The convulsions stopped when my daughter finished crushing the spirit of my son. I insisted on carrying his body all the way home by myself. He weighed nothing. It felt wonderful to hold him and terrible to think I’d had to wait until he was practically dead to do it.

The night was dark but clear, like my mind. Everything was pellucid now that I knew the truth. It was as if I could see those around me for the first time. The fog of secrets had lifted and there was nothing left to hide behind. In all those months, years, I had suspected everyone in my life harbored Archelaos. Even Dawn and Leon had not escaped suspicion, but never, not even once, did I imagine that Ambrose not only housed my ex-husband’s spirit but imprisoned him.

I looked only at my son’s face, letting my legs travel the way home automatically. Dawn walked beside me. Knowing she needed kind words, search though I might, I found none for her. Oddly my shoes on the cobblestone streets were as loud as gunshots, but those around me made no sound. The normal noise of the city disappeared also, leaving me completely alone.

Not alone. I am here, Ramillia. We will get through this together, as we have always done.

I went up the steps, over the threshold and straight into the parlor, slamming the door behind me. Alone with my two murderous children, I sat cradling Ambrose, wondering if I had done it more through the years this end could have been avoided.

Sitting on the chaise beside me, Dawn penned a letter. I said nothing, even after seeing that she enclosed it in an envelope addressed to Mr. Paetus Crawley. She rang for a footman and sent him out with the correspondence without ever saying a word.

Ambrose’s hair had gotten a bit shaggy, and with the length came added curl. I ran my fingers through it, putting soft texture to memory. His mouth, more generous than mine, had a subtle pout. His flesh was slack, his body relaxed, molded to me. Air filled his lungs in a jagged breath, reminding me that he was alive. Without thinking, I shouted for Leon. He would know what to do.

Ramillia, Sally began.

A soft knock on the door made me think my genteel Leon waited on the other side. “Come in,” I called.

Andrew and Auley entered instead of my husband. “Where is Leon?” I demanded.

Without a word, father and son crossed the room, bending down behind the couch. Only then did I notice that the plastered wall behind it was crushed, dented as if something had crashed into it. Not something, someone. Sally allowed me to recall the events during the time she left to find Dawn.

Even the memory of the pain that her leaving caused was gravid. Wrath threatened to take over and I realized I was squeezing Ambrose tightly. Leon had run in when he heard my distress at being alone. He hadn’t known the reason for it but rushed in to see if he could ease my suffering. He loved me. In that moment, I hadn’t felt any love for him, only the desire to kill. I had enjoyed choking Leon. He was alive when I threw him but I remember the crack when he hit the wall.

My men carried Leon’s body from behind the couch. Auley held the legs and Andrew supported the shoulders and head. A jagged bulge under the skin of Leon’s neck caught my attention. I had broken his neck.

Andrew turned to me and said, “This changes nothing. We will continue to serve and protect you and Lady Dawn as long as we live, just as Leonus wanted.”

I understood him but did not agree. This changed everything. I was a murderer at my very core. Maybe all Incola were. I had to try something, anything, to correct what I’d done, what I’d become.

With certainty, I knew that this was the moment the cylinder should be opened. Ning Shiru said it could save the world. Perhaps it could save Leon and Ambrose, my world. “Wait,” I commanded. Placing my son’s body beside me, I pulled the cylinder from my pocket, held the mysterious object with both hands, pressing the two children depicted with my thumbs and twisted.

Sally and I had enough experience with pain that we managed to keep from calling out when a metal claw jutted out from the cylinder, hooking into both of my palms. A burning started at each point and ran its course up both arms and into my chest and then head. I dropped the cylinder as soon as I was able.

The retracted claws took with them some of my blood, disappearing back into their hidden chambers and turning the blue liquid inside a deep indigo. The act of twisting the two sides changed the carved scene depicted. No longer being chased by the mob, the woman was leading them. The men who had been courting her had turned and were now fleeing her and her army.

Looking down at my hands I saw the puncture holes were no longer visible but my palms carried a blue network of veins, resembling spiderwebs, under the skin. I took Ambrose back into my arms. Nothing happened. I placed the vein-covered appendages on his face, head, then chest. No effect. I looked to Leon. No change. Whatever I had done, whatever that thing was, did nothing to save them.

A heaviness of heart filled my chest. Blood rushed from my head at the thought of the rest of my life without them. What would be my purpose for living?

Dawn, Sally answered, but I scarcely heard her.

I wanted to die. There was no reason to live.

Our daughter must be protected. Sally turned our head to force me to look at Dawn, hoping her visage would calm my suicidal thoughts. I looked.

I felt nothing.

“My lady,” Auley said. “We must dispose of the body.”

Andrew expounded, “Paetus says the older the Incola, the quicker they turn.”

Sally spoke aloud when I did not. “Go ahead.”

The two men looked at each other and then Andrew said, “We should take the little lord, also.”

Sally knew they were right. Ambrose had been an Incola his whole life, and though it had been a short one, who knew what consequence it would have. Rather than speak, I opened my mouth and a roar came out. Any man who touched my son would die. Sally took over. She shook our head no and dismissed the men.

 

Paetus burst in, Mr. Boyd not attempting to slow him down this time, and Dawn hopped into his embrace. She hung on his neck and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her off the floor. Dawn kissed him hard on the mouth, surprising Paetus for the first time in probably a thousand years. He spared me a glance but when I made no move to stop them, he kissed her back.

I realize that a first kiss at that age is not uncommon in modern day. For the late 1800s it was unheard of for anyone, no matter their age, to have public displays of physical affection. I was too broken at that moment to insist on decorum and Sally didn’t adhere to the strict etiquette of the day.

