Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

Hare Moon BY CARRIE RYAN

It’s because the paths are forbidden that Tabitha always finds her way to them. She’s tired of being trapped behind the village fences, tired of being told what to do all the time. She wasn’t made for a life like this: sedate, rule-following. Boring.

The first time she opens the gate it’s on a dare to herself. To see if she’s just a dreamer or if she’s someone who can follow through on her promises. She wants to know that she’s more than just desires—she’s action.

She’d like to believe she isn’t terrified. That she doesn’t approach the gate and hesitate. Look through the rusty metal links at the brambles and brush obscuring the path and tremble.

That the dead along the fence don’t frighten her, their cracked and broken fingers reaching, always reaching and the moans calling for her.

It’s the sound of them that gets to her, the way they invade every part of her life. She hears them in her sleep, in her daydreams, during chores and services. She hears them when she’s praying to God.

And on the path there’s no escaping the Unconsecrated. They shuffle along the fences on either side of her, pushing and pulling and grating and needing. She’s never known need like that in her life. Doesn’t understand it.

But all the same she wants it.

Tabitha knows there are rules and rules are meant to be followed. Every morning she attends services and every evening she recites her prayers. She gives deference to her parents, cares for her younger siblings and completes chores without complaint. Well, without too much complaint.

During the winter months she does as she’s asked and smiles and demurs to the eligible young men her age, waiting for a husband to choose her.

They never do.

She’s okay with this because it isn’t the young men who call to her at night. It’s the Forest of Hands and Teeth. It’s the whisper of the trees that there’s a bigger life outside the fences. That there’s still a world that’s bigger and braver than any she could ever comprehend and all she has to do is find the strength to go after it.

At night she writhes in her bed listening to it. Wanting it. Needing it until it causes her cheeks to burn red and tears to run from her eyes. And in the morning she slows her steps as she passes by the gate in the middle of an errand. She promises herself that tomorrow she will sneak through it. Tomorrow the world will be hers.

Tomorrow she does pass through the gate. Just enough to know that no siren will wail at her departure. That no one will notice her absence.

In her dreams and when she’s awake, again and again she crosses through the gate. She’s timed the Guardian patrol just right so that she knows when to slip away, when to sprint down the path with a lightness of freedom unlike she’s ever known. It consumes her.

Sometimes she tells herself she won’t ever come home. Yet she always does. Because there are rules and she’s a good girl. But not so “good” that her skin doesn’t start to feel tight and itch as if her body’s shrinking and the only thing that will release the compression of it is to escape to the path.

So she does, pushing farther and farther into the Forest. She learns to ignore the Unconsecrated who follow her every step, learns to listen instead to the way the wind tickles its way through leaves overhead and to the chirp and whir of birds.

The sun feels brighter and the shade cooler in the Forest and she starts to wonder why it’s off limits. She likes that she doesn’t have to think what’s next when she’s on the path: it’s just one step and then another and the fences keep her moving straight ahead.

One day, she walks far enough to find a second gate, and she stands for a long time staring at it, wondering if she should go through or if it’s a sign that she’s wandered too far.

She sets her hand on the metal latch, feeling a pattern of rusty prickles against her fingers. She still hasn’t decided what to do when a voice calls out to her. “You’re here,” it says.

Startled, she runs her gaze through the Forest and down the path and finds a pair of eyes looking back at her. A young man approaches the gate from the other side.

Not expecting anyone else to be on the path, especially a stranger, it takes a moment for her to find her voice. “I am,” she responds because to show her confusion and shock would make her appear weak. Tabitha never likes to appear weak. “Are you expecting me?” she asks because she’s suddenly not sure whether she’s awake or asleep.

She notices that the young man has his sleeves rolled up and his forearms are exposed. She’s seen forearms before, of course, but there’s something different about his. Something so informal and intimate about the sloppiness of the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as if she could push a finger underneath the fabric and tempt the sensitive skin there.

The sun glows off the blond hair covering his arms. His fingers look long and tan, curled slightly as he stops on the other side of the gate. “Not especially, but I’m glad you’re here,” he says. She looks up from his arms to his face.

He’s smiling at her, eyes slightly crinkled because the sun is at her back. “I think,” she tilts her head and ponders for a moment because she doesn’t like to be rash with her words. “I think I am too.” She grins at him.

She learns that his name it Patrick and that he comes from another village in the Forest.

“I didn’t know there were other villages in the Forest,” she admits, and he explains the system of the paths and gates, the tangle of their order.

She tries not to let him see what this knowledge does to her, how it makes her blood pump furiously through her body. Growing up, she’d been told they were all that was left. Her village the only survivors of the Return.

She was told it was her sole and sacred duty to continue the path of humanity.

“Quite a few of the villages are gone,” Patrick explains. “But there are enough left that we’ll survive.”

Neither of them opens the gate between them and, as she walks home in the late afternoon, Tabitha’s head explodes with the newly learned reality of her world. It’s as if she’s spent her life kneeling on the ground, staring at a rock, and suddenly she’s standing, staring at a field full of stones.

She wonders what it would be like to fly. To see the entire world at once. She runs through the Forest, arms out, with fingers almost—but not quite—brushing the metal links of the old fences. She realizes that the world might be hers to know after all.

They agree to meet at the same gate on the second afternoon after the full moon each month. Tabitha spends the between days lost in dreams. Her mother starts to scold her for burning dinner. Her younger brother skins his knee one day when she’s not paying attention. She barely remembers the words to the prayers she’s asked to recite at services.

