He didnae know what his face looked like. He didnae care about that.

“What are you doing?” Balthazar asked.

Syn paused as he came up to the feet of his mahmen. “Why did he keep her here? He didnae care for her.”

Even as he asked that of someone who wouldnae know, Syn himself had the answer. The remains were a visceral reminder of why doing what he was told was his only chance for survival. His sire had had to ensure Syn’s submission. There were many nights and days when the male was too drunk to be able to forage for food. He needed to be attended.

And he had wanted to be obeyed.

Syn murmured something to his mahmen and then he proceeded to pour the mead upon her, the dark liquid sinking into the layers of blanketing that surrounded her skeleton.

When he had emptied the bladder, he tossed the thing upon the pallet.

“Are you burning this down then, cousin?”

Dearest Virgin Scribe, he couldnae stand the stink of the mead. It took him back to nights he had been smaller. Weaker. Glancing behind himself, he saw a broken chair and remembered how he had been thrown into it, his little body splitting the arm and one of the legs.

At least his full set of teeth had come in during his change. His father had only knocked out the little ones.

Syn turned to the fire and picked out one of the logs that was alit. “You need to leave.”

Balthazar frowned. “Were you not even going to say goodbye to me?”

“You need to go.”

There was a long pause, and Syn prayed that the male didnae fall victim to emotions that were best left unexpressed.

When his cousin merely stepped out, Syn looked around one last time. Then he tossed the burning log onto his mahmen’s remains. As the flames flared and spread quickly, he thought of the heat that had torn through his body during his transition. He remembered little of what had happened with any clarity, but he recalled the heat. That and the snapping of his bones as they had grown inches in the course of hours.

He couldnae believe he had lived through it. Or that that lovely, generous female had fed him from her vein until just before dawn. With the approaching sunlight, she had had to go so that she wasnae caught in such deadly illumination. Balthazar, meanwhile, had strung up tarping around the shelter to shield Syn as the transition had continued, his body maturing to its current, unfathomable size.

He had been so weak after it was all over. He could remember lying with his cheek on the hoof-trodden, packed earth, and feeling as though he would never cool down. But eventually, as the sun had gone behind the horizon and the day’s warmth faded, so too had the burn within his torso and limbs.

When he had finally emerged from the shelter, he had braced himself to see the blood of his sire, blood that Syn had shed, the gore and the remains all that was left behind of his father. There was none. It was all gone, as if it had never been. He had asked Balthazar if he had smelled the burning during the daylight. His cousin had said yes, he had.

And after that, Syn had recovered herein this hut for the three days and nights.

Now, as flames flared further and began to spread, Syn closed his eyes and said his goodbyes. He knew not where he was going. He knew only that he couldnae stay in the village for one more night. He had no possessions and only his feet to carry him forth. But there were too many ghosts here, too many… people, here. He needed to find a destiny away from who his father had been and what he had done to the male as a result.

The village would know all by now. The female would surely have had to explain why she was gone for as long as she had been whilst feeding him through the change. And as for Syn’s father? The male’s brutish presence would not be mourned, but it would be very much of note.

Syn stepped out of the hut and—

Balthazar was standing just outside the cave, the reins of two strong horses well laden with supplies dangling in his hands.

“I’m coming with you,” his cousin said. “I may not be through my transition yet, but I am fast of hand and smarter than you. You will not survive without me.”

“I have already survived much and you know this,” Syn countered. “I shall be well enough.”

“Then just let me go with you. I need to get away from this place, too.”

“Because you’ve already stolen from everyone in the village and there are none who are not wary of you?”

There was a pause. “Yes. Exactly. Where do you think I got these steeds?”

“From the squire?”

“Aye. He didnae care for them well enough. They are better off with us.” As one of the horses stamped a hoof as if it agreed, Balthazar held out a set of reins. “So what say you, cousin?”

Syn didnae reply. But he took what was offered to him.

As he mounted up, Balthazar did the same. Smoke was rising from the hut, and the crackling of the fire within made the horses twitch. Soon, the blaze would eat through the thatched roof, and orange flames would lick their way out of the cave, reaching up to the heavens.

He had turned the horrible and sad home he had known into a pyre for his mahmen, and somehow, that seemed fitting.

Before they reined off, his cousin said, “Are you not going to say goodbye to the female before you go?”

Syn pictured her in that meadow before all had transpired, running free with her brother, her laughter rising, like the smoke was doing now, up to the stars.

“We are even, she and I,” he said. “It is best to leave things with this resolution.”

Spurring his horse forth, he knew he loved her. And that, more than anything else, was the real reason he didnae go unto her family’s land. It was also the true reason he was departing the village.

When you deeply cared for someone, you did what was best for them. His father had taught him that lesson by lack of example. So the kindest and most necessary thing for Syn to do was to leave the now.

And ne’er darken her doorstep ever again.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Mr. F sat gingerly on the bus seat, staring out the cloudy window as the gentle rock of the loose-cannon suspension lullaby’d him and the other four people riding the route out to the suburbs. Rain was falling, a soft, winsome dew drifting out of a dove-gray sky, and as the piss-poor aerodynamics of the public transport wicked the moisture down its injury lawyer advertising wraps, the water coalesced in rivers over the slick topography of the glass.

When his stop came, he got to his feet and shuffled down the center aisle. No one paid any attention to him. The other passengers were on their phones and not because they were talking to someone on a call, their heads tilted down, their eyes locked on little screens that provided them a virtual world vitally important yet made of less than air.

As he disembarked, he envied them the manufactured urgency of the useless information they were sunk into.

Mr. F had real problems.

There was no one waiting in the Plexiglas bus stop, and he cautiously ambled away from the pitiful shelter, his boots treading over the sidewalk that eventually took him by some small-scale apartment buildings. The units were short stacks of three and four stories that were split in mirrored halves, and only some of them had dedicated parking lots. These dwellings soon gave way to neighborhoods of small houses, and Mr. F continued as his feet took lefts and rights on their own.

When he arrived at the untended-to fake-Tudor he’d visited days before, he noticed that there was a new flyer in the mailbox, something orange. He imagined it was for a lawn service. Maybe a roofing company. Pavers looking for work, perhaps. It was the kind of advertisement that would have showed up at his parents’ house back when he was young, back when he didn’t have to worry about adult things. Not that he had done much of that sort of worrying when he’d reached adulthood. He’d always thought he was better than all that average Joe stuff. He’d been convinced he was going to be a rocker à la Kurt Cobain. A real badass poet with a pocketful of guitar riffs.