Mayfair Manor

[Okimiyage]

He can have that effect, Cian murmured, a thought half-snatched from the privacy of his own mind. To be honest, I'm surprised you tolerated him for this long. And--I know he probably won't be saying it anytime soon, but I don't mind--so--thank you for that. From both of us. Cian sighed. He looked tired; dark circles had begun to bruise beneath his eyes. That wasn't suprising, considering the past few days that he'd had. It was sheer stubbornness that had gotten him through to this point; that and the sleep deprivation high. Cian really didn't know whether he could sit through hours of genealogy.
Actually, he did know; he just didn't like admitting it, even to himself. He couldn't. He'd be asleep within minutes.
He followed her to the edge of the porch, where she had retreated after releasing his arm--the initial embrace had been more for Nicolae's benefit than his own, he suspected. Let's do this the quick and dirty way, he said, and a crooked smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
Here.
And he held out his hand for the knife.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Slowly, a mirroring smile spread to Antha's lips, her eyes glimmering with something that promised she was pleased with him. "Good boy," she murmured, taking his hand and sliding the blade across his palm herself, leaving a deep line of crimson in it's wake. She did the same to her own, her fingers curled around the back of the blade, and then it vanished again and she had brought their hands together, blood dripping, seeping between them and swapping veins. "Close your eyes," she murmured, bringing her lips briefly against his before the images began, the whole Mayfair family tree blazing through her blood and into his.
Suzanne first, the poor abducted peasant girl, tortured by Sleet, infected with his DNA, driven mad to the point of killing her parents, raped by the local aristocrats son, and by him giving birth to Deborah. Deborah, powerful with what had made her mother insane, always angry at her situation, to be so beautiful and so low. She had been young when her mother died, when the Talamascan Petyr Van Abel had come and reprimanded her for stringing her mother's rotting corpse from the ceiling, taken her away from their filthy cottage and tried to bring her into the Talamasca, but she had run from him, carrying his child, and married for money. She had been the one to purchase the Mayfair emerald, to soak it in her mother's blood, and to make from that putrid corpse a little doll to tell her secrets to. It was in complete secrecy that she had anything to do with the preternatural beings of the city, and that she had invoked a spirit stronger than anything she had ever heard of to do her bidding, for a cost, and bound it to her blood.
Her daughter---Petyr's daughter---Charlotte had always despised her mother. She was brought up as a lady, and she acted it, married into noble blood and run her estates all on her own, and yet when Deborah died she had still made the doll of bones, still soaked the Mayfair emerald in the woman's blood and strung it around her own neck as her descendants had up until the present, and when Petyr Van Abel came calling she had done as the spirits commanded, locked him away and bore by him two children, twins, before the spirits crushed him.
Jeanne-Louise and Peter had been less severe than their mother, fond of art and food and drink and pretty, shiny things. People had always said they were disturbingly close, even for twins, and when Jeanne-Louise's child had looked nothing like her husband and had, to much horror, referred to Peter as Papa, the Mayfairs, still a relatively small family, had withdrawn into themselves.
Growing up in such a way, Angelique had been the first to assert the prestige associated with the Mayfair name. Young, rich, and beautiful, she had seen the world as her oyster. When she married it had been for love, and when her eldest son came of age she had used him to unite the two branches of the Mayfair family that Deborah had created. As a mark of that union, she had been the one to create Mayfair Manor, to draw it out and watch it come to life.
Marie-Claudette was the first to toy with the spirit Deborah had branded into her blood, to see what it could do and how tightly it chained the various Mayfairs together. Outwardly, she was a demure socialite. Behind closed doors, she unleashed the power of the spirit again and again.
It was her daughter Marguerite who had taken it to the next level, who had hidden one of the rooms of the manor away behind a secret door and stolen the newborn babies born to her slaves away to that study, tried to take their spirits out and put the Mayfair spirit---their curse---within the tiny, quivering bodies. She had been the maddest of them all, or so the family said, worse than Suzanne or Deborah or Antha, and she had died a frightful old hag.
In contrast, Eden had been the angel of her family. She had loved her garden and her flowers, soft, flowing dresses and having tea in the backyard. She had taken the stray Mayfair children into her house and cared for them with infinite love and charity, and brought the ritualistic side of the Mayfair family back into the shadows.
When it came to Mary Beth, things began to get more hectic. Her early years were simple enough---loving parents, sunny days in her pretty house, the brothers that adored her. She had loved Julien for a while, dreamed of marrying him when she was very young, and then she had met Michael, who was warm and kind and modest and honest and everything Julien was not and she had married him against the family's violent outcries. Still, somehow the twins he had signed the birth certificates for had belonged to Julien by blood.
It all began to flicker after that. Blind spots in her memory, blood, screaming, the love she had developed for a cold, cruel man who had hated her, who she had tricked into marrying her despite what she knew it would end up meaning for her unborn daughter. Leaving her husband and children and all the rest of her family, taking up the old house---and there was something in the resonance of her memory, something about the house and how it was important---the fighting and anger and finally, she had died miserable and alone and entirely unloved.
Antha's memory was brief, the little bit that had spilled into Cian's mind before she had shut him out of it. Being brought up alone, chained up, terrified of the man who occasionally brought her food and screamed at her, hit her, and left her alone to take solace in the spirits that clung to her, tried to soothe her and protect her. It jumped then to the kind, ancient uncle Louis who had lived in the attic, who had listened to her secrets and loved her as a father should, who had let her stand on his feet and taught her to dance, bought her pretty new clothes and played her childish games out in the garden with her and her cousins. Louis who had died very old and very, very sick, his hand clasped around Antha's as she screamed and cried and Bianca shuffled around the yard, burning his things.
And then it ended, abruptly, as Antha threw him out, their hands parted, because she refused to let him see the things she had been through in her lifetime. Antha was nothing without her secrets. "The chain of succession," she murmured, shaking her head as if she were dizzy, "It is an odd trick of the Mayfairs, the way we write things in our blood to be passed along to our descendants."  

