Chapter Four:
Fast or Far Enough
I
The librarian is in the creche sitting on a padded chair surrounded by bean bags and delirious toddlers. She had a book open upon her lap, some vibrant thing with a caterpillar eating a leaf as she read aloud. It made little difference to her harsh critics. None of the children are listening. None of the children are watching. Some of them are flipping over themselves on the multi-coloured jigsaw carpet, one or two are sucking their thumbs in corners, a small cluster is squabbling over a Lego block by the window, and one rather brave little girl in dungarees and pigtails has her finger from knuckle jammed up her nose rooting for gold.
Her partners in crime do well in keeping attention absent from the backrooms.
Heather is far away from the noise and the havoc a visit from a kindergarten class created (she's timed her stopover purposefully well), sitting in the private part of the library where the old books were kept, the kind that couldn't be let out in daylight any longer, the ones that needed white gloves on fingertips to protect and an aircon to keep the temperature stable. Not many people visited these backrooms, Heather thought, as she broke off the dust flecked lock on the door with a snap of her wrist an hour ago and slipped inside while the Librarian had been busy trying to pull a boy away from tugging on a little girls braid.
No one would be disturbing her anytime soon, not when another fight between the children broke out over someone's chocolate bar (contraband in a library, the little rebels), and the notice me not charm made sure any passers-by wouldn't look twice should the toddlers fail in keeping the librarian distracted (they wouldn't, the hellish fiends they were).
"There you are."
Heather whispers as she slips a photo from its sleeve. It was a small photo, square, polished in sepia tones that were muddy around the edges. The mansion stood on sprawling lands that had once been a plantation, American Redwood and pine trees scattered around its back, picturesque and charming, a postcard setting if Heather ever saw one. Thumbed on its wallet is a sticky note with scratchy writing in ball point pen stating Lockwood mansion, 1901.
She finally found the right archival book. For whatever reason, the Salvatore's folder was missing in the filing cabinet (and she'd searched for it five times over now). There had been the Forbes family in the top draw, Gilbert's in the bottom, Fells in the second and Lockwood in the middle, and not even a snippet of a Salvatore album hiding in a crack. Maybe they didn't have one. Maybe it had been taken away to restore. Maybe it was bloody missing altogether, but it mattered a little less now that Heather had the Lockwood's in hand.
She just needed one thread to pluck to unravel a blanket, her fingers and mind were clever like that.
Flicking through the pages, Heather took a gander at the collection of memorabilia. Birth certificates and photos, marriage licences' and house deeds, news articles and Mayorships (a whole lot of those. One might begin to think the Lockwood's a little nepotistic).
Strangers in stranger places staring back from camera flashes and print.
It wasn't until Heather got to a yellowing page, crinkled and scorched in a corner (saved from some sort of fire once upon a time), did she halt in her perusal. A family tree written in black ink and embossed in gold leaf (fancy if a bit tacky for Heather's tastes).
Heather doesn't recognise the names, the branches sprouting out over time, the possible relatives dangling like fruit to be plucked. The names mean very little to her. There was Jacob, Barnette, a George and a Richard, Carol, Tyler, Jeffrey, Mason-
Marianna.
Heather pauses over the name speckled in gold, runs a curious finger over the lettering through its plastic sheath, tracing the curve of an A and the slash of an I.
Marianna Lillian Lockwood.
Dipping a hand into the collar of her crop top, rooting between her breasts, Heather worked free the Locket she had hidden below. Something was niggling in her gut, pecking behind her eyes, a lurch of intuitive impulse to look.
Heather had long ago learned to listen when her instincts talked. She just doesn't know why it is this name that is the one that snares her, grabs her attention so thoroughly, but something has.
A little ghost in her ear telling her to see.
Again Heather works her way through the photos and records, backwards in time, taking her own, traces every outline and every shadow and every shade of a face that's in the book.
She catches a woman near the beginning.
She's standing for a portrait in a drawing room, dressed in the high collars and puffy sleeves of an Edwardian heiress, and she's young with a fair complexion, slim build, somewhat tall with dark brown hair and dark eyes that's hard to see the colour through their sepia filter. Heather thinks they might be brown or they could be Hazel (just a little green). The woman has no tag near this photo, no post-it note, just a question mark in a corner.
Name lost to time-
or not.
Because there, around her swan like neck, rests the very same locket that Heather has around hers' now. Heather flicks back to the family tree, using her finger as a bookmark to keep the photo close by, in sight, at hand.
Marianna Lillian Lockwood, born 1887 in Mystic falls Virginia, died 1912. Heather juggles the math in her head. She would have been twenty-five. Hardly a life at all. Four more years than another Lily of Heather's life that had died too fucking young.
It's her locket.
Heather has Marianna's locket-
But that doesn't make sense.
Photos of the Lockwood women in this book show no other flash of the locket, not on this Carol, Nancy, or Julia, so it's not like it's a family heirloom that's been passed down until it's landed serendipitously into Heather's hands.
It's gone straight from one to the other.
From Marianna to Heather.
Yet the locket is too expensive to merely be a trinket. It's made from real silver, heavy and gleaming, and not as tarnished as a near century old locket should look. The crest is made from black onyx and ivory, and the martlets are speckled with bloody black diamond. It's not something cheap enough (even for a family rolling in the money like the Lockwoods seem to be) to just be given out willy-nilly.
So why was it left with Heather underneath an elder tree a century later?
Marianna seems to be, according to the family tree, the last woman born from the Lockwood line.
The arithmetic doesn't add up-
Unless magic was involved.
Time meant very little to a witch or wizard, after all.
Heather's gut sinks. Her fingers tremble. It's too ludicrous to think-
She takes the photo anyway, pockets it and retrieves the family tree, spreading it out on the table in the corner of the room underneath a desk lamp, driven by that phantom in her ear, the one urging her on and on and on, takes her wand from her holster-
The slicing hex stings her thumb, and the single drop of blood on the parchment is stark red as it splashes home at the base of the names.
"Revelarus Sanguinium."
Her blood on the page moves like a worm inching up, a vine weaving over brick as it finds its branch to perch on, wraps and settles below a name.
Marianna's name.
Her mother.
Marianna Lockwood, her birth mother, who was born in 1887. The one who'd died by twenty-five.
