It takes me a long time to find Meremon in the morning because his house is a maze of rooms and staircases. Eventually I locate him on one of the lower levels in a room filled with books and strange smells and things bubbling in glass jars. The light filtering through the dirty windows is thin and gray.

A large book is open on a bench and Meremon is poring over it. He looks up at me, his eyes dark as he tracks me across the room. They’re not black as I thought they were. A band of silver encircles his pupils, reminding me of a stalking wolf.

This man is all silver and darkness. Did he watch me in my bed as I was touching myself? Did he make me have that terrible dream?

I wait expectantly for him to tell me when we’ll be off. I’m anxious to see how my sister fares and to know if the rest of my family is safe. Meremon comes around the table toward me, a faint clacking sound coming from his clothing. There are things hanging from his belt on thin silver chains. A bird skull. The jawbone of a wolf or dog. A stone with a hole worn through it by water.

He stands before me, staring down at me in silence and I don’t know where to look.

“The children,” I say, indicating a hand over my shoulder in the direction of the village. “We should go while the weather is good.”

The sky is heavy with white cloud this morning and there is a pristine fall of snow on the ground, but for the moment it’s not falling and the wind has dropped. We should make it down the mountain in just a few hours.

Meremon shakes his head.

My mouth falls open. “You’re not going to help them?”

He keeps staring at me in silence. He’s only spoken a dozen words to me since I arrived and each one has made me more uneasy than the last, but him saying nothing is even more unnerving.

“I want something,” he finally tells me.

An uncomfortable sensation rolls through me and the skin on my left hand prickles. He’s had far too much from me already. “My father didn’t have to pay anything when you saved me.”

“Didn’t he?” Meremon asks quietly.

With just two words he’s stolen all the breath from my lungs. My father wouldn’t have bargained with my life. Not knowingly.

“What do you want?” I ask cautiously.

He looks around at his laboratory. The books in piles. The little cabinets with drawers hanging open and contents spilling out. The unwashed glass vials and instruments. “Help me here until the next full moon.”

That doesn’t seem so bad… I think quickly to remember the current phase of the moon and realize it’s still waning. “But that’s weeks away!”

“I am not a healer. I am of no use to the sick until they are nearly dead.” He holds out a pestle to me and indicates a mortar on the table, filled with dried herbs. “Grind these to a fine powder.”

I take the pestle from him, trying to make sense of what he’s said. “I can’t stay here so long. One of the sick children is my sister.”

But Meremon goes back to his workbench and turns to his open book. I didn’t ever consider that it was strange a necromancer had cured me. I thought that any type of sorcerer would do, that people like Meremon just knew the healing arts. But look how he approached my deathbed, first with a dagger and then with that terrible kiss.

What will he do to Ilsa when the time comes?

I shudder and move toward the mortar, peering into it. The herbs aren’t familiar to me but otherwise look and smell perfectly ordinary. I give them a suspicious prod with the pestle and they crumble like any other dried plants, so I get to work.

When my hands grow hot and red from grinding and I pause to rest them Meremon’s eyes spark with interest. He takes them in his and studies them with the zeal of a fortune teller. What’s so fascinating? Is it strange to him that my hands grow red through exertion? After a moment I pull away and he reluctantly lets me go.

He’s creating something in a cast iron cauldron heated by magical flames. It’s thick and green and makes a plip-plip sounds as it boils.

I finish the grinding and stand at a loss for a moment, waiting for more instructions, but Meremon has busied himself with the mixture and doesn’t notice. The cabinet of little drawers are a jumble, so I get to work on the contents, gingerly sorting the chicken feet from dandelion roots and what I think are strips of dried tongue.

Filax brings a tray of food for two and places it on a pile of books. The necromancer ignores it but I’m ravenous, and I help myself to a large slice of good soft bread with fresh butter and honey. I marvel at the food with every bite, wondering how Meremon can ignore such a delicious meal. The bread in the village is coarse and dry because the flour is milled from our second-rate grain. The grain that made this bread must have come all the way from the capital, and I savor it.

