Chapter Text
Solly was late.
Solly was always fucking late. Her Mama was always late for everything as well, and bad habits rub off on kids. Like when she was late to talking to Daddy on her fourteenth birthday because Mama had to stop and read a random woman’s fate through tarot on a side street in Glasgow.
Solly, however, didn’t want to be late for everything, as she is a Seer and had very important things to get to. Very important people, really.
One person. One guy. One very attractive guy.
Not even a breather.
Solly runs through the forest, panting like a dog, thinking that she really should be in better shape after 17 years of running from the undead. She stops by a tree and wheezes, hands on her knees, coughing and spluttering as she tries to catch her breath. Her chest hurts, her jaw hurts, her nose hurts. Why can’t she run? You’d think her Mama would have taught her, but the woman was too busy reading tarot and teaching her daughter magic to take over the role of Crone.
She finishes her coughing and wipes her nose, stumbling towards the cabin. “Mama.” She coughs again, wiping phlegm from her nose. “Mama, I had a vision. Mama?” Solly opens the door to the cabin, closing it quietly behind her. “Mama, Mama, Mama-” She’s still out of breath, of course, she’s probably asthmatic but her Mama doesn’t trust breather hospitals. Mama is probably just going to give her tea and incense, like usual.
Solly looks around the small cabin, taking down drawings and stuffing them into folders, trying to put them away as fast as she can. They need to pack their stuff and move on. She takes down a particularly detailed one and stares at it for a moment. She traces the cheekbone with a delicate finger, careful not to smudge the graphite. Green, her mind supplies, His eyes are green. Like pine and moss and apples.
She stares at the drawing. The drawing stares back. Solly has made hundreds of these over the years, watching this very important person grow up through prophetic dreams. She stares at the drawing. The drawing stares back. She can’t wait to meet him. Seventeen years, her entire destiny, her entire eternity was in that face and in those eyes. She lifts the paper towards her face slowly, closing her eyes, pursing her lips-
Mama bustles into the cabin, holding her favourite deck of cards, mumbling something about vampires and angels and demons and men. Like usual. Solly stuffs the drawing into her bra, a useless endeavour as she isn’t wearing a bra (perks of her Mama being all for freeing the nipple) so she stands there in guilt as Mama watches her.
The drawing slips out of her shirt.
“Mama-” Solly croaks, screeching as Mama whacks her on the head with a ring-laden hand, berating her about kissing the drawings again and getting caught graphite-lipped again, and she bats Mama’s hands away. “Mama. Please. I had a vision.” That stops Mama in her tracks, but only after she gets a few more hits in, staring at Solly with narrowed eyes, kohl smudging onto her cheeks.
Mama is a tall woman, a chronic wearer of high heels, landing her far over 6 '4 when she’s in her shoes. She’s slender and elegant but far from toned, with loose clothes hiding all of her ‘swan’esque features. Her neck is divine, but she hides it under scarves and tons of necklaces (it took Solly years to convince Mama to stop wearing a garlic necklace), all handmade out of clay and wood and dried flowers. They live off the grid, so handmade everything is their life. Mama loves wearing jumpers, usually ones she crocheted herself; she’s always caught in the middle of projects. Solly inherited a lot of her Mama’s features, like bad eyesight and rosy cheeks on otherwise completely pale skin, a beaky roman nose that's incredibly bird-like. Her lips are shrewd and thin with an unfortunately defined cupid’s bow. So she looks birdy and fishy. Her clothes are always paint stained, too, which can get incredibly embarrassing when they occasionally venture into towns.
There are two things Solly inherited from her Daddy. His eyes and his hair. Solly doesn’t fully know what Daddy actually looks like, she’s only ever had eclectic phone calls with him. Mama’s eyes are big, brown, constantly ringed in kohl and smudges of charcoal. Daddy’s and Solly’s eyes are the deepest, darkest shade of blue, almost black, so much so that people often think she has no pupils, only irises. Mama’s hair is hidden by headscarves usually, but on rare occasions when she forgoes them, her hair is a soft and silky brown, pin straight and chocolatey with red highlights, making her look like some Aphrodite witch lady. Daddy and Solly have hair that is extremely curly, no brush can get rid of the curls in their hair. Their hair is also… brown. Straight up just brown. Not even a pretty, mousy brown, but straight up dirt brown. Solly dyes her hair purple, but her roots have grown out and it looks horrific.
Solly isn’t slim like Mama or muscular like Daddy, she’s what Mama politely calls cake size. Mama is a muffin, Daddy is a protein bar, and Solly is a fucking three tier deluxe chocolate cake. She’s not fat, but she isn’t thin. All her trousers are worn where her thighs rub together, and she’s not particularly tall either. She’s still waiting for that growth spurt she was promised five years ago. Mama and Daddy are both tall, both over 6’, and Solly is… 5’ 7. Average, Mama assures her, but she feels tiny and huge next to Mama.
