❝ Anitchka, Anitchka, will you not invite me in? ❞
In which a girl is indebted to a wintry demon for saving her life, and the gold from her fingertips is a magic whose price she must repay tenfold. Unless she guesses his name first.
| loosely based...
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THE JOURNEY INTO THE DEAD of the night is too familiar for her to notice the changes imprinted into the snow. It is hard to tell time's trail in the skies, its inky ends bleeding a story that has been sung a hundred times before. Anitchka shifts nervously close to the Collector, for he had insisted that she sit next to him.
Voice low, she says, "We could have had the goblins seated between us."
"But I would rather have you beside me," he replies, grinning, "I wasn't expecting company, so bear with my request."
"You are a demon, after all."
"Call me a Count, if you'd like, but certainly not that." He loops his fingers together, watching the trees blur past the window. "You can shift closer . . . if there's no space."
Anitchka does comply, because he resembles someone she has known, but mostly because he is someone familiar to her now. She is aware that Dmitri rests on her shoulder, that Olga and Helga are crowding next to her. And for a split second, she finds this comforting. "Do you miss him sometimes, the boy you loved?" Then she eyes the goblins around her, wondering if she shouldn't have spoken.
The Count runs his hand through his hair. "It's fine, they know how I became the Collector." He clears his throat, slipping into the same emptiness he had the night he'd told her everything. "I do. I always have. I hoard all the gold from your fingers because it reminds me of him."
"I did think as much." She gulps. "I'm sorry for what happened."
"I know."
Anitchka attempts to count the hours it takes to cross over into the land of the living. The tunnel that she crossed with the Collector had frightened her, and she had clasped his hand along the way. She would not be straying this time. She was sure that the creatures of the In Between were calling out to her, and her eyes blinked furiously as though a fire had been lit in the distance.
She hopes that it was a nightmare and not a warning.
And just as it had before, the world has changed. Anitchka never looks clearly enough, but how could she when winter's claws remained the same. She steps outside the coach, hand flat on its sleek side for support. It seems that nothing exists besides a barren, snow-capped land with crumbling houses lining the edge. All that is left behind is a mess of rubble, and perhaps skeletons devoured by the cold. It has swallowed them all, icing a layer over their bodies to conceal its rotten core.
The air that bites her has aged since she had last been there.
Olga is the first to speak. "How many years has it been?" Her mask turns to the Collector. "How did the Mistress live in this place?"
Helga knocks her sister's head, crossing her arms thereafter. "Ssh, that was rude."
"No, she's right. Bones, I wonder how you lived here?" Dmitri adds, leaving her shoulder to flutter in the wind.
