His life would be short after all. What a mercy.
So Ethan thought after thoughtlessly transforming in the middle of town and killing two Pinkerton's men in public had landed him in jail. But not quickly enough, because the moon cycle in between had been occasion for another bloody spree that made him the synonym for evil in London, even the prison.
Anything could be borne for a short while, and so the cell's cold and damp had already found a place in his bones. It didn't bother the American, as long as he could spend his last moments remembering happier days.
"Ya've got a girl someplace, mate?" one of the other prisoners' voices asked again and again until it shattered a memory of sitting by the fire with Silver Bow and his old band.
"I've had a few," Ethan answered because there was nothing to be done about it. Alfred, the prisoner closest to his cell, was an incessant talker and would badger him within an inch of his sanity until he responded. His curt reply was met with ribald jests from all the men in earshot, who relayed the conversation to those farther down the corridor.
Finally, they ran out of lewd remarks and someone realized Ethan had fallen silent.
"What, never found that special someone?" Alfred asked.
"I would have, with that face," said James, who had taken a close inventory of Ethan when the newest prisoner was dragged past the Judas windows of the cells in the Hangman's Alley, as the last stop before the noose was called.
"James here will try to bring you that spot of paradise before the hangman calls for you," another voice that might have been Edgar's said.
"That's very kind of you, but I'm not in a temper for courting," Ethan said. He only spent two days among the regular inmates, and in this time he'd had to drive home his disinterest in all overtures with the end of a fist. And only the most violent, desperate or depraved had even tried it, since his reputation for being the next Jack the Ripper made cooler heads desist.
It was the inmates' excitement at being housed with the new Ripper that got Ethan sent to one of the separate cells, pending a trial that would soon confirm his capital sentence. Now he was with other notorious criminals, but even the worst of the worst were fascinated by the American brutality of his crimes.
"Why you done it, mate?" Alfred asked once again.
"Done what?" His life was a series of failures, one leading to the next, and Ethan was spending his last hours trying to untangle them, to no avail.
"Why you, you know, rip 'em apart, like? I'm in here for doing my wife, nasty cunt always passing it around to all and sundry," Alfred said. "But I did it because it weren't respectable. It had to stop, didn't it? But my Betsy'd drink anything down with a pint of gin, and I done for her, neat and clean with poison. You, mate, you made a mess such as they never seen. I've heard the wardens talking about it."
A few affirmations floated down the hall and Alfred continued. "When they talk to you they've got fear in their voices, comrade. I can tell. Me, I'm a common cuckold. They'll get another in here as soon as I vacate the premises. But you," his neighbor's voice took on an admiration of the exotic, "They'll study your brain for a generation. Me, they've got to remind themselves who I am and I'm not even dead yet," Alfred finished glumly.
"Don't be that way, Alf. You'll get a notice in the papers when you kick it," James said kindly.
When the star prisoner hoped they'd at last gone to sleep, someone took up the earlier line of questioning once more.
"Hey Ripper, 'ave you given up on the ladies because it don't work no more?" someone called out.
"It works just fine," Ethan snapped.
"Who was your last sweetheart, then?"
"A great beauty. And a firm hand, too." He smiled despite himself at Brona's strong will.
There were whoops. "I like a lass with some spirit."
"Give us a story," Alfred begged. "It may be your last chance to bring some joy to your fellow miserable prisoners."
Ethan tried to pick someone completely unlike Brona. "I made the acquaintance of one gal not too long ago. She was a lady of society. Now, I don't know how many of you gentlemen have bedded a lady of breeding," there were noncommittal noises, "But they aren't anything like a regular girl. You've got to treat them different."
"More gentle, with good manners an all?" someone ventured.
"No, my friend, I can tell you've not ventured from Whitechapel," Ethan warmed to his appreciative audience. "Or if you didn't go looking for sin in such a district, perhaps you found a nice girl, one from the shops, or a laundress. A girl such as that, you pick her to keep because you want to protect her. Or at least, not cause her any more grief than—" his voice caught, thinking of Brona's difficult end. "Any more sorrow than is her lot in life."
There were some respectful murmurs.
"But rich women, they're sick to death of kindness," Ethan resumed. "They've seen it all their lives and they're hungering for something else. The higher she is in society, the lower a lady wants to sink."
"Like what mate?" "Tell us."
