-

Sometimes there are secrets that can’t be shared.

(There was someone long ago, before Esmé, before this.)

-

It took him two hundred years to step foot in a house of God and what he found was her. Her with venom still fresh in her veins and them, torn apart.

She had picked their bones clean.

-

After the chloroform wears off she kneels, praying to herself; hail mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee. Suddenly she turns to him, head cocked and eyes blood red; “You’re not like the others.”

He swallows hard, “No, no I’m not.”

So quick he doesn’t realise it, she’s beside him with fingers trailing over his features.

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary; how does your garden grow?”

She kneels back down.

-

Her words are hums of nonsense, strings of soft sounds that made no sense. He thinks that maybe they were once catechisms, Latin whispered between rosary beads and candles with the heavy scent of incense to guide them home.

-

Slowly, surely, he falls under her spell. Softly, softly, she steals away from him; the key slipped from around his neck and a swish of a skirt as she leaves.

-

She comes back.

With a heart in her hands spilling blood on the floor.

“I got you a present my love,” palms offering alms no-one should ever receive. “Nice and juicy.”

He collapses, full of revulsion. He cries for her, for him and for whoever’s heart she’s drinking from.

There’s nothing between them. She turns to the door.

“Drusilla, you don’t have to do this.”

She presses her bloody lips against his, “Silly little boy. You couldn’t ever save me.” The door closes behind her and she puts her mouth to the keyhole, “Ad te clamamus, exules filii Evae”*

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* the Latin translates to: 'To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.'