Chapter 4.17 – Broken Dolls

Note: Caleb’s thoughts may make you want to smack him with a shovel.

Caleb arrived back the mansion, torn with indecision.

Should he visit Tuesday, Thursday or Friday?

He couldn’t choose Sunday, his newest girl, unfortunately. She wasn’t as hooked on his allure as some of his other girls were – it took her a while to warm to him – but he enjoyed that. Watching her fear give way to lust was a potent drug for Caleb.

But he’d visited her that morning, so she was out of action for tonight.

At first a little reluctant to accept his new reality and looking for the catch, Caleb had quickly adapted to his new life. He spent his days brooding in the mansion and flip-flopping between his girls; his preference for which blonde to dine on shifting with his mood.

When he missed his little blonde ex-wife, he’d choose Wednesday, who submitted completely at the mere sight of him. When his partial blindness frustrated him and his fractured skin burned, he liked the fight and feistiness of Saturday who gave almost as good as she got.

Sometimes, when he didn’t know how he really felt, he’d round up a few of them and feast on them in turn, enjoying the dynamics.

Perhaps Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, then.

He had long relinquished any guilt he had feigned and simply started to enjoy them, as he’d now been encouraged to. With the freedom to embrace his basal urges, he’d swiftly lost all the boundaries his sister had imposed, taking as he wished from these warm, willing vessels and paying no mind to the consequences. If there were any.

Honestly, he didn’t know how any of the girls were still alive, didn’t care to know. He’d leave them where they landed, drained and fractured. They would disappear for a short while, he didn’t know where, and they would return to the basement, as good as new.

Kitty was much better at fixing his ‘broken dolls’ than Lilith had ever been.

The mansion echoed with dramatic music and a haunting vocal, a sign that Kitty was awake and a building a crescendo for Caleb’s thoughts. He crossed the hall as quietly as he could, but not quietly enough. As he passed the sitting room he heard the piano concerto abruptly end and Kitty’s siren call singing him in.

He looked on towards the kitchen, where the entrance to the rabbit warren of tunnels and cells that housed his prey were, with sadness. His fun would have to wait.

He had only been residing with Kitty for a couple of months, but he already knew better than to ignore her when she called him. He didn’t have to ponder what she wanted. She wanted very little from him, in general.

She didn’t consider him her intellectual equal, which he wasn’t, so he was fine with it. It meant the pair rarely spoke in any great depth. She would only call him to garner his opinion on her new decor, to play a game of cards that she always won, or to take a drink from him.

Nothing seemed to be new in the room, and the table wasn’t set with the cribbage board. Caleb hadn’t seen much of her for a couple of days, so she was likely calling upon him because she was thirsty. Something her current appearance confirmed.

He hadn’t asked why she only fed indirectly, through him. But then, he had never gotten far in life by asking questions, so wasn’t about to start. Besides, he didn’t really mind her sitting in his lap, her long fingernails through his hair, her sharp teeth in his throat.

He might have even enjoyed it had he been allowed to touch her. Which he wasn’t. At all.

He entered the sitting room to find her standing beside the piano in that devilish silk gown he liked so much. The one that clung to every curve, emphasising her lack of undergarments. Her normally blonde curls were silver, falling wildly around her shoulders and her typically hazel eyes glowed green – her dark form.

She was definitely thirsty and completely captivating. 

She beckoned him over with her finger and he took his usual place on the sofa. She shifted gracefully into his lap and it took all he had not to press himself up against her, to caress her through the tempting slinkiness of her gown.

He reminded himself that she had granted his every waking dream, had been his saviour when he’d had no one, and that he had seven beautiful humans waiting in the dark for him to vent his frustrations on.

He dutifully clasped his hands behind his back as Kitty settled in his lap; braced himself for the sting and snare of her needle-like teeth and tried to focus on non-sexy items in the room so that no part of him would inadvertently touch her.

Wood… a cockerel…

…another cockerel… a fine bust… a portrait of Kitty in an unlaced corset…

Damn.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that after the initial tear through his tenderised flesh, Kitty drank by sweeping her tongue across the wound in short, quick bursts, like a kitten with a saucer of milk.

Lick, lick, lick… pure torture.

Caleb startled as Kitty broke the silence. She shifted on his lap. A warning.

Did you enjoy your walk? She asked him, telepathically.

He swallowed, hard, grateful for the distraction. “Yes. You were right; it was time for me to venture out again. The stars were much brighter above the old monastery ruins than they are above my balcony.”