Heather Lockwood (Marianna mustn't have married her father though his surname is on her birth certificate) it read below, born 1912-. There's no death recorded (there really wouldn't be, would there?), just a very, very wrong birth year. Or a very, very right birth year.
The year Marianna had died. Heather was born the year her mother lost her life. There's something a little bit hilariously tragic about that.
The locket hangs heavy around Heather's throat. The weight almost threatens to strangle her, bury her, especially as she sees her blood seep on the page once more, disseminating in the ink and the lineage, up and over and forking wide, churning.
A new name.
Two new names right next to her mother's.
A man called Timothée Parker, born 1880; Oregon- Died 1934 Mystic Falls. Another called Damon Salvatore, born 1839; Mystic Falls-
Blank.
Heather's name dangles below all three like Eve's apple.
Now how did a child have three genetic parents? Heather had never taken muggle biology beyond secondary school, but even she knew to get a child it typically involved one man and one woman and one horizontal tango.
But her magic is sound, her blood has no lies, the ties are there to see.
Furthermore, it seems good ol' papa Salvatore was still alive and kicking… Nearly two centuries later.
Another riddle, another colour on the Rubik cube.
What the fuck am I?
Heather snatches the family tree, pockets it with the photo, shoves her locket back into her shirt safe and sound, slams the book closed and the filing cabinet, and slips out the door anew.
Something real fuck-y is afoot.
II
Heather works her way through the town slowly, making her way through the high sun and looming buildings. It was the kind of town you could drive through and barely know you'd been there. A blink and you'll miss it sort of deal.
There's one stretch of street through the heart of it, the road Heather strolls her way down, a couple of hundred yards long, fish boned with a few side lanes. Mystic Falls seems to be suffering from a time capsule lockdown. They have the necessities, groceries and hardware stores, a laundromat and gas station, but everything's a little skewed, a Town Hall that seems to be plucked right out the manor days with an overly large clock tower, and the sole police station is a small, squat building barely big enough to house the two squad cars in its parking lot.
Many of the towns small population seem to live scattered in a Hallmark advert, some sort of TLC movie on a rerun, crammed in a green valley with two churches and only one bar (the horror). At the end of the road stood the local high school, one of the bigger buildings around, dotted with large windows and a larger football pitch, the pride of the town.
Heather passes by two gift shops, which she thinks speaks more of optimism than sound business sense, for a while, clearly, tourists pass through this candy-apple town, Heather suspects few chose to linger long. While the people she passes seem friendly in the way all small-town folk seem friendly, one or two get a glimpse of Heather and fucking scarper or scowl confusedly at her.
A town where everybody knows everybody, where the chief of police downs a beer next to the history professor, both who attended the same (and only) school 20 years ago, where their grandchildren will go in another 40, a new face is a curious thing to see, and sometimes, by a few looks Heather garners, not entirely wanted.
Heather doesn't mind. She's used to stares.
Still, big town, small town, one thing stays exactly the same wherever you went. It's the bar you'll want if you need gossip. Small towns and small people, word gets fast between them, and a bar is where the beer makes lips loose.
Heather grins toothily as she spots her destination, crawling to a stop in her boots and a thud. A green building with a yellow awning, Mystic Grill on a lacquered sign atop.
Bingo.
III
It's not much of a bar this Mystic Grill, but it's clean and quant. There's rustic leather high tables and stools, hanging glass racks by mirrors behind shelves of bottles of different shapes and sizes and colours of liquor. There's music playing from a speaker pegged in the ceiling corner, pop pouring over peanuts and pretzels in bowls.
At this time of morning there's not many patrons present, an old man swearing at the game playing on the TV in the corner, the game muggle Americans called football but was more like rugby with extra padding. A woman in a grocery shop polo slicing through buttered toast, either just off shift or just heading in. Another man down the main bar, nursing a beer and a, Heather thinks, broken heart.
The smell of it, with Heather's rather severe senses, is anything but quant.
She scents the grease and spices from the kitchen out back, the sweat and the perfume from last night's dancers, the hint of cheap aftershave teenage boys doused themselves in and cigarette smoke clinging to wallpaper, mingling with the remnants of bad beer breath, vomit from the bathroom, and stained money.
Heather smells it all. The pack of mints in the woman's handbag. The expired condom the man at the bar has in his wallet. The slick of mud on the bar keeps' trainer, sprucy, likely from a stroll in the woods taken… last week.
Heather stumbles a little under the onslaught, hesitates by the door with the bell, checks thrice that her dampening spell is still going, raised over her like a security blanket, and when she realizes this is as good as it's going to get, she squeezes herself into a vacancy at the bar (a stall with a torn leather seat closest to the door should she need a quick getaway).
The drink runner behind the bar seems to be a young man as he comes over to tend to Heather's order. He's around 6 feet tall, has those baby blues and short blonde hair that sends all the teen girls whispering. You know the type, the stereotypical Americana nightmare, the one invited to meet the parents in all the movies and always loses the girl to the new-in-town-bad-boy with a heart of gold.
Far too bland for Heather's tastes.
"ID?"
He asks her with a napkin in his hand. Heather smiles at the question. What was he? 17? 18? Heather herself would be… 23 this year( birthdays are pretty meaningless to count when you're immortal). Everlasting life wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Being ID'd eternally was a bloody ball ache.
Pilfering into her jacket, Heather pulls out the transfigured driving licence she'd magic'd from a twig before renting the car still by the library, flashing it at baby blue. He read it over three times, glancing between her and the photo and the birthday that made her twenty-one (the oldest she was going to get away with seen as she hadn't aged a day since Tom's death).
Eventually he nodded, thank Merlin.
"What can I get you?"
Blood.
Inferi, mermaid, centaur, fuck it, with the current burn ebbing in her throat, Heather would take a fucking pigmy puff to-go. She hadn't… Eaten in three days, and the hunger was beginning to pick up pace again, make its unwelcomed presence known, and while anything magical, anything not muggle, would ease the fire, werewolf and witch or wizard was best. They kept her fuller longer, and if the running theory was correct, the one she'd spent the last three years formulating through her feedings, vampire (though she's not met one of those since her turning yet) would be high on the list too.
She's only a little bit cannibalistic in nature.
Nothing to fear.
Everything to fear.