In short, Solly is the unfortunate mix of two handsome people, and she turned out looking like a stubby, half-fish, half-bird chalk baby with mud for hair and fleas for eyes.
“What was it? You’ve seen the First Meeting, what comes next?” Mama demands, putting the deck down. They’ve gone over the order of the visions dozens of times over the past few years, and Mama hounded it even more after Solly had her vision of the First Meeting. Solly blushes. Peachy mottle slides down her neck, making her look diseased, and she picks the drawing up, shoving it into her waistband instead.
“It was… You know what it was, Mama. What comes after the First.” It’s embarrassing. Solly had the second real vision, right while she was washing her clothes in the stream. The vision was sudden, and shocking, and she stood there like the fish she is, gaping into the water as she recovered from the impact of the vision. Visions leave her dizzy and gasping, as they squeeze her chest and bash her ears, like a punishment for what she is and what she sees.
Fuck, she left her clothes in the stream. “I’ll be right back!”
She runs out of the cabin, then runs back in to grab a laundry basket, then runs back out. She sprints towards the stream, and she spots her clothes laid out on the nearby rocks, right where she left them. Phew, no-one touched them. She folds the first one and then tosses the rest inside impatiently, jogging back to the cabin at a steady pace to not pass out. She reenters the cabin, not caring that her Mama will lecture her about getting moldy clothes and how they’ll need to venture into town to get more fabric and yarn and blah blah blah. Solly is so very over the lectures. “We need to go. There was a sign in the vision.” Solly hands the basket to Mama, then continues taking drawings down. They need to move on, and she is very careful about her precious drawings. Last time they lost one, she spent five hours sobbing like it was the end of the world and not a missing slip of paper. She’s a hormonal teenager and she’s allowed to cry, okay?
Mama gathers her skirts, picking the deck of hand painted cards up again, all self-righteous. “Well, I did pull the Lovers at dawn.” Solly gives an all-suffering exhale. Mama and her cards, thinking she knows everything. She turns to look at her mother, watching a tattoo of a spider crawl up Mama’s neck and hide behind her ear.
“You’re a horrible woman,” Solly mutters, stuffing the drawings into folders. Each drawing has a date on it, each folder has dates as well. The one that is most full is the most recent one, 2011. The bulk of the drawings is in this one folder, fighting for space as she crams them all in, careful not to crease them. Various sets of green oil pastel eyes stare back at her, and she turns the drawings around so they can’t judge her for her.. Her… Oh, she doesn’t know, they just judge her in general.
Mama is packing behind her, acting as if she hadn’t heard that comment. She packs books on divination, seances, Seeing and Seers, potions, and Mama’s favourite… Vegetarian cooking with a handsome man on the cover who’s shirtless. Solly doesn’t know who he is or why he’s shirtless while cooking vegetarian food, but Mama loves it so she can’t judge. Solly grabs the book on Seeing and Seers (aptly titled ‘THROUGH THE FOG: ONE IN A MILLION LEARNING FOR A ONE IN A MILLION BIRTHRIGHT’ by Lady Devi N Ation) and shoves it in her own bag. Her bag is already filled with random stuff, so she has to slam the book inside to actually make it fit.
“Tsk. I told you to empty that bag, you don’t need all of those candles and matches and jars of jam– did you take all my jam?!” Mama thunders over to Solly and starts smacking her on the head again, gathering the homemade jam to her chest in mock hurt. “All my jam! Even the peach! You deplorable little girl, just like your daddy.” It’s all in jest, of course. Solly and Mama are thick as thieves, even if they don’t see eye to eye behind their respective thick glasses. Mama’s glasses look good on her, big and tortoise shell and framing her eyes, but Solly’s glasses make her look like a demented doll, thin and black and like a 2000’s secretary. Not advantageous.
This is the third place they’ve moved on from in the past month, as breathers still believe in chasing people off with pitchforks and torches. At least this time they are moving on on their own terms, on good terms and not being run out by the locals. They never hurt anyone, but they were different, which means bad to the normies. A little bit of strangeness and uniqueness apparently does hurt people, if you were to ask the residents of Liverpool and surrounding small boroughs.
Solly looks around the cabin after a few minutes of packing. The tiny wooden thing had been one of their more ‘normal’ homes in the past few years, as Mama had bought it from a coven member who resided in Liverpool, as a way to get out of the hustle of the city, and back off the grid.