A few hours later Meremon pours his concoction into a glass jar, holding it up the light and admiring it. He seems pleased with himself. I want to ask if it’s something to help the children in my village but before I can work up the courage to speak he places the jar on a high shelf and strides out of the room.

I don’t know what to do after that. Follow him? Go to my bedroom? It’s still light out and there’s so much to do in the laboratory. Meremon makes such a mess and every surface is littered with objects. I keep working, but my eye strays to the jar on the shelf again and again.

It could be medicine. He might have been lying about not being able to do anything for the children. He probably just wants a free servant to clean up after him for a few weeks. I could steal that concoction and run away. There are enough daylight hours for me to get down the mountain before nightfall.

Pretending that the work I’m doing is taking me innocently in that direction, I edge closer and closer to the jar. What else could it be but medicine? What else could have been so important for Meremon to work on today? I don’t believe him that a necromancer is no good to the sick until they’re nearly dead. What would he need all these ingredients for if all he does is play around with dead things? The only undead being I’ve seen in his house is Filax. Meremon must know more magic.

Twenty minutes later I’ve convinced myself: all I need is the contents of that jar and everyone in the village will be safe and happy again.

I listen for a moment for the sound of approaching footsteps and then carry a stool over to the shelf where the mixture stands. Meremon is very tall and it is a low stool, and when I’m standing on it I have to strain on my tiptoes to take hold of it.

“What are you doing?” a slow, deep voice asks in my ear.

Meremon must have come silently into the room while I was intent on the jar. I shriek and drop it and have to grab the shelf to prevent myself from falling. There’s a smash and I look in dismay at the broken jar on the slate floor. Green slime oozes out. Fearfully, I glance at Meremon. He spent all day working on it and I’ve just ruined it.

Meremon intones, “Non speculo,” and the broken glass vanishes, leaving only the slime.

My heart lifts. Perhaps it’s not spoiled after all and he won’t be too angry. I get down off the stool and turn toward the door, not wanting to wait around and find out.

“Ligabis.”

Ropes appear from nowhere and wrap around my body. I gasp in shock, completely immobilized with my arms pinned to my sides. I’m impelled by some unseen force to turn and face him.

“I’m sorry. I thought it might have been for the villagers. I just wanted to—to look at it.” Does he know I’m lying and that I intended to steal it? I whimper, wondering if I’ve just made him so furious that he won’t help the villagers at all now.

Meremon isn’t listening to me. He’s looking hard at the slime on the floor and I follow the direction of his gaze.

It’s moving.

Toward me.

I gasp and try to step back. “Please, I said I’m sorry.”

“You should have told me you were so eager for your present.” His voice is as flat as usual and I can’t tell what he’s thinking.

“My present?”

The green goop reaches my shoe and climbs up it toward my ankle, beneath my skirts. I feel it touch my bare leg and I let out a high, thin shriek. “Make it stop! Please, it’s getting higher.”

Meremon doesn’t seem surprised by this. It’s reached my knees now, crawling up the inside of my leg. I squeeze them tightly together but it forces its way through and I feel it creeping up my inner thighs as if intent on—as if aiming for—

I cry out in horror as it oozes against my sex. I’m clenched so tightly but even so it finds its way between my lips and starts to pulsate.

I gasp at Meremon, “You’re doing this. Stop it at once, it’s disgusting.”

But the necromancer ignores my words, his silver eyes gleaming intensely. He’s looking at me like he did the jar of goop earlier, as if he’s created something very pleasing.

The slime is touching me like I touched myself in my dreams last night. He knows that I meant to steal the jar and he knows what I dreamed about, too. He knows I’m dirty, that I’m wrong. Maybe he didn’t even give me the mark. Maybe it’s just a result of my own badness.

“Meremon, please,” I pant, but it’s getting harder and harder to think straight. The slime feels so twisted in a good way as it rubs against my flesh. It’s concentrated on that sensitive pearl now, rubbing me just so, small, fast movements making heat flood my skin.

 “Deliciae, you look so lovely when you’re flushed. Does it feel good? I wanted to give you a present for coming to me.” The faintest smile is on his lips. He’s watching me fondly, a mockery of affection in his eyes.