Heather doubts baby blue has any of that on tap, however. She can smell the muggle on him from six blocks away. She'll settle for some alcohol to out-burn the thirst in her throat. Fight fire with fire and all that.
"Got any limoncello?"
Blond and blue seems confused by the word, and Heather comes to a pitiful realization of just how small this small town was if he hadn't heard of limoncello before.
"Negroni?... Bellini?... Bloody hell, sambuca?"
A blank stare and a helpless shrug is all Heather gets in reply.
"Fuck me, you've heard of vodka at least, right?"
His face flushes, the tight lines by the corner of his mouth ironing out, and he grins as he turns sharply to the back wall where the shelves are, scanning for the right bottle. He finds it two rows down and three across, capped with one of those funny nozzles, bringing a clean shot glass with him. He only fills it half full, keeps the bottle in his grasp and doesn't hand the entire lot over, keeps hovering in front of Heather waiting. His biggest sin though, Heather thinks, as he pushes the shot glass over towards her, is that he makes the apparent choice to try and make small chat.
Was there anything worse in world?
"Do I know you?"
Heather politely grins, the most she can muster, raising a shot in salute before downing the lot swiftly.
"I should bloody well hope not."
Because if blue did recognize her, it likely meant he knew who she was, and if he knew who she was then it meant Heather had to spend the next hour doing 'clean up'.
She was pretty sure there was an alley near the bar, one that held one of those big double lidded dumpsters with wheels on their legs. There had to be bin bags in the kitchen. A sharp knife too.
She might just be able to do it in thirty minutes with a spell here and there.
Blond and blue smiles at her, and Heather flicks the shot glass over the bar, tapping against the rolled edge to silent request another. He pours it only half high again.
The service was terrible here.
"I don't know, there's something about you… You're sure we've never met before?"
Heather nods stiltedly, glancing down to the badge on his chest, a gold-plated name tag.
Matt it said in cursive.
Mundane Matt with the mundane face with the mundane muggle life.
They definitely hadn't met before. Good for him.
"Must be the lighting."
Heather simply provides, snatching back the shot glass and sending it smoothly down the hatch. The alcohol doesn't burn, doesn't taste good either, doesn't taste of anything, bland like everything else she'd tried to eat or drink since her… awakening.
Anything but blood. Warm, rich, bloo-
Don't think about it.
"Not a local, are you?"
"What gave me away?"
Apparently, Americans weren't used to sarcasm because Matt, Matt with the fucking gelled hair, actually answers her earnestly, as if he's expecting a prize for his observational skills.
"The accent. Scottish, right?"
Scottish and a bit of Surrey posh-tosh actually, thanks to her formative years being bounced between Hogwarts in the Highlands and 4 Privet Drive in Surrey near Kent. Then again, Heather can't tell a Virginian accent apart from a Kentucky one, so she can't really give the poor boy much jip.
"A bit."
His grin lightens, less of a force of habit from a career in service now, a flash of pearly white teeth all in a flawless row. A dentists wet dream. Heather finds the perfectionism nauseating. It's the faults that made things real, the crookedness that makes the charm, moles that made you want to count constellations.
There's nothing pretty in perfect.
Just boring.
"What brings you all the way over here to our charming town?"
Finally.
Just as she knew it would, her new face has drawn out his curiosity. If a bar was the rumour mill of a town, then the barman was the one with the ears. The kind shoulder all the drunks cried their secrets to.
This is why Heather's here. Not for the music, not for the smell, and certainly not for the cheap fucking vodka.
It's for barman Matt.
Of course, she can't outrightly tell him that she's here for answers to her hunger, to her startling speed, to her furry little problem that comes creeping out when she loses her temper, her unflinching ability to go in houses uninvited and stand in sunlight unburnt, but now her total inability to die.
So she has to play it coy, drop little breadcrumbs for hansel to pick up, get the cooker heating in the kitchen to shove him into when the time is right.
It's manipulative, yes. Sneaky, of course. Machiavellian, unquestionably.
It's also what will see Matt walk out the bar door at the end of his shift and not be ditched in the dumpster out back in thirty-seven bin bags instead.
The less people that know exactly what she is (before she can reverse it. And she will reverse it. She has to) the better for everyone involved.
She doesn't need to kick off a doomsday cult again like she did in Bosnia.
"I heard I have family around these parts. Or I did once. I'm trying to reconnect."
"Oh?"
Matt questions excitedly, leaning across the bar towards her. Heather tries hard, very hard, to keep her face friendly, sociable, even when the charge of Axe body spray, toothpaste and acidic hair gel hits her full force in the face.
She can't smell anything over the revoltingly syrupy mix.
That's possibly why she doesn't scent the man approaching her back until it was too late, until a voice was speaking up behind her.
"Me, I believe."
IV
Heather glances back, over her shoulder, peeks the man behind. He's tall, muscular, with an athletic build with short, dark brown hair, blue eyes, and-
Sea salt and golden sand, a hint of gasoline and iron and the wax used on surfboards over the smell of-
Werewolf.
Not like Remus, or the wizarding wolves Heather had run into before (some of whom she'd drank dry), slightly sweet in their scent as if they were diseased or rotting from the inside, sickly, but like vetiver and cedarwood and oakmoss, something deep and dark and belonging to the forest.
"Mason."
The man says to her as he slips onto the stall at Heather's left without invitation.
"Mason Lockwood."
His smile was one of delight growing, a flash bulb burst, and he holds it on his face like someone would hold a crying child.
"My families been waiting for you to come back home for a long time now."
V
"This is yours."
Mason declares as he places a leather-bound book on the table, using his fingers to slew it over the notched wood towards Heather. They'd swopped their bar out for a booth, sat at the back of the Grill nursing untouched beers and vodka shots, far away from prying ears and Matt's chatter.
"It's Marianna Lockwoods diary from 1911 and 1912. Lynell Lockwood filled in the last passages. It doesn't go into great detail, but it tells you everything you genuinely need to know."
Really? Heather thinks. Everything? Because what Heather wants to know right then was not what happened to Marianna Lockwood, not who Timothée Parker was or where he came from, not how she had a third father called Damon, but exactly what was at play here.
The older Heather gets, the more she realizes no one does anything out the kindness of their heart, and you never just get answers dropped on your lap for free.