You were gone a long while.

He mulled over the evening’s events, unsure whether to tell her everything.

Secrets are lies, Caleb, she purred in his brain.

He licked his lips. “You’ll, um, you’ll never guess who I saw at the riverside.”

Only a moment’s hesitation before Kitty presented her response. Faith?

How did she guess that? He figured that she was cheating and reading his mind. He hadn’t felt her enter his thoughts, but maybe she was just that good at it that she could slip in unnoticed. He’d already learned that her power was beyond formidable – he’d been on the sharp end of it the last time he’d tried to touch her – so this didn’t surprise him.

“Yes,” he replied. “I was just as bemused as you are; she hates nature so the last place I expected to see her was all the way out here. And she was alone; I thought Seth must have brought her out here, but there was no sign of him.”

Kitty paused for a second, before running her tongue along the length of his neck, from his collar to his jaw, slowly, causing him to tremble.

Interesting. She replied. I wonder what happened there.

“So do I,” he murmured, fighting to keep the situation platonic as she purred contentedly against his skin. “I wonder what she’s doing around here.”

Oh? You did not speak with her?

“No. Other than calling out to check it was really her. Perhaps I should have followed her.”

She sat up in his lap and tossed her curls, licking a tiny trickle of his treacle-like blood from the corner of her mouth, slowly, as she did so. He stared intently at her little pink tongue as it parted her red lips, following its movement.

“How is my lipstick?” she asked, interrupting his trance.

“Uh… perfect,” he mumbled. “Kitty?”

“Yes?”

“If I do see her again, may I invite Faith over?”

She laughed a little. “Do you need my permission?”

“Well, uh… it’s your home…”

She cooed and stroked his hair. “Oh, sweet baby, no. This is our home.”

It took him a moment to understand that having someone over was something he was actually allowed to do now. Lilith would never have allowed him to have friends over. Especially not attractive, possibly-now-single, female friends. But then, Lilith would have never allowed him to have a basement full of beautiful women to fulfil his every desire with, or chambers with a door that he could lock, or his own personal computer. All right, so that last one hadn’t been successful because the house had no electrical sockets, but still, it was a nice gesture.

Yet, he couldn’t shrug off his unease.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

She dismounted from his lap with a coy smile; her skin regained a hint of colour as she walked away. “No.”

“Should I go back out and see if I can find her?”

Kitty pivoted on her heel and fixed him with an expression that he couldn’t read. She had a few of those.

“What do you wish to do?”

“…Find Faith.”

“Then why are you still here?” She returned to the piano, turning her back to him and resuming her piece. It meant that he was dismissed.

Caleb left the opulent warmth of the sitting room at speed, hurtling back towards the entranceway, his girls all but forgotten as he imagined tracking Faith down, inviting her over…

He paused in the archway, trying to get a sense of Faith and where she might have gone. She had a very distinct scent – fresh but a little dirty.

Aha!

He could sense her on the breeze. She was still close.

In the dankness of his troll cave, as someone he used to know had once called it, Seth nursed his bruised… ego. Dizzy with guilt over his latest kill, yet sated, at least, he turned his attention to the latest flurry of knowledge he had acquired during his rendezvous with his mistress.

It was a lot.

Bob was Kitty. Kitty was back. Kitty had never left. She had residence in the old Galloway Manor. She had Caleb and the girls at the old Galloway Manor. She had Faith. Kitty and he had developed something akin to a relationship. She had taught him to read, to write, to submit, to thrive on his own misery.

It was so much to process. It was dizzying, sickening. It seared his sensitive synapses.

Each hidden memory that Kitty had coaxed had unfolded in his mind like the tattered page of an old book; dog-eared, illegible and frustratingly, still, incomplete.

To learn that Lilith was not the one to clear his memories had thrown him the most. He had traced his steps in the dark swamp of his brain, seeking the answers, the reasoning why Patrick, of all people would do such a thing as to wipe his slate clean. Patrick, who had deemed him little more than scum, unworthy of immortality, barely worthy of feeding from.

Had he taken Seth’s mind as a show of dominance? To upset Kitty, as clearly it had?

Malice? Spite? Revenge?

For pity? For amusement?

Who knew?

Seth’s story was painfully fragmented, frustratingly still out of reach, tormenting him. With every page he filled, he only sought to reveal two more blank ones. It culminated in a bleak realisation; he was still so far from his answers, from any resolution.

It also struck him with a sense of hopelessness that he may never find it.