But she’s alive. And she wants to grab everyone around her and scream that there’s a world that’s more important than any of these daily toils. Yet she doesn’t say a word because she fears them locking the gates. Locking her from the path, and from Patrick.

The first two times they meet again, neither opens the gate. They stay on their respective sides and tell stories. She rolls onto her back on the path and stares up through the canopy of leaves and watches how the sun caresses each one as Patrick tells her about his dreams.

Sometimes she closes her eyes and wonders what it would be like to walk through the gate and run away with him. And sometimes she imagines bringing him home with her and claiming him as hers.

At the end of their third meeting, he laces his fingers through the links of the gate and she laces her fingers through his and they sit that way for an afternoon, feeling each others’ pulse fighting.

He brings her a gift at their next meeting: a worn book with pages as soft as feathers. She’s astonished at how small it is, how compact. The only books she’s ever seen are copies of the Scripture in her village, thick heavy tomes with paper like onionskin.

“It’s my sister’s favorite,” he tells her. “I thought you might like it too.”

She reads the little book three times before their next meeting, trying to understand what it means. It’s about a house and a woman and her husband who, she discovers, may have drowned his first wife. It’s lush and dangerous and makes her body pound and pulse.

“Why would a man be so cruel to his wives?” she asks Patrick after the next full moon.

He looks at her with his head tilted. “It’s just a story,” he says. “It’s just made-up. It’s fiction.”

She nods but she’s frowning because she still doesn’t understand what that means and he pulls her into his arms to ease her worries.

In the winter she tells him about Brethlaw, the celebration of life and marriage at her village. He opens the gate and she walks through it, and now they tangle together under blankets surrounded by snow that floats through the air and melts against their skin.

He traces his finger down the spine of her back, weaving between her bones. “Would you leave your world for me?” he asks.

“I might,” she tells him. She wonders how the world ever fell apart with this much love in it.

Her parents are unhappy with her. She’s not focusing, they tell her. They remind her that if she doesn’t find a husband soon she may be left with no option but to join the Sisterhood like her friends Ruth and Ami. And where this might have been an effective threat to her in the past, she just swallows back smiles because she knows there is no man or God for her other than Patrick.

Patrick’s not at their meeting spot. It’s the first time he’s been missing, and Tabitha wraps her arms around her body and paces little circles in the freezing rain. She walks through the gate and sprints down the path wondering if he’s hurt or lost, but there’s no sign of him.

She goes home confused and a little empty. Where before she felt too big for her skin when she walked around her village, now she feels too small. Her body doesn’t work the way it should—she’s clumsy, tripping when she walks. Nothing is right anymore.

The next month she checks the moon, making sure she knows exactly when it’s at its fullest. She’s so anxious to go to Patrick two days later that she’s not as careful as she should be. One of the Guardians sees her placing her hand on the gate to the path.

He takes her to the Cathedral, and the Sisters whisper in a tight little knot while her parents stand to the side white faced and silent. No one will marry her now, they know. She’s a dreamer, and dreamers need to be broken to the will of the Sisterhood.

Her parents don’t object when the Sisters proclaim Tabitha as one of theirs. She puts on the black tunic and combs her hair from her face into a severe bun. She stands with the other two newest Sisters, Ruth and Ami, and listens to the enumeration of her duties. She bows her head and recites the prayers but that is not where her mind and heart are. They’re on the path, waiting.

She spends the next month planning her escape. Soon, she can’t sleep anymore, and she’s memorized every detail of her room. She’s tired of the stone walls, stone floor, tiny window looking past the graveyard at the dead roaming the fences. She thinks she might understand a little now why they moan.

She thinks she might understand the pain of such intense desire. It brings tears to her eyes that never seem to go away.

She starts to wander through the Cathedral in the darkness of the too early morning hours. She counts the number of windows, she counts the number of benches and cushions and even stones in the floor. Anything to stop thinking about pregnant moons and Patrick and the feel of him trailing a hot finger down her spine.

She’s tracing her finger along a crooked crack in the wall, remembering the feel of his skin against hers, when the crack dips behind a curtain and she follows it. There’s a door there, and she doesn’t hesitate before pushing it open and revealing a long hallway. She wanders down it to another door, this one thick and banded with metal.

It’s dark and she has no candle and it’s late, and Tabitha spends a long while staring at that door before she turns around and goes back to bed. The moans of the Unconsecrated whisper her into the deepest sleep she’s felt for ages.

The next night she doesn’t even change into her sleeping gown, but instead waits in her black tunic for the Cathedral to fall silent. She takes the candle and flint from beside her bed and goes straight to the curtain in the sanctuary, her heart pounding so hard that her fingers shake from the force.

She sneaks down the hallway, her footsteps disturbing a thin layer of dust, and this time she doesn’t pause before going through the metal-banded door. It leads her down a set of stairs, the air growing dank and thick enough that the light from her candle barely penetrates it.

She’s in a basement, and it smells like dirt, tastes like the wet rot of fall. Rows of wooden racks march through the large room, some cradling old grimy bottles but most just barely withstanding entropy. There are no other doors and no windows, no escape from the heady mustiness.

Along one wall hangs a curtain, and Tabitha already knows this trick. She pulls it aside and finds another door, but this one is locked. She tries every way she knows how, but the door won’t open, and eventually she gives up and goes back to bed, but this time she cannot sleep.

Soon, to Tabitha, the locked door behind the curtain in the basement becomes like the gate blocking the path. She knows she must go through it. And as with the gate, she makes her plan carefully.

She offers to take on the chores assigned to Ruth and Ami, cleaning rooms and scrubbing walls and floors, using them as an excuse to rifle through drawers and cabinets. She finds dozens of keys and she tries them all, but none of them work.