"And you don't have to sit around wondering what they want, because what have they been brought up to do but give orders? Back in America I had a few who were so particular about how they wanted it I could've swore they were giving me the measurements to make them some drapes to hang in one of their parlors."
It was true. Ethan had fought off his loneliness with a few bored women of high society who thought him a simple brute rather than the specific kind of brute he was.
"What about this lady you were telling us about?" someone prompted.
"I thought this one would be the same. But she wasn't," Ethan reflected.
"No?" a voice said in disappointment.
"No, she was surprising. But she wasn't the kind that made you feel more noble than you really are. She didn't bring out the best in me."
"If there is any," one person remarked while another prompted, "Then what did she do?"
Ethan considered for a moment. "She gave me the strength to see my life all going to hell, and she looked at it with me. She was naked, really naked with me, the way even poor girls aren't because they've usually got religion, or been beat down too much, or otherwise forgotten they deserve love. This one was taken aback that she still wanted something real. I showed her that, I think. I felt her, and she felt me, and we knew neither of us deserved it, and we drank it up before anyone could correct the mistake."
The memory ran away with itself and Ethan sat wondering if it would come back to him when they threw the hood over his head.
Another question finally registered in his ears: "What was her name?"
Ethan thought quickly of the farthest thing from Dorian. "Maude."
"Heh-heh, Maude the Bawd! Maude she was a bawd!" This contribution came from Joseph, an enormous and very simple young man who'd arrived at Hangman's Alley a little earlier than the judge sent him there. The poor creature had a disruptive effect on the general population because he would do literally anything someone told him to do.
Joseph had been told often enough that girls had a very interesting secret under their petticoats but nobody would tell him what it was. No one had prepared him for how much his victims would struggle while he satisfied his curiosity, and several were broken by his great strength.
"Did you see 'er again?" James asked.
"Huh?"
"Maude, I mean."
"We didn't know each other for too long, but we managed to see each other a few times," Ethan reminisced. It seemed like so long since he'd seen Dorian, when it was only days before his capture. "Two times I saw her outside her mansion. Society people, I tell you, they love to play games. She wanted us to go out and pretend we didn't know each other, me dressed in fine clothes she gave me. And then we pretended to see each other across the folks in their fancy dress. She told me to be very correct while she let everyone know in not so many words that she'd had me once and would have me again whenever she felt like it."
The storyteller waited for the jests to die down. "Then she brought me to a toilet and had her way with me. The woman kept my tie so there was no way to get out of there properly dressed. She knew that with me looking and talking like I do people would think I was a rich lady's caprice. Not that I minded the gratuity she slipped me in plain sight…."
"If you want to play at being a ruffian all the time, then I want everyone to see you that way," had been Dorian's reasoning for the whole carefully constructed evening. That was the thing about his most recent lover—where other moneyed individuals had roped Ethan into their own fantasies, Dorian was at least as interested in his paramour's desires. Ethan had enjoyed the submissive pose, and Dorian enjoyed studying these reactions.
"And the other time she took you out?"
Ethan chuckled. "She arranged to have a picnic on one of the balconies at Parliament." There was no reaction. "You all should know it's impossible to hang around the roof of the Palace of Westminster with clothes on, much less naked." He considered. "Maybe if you're a bigwig from the House of Lords or part of the royal family, but then you would have all kinds of guards. My lady, she's very clever about making impossible things happen. That night it was just us and the stars."
Sharing the outdoors at night was obviously very special to Ethan, though he'd never formulated it that way to himself. But Dorian had somehow guessed what getting closer to the stars would mean to the American in exile.
"We spread out our rugs and lay back and fed each other fruits and cheese and smoked meat, and drank wine. We drank enough that she started missing her phonograph because she is one for music. My lady friend asked me what kind of songs people sing in America, and I taught her Yankee Doodle and the Yellow Rose of Texas. She tried to teach me Leezie Lindsay and was surprised that I knew every word of an English song. I taught her 'Hope the Hermit' because she didn't know that one, and together we sang "The Bonnie Wood o' Craiglee" and "Ye Mariners of England" and every other traditional song of these parts we could think of, breaking into fits of giggles at what anyone down below us must be thinking."