[Okimiyage]

Cian felt--choked, drowning in the history of the family as it tore through his mind like floodwaters through a barricade. It was only when their hands parted that he realized he had shut his eyes, and he opened them again with a little groan, blinking at the light. Well, and he looked at his hand, the blood seeping across his palms, pooling in the webbing between finger and thumb. I suppose there's no going back now, is there?
He touched his fingers to his lips, and shuddered; when his hand fell away, it left stains red as cherries on his mouth. Your ancestors didn't have an easy time of it either, it seems. No wonder they called the witching families cursed. After what he'd just seen--had seared into his mind's eye, more like--he could not blame the Talamasca for keeping a close watch on the Mayfairs. It took a morbid curiousity to find their story fascinating, but there was no shortage of that in the Talamasca. Flexing his hand, where the blood had begun to gum, he added, So, I think this makes me doubly-cursed now? If what they're saying about the Calais family is right, anyways. Which it wasn't, he reminded himself. Just hearsay and rumors. He smiled to himself--it was stupid, but he was half-inclined to wonder whether what the Talamasca was saying about their family had any truth to it.
Cian looked up, then, and that familiar crooked smile faded after a moment. Antha? May I ask--the spirit that was bound to your bloodline, generations ago--what is it? And--how did a mortal woman bind such a thing to herself? The why of the matter was not needed. Cian knew what acts were committed for love of power.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Quietly, Antha watched him through her dark lashes, her eyes glimmering in a way that was wholly suspicious. "I can't be certain how it was done," she murmured at length, taking his bloodied hands in her own and drawing him around the corner of the house, escaping the prying ears of the Mayfairs who passed through the doors and left by the gate, the tears still glimmering on their faces, "But I can guess, as you should be able to. That thing, the spirit, our curse...you met it. Last night, in the vault, when it consumed Nicolae and me and struck out against you and your siblings." Within the house, there was a shift in the air from the attic as if it knew, it heard her spilling their secrets and it wanted to do something. "It has a great number of names---in ages past, civilizations mistook it for a God and worshiped it, gave lives to it. I don't know how Deborah came across it, exactly, that has always been their secret, or exactly what arcane ritual took some piece of the spirit and infused her blood with it, only that it has since been anchored to us." She paused briefly, making a sweeping gesture at the lilac walls and crystalline floor to ceiling windows of Mayfair Manor. "The entire purpose of this mansion was to have somewhere to house the thing. It was designed and built by Mayfairs so that the part of it that was not in our blood could be locked away in the backroom of the attic, and once stored away the family sort of...forgot about it. That went on for generations, and it kept silent about it, until Nicolae went in uncle Louis' 'secret room' and found it, and it liked the strength of his blood enough that it began to possess him. But it wasn't satisfied, and it drew the other cousins into the games it had devised with Nicolae. And then...then I came along." She sighed, leaning back against the porch railing, and glanced up towards the attic. She had already explained in the vault why it had watched the Mayfairs, guided their breeding, because it wanted something strong enough to truly channel it, and that Antha had been that end result. "Our family is something of a pet to it. It likes to watch us, manipulate us, tell us what we can and cannot do. It was the thing's idea that the half-breed Mayfairs---the children of Mayfair blood by outsiders---should be exterminated. It refused to tolerate them, and the thought that 'true' Mayfairs would begin breeding with them was intolerable."
Finally, Antha shook her head. "I think that's quite enough for tonight," she sighed, taking his arm and starting back through the front door and up the stairs, "Tomorrow is going to be a very, very long day. I suggest we retire for the night." When she stepped through the door to Malakai's room, she found Sirius gone and Malakai, along with most of the Mayfair cousins who did not have their own homes to return to, passed out in his bed. Courtland and Jack had chosen the floor, a blanket torn between them. "I should have mentioned," she whispered in that tone that people use when they fear to wake those that sleep nearby, going to Malakai's closet and taking clothes from it, "When we sleep, we sleep together. We're rather like puppies in that respect." She went then to his bathroom, shrugging out of her wet dress and laying it across the side of the bathtub. When she stepped back out she had donned one of Malakai's simpler t-shirts, which swallowed her figure whole. It looked odd, the plain black shirt with the ornate Mayfair emerald resting against it, but Antha ignored the idea, sliding in between Armand and Malakai so that they stirred, Armand wriggling briefly in the sheets before returning to the gentle stillness of sleep, while Malakai rolled over and made a place for her, letting her and Dolly Jean squish him between them. Always the perfect gentleman, even in sleep.  

[Okimiyage]

Cian stripped off his shoes and socks, trying to make as little noise as possible as he moved across the naked floorboards. Unbuttoning his shirt, he made his way to the window, checking to make certain--certain that the shutters were closed, and bolted, and the curtains drawn. It was strange to realize that now it mattered. That there was something worth protecting inside this house, now. He was a Mayfair, by oath and now in blood, and moreover--he wanted this. To hell with their curses, he thought grimly. Even if Rynn hated him for it--for the rest of his life, maybe, and Cian was fully aware of his capacity to hold a grudge--he had a stake in their world now. They mattered. She mattered.

Climbing into bed, he found space for his spare frame between the pale, intertangled limbs of the sleeping Mayfairs. He could feel heat, and a heartbeat up against his own. He'd never slept like this before, so closely together; even when he'd shared someone's bed, there was always the sense of the gap between their skins, the space that they were so careful to partition between one another. This was--new, different, odd-- and --
nice.
Even if he might be disowned by his own brother if Rynn ever found out.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

