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The season has just turned. For the first time in recorded history, Death has a homestead in the Colorado Rockies.
She has been in this body for one hundred and fifty-two consecutive years, and married by natural law for ninety-six of them. Sometimes she marvels at it: not now, but sometimes, she will go out into the garden of her cottage and look up at the night sky’s great, glittering mass, wondering what she will do – how far she will go – for a girl. She will remember when she used to be boundless, and she will think about tragic young Agatha Harkness, teeth bared around the magick of a corpse. She will regret nothing.
Now is smaller, though not by much. There is still a vast night overhead, and she is still in the garden, where Rio has just begun to coax her winter vegetables into bloom. The night is quiet, and improbably, Agatha is, too.
It is an issue of focus: flanked on all sides by burgeoning squash, Rio stands sentinel as Agatha fastens the tie of her cloak. It is French, and old, and finicky for both – the Lady Death, little more than a doll for her lover to pose. It feels, in a sense, meditative.
She likes it, she thinks.
The cloak settles around Rio’s shoulders, green like the leaves of her squash, like the mass of the forest due east. Satisfied, Agatha murmurs: “You remember what to say if you need to call a halt?”
At once, Rio answers: “Yes.”
She is impatient; she has been called greedy on more than one occasion. Agatha fixes her with a look, brow raised to a point, that makes Rio wish she had the comfort of layers – petticoats with which to mask the tremor in her metacarpals.
Swallowing, she speaks the phrase. It is in an ancient tongue that she has no other use for anymore.
Pleasure breaks over Agatha’s face like sunlight, and Rio – who has not experienced something new like this since the first living creatures came upon the earth – cannot breathe for loving her.
“Good girl,” Agatha says matter-of-factly. Her palms smooth over the caps of Rio’s cloaked shoulders, framing her. Slowly, as though to savour, she whispers: “Then run.”
Rio fancies she can see the change happening in Agatha’s body: she lengthens into a predator by degrees, taller and sharper. Her fingers flex with magick when they pull apart.
The dainty, roughshod little cloak flutters behind her when Rio takes off into the tree line, grinning like a madwoman.
—
She runs awhile. Her sense of time is distorted by several factors. All she knows is that the ground slopes upward eventually, and when it does, she turns left.
The terrain is unkind here. It is jagged with roots and boulders, and Rio is bound and determined not to cheat – they agreed no magick for her, in a fit of contagious ambition – so she is slow to pick through it. Precision is so difficult in the guise of an animal thing. She does not know how they manage, and for the most part, she does not care. (Agatha’s curiosity about her world, somehow not yet poisoned by the vitriol it has dealt her, is partly contagious, too.)
Fed up, she sheds her cloak and tears a high slit into the shift beneath it. The cloak smells like her, like pomegranate and lye; she balls it up and stashes it in the hollow of a tree thirty paces east, considering her next move.
There is a lake past the ridge; when the earth turns to gravel under her feet, she knows she is close.
The moon is full, casting her pale light in lines over the water, and Rio dives. She swims until she imagines a stitch would have developed in her side. She pictures pain curling between her ribs, breath whistling behind her teeth, tells that reveal to Agatha where she is hiding and how .
It would be cheating, she thinks, to stay in the water, so she emerges from the southern edge of the lake in short order. In a happy coincidence, the too-thin shift clings to what curves she has.
Agatha likes her wet – she likes Rio’s hair shining with rainwater, the way it runs in rivulets along the jut of her collarbone. Agatha, broadly, likes her affected by nature: streaked with dirt, warm with fire. She enjoys a dramatic juxtaposition.
Rio, who has learnt by now to view the scope of her own beauty largely through Agatha’s touch, supposes she must like this, too.
—
It’s some years earlier, if you subscribe to that sort of thing.
Agatha has accumulated a sprawling estate in east Mayfair. It spans three acres, most of which is grounds. Death has a particular fondness for the apple orchard tucked into the back left corner of the property – Agatha knows little about horticulture and has not cared especially to learn, and so she mostly leaves Death to her playground.
A number of people think she is the Lady’s gardener. They are not incorrect, exactly.
She is in the orchard now, watching Agatha fashion a grave for the man who was, in all technicality, her second husband. This particular marriage lasted precisely thirty-six minutes. In one aspect, Death gorges herself on the gossamer thread of his soul, prematurely cut – in the other, she admires the rippling in Agatha’s forearms as she shapes her raw magick into a spade.
“You spoil me,” she purrs. Agatha’s laugh rings in the trees, sweat beading on her brow. She is a being without parallel.
“Never let it be said that I am not a generous wife.”
Her actual wedding band shines on her finger again, freshly unglamoured. It catches what fading sunlight is left as she claws her arcane demands into the air – a resting place, a requiem. Generous indeed for the late Lord Harkness, who currently regales Death with every foul expletive he can come up with for his murderess.