The other men laughed with him. "And when we ran out of things to say it was getting cold sitting against the stone. We got under the blanket and warmed each other." In this detail, too, Dorian had somehow guessed the togetherness Ethan had left behind in a shared tent in the American wilderness. He came back to the present. "I hope I think of that night when my time comes. It made a lot of other things worth it.'
Ethan felt the much less welcoming stone damp against him now and tried to block out the relentless questions from his cellmates so he could pretend he was back with Dorian.
"How on earth do you know all these English songs?" Dorian had asked him when they were tangled skin to skin and keeping their warmth trapped beneath the blanket.
"How do you know English songs?" someone asked from a few cells down.
"I learned them from a man I knew. An Englishman come to America to be alone."
He ignored all the questions resounding from the neighboring cells and thought of Brother Simon.
After he ran off from his father's house, Ethan had decided he cared nothing for humans anymore. He was a beast, and he was going to make good use of the simplicity of the beast. He remembered the stories of Silver Bow running with a real wolf pack for several years, and he thought she had the right idea in that, as in so many things.
Ethan set out into the forest to find wolf packs, but when he did find one, he was unhappy to discover that they had no wish for his company. Looking back, he realized that in his human form he couldn't run as fast as they did, and his height would have drawn unwanted attention. All he knew was that they looked on him with a sort of pity, and nobody wants to be pitied by nature. They ran away from him after a few licks as some kind of consolation.
Experiencing this rejection from a couple of packs, and knowing that it would be no better with his old band, Ethan resolved to die.
Every Indian he ever met agreed on one thing: when you get to the end of your road, your spirit wasn't going to hang around. You could stop wherever you were and wait for it to leave you. For a few months this creature, neither white nor native, neither human nor animal, lived for the moon phases and found it an agony to be kicked out of perfection for another month. After one such blissful change, he came to in a clearing near a stream, and he decided he could go no further.
It was during the warmest part of the summer and he lay there, dipping a hand into the water and moistening his lips, occasionally chewing on the right kind of his moss to ease the worst of the hunger pains. He imagined going to a place where he never had to be a man again, and he was ready for it.
He must have passed out and was dreaming he was dead because the next thing Ethan knew was a strange voice saying, "Brother, my brother."
The moribund man opened his eyes to a deeply lined face with twinkling blue eyes and asked, "Am I dead?"
"No, my friend, this is still the valley of sorrow." He must have made a grimace of anguish because the other face reflected it. "But I beg you to allow me to fill your stomach and tend to your skin where the sun has burned it. If after you have given me this gift you wish to leave this mortal coil behind, you will have made your humble servant happy first. Not a bad foot to leave on." There was another twinkle.
Ethan was so surprised by finding kindness from a human when he had been chasing it in animals that he had nothing to say.
He drank the water at the intervals indicated by Brother Simon, who stuck leaves to his sunburn from the shade of a canopy he made with boughs. At last the patient was able to sit up and was allowed a mouthful of baked potato.
"Have you brought anyone else back to life before? You seem to know what you're doing, whoever you are," he was finally himself enough to say.
"A few. Please call me Brother Simon. I'm a hermit, but a restless one. Clotilde and I," he indicated his mule, "Go into town only as often as I have to in order to remind myself why I don't want to stay there."
Ethan made a wry face at the idea of returning to town life.
"You understand. You didn't come out into the forest to die, but to live."
"Yes, Brother Simon. I want to be a natural thing, not an unnatural one," Ethan said without thinking.
The man surprised him by initiating a very thought-provoking conversation about the nature of man after the Fall, and whether society could ever be fully an instrument of good, and all sorts of other questions that filled their hours as they trekked across the mountains and stopped for provisions in small towns, preferably, rather than large ones.
Simon was a skinny man who'd lived most of his life in towns and cities, but he had a remarkable ability to find a good pace and keep it up in all weathers and conditions. He said England had become too crowded for him, whereas in America a man could really breathe.
Soon after Ethan was well they arrived in a mountain village to buy a few vegetables and ammunition for the gun that provided their meat. Brother Simon earned his money by trafficking in holy medals. He told his new companion that the best way to always have the medals people wanted was to carry around blank pewter disks. On the spot he stamped the metal with a die from the set of assorted saints he brought from Italy.
Now Ethan was there to take a mallet and stamp the medal with the image of St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things, or St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Besides, the people liked it when the medal was blessed right in front of them with Simon's fluent Latin.