For a moment as Cian slid into bed, Armand did not want to move. Half asleep as she felt weight shifting across the springs, Antha turned and pushed at her cousin, meeting with a slow, sleepy resistance so that they fought like lazy cats, pawing halfheartedly at one another until Antha finally drew her legs up and kicked him away, towards the edge of the bed, and drew Cian down beside herself before falling instantly into a slumber like death.
In sleep, her dreams flickered like fuzzy channels being flipped on a screen. They seemed to be trying to anchor themselves in her mind, she thought, but something was shuffling them, distancing them from her subconscious. However, she had no way to know that it was the thing, that cursed spirit, as it stirred in it's attic prison, reaching for Cian's mind.
In his dreams, the spirit was a man, formed with the broad, rippling physique he had so often in ancient times been glimpsed as, his long, pale hair and beard wild, his bushy brows set low and puckered above his eyes, lending his stern face a dramatic edge. It was this form, wavering and ghostly, an apparition even in his dreams, that reached out to him, embraced him as it would one of it's Mayfairs.
It was fleeting, a brief image, but any of the Mayfair cousins could have told him what it meant. The thing had wanted his blood, wanted for him to be a part of his grand design, and of the two radicals of being involved with the Mayfair family---tragic death or being swallowed into it---the thing had accepted him as one of it's pets.
"Seven o'clock, time to get up you lazy bums!" All across the room there was the collective murmur of groggy groans, yawns and growling, pillows or sheets being pulled over heads to drown out Lawrence's voice as he went around the room, shaking his cousins into consciousness. "Come on, get the hell up, we have two hours until we have to be at the church." As the bodies slowly began to rise, stumbling and whining and stretching their limbs and backs, a number of curses were muttered against Lawrence. Among the many family traits of the Mayfairs, they were not morning people.
Antha came to clutching to Cian as if he were a teddy bear, Malakai's arm thrown around her waist and Pierce's head resting at her feet. "Goddamn the bloody morning," she muttered beneath her breath as she rose, shrugging off other people's limbs, and crawled off the bed, stumbling towards the bathroom to brush her teeth.
This was when Jacob neared the door, met by half a dozen voices telling him to come in before he could knock. Quite used to this, the boy entered quietly, going to lay the dry cleaning bag in his arms across the back of the nearest chair. "The suit for Mr. Calais," he said softly, his red-rimmed eyes watching the floor, "Monsieur Mayfair has asked me to inform you that breakfast will consist of leftovers."
"Thank you, Jacob," Antha said sincerely to the boy, reemerging from the bathroom and going to lay a light kiss upon his forehead, taking his face in her hands, "Now go get dressed. We can survive without you for an hour."
He nodded, turning and leaving as the Mayfairs began shuffling out and down the stairs into the kitchen, removing plated from the refrigerator and picking at them. Finally there was only Antha, Cian, and Cyrus dragging Malakai out of his bed by the feet. When it came to sleeping, Malakai was the master. "Not hungry?" Antha asked Cyrus, to which he shook his head and released Malakai, letting him fall to the floor and settle there, "Me neither."
"Sorry," Cyrus sighed, scratching his auburn hair and reaching across the bed to offer his hand to Cian, "We haven't really met yet. Cyrus Mayfair, one of Stefan's grandsons." Along with his brother Armand, Cyrus was one of the two oldest of Antha's generation, bordering dangerously on his thirties, and it showed. The wild behavior his cousins had developed due to one another's company when they were young was not so evident with him---his eyes did not sparkle wickedly, his tone did not promise some outlandish or secretive train of thought, and his air did not leave one expecting theatricals. All in all, compared to the rest of them, he was almost disturbingly normal. "Antha?" he asked, gesturing towards her brother on the floor, at which point the girl sighed and swooped down upon him all at once, shaking him with her entire body and shouting for him to wake up, a routine natural enough to assume it was done often.  