“You gave chase,” Death drawls, at length. “Why?”
Agatha pauses. A wicked grin curves slow over her perfect lips.
“Anticipation is a potent drug, my love,” she murmurs. “A victory is only as sweet as its earning. Come here, won’t you, and help me lift him?”
Death comes. She hoists the dead man’s legs while Agatha grapples with his torso. A fine mist of Death’s freshly-tilled soil transfers from his hair to her blouse, and together they pitch him into the hole.
“There we go,” Agatha sighs, surveying her work. She brushes him from her hands, loose dirt spilling over and down. Death does not know why she stares so intensely until Agatha glances up, points one accusatory finger, and says: “I know that look. You’re jealous .”
“Always and most ardently,” Death says, taking it in stride. She tilts her head in such a way that bones would crack, if they could. “Will you chase me like you chased him?”
“Certainly,” says Agatha. “But not here.”
—
It becomes immediately clear that Rio’s efforts were somewhat in vain. No sooner has she wrung the water from her shift, coming to the unfortunate realisation that the lakebed is terribly wanting in the way of cover, than a flash of violet has issued from the wood to her right. She bolts in the opposite direction, weaving her way into the trees herself.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are…”
Rio imagines her body would tire about now. Her ribs would ache and her legs would burn, wrought with lactic acid. It is a convenient timing, but plausible – she swam quite far, and she was not dressed in such a way to suggest any particular athleticism.
Fresh earth shifts beneath her bare feet, pockets of stone biting into her soles; she allows herself to fumble. Her weight pitches over a twig, and its snap reverberates through the wood.
Behind her, Agatha begins to hold her breath. Softly, Rio thinks: oh.
Giddily, she counts it out: the outside length of time she has before this disorientation will end, before she will have a sense of the board again. She knows approximately how long Agatha has before she must yield, gasping, revealing herself.
She pictures the contraction of her beloved’s lungs, not unlike what becomes of them when Rio’s hand stretches over the delicate column of her throat – the spasming, the need, the biological imperative. She feels herself getting wetter.
Predictably, Agatha lights on her distraction. It is easy to fantasise that she is advantaged in every way over Rio, exhausted and aroused. Suddenly and all at once, her vision tilts: rough hands brand heat into her shoulder and hip, and she is crowded against the nearest trunk. There her breasts rub up against the unyielding plane of Agatha’s sternum, and Rio is so sensitive – has been since the garden, since Agatha first went into this creature, with her talons and her unchecked hunger – that her jaw creaks wide on a gasp.
“Well, well, well,” Agatha murmurs. Her breath is hot over Rio’s cheek, where she is soft and blushing. Her skin gives under the sharpness of Agatha’s fingernails. It caves in, closer to her skeleton, and she wishes she could bleed the way her beloved does – this body of hers is not nearly so fragile as she would like . “Got you.”
“So you have,” Rio husks, vaguely struggling. She cannot mask her desire, and does not bother to try. “Oops.”
Agatha digs in. Rio imagines a flash of pain along her jaw, a spark so bright it drowns out the other, gentler things. She inhales sharply with her own constructed lungs, and for the first time, feels the cage.
“Most people would be terrified, now,” Agatha drawls. She is teasing Rio, calling her to remember her character, but Rio does remember: she just doesn’t care .
“I am not most people,” she says, and Agatha laughs. It’s warm and sultry, pressed into the gap between Rio’s teeth and cheekbone. She lingers there a moment longer, then rears back to study her prize.
“Who are you then, girl? Who have I caught?”
Rio’s head wants to tilt, but Agatha holds her still. She stares into the blue of her eyes, and the forest dims, and she considers.
“Nima,” she settles on. It’s sharp in her mouth, a languid little cut, and Agatha purrs her approval. Rio, grinning, makes another choice she knows her love will like: “And you are Agatha Harkness.”
So much wars for centre in Agatha’s gaze – roaring pride, banked lust, pure, unfettered joy. Her lips part in the delighted shock of her crafted self.
“You know of me.”
“Of course,” Rio drawls around the sudden weight of her own tongue. She shifts in Agatha’s grasp, something in her body come awake that only this woman can conjure. Agatha watches her do it, working her jaw – she is hungry, too.
“Then you know that I cannot let you leave this place alive.” Oh, the drama of her: the looming silhouette she cuts, all her harsh angles dipped in moonlight. The dark, rich edge in her voice when she talks about killing, about draining, about using up.
“Mm,” Rio breathes, overcome. It sparks along her spine, in her pelvis, at the base of her skull. “I certainly hope not.”
Agatha’s lashes flutter, and she moans, a soft, punched-out thing. She leans in, slowly and then all at once, and Rio surges up to meet her.
She does not think about how Nima would kiss – not how she knows Agatha is, treating it like a claiming, licking into Rio’s mouth as though to take from the core of her. Agatha kisses Nima with intent to devour, and Rio shudders in voyeuristic awe. Her hands settle into the riot of Agatha’s hair. She whines like a dog.
