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She should be dead, Mary thought, she was dead. Now that some clarity had returned, she remembered her own brother shambling towards her, tearing out her throat when she had wrapped her arms around him. She cried harder, tears coming out viscous and red. There was a body at her feet, and the taste of something bitter yet addictive on her tongue.
Her fingers ached, splinters from — yes, that was her coffin she scratched her way out of — splinters from her coffin embedded beneath her nails, crusted with grave dirt.
Nothing felt real, other than the lingering tang on her tongue and the sharp bits of wood stabbing at her fingertips.
She barely knew how she got here, on this half-rotted dock with a body at her feet and a crossbow bolt in her stomach.
(It wasn’t the first death she had caused tonight, she knew. There was another, closer to her grave, one that hadn’t fought back before she dropped it and ran, solid as smoke in the wind.)
This body had come after her as soon as she stopped, when the body was still a person and not just a weight in her arms.
Was this what had happened to her brother when he…?
She gasped out the choked beginnings of a scream, caging the sound and all it carried in her chest as best she could. It wasn’t fair.
That was the sort of complaint her son would have whined out, and the thought only made her cry harder. How many more tragedies could the world see fit to bury her under?
Rage was burning, years and years of grief compacted into a pit in her heart acting as kindling. And why should she not express it? She wondered. Who did she have left to keep a brave face for?
And she let herself scream.
It was a banshee’s wail — mourning all she had lost. An expression of the pain that stabbed at her heart more fiercely than the wood beneath her nails. A challenge to the world. She had nothing left to give, nothing more that it could take from her.
Now, it was her turn to take.
***
She let herself stay there for an unknown amount of time. The pitiable spit of sand she was on could hardly be called a beach, but the waves crashed all the same — the gentle hush of its push and pull like a mother soothing her child to sleep.
She would have to move eventually, she knew. To understand what happened to her, since all she had right now were itching suspicions and plots from penny dreadfuls. But there was something comforting about feeling so emptied out: her connections severed and every ugly thing inside her scraped out when she finally abandoned that last bit of hope she had been clinging onto the past year.
She nudged the body of the crossbow wielding stranger with her foot. One arm flopped limply with the contact, and she didn’t resist the urge to laugh. The sound was just as hollow as the rest of her.