[Okimiyage]

Cian rose groggily with the rest of the heap, rubbing sleep from his eyes. His entire body ached. The dreams hadn't helped. Gods and monsters and bloodlines--he'd been spending too much time around witches.
When Cyrus's hand was proffered, Cian accepted it briefly, long enough to voice the opinion that it was nice to meet him, even if it was at ungodly hours of the morning.
Gathering up the suit laid out for him--perfectly tailored, he realized, although that did not surprise him--he dressed as though sleep-walking, and shuffled into the bathroom to scrub his face. The shock of the cold water restored him, and when he re-emerged, running his hands along the shadow of stubble upon his jaw, he felt halfway human again. Or at least close enough to make a decent imitation.
He groped his way downstairs, navigating his way though the halls through a haze of exhaustion. In the kitchen, he was greeted by an array of cold meats and the scent of brewing coffee. The latter, he went for like a bloodhound on a trace.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

When Courtland returned, finding Malakai stumbling and falling and crawling towards the bathroom, he had combed his pretty blond hair and donned his expensive, sharply cut white suit. Antha, already draped in fine white silk, the hem of the flaring skirts touching her knees, went straight for the glass of white wine held in his hands. "Did you ever think we'd really have to be doing this?" he sighed as she turned her back to him and gathered her red curls out of the way as he went to work on the row of small buttons on her dress.
Antha only smiled grimly, turning and adjusting his cornflower blue tie. "We'll be fine. Just keep your eyes forward."
Downstairs, Dolly Jean was the one to hand Cian his coffee cup, bustling around the kitchen cleaning up after her cousins. Julien had stationed himself at the dining room table, fully dressed and groomed, a cup of coffee sitting on the table beside him and the morning newspaper in his hands. Stefan was all the rage today, of course, though there was quite a touching obituary in the society section. "Come on, everybody," Lawrence was shouting through the house, "Get dressed, let's go!"
"Calm the hell down," Antha sighed, flowing down the stairs with that odd grace of high heels and experience, laying a light hand on his arm and then wandering off to find Cian. "There you are," she murmured, going to brush her fingers through his hair. Her own had been pinned beautifully on the back of her head in tight coils with Marie-Claudette's antique silver and diamond pins, little curls framing her face, upon which the fatigue of the last few days was hidden away beneath the expert touches of make-up. "Lovely. I'm glad the tailor could finish it in time," she murmured, picking at his suit the way women do, perfecting it, "Are you about ready? It's time to head to the church."  

[Okimiyage]

Cian accepted the mug of steaming liquid from Dolly-Jean, with a grateful, Thank you as their fingers brushed. The smile he offered was a decent attempt, as seven-o'-clock smiles went. He liked Dolly-Jean; she reminded him of Liesse, in the way that she would look at things sometimes. And being in her quiet company made him feel less of a mute.
Cian sipped gingerly at his coffee, trying not to burn his tongue and especially to avoid even the tiniest speck on his suit. Wearing white was going to be stressful for him; Cian had always been the sort of child that managed to muddy formalwear despite a total absence of dirt. When their parents had died, the Calais orphans had held an empty-casket funeral, and Cian had fled into the woods for hours, until well after sunset, and returned with his black suit turned brown with filth. He'd hated funerals. But this--for Stefan, and the Mayfair name--he would bear this.