She ties her hair up and starts taking bags and cases out to their car. Hearse. They have a hearse. Solly nudges the back open with her hips, hearing Mama berate her for not using magic to do the work for her, and she rolls her eyes so hard she swears she saw her brain. She shoves everything into the boot, pushing it as far up as she can, then goes back in for the second lot. Mama makes quick work of packing up, as she does use her powers to help her pack, and Solly watches clothes fold themselves neatly into boxes, incense go out and tie itself into bundles, shoes clean themselves of dirt and sit into boxes. Solly wishes she could do all that, but she can’t. She can’t even light a candle with her mind, much less make things dance midair. She puts the rest of the cases and boxes into the hearse as well, closing the boot with a dusty thud.
Mama clinks and clacks out of the cabin, sliding into the front of the hearse to reapply her makeup in a mirror she put in a shell. Why she did that, Solly doesn’t know, but it is very cute. Solly goes back into the cabin one more time to wish it goodbye, and she catches sight of herself in the window.
The first thing she notices is a huge zit on her chin, and she sighs. The second is the glasses perched on the bump of her nose. The third is her mess of hair, a tumbleweed attached to her head. Finally, her outfit. A crime in itself, all homemade. Many different necklaces, matching Mama’s, a litany of bracelets made of all sorts of metals ranging from gold to Argentallium to copper. A white tank top that she painted bats onto with homemade paint that still smells slightly of vinegar no matter how much she washes it. Dark green jeans, flaring out at the ends, embroidered with wonky silver and gold skeletons. Her shoes are muddy men’s hiking boots that are fifteen years old, the laces frayed in the left shoe and completely missing in the right shoe, replaced with a random cord of elastic. A hoodie is tied around her waist (Mama always says she’ll catch a cold if her waist is out) and bleach patterns of bats and the moon and religious imagery Mama ‘snuck’ on there look lame on the red fabric. The hoodie is too big on her and makes her look like a hobo. Mama insisted upon it, saying all teenagers need a good, humungous hoodie. Mama hasn’t been a teenager for like four hundred years, so Solly doesn’t know why she listens to her at all about teenagers.
Solly steps closer to the window, examining her face. Nothing out of the ordinary. She can’t wait to get familiars like Mama has, like the spider behind her ear, the snake on her hip, the scorpion on her shoulders. Mama had said that once Solly turns 17 she can get one small one, as it is a tattoo that needs to be done. Solly turned 17 four months ago. No familiar. With any luck, she’ll get one when she turns 18, but luck isn’t on her side the majority of the time.
She flinches when Mama honks the horn, and rushes outside, closing the door behind her, closing the door on a chapter of her life. A very short chapter. They had only been at the cabin for two weeks, maybe two and a half. They always move on fairly quickly, never wanting to draw too much attention to themselves. They’ve spent the entirety of Solly’s life running from ghosts and the undead, rarely ever meeting these creatures they’re supposed to be running from. They’ve met slayers many times, and have had to hide the drawings and Solly’s nature from them. The wide majority of those ‘in the know’ about those living unlife don’t know Solly exists, or that she had one predecessor, three thousand years ago when the previous Chosen One was at large. Then both the Chosen One and his Seer disappeared.
Solly clambers into the passenger side of the hearse, wincing at the strong smell of incense and Mama’s ancient flowery perfume. She pulls a map out of her bag, smoothing it out on the dashboard, pulling a pen from a side pocket on her bag. The bag itself is as tattered as the rest of their homemade things, a messenger bag made of thrifted shirts that has been restitched together more times than Solly cares to remember. She circles a small field on the map, looking up at Mama. “There. Just outside of Liverpool. If we drive through the city, it’ll take three days less… And we’d get there on time for once.” Solly murmurs the last comment, and suffers a scowl from Mama for it. “If we go around the city, it’ll take a week, maybe nine days. But then we’ll be late.”
She looks up at her mother, sighing. Mama is starting the hearse, gripping the steering wheel as she drives away from the cabin. A loose strand of hair has slipped out of the headscarf, yet she still looks unfairly gorgeous. There are charms hanging on the rearview mirror; a dried clove of garlic which Solly pulls down and stuffs in her bag, a peacock feather that’s probably decades old at this point, a small candle that smells like cloves and orange, and a vampire fang.
According to Mama, it was a gift from Daddy for their eighth anniversary, that Daddy pulled it from a vampire's mouth with his bare hands in Mama’s favour. Very romantic and brutal, exactly like Daddy. She doesn’t know much about Daddy, apparently he was around when Solly was very young, maybe two or three months, but he left soon after her birth to do… Something or other. They have never told her what he was doing and where he was doing it or who he really was. She talks to him once or twice a week, but only at night and the way to ‘call’ him can get tricky.
Solly leans back and puts her feet up on the dash, the map in her lap, bag next to her, preparing for a long journey. Mama will probably take the route that goes around the city, so it's gonna take at least a week to get to their next new place, and who knows how long they’ll stay there. Solly needs to remind Mama to call ahead and apply for the job, and to tell the people working at their intended destination that they need to set up rooms for them, as they are effectively unhoused and living out of their hearse majority of the time.
