When Esther Wyley opened her eyes, it was to brilliant sunlight.

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She immediately shut them. The glare burned white hot and stabbed straight through to the back of her skull, lingering even behind the dark of her eyelids. Wind rustled leaves, though no birdcall joined along, and deep under the sound of branches and the scent of air unmarred by coalsmoke was thick, eerie quiet.

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Until a voice cut into her ears.

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“Lovely. I wondered when you would join me.”

  

Through her eyelashes, deliberately turned away from the sky, she looked again.

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To her left sat a man on an old, felled tree. Though she glanced briefly from his dark hair to the noble angles of his face, her focus caught on how the top set of his shirt buttons were undone, how he wore no jacket or vest.

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Lying as she was, on her back against a bed of soft and gentle green, Esther’s immediate thought was that this man had dragged her away and taken her virtue.

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The mortification she expected never filled her chest, only mild confusion and deadened curiosity.

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Such a shame, her father’s friends would say, and her mother would surely cry. Many would likely sneer behind their hands about how it was her own fault, hers and her father’s, for leaving her without a betrothal even at nineteen.

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“Who are you?” She asked, rasped and blunt. He was no one she had seen in town, not even by the docks.

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He was about to refasten his buttons but paused. “I am surprised at your choice of question to start with.”

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A third feeling rose from the fog clouding her, sharper than the others but only just—irritation.

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She propped herself up but had to stop halfway when the motion burned, and her elbow buckled. The jolt resulted in sudden, fiery pain as her sleeves raked over her skin, and she couldn’t keep the hiss hidden behind her teeth. It was unexpectedly animalistic.

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The pale skirts of her Sunday dress were twisted around her legs, hiked just high enough she could see the scuffed leather of her shoes. That made her initial conclusion less likely but that hardly mattered when the fabric scraped at her like a fleshing knife. Wild red curls tumbled over her shoulder and scratched her cheek like a dry sponge.

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Esther stayed still. Leastwise her eyes were growing accustomed to the glare.

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There were no other people as far as she could see, just meadow grass and tall trees, herself and the man, and it was he who held her attention. She watched him continue feeding buttons through buttonholes until he was appropriately clothed.

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About to ask a second time, hesitant to move again so soon, she resisted when he aimed a pointed look not at her, but to her front.

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When she examined higher than the hem of her dress, Esther understood.

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Wide rivulets of red gashed across the bodice of what had once been one of her favourite gowns.

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Her body shrieked in protest, the fine material scouring her skin like the roughest burlap woven with nettles, but Esther forced herself to sit up completely. Her fingers ached, her palms ached, her head ached. Touching anything was agony, and still she ran her hands down her front.

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The blood—her blood—couldn’t be that old. Smaller stains were already dry and flaked off under her touch, but the further up she went it got tacky and smeared, cold, onto her fingers. The smell of iron and salt clogged her throat.

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What happened?

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She could barely remember. They’d been in town and—

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Who was ‘they’? Who had she been with? They had been at the market, surely, by the phantom weight of a basket in the crook of her arm. Faintly, the recollection of a small pile of apples taken from Mrs. Fraser’s storefront. Was I with Father? How did I… get here… Esther laid her hands in her lap.

  

The man was still sitting, lounging on the log as though it were his throne, barely paying her any attention. Or perhaps he was only feigning his disinterest because the moment she opened her mouth his eyes were fixed on her face, dark hazel gleaming from beneath a sharp brow.

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“What did you do?” Her words were deceptively calm. Or perhaps they weren’t. Esther knew she should be afraid, or angry, or anything, and that did not show, but was it truly deceptive if her only emotion was a conglomeration of shoulds? Her larger concern was the taste of sour milk and metal on her tongue.

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Esther started rubbing her fingers together, desperate to dull or at least get used to the sensation of being flayed with every touch. He made no sound, no motion to indicate he would speak, but she looked up from her hands just as he answered.

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“Oh, I killed you.” Lightly, so lightly—voice calm, clear and pleased.

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Her fingers stopped their rhythmic pattern and she slowly, carefully, reached up and pressed them to her neck. All that blood had to come from somewhere, it only made sense that it would be—

 

She felt nothing but smooth skin.

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There were so many gaps. How did the centre of town with her father become a clearing, completely unlike any she knew, with a strange man?

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How much had she lost? Time? Moments? How much was much? What left her bereft in the sea of her mind? What picked relentlessly at the edges of her memory?

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Town…and Father went in to see…he went to—

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She had been waiting on the street, just outside, and she had left because…she had left because—

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Esther couldn’t remember. Then, flashing behind her eyes, pictures of rose petal fountains and gouts of heat and serrated bone and tongue wrapping around her windpipe. She couldn’t shake the certainty that her head should barely be hanging onto her spine.

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“You killed me,” she repeated, with all the level and none of the levity. Gentle vibrations purred against her fingers, still splayed in a spidery necklace. Something was wrong, something missing from the tip of her tongue. “Yet I am not dead.”

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His lips quirked up at an angle a blind man might call a smile. “Are you not? I’m fairly skilled at my craft, dear, and you are fairly dead.”

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“How might one be fairly dead?”

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“You have your hands collared around your neck and you still do not know?” The glint in his mouth could have been teeth, if teeth were that thin and that sharp.

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Esther looked at him—the fine thread of his shirt, the expensive cut of his trousers, the shine of his shoes—the more she looked the more she saw that he wasn’t right. She couldn’t see herself, but she wasn’t right either.

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Swallowing another question, the movement of her throat pushing the pads of her fingers and her nails digging into her skin, she knew what she had missed. Her throat was still and cold.

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No pulse.