"And you had all this at hand just collecting dust on a bookcase?"
Mason chuckles as he fiddles with the label on his beer bottle, using the edge of a blunt thumb nail to peel the corners back from glass.
"No. It was hidden in the old Lockwood plantation. When I… Activated the Lockwood curse, I went looking for answers, and I stumbled across yours. I've kept it close by since."
Heather guesses this so called 'Lockwood curse' was lycanthropy.
She hummed dryly.
"And you're just handing it over with no price tag attached?"
Abandoning his beer, Mason's chair squeaks on the floorboards as it was pushed back from the table as he stood.
"We have some things in common. We're family. I don't know what that means to you, but it means something to me."
Mason went to walk away, leave, but Heather's arm shot out, faster than a bullet, capturing a wrist in a tight, sure grip. Mason was smart enough not to try and tug himself free.
Clever boy.
"How did you know who I was?"
There was that smile again, the gentle thing that tried to comfort spikes and pricks and things that stabbed.
"You'll see."
His gaze pointedly flickers down to the table, to the tainted book lying in wait.
"Give that a read and then come find me. There's someone who's interested in meeting you. She says you'll both want the same thing in the end."
Heather, sensing the end of a conversation that went nearly nowhere, unfurls her fingers and let Mason go. She doesn't glance back to the book until the door of the bar shuts behind him, and even when she does take a gander at the book, she doesn't pick it up for a long while.
It could be a trap.
Who knows where this book really came from, who Mason Lockwood really was, what this mysterious 'she' truly wanted.
Heather's being played here. She can feel it, the inner clockwork, the machinations of an unseen hand who thought they were good at pushing chess pieces around a board but couldn't have a leg to stand on next to Albus Dumbledore, trying to turn her cogs and twist her arms to midnight in daylight.
She also knows the best way to manipulate someone is to hide that influence in truth.
It makes the pills easier to swallow.
Normally, when someone lied, there was a spike in their scent that smelt brackish, an increase in their heartbeat, a swallow just two shades too hard. Mason had none of that when he'd spoken to her, but just because he thought he was speaking the truth didn't mean he actually was.
But what else did Heather have? A sepia photo, a magic'd family tree in her jacket pocket, a locket around her neck, and an endless list of questions that were growing every minute she stayed in this fucking town.
Not much to go on at all, and no good alcohol to ease the blow. What she wouldn't do for a bubble bath, fireplace, and a glass of Chateau Lafite right about then. Don't get her wrong, she can get down with cheap beer and a dead-end seedy bar like any disenfranchised twenty year old, but fuck, a girl needed some class some times.
Heather downs the last shot of vodka and swipes the diary, striding for the door. She walks for a long time, not quite aimlessly but neither did she have a set goal, she ambled through town until, in the crisp summer air that filled the local park, she finds a bench and takes a seat, closed diary resting on her knee.
The park was packed. A young couple lounging on fresh grass, children scrambling up jungle gyms and climbing frames and getting scraped knees kissed, a young man walking a tea-cup dog. Across the way was an ice-cream truck, paint slightly peeling, children swarming the open window for cool treats from pocket money burning holes in hands.
Heather feels a flush of warmth on her right arm. She shirks up her sleeve, watches the ink wondrously appear on flesh.
We'll be there soon. Wait for us.
Heather jerks the sleeve down as quickly as it had come up, hides the mark from sight, scrunches her eyes closed and wonders who she'd pissed off in her last life to get this hand dealt to her now.
She doesn't know who We is, perhaps they used We like the Queen uses We, they haven't written Mystic Falls so perhaps the one on the other side of her mark thinks they know where she is but doesn't, but-
But time is running out.
Even if they've got the destination wrong, this shows they're looking for her-
And they can't find her.
Not while she's like… Like this. Bloody and venomous. Barely hanging on to the shreds of humanity she has left.
A lost girl in a lost world with a lost fucking soul.
Heather is being played, she knows this, and she also knows how little time she has left, how desperate she is, and so… So she opens the diary and she begins to read.
January 13th 1911.
The oddest thing happened today-
VI
Marianna Lockwood peered through the window with cupped hands, squinting in the dark, chin balanced on sill, trying to leer through the low lamplight to the figures inside the parlour of her family home from outside. The back of her father, a figure she could make out even in the damp dark, began to swivel to where she was ducked, and with a giggle and a tug on her skirt, Marianna dropped back below scarcely in time to go unnoticed.
"Shhh!"
Samantha Gilbert, her dearest friend since childhood, hissed at her, though the noise did very little to wane the smile on her face.
"Did you see him?"
She asks eagerly, and Marianna shakes her head, the dark curls from her bun falling around her neck, brushing her locket mother had gifted her for her twentieth birthday. Her bare toes curled in the grass outside the window, cold and wet from last eve's rain, the water soaking into the hem of her nightdress and soiling it with mud.
Mother would be most displeased at the state of her nightdress, that Marianna was out unclothed, her hair improper and loose-
But she didn't care.
Nothing this exciting had ever happened in Mystic Falls.
"I think they've laid him out on grandmother Nettles' dining table. The doctor has his bag out, so I assume they're checking if he has fever. Father thinks so. When he and my brother carried him inside he was most hot to the touch."
Samantha, who had spent the night sleeping over for the ball tomorrow, clasped and wrung her hands together as if she were doing laundry in a tin bucket.
"But did you see his face? Was he handsome? Ugly? Oh, did he have a scar? Do you think he's a vagabond? Why else would he be found at the edge of your property? Do you think… Do you think he has a soulmark?"
Marianna has no answers to give. She knew as much as Samantha. All she knew was two hours passed her father and brother had carried an unconscious man into their home, drenched in rainwater and mud and burning to the touch, and much too dirty to see if he had any soulmark blemishing his skin.
The back door not three feet away swung open, Lynell Lockwood's, Marianna's father, head sweeping out, gaze locked on the girls crouched below the window trying to peak at their new guest.
"Girls! You should be in bed-"
Marianna jolts, snatches her best friends wrist, and bolted with a giggle trailing her swift feet.
"Marianna! Get back here now!"
Marianna only laughs and runs harder.
She doesn't run fast or far enough.