Even non-Catholics felt something when they saw the ritual, and the medals sold like hotcakes to drought-afflicted farmers, childless women and the many other yearning souls they encountered.
Ethan had taken Latin in school, and he got used to the brother's hymns and Pater Nosters from their time on the trail. The general rule was that while walking they spent their time in silent contemplation or pious chants, but at night before the fire the two men debated science and theology and shared any song in memory.
He was surprised that Brother Simon's Latin blessings over the medals never followed any set pattern, one of several things that made him suspect this Englishman wasn't a real clergyman at all, but an immigrant like any other who'd come to America for a fresh start.
They traveled together for about three weeks. Then Ethan had to face that the moon cycle would soon wrench him away from this human company. The pull of the wild was tantalizing, but he didn't want to put his savior in danger. Even less did Ethan want to tell Simon why he had to go away.
They were walking down a path when Simon broke their silence. "My brother, I am a sinner like you. If it would help you to tell me what has your heart unquiet, it would be a privilege to listen."
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," he muttered. They continued in silence for another hour and then Ethan suddenly found himself crying. He sobbed out the whole story of his friends' slaughter, his own change, living with the Indians, loving a woman who was also a man and losing Silver Bow. There was no reason not to. That night he and his companion would have to part ways. Any minute he should head in a separate direction.
"I need to go, Simon," he sniffled. "You've been so kind to me that I can't think of hurting you. You should be there to save the souls worth saving."
The rangy hermit drew himself up to his full height. "My brother, I refuse to let you go."
Ethan was surprised. "I'll run off. On four legs no man can catch me."
"Didn't you tell me that you have an acute sense of smell as a wolf?" the brother asked reasonably. "Clotilde and I haven't had a bath in a long time. Following you at our usual pace you'll smell us for three miles, at least."
"You can't! Stay away from me!" Ethan panicked, then he understood. "If this is about following your beloved saints as a martyr, I want no part in it! I forbid you to follow."
Ethan was just grabbing his pack from the mule when a blow struck him from behind.
The cleric knocked him out with the efficient use of their skillet.
A groggy Ethan woke up with the sun slipping over the horizon. He forgot why that was significant and then smelled the cooking fire and saw Brother Simon enjoying some roasted birds.
"I saved some raw for you in case you prefer it that way," the hermit said imperturbably.
"You're mad."
"Probably."
The two men gazed at each other, waiting for the moon to rise. A shudder went over Ethan as he felt the urge to change.
"I thought you didn't have to change the night before the full moon; that the shift was only obligatory on that one night," the brother said.
"I don't," came the dull reply.
But he wanted to. This three-day window was Ethan's only brief chance to be who he really was, and giving up a night out of politeness was a lot to ask.
The brother tossed the raw meat at him and he fell on it, snarling. With a cracking of bones he was changed in a moment.
Through his wolf-eyes, people all looked the same. But Brother Simon didn't. The man came up to him slowly but confidently with outstretched hand while uttering one of his prayers. The sound was calming. The wolf felt each of his hairs lay down one by one as the prayer continued and the hand stayed where it was.
Ethan sniffed it and found it didn't smell like a normal person's hand. Not like something to be overpowered. Just—clean. He licked the hand and Simon bared his teeth in a smile, which would normally make a wolf do the same. But he didn't. He sniffed around while the brother ate and then kept watch while he slept. The next morning in the early hours he was bounding around to wake up the hermit without knowing why. The man scratched him on the ears, and it turned out that contact was all Ethan was waiting for before turning back into a man.
The next night was the same. The change ripped open his body and reassembled his guts. It was always disorienting the night of the full moon, but this time brother Simon was rocking and chanting. The wolf snarled, feeling the ungovernable urge to rend.
Something splashed into his eyes. Holy water, he found out later. While he was shaking it off the medal was roped around his neck by a lasso.
"St. Blaise," the hermit explained after. "Known for coaxing a wolf to return a poor woman's pig."
Sitting still was too much to ask of Ethan at that moment, so he loped along next to the cleric drowsing on the back of the mule.
"You're one of God's creatures, Ethan. Else how would you have come to be?" Brother Simon asked reasonably when they had survived another night together.
