasting out from the backs of skinny, ailing men. And they hang over the highways, begging for alms saying, why won't you heal me, why won't you look—

Under their glaucomic eyes Caroline drives, their heavy burdens and their rotting coconut packed sorrows, heaved over their backs like nomads doomed to stand eternal. And soon they grow thin in number, they stand side by side with their wives, the burly women with their mossy willow shawls, the great hanging arch of their closed-eyed sway. How eerie they appear, animate somehow, and they wait so looming and so large, they trap the wet, wet heat below and they mold under their own humid tears. Their tears, they bend into reaching stems of spider widow moss, and their veils, like mothers who have lost children over graves. They yearn to grasp them back— oh come back! Come back!

Please—!

The lightning flares again in the distance, between the tulle of their shrouds and their huge, heaving trunks.

Go back—none of the willows say.

But they watch. They are eyes hanging on sticks and little glass baubles cracking together in the wind. They are the stench of oleander and the long bone-breaking ache of an organ. They simply watch the cars feed into the mouth of the great bay, the pungent open bayou tattering and fraying at the ends. And look at the mangroves, how they begin to gather at the freeway's edge, how they mean to eat away with their tangled teeth the only way out, the only way in.

And so they go on, for hours more, further, deeper, and so it is like the descent of Virgil, something akin to that, the way the sky blackens and the way the land pans out, so flat, so sullen, so wet, and boggy and seeping like something is sucking them all down from below.

Caroline exits from the highway, she spares the cars the frothing of her engine, and Jesse is silent. His hand pressed to his mouth.

His eyes are closed.

And so they crawl ever forward, under the mourning lichen and the ossified frames of the willows, like spirits calcified just as they let out their last agonized scream from the land of the living into the land of the dead.

WELCOME TO LOUISIANA, BIENVENUE EN LOUISIANE says the chipping sign in polite and mannered beige, through the full-leafed overcoat of forest. The butter maple leaves, gripping around like heavy hands.

But below is the spray-painted desperation, the hollow god cry, and it reads like this under the weeping sky:

[TURN BACK, THIS CITY IS DEAD

AND THE DEAD R WAKE]

And Caroline is concentrated, but the speedometer quiets under her white sneakered foot.

GO BACK! says another GO AWAY!

[THE DEAD DO NOT SLEEP

THE DEAD KEEP US]

The road rushes past, and those signs are withered in the rain. More decrepit, more lowly they become with each rain driven mile, written on boards and propped against trees. Stabbed into the ground and smeared in red.

[KEEP ON TO ATLANTA: 468.4 MILES

BILOXI: 91.1 MILES]

[DO NOT STOP]

"Honestly Caroline," Jesse says, some sort of resolve dammed up inside him now. "You got that the other way around. It's you that better stick with me in the Ninth Ward."

[GOD FORGIVE US OUR TRESSPASSES

I'M SORRY]

[I'M SO SORRY]

[DO NOT STOP

ONLY DRIVE

ON

BYE

YOU CAN

NOT

SAVE

US

DO NOT

TRY]

---

"Wait, wait, wait wait," Jesse says. He's reaching over to grab the wheel and Caroline is pushing him off.

What the hell— she says. In her eyes he's had a lobotomy, or will soon. "What are you doing? Stop."

"No, look, we can't go past here. We have to wait."

She keeps driving.

Caroline!—he shouts, "Caroline, listen to me girl, listen," his eyes are wide, his burnt comb hair is repelled in all different directions, like a magnet resides in the center of his skull fanning it all apart, and his looks so serious, the way he splays his fingers out, the way he reaches to grab around the arm that has minced him.

Damnit!— Caroline yells, her voice slams against the roof of the car. The Dodge Challenger skids to the side of the road in one uncomfortable swoop, the southern sky tilted into pale blue as the willows and palms begin to fall into crippled silhouettes. She stops on white bayou sand, the tires crackling, tree brush overhanging, dropping thick clumps of pollen as the crickets scream from the dense underbelly of the swamp.

What—she snaps, infuriated, arm on the wheel, looking over at him. "What now, what could it possibly be. The boogeyman? Is Michael, Freddie, Jason? Who is it now? Jesus lording Christ Jesse, I think even freaking Bambi would cause you to hemorrhage."

"Listen," Jesse says evenly, calmed by the stilled engine though his eyes remain large. "We can't go in there right now. We won't make it by dark."

"If you haven't noticed, dark is kind of my thing," she replies, brows flat and unimpressed as the horizon.

Caroline—his voice is a warning. "You're just going to have to trust me."

"Yeah," she retorts. "Okay mark that down for never o'clock."

Her ears remind though, her otherworldly ears with their pin-drop echoes, that there are no other cars on the road. Empty, and this byway, this road that should be overused and tired is barren though it is not yet nightfall. None, and then one—one that has its engine wailing, its motor hacking into space, and the roar of its tires like cannon fire, steaming through the road like its driver is set aflame, fast, so fast, ablaze behind the wheel like with skin melting from their zygomatic arch, cartilage singed away leaving the whistling black nasal cavity exposed, and the scream of the engine—enough to lash the agony into the spaces between the trees.

She looks back at Jesse.

"Talk," she says, irritated, blue eyes leveling on him, waves hitting his ankles that are far too cold.

"There are Rules, girl. Marcel's Rules."

Like—? she asks with a jerk of her head, the pinnacle of her brows.

Jesse inhaled. He looked like a schoolboy, reciting the alphabet, reciting the Presidents, going through numbers one through ten in French, un deux trois quarte cinq six sept huit something that was indelible within him. Committed to memory.

He pressed, "Like no witches out past curfew. Curfew is at nine o'clock. Everyone has to report to the Nightwatch at the Guard by eight-thirty, to be inside the Ward by eight-forty-five , at the latest. No magic inside the Ward. No magic unequivocally unless thereby commanded by a vampire and only in the presence of two or more vampires. No permission to be outside the Ward past eight forty-five unless you have a written ordinance approved and signed by Thierry, the Watch's commander. The ordinance has to be renewed every month on the day. Carry identification at all times. Always wear the Pentagram. No walking the streets of the Ward at night, doors locked by ten—"

Caroline's pencil line brows bang like cymbals. What?—she laughed, honestly laughed, and Jesse's eyes grew dark. "That is the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. What happens if you don't follow these stupid Rules?"

Jesse looks down, looks up. "Let's just stay here, ok? I called a friend. She'll be here soon. She can get us in, maybe."

Caroline rolls her eyes. Tired. Shakes her head. Whatever.