VII
Marianna steps out of the main hall, the music of a pianoforte drifting in the night hair, Samantha in her element. Her new dress pinches her hips and waist, makes the air in her lungs tight and hard won from the whale bone compressing her ribs, and the striking at her temple matches the beat of dancers steps in the ball behind her.
She's not alone in the hall.
A man stands across the way, bowing his head in greeting, his hat making circles in his hands as he fidgets with the rim.
"Lady Lockwood. I owe your father a great service for the kindness he has shown me."
He's tall, striking, dark haired and dark eyed and pretty in the way all her novels make men seem.
Dangerously so.
Mother would have a fit if she knew Marianna was out here, alone, with him without a chaperone. Yet mother isn't here, mother is ill and in bed, and Marianna has always been a curious girl.
Timothée Parker his name is, the name Marianna's picked up from whispers of the maids and servant boys. The man her father had brought into their home not a month ago, stricken with fever and delirium.
According to Lucy, Marianna's once nurse maid since she was a babe now long-time confidante, says there isn't much to know about him. He comes from Oregon, had been travelling the long road east to trade at a port in north Carolina when illness struck him hard and his cart was lost to robbers.
Marianna isn't the only one who thinks this is odd, that it doesn't quite add up. Samantha is in total agreement, even if her father tells her to be quiet when she pushes her questions.
"He did what any good man would do, sir."
Timothée smiles at her, and it's not exactly a kind smile, not so nice in the shadowed hall.
"You would be surprised, my Lady, what good men can do when given the incentive."
Marianna doesn't understand, frowns, but Timothée is strolling forward, one long stride from one long leg, and his smile is nicer this time, softer on its edges.
He smells of hyacinths and violets and black roses, flowers that are dark.
"My thanks remain, nevertheless. Your family saved my life. I owe you more than my gratitude can adequately accomplish."
Marianna has always been a brave girl, hot headed and hotblooded her mother would moan as she fretted over each year Marianna grew without a suiter, and so she smiles back at the handsome man from the far-off place of Oregon, grins so large her face aches.
"I suggest a dance is a good place to start, yes?"
Timothée chuckles at her, a raspy noise deep in his chest below the neatly ironed cravat, and offers a hand out.
"Who am I to deny a pretty Lady her wishes?"
"A foolish man, I would think."
Marianna quips as she places her hand in his, his palm large and warm, lets him lead her back to the ball, back to the dance.
"Let it never be said I am a fool, then."
They dance that night well into the improper hours, until Marianna is flushed and breathless for more reasons than a whalebone corset, and when a passer by splashes Timothée with wine down his side and his arm, when he wipes off the drink with Marianna's handkerchief to her giggling, when the rich berries have stained his wrist purple (Harvard must be dying his wines deeper again and selling them for extra coin) and there's a match on Marianna's-
Well, it was, perhaps, the best night of her life.
The happiness doesn't last long.
Marianna is dead in a year.
VIII
The carriage ride bumps along the road of Mystic Falls, and Marianna, dressed in a fur coat and adorned hat, brushes her fingers over the long fingered hand in her grip, over the face of a ring.
"It's quite lovely."
Samantha, sitting opposite her in the carriage, pulls back to her seat, shuffling her gloves back on.
"Isn't it? Father gave it to me yesterday. It's an heirloom. He told me to never take it off no matter what."
Marianna hums and digs herself deeper into her coat, the March wind unseasonably cold this time of year, peering out the drawn curtain window of her carriage to the streets strolling by.
"Did you hear about Mary Goldsworth?"
Samantha makes a strange noise in the back of her throat, words rushing to get out from a too slow mouth.
"Dreadful, isn't it? I heard mother speaking to father last night. Did you know she was found in an alley way? Her neck was still bleeding when Matthew and Luke stumbled across her corpse. They think there might be a wild animal prowling around town. Our families are gathering tonight to discuss perhaps putting a curfew in place."
The carriage trundles to a stop outside the bare-bricked tower of the town hall, and both girls slip from the cab as the footman swings open the door.
"But what kind of animal only attacks the neck? Surely there would have been more… wounds if it were a wolf or bear or wild dog?"
Marianna questions as the two descend. The street is busy outside, men and women and children going about their days, some stopping momentarily in the gait to offer Marianna a nod of greeting (good manners for the Mayor's daughter), and that's when she sees them.
Two men across the road stood arguing with one another. The first is well-built, toned, perhaps around twenty-five, Marianna's own age. He has a light complexion with olive undertones, the highest cheekbones Marianna had ever seen above a solid jaw. His hair is as black as night, carelessly combed, and his blue eyes are positively striking, not like Marianna's own darkly hazel, intense as they scowled at who she thought might be a younger brother.
This one's more boyish than the first, leaner too, classically handsome in the way Samantha would find swoon worthy, with a broodingly intense face of deep-set forest green eyes, straight nose, and a well-formed mouth.
She's never seen them before. They must be new to town.
The hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Something inside tells Marianna to run-
The brother's glance her way, Samantha waves an excited greeting from her side-
Marianna snatches her waving hand and pulls her to the town hall where their parents awaited their arrival. Samantha stumbles after her, trips on the edge of her dress, complains all the way to the door.
"Marianna! What has gotten into you-"
She doesn't know. She really doesn't know, but she knows she doesn't like the way she can still feel eyes on her before they get through the front door of the town hall, doesn't like the prickling on her skin of danger, peril, doesn't like the way her heart is beating like a rabbits in her chest.
Something was horribly wrong with those men, or something was horribly wrong with herself.
She does not know which outcome would be worse.
"It's just… Cold. I thought we should get in and heat up before we begin to lose fingers."
She can see Samantha doesn't believe it, but neither does she push the issue, Samantha's best trait was her easy-going nature, and instead her friend switched tactics.
"Tell me how you and Timothée are doing, then?"
And she does. She tells Samantha about the outing they have planned for that evening, to a show in the town hall from an opera singer visiting from abroad, that they have an engagement set for next year, in spring.
She also tells Samantha about Timothée's family, or lack thereof. They won't be coming to the wedding. He's an orphan, his distant cousins are still in Europe. It doesn't matter, however, Timothée tells her. They have each other.
That's all they need.
"And his kisses? How are they?"
Jovially, Marianna slaps her friends arm, hissing through her teeth.
