A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,45

against the resistance of the children's pummeled bodies, and where Tanen had crashed through a window in my interest, he did nothing but stand and watch as the children faced the same fate.

I screamed at him. I pounded my fists against the restrictive membranes of the dream, but they held me fast. Thank the gods I could not interpret the gritty details of the children's demise through my frustration, panic, and tears, but the horror of it took place either way. Raucous oaths ripped from my throat, clawing at the walls that kept me from doing what Tanen wouldn't. I shredded him with my shrieks.

But he remained stoic, composed and horrible. Still as an unfeeling statue.

I bloodied my hands on the invisible walls around me, but it was no use.

Tanen would not do for the children what he did for me.

*

I had the dream three nights in a row. My singing voice had returned – enough that I could charm the weedflowers again, so I needn't worry about that. But I could not shake the bother of Tanen rooted within the issue.

On that third night, I awoke from the horrible dream gasping and sweaty. I could not breathe beneath the tight laces of the corset Tanen had devised. I felt caught in a web. His web.

I launched from my pallet, stumbling away toward the door, tugging at my laces to loosen them as I went. I fumbled with the lock on the door and threw back the latch, and then spilled out onto the porch and into the predawn mist. The gloom was icy against the beads of sweat on my skin as I went to my knees there, but I sucked in great gulps of the cold to refresh me. Then I drew myself up and sat on my legs, and stared out over the eddying land and calmed myself. It was mystic and peaceful, a calm sea of ghosts and angels walking among us.

I stayed there without the chill penetrating me, my flesh fiery, my core feverish. To the touch, my skin turned cold, but it was only a shallow frost. I did not feel it within. I was effulgent.

I heard the floorboards creak in the house. A look over my shoulder saw the faint silhouette of someone coming to check on me. I'd left the door cracked. As the figure drew nearer, dawn whispers painted telltale details onto his face.

Dismay sank a ship inside me, but the cold numbed the outer traces of its presence.

Tanen came to the door.

“Are you alright?” he inquired quietly.

I looked out over the land, trying to center myself. I hated his concern. I could not deal with the possible sincerity of it, when in the back of my mind was the image from my dream of him standing there, watching as a wardog tore the children to shreds in my place. Not doing for them what he had done for me. It haunted me.

I'm sure he could not understand the raw hatred in my eyes as I turned to look at him. Maybe he was blind to it. That would be for the better, I supposed, even though I wanted to spit at him. Concern remained lodged unfairly in his woken eyes.

“I just needed some air,” I managed to say without sharpening each word with derision.

He eyed the roving mist. A sorry excuse for air, he seemed to be thinking.

A sorry excuse for most things, these days.

“It doesn't bother you to be sitting here?” he asked instead of his apparent musing. At my quizzical look, he explained, “Where it...happened.”

It wasn't me, Tanen, I wanted to say. It was the children. And you left them. How could you?

I swallowed that. It tasted like lemons and rust.

Not a real taste.

“The Serbaens say that the greatest thrones to be sat upon are the ones where we sit ourselves down and realize we are masters in our own right. There are many thrones to be taken in life. If you sit at death's doorstep and look it in its face, that doorstep becomes a throne. You have made peace with it. You have mastered it. So I sit at the doorstep where death came knocking.”

The concept that this doorstep could be a throne was not something that seemed to readily translate to him, although it did seem to intrigue him. But in all honesty, I could see that he was unable to see it as anything other than the estranged scene of the crime that it