A/N: WUGGGGHHHH.

That is all.

(Actually, I lied: this chapter is like a freaking word journey, and complex because of it. I just ask that you take your time to read it and not expect it to be quick and easy, because it actually spans a few months. Quick and easy chapters will come later. Gracias!)

Warnings: flashback, disturbing crap, horrific violence, sadness, abuse, desperation, OCD vampires, hopefully no racial stereotypes but this is the Colonial South and I've read Huckleberry Finn, scary shit, did I mention this chapter is gory and terrifying

Underground

Luce woke up crumpled against a hard surface, temple aching hard enough to blind. Dull pain. Bad pain. Groaning, he put a hand out and met with more hardness and impenetrable darkness.

Something had soaked, quick and cold, through his singlet. His elbows were scraped. He worked his gummed-up eyes open and closed, with no change in his surroundings, then cautiously, groggily groped around in the dark, palms skidding uncomprehendingly across what had to be stone. The only sounds that reached him were a soft, husky noise and a constant dripping. It took reaching forward and nearly bloodying his knuckles on the roughness of a wall to wake up, look up, and realize that the darkness around him was due to the night – and the wetness was from the water trickling blackly down the sides of a deep cavern, which he was at the bottom of.

The sky, reduced to a star-pricked scar in a casing of jagged rock, was probably no more than a few dozen meters away, but it seemed like a kilometer to Luce with his knees against the hard floor and his neck bent double.

Before he could think about what it meant or even how he came to be there – his last memory was of the little house and the orange of the lantern on the wooden walls, snuff and mild annoyance and a long woven coat – something blacked out a pocket of stars and slammed onto the stone a few feet away, leather slapping upon impact. Luce sucked in air through his teeth and threw himself away from the crouched form, which was nothing more than a threatening void to his unadjusted eyes. His stunned body didn't obey; his hand slipped and his head knocked against the wall and he cursed hoarsely, hand instantly cupping his swollen temple as the pain roared up anew, confusing his fear.

"Doctor Worth."

The voice was cold, masculine and entirely too close: the same hissing timber of the bloke in his shop, just a little stronger. The same bloke he'd shortly get to renaming as his kidnapper, if his head would cooperate and stop whining at every little twitch.

"Whatever pit'a hell this is, yer lettin' me out," Luce heard himself growl, weak and low.

Battered as he was, he was seized by a dogged urge to be on his feet to face the man. No one had ever found him on his knees before. The slap of his hand to the wet stone was audible as he dragged himself upwards, hardly feeling his swollen face contort in effort. Goddamn, but the man could throw a punch. How long had he been out?

"Whass bugged in yer head? Where'd you take me?" he croaked out, mouth dry. "How d'ya … know my bloody name?"

"Your documents provided it. I brought them along with your equipment."

A short, crisp sizzle made Luce look over his shoulder, then the flare of a lamp chased back the darkness and overwhelmed his senses. The little flame sliced to the back of his dry eyeballs, inflaming the last of the snuff buzz and making him recoil with a grunt before he could see the man behind the lamp. He cursed behind his teeth.

"If I overlooked anything, you would do well to alert me immediately. There will be little time to retrieve it."

Luce dragged in a chest-full of the cool, stale air and forced himself around, leaning heavily on the wall. He put his hand between his eyes and the lamp, only able to see enough in the hard yellow to tell that the man had put on protective lenses and was again hiding in the brim of the old woven hat. Then Luce's eyes traveled beyond the sharp yellows and blacks of his kidnapper and into the soft glow dusting the rest of the cavern.

Standing along the far wall of the miserable crack in the earth was the hand-carved desk and the medicine cabinet, every bottle perfectly lined up along its surface with obsessive care. His peeling books, all stacked with mirroring stringency in columns of equal height and positioned parallel to the desk; his tools along the far wall, arranged according to size.

The relentlessness of the geometry faded to a murmur in the back of his head when Luce realized the man had gutted his shop. Taken everything and pushed it down into a cave.

"Christ," he breathed out, trying to make the seams between the wooden furniture and the ancient black stone fit in his mind. Trying to see any scenario where a desk could survive such a drop. His skin, clammy, prickled viciously against the rock wall and his soaked undershirt. "Th' hell is this?"

"Your work place."

His hearing was finally coming back to him, sounds filtering in clearer and louder. The husky, rhythmic noise in the background rose higher and Luce shook it away, pushing himself away from the wall. The vertigo did a knock-out job of rearranging his focus.

"You nabbed me ta have me work on someone?" he hissed, fighting to understand. The huffing sound swelled up in his periphery again, confusing his efforts at speaking in complete sentences. "The hell couldn't you've jus' brought 'em to me? Y'nearly broke — a'right, whass that goddamn racket?"

Squinting, the doctor turned then cursed sharply, drawing backwards again. At the opposite end of the crevice was a cage. Inside that cage was a girl.

She looked like a tiny-boned slave girl, crumpled inside a filthy mutton shift that had a tacky brown discoloration down the front, as if a great gout of blood had fallen there and then dried. She was staring at him through the bars, dark fingers clawed around them, nostrils flaring rhythmically. She was glistening, looking caught up in the final twitches of diptheria or something worse, eyes wide.