Propping her legs, long white strips of birch, over the dash she released the seat back and closed her eyes. "Wake me up when we get there," she says, leaving him in the car alone.

Jesse watched her for a moment.

He watched her vanilla ice cream sweet gin face, her lithe little body, all that power in one pretty chip of glass. She seems so delicate, so fragile, and still he thought, perhaps she was. Deep inside, deep within that hot crystal core, the place that was so slight, so thin, painted china, she had to be, that it splintered into a thousand irretrievable pieces the moment that she was compelled to black out the light in her eyes. When she decided to turn the switch away, that switch that was more like a pinwheel wasn't it, blowing around and around and never quite staying there where you wanted it to. That windmill that depended on the slimmest breath of air.

That is what Jesse believed.

That some of them had to be different. That she was. That maybe if they found out how, they could change things—

He breathed.

He looks out the window as if there were things walking in the woods. He closes his eyes, whispers something under his breath, and caresses a finger over the door lock, pressing it down.

You're breathing really loud, I can't sleep– says Caroline.

"Sorry," says Jesse, closing his eyes again, nerves singing in his skin. He unlocks the car door, opens it, steps out. The car light was on, and Caroline remained inside. Caroline looking like a girl in a TV, behind the microwave-lighted windows, you could hear her and see her but never touch her.

Wake up—you wanted to say, you did try, but she couldn't listen. She wouldn't. Wake up wake up, you bang on the glass, and your voice is muffled, and you spell it out in letters through the saliva mist of your breath on the windows.

Wake up—!

Jesse shoves his scabbed knuckles into the pockets of his coat. He was tall, taller than everyone it seemed, but not taller than these trees here. These grieving willows, the bulbous-trunked baldcypress and their shrouds of Spanish moss. His seagreen eyes flicked to and from the woods. The hue of them now, it looked overgrown and mildewed and that was the color precisely, no not seagreen sparklers, burning bright on the beach on the Fourth of July, but the still-groaning water of the bayou. Unclean and waiting.

Something inside him had been, hadn't it Jesse—?

What are you waiting for young, man? This touch of destiny in you.

Maman stop stop, let me go.

Jesse, never come back here. Jamais. Je ne veux pas cela pour toi.

You are good. Good. And this terrible world will ruin you.

You are going to beat this world.

It does not matter, not the color of your hands or the gift within, you turn your back, you always win.

You live.

He paces around in circles, kicking up pollen. Jesse could smell magnolia. It reminded him of death. Jesse's mother had loved magnolia. White on the kitchen table like snow, like snow never to come down to the tendril edge of the bayou. Not while the big-footed giants slogged in the mud, the baldcypress, those trammeled titans slowly fossilizing in the water like reptiles that hung their necks in the clouds.

Fuck me—said a voice, and suddenly he is attacked from behind, staggering into an embrace, a hold so strong and unrelenting that he thought his wounded ribs might dissolve at last. "Jesse, what go on, you motherfucker!"

It was Jade.

Eyes the pure white of Alaskan glacier and skin the color of bold mahogany. She had a warrior's body, small but resilient, muscular and solid. "Jade, no shit, no shit," Jesse laughs, his fear assuaging into relief, the tears in his eyes from the former. His chest is still trembling. He hugs her tightly.

I thought you'd never come back here—she says, breathless. Her smile pierces the oncoming dusk. It banishes it to the edge of the world like the good book to a trifling soul.

So did I— he responds, running a hand over his quill-tipped hair.

"You look like shit," she exclaims, dark eyes taking on an entirely new expression. She gapes, wide-mouthed, at his injuries. "Holy shit, did someone chew you up and spit you out?" her hands roam his chest freely, pushing the material of his shirt in careless whirls. "I wouldn't have recognized you if I wasn't already a master of disguise myself," she grins, so cheeky and big that her face was more teeth than skin or bone.

Seems like I was,— he responds genially, but still is the long note of worry ringing inside of him, and he pushes her hands away. "Can you get us in to the Ward?" he is anxious, hurried, his frame seems ragged, ragged and torn like a rawhide bone, despite the warmth it had exuded on the beach weeks before, the plain spoken strength now withered like faith.

Who's we?— Jade asks promptly, eyebrow popping with the strength of a typhoon.

"Caroline and I," he explains, motioning to the car, the bright light inside is still blaring, slowly surrounded by the pulsing of the muggy sundown, mosquitos buzzing over the metal.

Caroline?— Jade asks. "You brought someone back here? She insane or is she going to donate five hundred dollars and leave, content she did her good deed for the next year and a half." The expression on her face was judgmental but soft, Jade was cool, like her namesake.

She's just insane— Jesse answers.

"Fine, you two better git your asses in gear," Jade broadcasts, rounds past Jesse like a spinning top, opens the front door to the car. "Move over Blondie, I'm driving."

Caroline wakes, takes in the presence of this new personage. It's Caroline. Call me Blondie again and I'll break your face on the steering wheel— she reponds.

I like her—says Jade, as Jesse moves into the passenger seat.

Who's this?— lemon Caroline asks, still reclined.

"This is my friend Jaydie. We grew up together," Jade beams at him, looking tiny outside the front door, blocking out a best friend handshake against the air. She chuckles.

"Does she know the witch?" Caroline asks. Jesse's witch that she was searching for. The one who would teach her forever and never. Caroline climbs with the long legs of a crane, falls into the backseat, presses a foot into the space between Jesse's legs for stability.

Jade looks at Jesse, eyes suddenly serious —She knows?

Jesse eyed his friend— She knows more than we do, girl. And less.

Jade adjusts the rear view mirror, yanks it down to meet the requirements of her small stature. She pulls onto the road with an abandon for safety that leaves Caroline mildly impressed. "Look, we can't take her into the Ward. She's an ashy spot on my flawless ebony ass. Evident from a mile away."

Amber goes in. Take us the way Amber goes in— Jesse points out.

Who the fuck is Amber— Caroline asks, bracing a steady locked arm against the window as Jade slams the gas pedal and knocked Jesse into the door. Caroline's dimples deepen with concentration.

"Another friend," he responds.

"Fine, but it's your funeral," says Jade, dragging the car's handling around sharp corners, the engine fuming below legions of overhanging moss. The cypresses are teeming with stinging locusts, screeching in the woods as the sky dims. No visitors in the Ward— Jade says, and Caroline blinks. It is the same peculiar tone Jesse had used when he rattled off the so-called Rules. Committed to memory.

"Speaking of funerals, who put up those signs?"

