Serene

  She felt a rush of pride the moment she made her vow. And the very next moment, a great pit of despair opened before her, and she was overcome with a dizzying spell of existential vertigo.

  "What happens now?" she asked.

  Will regarded her with the same stone-faced expression he seemed to keep at all times. "Now you wait until the drugs are flushed from your system," he said, "and until you've weaned your body off its dependency to whatever substances you've been filling it with."

  "I know that!" Serene hissed, sliding until she lay bonelessly draped over the armrest of the kitchen couch. "I mean, how are we going to do it?"

  "We?" Will asked. "It's not a very complicated procedure, and I've got a lot of things to do. I'll check in on you every now and then, but for the most part you'll need to tend to your own needs. There should be food in the house, and I'll make sure to bring in fresh water on a regular basis."

  "What? You're just going to leave me here?"

  "I don't know what you expect me to do, Catherine."

  "Don't call me that!"

  "Then stop calling me 'killer'."

  "You are one."

  "So are you."

  "Shut up!"

  "What?" Will asked. "I didn't say anything."

  Serene glanced around, found Ratcatcher crouched by her side, grinning evilly. "You're a killer, babe," he repeated at a low, sultry whisper.

  "You seem to be a little delirious," Will noted. "Try to get some sleep."

  "Fuck you."

  "No thanks."

  "At least… lock me away somewhere. Somewhere with no temptations."

  Will shrugged. "Don't think that's a good idea. Only place on the farm sturdy enough to hold a person against their will is the root cellar. Gets awful cold down there, and it's dark, and it smells. I wasn't really looking forward to throwing you in there if you'd decided to be difficult. Not the best place to be going cold turkey.

  "Besides, you need to be able to get through this on your own, with your own strength."

  "Why?" Serene asked, whimpering at the building pressure behind her eyes.

  "Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?" Ratcatcher repeated in a mockingly shrill voice.

  "Because I said so," Will said in a way that made it sound final.

  "You're… such a dick."

  "Noted. By the way, I feel I need to make it clear that you should not, for any reason, break the vow you just made." Will drummed his fingers casually along the edge of the tabletop. "The Concord punishes oathbreakers pretty harshly. Like, 'fate worse than death', Old Testament kind of harsh."

  "Great. Really glad you told me that now."

  "I assumed the gravity of it was implied with a name like 'divine vow'."

  Serene let out a frustrated sigh that turned into a pained groan halfway through.

  "Well, I'll let you get some rest," Will said, and stood up to leave.

  "Wait!" Serene cried. "I'm sorry! Please don't go! I don't want to be alone!"

  The spirits always came out when she was alone.

  Serene's heavy lids fell shut for just a second, and when she pried them open again, the Misfortune was gone, having disappeared without a trace.

  "Killer," Ratcatcher whispered.

  "Killer!" Serene's mother accused.

  "Killerrr!" sang that one neighbor's cat, dancing on the table.

  Serene covered her face with her corpse-chill hands and wept.

  * * *

  Time became a vague, immaterial concept.

  Serene suffered, and wept, and endured an unending torrent of vitriol from a hundred different voices. At some point Will returned with a bucket of water and instructed her to drink. She tried to trap him into staying with conversation, but the moment she looked away he was gone again.

  The bottles glinted, glinted, glinted from the cupboards like eyes in the dark. Why hadn't he taken them away? How could he be so cruel?

  Then she found herself scrambling up on stiff legs, staggering over to the other end of the room, throwing the cabinet doors wide to dig out the bottles inside. She uncorked one, smelled the contents. Whiskey. She picked up another. Brandy. Another. Some kind of liqueur. She sat back down with a whole clinking armful, the only thing on her mind to bring one of those bottles to her lips and swallow salvation.

  Just a mouthful.

  Just a drop.

  Anything.

  Even though she knew the price, the pull was so strong. Maybe Will had lied? Maybe he was trying to mess with her. She wouldn't put it past him, the dickhead. Why not have a drink just to spite him?

  "Yes, there we go," Ratcatcher chuckled, clambering onto the table with the jerky, too-quick movements of a spider. "Have a drink. Just one. The last one, right? Just to get you straight. Then you can stop forever."

  "Shut up," Serene groaned, rocking back and forth, clutching the bottles protectively. "You're not real. Go away."