As Antha brushed invisible dust from his lapels, Cian readjusted his crooked tie and made it an excuse to catch her hand. Antha, it's just come back from the cleaners. I don't think you can get much more blindingly immaculate than this suit. he pointed out, and his warm laugh accompanied the message. Then, gently removing her hands, he gave her palm a kiss, and released her. I'm ready whenever you are. Shall we?  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Antha smiled gently at this, as if to admit that he was right, yet still she smoothed down his tie and adjusted his lapels. It was the first time the girl really admitted to herself that she actually quite liked Cian. Perhaps it was the part of her that wanted to equate him with Rynn finally going quiet and vanishing that made up her mind on the matter---after all, Rynn wouldn't have been sitting there, going to Stefan's funeral with them, partaking in all the rituals of being a family, and a large one at that.
Outside, there was the blaring of a car horn that brought the Mayfairs to converge in the atrium, filing out the door in a wave of white, all pale skin and white cloth, to cram into the taxis lined down the street, some of which were already filled with Mayfair aunts and uncles. Antha chose the town car, taking Cian's hand and slipping into the garage after Courtland. Once they were in the car, locked away with Jack, who was behind the wheel, and Thorne---the latter introduced himself briefly to Cian, grinning and brushing his purple-dyed hair from his eyes---the radio began to blare and suddenly the Mayfairs were all singing, laughing at one another, because these were the last moments in which they could pretend the awful thing hadn't happened.
St. Louis Cathedral was, in the tradition of all the historic Catholic churches, outrageously ornate. All white marble and intricate stained glass, golden crosses and breathtaking murals. Today, it was as packed as possible. Stefan had been greatly popular during his long life, revered by the community and loved intensely by his friends and family, all of whom now sat or stood listening to the service that droned on for most of the day while they clutched their rosaries and watched their feet. Within the Mayfair family, Catholicism was handed down like a pretty trinket, to be taken out on special occasions and then put away and forgotten again, and so they went through the motions and then went silent and withdrew into their own minds. Antha had kept Cian close to her all this while, brought him to sit beside her in the front pew and held to him after that, her hand on his arm. She cried most of this time, silently, as did most of the family. When they filed back outside and into their cars, heading to the cemetery, she had dragged him with her again, clung to him with her gaze on the ground.
The Mayfair Clock, the burial place of all Mayfairs, consisted of twelve small mausoleums set evenly around a large marble circle inscribed with symbols lost to history and latin verses that spoke cryptically of death and the beyond. It was here that they gathered, watching Julien, Remy, Barclay, Danny, Lionel, and Armand carry the gleaming black casket laden with flowers to the little marble structure and place it gingerly within and reseal the door.
The cousins left as soon as the body was gone and done with, slipping out of the crowd and fleeing to the cars to return to Mayfair Manor before it was swarmed by every living being that shared their name. Most of them went to the library to lock themselves away with the contents of an entire bar; Antha went to her tree house, squirreling herself away with a cigarette and the last eighth of a bottle of wine.  