"Shit, they were up again? Must have been Little Ben and Christie from the Garden district. She is such a little shit. Thinks just because she lives in the heights she'll never get caught."

Caroline's eyes linger on the two of them, internalizing their words. This was an in and out job then. Find the witch. Get out of dodge.

"What's her name?" Caroline presses, talking loudly as the engine snarls.

Sabine— Jesse says. His answer is clear, automatic. Honest.

"Shit, what you want with Sabine, girl," Jade asks, eyes locked in the rear-view mirror, staring back at Caroline's pale alabaster lips and thin blonde eyelashes. "No one goes to Sabine unless they don't wanna come back."

Sounds like my kind of woman—says Caroline.

"What did you do," Jade says so plainly, so blatantly and straight-forward that Caroline meets her eyes in the windshield and some honestly of her own was inspired within.

What didn't I— she responds, and the words were empty, empty like the last dry well of water before war inspires man.

---

Getting through the bayou is a chore.

But parking on the other side of town, tearing up the door of the warehouse, removing a tire, balancing an empty spire on a block of concrete—that was nothing. Jade moves her hands with mathematical precision. They were small, but capable, deft. This car won't be here tomorrow otherwise, she says offhandedly.

Caroline observes, impressed. Hey— she adds, citrus yellow in the falling night. She walks dandelion legs to the front of the car and pops the hood. She disconnects the wiring harness and the transmission. Insurance— she clarifies, slipping the wiring into the back pocket of her torn jean shorts, the overused fabric with the hole in the side of her ass cheek.

Jesse stands back, lets them work. His stomach is foul.

"And I thought you were a cold bitch," says pretty Jade, smile cracking ear to ear like a jack-o-lantern.

I'm offended you'd think otherwise— answers Caroline. She looks over to Jesse with impatience. Hello—?

Jesse nods, knocked into mastery of himself by the off-key hymns from her burnt chapel lips. He walks between the two of them, paying one last look to his strawberry red Dodge Challenger. It is as disassembled as he felt himself. One wheel gone, no means of escape. Jesse's tire was in his chest, he didn't have a spare.

"It'll be a twenty minute walk. Think those little legs can make it," Jade jokes.

It's not my legs I'd be worrying about if I were you— says Caroline, and she feels Jesse's elbow like a fork her side. Her eyes rest on him. Then they glide away.

Her gaze traces the sidewalks, filthy.

She kicks up wrappers, soiled napkins.

The corpse-coal stench of contaminated garbage hangs in the air like men lynched in trees. There, the paint-peeling off molded sideboards, graffiti tattooing the cold sore lips of every door, and the air that seemed wet. It is a landfill.

And the smell—

Toxic, somehow, like formaldehyde, chemicals poured over something rotting— sulfur or phosphorus, wear a mask, the instructions would say. CAUTION KEEP OUT OF EYES AND AWAY FROM SMALL CHILDREN, HAZARDOUS PARTS.

She hacks, has to stop and spit over her rounded leather boots.

"That's the oleander," Jade comments. And Caroline began to see, the streets, the gutters, the drain pipes, stuffed through with decomposing stems of oleander, flower petals dried and curled up, sopped with thick street filth, gathering in unhygienic piles like vomit at the street corners. They clogged the drain pipes, made the grime stick harder. "Marcel has his people throw them into the streets. To get rid of the stench."

I could never forget that smell—says Jesse, too quiet. Something buried there.

"Why doesn't he just clean it instead?" Caroline asks the logical question, looking down to the smaller woman walking beside her.

Jade laughed. For us—?

It is exactly twenty minutes before they reached the end of the blocks, the long bay-side roadway that led down to the Ninth Ward. The water lapping the concrete seawall is putrid. Jesse gazes towards it, his eyes poisoned.

The water is black. The concrete wall where the tide meets the water that has passed over the levees is clogged with white belly up fish, discarded clothing, stained styrofoam coffee cups. It is fetid like a carcass has sunk below it all, the carcass of a giant, rank water mired with disease.

The sun was setting. It broke the oil-blackening sky with a fierce hush of dagger orange, the bleeding molten pink of a woman's lipstick. Caroline gazes up it, and below, the outer rim of the city, the part that fed into the bay, an endless smattering of shacks and ramshackle hovels, the tumbledown ghetto of an already decrepit neighborhood.

In front of it was a mass of people. A gate, a long black wall erected on its outskirts, tall planks of sturdy wood, and the people gathered outside of it, waiting in in a hoard that seemed to filtered off into smaller lines someplace around the fencing. She saw little blue and orange lights disappearing and reappearing, the people filtering into the gates.

What the hell is this—Caroline asks. Jesse is numb inside, eggshells and corked wine, he closes his eyes. Reaches for Caroline's hand.

She feels it brush up against hers, his warm skin against the back of her wrist. She edges hers away.

Caroline is tall. Curling cream hair spinning into rivulets by her temples, wet humidity on her cheeks. She looks over to him. Jesse is crying again. Something knocks on her chest like a sledgehammer, trying and trying and trying to nail a memory into a wall. And she watches those bayou-blued eyes, opens her mouth like she is about to say something.

Here— says Jade, she yanks down Caroline by the collar of her loose cargo jacket. Heat flares under Caroline's eyes but she closes them quickly, conceals it. Opening them she watches Jade pull something from her own pocket, a star, no more unique than that, a fabric pentagram. In seconds she has thread, a needle, a thimble, and it is fastened to the outside of Caroline's coat. Nimble-fingered Jade with her talents, quiet as a stablemouse.

"That's how you get in," says Jesse, but his words were thick like the rocks at the river bottom. Jade finishes with his coat in seconds.

Follow me—she instructs. Don't say anything, were her last instructions. Caroline pulls her hood over her hair.

In the crowd people are quiet, it is not the massive throng of impatience that Caroline imagined it would be, moshing and tramping, she didn't have to use her strength. No, in fact they wove peacefully through the five dozen people, and the people, sheltered by the quilt of night are polite, meek. The step in silent movements with white eyes downcast.

Jesse looks like he is going to double over. Caroline can hear his heartbeat, pattering like a machine gun in the crowd, and she instantly thinks nothing but human human human. Her lips curl and she grabs Jesse's hand with the force of a predator. She squeezes it in her own, fingers lacing with his. She looks at him. Shh.

He nods, squeezes back.

Next—! Shouts a voice up ahead. Caroline raises on her toes to look. Tall Caroline like the swing on an oak. It was a man, what appeared to be a bored and impatient man, shining a bright blue lighted flashlight into peoples' eyes, marking something off on a piece of paper, checking their jackets and then filing them inside.