Dawn ended the kiss and Paetus set her feet back to the carpet. She straightened her dress, the one exchanged for her fancy party gown. Paetus, still riding the high of their first physical exchange, brushed a stray hair from her cheek and leaned in to kiss her again. Dawn reacted with a swift slap across his face that rang out sharply in the house’s silence. The message was unmistakable. Their contact would be under her terms and none other. Paetus dropped to his knees in apology, matching her muteness with his own. Snatching a decorative rope from where it held back the curtains, my daughter put a makeshift leash around his neck and pulled him from the room on his hands and knees.

The peace of my son’s face called to me, like a mother who cannot bring herself to leave the crib side of her newborn. Had it been Ambrose or Archelaos staring back at me from my own newborn’s eyes? Exploring my memories, I tried to sort them but found it difficult to credit my son with the wrongdoing of which I knew he was guilty.

Dawn was our firstborn but Ambrose was the first baby I ever held and loved in that way only a mother could understand. Sally knew the loss I was suffering and though she mourned too, she stepped in as always when I needed her. I sank to that place where I felt carefree and left her to endure something for the both of us that I could not handle.

Paetus came back into the room looking satiated and near intoxicated. I knew not how much time had passed. Blood trickled from his cuff down his hand but he caught it in his handkerchief before it dropped to stain my rug. “Was it Archelaos?” Paetus pressed.

“Dawn killed the spirits of both Ambrose and Archelaos when they tried to possess her.” Sally told them how my husband had inhabited my son’s body since before birth. They had a different relationship than any previous Incola and Carrier. “Ambrose became an Incola, able to ride any body that Archelaos could. Archelaos used their shared blood to make a path, trying to escape, unknowing that Ambrose could follow.”

“And once Archelaos knew that the Carrier bodies were compromised, he destroyed them.” Paetus said it as a statement, so sure was he of his lifelong friend.

“No,” Sally argued. “It was Ambrose who killed the Carriers out of jealousy. That emotion plagued him his full five years. The strongest had been of Dawn. When Archelaos loved her, Ambrose felt only poisonous envy. He had been rejected by Archelaos as weak, but my son would not accept. He held Archelaos prisoner.”

“Why was I spared?” Paetus struggled to understand.

“Could be a number of reasons. Ambrose could have hoped you would prove to be an advantageous ally or perhaps it was Archelaos who spared you because of your two-millennium alliance.”

“Almost three, actually,” Paetus mumbled. “Ambrose told me of Dawn that night. Or maybe it was Archelaos.” The motivations of either could only be guessed. Perhaps it was an attempt by my son to rid his life of Dawn. Archelaos could have sensed the danger and tried to remove her from the situation.

Then I remembered something. That night Leon and I had made love for the first time. I had woken later and we had sex again, this time very different than the first, and the next day Leon had not recalled our second tryst. Sally maintained control of our body, keeping me from retching. I wasn’t certain if that had been my ex-husband or my son in Leon’s body at the time. Sally refused to allow me to think that it was my son but she could not erase what she had said only a few hours ago about his twisted desires toward me.

“Is there anything we can do for him?” Paetus nodded at the tiny body in my arms, not specifying which of “him” remained.

Sally shook our head no. “They are both gone. The body will not be far behind them.”

 

Sally was right. Our son’s body could not continue without the magic that makes us all alive. The flesh held on for a day but eventually the little heart stopped beating, the minuscule lungs failed to inflate. We mourned his loss even before his physical death. I held a private wake. I, alone, sat with his body, fearing in my absence they would take him and burn him, which now, in hindsight, I see would have been the right choice. When it came time to bury him, there were no tears left. I was too stunned when Dawn killed Ambrose the second time—in his own grave—to cry. Destroying the undead husk he had become was a mercy I couldn’t manage. I didn’t know who I had failed more severely: my damaged daughter or my soulless son.

My daughter stopped speaking. She ate and drank and slept as normal but she did not reply when asked a question. Sitting with me while I read or feigned cross-stitch, she faked nothing, only sat. Hands crossed in her lap, a smirk on her face.

Dawn was not the only one broken. When Sally retreated to the deep recesses of our mind and I came to control our body, I sat staring into the distance, looking at nothing. Hours we lost like this, maybe days. The only moments I remember clearly were when we stood by Leon’s funeral pyre and we went to Ambrose’s grave.

News of the vacancy at my side, left by Leon’s death, spread quickly. It mattered not that I was in my mourning blacks. Suiters, the most eligible of all the other English Incola families, the sons of those who Ambrose had forced to commit suicide, from every corner of the Queen’s kingdom, visited. Too much the Victorian lady to send them away, I met with each one, expressed both my gratitude for the honor they paid me but also my refusal to break tradition and be courted before my allotted grieving period ended.

This adherence to proper social etiquette unknowingly exposed them all to something.

Andrew and Auley fell ill first.

Then those who guarded me most closely.

Quickly the mysterious illness laid low every Carrier in my household and Paetus’. And then, through human servant gossip, I heard the sickness had spread across the city and nation and kingdom.

It started with an extreme weakness, which terrified those who had never experienced such a thing. Claustrophobia in one’s own skin brought many to the brink of insanity. Only Dawn and I seemed immune.

For the third time in my life, my human servants abandoned me out of fear for their lives. I did not blame them.

Wise even in his weakened state, Paetus stopped all outgoing post. He isolated the country so that no foreign Incola would hear of our impotence and this nation’s ripeness for the taking. He used my power and authority to do this. There was simply no aspect of British life over which I did not hold formidable sway.

Sally cared for my Carriers as best she could, conveying them to their beds from wherever they dropped. In truth I cared not if they died.