It’s not a room, it’s an attic, and the hot Louisiana sun shone down onto the end of her bed from the large circular window in the middle of the room. Sne is eight years old. Everything was hot, the summer humidity making long strands of unbrushed hair stick to her. There’s a haze she can’t get through, makes her think that she can see the actual sunbeams. Maybe she can, maybe they’re magic and she can reach out to touch them. Her fingers reach out towards the end of the bed as much as they can without her sitting up-
Only for her to immediately haul herself into a sitting position in order to dry heave into the bucket on her nightstand. The noise alerts Antonella, all the sputtering and coughing and she thinks she’s crying. It’s a fatigue that’s bone deep, there’s nothing in her stomach, there’s nothing between her ears but fog.
As she grew older, she’d feel disgusted with herself for being relieved that her mother was at her side. Smoothing her hair back, pressing a wet towel to her forehead. There would be whole weeks like this. Days just spent in and out of the haze and she’d hear the words of her mother, feel the weight of her sitting on the edge of the bed.
*
She’s barefoot, she’s carrying a basket of mushrooms when she first meets him. She is thirteen and he’s so much taller than her, though she suspects they’re close in age. He also seems to be foraging and when he’s about to pick up a mushroom off of the forest floor, she bursts from out behind the tree she’d been clinging to. There’s a moment where they just seem to stare at each other and she feels small in her dirty dress with it’s hemline destroyed by the muck of the land. There is something there though, something like when she visits the older witches along the bayou. Magic, he has magic and she told him plainly that those were her mushrooms and without missing a beat, the boy said that it was his backyard.
Sure enough, she’d wandered off the path and onto a property, the Hahn house and its beautiful lawn was just up ahead, she could see it through the trees. He asks her if she’s lost, she stubbornly says no, he offers to walk her back home with this easy smile, the slightest twang. She accepts, let the consequences of running around with strangers be damned.
They walk into the yard, the boy calls to his mother on the porch who looks at her not with scrutiny, but with something else. Something soft and gentle, she doesn’t think any adult has ever really looked at her that way before.
The boy doesn’t look at her like that though. He doesn’t look at her like any boy has ever looked at her in her whole life. Like she was interesting, like she wasn’t some girl with a tattered dress and tangled hair and dirt beneath her fingernails. They were both odd, she found that out on the walk back. They had magic, they liked mushrooms and graveyards. He was Casper, like the friendly ghost, but she didn’t know what he was talking about, she’d never seen the film.
Years later they were watching movies in the dark parlor room and reading each other scary stories. Both still odd, but neither of them alone, not anymore.
*
She has no business being in a church when she has spent ample time defying the laws the Christian god put in place. But she kneels before the altar anyways, clothes black, hair sleek, and nails sharp. She is a far cry from who she had been back in New Orleans, the feral child. She’s a young woman, a more confident witch and when the vampire approaches her, asks to pray with her, she is not afraid. For she has always found comfort in dead things.
She asks to confess instead.
She tells him she doesn’t want revenge against a cruel mother, she wants power. Any task the woman has failed, Marcella wanted to rise above it. She thinks he sees some value in this ambition, she keeps coming back to a church she doesn’t believe in to speak to a man who feels like the closest thing she’s ever had to a father. He is someone her mother cannot rob her of, she regards him fondly regardless of what he is. When she starts making daylight rings, when she has perfected the spell, she gives him one that she’s forged herself.
It is solid and intricate, wrapped around a flat red stone, she always associates Mars with the color. She gives it to him the day she is leaving Rome to return to New Orleans where she will no longer be the ill child she once was. It is a promise that she will return to him again one day, braver, stronger.
She will accept nothing short of making him proud of her.