Caroline stays silent as they move through the people, a soft morass of moss and quiet breathing. She narrows her hearing, listening over the crowd of warm human soulbeats, can sense something else as they approached the gate. Absent beats. Too slow. Too cold. Vampires. She opened her eyes, seeing the little blue and orange lights.

Name— says another man into her ear. This one human. This one with a pentagram on his jacket. There were two with pentagrams, Caroline counted, swift deer eyes, and three vampires, dispersed among the long wall. The light in her eyes burned.

Who do you think you are—!

The is a scream from the other side of the bank. Caroline's gaze is snared, eyes dodging through the crowd which seems to jolt back in unison. "He was only three minutes late!" the woman continues to swail, frantic. Her voice is hoarse against the bare night. It hits the air like a saw. He was only three minutes late—!

"You all know the Rules," comes a smooth and unforgiving timbre. "Rule Number Five clearly states, if you are not at the gates of the Ward by the assigned hour, all persons will be taken back to Thierry for court martial, and then to Marcel for judgment."

Diego you bastard, you bastard—! the woman is hysterical, barely visible in the dark, black eyes and black lips and a magenta scarf around her head. The boy in her arms no more than fourteen. How could you betray us like this—how could do this to us, he was only three minutes late, she shrieks, she is sobbing, yowling, reaching for the boy who reaches back like a bird falling from a nest, pulled away by the other two vampires. Please, please Diego, please—her pleas are horrifying, bleak as the end of all things, like the prophecies of a mute woman to a roaring and gluttonous god.

You will always be one of us to them, that is why they put you at the Ward guard— she roared, damning him, exposing something that seems to ignite anger on his features in the turning night.

He rounds to spit something back to her, but her fingernails are in Diego's face, clawing ravenously, a mother's desperation, and the vampire's eyes turn mourning black after the agony, the veins under his copper skin the color of cancer, and without warning he tears into her throat as her son wails and thrashes like a calf set for veal.

He drains her to ugly drought and snaps her neck, dropping her to the sludge like a rag doll.

Her eyes are still and wide, but her chest does not move. Her cheek sinks into the mud like the leakage of a chemical plant.

Anyone else want to question the rules tonight!

Diego hollers into the stillness. His eyes are blood red, the woman's life still warm on his chin, and the crowd sobs, covering their mouths, silencing their cries, pressing into the gate, their information stumbling out of traumatized lips. Diego shoves the boy into the arms of another vampire, a black bag claims his face and Caroline's heart is dead.

Colder somehow than she has ever felt it before. Less feelng. More absent, more departed than she could have ever known. There is only off, only off and never on, and she can feel her chest solid like a block of hoarfrost in the dead eye of winter. Her feet are lead, they poison everything they touch.

Name— says the voice of the man with the light again, this time his tongue faltering. The light pulses with the tremors of his grip. He is shellshocked like a soldier against mustard gas, eyes yellowed and tearful.

"Jade Daniels," Jade says, loud and clear. She flashes her star, and the man with the light, his heart skips for one small second, and Caroline hears. She sees the look in his eyes and the petrified tilt to Jade's worried lips.

Love.

Caroline Cole—she is compelled to lie, quick, easy. It is not safe here.

The man with the light, he barely looks at her, moves his pen along the paper. Does not leave a mark.

"Jesse Warren," he murmurs, so low, so frightened, his fingers grip around Caroline's, and they are all within the confines of the Ward three minutes later.

---

Inside the Ward it is no different. Long, empty streets paved over in the most solemn black. The houses are derelict, surrounded by small iron rod fences, overgrown grass which stenches from ruined sewers. Houses are bright obscene colors that Caroline could see in the dark, a bright paradox to the destitution. The streets are empty as people made the fastest line through to their houses. Others buildings are collapsed, totally irreparable as if some cruel foot had stepped atop them.

Jade and Jesse plow forward, and Caroline walks astride, her hand unlinked from Jesse's own, and she is surprised, at how tightly and fearlessly he gripped. Like he felt a new urge of strength even amidst this rubble and bone.

WELCOME TO THE LOWER NINTH WARD is the sign perched ahead, hand written in neat cursive, standing above a plot of empty and dying grass.

Her two companions walk quickly through the streets. Caroline notices other signs as they pass clusters of torn up houses, pinned to lamp posts and mounted over soggy telephone poles. NOT AS SEEN ON TV

STOP ETHNIC CLEANSING reads the most jarring.

They walk over another, scribbled in chalk, JUSUS CHYRST COME BACK

MERRY CHRISTMAS says the spray painted message over the rusted hinges of abandoned car. Grass grows through the windows. It stenches of urine.

"Oh god no," and it is Jade this time with the broken cry, the broken cry that echoes the earsplitting sorrow of the mother at the gate. She shoves her hand to her mouth and glances back from the adjacent yard she had just cast her eyes over.

Caroline looks, following her gaze. It is a blue-painted house, crumbling under the wet mold of its pillars, a front door with the tattered screen. And on the steps, roses. Hundreds of them. Oh, piled over like some sort of tower to the fertile heavens, the underwomb of the earth—

"Who's house was that?" Jesse asks edgily.

"Little Ben's," Jade answers.

He's dead—? asks Caroline. Little Ben, the man they spoke of in the car, the one who had made the strange signs that had proliferated along the highway. The man who had propped up the ones they passed in the Ward. After seeing the fate of the woman at the gate, she didn't doubt her assumption.

No other way—says Jade, schooling her broken face, her hooked lips into submission. She gasps quietly and curls a hand into her chest, and Jesse says shh shh.

There is a ramshackle home at the corner of the avenue, sunken windows, but a roof intact.

Up the steps and inside they went, like a swift wind over the mire of the water. Caroline pauses at the door a moment longer after the screen aches shut. She is caught by the coolness of the breeze. She can see the gulf through the ends of the houses at the furthest end of the Ward. Bright lights on boats, wheeling riverboats far in the distance chugging through dark waves in pleasant drunkenness, the tin of fine cutlery and polite and pumping music. And if the air changed course, but a degree to the west or east—

Something fresh. Fine food, and smoke, and lights ahead—

Caroline! is the harsh whisper. She turns and enters the silent home.

The door behind her shuts.

Jesse and Jade are crying.

Clutching one another, gripping, skin pulling and eyes broken and lips curling into the jacket-muffled trenches of a long, long night.

Caroline looks at them, freeze-dried. She pulls off the hood of her cargo jacket, blonde hair like exhausted feathers around her cheeks. She is a tall statue in a graveyard, motionless over the grief-stricken. She turns around on the rickety floorboards, passing through the doorways of the paper-thin walls, boots rocking on the wood, and she walks slow and evenly.