It had to have been a trick of the spiteful yellow light, but those eyes glinted blood red.

"She has a disease. The most terrible kind," the man behind him said hoarsely, each word coming out like a boot-fall in a military line-up. Perfectly measured but slightly muffled, as if from behind a mask. "You will cure her."

"She's in a bloody cage," Luce rasped in disbelief, turning. The lamp had found its way to his desk and now he could see the man in full. A heavy leather coat had replaced the ill-woven cloth one and his kidnapper stood tall and still, protective lenses over his eyes and a leather mask over his nose and mouth. What skin Luce could see was perversely white, hemmed in by dark hair descending from his temples.

"Her condition demands it," the Coat answered with a tilt of his head, finishing in a maddening monotone, "You will cure her."

Luce couldn't understand it. He didn't try to, when the answer was simple. Really, at the base of things, he'd had about enough of all of it.

He didn't do well with being ordered around. Yet another reason he would have been a shit nurse.

"Y'think that," Luce snorted harshly, pushing his hand through his hair. He shook his head as brusquely as he could without setting off the mines in his temple. "I quit bein' a doctor the second I'm outta my shop. Don't matter if someone busts my skull ta do it. Feel fer yer gal, but ya kin start by gettin' her outta that cage and upstate to a real doc. I'm leavin. F'you got those trappins down here, there's gotta be a walkin way out. You try an' put a boot in my path, I'll bloody you so – "

The only warning Luce got was a low, windy sound that was more pressure-change than vibration: suddenly, the man several meters to his left had him by the throat and was hard at work crushing him flat against the wall that had been ten meters to his right. The impact stole all the breath from his bony body. His bare feet were off the floor; pain daggered from the base of his skull. Bucking, Luce scrabbled at the gloved hand angled around his thin throat, tearing at the fabric of his sleeve and kicking out with his feet.

The man's arm and his grip were like stone, motionless. Lip curling from his teeth, Luce struggled jerkily until the man's other hand came down on his chest and pushed at his sternum until his entire body creaked. He stilled through the basest of his remaining instincts, belly twitching in a frenzy. He stared downwards and his attempt to swallow stuck against the man's palm, grating painfully.

"You will cure her or I will end your life," the man said without emotion. His goggles gleamed up at him in the yellow light of the lamp, myriad scratches fazing in and out of focus as Luce's own vision weaved. "She is in your care. God willing, she will not depart it."

Luce forced a little air out of his teeth, chin forced high. After a moment more of staring – grinding the message in with the dripping void behind him and the girl's harsh, rhythmic breathing – the tall man dropped him. He hit hard, nearly twisting his foot underneath himself, but by that point his captor had backed out of the light, leaving him doubled and choking for air in the orangey glow. Then he left.

No amount of weaving vision or head trauma could have excused the jump onto the wall, and the weighty, loping motions and whips of his coat that took him up the sheer rock wall and into the night sky.

Luce knew an ultimatum when he heard one, so he didn't waste time panicking.

For days, he mixed the contents of his battered jars and dug into the recesses of books he'd never touched, trying to reason through symptoms. With a focus only gifted to those with sparse but intelligent minds, he figured that Coat's mention of his fictional witch-doctoring wasn't at all coincidental. What the girl had looked normal enough, if fatal, but he wasn't going to skimp on the ritual.

There was also the fact of the man jumping up the wall like a bloody kangaroo to deal with, but that wasn't his direct concern.

Trying to read in the low light of dusk made his head ache something terrible, only worsened by the grinding want of snuff in his skinny body. He even tried to talk to the girl. Some really underestimated peoples' ability to tell you what was wrong with them, or what they thought they were feeling. She was too weak for much of anything, curled up limply on the floor of the cage, hiding in the tatters of her dress. Started crying if he pressed too much. Sneering through nothing more than frustration, he went back to his books.

The Coat told him he couldn't take her out of the cage, and he had to do his work during the day, when she would be more pliant – and it seemed to be a good bit of advice, with as quickly and finally as the gal fell asleep the second the sun came up. Anybody looking at her would have thought she was dead.

During the day, when it was just him and the girl, the cavern was twice as small and quiet as insanity. Far above him, he could hear grass of some kind rustling, but it was like he was seeing the sound as it skimmed over the top of the cavern, and he stood in the splotch of sunlight and just stared upwards for long periods. It almost spooked him, how long he stayed staring at the sky.

The Coat only came at night, and expected results during that time. For that, Luce needed more candles. It was another way of getting the freak out of the cavern in order to grope around for a possible way out.

By that point, he was just frustrated. Maybe he wasn't giving proper due to the amount of damage that the man and his stone grip could do to him, but Luce had also never been very good at being afraid, much less remaining in a constant state of fear. Irritation and efficiency always slipped in, hardening him and tightening his hands into fists. But the one time Luce reached for the new candles, the Coat actually flinched away, lenses fixed tensely on his grey-smeared palms. They stood a distance from each other, Luce locked in uncomprehending wariness, until the man backed away and placed the candles – in a row, always in a row – on the top of the desk, then retreated into a corner to watch, entire form reduced to the gleam off of his lenses.