"Samantha! A Lady would do no such thing-"
And sweeps closer, voice plunging to a whisper.
"But I would and I can say his kisses are not the sweetest thing about him."
"Marianna!"
She dances away from the scandalized tone of her best friend, grins wide and heads for the hall where her mother and father and brother were waiting. She only glances out the window once. The brother's are gone from the street.
Perhaps she had eaten something slightly off this morning.
"What? We'll be married soon anyway, and I bare his soulmark as he bares mine. I do not see the difference between now and then being too much when our souls match. The wedding is just a formality."
Samantha rushes to follow, clicking into step beside, ruffling in her silken skirts.
"You say that now but if you end up with a bastard in your belly, your mother is finally going to send you to that nunnery she keeps threatening you with. You two being soulmarked or not."
"If I end up with a bastard in my belly, we'll marry sooner. Simple."
"You're incorrigible, Marianna. Absolutely incorrigible."
But she's happy too. So very happy that day.
And then another body is found that evening.
Another after that.
Then, two months later, Marianna meets the devil in the dark.
IX
"A child?"
Timothée inquiries from below the sinking twilight, the moon rising above their heads to glow hoary light in the fog until everything was a little misty, a little silvery, a little touched by magic. Marianna's hand rests on her stomach, on the bump that does not show yet but will, the little life growing, right now, inside her.
She can't make out Timothée's tone, the breathlessness of it that could either be shock or wonder or fear. Perhaps like herself it was all three.
"My monthly dues have not come this month. They are always on time. I have never had trouble with them before. I cannot think of another reason…"
She can't be longer with babe than a week. Perhaps two. And yet she knows she is.
She knows.
Timothée says nothing for a long while, but then he's moving over the bench, pressing into her side, and his large, warm hand is settling over her own at her belly, spread and cradled, and yes, yes, there's a little bit of magic in his voice too.
"A child… Our child. A little girl."
Marianna laughs incredulously.
"Or a boy. Perhaps twins. You did say twins ran in your family-"
"Not twins!"
Marianna jolts where she sits, jars at the harsh tone of Timothée's voice, the way it crushes in the night.
She knew his family was a… touchy subject, one he hardly ever spoke of beyond snippets he let out as they rested side by side with their heads on her pillow, but he had never yelled at her like that-
The hand over hers, the one cradling her belly, the little life, relaxes, as does the darkness in Timothée's eyes, the line of his drawn mouth.
"I'm sorry, love. But not twins, I don't think. A girl would be better, wouldn't it? Boys get into so much trouble."
Marianna smiles through the declining shock of Timothée's biting bark. She does not know a lot of Timothée's family but she knows enough to know they've left wounds on him that bleed still.
"I would like to teach her how to paint."
Timothée sweeps his thumb over her knuckles, soothing swipes of tender love.
"And I would teach her how to ride horses. Of course, you would have to be the disciplinarian. All she would need to do is bat her eyes at me and I would break."
"And you will drive me to insanity with the way you sneak her desert before tea."
"And we will spend evenings out in these woods with picnics and blankets."
It sounds like a good life. Too good.
"We're going to have to marry before next year. Before I begin showing."
Timothée, naturally, agrees.
"I would marry you next week, but your mother has her heart set on at least a hundred guests, some of which will have to come from out of town."
"Three weeks then?"
Marianna proposes. She can hide the bump for three weeks.
Timothée chuckles and pecks her cheek.
"Three weeks."
Marianna Lockwood is dead in two.
X
"Please!"
Marianna begs frantically, tear-stained and feeble and afraid, beating her fists against an immovable chest.
"Please, no more!"
The pain in her neck is indescribable, a searing burn as the beast at her throat takes his fill, pins her harder against the wall in an alley, and when he finally, finally, pulls away, her blood is splattered over his mouth, his fangs, the devil in the dark staring back, tutting at her disapprovingly.
"Don't worry. I'm not going to kill you. I just want a little taste."
He glances down to the ruin of her neck, and tuts some more like she's a misbehaving child.
"Can't send you home with this neck though, can I? Not with your family and the Founders already ticked on to the game due to Stefan's… indiscretions. Younger brothers-"
He smirks.
"They ruin all the fun. Nothing else for it, I suppose."
Within a blink his hand is at her jaw, the pain in her neck flaring as blood seeps into her dress, the Gilbert party she'd been attending boisterous just outside the door of the room she'd been dragged in as she passed, if she shouted loud enough-
"Don't do something stupid."
The fingers bite into her chin, push harder, threaten to break, and those monstrous eyes that had been such a lovely blue, now a veined black, sneer at her.
"You won't speak a word of this to anyone. Not a soul. Do you understand me?"
Something unnatural and slick like cold ice settles in her mind, on her tongue, and it tastes vile, and Marianna speaks without meaning to, without wanting to, voice flat and smooth.
"Yes."
"Good girl."
He smiles, and then he's lifting his hand from her, lifting it to his mouth, and those terrible fangs are at his own wrist, tearing into his own flesh, and-
And the wound is pressed harshly over her mouth, copper on her tongue, down her throat as he pins her to the wound, forces her on it, forces it in.
"Drink up, buttercup. Gotta get that neck squeaky clean before your dear family spots it."
Marianna chokes on the blood, but down it goes with a gulp. Two. Three.
The pain lessens in her neck, but her mind screams as the man, the one Sir Salvatore had introduced as his nephew, Damon, strokes almost sickeningly tender at her hair.
"Not when we're just beginning."
He leaves her alone after that. Disappears out the door as Marianna falls to her knees and sobs, clawing at her face to wipe the blood from her mouth.
She goes home that night and tries to tell her father what had happened, tell Timothée the real reason she had been so long in the restroom, tries-
The words don't come… So she writes it down. She writes it all down in her diary, and leaves the book around the house. On her father's desk in his study, on Timothée's pillow in his chambers, in the kitchen and the library and mantel of the parlour fireplace.
No one reads it.
They had it back to her with a fond chuckle and say you should really look after this better, dear.
Damon comes back, she's a filly in a paddock, easy pickings now.
More blood is taken, more blood is given.
More pages are filled with pain in her book.
XI
"Human blood. Go ahead, Stefan. Pick one."
The tent is filled with people cheering, jeering, bayed into exhilaration from the ring in the middle where a woman stood beating seven pounds of flesh from her boxing opponent.