  "I'm as real as you are, babe." He crept closer until he was almost on top of her, trailing ruined intestines from his blasted-open gut. "Face it—there's not a person under that pretty mask you wear, no matter how much you pretend there is. You spent your whole life pretending. Then you came here and started right back up again." He laughed a bitter laugh. "That must be why you're so good at it."

  Serene curled into a ball on the couch, still holding onto the bottles, and squeezed her eyes shut. She said prayers to a goddess she didn't believe in, repeating them over and over just to try and drown out the voice.

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  It didn't work.

  She must have dozed off at some point, because when she opened her eyes again, it was dark in the room apart from a low cook fire and a single candle guttering on the table. Will sat on a chair a few feet away, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles as he pared an apple into wedges with a sharp knife. Arranging the wedges on a ceramic plate, he steered it slightly toward her.

  "Eat," he said.

  "Not hungry," Serene whispered. Her arms were empty, she realized. Where were the bottles? Had she drunk it all? No, she shouldn't have. She still felt all empty and cold.

  "You need to eat," Will repeated, wiping the juice off his knife with a handkerchief. "You haven't been drinking enough, either."

  "What do you care?"

  "I don't. You still need to eat, though."

  Realizing that he wasn't going to go away until she did what he wanted, she made a sound halfway between a snarl and a whimper. It took three attempts before she managed to sit upright, propped with her elbows on the table and a shaky hand holding sweaty hair out of her face.

  Her stomach gurgled uncomfortably at the sight of the apple wedges. They looked fresh enough, but at that moment there were few things she'd rather do less than eat them. Even the faint, normally pleasant fructose smell made bile rise in her throat.

  "Go on," Will said, his voice sounding strangely like Ratcatcher's.

  Serene reluctantly picked up one of the wedges with two fingers. The moment she touched it, the bright yellow pulp began to shrivel and darken, curling in on itself like a dead grub until she was holding a brown, leathery husk.

  She let go of it with a disgusted yelp, and it vanished from her hand. She looked down and found that the rest of the apple was gone, too, and the plate besides.

  "What's going…" Looking up, she found that there was only an empty chair where Will had been sitting. "...on?"

  * * *

  Will

  Only three of the goats had survived—Emmie, Wilma, and Esmerelda. He rounded them up and herded them back toward the farm by intermittently Pulsing in the opposite direction of where he wanted them to go. The sensory spike it produced was enough to trigger the animals' fight or flight, making them run roughly wherever he liked. A bit of finagling and two dead grinners later, he had them back in the stables where they'd be safe enough for the time being. Some careless guest had broken the latch, but he circumvented that by tying the door shut with some steel wire.

  All of the chickens had either been killed or strayed far enough that Will could not locate them, and he found the feather-strewn corpse of the rooster in the crook of an old tree, gnawed to the bone by various scavengers.

  There wasn't much he could do for the farm without Mongrel—or rather, his chimps—there to do their Farmer-Builder thing. As such, he spent most of the day taking inventory of what was still present and what was lost or broken, as well as harvesting some of the herbs from his garden that would soon spoil otherwise, then preparing them for long-term storage until he had the time to make something out of them.

  He gave the workshop a once-over as well, but it appeared that no one had been quite brave enough to touch his alchemical goods, all his finished product present and accounted for.

  It was late afternoon by the time he was done with that, sun gone low. He had a smoke on the porch, enjoying a few minutes of silent contemplation before going inside to check up on his newest charge.

  Entering the farmhouse, things immediately seemed… not quite right. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but the feeling didn't go away. Trusting his instincts, he had Anathema drawn as he paced through the hall, but a pulse of Detect [Life] showed him nothing untoward—just Serene in the kitchen, pretty much in the same spot he'd left her.

  As he went into the room to inspect her condition, he immediately figured out what he'd been picking up on. The house was too dark, like all the light had been sucked out of it. There was a starry sky showing through the window, along with an impossible view of some barren desert cast in deep blue by weak moonlight.

  A fire burned on the hearth that Will did not remember lighting, and there was a candle on the table whose brass holder did not match any he owned.

  Serene lay in a tight ball, arms wrapped around her like a child, and there were overturned glass bottles strewn on the floor below her. Unopened, he noted. Good for her.

  "How are you holding up?" he asked, sheathing his sword as he approached. The spirits in the blade gave a disappointed murmur, his fingers sticking to the handle, and he had to forcefully pry them free.