He stayed there the entire night, only leaving when the sky began to lighten to a dove grey far, far above them.

Luce had been there two days when his first meal appeared. His captor dragged things in for him. Halves of things. The first time the monster dropped in, hunched, with the skidding corpse of a cow behind him, Luce nearly bashed his head in again trying to get a safe distance away. The corpse fell on the cave floor with a wet-meat weight. Luce was almost transfixed by the taffy-like softness of the white skin swooping between the cow's stick legs and barrel torso. Then came the creaking of leather, and Luce realized his captor had straightened and was staring at him. Expectantly.

"The 'ell am I s'posed to do wiv'at?" he slurred. The dark and his frustration were making him hazy and slow, muddying up the usually quick liquor of his blood.

"Eat."

The single syllable was as curt and uncomprehending as the Coat's stare. Like a bitter scent, Luce sensed the gap in between them in that moment, an alienation so complete it made his breath catch, and he realized he wasn't quite human to this person. Or human meant something else. Then the Coat took off up the side of the cave wall with those snapping movements that blurred at the edges, too quick to see.

Far off in the corner, the girl started moaning. The sound was high and unbearably shaky, and he realized, unless she had food back there, she hadn't taken in anything for as long as he had. After staring at the great white and black mound in disbelief, he was forced to hack into the cow's side with one of his bonesaws and dig his fingers into the tacky gore. He was so focused, so emptied of all common sense by the blood on his hands, that when he cut into the slippery fat-laced intestines and the smell crumpled his already empty stomach, he had to stagger to the back of the cave and swallow down bile.

When he came back, the silty black waste had oozed out onto some of the useable meat and he was too tired to curse himself. The smell hung around the cave for the next week.

He managed to tear off a chunk and cook it with agonizing slowness over a candle. When he got down on his knees and tried to hand the grease-wet tidbit to the girl, through the bars, her moan cinched into a shriek and she dragged herself backwards, rattling her head back and forth with enough force to make her braids slap at her cheeks. Ignoring the 'don't touch her at night' rule, Luce leaned flat against the bars, pushing his arm in up to his bony, scarred shoulder.

"Ya need it, love. C'mon."

The endearment was more a product of her shivering state than his own softness; it floated out of him hollowly and he only hoped he wasn't starting to care about her.

Slowly, hand over her mouth and nose, she shuffled towards him, eyes narrowed piteously against the light of the candle. He was only watching her with one eye, tired mind pointed in the direction opposite his outstretched arm. She needed to eat. She was his patient, at least until he found a way out. That was the end of it.

She reached out. Her hand hovered above his and the chunk of pinkish meat for a second before she grabbed him and, quick as a whip, bit him.

The pain was unexpectedly sharp, not that the entire thing didn't have his skin sizzling with adrenaline. Luce cried out gutturally and yanked his hand out of the cage, tearing himself away from her working jaw and cracking his elbow on the bars. His palm popped free from her bloody mouth and brought with it a hysterical shriek, her dark hands caught between shoving at her lips and rattling the cage.

Luce rocked backwards and clamped his hand between his knees, hissing and cursing until the pain, too sharp to be good, faded to a tolerable buzz. He staggered to his feet before it was safe, almost falling over, and looked back at her, unshaven face twisted coldly.

"Ain't the one what locked you up," he hissed, and briefly her shrieks condensed into words – something about needing it, needing it please – and that was all he got out of her before she dissolved into nonsense.

He had the cow all to himself. It was up to their mutual captor to feed the crazy girl, but it was almost as exhausting working his meals free, especially now that he had a busted hand. Good thing he had never needed much food, even when he was working. Or, more accurately, scrambling for what little he remembered of abo lore and, when that failed, making shit up.

He only hoped his well of shit was endless, but he had never been very creative about things he wasn't interested in – and the girl wasn't getting any pinker.

The fourth time he came, the Coat brought something with him. Something that wasn't half-animals or unknown plants for the doctor's jars.

Luce was at his worktable, painstakingly peeling a strange root with one of his long blades and nicking his fingers every other stroke. He turned at the sound of leather slapping on stone, knowing the Coat's calling sound by then, and immediately squinted. At length, he reached up and rubbed his eyes, but it didn't clear the foggy layer from the Coat's straightening form. Frowning, Luce had a brief, criminally neutral thought about cataracts before he saw it. The thing inside the fog.

The mist was moving gently, though the air inside the cave hadn't stirred since the earthquake that formed it. As Luce watched, the white substance twisted into a slithering line of paleness. Crossing the length of the cave with a disturbing fluidity, it curled to a halt right in front of his face, soundless and hauntingly bright. Luce choked and jerked away out of instinct, staring into the sharp slits of orange in the fog. The longer it settled into the cool air in front of him, he saw more things: a serpentine neck, a rodent-like face, tiny swept-back ears and paws. An echo of child-like inquiry accompanied a tilt of its transparent head.

Behind it, the Coat snapped his fingers. The apparition lingered for no more than an instant before rearing backwards and disintegrating into sparse curls of smoke, which chased each other underneath the hem of the man's stock-still jacket. He jerked the clothing straight and Luce caught a flash of white underneath, small and textured like fur. A pelt.