This time when the moon is full she thinks about abandoning Patrick in the Forest. It’s been months since she’s seen him and she’s angry and hurt and broken. Sometimes she’ll pull his book out from under a loose stone in the wall, and she’ll flip through the pages, wondering if all men are so cruel; if love is like a spring blossom that builds and bursts in a bright hot color and then wilts and dies, never to return.

Two days later, she spends the afternoon torn. She finds herself walking toward the gate and then turning back. She doesn’t know what’s right. She doesn’t want to give up the hope of him, but she’s not sure she’s ready to deal with the pain of him either.

It frustrates her that he occupies so much of her mind. Even when she tries to think of other things during the day, he invades her dreams at night, and she wakes up sweaty and alone. The second night after the fullest moon is no exception. She crawls from her bed and carries her candle to the gate and walks the path through the Forest to their meeting spot.

The tiny flame of the candle barely penetrates past the fences bordering the path, and it throws cruel shadows across the Unconsecrated who follow her. Their eyes seem more hollow, their cheeks sharper, their teeth and tongues black maws.

Moans surround her, peel away her flesh until she feels bare and raw. The Unconsecrated bang against the fence, claw for her so hard their fingers snap and bones protrude gleaming and sharp. She can’t sprint because the candle will go out, and so she’s forced to walk slowly, unable to outrun the death on either side of her.

The gate is as it always is: impassive and sturdy. As she expected, the path on the other side is empty. She stands in the darkness surrounded by the agony of existence and tries to decide what to do next. Go back? Go forward? Curl up on the path and let time take its toll?

Her shoulders crumble, her fingers going limp and dropping the candle. Just before the flame sputters out against the damp earth, she catches the reflection of something lying on the ground.

The moon is fat but waning, and she doesn’t bother relighting the candle before opening the gate. In the middle of the path is a small basket covered by a scrap of material.

She pulls it back to find a spray of wilted flowers, their petals black in the darkness. Nestled amid the limp leaves rests a scrap of paper, and it takes her three strikes of the flint until her candle is bright enough to read the words.

“My Tabby,” she whispers aloud to the dead around her. “My family has grown sick, and my father is on the verge of death. I couldn’t bear to leave my mother and sister so soon. Forgive my absences. Please forgive me. I have missed you like the shore misses the touch of waves. I promise that nothing will keep me from you after the hare moon. Hopefully you remain mine as I remain yours. Always, my love, Patrick.”

She presses the words to her lips, hoping for a taste of his skin on the paper. She holds her hand against her chest, wanting to rip out her heart and leave it in this basket among the wilted flowers for him. Because she now understands that it belongs to him and always will.

Tabitha keeps the note on her person at all times, tucked between the bindings for her breasts and her heart. She doesn’t care that the sweat of the day blurs his words, she needs them against her. She needs to remember the feel of him.

She continues her search for the key in a fever and daze. Her skin often feels flushed, and she finds herself in the middle of mundane tasks staring off into space. She’s late for services more than once and as punishment is tasked with the duty of the Midnight Office and Matins for which she spends several hours alone in the darkest time of night on her knees in the sanctuary.

Her eyes begin to look a bit hollow, the bones in her cheeks a little sharper, and her jaw more defined. There are confusing moments when she thinks she almost feels the comforting heat of God when she’s in her deepest prayers and she stumbles to her bed with thoughts muddled and hazy.

She’s so lost in the conundrum of her thoughts one afternoon that she doesn’t realize at first what it means when she comes across a large key while dusting the shelves and stacking papers on the desk of the oldest Sister’s chambers.

She holds it in her hands, feeling its weight, running her fingers along the blunt lines of its teeth. Something warms in her chest, loosens along the small of her back. She slips the key into the binding around her breasts, with Patrick’s letter, and spends the rest of the day itching for the time to pray.

She’s standing in the middle of the Cathedral, staring at the altar and trying to decide if she believes in prayer when a little girl comes and stands next to her. The girl’s name is Anne, and Tabitha recognizes her as a friend of her little brother’s.

Anne stands next to Tabitha quietly for a moment, and then she shyly looks up at her. “Are you praying?” she asks.

Tabitha thinks about this for a moment and answers, “I don’t know.”

The girl looks puzzled. “Why don’t you know?”

“Because I don’t know what to believe in right now,” she answers.

The little girl takes a short breath and then shoves her slightly damp hand into Tabitha’s, squeezing her fingers. “I know what to believe,” she says. “My mother told me and her mother told her.”

“What’s that?” Tabitha asks.

The little girl scrunches her face. “You won’t get me in trouble for saying?”

Tabitha shakes her head.

The little girl motions for Tabitha to bend down, and she obliges, getting on her knees so that she’s face-to-face with the child. The girl leans forward, her dark hair falling against Tabitha’s cheeks. “My mother says there’s a world outside the fences. She told me about the ocean, and when I get older, I’m going to find it. If you want, you can go with me.”

The little girl pulls back, her eyes shining and her little body almost trembling with energy. Tabitha thinks about telling her that it’s true, that there’s something greater beyond their gate. That she’s touched the very edge of it. But when she opens her mouth, nothing comes out.

Tabitha starts the Midnight Office early and races through the words, baldly reciting them hot and fast without thought to their meaning or significance. After the last Amen, she slips from the pews past the altar and toward the secret door.

She’s just pulling back the curtain when she hears the whisper of feet over stones. “I thought we would keep you company tonight,” Ruth says, carrying a candle into the sanctuary, a yawning Ami at her heels. They pause when they see Tabitha and the hidden door.