“Agatha,” she husks. The chase has made her impatient, she realises: her conjured pulse pounds in her clit, and she pants for no reason other than to encourage it, wishing the scratch of treebark at her back was worse, sharper, more. “ Agatha– ”
“Say that again, angel,” Agatha murmurs. “Say it again, and I’ll make sure you die slow.”
“Fuck,” Rio gasps. She tosses her head back, flushing, breathing, wanting. Agatha’s hands smooth down her shoulders, hot enough to burn. She lays her teeth into the column of Rio’s neck, and Rio shakes . “ Agatha. ”
Agatha reaches for the tear Rio made in her shift. She tugs it wider, cotton rending under her witch’s callouses. It’s such a raw, manual act that Rio moans fresh, then laughs.
There’s a change in the air, then. Agatha digs into the meat of Rio’s thigh, into the skin that stretches and warps over such oddly-shaped bone. With her other hand – her left, her dominant – she encircles Rio’s throat, brushing where she bit.
“What a strange little thing you are,” she says. The curl of her confusion is so beautifully acted that Rio almost mistakes it for real. “Strange and foolish. Why did you come here?”
“Rarely am I praised for my foresight,” she mutters, grinning. Agatha’s grip tightens in both places, and Rio wants her so desperately she can barely think. “Maybe I’m mad. Did you think about that?”
“Only constantly,” Agatha says, and Rio knows she means I love you.
There is still an uncanny silence to the wood – not even the whisper of wind in the trees to which Rio is so accustomed. It should bother her more that Agatha is, somehow, disrupting the balance of this place.
(Agatha Harkness is a force of nature in her own right. She alters ancient things in the bones of them. Rio cannot rightly despair if she does to this forest what she has been doing to Rio for decades now.)
She pierces the oppressive quiet with an incantation, and it takes Rio altogether too long – busy with following the shapes her lips form in the casting – to recognise Agatha’s infamous, temporary take on a binding spell. Lashes of violet wrap around her form, tying her to the trunk by her extremities, and she can’t help it: she cackles.
“Marry me,” she calls. It is heavy with want. Agatha, the consummate professional, relegates her reaction to a smug twitch of lips.
“How sweet,” she says. At last, she presses the whole of her body into Rio’s. Rio shivers and melts, baring her throat, and throbs from her cheeks to her toes. “But I fear I have no need of a wife.”
“A– a tragedy,” Rio drawls, or tries. She looks up at Agatha through her lashes; there is something nearly drunken in the loll of her head. “Fuck me, then. Please?”
“Now that I can do,” Agatha purrs. She (finally, finally ) puts her hand to Rio’s cunt, where Rio is so slick that she takes two fingers to the knuckle without any further preamble. Her eyes roll up, and Agatha laughs at her. It isn’t particularly mean, but it makes Rio twitch anyway, straining against her bonds, craving more.
Agatha obliges. She is not of a mood to tease, it seems. Rio fights to hold her gaze where she is dark and sharp and demanding , as though the pleasure she pulls from Rio’s body is something to siphon . She squirms on a third finger, and Agatha fucks into her like the feral thing she is: helplessly exposed, the tatters of her shift fallen about her.
“You are so beautiful,” she moans, rocking into Agatha’s touch as best as she’s able. Agatha laughs into her hair, low enough to reverberate through her skull.
“Yes,” she says. Rio looks up, past the canopy of the trees, into endless sky. “I am, aren’t I?”
She comes undone quickly from there, in long, sharp twists of Agatha’s wrist. Agatha watches her: sweat beads on Rio’s brow for her to lick, and Rio drips down the line of her forearm as the heat in her pelvis builds and tightens, and Agatha is there, watching her. Agatha’s magick is there, seeping into Rio’s borrowed skin, holding her down.
“Agatha,” she chants, again. She cannot seem to stop. “ Agatha. ”
The heel of Agatha’s hand presses into her clit, rewarding her; she is so far gone so soon, and she is laughing again. It is pushed out of her on each laborious exhale, the joy of this, the glory. She is still unused to it – to this body, which feels so intensely and needs so much.
“Come for me, darling,” Agatha murmurs. She is used to it. She knows. “Come for me now.”
Rio comes. Perhaps more accurately, she shakes apart: the molecules of her disintegrate and reform. This body does one of the things it was most designed to do, for whom it was designed to do it. It lasts and lasts.
The sky winks out (she closes her eyes, all input stops, there is nothing but Agatha’s breath in her ear and the violet-rich scent of her, the earth and the bonds and the bark).
With an unwieldy lethargy, Rio manages to say: “I love you.”
Agatha lays a hand into her hair. On her whispered word, the spell drops, and Rio sags in her arms.
As softly as she ever says anything, she answers: “I know, dear. I know.”