"The hell?" he hissed out, not even hearing himself speak. Luce only realized he was gripping the blade so hard it was cutting into his hand when he felt the blood well beneath his fingers and let go. The blade clattered to the floor. He could only see the red because of the silver behind it, and couldn't even feel the cut.

Like clockwork, the girl set up moaning again. The Coat just looked at him, then turned and settled into the corner. Waiting.

In direct response to the silence, Luce turned, wiped the blood off his hands, picked up the knife and finished peeling, bony hands shaking slightly.

About the time the cow corpse needed getting rid of, he found a use for the chasm. It was in the back of the cave. Dropped off to god knew where. Black as sin.

The discovery coincided with another important realization: he might not be getting out of this.

Luce spent many a day – such a bloody packaged term, a day, with the sun beating down on his back as the days got longer and the season started to change – staring into it, pressing his filthy bare feet onto the edge and trying to imagine the drop in his stomach as he followed all the food scraps and the shit into the earth, but he couldn't. His desperation wasn't high enough – and he didn't think it ever would be. There was something basic in him, in his wiry form and his red dirt upbringing, that rebelled at such an exit. No matter what hell was going to smear him to the stone over the next week or month or year, he wouldn't submit to gravity.

No doubt, he thought about escaping – in all forms. He wasn't one to flinch away from anything, the hell what the church said, so one day he had a scare while messing with his blades. Cut all the way up his arm and tried to let himself go in the patch of sunlight, but something stopped him, and it wasn't just the nauseating quality that bleeding himself had taken on.

The sensation of slicing got tangled up with others in his confused, dry, miserable body and just made him feel sick. It had him stuffing cloth to his flayed wrists with stifled curses as the high thrilling stomach-turning sting faded and the ugly pain set in. Luce knew with a strange surety that if this had happened back at home, in some red cave with access to blades, he would have put himself out of his misery by then, or flown at the Coat and taken care of it that way.

Thirty-something was a fine age and he didn't care so much. But there was something keeping him alive, weak but insistent and maddening because of it – because everything in Luce's mind was loud and sharp and non-negotiable. He'd made it to his new world but had been shoved out of a new life before he could even get a foothold. He couldn't give it up so easily, not that anything about this was easy.

Still, he mixed and crushed and combined, trying stupid things now. Nothing brought her temperature up, and he was at a loss because he'd never tried to bring anyone's temperature up. She couldn't swallow half of them, so he turned to poultices, leaving them on the floor of the cage or smearing pastes onto her clammy skin while she death-slept. Nothing worked.

When the Coat realized his results weren't going to be instant and he could stop crouching like a gargoyle in the corner, he took to being gone most of the time, which would have made Luce almost grateful if most of the time hadn't meant he forgot to come back and feed him. Him and the girl both.

Girl was pale and getting paler. He started to second-guess himself when he'd said she was negroid: she had the full lips and high cheekbones, but that first day was seeming more and more like a hallucination (and Luce had had his fair share of those to recognize the milky disconnection) because she just kept getting paler.

The day after he tried to feed her, he hissed to the Coat that she needed to eat and it wasn't his responsibility: if he wanted her alive to cure, he'd have to take care of business. After staring at the dirty, blood-soaked cloth that he'd wrapped around his fist to cover her damn bite-marks, the Coat left. Now, every few days his captor would come back with an earthen jug, impeccably clean on the outside. Luce had stared suspiciously, but the contents were soon revealed when the girl first opened it and her voice blasted the inside of the cavern, shrill and cracking. She screamed no no no no no, body caving with the force of her desperation, and dashed it against the floor.

A dark liquid arced out and splattered the walls. Luce didn't need to look up to know that their captor was already up and out, and his eyes were fixed on the pool of glossy fluid spreading slowly over the floor. Blood.

It was only a few minutes of whimpering and rocking to herself in the corner before she let out a ragged sob and scraped forward on her knees, reaching for the vase and upending it into her gaping mouth with a muffled, slick gulp. He could hear it gluk-gluk-glukking into her throat and fought his own nausea. When it was empty, she licked around the neck with an animal twist of her tongue, wincing away from the congealing liquid even as she swallowed it down, a horrifying ring of cold blood around her mouth. Then she gasped and her sobs redoubled, crying for Benny again.

Benny, as far as Luce could be bothered to care, was her beau before the Coat had killed him.

The man fed her blood. Blood from the cows and livestock he dragged back for his doctor. When Luce asked, he said she needed the humors. Needed a liquid diet. To stay pure. It wasn't the first time Luce had heard of anyone subsisting off of blood – the stuff was damn nutritious, he'd heard of some tribes doing it every so often – so he let it rest if just because of the way the Coat stared at him. As if he wasn't supposed to be asking questions about the condition he was supposed to be curing.

But she'd never moved from the cage, never once had to relieve herself. Her teeth, as his palm could contest, were sharp as knives. Her eyes, large and doey when not narrowed in pain or heightened light sensitivity, were the purest kind of holly-red he'd ever seen. In any light. Night after night.