[Okimiyage]

Cian wasn't religious, but he managed to keep up--in appearance, at least--by bowing his head, and clasping his hands, and keeping an eye on the surrounding attendees. He had no right to cry for the man, whom he'd barely known--but he could at least pay his respects. After the priest had spoken, their mass said for the dead, they filed out to the family mausoleums, and made a somber-faced crowd about the casket piled high with flowers. He wondered whether he, too, would one day be entombed in one of these marble temples. He wondered where Rynn would be buried, now that the crypts were collapsed.
The sun was rising in the sky, and by the time they had resealed the mausoleum, sweat was beading on the brow of a number of the funeral attendees. They were eager to escape; when the service was done with, they broke for their cars, and their air-conditioning, in a flood. Cian accompanied Antha in the town-car upon the return trip once again. This time, there was no singing. He spent most of the time watching the landscape pass by through the car window, his hand clasping Antha's upon the seat between them.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

The spirits, who had loved Stefan so well, had let the sun shine brilliantly upon the funeral. But now that it was done with and the Mayfairs were all returning to shelter, the dark clouds had begun to brew in the sky again, sprinkling the sun-warmed ground with small raindrops that would soon become another downpour, a flood for Antha's swamp.
In the library, the cousins were silent. They listened to the open and close of the door below and swilled their bottles of alcohol, sitting around with all the movement of the dead. Of the entire group of them, all the cousins that belonged to their generation, only Antha and Dorian were missing.
The house was full again by now, though far from alive, with the sea of white-clad mourners dabbing at their eyes with cotton handkerchiefs, picking idly at food they had no intention of eating. Some of them passed through Stefan's room, running their fingers lovingly over his things and laying their flowers on his tidy bed. Jacob in particular hovered around the room, setting things back straight when they were handled, adjusting and readjusting the curtains, the bedspread, the oriental carpet on the floor.
"Is someone watching the pool?" This from Cyrus, who said it with a small start to his cousins as he glanced around at them, realizing that if someone was, it wasn't one of them.
Courtland, propped against the wall and swirling the dark contents of a bottle of rum around, scoffed at the question. "She's in the tree house," he murmured, never looking at them, "But she won't play at suicide this time. There's too much at risk to be gambling idly with her life. No, she'll drink, and she'll think herself into an even deeper depression, and finally she'll find another body to drive away the loneliness."
"In other words," Armand paraphrased for no one in particular, more than just a little bitter, "You. Courtland, her trusty pet Mayfair slut."
"Give it a ******** break, Armand," the boy hissed back, too drunk to go picking a real fight, "We're in the middle of a goddamn wake, just lay off."
"Both of you." This from Cyrus, in his quiet tone, looking between his brother and his cousin. "Let's just...let's all shut up, okay?"
Across the yard, Antha laughed in spite of herself. It wasn't a Mayfair event without a fight. Parties, funerals, births, holidays...none of these ever passed without a dispute between two Mayfairs, though admittedly it was usually Julien and herself that did the fighting. But this was for Stefan, all of it, and he had hated to see them fight so for his sake---his memory---Antha kept her distance from the house and from Julien.