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Her first instinct was to hold her breath, strain to hear or feel for any hidden thrum, and that was when she realized there was no air in her lungs to hold.

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Yes, her skin was much, much too cold.

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“There we are.” The man stood with a vulpine sort of grace, each motion deliberate and fluid.

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He was in front of her, then, holding out his hand like a gentleman asking for a dance.  

Esther dropped her hands. She didn’t accept.

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“You aren’t frightened,” he said indulgently. “You can’t be, not when I mean you no harm.”

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His conviction chafed, but the worst part was that it was true. She wasn’t frightened, not at all. She was curious, and confused, and thirsty—by God was she thirsty, parched as the desert—but not afraid. Buried somewhere in her chest, under layers and layers of wool, she knew she should be worried; not even about him, or herself, but the blood, and how her heart no longer beat in her chest.

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She simply wasn’t.

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That was when the drifting wisps of memory solidified and slotted into place.  

“Patience called me. I heard her voice.”

 

Patience Collings had been her friend. Two years previous she married, became Patience Doidge, moved to Newtown. She and her husband had been meant to visit her mother this month but must have been delayed because they had yet to arrive and—

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He was still waiting, his hand still outstretched, and when he spoke his voice was not his own. “She did not.”

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It was Patience’s.

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The sound crawled across her body with a thousand little legs and raised every hair she had. “Did you take her, too?” The irritation, incessant and gnawing returned, but so faded she could hardly do anything with it.

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“In a way,” he said as himself. “Though she is more than fairly dead.”

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Instead of rage, instead of grief, all Esther had was the simmering in her chest where her heart used to beat. Irritation, fog, and curiosity. It was not a human thing, to feel so little at such devastating news.

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Was she human, still? Was he? What were those who were not people any longer?

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“Who are you?” She finally asked again, instead of chasing into herself and searching for rage. Instead of probing how she had known Patience’s fate before he said, instead of following the insistent urge to take his hand.

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He blinked, and Esther was struck with the realization that he hadn’t before.

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Had she? Since she woke up?

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“Aulus, I suppose.”

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“I’ve never heard such a name.”

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His grin was sharp around the edges. “Unsurprising. It’s an old one.”

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“How old?” She held his gaze, unmoving.

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“Roman Empire, thereabouts.”

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There was no such thing, not for hundreds and hundreds of years. “You’re…Roman, then?” He—Aulus, and she already knew her mouth would trip over the exotic sounds—looked nothing like the sort of grizzled, ancient creature she would believe could have been born with a Roman name.

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“No.” He said it as though it were a joke she should be in on, hand held out and never wavering.

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Esther slid her own into it.

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The laugh he graced her with as he helped her to her feet should have been pleasant.  

She wondered where most of her feelings had gone. Curiosity wasn’t a feeling, not really. Neither was confusion. The irritation simmered, but simmer was all it did.

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“Esther.” Aulus maneuvered her like a jointed doll to fall in-step beside him, placing her hand in the crook of his arm. “You’re thinking rather loudly.”

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Thinking, he said. He could hear her thinking?

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“Do the dead not feel, then?” It was easy to walk as he walked, to follow. She wanted to see where he would lead. “Or rot in the ground?”

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“Most things die and rot, love, but not I.” He winked. “Not us. Us? We die and walk.” He hopped, not breaking his stride, punctuation to wordplay Esther was not at all impressed by. “Oh, you’ll be much more fun once you’ve fed.”

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The longer he spoke the more his voice warbled and shifted, and faint hints of an unplaceable accent began to filter through. Everything about him was like that, commonplace at first glance yet uncanny if one was given time to really look. Too bright, too sharp. He was the living portrait of a beautiful young man, painted by a being people only described in poetry.

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“Feeling a bit numb, a little fuzzy around the ears? Is that why you asked?”

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“About feeling?” She knew she was supposed to look at people when they spoke, but courtesy was just another dulled thing. That, and she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the craggy slopes and gaps of the tree bark, gilded sunlight shining lattice-like through viridescent leaves, the—

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He turned her head towards him roughly, fingers clamped on her chin, and all his frivolity was gone. “Yes, about feeling. You really are up in the clouds, aren’t you?”

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It was a question she knew not to answer. Aulus said it for himself, a velveteen grumble in his chest.

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She’d never met a grown man she could look dead in the eye, yet even with the evenness of their heights she felt neither equal nor surefooted locked in his gaze.

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His eyes weren’t so light before, were they?

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“Ah well.” He dropped her chin and pulled her along, like a suitor escorting her on a walk through the park. “We must simply get you fed a little ahead of schedule.”

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“I’m not all that hungry.” In truth, the rotten milk and metal taste had only grown stronger. If she ate anything at all it would surely come back up and add another stain down the front of her dress.

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He caught her eye and made sure she saw him roll his own, though he did it with a teasing air. “Did I say a word about eating? You’re thirsty, are you not?”

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God, how had she forgotten? The acrid burn came rushing back to her attention. “Yes,” she admitted, and her voice—suddenly scratchy and hoarse was almost a plea. “Very much so.” 

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Aulus’ boyish grin was incongruous with the tension that hung in the air. The contrast made him look, not younger—he looked plenty young, he couldn’t have been thirty—but less human entirely. “What a wonderful thing to hear.”

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He did not elaborate.

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Esther waited as the fire in her throat transformed into something she could manage, just as the pain of the clothes on her skin had not subsided but become bearable. “I won’t be like this forever, will I?” Would it matter if she was? Would she one day forget that there had ever been anything else? “So muffled, so detached?”

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Out of all the expressions she had seen this Aulus make, none could compare to the fiendish curiosity alight in his eyes right then. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” his voice lilted with a burble of glee. “You’re my very first.”