Night was in the sky, and Helene knew she had to hurry. It polluted the air like some sinister fume and hovered, bird-like, above the city. Already there were traces of lantern-light pooling from apartment-windows and the cracks of alehouse doors. There were shadows where there had been no shadows previously – dark, heavy things that lined the pavement and grinned from around corners.

The boy was late.

He was late like he was always late, but still she fidgeted. She scowled at the door of the drinking hole as though to bore through it with her eyes alone. Laughter, ripe and reeking, trickled from the open windows, and Helene found herself making a fourth round down the street to escape it. She had to time her breath and count her steps to keep her mind from caving in altogether. Already her spirit was beginning to wind down; she had to save what she might.

(He was gone – gone gone gone. He was gone and she was left to trudge the streets alone.)

Helene tried to recall a place in time when the thought of nighttime had filled her with exhilaration instead of fear, when her veins had hummed with excitement and her heart perched on her tongue. She dug her teeth into her lips to stub the life out of the thought. It shamed her, the sweat that slicked her palms and set her flesh on fire. She cast aside the deep-seated nausea in her stomach and aimed her eyes ahead.

(Was there a reason he had left? There had to be one. Seven years… he couldn’t vanish into thin air after all that time, unmarked and untraceable.)

Helene side-stepped the open sewers that lined the streets like repugnant mouths; she kept to the doors instead. These were rickety with rot, far from the niceties of the nobler homes. The marks she had chalked in the previous night were still there, slightly smudged but overlooked by the patrons who leaned in the doorways and leered at the women. Alehouses, cellars, pot-shops and even a little soup-kitchen: no building had gone unnoticed. Even in her state she had been scrupulous. Holding her breath, she stepped onto a sunken threshold to trace the wood. The whiteness of the scratch was sharp and brutal; abysmal.

There were monsters in that darkness. They dozed somewhere beyond the slant of doorway, curled into the cold damp like hideous cocoons in anticipation of their time. Together – always together – they had played exterminators. In the night they had enacted a brutal game of hide-and-search, seeking out the lairs before the monstrous butterflies came to their prime. Scouting the streets in the old days, she had walked with a rhyme in her head and pride in her heart. (Two for two and one for one, he won’t last long beneath the sun.) Thinking of it now brought to her a strange, steely breed of calm.

Sucking on comfort, she returned to her vigil.

It wasn’t long then until the door rolled open. Screams and giggles blared through the streets, conspicuous as fog signals, and from the clatter clambered the stooped, tussled figure of a man. Edwin. Like a lioness starved for prey, she was upon him in an instant.

“Where have you been?” She grabbed his shoulders and shook so hard that his head rattled back and forth on his stick of a neck. Spittle trickled from the boy’s hobbling lips; he stunk of sweat and unwashed bed-sheets. His mouth opened and closed, lax as a fish’s. His pasty face had the look of a man who had been dunked, naked, into cold water.

“Hey, hey, watch it!” There was booze on his breath, but he didn’t fight back. Edwin staggered a little, lost in this new world full of sewage-smells and void of women. His shirt was splattered and undone, torn at the hem, and Helene lost herself at the sight of him.

Quick and springy with nerves, her arm moved of its own accord. The smack of skin on skin resounded in her ears: a horribly-satisfying falsetto.

“You promised!” Disgusted, she flung him away from her and watched him wobble in place like a rag doll. He didn’t object – he had not once raised a gripe in the few days she had known him. Though she yearned to keep her anger, already Helene could feel the slow lull of blood leaving her cheeks.

What more could she expect of the boy? Had it really been in her sights to snag an accomplice of her own? It was a foolish tactic, and she was certain he would never have approved. It was a risk, a senseless danger – but she knew she couldn’t do it alone.

It bothered her to see him looking so wan – the mark of her palm stood on his cheek like blood – and for a moment she considered closing the whole thing off. ‘Go hide under your blankets,’ she was tempted to sneer, snide but merciful. It would be a kindness to them both (she would never need to face the shadows alone – not tonight) but the words sat on her lips, unborn. ‘Forget your promise.’

The words that came instead were cold and unforgiving: a condemnation.

“You’re late already. Let’s go.”

Edwin didn’t protest. He swung his head a little to the side and stepped into stride behind her, one hand feeling for his face.

“Yoo-hoo!” A woman swung her torso from the window, breasts dribbling from her dress. Irritated, Helene turned her head while Edwin stopped to stare. Dully she wondered what he saw in those women he visited, what coaxed him back night after night. Was it their plumpness that enticed him, the softness of their cheeks and the smoothness of their hands? She was suddenly aware of the sharpness of her own bones, the long angularity of her face coupled with the dark wilderness of her hair.

With him at her side she had never felt as blame-worthy as she did now. (But he was gone – gone, gone, GONE) and she had work to do.

“I said, let’s go!” This time she reached to tug the boy’s arm. Huffing somewhat, he set his sights away from the giggling woman and turned again to follow.

“Dunno why you’d drag me along,” Edwin mumbled as they turned along the streets, bitter at being hauled from his play. His ears were tuned wistfully toward the sound of laughter. It would be gone soon, swallowed by a swarm of alleyways and constant boulevards. “You’re the one’t knows the trade, not I.”

“Walk,” Helene answered shortly, groping distractedly for the bulging bundle she had stashed in her coat. It was surprising, the effort she had to spend to keep her legs from buckling. There was night ahead of them, stretched like an orifice waiting to swallow. Edwin had fallen silent in favor of nursing his bruised skin, and her head was much too loud for conversation. A mismatched pair, they would come to greet the unknown halfway.

She told herself that there was no claim to the boy’s words – he was only sullen at being kept away from his whores – and yet, and yet…

Perhaps he had swatted at the truth.

Helene knew how sharp to make the stakes and which doors to mark.

She knew which signs to look for and where they lingered most.

She even knew a bit about where they left their bloated dead.

What she didn’t know was how to be alone.