Tabitha’s heart beats fast and wild. There’s a certain thrill, she realizes, in getting caught. “I finished early,” she says.

Her two friends drift closer. “What’s that?” Ruth asks.

Ami tugs on her sleeve. “It’s not our place to know if they haven’t told us,” she says. The whites of her eyes almost glow in the darkness.

“Where does it go?” Ruth asks Tabitha.

Tabitha grasps the key tight in her hand, dull teeth digging against her palm. “I don’t know,” she says because in truth she doesn’t know what’s past the door in the basement.

“Ruth?” Ami’s whine is tinged with anxiety. She glances over her shoulder as if expecting someone to come upon them at any moment.

“You’re going to explore it?” Ruth asks. Tabitha recognizes the hint of thrill in her voice. Knows that Ruth is like her—that she craves the knowing.

Tabitha raises her chin. “I am.”

“Ruth,” Ami is now close to panic, scrabbling at her friend’s arm. Ruth looks between them, and Tabitha knows the moment she makes up her mind because her shoulders sag a little. She places a hand over Ami’s.

“We’ll pray for you,” Ruth says. Ami sags with relief. “And will make sure no one asks about your absence.”

Tabitha nods. “Thank you,” she says, thankful to be left alone but more grateful to know her friends will be looking out for her.

Ruth tugs Ami toward the rail, and together they kneel. Tabitha slips through the door and, before the curtain falls back into place, she sees Ami’s head bowed low and Ruth’s glittering eyes following Tabitha’s movements with a lusty resignation.

The basement is the same as before: dark, damp, fecund. She slides back the curtain and pulls out the key. The lock on the door doesn’t even protest or groan, just slips away revealing a long low tunnel.

There’s a thrill in her chest like the first time she opened the secret gate between her and Patrick. On a small table just past the door, she finds a stash of old candles, but she ignores them, cupping her hand around the tiny flame she brought with her and pushing into the darkness.

She can tell she’s underground, the walls slick with moss and sweat, the floor a hard-packed dirt. Her steps are slow and hesitant not because she’s afraid, which she is a little, but because it is rare for there to be something new in her life.

Rare for her to have a feeling she’s never experienced or a thought she’s never shared. She assumed she knew this village and this life and everything about it, and now she’s found something new, and she wants to make it last, not gobble it up like the tart treats of the Harvest Celebration.

Down the low tunnels she finds a series of doors, most of them with locks that her key won’t budge. But one door opens easily after she twists away metal bars that hold it closed into the stone wall. Inside, the glow of her candle illuminates a low bed piled with mildewed blankets and a rotted mat on the floor.

Against the far wall sits a rickety table with a thick book resting on top. She knows even in the dimness that the book is a copy of the Scripture, and she’s about to return to the hallway and her explorations when something about it calls to her.

She wonders if this is what it was like for the prophets she’s learned so much about, this pull and tug toward some offering of a truth. She places a hand on the book, thick dust sliding smooth under her fingers.

With a reverence and deference she’s never before felt, she opens the cover. The printed text is as she expects, as she’s seen before. But what she doesn’t expect is the cramped handwriting covering the margins. She sets down her candle and leans closer to the page, reading the first line: In the beginning, we did not know the extent of it.

She immediately recognizes the writing for what it is: a history of the village beginning at the Return. She carries the book to the bed, arranges the blankets around her, and reads. When her candle burns out, she gets another from the table by the door.

Time ceases to exist for Tabitha in that room. All that matters is the words, the memories. The horrifying facts of her world. Memories and stories she’d never even known about the brutality of the pre-Return existence. The sacrifices those who’d come before her had made to keep her village safe.

It feels as though the words slide from the page and eat their way under her skin, infecting her with a fever that causes her head to pound and her blood to burn.

She begins to understand the precariousness of their existence. The delicate balance of what knowledge to pass down to the general populace of the village and what to keep locked up safe in the Sisterhood.

And she learns the reason the paths are forbidden. She reads about the bandits who attacked the village in the early years. About the men who would leave and never return, who would alert the outside world to the village’s existence, who would incite a fresh wave of refugees that overwhelmed the village’s resources.

There were times the infected from other villages would try to invade. There was a year when her village almost perished because a small child had wandered from the Forest and turned Unconsecrated in the middle of the night, sparking infection that raged.

In a desperate act, those who’d come before her closed off the paths. Sent word that their village was infected and broken, would never survive. They started to tell the next generation that they were all that was left. They killed any who dared to tip this delicate balance.

They did it out of love. Out of loyalty. Out of a desire to continue the existence of humanity in the service of God. They did it with a passion of conviction.

This, Tabitha realizes, is what she inherited. This is what she jeopardizes every time she steps into the Forest.

As she closes the book, Sister Tabitha understands that she has to decide what she will stand for: her own selfish desire for love or devotion to her village and the people within it.

Tabitha has just stepped back into the sanctuary, weak and trembling, her face pale, when the oldest Sister comes upon her. “You’re late for the Midnight Office,” she scolds. “Your face is streaked with dirt and hair uncombed. This is no way to come before God.”

In the past Tabitha would have seethed inside for being treated like a child, but tonight she merely nods and walks stiffly to her room. She’d been in the tunnel chamber almost an entire day, and her eyes burn dry and painful.

She washes her face and plaits her hair and returns to the sanctuary half-asleep for the midnight prayers. It’s hard not to weave on her knees, not to rest her head against the altar railing and slip from the world.

Ruth and Ami join her. Ami keeps her head bowed, her fingers laced so tight that her knuckles blaze white, but Ruth looks Tabitha straight in the eye. “We covered for you,” she says.