  Serene's eyes slowly opened, and her entire appearance rapidly shifted in the span of a few moments. She was clad in a dress, then trousers and a tunic, then a skirt and a blouse, then just an undershirt, and finally a dress again. Her face morphed, melted, reformed again. Went from beautiful to grotesque and back again.

  "Just go away," she breathed, desperation in her voice. "I'm tired."

  "I'm here to check on you."

  "You're not real."

  "I feel pretty real."

  "Don't worry about her," said a voice in his ear, "she's just sulking right now."

  Spinning, Will had his sword halfway clear of the scabbard before he realized what he was looking at. A man with a good chunk of his head blown out, intestines spilling out of him and trailing around his ankles. A man with no business walking around. There was a brief moment of confusion, then Will understood, rammed the saber home again.

  "Who is this, then?" he asked. "A friend of yours?"

  "Like you don't know," Serene muttered, burying her head in her arms.

  "I actually don't. I'm not one of your Illusions, just so we're clear."

  "What a coincidence! Neither am I!" said the dead man, throwing an arm over Will's shoulder. It felt just like he had a real person touching him, down to the bloody mess he transferred from his ruined jaw onto Will's cheek as he rubbed up uncomfortably close.

  "You don't seem to have very good control over them at the moment," Will noted. "Though, I suppose you can be forgiven for that, circumstances being what they are."

  Her skills really were very impressive. He could certainly use her—if she survived her detox, in any case.

  "Shut up," Serene said.

  "She's really not very polite, is she?" the dead man observed with a light chuckle. "She gets like this when she can't pump herself full of junkie filth every five minutes."

  Another man stepped out of thin air on Will's right—an older gentleman with a thinning pate. "Disgusting whore," he spat.

  "She killed me, you know," said a woman walking in circles on the ceiling, defying gravity.

  "She's not even worthy of breathing the same air as me," Sam said; leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed. She directed her gaze from Serene to Will. "Now that I think about it, neither are you."

  Will's patience for this charade had all run out. "Cancel," he barked, and with a snap of his fingers the Illusory coating that covered the whole room shattered like glass, leaving the kitchen as it should be. An orange sunset fell in through the windows, the hearth was cold, and the table stood empty, no candle on it. Most importantly, there were no longer any pretend people occupying the space.

  Serene lay on the couch in her scuffed trousers and sweat-soaked shirt, peeking up at him through her raised forearms. "Are you actually there?" she asked, voice tiny and scared.

  "I am," Will said simply. He went and fetched the young woman a large mug of water from the bucket he had brought in, crouched beside her to let her drink. She gulped it down like a woman possessed, and he had to refill it twice before she was satisfied.

  Then he tied on his apron and went to cook them dinner using what unspoiled supplies were left in the house—a light soup made with potato and herbs and potted chicken all boiled until very soft so it would be easy to digest for Serene's compromised system.

  "You left," she said while he worked over a pot on the stove, accusation in her voice.

  "My life doesn't revolve around you," Will replied simply. "I told you I had things to do."

  "Are you going to leave again?"

  Will sighed. "That seems to be what I do best. But no. I'll be staying in for the night."

  "Okay."

  He finished the soup, Prepared it, and plated the table for two. Serene worked her way through a bowl with ravenous haste, threw up, then ate more carefully on her second try, managing to keep it down this time.

  Once she was done eating, he forced some more water down her, then got her ready for sleep. He brought her to the room that had originally been meant for Sam, before she'd insisted on sharing his. Another Illusion began spontaneously manifesting as he was bundling her into bed, forcing him to Cancel it again.

  He left a candle burning for her on the nightstand, instructing her to blow it out when she felt she was about to fall asleep, and turned to leave.

  "Wait!" she called after him.

  Reluctantly, he looked over his shoulder and found the sweat-soaked, bruised woman looking up at him from her blankets with pleading eyes. "Sam told me stories to help me sleep."

  "That's very nice of her," Will muttered. "But as you've already quite correctly pointed out, I'm a bit of a bastard. I'm not a babysitter."

  "Please."

  "I thought you hated me."

  "You're better than them." Her eyes darted wildly about the shadows dancing on the walls, as though expecting them to come alive at any moment.

  Will sighed, and pulled a three-legged stool from the corner of the room over to the bedside, taking a seat. "Fine. What do you want me to talk about, exactly?"

  "Tell me about Sam."

  "What about her?"

  "Something nice."

  "Something nice it is, then."