She needs to touch something hot.

She finds some black, black tea.

---

She doesn't keep track of the time, but the moon does. She is resting the sacrum of her back against the tiny counter with the broken tiles. The blind moon stares into the window. It stares at her.

Jesse and Jade are hushed, sitting at the tiny linoleum table with their burning hands around steaming mugs, and rabbit cheeks scarred by hot tears like gunpowder.

Jade is saying—how could they Mary-Beth's boy is only thirteen

And Jesse is shaking his head, saying—how many times did we tell Ben he was going to get caught, how many times

Caroline leans her thin legs against the cold oven. She switches positions. If she stuck there, the hinges to it would have fallen off. She is aware of the people in the room with her, but things seem internal. She still feels quiet. Cold. More distant that before, somehow more removed. Silent inside like a wind chime on the floor. It is the something she is thinking on, but in a way she is not thinking. She is being, utterly, with nothing else. Her eyes feel like coins dropped into water.

The front door opens, and the human hearts leap. Caroline's fangs pulse underneath her gums as her eyes narrow on the door.

The man with the light from the wall walks in. It looks like he was dragging summer behind him, like he alone was pulling the days forward, and the unkind heat has finally allowed him a solitary night of respite.

Luke—! Jade shouts, barreling into him, grasping his neck like a raft in the endless dark gulf that kissed the shores of the Nine Ward from all the rotted edges of its teeth. He hugs her back, so fiercely, like a bear in his honey, like a soldier under fire to the rifle in his arms.

"What's going to happen to him," asks Jesse, standing up. Caroline hears his voice shaking. "The boy."

Luke is holding Jade's waist. He is small, broad-shouldered. Jesse—his eyes say, but there are no other words exchange to discuss it. "Diego said he's going to take him to Thierry. He thinks they might induct him into the Nightwatch. Said he's young enough. Said it was the right thing to do for Mrs Griffith," he spit the words, so disgusted by them, like he is cursed himself for their utterance.

Was that the woman—? Caroline ask, her voice bright, too bright and pocketknife sharp for this solemn quivering quiet.

Luke puts his finger to his lips, indicated Nightwatchmen still roamed the Ward streets at after dark. Yes, he nods. He didn't ask questions. If this woman was here, with her ping pong voice and her blonde briar braid, she was a friend. These people had learned to trust.

What are they going to do with her body—Caroline's stomach growls, and the sharp monstrosity did well to pollute the honest wonder in her throat.

"They don't care what we do with the bodies," Luke says, resting his jacket and a cold black-handled revolver on the table. "They'll be a funeral tomorrow, at the Barrow."

Jesse is pacing, saying things under his breath.

"Will Sabine be there?" questions Caroline, she looks to Luke. She is so thin and wiry, all lean pale muscle and crescent moon eyes with buttercream eyelashes.

His arms rest around Jade again, holding close like if a cobra could love. They were pressed together, near to one like pages of a book concealing a dry petal.

Luke is looking to this new woman, with her blonde hair and her empty eyes. "Did you use the tea? We can't share rations," he says. "It's one of the Rules."

"There was plenty in the cabinet," Caroline answers. Despite the impoverished kitchen, the supplies seemed plenty enough. The house is empty, dirty but clean enough. The walls shallow, but sturdy enough.

Missing something.

Jade looks over to her, "People don't like us, Caroline. They don't take our food even if we wanted to give it, and we do. I hope you know we would. Of course we would. Luke is one of the Nightwatch. Some of our people are chosen to be. They say we're traitors enough."

Caroline's eyes are graves.

She feels bile in her throat, burning her esophagus like hotsprings. She turns her head with scathing quickness, looks from the couple back to Jesse. Her hand is harsh on his shoulder. What kind of hell is this—her voice is a blade, and low and sharp as a whisper. She corners him while they hold one another like birds in a tree.

There is another knock on the door.

And the human hearts do not tremor this time, but still. Caroline's cobalt blue eyes grow detached from their purpose, edging away from her focus on Jesse, mouth falling open as she gazes back to the door. The grip she has in his jacket fades slowly.

Who is that—trembles Jade, her voice is ice and cracked winter. The air is too humid for that.

"I know you're in there," sings the visitor behind the front door. "Open up Luke, come on it's Etienne."

Luke curses wordlessly, pressing a hand over Jade's that rests on his chest. He glances at the two stowaways. Caroline Cole and Jesse Warren. Don't let him in, don't let him in— Jade is repeating, desperate. He'll kill you, he'll kill us—she shakes the collar of his coat, fingers angled into it like teeth, and he has his own around her small dark wrists, dark walnut eyes laden with care, like the weary back of a camel through the long, long dust.

Luke motions to Jesse, go, take her—

Jesse grabs Caroline's elbow, leads her into an adjacent room. The thin paper wall scratches against her shoulders as they leaned into it. The light is blue, the walls are pale.

Caroline hears the front door open, the screen cracking. "Hey, Etienne," says Luke, favorably enough. Tired. "What now."

"You're not going to invite me in?" pipes Etienne. "Seems rude."

Caroline's fangs strain through her gums and Jesse isn't inhaling, lungs quiet as stone, could have been a monster himself. His hand is on Caroline's shoulder. The burning of her mandible is distracting her.

Etienne pushes himself inside, his boots shaking the dust on the aged floorboards. "Nice house you got yourself here, Luke. I've never seen it before myself." He raps on the wall with a knuckle, and Caroline feels it on the other side like it had been meant for her face. The veins under her eyes stencil her cheek in black.

"Hi there, Jade," is the sing-song voice again. He waves genially through the hallway at the woman in the kitchen. Jade hurries past the doorway. "Rude bitch," he comments under his breath, looking back at Luke with a polite smile.

Caroline feels the distance again inside, something less, something more deleted than before. She feels a piece of herself surgically removed, like someone had opened her up cadaver and taken out those things that before made her body heavy. It is lightness but it is emptiness, knocking space where there is nothing but absence. A closet of an attic, musty and old. A container for a body, only the bone around. And there is the heat there, but it burns on oxygen so clean. Nothing that can be seen. Nothing that can be felt.

Etienne moves into the kitchen.

Luke follows, on his heels. "What do you want, man," he asks, impatience tangles his limbs, but he stretches them straight.

"Just a cup of coffee with a little molasses or something," he slurs, looking at the table, looking at Jade by the tiny sink, washing the cups. "Interesting. One. Two." His steps bring him close to her. He rests his hand on the still-warm mug. "Three."