"This disease turns yer eyes red."

"She bleeds in her eyes," came the raspy answer from behind him, always in that tick-tock monotone.

"She's bloody cold as ice," Luce growled, chest tight with all of his words and suspicions. He jabbed at the crackling bowl of herbs on his knee. "An her choppers are a sight."

"She will die, if you do not hurry."

He'd been in the cave a little over a month, if he kept his days straight. All that time started to scrape at you, make you toothy. Luce had almost convinced himself that what he saw the night of his kidnapping wasn't real, but with the lengths the Coat was taking to conceal his face, it all made sense.

"You've got it, too," Luce grit out, fire in his voice. He glared up at his motionless captor, hand clamped around his pestle as though it were a club. "Doncha, ya bloody bastard. You've got whatever this poor bid's got, an yer makin me put fire to 'er so you kin snatch up the cure after."

"If her body cannot withstand the cure, her soul will remain. It is better she go to the flames without claiming a victim," the man said with a distance that left the doctor staring, and went into the sky again.

Days passed. Then weeks.

Haunted by the girl's perfect stagnation, Luce began to reach further into magicks and rituals. His life became a series of routines, all edging away from the chasm of hopelessness that lay in his mind, its physical counterpart sitting black and heavy in the back of the cave. A new dead animal arrived and the smoke from cooking the meat clotted at the top of the cavern and hung there for days, and no matter how he coughed, the spicy, filthy tang just made him ache more for fags or maybe just the suffocation that the hanging rock and darkness promised.

Started talking to himself, if just to drown out the sound of her talking to herself.

One day, something clattered at the top, in the outside world. He nearly split his knee he got to his feet so fast, and he screamed himself hoarse trying to hail it down. It was a dog.

During the day and those dusty grey hours at either end, Luce crammed himself into corners and bit at his nails, twisting away at his hard fingernails just to give his teeth something to dig into. But as the weeks wore on, his nails grew waxier and one day a jerk of his finger exposed an oily red welt and a splitting, insanely concise pain-pleasure, except that his nerves were strung as tight as barbed wire and it just made him sick to feel so much. Half of his nail was spit to the floor, and he started wrapping his fingers after that. He didn't like the looks the Coat gave him and his bleeding bits.

The man was getting worse, whatever that meant.

He seemed even cagier than either of his captives, as if the very cavern was smothering him; more and more layers were added to his face, leaving him barely human-looking, a lurching mannequin of ratted fabrics and leather straps. Sometimes, the Coat took leave when the experiments dragged on. Othertimes, Luce felt like something else was chasing him off.

The doctor felt his hidden eyes burning into his back when he pulled out bottles at random and spread them over his desk, searching for an ingredient that he would have to scrape out of an empty bottle. More and more, Luce woke from watery sleep and looked over and his entire work-station was once more parallel and balanced and perfectly, ruthlessly arranged. He hallucinated a manic intensity, silent and dangerous, in the gleaming rows of tools and bottles. A terrible symmetry that made him afraid to touch and break the vibrating net around the pristine arrangement, which was sewed straight into the Coat's mind.

At its worst, secret levels of order rolled out before him, infinite and terrifying: the bottles were placed on age-lines of the wood, as were the identical blades that were arranged by width of the cutting edge. He felt like his bare feet were being sliced apart by unseen grids that coated every surface of everything. Luce reached for what he needed and felt the Coat look over. The closer his hand got the tool, he could imagine the man twitching, grating, something crawling higher under his skin.

Underneath his gritty wariness, he was swamped with the feeling that he was destroying something much more than a stepladder of tools, but a universe or a law or a credo or something unifying but incomprehensible and compelling.

The Coat never came any closer to him than twenty paces, and that was pushing it, considering the length of the cave. After a few weeks Luce started to smell himself, and that was bloody saying something. It also seemed to keep the monster away from him, which was an advantage if he wanted to stay alive. The twitches from weak to strong unnerved Luce more than anything, even more than the quick way the Coat's head cracked over if he made a noise, or touched anything.

As hollowed as his mind was from concocting ritual after ritual from the bare bones he had, surviving in a dark hole, Luce had the feeling if he got his mitts on the white skin under the jacket, then his situation would change. He knew enough about totems to recognize one and that little white scrap held an animal familiar or something that was bound to the Coat. He obsessed over getting it. He spent all of his time planning ways to trick him closer, but when the Coat actually dropped down into the cavern, just the way he moved (a spidery mix between limping and lion stride, unstable and soundless) was enough to tell him he didn't want to be in close contact with him. Something in his very spine rebelled, kept him against the back of the wall or near the girl.

It wasn't cowardice, but he almost didn't have a reason to be brave. Pushed down to the bottom of his brainstem, he lurked there, low and flat and silent. Waiting for something to end so he wouldn't have to.

More time passed. She spoke sometimes. Not to him, but she spoke.