Ethan couldn't believe it. He had found peace as a monster. Simon had allowed him to feel all the bliss of connectedness with nature, and afterwards none of the guilt. He even learned that he could control some of what happened on the full moon, avoiding becoming a creature on all fours, staying a man with bestial features. They traveled this way for almost a year.
"Eh-eh," Brother Simon said warningly the one time people happened upon their camp and peered at the monk's cowl that the wolf-man borrowed for full moons. "This is my comrade, Brother Ethan, whose good looks have sadly been lost to a dread disease. A remarkable young man for the ladies at one time, believe it or not."
When the travelershad passed on, the hermit observed, "I didn't even say a Hail Mary, and yet you didn't so much as snarl at those wayfarers. You have a conscience every day of the month, Ethan. You are not your condition."
That was the last proof Ethan was waiting for. He was healed. Of course when the moon was upon him he only felt safe around Brother Simon, but he no longer had to be a slave to his passions. He was a man. A man with a strange fate, but one who also had a friend who didn't treat him like a beast—not even when he was one.
Life was peaceful. It seemed impossible, but next to a human he had found the perfection of nature.
One day they completed Simon's yearly pilgrimage to Santa Fe. It was the one large town the mendicant ever step foot in, and he only went there out of necessity. Every year the brother descended from the back trails to visit the silversmith who replenished his supply of blank pewter disks for his medals. This time, they were able to speed up this errand by dividing forces. Ethan took the mule to be reshod and looked at the busy streets.
The people seemed far away, as they did when he was running with Silver Bow and went to town to steal. This time he was mentally saying one of Brother Simon's prayers to wish the people around him the same peace as he found on the open trails. He passed a few Indians and Ethan was seized by a desire to know where his old pack was running these days.
He followed behind several groups, struggling with the desire to ask after others of his kind. It took many frightened looks before Ethan realized he was frightening them with this interest that had nothing to do with violence. He wished he could tell them he was not to be feared.
The mule was ready, and so Ethan loaded it up with provisions, hoping to get away from the temptations of city life as soon as possible. Being looked at with fear by all those Indians made him feel more uneasy than he had in a year. It wasn't pleasant to realize how fragile his new peace really was.
Sweating and jittery as dusk was drawing near, Ethan finished tying on the last sack and went towards the silversmith in a more affluent merchant's quarter to retrieve his brother. Such a worldly place was doubtless wearing on the hermit as well.
"Brother Simon?" the silversmith asked. "You must be his friend. He left word that you should meet him over at the Johnson's garden. That's where he usually holds his blessing—tells me the flowers and green things make the people go over easier. The brother has a big following here in town and will probably be blessing people long into the night. He won't turn anyone away, though he always says he will."
Ethan followed the directions to the garden, but part way there his instincts were awash with dread. There was no one on the street, when the silversmith had led him to expect a big turnout.
He found the body of the hermit crumpled underneath a flowering bush alight with butterflies. Birds were singing as if it were sunrise. There could be no doubt that Simon was the real thing—a real holy man. Ethan felt terrible for doubting the hermit who had refused to abandon him, a half-man to a half-life.
Ethan lowered to the ground and uttered a few of Simon's prayers because he wasn't sure what else to do, but he couldn't bear seeing the hermit abandoned in his cassock like a threadbare sack.
A policeman hovered some distance away as if he wished to be anywhere else. He beckoned Ethan closer. "It was some outsiders that knifed him. Thought he bought a mess of silver jewelry. They didn't know it was junk, no offense," he said pleadingly. "Nobody here knows what to do with him. Somebody went to fetch the bishop; do you think that's what's to be done?"
Ethan was suddenly resolute. "Simon can't be buried in a town. He belongs out in the open and nowhere else." He bent and gathered up the lanky body in its tattered cowl and lashed it to Clotilde. The policeman did nothing to stop him, and it seemed as though no one even dared come to the windows as the man and the mule walked back towards the countryside.
The pseudo-hermit understood what the people in Santa Fe felt about this particular murder happening on their soil. When in the presence of the blessed, the ordinary person feels embarrassed. That's what Ethan felt as he buried the Englishman under a tree accompanied with prayers that were already being laced through with doubt.
Then he returned to town, sold the mule and made ready to travel light. Ethan tracked the two murderers as a man, not a beast. Out of respect for his friend, he thought, without considering that Simon wouldn't support vengeance in his name.