"They're people, Damon."
Damon does not disagree.
"Yes they are people, Stefan. People with blood pumping through their veins waiting to be opened up and sucked dry. You've just forgotten how good it feels."
Drawing from Stefan's ear, Damon regarded the redhead in the ring, the vampiress with a smile.
"So had I but Sage reminded me. It's worth it. It's all worth it."
The poor mortal in the ring with the woman takes a hit to his jaw, fumbles, falls. Blood seeps out his mouth, and Stefan takes a tentative step closer, towards the smell, the heat-
Damon holds him back.
"Not him."
He says, nodding over the crowd, across the ring, to the woman he'd placed across the way just for this moment.
"Her. She's the one."
"I don't do that anymore."
"But you can, Stefan. We can. Let the past be the past."
The hand tightened on Stefan's shoulder, desperate as it was beseeching.
"Have a drink with me, brother."
Stefan doesn't say no.
XII
"I knew you still had it in you."
Damon smiles from the side, reaching for his brother hooked over the unconscious woman's neck, latched and growling. The heartbeat behind the ribs was slowing. The end had come.
"Don't be greedy."
Damon jokes as he tries to pull his brother back before the final beat could strike, only to get shoved away with a howl, a flash of fangs, a warning before Stefan descends back on the neck.
"Stefan-… Stefan!"
It's too late. Stefan bites too hard. The spine severs. The head falls and the heart stops.
He drops the body at his feet and panics.
"Oh my god-"
Stefan falls with it, onto his knees into the dirt, tries fruitlessly to put the head back on.
"Oh my god. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry-"
Damon tries to pulls his brother back, away from the body, the corpse of Marianna Lockwood. There would be no hope for her. The vampire blood in her system wouldn't change a headless carcass.
Even vampirism had its limitations.
"Stefan, stop. Stefan, stop!"
"I'm so sorry. So sorry-"
He whirls on Damon, blood on his mouth, on his shirt, one his hands in more ways than one.
"What did you do to me?"
Damon falters, glances back to the packed tent behind them.
"Shhh! Stefan-"
"What did you do to me?!"
"You just need to learn when to stop. I can help you-"
Stefan struggles to a stand, struggles to a lurch.
"I don't need your help."
And he runs. Runs into the night and into the dark and into a life filled with blood and sorrow.
Damon runs after him as he had all his life.
Neither brother heard the heartbeat echoing, not of Marianna but something smaller, weaker.
Timothée Parker is found dead in his study. The soulmark that binds their flesh binds their lives, and when Lynell finds Timothée with his head on the carpet, he knows what's happened to his daughter.
A child hiding in the woods tells an impossible tale that she'd witnessed that night to Lynell when the chief of police, Fredrick Forbes, bring her to him. One of Salvatore brothers and fangs in the dark and whispered begging.
It's too late, of course. The Salvatore brothers have left town. Gone. Lynell only has corpses left.
Timothée is buried next to his fiancé on the Lockwood estate in a quiet, sombre affair. Lynell visits their graves daily. Brings fresh flowers and tends to the earth and keeps the headstones polished.
And then one night, eight months on, he swears he hears a child's muffled crying.
XIII
Lynell digs until his fingers bleed, until a nail snaps off, until his knuckles crack as he thrashes through the lid of a coffin. The stench that burst forth is fetid, sweet in decay, makes him heave in the hole his dug.
The crying gets louder.
Lynell can't bare to look up, up at the smell, up at the decaying, ruined face of his daughter, but instead finds his eyes locked on her skirts, purple, her favourite dress.
There's a squirming mound in the silk and lace.
Lynell lifts it.
A babe covered in blood and grave dirt wails up at him.
A child.
A child born in a dead womb.
He shirks off his coat, wraps the babe in it, climbs from the grave, and stumbles home.
XIV
"You'll take it from me?"
The babe does not look like Marianna, neither does she much appear to be like Timothée. Her hair is as dark as ravens wings, flesh pale with olive tones, eyes a too intense green, the colour in name the only similarity she had with Lynell's daughter.
Lynell tries to love the babe. He tries very, very hard.
He doesn't succeed.
She looks like her mother's killer, and Lynell, no matter how hard he tries, cannot see the babe without feeling bile lash hot at the back of his throat. Remember how Damon Salvatore had smiled at him with sherry in hand over the ballroom welcoming the Salvatore's back home. Remember the sink of his gut when he walked in on Timothée's headless body only to realize his daughter, his sweet Marianna, was somewhere in Mystic Falls exactly the same.
The man before him nods, eyes a periwinkle blue behind his half-moon glasses, hair a lively red streaked with grey, babe cradled in his arms as he bounced the tyke back and forth with an old-practiced hand.
"Her father was a Parker, you say? He was likely a Siphon, a rare breed of Wiccan. A powerful one I would hazard. It's possibly how the babe survived. She must have inherited it from him. Yet, if what you tell me is correct, she must have only been a foetus when her mother was introduced to vampire blood. It's magical, you see."
The babe grumbled in the hold, and Lynell turns away, stares out the window of his study, tries to look anywhere but at the man and the thing that had been burst from his daughter's stomach.
"Marianna was barely a month pregnant before her death."
"Ah-"
The man sighs.
"that explains it."
Lynell whirled, temper flaring, something in his chest growling, a flicker and flame of his own beast raising a head.
"It does, does it? Does it explain how that… thing is alive? Why it looks like… that?"
Like his daughter's killer.
The man's smile is small but kind and warm. A teacher's smile.
"Siphons do not have magic of their own. They absorb it from outward sources. Vampire blood is magical. If the foetus was introduced to it in the womb, so early in development, she might have absorbed it through her mother. Enough so that, even if she were only partially developed as she would be at just under a months' gestation, she was capable of surviving her mother's death. Added to her mother's inactive lycanthropy, which really is only a branch of transfiguration magic, the vampire blood was mutated. I suspect she's taken more than that too. Genetics, clearly. I wouldn't be surprised if the induction of the vampire blood means she's more closely related to the vampire than her original birth parents, an over-writing of biology so to speak. She's a survivor, this one."
The man says it so fondly, survivor, and Lynell only feels sick. Sick and angry and tired.