It feels—it feels like nothing natural and yet my body is responding as if it’s been waiting for this my whole life. The slime keeps massaging me, on and on, and a sweet ache begins within me, deep in my core.

I can’t call it pleasure. I won’t.

Meremon seems to know exactly what’s going on beneath my skirts and he’s staring at my hips as though he can see what the slime is doing to me. He’s driving me toward that precipice that I felt in my dreams and I don’t know what it is except that I know it’s something powerful. Something transformative.

He meets my eyes and says softly, “Don’t be afraid.”

But I am afraid because all unknown things are to be feared. How can these feelings be good and right when they have the power to take hold of my body like this? My eyes close as the sensations surge through me. Tight, golden heat rises up within me and I can’t hold it back any longer. My body flexes in the ropes and I shatter into a thousand pieces which fall in gentle sparkles to the ground.

The ropes finally release me, but I don’t fall gently. I end up in a clumsy heap at Meremon’s feet. Hair falling in front of my bowed head, I start to sob. “Why are you doing this to me? You’ve already ruined my life. You made me an outcast in my own village.”

All I can see are his booted feet. He doesn’t move as I continue to cry. The slime slides out from beneath me and forms a goopy ball a few feet away, finally motionless.

The feelings he gave me have shaken something loose and I cry out my misery. “Some days I feel like a ghost because I move among them, ignored and unseen. And now you do these things to me and it’s like you’re proving to me what I knew all along. That I’m dirty. That I’m wrong.”

Meremon crouches down before me and lifts my chin with a forefinger. I don’t see sympathy in his eyes, only more curiosity. His experiment is reacting in a surprising manner. I’m his experiment.

“Were they cruel to you, my Rhona? Were they afraid of what they didn’t understand?”

Tears trickle down my face. I don’t understand, either.

He gets up and moves away and then comes back with a tiny glass bottle in his fingers, no longer than an inch. Delicately, he collects each of my tears as they run down my face.

I feel weak and shivery after what his terrible concoction did to me. “Why are you stealing my tears?”

He collects each drip carefully with the manner of one engaged in fascinating work. “To study them later.”

“You’re a monster,” I tell him, too tired to give the words any heat. He stoppers the tiny bottle and slips it into his pocket. “What did you do to me?”

“Just now, with your gift? Ah, have you not felt that before, deliciae?” He puts his hands around my waist and gets to his feet, pulling me up with him. He doesn’t let me go, instead wrapping his arms around me, one hand behind my head, cradling me against his chest.

One of my ears is pressed against him. I can’t hear his heart beating. And then, finally, I hear a slow thump. There’s a long pause, alarmingly long, and then another thump.

“Why did you mark me when I was a child?” I whisper.

I feel him look down at me. “You were dying, and you were so afraid to be bled. I could have forced you, but…” I look up at him and he grimaces. “It is not in my nature to force people into pain so I took the sickness with my mouth. I was happy to. You begged so sweetly and so bravely for death.”

A faint smile curves his lips as if he’s preening over the memory. I didn’t mean I wanted him. I was in so much pain. I just wanted to die so it would all be over. “But that’s not what I wanted when I asked for death.”

I shouldn’t be looking up at him like this when he’s standing so close but I realize my mistake too late. He presses his mouth against mine and his lips are as cold as his arms around me. But he still kisses like a man, or how I have imagined a man would kiss, soft and good, and gentle at first before growing bolder. His tongue flicks against my lips and surprise makes me part them, inviting him in. He’s like fresh mountain air, a bite of spearmint and a blast of sleet all at once. A consuming kiss, and as his flesh cools, my fire is stoked.

He breaks the kiss and lifts my left palm to his lips. His words are like winter against my flesh. “And yet here you are.” He kisses the mark as tenderly as he kissed me. “My bride.”

With a wave of his hand he scoops up the slime and puts it into a fresh jar and presents it to me. “It will do the same to you again whenever you wish, deliciae. No need to lie so unsatisfied in your bed.”

Meremon presses his cold lips against my cheek and then turns and walks out of the room, leaving me alone with strange sensations running through my body.