Luke swallows by the door, hands stilled at his sides.

"That's funny, I thought," Etienne postulates. "Only two of you lived here?" he eyes narrow, he leans so close to Jade, whose lips tremble as she works to get a word out.

Luke speaks first, interjecting immediately, Etienne—

Don't you dare lie to me!—is his unmerciful roar, oh so princely and white-collared. Caroline hears the fury that rings up inside of him, like a frantic churchbell, the opposite of one, some unholy reverse, and how lightning fast he has thrown Luke into the wall, fangs shining in the bright silver moonlight like two sabreteeth.

Jade drops the mug, and it shattered to the floor like a scream. The vampire's eyes gleam marble black, the veins throbbing beneath his sable eyes like estuaries that lead to a violent river. I know that you've been sneaking people in to the Ward and I know that for a fact, you piece of shit Lucas. Either way you're going to die, but hand over your stowaways from tonight and maybe I'll spare Jadie-Bea, hm?—

But the threat is all too hot—

Oh, red sun rises like an early warning.

And in a blur of seconds, those mortal minutes they could comprehend, those split moments where Luke had seen the very end of his life, and his final choice pressed out before him, there had been a new fury to overtake the first.

And it was Caroline, Carolina, standing over this aggressor with her pale leg bent up, white sneaker grating, slammed, into the artery on his bicep, toppling him like a reflective-eyed beast sprung from the silence of the grass, ends of her hair on fire, fangs agonizing through jaw like the pitchfork of the damned.

She is ruining the flesh in his arm like a cooking grater on a soft lemon hide, reams of skin under the sole of her shoe, hands rung in the collar of his soft cotton shirt, and her fangs, submerged savagely into his carotid. She drinks, and she drinks, and she drinks, and she drinks, and she is brutal, snapping her jaw through the layers of muscle and artery and marrow bone, imbibing raucous mouthfuls of blood alongside fatty adipose tissue like rushing Colorado against her throat, and she feels him dying out beneath her, blue desiccating faster than he is healing, and she feels stronger, more potent with each flooding gulp, and she shakes his shoulders after she pulls back, eyes like the hollow desert night with the sky void and bitter of stars. She splinters his head against the grain of the floorboards, dents the back of his skull into his brain's occipital lobe, her fingers rung up in his curled hair like vermin caught in traps.

His brown eyes are glassy, astonished, a weakened hand against her arm. Mouth gaping and gaping and gaping, drooling and dumb. Wha—he could not speak and his lips, chapped, crusting. What are you, he would have cried. What kind of sister does this.

What kind of Benedict is she? A betrayer, a horrid demon of a demon, a nightmare cloaked in betwixt their inelegant nightmares, the unholy home, their kingdom—

A different kind of monster.

She is pale blue in the light from the decayed window, her blonde hair flat with the heavy weight of blood and her eyes like tar and her throat drenched in his fluids. She hissed, fangs elongating and her body possessed of and on its own chemicals, deforming Etienne's face with shards of the broken mug, shoving it into his eye socket, hearing him bawl as his body withered.

Without a glance aside, Caroline reaches for the chair at the linoleum table and snaps its leg, entombing it within the vampire chest with one unforgiving skewer. His eyes cloud and his body frosts like a black tree branch in winter, interred in cold.

His hands are relics on her sleeve, leaving streaks of his frantic blood.

And there is another, footsteps brash and hollow on the front steps —

Yes, they travel in pairs, said her throbbing mind. Jesse's words.

"But we never get them alone."

He is fast, but Caroline is faster, calculated and ready and blood slicked in the tiny kitchen like she was born, just born and only made to eat. She kicks the invader in the face (high-kick one two three, Mystic Falls is where to be), shoves his skull into the ground with a violent palm as he fumbles left from the blow. Ripping a plank from the floor thin-bodied Caroline buries the thing entirely into his ribcage, her abdomen hardening and flexing, leaning up against it to get the leverage, cracking his bones and watching his cavern open like poultry as his heart is exploded within. Garnet red pulp, holly berries of poison.

And it is soundless again, but maybe her breath is loud, maybe it is titanic and tempestuous, thou hast slept well, awake—

O bravest new world—

She turns, victims felled below her as nothing but petrified cardboard skin, flaking bone. Everywhere there is that elixir of life, the medicine they need, the youth of their endless age. Blood. Blood in portraits and watercolors on the walls, the floorboards marked by fingerprints, the body, the girl with her immeasurable legs, she has come up from the foam, the crime of her lust.

Caroline's hair is straight, long and oiled locks of amber, amber, scarlet. A greasy crown from the moisture of the body's red holy waters, strands caked and heavy. Her bony girl's shoulders are hunched under the cargo jacket, white hands smeared with blood and the lifelessness in her eyes not yet fading. Her jaw hangs open, blood pours out and over her lips, oh the warmth of excess, the visceral paint of her pernicious smile. Her teeth are cutlasses under her lip, cutting through her own skin, and she breathes. Baby cheeks and black drained eyes and little cupid lips. Her stare is straight against them, those human cores and their fret fret beat—

Yes, the three humans – witches once, or still—stare at her as if language as fled from them before this.

But their heart beats, oh they staggered through the air like little doe feet in the dry bone woods—

Running from the beast.

I said, will Sabine be there—Caroline speaks.

Luke nods, numb, as in frostbite.

---

The next morning the feeble walls are pressed with the clean morning chill.

There was hardly any sleep, but Caroline's bloody fist on the kitchen table and her heeled boots in several long strides out the front door. She hadn't gone far. The Nightwatch plagued the streets of the Ward like maggots in the bodies of the dead. And there were dead bodies enough, monster corpses behind those walls and she would burn or bury them. Bury—

(Remember don't you—

Bury them, all

all

all)

She blinked matte blue eyes into the dark.

Caroline's veins were full to bursting, her brain a sparkler in this solid nighttime quiet. And inside she was hot, so statically hot that her lungs fray from the boom of heat behind her chest wall. That continuous and immoveable hearth that has grown only more furious, that is ignited by the gasoline of bodily raspberry, crimson plasma and the gore of killing.

Still there is the distance in her.

It is more pointed now, more acute. She feels like this is all superficial, impermanent only, even this suffering, and she is the boulder as time rolls over her. There is a detachment within, an unresponsiveness of heart and it is kind and it is beautiful and she feels like the only real thing, and it is so last, yes she will be last, and lasting, and more empty than the world as it falls apart. With her mechanical movements and her blood-lathered cherub cheeks.