Tabitha nods. “Thank you.”

“What did you find?” Ruth asks. Ami closes her eyes tight, mumbling prayers as if to drown out everything around her.

Tabitha thinks of the Scripture with the journal written in the margins. She thinks of the burden of the knowledge and wonders what it would be like to share it. To seek counsel of someone else.

She thinks of telling Patrick. Of lying in the spring grass with his fingers tangled in her hair.

“A basement,” Tabitha says truthfully. “Old dusty bottles and broken shelves.” She turns her attention to the altar and the cross though she still feels Ruth’s heavy gaze.

“That’s it?” Ruth sounds disappointed, deflated.

Tabitha nods and joins in Ami’s mumbling prayers, reciting the words without thinking or hearing or feeling them. In her mind she’s begging God to tell her what to do—what choice to make.

Tabitha sneaks back to the room underground whenever she can, each time with a growing sense of dread and apprehension rather than excitement and joy. She sits on the old bed surrounded with the taste of mildew, and she stares at the book lying on its rickety table.

There hasn’t been an entry recorded in it for seven years—since the last oldest Sister passed on in her sleep. She wonders if the Sister simply forgot to mention the book to her successor or if its loss was more purposeful. If maybe the Sister meant for the village to forget its past and start anew.

Tabitha understands that this determination rests in her hands now. She’s suddenly become the keeper of her village, and she must decide whether to accept or demur.

Thus agitated, Tabitha paces down the long dark hallway past the rows of locked doors, past the tiny room with its bed and book and rot. She stops at the end of the tunnel farthest from the Cathedral basement and sits on a narrow set of steps carved into the earth.

Above her, set horizontal to the ceiling, is another locked door. Another taunting gate. She’s tired of these damn secrets, tired of them pulsing in her dreams. She pulls useless keys from her pockets and shoves them into the lock, but none of them will turn.

She trembles with the rage of it and storms back to the basement, ripping apart one of the old empty shelves until she has a pile of dry splintered wood cradled in her arms. For good measure, she swipes a few candles from the table just inside the door and piles it all haphazardly under the lock on the door at the other end of the tunnel.

She strikes her flint, letting sparks fly until everything begins to smoke darkly. Eventually the wood catches, and the flames lick the old wood around the lock on the door. She stumbles back down the tunnel seeking fresh air and watches it, her eyes burning and her lungs protesting while heat sears her face.

She’s never been one for patience, and when she thinks the fire’s done enough damage, and when she starts to fear that the smoke might be leaching itself too far down the tunnel, she wraps one of the moldy blankets around her arms and scatters the charcoaled wood, stomping it out with her feet.

Not even caring that the steps are burning hot and that stray embers sear against her skin, she kicks at the lock with her feet until it breaks free.

Fresh air storms in through the opening, bathing her face with its pure sunlight. It’s like an epiphany, this rising from the ashes and into an outside world.

She crouches in a tiny clearing, nothing but soft clover spread around her, white flowers woven through it. An old fence circles around her, woven through with blooming vines that make Tabitha feel like she’s stepped into another world.

She flings herself out into the grass, feeling the caress of the soft earth against her burned face and fingers. A shard of bright sunlight streaks through the trees, falling on her face, traces of smoke and ash sparkling around her. And for a few moments, nothing exists in her world except her breath and blood and pounding heart and belief that she’s been reborn here for something important: something greater than herself.

The hare moon is pregnant in the sky. Tabitha watches it from her little clearing in the woods. She doesn’t care that the dead have sensed her and wandered from the Forest to trace their fingers along the old links of the fence. She sits cross-legged, old pilfered tools that she’s used to repair the door to the tunnel scattered around her.

She has two days to decide what to do about Patrick. The words from the journal about duty rattle around in her head, but her body remembers the feel of his fingers weaving around her spine.

She prays to God, but He’s silent. She searches for guidance, but the Forest only moans.

Two days later her hands tremble so badly she has to replait her hair several times before it will lay flat along her back. Her face is scrubbed clean, her tunic freshly washed, and she pretends to gather wildflowers from the cemetery while she waits for the Guardian patrols to rotate off so that she can sneak through the gate and down the path.

It’s an achingly beautiful spring day, one whose soft air whispers into Tabitha’s ears about love, and she smiles as she listens. It’s been too many months since she’s seen Patrick, and as she makes her way to him, her body almost vibrates with excitement and anticipation.

In her arms she carries the basket he’d left for her, this time with fresh flowers hiding a change of clothes underneath. Pressed against her breast is his letter.

If he asks her to leave her world for him, she will say yes.

She practices saying it as she walks: “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” She smiles and blushes and twirls each time she utters the word.

When she arrives at the gate, he’s not there, and she has a moment of uncertainty. She sets the basket on the ground and then picks it up again. She runs her hands over her tunic, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. She holds her breath and blows it out and tugs on her braid and paces.

The dead catch up with her and rake at the fences, and they do nothing to calm her agitation. She grabs a stick from the ground and pokes at them, trying to force them away but, of course, they don’t notice or care or move. Not when she flays their skin. Not when she destroys their eyes with a sharp squish, despising the idea that they’re somehow looking at her and judging her.

She’s about to scream in frustration, and she closes her eyes and inhales deep, trying to find a way to calm the mortified burn of her skin. She’s standing just like that, strong and tall in the middle of the path with her fists clenched when Patrick finds her.

“Tabitha,” he says, his voice sounding dryer than she remembered, like the bark of a dew-starved tree.