Luce could hardly understand her through her accent, which was rich and drawling unless it was drawn tight into a shriek. The girl would ramble on and on, rocking to herself and clawing at her hair and skin, whimpering about Benny and how he promised to Make her and take her someplace but Benny was dead. The sorrow and hysteria in her was real, but over the weeks and weeks, Luce had become so packed around himself by his desperation (lashed tight around his spine, no more caring flesh to spare and he was already a lean bloke) that eventually it just hurt his head something terrible as the snuff withdrawal crashed up against her shrill, pointless screams. Finally, he screamed at her to shut up, heart beating painfully fast, all the walls closing in as he realized he wasn't getting out and he didn't have the care to kill himself.

And she shut up. But she watched him – no. Hunched low in her cage, studs of her white teeth pressing into her bottom lip, she watched his heart.

The red of her eyes were like the tip of an arrow and it was trained on his thumping center. She went too quiet, too still, hunger trembling on her lips, and he had to duck around the corner and bash his fists against the walls until they bled, just to put force to something after so long staying perfectly still and measuring his every step under Coat's eyes, paralyzed with a fear as foreign as it was smothering. It turned his fists messy oily orange, and she started screaming again, her shrieks that of a starving beast.

It was then that he realized what he had been avoiding and packaging into symptoms. She was a demon. Both of them were, and what they survived off of was no secret.

That was the closest Luce Worth came to throwing himself into the chasm, but he stopped a meter short and clattered to the ground, sobbing. They were dry, wracking things that made the husk of his chest creak, unknown to him before that moment. He heard a hoarse scream peel away from hers and realized it was barreling out of his own sandpaper throat. It split his crackling lips and his crackling mind and the only wetness he knew came dribbling out.

Being deprived of a solid gulp of water was more maddening than Luce had ever imagined, but only because of the desperate sense of thirst that already hung in the air.

Luce had lost track of the weeks when the Coat came down with torn clothing and the unsteadiest of trembles in his hands and shoulders. He held a glass jar, filled to the brim with red liquid. He set it on the desk, in the display of lines and angles Luce hadn't touched for days.

It looked like blood, but he didn't give it to the girl. It stayed there in the lantern light, unspeakably thick and bright.

"S'that?"

Luce could hardly recognize the sound of his own voice. Hadn't needed to talk. Coat wasn't interested in excuses.

And whenever he talked, he came back to himself a little. Wasn't so keen on that.

"Lycan blood."

The Coat's voice was horribly steady for how he was shaking. The term passed through Luce's aching head, finding no niche. Lycan must have been some kind of animal he hadn't had at home. Luce sat up, torn with anticipation for a new material and the wrenching certainty it wouldn't work.

His mind was starting to spiral. It had taken a while to do so, but he was going down hard and he felt the loss of every brittle inch of himself. Above him, the Coat hunched over the doctor's work table and ran his gloved hands in the tense air above his configurations, his lines and his testament.

"There are balances, even in the darkest of regions. Lycans are dark nature, nightwalkers are dark stagnation. Combined, they could cancel. Get this into her."

"The hell am I s'posed to do that? Make 'er drink it?" Luce croaked.

"No. Not directly. Withdraw her blood. Mix it with the sample," the Coat bit out, turning around and cocking his head, a once-expensive syringe in his gloved hand. The needle was now clotted with an orangey dust. "Dilute. Inject."

"Ain't usin that. Ain't big on cleanliness, but I wouldn't use that thing on my wors' enemy. S'gonna kill 'er."

"She will weather it," he replied, putting the needle down.

"You mean the thing inside'a her will!" Luce snapped, reaching out.

He was peripherally shocked by the thinness of his arms as he heaved himself to his feet for the first time in days, chest working hard like holey bellows. The vertigo sent his head spinning and he felt, all over, how goddamn weak he was. Blood weak, bone weak, the kind that made him not care about the tension in the Coat's shoulders and the cold way he was staring.

"The hell's so special about her? Why're you doin this? Why're you fightin' ta get this thing outta her when yer puttin' her through hell ta do it and you'd just as soon she die?"

"She is virginal," the Coat rasped, nearly roared, tall frame vibrating. "The demon in her has not fed on human life. The pact has not been sealed. If there is any possibility that this will succeed, it lies in her. Now, create the first dilution."

Before, it had been poultices. Herbs that could do no more than send the human digestive tract running hot and fast. Ashes and feathers and mutters.

When he injected the first mixture into her, jabbing the rust-coated needle into the soft of her brown-grey arm while their captor held her twisting body still, Luce thought she was going to die.

When he pushed her cage into the sunlight at the Coat's orders, he thought she was going to die, the way she screamed and clawed and steamed, red eyes rolling back in her head. Terrified at the explosion of noise and pain, he threw himself against the cage and forced it back into the shadow, heart slamming in his chest. She returned to the corner of it shivering wildly, covered in stone-like burns. Incantations made her hiss, all while the Coat watched impassively, gloved hands knotted at his sides.

Coated in bitter sweat and oily desperation, Luce diluted the Lycan blood further and further, halving it again and again in the thin beams of daylight that pierced the cave, unknowing of why the liquid burned so painfully in her. Sixteen-fold, thirtytwo-fold, sixtyfour-fold. For hours, the combination was warm, eerie and bright. Every time they forced it into her, he thought she was going to die and his heart tightened instinctively because of it, because of his hands on the needle – and she never did.