In the solitude of his cavern, Seth had desperately scrawled these latest snippets into his bedraggled note book, as he had many times before in his existence, filling spaces between lines and around the margins as he attempted, in vain, to connect the dots of his erratic and disjointed life.

He took these precious new pieces and attempted to place them into the puzzle; his imprisonment by Kitty and subsequent affection for her. His misplaced aggression towards Lilith borne from his previously-held assumption that she had been the one to rob of him of his past.

Gah! That revelation. It wounded him deeper than any stiletto ever would.

He crumpled the booklet in his fist. If Lilith hadn’t actually been the one to wipe his memory, why had she never denied it? His mind was cast back to the night at her house, the night that Faith had fled with her merry band of morons, how Lilith had approached him as he left, her words unusually soft.

“…She’s too similar.”

“To the green-eyed woman?”

 “You asked me to do it for a very good reason. Please. Leave her buried.”

He had assumed that she was taking about Angeline, but what if she wasn’t? If Patrick had erased his memories then surely that would have included Angeline. So which green-eyed woman was Lilith referring to? Which memory had she erased in him? That of Kitty?

Perhaps. He could certainly sense a resemblance between his, no! Gah! The! The goddamn fickle fledgling and his sadistic sire. A thread of the overdramatic bound them both, for sure. He got the sense also that whatever he chose to do for either them, he should have been expected to do the opposite…

Wait, is that what Lilith had been alluding to that night?

“No,” she answered. “From corrupting yourself. Look, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave Faith alone.”

He couldn’t leave anything alone. But Lilith knew that, she had always known that. So that had not been a ridiculous warning, as he had first thought.

It had been a trap. She had wanted him to trip up.

“She deserves better than you. I hope she’s your downfall.”

And his downfall she had been.

Well played, vixen.

It was only ever when Seth felt the cold ground at the very bottom that he was motivated to get back up, and he had reached that inevitable low once more. His blinkered efforts to discover the past had led him here, to a place where he couldn’t control his own damn power, couldn’t strategise, could barely see straight. This whole endeavour was pointless, it was getting him nowhere. He could feel his feeble grip on sanity slowly loosening with every lap he did of this cerebral circle.

And for what? Faith had been right.

“I think that you got so obsessed with finding Angeline that you lost all focus and drove yourself – and everyone around you – literally insane.”

He had no idea where he might find Lilith, to challenge her. He had been unable to locate Jessica Spoon and any further pieces she held to this puzzle. And he had been so certain that she would pursue him to Forgotten Hollow; her thirst for answers was almost on par with his own.

Clearly he had misjudged Jessica, overestimated Lilith, underestimated Faith.

He had been… wrong.

With a heavy sigh, Seth pocketed the notebook of his past and the slippery spiral to insanity it promised. He lay back on the bottom of the metaphorical bottle, eerily calm, gazing up, seeking light.

Perhaps Kitty’s resurgence was a blessing in disguise. He couldn’t deny that the pull he felt towards the silver-haired demon was magnetic. In a world of people who had never given him a chance, Kitty had been a rare exception, and the only exception who was still willing to hear him out.

Was part of him still unsure about Kitty’s motivations? Of course. But as terrifying and unknown as she objectively was, deep within his core he remembered that she wouldn’t harm him. She would hurt him, yes, but while she wanted something from him, while he had a use, while he was careful about how much he pushed her, she would accept him. After all, he was, ugh, her baby.

And he could tolerate a little more hurt, surely, to get closer to a resolution, closer to meaning. Closer to a reason to scrape his arse off the goddamn floor and carry on.

I had a reason, he thought bitterly.

If he returned to the Manor, would Faith stay there? Would she tolerate him being under the same roof? Would she have any choice? If Caleb and the girls had ended up at the manor, Seth knew that something had gone wrong with the capricious companions. Perhaps a falling out with Lilith? Regardless, he couldn’t imagine that they’d had anywhere else to go.

Perhaps he could win Faith back around, in enough time.

Ah, of course, time. He had all the time in the world.

With this thought, Seth fought the almost overwhelming urge to track to the manor at that very second and bang down the door. He couldn’t afford to make any more foolish mistakes. He needed to regain composure. He needed to keep his head.

He calmed himself with the light show in his cave as the moon found its perfect position in the sky and sliced through the everlasting blackness of the vast cavern. Seth watched in awe, as if this hadn’t happened every night for decades.

He listened deeply to the silence that followed until he had absorbed it within himself.  

Until his mind, and his plan, were clear.

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