She smiles, of course she smiles, the world suddenly lilting into place. When she turns to him, he’s nothing as she remembered and the same all at once. The blurred bits of her memory sharpening into focus: his eyes a deeper green, his lips fuller, his skin that much more lush and warm.

“My Patrick,” she cries out, racing to him.

It isn’t until he fumbles with the gate that she sees he’s not alone and her steps falter. She tilts her head, looking at the little boy stretching on his toes to grasp Patrick’s fingers.

“Patrick?” she asks. She’s thrown off by his recent absence, by him being late. By the child.

Patrick looks between the two of them. He pulls the boy in front of him and grasps his fingers around his shoulders. Tabitha doesn’t notice just how tight his grip is on the child.

“My brother,” Patrick says. She can tell he’s trying not to sound hesitant.

“I...” She doesn’t know how to finish the statement.

“I need your help, Tabby,” Patrick says, and she hears the misery in his voice. He falls to his knees and crawls to her. He wraps his arms around her waist and presses his face into her abdomen. Her hands go to his head, slip into his hair, but her eyes are still on the little boy who just stands there. Watching.

Patrick is telling her how he missed her. How he loves her and didn’t know what to do when she wasn’t there before. How so much has gone wrong and his father has died. She nods and tells him she understands and how sorry she is for the loss of his father but really she’s waiting for him to explain the boy. She feels the muscles in her cheeks straining and twitching, an aching pain beginning to radiate through her mouth.

He tips his head back, his cheeks damp. “I need to ask you something, my Tabby-cat,” he says, and she trembles, waiting for the words he’s whispered to her every night in her dreams— run away with me. To leave everything she’s known behind.

She’s waiting for him to unlock the world for her.

“My brother’s sick,” he tells her.

She looks at the child, eyes wide. “Infected?” she breathes before she can stop herself.

Patrick shakes his head adamantly and tugs on her hands, demanding her attention. “Your village, they have medicine. They can fix him.”

She struggles away from him, but he won’t let go. He crawls after her on his knees.

“Please, Tabitha, please,” he says. “We don’t know medicine the way your village does.”

She jerks her hands until she’s free and stumbles away.

“I thought you were going to ask me to leave with you,” she says, her forehead crinkled.

“There’s nowhere for me to take you,” he says.

“But you talked about the world. The life outside the Forest.” The bindings around her breasts are pulling too tight, squeezing her so that it’s difficult to breathe. The little boy’s just standing there. Staring at her.

Patrick shakes his head. “I have to make my brother well first. I promised my mother I would take care of him. It was the last thing she asked of me before pushing me out of our village.”

A bright exquisite grief begins to wail inside her. She presses her lips together, doing everything she can to swallow the growing agony. She turns and stumbles away from Patrick. She wishes she had something to sag against, something to support her, because she’s not quite sure her legs will hold. But there’s nothing: just fences lined with the dead, waiting for any chance to sink their teeth into her.

“How did your father die?” her voice is defeated.

Patrick slowly walks toward her, she can feel when he’s just behind her. When he inhales, his chest brushes against her back and she closes her eyes, aching for him to take his finger and weave it around her spine.

“He was infected,” he says softly.

She clears her throat. She will not sound weak. “How?” she asks.

“Someone from another village. They’d checked her over when she arrived but she’d hidden the bite by cutting off her own finger. They thought it was under control after my father was ill but...”

Tabitha winces. “But your brother? And you?” She thinks about the book in the basement, the words of her village twisted around the words of God. It’s the way her world has always been.

“He’s not infected, Tabby,” Patrick says. “Nor am I. I promise.”

“The rest of your village?” She clenches her fists and prays to God that please just this once let the answer be what she needs it to be. She’s been a loyal believer for so long, all she asks is for this one small token in return.

“Chaos,” he says simply. “My mother shoved my brother into my arms and told me to save him. I ran to you.”

She clenches her teeth to stop from crying out.

She turns to face him. “Do you love me?” she asks.

His expression softens, and his lips part. “More than anything,” he says, tracing the back of his fingers down her face.

She feels the tears in her eyes. She doesn’t want to give up on the dream of running away with him. She doesn’t want to turn back to her village and its claustrophobic fences and rules.

But Patrick has asked for her help, and she loves him. “Then I will help you,” she says.

As planned, Patrick and his brother stay on the path until darkness falls and wraps itself thickly around the village. Tabitha spends the hours kneeling in the sanctuary. Her lips tremble as she prays, the words feeling hollow in her heart.

When she’s sure no one will see them, Tabitha leads Patrick and his brother into the Cathedral. The boy’s eyes are wide, astounded by the warren of hallways, the soaring sanctuary, and the dominance belief plays in her world. She takes them to her room and leaves them there.

“I have duties,” she says. She doesn’t know why it’s so hard for her to meet Patrick’s eyes. Maybe it’s because he’s sitting on the bed. Her bed where she’s dreamt of him and thought of his fingertips sliding along the back of her calves to her knees.

She shivers and looks down at her hands. If the boy weren’t there ... Would Patrick touch her like that when she returned?

“We’ll be okay,” Patrick says. His little brother sits next to him on the bed, silent.

“I’ll try to bring food,” she says. Patrick nods. It feels strange and wrong for him to be here, in the Cathedral with its sharp stone walls and ceilings, rather than on the path with the air and the leaves and the light and the freedom.

Tabitha walks to Midnight Office, welcoming the silence of thoughts.

Tonight she’s slow with her prayers. Ami and Ruth kneel beside her, their heads bowed, but she sees them glance at her and then each other. She knows they sense something is wrong, but she keeps her fingers twined tight and her lips moving in praise of God and doesn’t allow them the chance to interrupt.