The child had survived when his daughter hadn't, and he knows it is an unfair thought, unjust, cruel even, but he has it all the same and he can't shift it from his mind no matter what he does or who he sees or how hard he tries.
"Then it's an abomination of nature."
The man's smile are less kind now.
"No. She is special. Very special. You say she bit her nursemaid?"
Lynell winces, hands clenching to fists on the arms of his chair.
"she bit her breast when the lady tried feeding her, sucked at the blood and it took two servants to pry it off her."
The man holding hummed.
"I might be able to temper her vampiric side for a while. She'll have to come with me, however."
Lynell doesn't hesitate.
"Take her."
"She might not be back for a very, very long time."
"Must she come back at all?"
The smile is now a little condescending. Disappointed.
"I said I might be able to temper her vampiric side temporarily. At some point it will break free. As will the very curse you're side has passed to her."
Lycanthropy.
"But-"
The man carries on.
"I can find her a loving family. A family that will pass their magic to her through her siphoning abilities which have somehow muted into making the transfer not temporary, and, hopefully, this magic will diminish her more… Animalistic inclinations for a time. But she'll know the truth one day, and one day she will want answers, and those answers will lead her back here. It is your choice, Mr Lockwood."
It's not much choice at all.
"Take her away. Tell her… Tell her I am sorry I couldn't see more than her mother's murder in her. Tell her I tried."
Tried and failed.
"Give her these."
Holding out the locket, and the birth certificate, one Zachariah had agreed to sign given his part in the death of his daughter, Lynell waited for the man to take it all from him.
"She will be back one day, Lynell."
Lynell nods.
"We'll be waiting."
The man straightens, the man nods, and then the man's gone, and the house is empty.
XV
Heather closes the book. She doesn't really know how to feel. Empty? Angry? Sad? She just feels a little numb, a bit dumb, a whole lot fucking sick.
She still has questions, knows despite his name not being wrote that it's bloody Albus in Lynell's passages. What was he doing there? How was he there at all? Why did he take her? What-
It's too much.
She was dead long before even leaving the womb. Damon Salvatore had fed his blood and Stefan Salvatore had ripped her mother's head off, and both brother's had set Heather on this path before she ever had a first breath.
She was doomed from the start.
Her fingers tighten on the book, threaten to bend, threaten to break.
She knows where she ended up after that. Under an elder tree where James Potter found her, where Albus put her to be found. James discovered her and took her in and, perhaps without even knowing, perhaps through this 'siphoning' ability that had turned Heather into this before she could be anything else, she'd absorbed their kind of magic too.
Magic that had temporarily dampened her need to feed, briefly made her a real girl. Her death at Tom's hands had kickstarted her slumbering Vampirism back into devastating gears. Tom's death had activated the Lockwood curse. Magic swam in her bad blood.
Here Heather sat.
A fucking Tribrid.
And there would be no undoing it. She couldn't become something she never was. If this was a hex placed on her as a child, perhaps. Maybe if she had been bitten or turned as a baby, or otherwise exposed, possibly-
But she'd grown from a foetus as this, in a dead womb from dead blood and dead parents. Her first breath had been filled with decay, down in a grave, expelled from a bloating belly ready to burst.
She's been partly dead long before even being born.
There's no undoing that, the realisation comes hot and hard. There's no reversal.
She'd been dead all along.
Albus and Lily and James had only offered her time masquerading, a reprieve, but that was all it was.
Temporary life support.
A momentary fleeting pass of mortality that was never meant to last, tipping her genetic scales to Witch more than anything else to try and steady the weights. Dying again had wiped those scales clean, settled the levels, balanced and now-
Maybe this was why she could only feed on supernaturals. Siphoning had mutated her Vampiric nature, and her vampiric nature had mutated her siphoning abilities. Now when she siphoned, she took and she kept, as vampires keep living on. Worse yet, siphoning had mutated the vampirism that had gifted her undead life in the womb.
It wasn't blood she was feeding on, not really.
It was the life in the blood.
All supernatural beings had more life than mortals. Some only a decade or two like Werewolves, other's centuries like Witches and Vampires. That was what Heather was truly feeding on-
Siphoning.
Her bites are really just her mutated siphoning abilities absorbing life, feeding the modified vampirism that keeps the gears turning, which in turn keeps her altered Lycanthropy, one unbound by moon, running which then bleeds into keeping her metamorphosed magic, one she'd absorbed and kept, at her finger tips.
Its not blood, it's not magic, it's bloody life she's thirsting for.
And she'll never get it, never have enough, because she was dead before she was born.
In trying to survive in the womb, her underdeveloped siphoning abilities had taken something it shouldn't, absorbed what shouldn't be absorbed, had given her life… Too much life. Unending.
Heather was dead.
Wasn't that a kick in the bloody teeth?
XVI
Heather freezes on the bench, nose twitching. She smirks.
"I'm guessing you're the she Mason mentioned?"
She stands from her seat on the bench; turns as she keeps the diary in hand, her history in weathered pages. The woman walking towards her is extraordinarily beautiful, deceptively young. She had a heart-shaped face with fine bone structure, a wealth of brown curly hair, and almond-shaped, deep brown eyes with thick dark lashes.
Her smile is utterly condescending.
"I thought you could do with the helping hand in finding your answers. Get what you're looking for?"
Heather's head cocks.
"And what do you want in return, then?"
The woman tuts at her. She's old… smells like red berries and patchouli and dark chocolate with something Heather can't name, something that makes her mouth water.
Ah.
Vampire.
"Not what I want. What we want."
She crosses her arms over her chest, her grin widens, brightens, mean.
"Revenge on the Salvatore's. You do want that, don't you?"
Yes.
Yes Heather does.
A.N: Super long chapter for you guys this week, and I think we can all guess who dropped in at the last possible second to play some games lol. The longest I've got out in absolutely ages. Also, no preview this week because I can't find a snippet to cut free that won't sort of ruin anything that's coming up lol. Still, hope you guys liked it! Not sure when exactly the next update will be, I'm hoping to get something out next week but I have a lot of work to get through over the next fortnight, as I've left everything to the last possible second again. I can say though Nik and Elijah come back really soon!
Hope you guys liked this, and if you can, don't forget to drop a review, and I will see you all soon! Until then, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21