Throne of Shadows, Cast in Blood

The rain didn’t feel like a cleansing ritual; it felt like an insult. It was a cold, relentless drizzle that turned the cemetery grounds into a hungry, dark sludge. Natalie stood at the end of the open grave, her black coat buttoned to her chin. She felt strangely hollow, as if the wind were blowing right through her ribs. A few steps behind her stood a small group of people–mostly neighbors from their apartment complex and a few colleagues from her mother’s accounting firm. No extended family. No old friends from distant cities. Just a handful of polite strangers watching a woman they barely knew return to the dirt. “Ashes to ashes,” the minister droned amidst the rain. Natalie didn’t listen to the prayer. Her focus was on her mother’s mahogany casket. Her mother, Elena Sterling, had died at fifty-two looking like a woman of eighty. The doctors had been baffled. “An unexplained collapse of the hematopoetic system,” they’d said in hushed, clinical tones. To Natalie, it just looked like her mother had simply run out of life. Like a candle that had burned twice as bright to keep a dark room lit, only to flicker out the moment Natalie finished her final exams. It had always been just the two of them. Now, all of a sudden, she’s alone. As the first shovel of dirt hit the wood with a hollow thud, Natalie’s head throbbed. It started in her left eye–a sharp, rhythmic pulsing. She checked her phone. Three days until the full moon. Usually the migraines don’t start this early. She reached into her pocket, her fingers brushing against the small, amber plastic bottle. It had several pills in it and soon it would run out. “Don’t skip a dose, Nat,” her mother’s voice echoed in her mind, frail and urgent. “It keeps the blood quiet.” “Are you alright, dear?” Natalie blinked, realizing she had been swaying. Mrs. Gable, her boss and the executive secretary of the firm where Natalie had just started her internship, placed a gloved hand on her arm. “I’m fine, Mrs. Gable, Thank you.” She lied, her voice rasping. “Must be the weather.” “You should head home. Take the rest of the week off,” Mrs. Gable said kindly. “Mr. Blackwood will be back from the London office on Monday. Things around the office will be…intense. You’ll need your strength.” “I’ll be at the office on Monday,” Natalie insisted in a firm voice. She needed the work. She needed the distraction. If she sat alone in their quiet, sterile apartment, she would drown in sadness. The reception was brief. By 4:00PM, Natalie was alone in their two-bedroom high-rise apartment. She sat on the floor, back against the floor-to-ceiling glass that looked out over the city grid–a sea of concrete, steel, and glass. Her mother had always chosen apartments like this: glass, steel, and at least twenty stories above the ground. Always miles away from any forest. “High enough to see them coming,” her mother used to joke. But she never said who they were. Natalie let her head rest on her knees. A memory flickered–a sharp vivid fragment from when she was around 7 or 8 in Chicago. They had been walking from the city library when she spotted a stray dog. A large, gray husky with intelligent eyes darting into a small wooded park. Entranced, Natalie had let go of her mother’s hand and started toward the treeline. The reaction had been visceral. Almost violent. Her mother hadn’t just called her back; she had tackled her. Elena had scooped Natalie up with a strength that seemed impossible for her thin frame, her face pale and eyes darting toward the shadows of the trees as if they were lined with snipers. “Never the woods, Natalie,” her mother had hissed, voice trembling. “The forest is a dangerous place. We stay in the concrete, we stay in the open where people can see us. Promise me.” Natalie had promised. She spent her childhood in libraries, museums, and concrete playgrounds. Her mother said she had a rare “environmental allergy” to pollen and forest mold. Weeks after that day in Chicago, they moved to another city. Natalie stood up, her joints popping. The migraine was a dull roar now. A rythmic thrumming that matched the blinking red light of the smoke detector. She walked to the kitchen and opened the spice cabinet. Hidden behind a tin of expensive Earl Grey tea that her mother loved to drink was the bottle of medicine. For fifteen years, these pills had been her salvation. Her mother claimed they were homeopathic–a blend of rare herbs from a specialist friend back east. They tasted like bitter earth and crushed pennies. These will run out soon, and she doesn’t know where else to get them or how to reach her mother’s friend. Natalie looked at the amber bottle. There was a label but no pharmacy name. No doctor. Just a hand-drawn symbol: a small stylized crescent moon entwined with a root. She opened the bottle and took another pill, her mother’s words ringing in her head, “you have a sensitive constitution like your father, Nat.” That was the only time her father was ever mentioned. A source of weakness. A man who left before she was born because he couldn’t handle the “burden” of a family. A man whose “bad blood” had given her these agonizing headaches. She moved to her mother’s bedroom. The air still held the faint, medical scent of Elena’s final weeks. The illness had been aggressive. In a matter of months, her mother’s vibrant, watchful energy had vanished. She had become translucent. Natalie remembered sitting by her bed, holding her mother’s hand that felt cold and looked like dry parchment. She sat on the bed and pulled open the drawer of her mother’s bedside table. Inside was a stack of local maps from every city they had lived–in Chicago, New York, Miami, San Francisco. On every map, her mother had meticulously marked certain areas with red “X” s. Natalie looked closer. The marks weren’t over high-crime neighborhoods. The were over parks. Nature reserves. National forests. Places they made sure to stay away from. Every place they lived was a calculated distance away from the mountains. At the bottom of the drawer lay a single envelope with her name. Natalie. She recognized her mother’s handwriting. Inside was not a letter, but a pressed flower with white petals that looked like a lily but felt velvet. Until the end, her mother was cryptic. The sun began to set, casting long bruised shadows across the room. Natalie’s vision suddenly doubled. A sound–high-pitched and vibrating–ripped through her skull. It was the sound of a siren about three miles away, but to Natalie, it sounded like it was inside the room. She dropped to her knees, clutching her ears. Her heart began to gallop. 120bpm…140bpm… She staggered toward the kitchen, desperate for water, but as she passed the hallway mirror, she stopped. The girl in the reflection looked like her, but the eyes were wrong. The storm-gray irises she had seen every day of her life were flickering, bleeding into a startling, molten gold. Beneath the skin on her neck and shoulders were faint, glowing lines–like a map of veins made of starlight–appearing and disappearing with every thud of her heart. “What the f*ck is wrong with me?”