burning red eyes fixed on me. I was brought back to my childhood, to the moment she dropped from the ceiling. I could not move, I could not breathe; I did not make a sound. When her fingers reached up and pressed against my temple, my world went black. The room around me faded away, and I was in another place, another time. Ellen’s mind opened to me, her thoughts, her memories, revealing the true fate of the Dearg-Due, revealing to me the true life of the woman before me.
* * *
? ? ?
I AWOKE FROM DEATH for a second time three years after my beloved pierced my heart with a dagger and buried me in a grave covered with stones and with a white rose placed atop in hopes of bringing some peace to my tormented soul. My tired eyes had fluttered open and peered into the gloom of what could only be the interior of a castle, a chamber so similar to the one my terrible husband locked me in a lifetime ago. I thought it had all been a dream, a horrid nightmare that had commenced when I was but a child, that perhaps my father, or even my beloved, would rescue me, but then I saw him, this tall man, bending over me in the dim light, suspending a rabbit by its leg over my mouth. Its neck had been sliced open, and blood flowed freely from the wound to my willing lips. I tasted every sweet drip; I felt its warmth racing through my muscles and tissue and limbs. It seemed to impart life in me as if it were something new.
“How can that be?” I heard myself say in a hoarse voice, a voice that had not uttered a word in a long, long time.
The man said nothing at first, still clasping the rabbit with one hand, his free hand squeezing the carcass to release every last drop of blood. When he did speak, I found his voice to be deep and rich, thick with an accent I could not quite place. “I have woken you from a deep sleep. I have brought you back to life.”
I tried to sit up, but I was so weak that simply lifting my hand to his face was quite the feat, but I did so nonetheless. I touched his cheek and felt a coldness not unlike my own, dead flesh that somehow was still living. “How long?” I forced myself to ask.
“How long have you slept, you mean?”
I nodded weakly.
“Three years have passed since you were sealed in that grave.”
At this revelation, I did sit up, the rabbit’s blood further awakening my limbs with each passing second. “Only three years? My beloved, then, he lives still?”
The dark man finished with the rabbit, licking at the wound in the poor creature’s neck before tossing it across the room. “If by ‘beloved’ you refer to the man who plunged a dagger into your unsuspecting heart and buried you behind his house, yes, he lives. I allowed him to live because I thought you would wish to kill him yourself for what he did.”
I shook my head violently at this assertion. “Kill him? I could never do such a thing. He is all I have ever loved.”
I realized now I lay in a large wooden box filled with the dirt of my earthly grave. I still wore the same white dress I had at last memory, which bore a hole in the fabric above my heart, now encrusted in stiff, dry blood. My fingers went to the spot and probed the flesh beneath. I found it perfectly mended; not even a scar remained. “He only wished for me to find peace in death.”
The dark man, now sitting in a chair beside my box, leaned forward and ran his hand through my hair. “Mortals cannot be expected to understand us, and you should pay them no mind. They are no more to us than that hapless hare,” he said, gesturing towards the corner where the carcass lay. “They are akin to flies buzzing about our heads, pests, perhaps sustenance, nothing more.”
“But he is my true love.”
The dark man smiled. “He is no more your true love