She never changed back human, either, and with every near-act of murder, Luce's mind hardened beyond comprehension. He emptied, started seeing her as an animal. It worked, for what he had to do.

It had been a long time.

More weeks passed.

He was against the wall. He was trying to sleep (trying to see the point in sleeping, with as thin and dingy as his unconsciousness was and only to come back to this) when he heard her. Low and husky.

"Suh. Suh."

"You talkin' ta me now?" he rasped at the wall after an eon, nothing but a whisper himself. Nothing but a cough of a man. His eyes were hovering at the line of his lids, rolled back just slightly, like he was flirting with the cusp of something else.

He'd never needed to talk to anyone. Fine being alone. And talking to her made her real again. Took him away from the red, dry dirt landscape of his thoughts.

"I's talkin', I's talkin'," she whispered, and the way she pushed the words out sharp and smart, almost foreign in their succinctness, made him look over.

Her face, all roundness and plush lips, was once again just behind the bars, but she was motioning him over with a hand, berry-red eyes wide. Cracked through with a mixture of exhaustion and curdling suspicion, Luce snorted and turned back around, cradling his knees in his hands. He was all tendon now.

He could hear himself creaking, even the parts that weren't supposed to.

She hailed him again with the same insistent suh suh, whining and soft in turns until, surrendering, he crawled over to her, unable to part from the stone and walk. She talked him closer like a lost mutt, words so fast his ears couldn't keep up even as he knew they weren't fast. Everything just dissolved as soon as it reached the sphere of his head.

"We d'same, dat devil'n me. I's strong like him," she whispered when he was within arms reach. He stayed there, stared there, feeling the slackness of his skin beneath his dry eyes as he looked into hers. "You ne'r gonna cure me 'cos what I got ain' for curin."

"I tried everythin' I know," Luce heard himself say, some of the weakness bleeding into his voice. She didn't flinch away, just kept holding his eyes, so he sucked in a breath and said more, letting it fall to the hard floor. "Tried bloody everythin' I kin think an' more."

"You don' need ta be doin that, don' needa be heah. You done nothin' wrong."

He couldn't ever remember so many words coming out of her, but in that moment, it all seemed natural. Something that had waited a long time to happen. He muttered it back, he hadn't done anything wrong – it was damn right – and she nodded. Her eyes were bright, pulling him in.

"I done nothin' wrong too. Dis all bad, all wrong. He the devil, I seen his insides and they black. He kilt my Benny and stole me. But me, I kin git us out, inna the grass. Inna the forest agin."

Forests. The memory of forests was like a painful hallucination, green turned acidic and overwhelming in his memory. Crisp, sweet. Space to move. He hadn't run in months and the cramp was a constant ache in his knees, corkscrewing all the way up into his chest.

Luce almost sobbed at the thought but her red eyes pushed his mind front and center, away from any fraying madnesses. Looking at her, Luce felt safe. Calm for the first time since he woke up. Calm like snuff. The back of his mind extended into soothing blackness, his starved muscles relaxing, and he just looked.

She was goddamn beautiful.

"Iss all gonna be righ'. You jus le'me out, and I's gon' git us outta heah. I fo'give you ever-thin you ever done t'me, you jus hatta le'me out."

Her voice was so smooth.

"Le'me out, suh. You gots ta."

"M'sorry. Sorry fer it all. What I've done to ya."

Someone was crying.

"He'd kill me, f'I didn'."

"Ah knows it. But you gon' fix everythin."

As if the air were syrup, Luce reached up. He could feel his every joint in his hand, which made him realize he was nothing but bones. Bones and razor-scars. A prickle built behind his ears. This was what he had to do, if he ever wanted to be more than hard things lashed together with tendon. If he had just done it earlier, trusted her, it would have saved them both so much pain.

He wrapped his hand around the silver latch and began to pull down – began to feel the creak and the give, her way to freedom – when something dug down into his shoulder and ripped him away from the cloud of quiet, flinging him backwards. His head cracked against the floor and everything went black for a moment.

When everything came back, he was on his back and the cavern shook with her screeches and a sizzling sound; between them, their captor was standing with a jar of water and a small wooden cross, stock-still.

All the things Luce hadn't felt for a precious few seconds came bubbling back under his skin, nearly crushing him and his ability to breathe. Unable to control himself, he moaned, smothering the sound in his gut by curling into a shaking ball, hands clawed against the stone. His face was dry, but that didn't mean anything.

The Coat paced away from her writhing form, then looked down at his other captive, face cocooned in fresh white strips.

"Never look her in the eye. Her kind have a witching power." The man's emotionless staccato voice brought back the deepest of desperations in Luce's gut. "They will seduce your mind."

Without even looking at her, Luce felt her hunger scraping along side the underside of his stomach like a devil vibration, and realized that was it.

Once, they might have escaped. That time was past. Even if he let her out now, she would tear him apart for his blood.

Luce had just finished mixing up the last dilutions of the animal blood and the demon girl's blood when his last moment came, unexpected in its minimalism.