When she goes back to her room there’s a promise of morning in the air, the sweetness of grass and dew. She slips open the door, and Patrick’s asleep under her blankets.

The hare moon is still in the sky somewhere, allowing her to see his face. She stands for a bit, the moans of the Unconsecrated threading through the fences as she stares. He sleeps with his lips parted, one hand thrown out to the side as if waiting for her to slip her fingers into them.

It’s like he cares for nothing. Has no fears.

Tabitha knows she sleeps curled around herself in a small ball, protecting herself from the world.

He opens his eyes, sees her.

She inhales at the intensity of his gaze. Something inside her flutters, warms, spreads. He doesn’t say anything as he slips from underneath the covers, the thin sheet trailing over his chest and down across his hips.

He’s wearing nothing. She swallows.

Her voice is a panicked squeak. “Your brother—”

“Is in the room next door. It looked vacant, dusty. Never used.”

She nods her head. No one’s stayed in that room so long as she’s been here. He comes closer. She swallows again. She’s still not looking directly at him, and he raises a fingertip.

He starts at her thumb, trailing his touch around her wrist, up the inside of her arm and across her elbow. Along her upper arm so that his knuckles brush against her bound breasts.

She’s not sure what breathing is anymore. What heat is.

His fingertips dance over her collarbone, slip just lightly under the hem of her tunic, over her chest. His skin is sleep-warm, his eyelids heavy.

“My Tabby-cat,” he says, lowering his face to where her neck meets her shoulder. Every part of her is alive and waiting for that first touch of lips to skin. When it happens she opens her mouth, her body unable to contain air any longer.

He kisses the line of her jaw and along her cheekbone. Into her ear he murmurs, “My love.”

She stands there, eyes closed, wound up so tight she doesn’t understand how his next touch won’t cause her to explode and end the world.

She wants to raise her hand and touch him. To wrap her fingers around his muscles and feel them twitch at her touch. She wants to make him catch his breath. She wants to make him feel as full of need and desire as she does at this moment.

His lips are just skimming hers. She breathes him into her, and he breathes her into him, and she wonders if anything can be more intimate than this: this sharing of breath that is life.

He slips a hand behind her neck, into her hair, untangling her bun. His fingertips dig into her scalp, and she can feel that he is wound tight, like her. That in the next moment he will pull her mouth to his and his to hers and they’ll ignite. She’ll crack and open and be nothing but pure light energy, her soul bursting into the world to burn with his.

The scream is high pitched and long and so unexpected that it takes Tabitha and Patrick too many heartbeats to understand what’s happening.

In the hallway roars a commotion and banging and then the door flies open. “Tabitha,” Ruth comes racing in, blood trailing down her arm. She’s too far into the room before she realizes what she’s barged in on. Before she sees the naked young man with his hands threaded around Tabitha.

Ruth pauses and, in that moment, a tiny body struggles out of the darkness at her. It’s Patrick’s brother, his lips dripping blood and fingers digging into the Sister’s knee as he bites at her calf.

Tabitha screams. Footsteps pound down the hallway, and before she can warn anyone away, Ami careens into the room. Patrick’s brother switches targets, pawing at the newcomer.

Ruth stands there, sobbing, and Ami dissolves into panic just as fast, trying to fling her body to dislodge the Unconsecrated child but managing only to tangle herself in her tunic—allowing him access to her ankle. More footsteps in the hallway. The boy drops Ami and looks straight at Tabitha. He stumbles toward her and Patrick rears back.

Tabitha doesn’t think. She just acts. She snatches the boy by his arm, twisting him to keep his teeth from her. With all of her force, she flings him across the room. He slams into the wall. Bones crunch, and Patrick shouts.

“Out!” Tabitha screams at everyone. Patrick tries to approach his brother who lies crumpled on the floor, little mewling moans dribbling from his lips. The boy starts to crawl toward them, his fingertips shredding and snapping against the stone floor as he tries to gain traction.

Tabitha pushes the two infected Sisters from the room and grabs Patrick’s arm, tugging him behind her.

He grips her hand as she slams the door. “I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know,” he says again as if repeating it over and over again will still the confusion inside.

Tabitha sits in the corner of a cramped room while the rest of the Sisters figure out what to do next. Ruth and Ami are in the infirmary. They’re being given their last rights and will be put down soon. “We’ll tell the village it was a bout of food poisoning,” the oldest Sister, and therefore their de facto leader, says. Everyone else murmurs in stunned agreement, but Tabitha stays silent.

“Now about the infected child,” the head Sister says. As if she’s leading some sort of meeting with an agenda.

Patrick’s brother is still in Tabitha’s room. She knows he’s made it to the door because she thinks she can hear him scratching against it. Tiny moans floating through the hallways. Patrick’s been tied to a bed in another room. Tabitha’s sure they gagged him or else she’d be able to hear him shouting for his brother, screaming that he didn’t know.

She presses her lips tight together. She’s very aware that everyone around her struggles not to look at her. She’s trying to figure out what she believes. She’s trying to decide if it matters.

She knows she asked him directly if his brother was infected and he said no. She doesn’t know if he was lying. She closes her eyes, remembering the earnest panic of his expression as she pulled him from the room.

Tabitha thinks about the book in the tunnel room. About how long this village has lasted being cut off. How she’s the one that endangered them.

Ruth and Ami, her only two friends in the Sisterhood, will be dead soon. Her family could have died as well. Everyone in the village could have become infected.

“Someone will have to take care of the child,” the oldest Sister says.