It took him almost two months, but Ethan located the two adventurers who knifed Simon. With his training it was easy to surprise them camping on a trail to a gold mine. He knifed them without a shred of embarrassment or any other emotion.
A few days later the moon cycle began. Ethan took no special precautions, secure in what Simon had taught him about mastering his condition.
With his St. Blaise's medal on its long chain around his neck and a St. Francis for good measure, Ethan gave in to the change. Soon his wolf-nose scented humans not far away, and he had run there before giving it a thought.
He woke up with human skin between his teeth after giving into the urge to tear someone apart. But what was worse was that everything he'd learned from Brother Simon had died with Brother Simon. Under the effects of a true holy man even a monster could be a man, but a bit of metal wasn't going to keep Ethan from succumbing to his true nature.
Across London, far from Ethan's cell, a domestic drama was taking place.
"She made it very clear she did not wish to see you," Sir Malcolm said outside Vanessa's door to the unannounced visitor. "If you insist upon entering, I think it best that someone observes this conversation to ensure she does not find it too—stimulating."
"I apologize, Dorian, for this invasion of your privacy," came Vanessa's hoarse voice from the bed. "One of my spirit beaux is always telling every little thing I get up to, which in this case includes what you got up to with me."
"Vanessa," breathed Dorian Gray as he stood before her. He thought he could not find this woman any more intriguing, but seeing her there with a nightgown falling off her shoulder amid the muddled scents of camphor, broth and blood made her even more alluring. Everything about her screamed a woman who was being steadily violated from within—whether by madness or actual spirits didn't matter.
"Leave us, Sir Malcolm," Vanessa said with some of her old aplomb.
"I do not think it is wise," her protector, Sir Malcolm, said. "Mr. Gray is hardly a man of confidence. He has doubtless heard you have been unwell, but it only occurred to him to enquire after you this morning."
"Either I am guilty of violating Miss Ives' instruction to stay away, or guilty of not visiting quickly enough, but I hope to be forgiven now that I am in the presence of she who may pardon me," Dorian said in his mildest tone.
Sir Malcolm was finally ejected from the room by Vanessa's most imperious gaze, but not without a struggle over keeping the door closed.
"That was rather amusing," Dorian said. "Am I threat to your virtue or something else? I do wish to play my part correctly."
"So you would allow me to do the directing?" Vanessa mused while tying her dressing-gown. "I had always thought you were firmly ensconced in that pose."
"You make me sound like a poseur, Miss Ives," rejoined Dorian with a smile. "I have found that only by giving up control can one truly experience a moment. For instance, the most passionate specimens in my picture collection came from my photographer arranging the tableau, and me in it."
"Do you really wish to succumb, or do you seek the watch yourself succumb? They're not at all similar. I have my ideas about your preferences. Besides, I heard you were more likely to facilitate another's passivity," Vanessa said, reaching for the water jug.
Dorian's hand arrived there first to tip the heavy jug into her glass. "I have had many pleasures, none so great as making possible the pleasure of another," he said without embarrassment, catching her reference to a few dalliances with Ethan Chandler.
He watched her drink. "Do you enjoy what you do? With channeling, I mean," he asked with the casual tone of a dipsomaniac contemplating a new liquid forgetfulness. He saw that Vanessa saw his eagerness and smiled.
"Enjoyment isn't the right word," she said, brushing a weary hand across her face devoid of cosmetics. "But there is a satisfaction in being useful. Even the most dangerous spirit has no one else to speak for it than me, their darling. It is so nice to be needed," she finished with some bitterness.
"I cannot believe you are only the spirits' darling, Miss Ives," Ethan whispered. "I did wish to pay my respects as soon as I heard of your illness, but I was concerned." He faltered. "Afraid that you would be some ghastly species of kind to me, after exposing me to this thing called rejection."
The stinging sensation that had been lingering since Vanessa broke off their relations in the greenhouse reddened his face once more. The woman studied his reaction like the flowering of a rare orchid. A cold/hot wave passed between them as the two impulses they shared went to war: cold, scientific observation versus a shameless trust in the carnal.
"I wish you to do something for me, Mr. Gray," Vanessa said.
"At your service, Miss Ives."
"You set no conditions?" she asked with something like a purr.
"None whatsoever," the man replied.
"I want you to die," Vanessa said.