It was a simple combination of the dogged nervousness of being watched – even as it drove repulsed shivers under his skin, forcing his head a few degrees to the side, the Coat had obviously decided he couldn't be trusted by himself – and a slip of a blade. His skin was too thin, rotted down to a scummy yellow layer by a patchy diet of meat and little else. His mind was in worse shape, porous and weak. Before Luce knew it, his muddy, too-thick blood was on the floor and he reached for the instrument.

Too close.

He saw the gleam of the cage a second before her dark-dusky hand snapped out and yanked him against the cage with a monstrous quickness and strength, dislocating his shoulder. The only thing he could think in the split second before it happened – as it happened – was that she had never reached beyond the cage before and he didn't understand it. And he didn't particularly care.

The muffled, instant pop at his collarbone was almost enough to drown out the searing pain as she tore into his wrist with dagger canines and the full strength of her jaw. Before Luce could even cry out, he was ripped away and kicked back, the whistle of air strong in his ears.

He rolled to a stop, arching against the stone as two different kinds of pain wrecked his body. Then, panting and forcing a brittle elbow beneath him, Luce looked behind him and his eyes widened. The Coat was in front of the girl's cage, gloved hands braced atop it, but the girl was scarcely a girl anymore. As Luce watched, her dark face elongated ad paled, pulled at the chin and the cheekbones until her nose began to warp into ghastly slits, rows of needle teeth pushing out from her whitening gums. Her red irises had shrunk down to nothing and her fingers were long, so long, and scratching for him.

The Coat just stood and watched her writhe in the pulsing yellow light of the lamp. He watched her scratch and shriek as the last of the humanity bled from her in a noxious shimmering smoke, and then spoke.

"It has her."

Each word like a drop on a stone floor. His head jerked to the side, creating an audible crack.

"It has her."

A husky sound rose from so long ago, from when Luce first woke up. Seemed like a lifetime ago. But this time, it was coming from the Coat. Slowly, his body began to heave, breaths getting deeper and hoarser until he suddenly stepped forward and snapped the latch off the cage with a jerk of his hand, flinging the door open.

Throat closing, Luce saw the she-monster rise up with inhuman quickness, or saw her sitting and then saw her mid-leap, maw gaping – and then, just as quickly, saw her caught in the Coat's thick arms.

There was no struggle. He slammed her to his chest and snapped her neck with a jerk of his arm. The cracking vegetable sound made Luce's stomach cave flat to his spine, and he was stumbling to his feet before he could even think, pain a distant buzz in his limbs. Fear narrowed his vision to silhouettes: below the hem of the man's coat, the girl's tiny naked feet pointed with excruciating sharpness then went slack. Then the Coat doubled with a stifled growl, and there was a slow, sticky ripping sound, twice as grisly.

Cool blood splattered down onto his boots and something hit the floor with eerie softness, cushioned by a pile of thick brown braids.

Frozen, the Coat gripped onto her body, shivers crawling up his tall frame. Luce only stopped backing up when he felt the wall of the cave scrape his back, and then the man flung the girl's body onto his work-table, sending his tools scattering. With a hoarse roar, he seized the cage and crushed one side of it, crumpling the bars like clay, then dashed it against the wall and did the same with the lamp. Oil splattered and caught fire.

The clanging sound and the sudden burst of heat broke Luce's trance and he staggered to the side, slipping on the spreading pile of blood. Teeth clacking shut on his tongue, he fell back on his desk and tumbled into his piles of books, cursing as their sharp edges tore into his back.

The Coat turned whip-crack quick at the noise, the tremulous shifting of the freed flames reflected in his lenses, and Luce saw the sparking, quivering, uncontrollable madness brimming in him. He felt the monster's eyes systematically tear apart the books scattered beneath him, crushed from their pristine towers. The books were his pieces, the last barrier of his controlled reality – and blood was everywhere, a rich stink in the close, dirty air.

The chaotic bristling angles of the peeling books ripped through his organs, letting free hot madness into the blackness of his insides, raw and unshaped like the inside of the cave.

The Coat erupted with a ghastly noise, an animal howl, and ripped off the cloth over his face with muted jerks of his bunched-up back, flinging it away and following with the leather mask. Cradling his dislocated arm, Luce shouted as his starved body was wrenched from the pile of books, the Coat's gloved hands tight enough to break bone. The last thing he saw was the pure white of fangs splitting the darkness of the monster's open, roaring throat before pain lanced through his chest, curling in his weak heart and bursting it.

Fangs split the flesh of his throat, slicing in and then ripping outwards, stealing the noise from his body. The pain was too much to comprehend as a pressure pulled him out, out, out, emptying him.

Warm wetness flowed over Luce's shoulder, which was slowly drifting downwards, followed by his head. Gravity had finally claimed him, pulling him down into the waiting blackness. Always had been waiting.

He could feel the last of himself pulsing into the serrated maw and faded from his torn body entirely when he was flung away, head cracking on hard wood. Heard glass shatter. Another roar shook the stone, but he was too far away to feel it, or the frenzied slams of boots scaling a cavern wall.

Eyes half-lidded but unseeing, Luce died there on the ground, warm liquid pap-pap-papping onto his cooling forehead and sliding slowly down the bridge of his nose, towards the black cavern of his mouth.