Humanity rages behind the walls of the house. She can hear it perfectly, but she blocks it away. Makes it like voices from under water. They are screaming at one another, She's one of them! She's one of them!

No, no you don't understand she's different… look at what she did for us!

Yes, yes, just look at what she did!

You love me both, you have to trust me, you have to—

Jesse you've gone blind man, you've gone mad. They poison you, they are like junk man, junk, one taste and your head is never the same—

She saved your lives—

I'd rather die

You would—

You would?

And then they are quiet, putting the record on again, playing it from the start. She was blood-slicked, could feel the serosanguineous fluid drying and cracking apart against her face. Salmon skinned.

She had stood there on the porch as they screamed, fingers catching splinters on the exhausted wooden rail. Caroline breathed the stench of garbage and the putrid perfume of roses, from down the road at Little Ben's. She stared across the long roads of the Ward, down to the water's edge, and over the sharp black glass of water. To the riverboat in the far distance, still there, still living on as if the night was the fuel inside its engines, hovering on the edge of the world in the cavernous mouth of the gulf. The brunt of cologne and the sweet balm of burst champagne— gold-blurred colors against the stale wind that seemed to settle on the dust at her feet.

It was morning now.

The sun had risen, and Caroline had dragged the bodies into the corner of the kitchen. Pressed them against the wood like wallpaper, flat, flat, there. Blood untouched on the planks of the floorboards.

The wood was pulled up, nails strewn across the room like birds. Vermilion streaks of carmine on the ground from movement made when death was new. No one went in, as if there were a police line in brilliant yellow and black saying DO NOT CROSS, but there was not. There was only Caroline, numb Caroline with the vacant chest and the small breasts and the badge swinging in her hand like jewelry that didn't match.

Luke and Jade were impossible to find.

Caroline heard footsteps upstairs, but it was Jesse there in the doorway of the room she had been allowed to sleep in.

"What you did last night," he began.

Caroline had pale eyes in the vanity mirror, pastel blue cheeks from the barely morning light. Her face absent of makeup, washed of blood. She stares into the mirror and acknowledges him only.

That was incredible—he finishes. Jesse is a straight-backed pine, something in him standing tall and he is wearing all black. All black.

Caroline's brow curve in and she turns in the chair, looking at him directly. Her eyes ask for her.

"They're having a funeral for Mrs Griffith at the Barrow, remember."

"The one with Sabine," says Caroline.

Jesse nods quietly, something in his eyes that Caroline closes away. Yes, Caroline.

The one with Sabine.

She looks at him, the house is noiseless, she can hear breathing upstairs.

He watches her, his honey lips and his cheeks with color back upon them, florid over caramel warmth. His muscles say calm, his breathing says here. The bodies in the kitchen do nothing to disturb him. She is standing, rifling through the two thin shirts she had stuffed into the pockets of her cargo coat.

"You don't have anything black," he comments, he sounds concerned. Helpful.

Caroline looks over at him.

She thinks it is the biggest lie ever told.

---

Jade and Luke descend the front steps. Her arm is crossed over his, and they are only moonless black overcoats and low black heels. She smells perfume, the dying kind, the kind that clouds the air like grief. They are gorgeous together, in that sad monotony of color, and their heartache lines the insides of their clothing.

They do not say a word.

Caroline follows, thin-boned Caroline with her white gold hair, wan face like a wraith and eyes clear of shadow. She is slipped through the doorway, holding the screen open like with a hand found from the morgue, her hand. And she is a dead thing, she is as yellowed as the grass at the base of the concrete. Her lips are thin and quiet.

Jesse is behind her, he shuts the door.

He has a black t-shirt, black pants. It is nothing special, nothing appropriate. Not church nine-yards and a pinch-for-more-for-Jesus gospel south like his friends, but it is enough. And as she walks into the front yard, she sees the others. Dozens of people dressed the same, black sweatpants or zip-ups, black boots and gloves and scarves. Anything that is enough. They all walk in the same direction, not talking to one another, scuffing through the mud. Heels and torn sneakers make the same somber tracks.

Caroline sees the lines of people – the black, black, black, chia seeds spilled into the street and there is a woman with red hair in the distance. She stands out among the gravel sea of strong ebony. Amber, Caroline thinks.

They fall into step with the crowd, and it's miles to where they go, but they go, they all go for one woman at the quiet fold of evening on a day no one will ever remember.

Caroline is in white, a black tank top underneath that barely covers her stomach. Her legs are like palms, smooth and long and blanched. She is silent.

She hears humming, the long-thronged cat-o-nine of a hymn, something so bottomless, so sunken into the river bed, so sanctified and miserable and clear—

And others join in, an old woman moving her head in tandem, gloved fingers gripped by a young woman at her side, walking so slow, but walking still. There is a child behind them, sucking its thumb. Rubbing its eye, oh woeful little one—

Jesse looks askance and no one has yet to recognize him.

Perhaps he is different, somehow. Caroline wonders if this too is a grief worth marching with a funeral towards. She drags her thumb over her humid palm, the air is cool, new with the morning. Anemic.

The Barrow is a long stretch of land with small stones over mounded hills. It is solid grass outside the heart of the bayou, surrounded by throngs of full-bodied trees, standing in heavy-leafed attention like a crowd of men before the gallows. Caroline watches the line of people file through, like this has all been done before, like it is somehow so practiced, so precise, so wordless—

How—

She follows, hearing the aching overture of a muffled sob, a no, no, and a woman nearly collapsing to her knees. Calamity in the grief, over these hills, and more appear, dozens, and dozens, coming through the ground like flowers colored of absence.

There is a mound in the distance, large and wide, so wide it seems to leap to the forest's edge, with ribbons, glass beads, and herbs, stubs of candles piled into the grass as if in offering. She stares until the procession stops. The newly dug grave, there, right there just six by two. She can smell the earth so potently, she closes her eyes against the pallid glare of the sun.

Jesse folds his hands. The rows of people filter out and back, hands interlinked, affirmations called allowed, tears into the mud, and so Caroline thinks that may be the water in them, not this heinous satan summer humidity. But the tears, making the land like drowned skin. Bulbous and bloated.

Jade is crying into Luke's shoulder. There is so much agony, so much lamentation in these ranks and it feels like lily in the air, like petals made from sorrow, and each flower wilts, and wilts, and wilts—

And yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For: thou art with me—a man sings out, and the response is immediate, avowal and declaration and cries up from the crowd.

