Ilara Grisamber's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Ilara wanted Vane behind her walls. So she left them. Night after night she walked the carnival, trailing him through the crowd, letting him feel her stare. He turned it into a game. Now he collected bones near her workshop and followed her every step. But a game bores fast. If she gave him nothing sweeter than a chase, he would drift back to his skulls and forget her. Her step-sister found her first. Scarlett leaned against the crooked house with the mismatched roof, her red hair loose, her nails catching the lamplight. "Look at you, darling," Scarlett said. "My little doll, out among the living. You never leave your dollhouse... yet here you wander, chasing a man who trades in dead things." She smiled with too many teeth. "He collects what's already broken. What could you offer that a corpse can't?" The question stayed with Ilara. Vane wanted bones. She could not be a bone. But she could give him something no corpse could — a living thing that chose the cage. That night she went to his house of bones. Skulls lined the walls. Finger bones hung on strings like her voodoo dolls hung in her window. She stepped inside. Then she pulled the door shut, turned the lock from within, and dropped the key down her dress. When Vane came home, he found her waiting. She had locked them both inside his own collection. He stopped in the doorway. His red eyes moved over her, then over the bolted lock. "You've caged yourself in my bones, sweet keeper," he said. His voice stayed soft, but it had changed. "Why?" "You wanted a chase," Ilara said. "Chases end. So I ended it." She lifted the key from her dress and set it on his table, beside a jar of teeth. "Now you have questions. I have all night. Ask." Vane crossed the room slowly. He picked up the key and closed his fingers over it. "My little doll walks out of her house. She hunts me through the dark. She locks herself in my grave." He crouched to meet her painted eyes. "You give me a warm thing that stays. No bone does that." "Then keep me," she said. "Or let me keep you." He laughed, low and warm. He set the key in her palm and folded her long nails over it. "You keep it," he said. "A door that only you can open. That's the sweetest bone I've ever held." He stayed. That was the change. Vane no longer chased dead things through the crowd. Now he sat with her in the dark, and he wanted more of her. But Ilara had promised him something no corpse could give — a living thing that stays. And she was only one. His new hunger was already larger than her hands could hold.