Tabitha rubs a hand over her face, shifting in her chair. It’s all her fault. Whether Patrick lied to her or not, she was the one to bring the infected child into the village. The little boy is her responsibility. Just as Patrick’s fate belongs to her as well.

It would be so much easier if she knew Patrick lied to her. If she could believe that he knew all along his brother was infected. But she knows her heart, and her heart knows his, and this is how she is sure that Patrick tells the truth when he says he didn’t know.

And yet it doesn’t matter that she believes him: belief is irrelevant in the face of fact. He brought the infection. She allowed it to happen.

“I will take care of the infected child,” she says softly. She looks at the other women in the room—really looks at them. At how soft some of them appear. How old and tired. How they devote their lives to God and leave nothing for themselves.

How unlike Tabitha. She who lusted. She who put desire for a man before God. She who almost brought down her village.

“And the older brother?” the head Sister asks. For the first time Tabitha realizes the hesitation in her voice. She realizes how weak this woman is to be in charge of not just the Cathedral, but the fate of the village. She wonders if any of the rest of them know of the journal downstairs, know of the legacy of their survival.

Tabitha thinks about taking Patrick’s hand and leading him down the path and away from the village. Of banishing herself and him together. She smiles, letting the dream roll warm and round in her mind.

“He I will take care of as well,” Tabitha says.

“About the circumstances in which the older boy was found...,” the head Sister begins to say, leaving an opening for Tabitha to fill in the blank.

Tabitha stands and squares her shoulders. She keeps her chin level and voice even as she says. “It is none of your concern.” She sweeps toward the door, black tunic floating around her ankles. She waits for the head Sister to challenge her, to maintain her authority and dress Tabitha down in front of her peers for what she’s allowed to happen. But the old woman is silent.

“What will you do?” one of the other Sisters asks, as if this was some sort of democracy where everyone can voice a thought.

She pauses in the doorway, examining them, meeting their eyes one by one. Establishing her control. “I will do what is necessary,” Sister Tabitha responds.

The boy is small and broken and weak. His moans are those of a newborn kitten. Tabitha steps into her room and walks toward the window easily avoiding his reach. He starts to pull himself across the floor toward her, and she stands and stares at the Unconsecrated outside past the fences.

So much useless death. Such a waste.

When the boy is closer Tabitha kneels and cups his cheeks in her hands. He tries to squirm, tries to twist and turn so that he can taste her. “May God show mercy on us both,” she whispers before snapping his neck and bashing his small fragile head against the stone floor.

For a while she looks at him. If only Patrick had asked her to go away with him. If only they’d been on the path when the boy turned, he could have infected them both. They could have woken up dead, entwined together forever.

As she unties Patrick’s ropes she avoids his eyes.

But he grabs her and makes her look at him. “I didn’t know he was infected,” he says, his voice hoarse and lips dry. “My mother gave him to me, told me to take him away. I never knew.”

Tabitha nods. “I believe you,” she says. And it’s true.

“I would never lie to you, Tabby. I love you too much.”

She nods again. She understands this as well.

She tells him they put his brother in a special room—a safe place where Patrick could say good-bye. Then, she tells him, she will lead him back into the Forest and away from the village and together they will find a way to live and love beyond this constricted world.

He doesn’t question as she pulls him down the stairs into the basement, nor when she pulls aside the curtain and unlocks the hidden door. He follows her blindly as she leads him down the dark tunnel. She stops at the stairs climbing from the ground at the far end.

They face each other and Tabitha inhales deep, the scent of him mingling with the smell of old smoke and rot. She closes her eyes, trying to sear it into her memory. Slowly, she runs a hand up his arm, along his collarbone and around his neck until her fingers dig into his hair.

She thinks about the kiss they almost—but never—shared and she wonders if his lips could have been a part of her, if they could have left this world before his infected brother Returned—if their love had been pure, maybe they’d have been able to stop time.

“I will love you always,” she says, pulling his lips to hers.

Through her kiss she tries to explain everything that words cannot. About love and duty and God and need and choices and memory and history. She wants him to taste her and understand her. In that kiss is everything she was and could be, all that she’s giving up in her life.

She needs to take this part of him with her because it’s the only way she can go back to the life she needs to live. To her duty to village and God.

When she pulls away she’s crying and Patrick reaches up to her cheek and catches a tear on his finger. He doesn’t realize she’s saying good-bye to him. “I will love you always,” he says, and she smiles, sad and aching.

She gestures for him to go up the stairs first, and he pushes open the door. Before he disappears above ground she presses her lips to her fingers and her fingers against his spine, and then he’s gone and she closes and locks the door behind him.

She huddles on the top step and listens to him bang and call for her and then to the sound of the moans. She tears at her clothes and her body, raking her nails against her flesh hoping to let the agony pulsing inside her escape, but nothing can dull the torment.

Her hand shakes as she dips the pen into ink and holds it above the page. The printed words are impossible to decipher, tears trembling from her eyes and her body racked with sobs. And then she writes: There is always a choice. It is what makes us human. It is what separates us from the Unconsecrated. But that does not mean that choice cannot turn men into monsters. I have chosen survival over life.

In her life, Tabitha has felt consuming desire only once—on those too short days with Patrick in the Forest. She watches him along the fences with the others now, at the way he grabs at the metal links and pleads and begs. She touches the old note from him, tucked against her breast under the cross she wears around her neck.

A part of her likes to believe that he’s different from the others, that he doesn’t moan for anyone but her. That he spends his days and nights trying to return to her.

He is always there for her, always waiting. The most constant companion anyone could pray for. One of these days she will return to him. She will feel that desire again, that need beyond human comprehension, and they will be together forever.