Direwood by Catherine Yu

Author:Catherine Yu [Yu, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Page Street Publishing
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

As the evening wears on and the music dwindles, Padraic tells me about his life … mostly his undead one.

“Perhaps the easiest way to understand it is through these trinkets I carry,” the vampire says. He shows me his rings again—the black signet on his small finger with the looping cursive M, and the dark red garnet glittering on his right hand. He nods to the one on my own hand, the black ring engraved with two hands clasping a crowned heart. The favorite’s ring.

His fingers are very slender, long and tapered. His hands are beautiful and thin—a pianist’s hands, enviably graceful if not for their luster, which reminds me so much of embalmment. Flesh made fleshless. Of course, one of those lovely fingers is permanently gone because of his spiteful counterpart.

“How could you let her treat you like this?” I ask. He’s missing a digit because of Kate, and yet they remain so fiercely loyal to each other.

He shows me the dark garnet on his finger, shaped like a teardrop. “She gave this to me, willingly, from her own hand. Even as a newborn, when her thoughts were marred completely by the hunger. We have been together ever since she turned. Always together.”

For decades Padraic had lived alone, depleting towns in Europe, keeping more and more to the shadows over time as humans became savvier. When he saw the girl, black-haired and sharp-tongued and alone in the alley, his first thought had been to drain her.

“I liked how she shouted at me,” the vampire says, sounding amused now. “She said all manner of awful things a human girl should never say to a monster. Quite creative and ghastly. I began to think maybe she was meant to be a monster herself.”

He turned her, and she gave herself the name Kate when she awoke, black-eyed and bloodless like him.

“Did you name yourself too?” I ask him.

He looks startled by my question. “No,” he says slowly. “I heard myself called that. Before I tore out my master’s throat, I heard him call out Padraic, just once. I suppose he named me then. Or else, it had once been my human name.”

“Are you Kate’s master?” I’m curious about how they work together, given her vicious temperament. She hurts Padraic, and he does nothing to stop her.

“Kate has no master.” Padraic grins. “I am her maker, but never her master. She is fully my equal.”

She stays in the church because he does. I file away this information carefully … it feels important in a way I don’t quite understand yet. I want to remember it. Kate had a choice—and this is what she chose. Who she chose.

“You already know about the signet ring,” Padraic continues. “It was the first one I collected when I awoke as a vampire.”

For he had immediately turned on his old master as soon as he sprung back from the dead. He’d reached forward and tore out his pale throat. Padraic was hungry, so hungry that he tried to feed on the dead vampire himself.

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