Antha, after releasing Cian for the first time the whole long day, was happy to lay on the tired boards of her tree house, watching the jerking movements of the leaves outside as the slow raindrops struck them. The cigarette was gone, the wine was finished, and she laid like something limp and lifeless upon the creaking boards, ignoring the touch of the filthy planks on her pretty white dress, her green eyes dark, glassy before she closed them and let herself drift off, quietly, into the darkness of sweet, dreamless sleep.
Dreamless, at least, until she heard her name called sweetly across the distance. Dreamless until she felt the cold splash of water beneath her bare feet, the brush of greenery against her arms as she moved, wading through something she could not see in the darkness of a moonless, starless night. There was no thought as to why she was following the sound of her name, this foreign voice that beckoned her, only confusion as to where it was and how to get to it through the marsh.
It couldn't have been more than a solitary minute before she woke, but Antha found herself considerably disturbed by the fleeting dream. Enough so that the darkness around her was threatening and like a child convinced that something lived in the space beneath their bed, she feared to leave her tree house. This was the point at which she called for Cian, frantically, because being alone in the darkness suddenly seemed the most awful idea in the world.
Well, the second most awful at any rate. Nothing would persuade her to be in the same house as Julien at the moment.  

[Okimiyage]

Cian had made his way upstairs while the cousins had made their way to the liquor cabinet, and now he re-emerged in 'casual clothing'--or at least as casual as the Mayfairs got, which meant that the distressed jeans and simple black V-neck shirt he was wearing probably cost a few hundred dollars combined. He clattered down the stairs still wearing his dress shoes; he couldn't find another pair of men's shoes in the same size as his own, and didn't want to stay inside long enough to hunt for them. Cian had never been one for funerals, but he had stuck it out for Antha and for the memory of Stefan, but now he just wanted to be away from all of the cousins.
He was in the gardens, hunkered down in the grass, watching the rain splash from the petals of flowers, when he heard someone calling his name. Cian almost didn't recognize the voice, it was so very faint--
He almost made it to his feet before a foot hit him in the back of the head, and forced him down again.
"I think it would be best if here you stay,
A third wheel who'd only get in the way.
My cousin's time is very dear
I'm sure she'd rather have me near."
The speaker was a fair-haired boy, tall and slim and narrow of frame--a Mayfair, obviously, for he wore the immaculate white suit of one of the attendees of the funeral. In one hand, he carried a rose; the thorns had pierced his palm, buried inside his skin almost to the stem, but he showed no sign of discomfort. With a cold smile, he lifted his foot off of Cian's shoulder, and turned to walk away.
With a grimace, the Calais boy flicked the mud off his shirt. It was one thing to be eccentric--as a Mayfair, he had a right to be, practically--but what kind of a*****e went around speaking poetry to people and physically assaulting total strangers?
Still, he had to try to make a good impression. Which meant that even though Cian was angry--he wasn't going to pick a fight with this guy. Instead he stood up, and followed the unnamed cousin to the tree-house. Dorian climbed the rungs with the ease of someone who'd spent his childhood scampering through the trees; halfway up, he glanced down and realized that Cian had followed him.
"Idiot," he muttered, under his breath.