"Are you awake?" The boy throws a dirty black sack into the slit of weathered brown cloth before skipping in after it. "I heard you've been quite the drunken vixen. Having those "the great noble men" moping all about the town. If your not more careful, you'll burn."
"You're such a shit," the girl huffs through her mouth full of blood. Smoke swirls and glimmers under the dim candles surrounding her. Eyes heavy with an thirst just quenched. Blood trickles down her palms, the oil black heart held in the left sloppily beating.
A beast howls in the way they move around each other. Those men. Their "greatness." Their arrogance. Their slimy hands and wicked grins on people they shouldn't touch and money they don't deserve. Its their own damn fault to damn themselves to her empty heart with their pitiful rotten one.
The only boy the lady felt for was gone. His family died in that house and internally, so did he. It's like that fire never went out. It burns in his head, shines in his eyes. He always wants to know, just to make sure. If they're okay. Can he meet them up with them yet. She knows the dead a bit too well at this point. The witch knows they set the fire with intentions to die together as their secrets lived throughout town.
The wife and husband stripped strangers of their skin, their own a rash of disease. A curse for their vanity many speculate.
A stranger escaped one day, a nobles daughter. At first they laughed, thinking her just being a child with an overactive imagination.
Then they saw her hands. Nails and skin ridden.
He waits. She sighs, disappointed. The poor boy still believes that the people still lie. After all these years. "Give me your hand, you little shit. If you really want to know what you future holds too high above you head." He does. But he almost snatches it back. Her palms are so clammy.
His palm face upwards as her nails run through it.
After a moment of silence, she jerks up right, darting to her feet.
They are okay with him following them to death. They miss him. Their pride and joy, they whisper feverishly. The vibration is off though. Bitter. It's not right but he wouldn't know that. Her thin alabaster legs peak out from under the rugged tresses of her dusty skirt. He is distracted for a second as she puts her face back together.
Fuck. Not him.
"You will learn many things and those many things you learn will be of no use to you. For you soon will loose the things that would have made those lessons to be learned any real value."
"Oh?" He cast an inquisitive gaze at the girl. "And what will be taken from me? When I have nothing left to take?"
"This, you ass," her hand sinks into his chest, a finger lovingly caressing it. She pulls her hand back empty for the first time. He shuttered, eyes wide.
"Leave this place. You are not dead. Stop acting as if you were. Your family wants you to move on."
"I can't."
"Of course you can, it's not too late for you-"
"But it is." His face is pinched now, lips twitching down. Bitter boy.
He made a deal with the devil.
"You're so fucking stupid. I cant save you from this."
"I never asked you to," he screams, red faced.
The womans hand that once laid on his heart seethes and boils but she doesn't care. She cares about nothing but the keep. What she paid for. What hes paying for.
"I hope it was worth it." He smiles then, slow and malicious.
"It always will be," he murmurs, reaching into the womans chest to pull out her heart.