The women's son is gone, vanished from this world, taken away last night to the land across the Ward, the otherness to the city, this city-state that Caroline has yet to see.

Jesse smudges tears from his face.

Fair-hair Caroline, watches it all, and each tear from these people is a coffin nail, the deadest piece of ironmongery, and she is so departed, so deathly in their midst that she is surprised they can still see her still.

The righteous perish and no one ponders it in his heart, that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil—the man calls it into the air, like the wings of a bird, like the feather-tipped freedom of sadness.

Caroline remembers the woman's wretched screams for her child.

Those who walk uprightly enter into peace, they find rest as they lie in death—the believers cup their wide pink mouths, and nod, and nod, and look at the pentagrams sewn into all their jackets. Caroline's button eyes rest upon them. They are the yellow eye of watchfulness even now over all their tattered grief.

When the service is over, Caroline is still watching the mound in the distance. People break from the site of this grave and amble in that direction, break down before it, paw it with their palms, thread their fingers into the grass before being carried up and away, kicking and mourning aloud in such potent strength. The pain is strong, such depth and promise, like the lapis lazuli in the ring that keeps her from diminishing in this careworn sun. She is watching it as Jesse and his friends talk amongst one another. Still staring as he tugs her elbow, —hey.

"Do you want me to take you to Sabine," he says. His voice is quiet, thick with an aching throat, but his promise is there, ripe and present as always.

What is that over there—Caroline says, eyes straying back. What are those people doing.

Jesse's eyes come up, slowly, so slow, as if he is confronting a person he wishes he had never known. He stares to the giant acreage in the distance. And his eyes go back to Caroline, this frail form of a girl with a monster's retching strength. "I'll show you."

He walks straight by her side, past the roses draped over the day-old grave of Little Ben, the sign maker.

At the edge of the mound he stops, Caroline's toes touch the grass. She looks over to him, she waits.

"My mother is buried here," he says in a voice smooth as marble. Her eyes haven't moved or wandered. "That's why I left," he shares, finally. "She was killed by him. By Marcel."

Someone behind spits at the name, stamping on the saliva into the dirt.

"All of these people—" he gestures outwardly, to the scattered crowd of sugar ants, the rain drop people and their cloaks of solid sable. "They have someone here too. You see, one decade ago, Marcel demanded the amulets be unearthed. My mother wouldn't tell, no, no, she'd rather her tongue was cut out, she'd rather walk into her own grave—" Jesse's lips are stark and rigged as he talks, throat tightening, finger pointing harshly into the air at his side.

"He killed her," Caroline says, looking at the riverbeds under his eyes.

"He killed more than her girl, three hundred in the uprising, and revenge further after that. A great storm, they say it was the devil's work, that of the darkest magic, brought up from the vortex of the seas, a hurricane, something so evil and potent and extirpating—" Jesse swallows hard. "His revenge. To wipe us all away."

Caroline feels something lunge into her throat. "He wanted to exterminate the witches," her whisper is harsh, and dead. Dead with the fury of death, with the mad stillness that will drive the mind wild. "And he won't stop," she realizes.

She feels the ground shake under her, as if to swallow her too into this mass grave, this catacomb in the cavities of the earth. It is saying stay, stay, stay, it is so knowing, so hollow and truthful and grating that Caroline feels that locked closet door, oh would it be called guilt, no, the one with the spider key in her mind, the forbidden room of her lowest blackness pounded upon, we know! It seems to scream. We know, we know, we know!

We know all what you did!

She inhales sharply.

Jesse is staring at her, green eyes slimming, cheeks carrot orange.

"He'll keep going. He won't stop with New Orleans, Jesse. He can convince the vampires here that the witches are the ones causing all the trouble, the destitution, right? That they're better. That must be what he's doing, but then it'll grow— it'll expand and it will be all witches. All witches everywhere. The entire witch race, and he'll be free, you see, King, and he'll defeat the people who suffocated him, who denied him everything, who made sure he'd always be just short of what he could be, and he's a maniac, Jesse—" the words rattle from her tongue, the wind of winter, dead but furious and cold and devoid of passion but still heated and assaulting, and yes glorious red. Oh, and she knows this to be truth, oh how know she knows, she knows she will not say—

Some of the mourners have begun to stare, and there is Caroline, standing over the grave of hundreds, frantic in the deadest part of her, and so more dead, more empty, less of everything and less than that.

We know, we know, we know call the voices from the below, the dead below, and Caroline is stepping, she is uneasy in her feet, not keeping them solid on the ground, there are hands there, trying to pull her under, trying to complete—

There is another voice, and it is only then at its utterance that Caroline sees her cold cadaver hands bent into Jesse's shirt, raw at the knuckles, wide blank eyes devoid of all, but in their cavernous vacancy somehow purposeful still. Somehow powerful and predatory and blackness that can build. They turn at the sound, the slick note of purple and rosehips and ruined hope.

"You must be Caroline," says Sabine. She paused, huge stunning eyes sweeping her with heavy consideration. "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine."

Caroline drops her hands, turns her back to the swallowing pit of mangled bodies— that river Styx of grasping hands. Oh it is a peaceful sleep they have, but not for Caroline, scarlet Carolina with the black heat in the dead center of her space, space, galaxy. She who is already dead, who has tasted the finite corner of the universe, and stares out to the afterthought of creation—no peace.

Facing this woman, with her swinging hips and her serious eyed smile, Caroline is feeble girlhood. She is infirm death with the bones of a child but the strength of a beast, the heart of a canopic jar but the empty burning of a universe about to unfold upon this blank and haughty canvas of parsimonious stars. Oh burn them all, swallow them, swallow them all!

And this, the power, it consumes her, this whorl of blackness, they utter and peaceful nothing. It is all she ever wanted, and then some more, some more buried in the ground that she wishes to keep buried. That says still in its lizard whisper below the folds of the earth—

I know what you did, Carolina—

Oh, it is like Jesse said, a gift and curse, and she is hexed she chose, I don't want to die, and so this sparseness, this vacuum of existence is to both revel and revile.

And she will turn it all off, will silence humanity forever, but this raging grief too, this injustice, it numbs her so hard she feels like tombstone incarnate, a carnivore. So perfectly gone she craves the black and soulless heat inside like sun on her dead blue skin.

Oh she feels nothing!

It is good, says something in Jesse's eyes, though she cannot see him. The offensive chartreuse hope that flashes there, behind her, lingering so prominently in the shadow of her inner absence.

"Fuck yes," Caroline's teeth grind together, "Count me in."

She is so sure of what plants here there.

She is lying to herself.

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TBC... PART II: GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE