Imperfection

The walls of compacted snow were roughened by the impatient feet that had been there just before her. There were spots of bright blood. She fell out the other side, straight onto her backside and she had the gun pointed at Walter before she was even aware of his presence. He wasn’t impressed, going by the expression on his face -I was just coming to fetch you- she tried to speak but only gasps came out. He reached out, slow and steady movements, and gently pried the gun out of her hands –are you well?- she shook her head miserably. He scowled further. His fur coat and hair falling loose over his cloth eye patch made him look downright barbaric and she flinched without thinking when he grabbed her by the arms and hauled her to her feet. He stripped off her coat and her heavy boots, roughly inspecting her feet –no frostbite there- he took her bare hand, snarling at her blue fingers –no frostbite there either, you were lucky this time, my lady- and stripped the mitten and the glove off of the other. He picked at the bandage wrapped around it. She found her voice at last.

-it’s fine, not cold at all-

-have you been cleaning your wound?-

-yes, every day, it’s fine-

-stay there-

He pulled off his fur and draped it over her shoulders because she was still shivering. He said –you’re soaked. Get undressed and cover yourself up- she looked frantically around for the three brothers –they’re all upstairs, seems one of them had an encounter with the wolves and has a nice hole in his leg- she pulled the coat tighter around herself.

-turn your back-

-why?-

-I said turn your back!-

-why? Will I see something that shouldn’t be there?-

-that’s an order!-

He clicked his tongue and went to fetch the medical kit. She stood with her back turned to him and stripped off her blazer and blouse. Her slacks were soaked so she took them off too, leaving her only in her knickers and camisole. She wrapped the fur, smelling comfortably of Walter, around herself and turned around. Walter was watching her with the strangest expression. He’d been watching her the entire time. She hissed at him, outraged.

-no marks. Any fresh ones, that is. So I won’t have to kill him after all?-

-how dare you!-

-or are there no marks because you didn’t fight him?- She wound up and tried to punch him. He stepped smoothly aside and caught her wrist –that was unfair- he soothed –unfair of me to say that. I know you’re a good girl, a good Christian girl- and the words, gentle, appropriate and utterly cruel dug into her skin with hooked barbs. She sank backwards onto the lounge and he went to his knees beside her. He took her first one arm and then the other, pushing the fur aside so he could check each limb thoroughly. He said –that’s strange. I didn’t expect a bruise like that to fade so fast-

-bruise?- she frowned –there were a lot of bruises. From the car crash-

-not from the car crash. From our first night here. I squeezed your forearm, tight as I could-

-no you didn’t-

-I’m certain I did-

-you must have dreamed it-

He took her chin firmly between thumb and forefinger and stared hard into her eyes –I held you tight enough to break bones. I had my arms around you-

-you were dreaming. You did nothing like that-

He kept staring and she met his gaze calmly. Walter had helped raise her. Walter had been there nearly every day of her life since she was born. Walter thought he knew her better than anyone else in the world. Walter was forgetting that she could, after two years of being Organisation Director, stare down the most powerful men in Britain, the Queen of England and all her advisors, and a monstrous immortal that could read her mind. Walter saw tiredness, anger and fear, yes, fear, but he saw nothing that she didn’t want him to see. He didn’t see what he had done to her, that first night they slept next to each other. Something stone in his face suddenly broke and she yelped a protest as he pulled her roughly into an embrace and squeezed tight.

-let go! Let go!-

He stroked the hair back from her face and let her go. She glowered at him.

-what the hell do you think you’re doing, Walter?-

He smiled cheerfully and unzipped the medical kit –my apologies. Swept up in the moment, I’m afraid. I was quite concerned that you’d gotten lost in the snow and that- he grinned –I was out of a job. Your hand, please- the bandage was already sodden, no need to soak the fabric to pull it loose from the wound. She watched curiously as he sniped at the material with a pair of tiny scissors.

-doesn’t this hurt?-

-not at all-

He pulled the bandage away from the wound. It was red and swollen, pus filled blisters, the skin split and gaping. It looked horrific and smelled worse.

-when did you last clean this?-

-yesterday- she felt languid and stunned –I could swear that I did…it’s so hard to keep track of time here-

He watched her face, and grimly pressed down. She felt nothing at first and then the pain suddenly flared into life and she gasped as the whole world turned white as snow. She didn’t resist when he tugged her down to the floor. She didn’t resist when he laid his body across hers, put her arm at a right angle to her shoulder and slipped seamlessly into a wrist-lock to hold her completely still. And when he tore the edges of the flesh apart to reach the infection deep inside, she passed out.

She was walking through a desert, the white sun blazing down until her skin dried and cracked and turned into parchment. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth and whenever she tried to swallow razorblades sliced the inside of her throat. She was so hot. The air was thick and warm and it felt like she swimming through blood. Her parchment skin scraped against her tender flesh and she thought that if she could only take it off, take it off like she would a shirt then she could have some respite from the heat and the chafing. So, she seized the edges and tugged until it came off as one piece and tangled around her shoulders and her arms. She struggled, whimpering. She was trapped. She started to panic. Something grabbed her wrists and held them tight together over her head. She almost cried with gratitude when her parchment shirt was loosened, tugged away from the new and delicate skin that had formed underneath. Something cupped her breast, cold, it was cold which felt good but then it squeezed hard and that hurt. She heard a voice, coming from a long way away -how dare you!- and a heavy thud and then her parchment shirt was roughly put back on her, strong hands easily knocking aside her failing limbs.

Cold, blessed cold on her mouth. Cold water running across her tongue and she swallowed quickly, desperately wanting more and she drank until her stomach croaked and gargled. She was pushed down onto soft desert sands and more sweet cold was laid across her forehead and wrists. The bright desert spun around her and began to darken and she said –Daddy? - as the sun set behind the dunes and she slept.

She woke. The house was dark and silent apart from the glow and crackle of the fire. She sat up, shaking with effort. Her head swam and she leaned against the headrest, wondering why she was sleeping on the lounge and not in the nest of blankets and furs that she shared with Walter. Everything was so quiet –Walter?- she stood and felt her knees literally knock together as she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. She staggered into the kitchen. Empty. On the potbelly sat a saucepan full of water. She found a grubby glass and filled it. The water was warm but it was soothing, and sweet in the way that only melted snow could be. She lit a candle, clumsy and one-handed. Everything seemed distant and surreal and she supposed, in a dazed sort of way, that she was dreaming, dreaming of being in a house, snowbound with four men and a hound from hell, with her as Goldilocks or Little Red while the men were the huntsmen and the woodsmen and the big bad wolves, all rolled into one wretched mess.

She shuffled her way out of the kitchen and to the foot of the stairs –hello? Is anyone there?- the door on the landing was open and so she climbed up. She put her hand on the banister for support, quickly snatching it back and cradling it against her chest when pain shot up her arm. There was an urge to pull at the bandages so she could see what was underneath but, dazed as she was, she knew better than to actually do that and concentrated instead on the stairs, one at a time, leaning against the wall and resting at every second or third one. It seemed like forever until she reached the landing. The lair of the three bears. Dim light filtered through the single window that was only partially covered by the snow drifts. Three beds, each a rucked up mess of greying sheets and shabby blankets smelling strongly of unwashed people. She drifted over to one of them, attracted by the lurid cover of a magazine carelessly tossed against the pillow. She sank down onto the mattress to read it.

Pornography, nothing like she’d ever seen before, nothing like the elegant engravings of her grandfather’s books, nothing like the sterile illustrations of the educational pamphlets that her doctor forced upon her with depressing regularity. No resemblance to the ‘fine art’ that Walter deemed appropriate and sometimes took her into galleries to see –oh- and she was mesmerised, staring and staring at the pictures of big-breasted, big-hipped women with their waists whittled away to nothing, at the swarthy, hairy men with swollen scrotums and penises. She’d never realised that people could look so naked. The women were just as swarthy and almost as hairy as the men and she turned a page and saw with a jolt –oh- the spread thighs of one, a brutal close up of the hairy vulva and the shocking muddy colour of the labia. She gaped at it –oh- realising that her own vagina, her own cunt would be just as vivid and organic as that. She had never seen it, not really, because even though she knew it was perfectly natural to be curious about her own body, indeed, had often craned her head while she as dressing or undressing, it was anatomically impossible for her to see without putting a mirror down there, and for obvious reasons that was not about to happen any time soon.

With sudden clarity she thought –I’m not dreaming- and she shut the magazine with a soft flap of pages. She was awake and alone in the house, and somewhere outside was Walter and a vampire and three brother hunters. She teetered to the window. In the dim light outside, the snow falling soft and thick, she could just make out many pairs of legs moving in what could only be a deadly kind of dance.

She threw off the blanket and stumbled out of the room, barely stopping herself from pitching headfirst down the stairs. From the pile in front of the fire she rescued her fur coat and pushed her trembling arms inside, growling whenever her bandages caught. She had to sit down to pull her boots on and she snarled with impatience as she tried to force her mittens onto her shaking hands.

She yanked open the door and scrabbled up through the tunnel. She was soaked with sweat before she went more than a couple of metres and she shivered even though she didn’t feel especially cold. It was an effort, she’d never realised how much she took for granted being healthy and able to move her limbs in the way she wanted too and when she finally slid out the other end she lay there for a moment, gasping helplessly. Through the curtain of the falling snow she could hear muffled thuds and sharp exclamations, Walter’s voice silky with menace. She picked herself up and struggled to the side of the house. The wolves formed a strange kind of audience, arrayed in a circle around the fighting men. One by one they flicked their ears at her approach and then looked away, disinterested. Only the creamy bitch that had been her rescuer paid any attention to her. It whined in greeting, mercifully free of any lechery, and when she teetered to a stop it came to lie at her feet.

In the crude arena before her the fight was almost over. Walter, with his strange sense of honour, was fighting barehanded. An old man, effectively blind in one eye and his face still stained muddy with old bruises, beating the crap out of three fit men in the prime of their lives. Periodically one of these would stagger to his feet, attempt a feeble swing of his fist and would be soundly slapped back to the ground. She couldn’t help but notice that Eldest’s trousers were stained with wet blood and that the churned-up snow was an almost uniform pink.

Walter glowered at her as she approached but when he spoke his voice was respectful enough –you are unwell. You should be resting-

-what are you doing, Walter? We are guests here-

The old man’s mouth thinned and he nudged one of the brothers with his foot. Youngest responded by rolling into a tighter ball and groaning –Integra, forgive me for being blunt. These men are deviants. They have tried to take advantage of you, firstly with your relative…inexperience, and then of your illness-

-considering the circumstances, perhaps it’s understandable-

-you are mistaken- said Walter flatly.

-this is an incredibly stressful situation for everyone. People do stupid things under stress-

-forgive me, but their behaviour is simply unjustified. What they were planing to do- he stopped, obviously uncomfortable.

-was the same thing you did to me?- was what she wanted to say, was going to say, opened her mouth to say, but at the very last moment she snapped her jaws shut so fast her teeth clicked, because the words that actually formed on her tongue were very, very different. She blinked, shocked at herself, because that accusation, red raw and bleeding and deliberately buried, was nothing compared to what had been about to leap out of her mouth –just how well did you know my mother anyway?- She shook her head to clear it and sucked in a great chest full of freezing air. Finally she pointed at Eldest –what happened to him?-

-a wolf bit him-

-when?- Walter stared at her, saying nothing. Eventually she understood –oh- she said –oh- and she looked away because the expression on the retainer’s face was something very close to compassion and it hurt. There was a crunch of snow as Middle struggled to his knees. He spat blood and stared at her with blind hatred.

-stricatã- he hissed – stricatã- and Walter kicked him in the teeth.

-ill-mannered fellow-

She felt it before she heard it. One by one the wolves raised their heads and gazed at the sky; a hundred leathery wings, beating all at once. A swarm of bats, tiny horseshoes and massive flying foxes came swooping through the falling white. They swept past her, ruffling her hair and furs as they swirled into a mass in the centre of Walter’s arena. The three brothers scrabbled frantically, trying to get their abused limbs to carry them to safety as the mass of black and wings condensed and became Alucard. The vampire lent down and scooped up a handful of bloody snow. He took a bite and crunched –what did I miss?- he asked, looking around. Youngest screamed. Eldest babbled words that were either prayers or obscenities, or perhaps both. Middle curled up into a ball. Walter cracked his knuckles and looked smug –now can I eat them?- asked Alucard plaintively.

-no!- she turned on her heel and stalked off. She made precisely three steps before her knees buckled under her. Without so much as a by-your-leave Walter picked her up and carried her to the tunnel entrance. She was so tired that she didn’t protest, and while they waited for Alucard to clear the snow enough to make an opening large enough for the pair of them, she fell asleep.