She closes her eyes, and the many drawings, paintings and rough sketches she’s done blaze into her eyelids, and she sighs quietly. She knows when she’ll meet him, how she’ll meet him, who he is. Lords only know that he knows who she is and he’s been properly informed about her existence and the reason for it.
She thinks back to the first vision. She was thirteen, and she had been standing by a notice board in the small town they were staying in at the time, looking at an advertisement for a local bake-off, when her mind went blank and then exploded with images. A courtyard, a teen boy in the shadow of an archway, wearing a zipper top over his uniform, his arms crossed as he stares at her. Her mind had supplied all the details, almost immediately. Seventeen years old. Vampire. The Chosen One. Green. His eyes are green.
Solly hadn’t been able to let those eyes leave her mind for the past five years. They haunted her, day and night, constantly there when she closed her eyes. The curse of being a Seer, the curse of seeing your future and your loved ones’ futures before it can even decide to happen.
Mama had reached out to all covens in the world that she could to get as much information on Seers. Books, scrolls, myths, legends, rumours. She had desperately gathered it all and crammed it into her mind and then Solly’s. All because Mama found out her baby would be the only baby born exactly four months after the Chosen One, something that hadn’t happened since the original Chosen One, Sethius, disappeared three thousand years ago with his Seer, a breather witch named Boudīkā. So, in totality, there have been two Chosen Ones, and two Seers. The prototypes went missing three millennia ago, and the contemporary variants have yet to meet. Solly knows all there is to be known about Seers. The orders of the visions, why she gets prophetic dreams almost every night, what it means to be a Seer.
Solly is also a breather, and also a witch, like Boudīkā. So she needs to juggle being a witch, being the future Crone of Mama’s coven, and being the Seer. Solly is tired of it all, as she is a mediocre witch, doesn’t understand why she needs to be the Crone, and she doesn’t know what being the Seer even fully entails as she, maybe, spaced out while Mama taught her.
Mama, seemingly a mind reader, decides at that moment, half an hour into their trip, to question Solly on being a Seer. “Recite the order of visions, Sol.” She demands as she drives, putting the radio on and turning it down. They’re playing some indie rock song by the Tropical Monkeys? Solly doesn’t know and doesn’t care. She rearranges her feet on the dash and starts reciting the order by heart. “First Meeting, Consummation, First Bite, First Night.” She has yet to open her eyes, her head tilted back against the head rest, listening to all their various crystals and seashells clink in various boxes behind her. She goes on, knowing what Mama will ask next. “First Meeting is between Seer and Chosen, Consummation is the solidification of their bond, First Bite is the Ceremony, and First Night is the first new cycle the Seer completes upon joining the Chosen in nocturnal life.” Solly is bored, wanting to take a nap instead of reciting something that’s been drilled into her about five hundred times in the past ten years. She looks at the back of her eyelids, and those deliciously green eyes look back.
She can’t wait to meet her Chosen. Five years she’s spent trying to depict him in any way possible, fantasising about how he’ll sweep her off her feet in the shadow of that arch.
She thinks about the dried garlic in her bag, and opens one eye to stare at the fang on the rearview mirror. She has had this sinking feeling in her gut for years now that her Daddy is a slayer, and that’s why he ripped the fang out of the vampire’s mouth. That only makes her predicament as Seer worse.
Solly sighs and sits up, putting her feet back down and staring down at the map. It’s not a magic map or a GPS like breathers have, it’s a piece of paper that is creased and stressed and scribbled on, years of trips marked out on it. She stares at the circle she just added, wondering where this new foray will lead her. The only real future she can’t see is her own, which sucks. She can see how her Mama will die, she can see how her Daddy will die, she can see how she’ll meet her Chosen One. But she can’t see what will happen to her, and it pisses her off to no end. Solly fiddles with her bracelet, the Argentallium one that her Daddy allegedly had made for her when they found out Mama was pregnant. It’s a simple silver chain, rounded down and smoothed out from years of it rubbing against her skin and clothing and drawings. She rubs her fingers along the charms, a little silver toned S and a star that she always thought was incredibly cheesy. Every father gives their daughter charms like this. It’s hardly original. But it’s all she really has of her father, besides her hair and eyes, and that's not much of him either.
Solly leans her head back again and closes her eyes. The green eyes glare at her, and she thinks she snaps her eyes open. Her mind empties, and then rushes back in, an image of the Chosen One, giving her the meanest look he can, uttering words of anger and talking about how she can’t expect everything to revolve around her, that he doesn’t know who she thinks she is, to be ordering him around. The image fades as he opens his mouth again to shout at her, and her eyes open for real this time. She stares ahead, listening to some British man sing about only calling his lover when he’s high, and Solly sighs. She knows that these minor visions aren’t even visions, just prophetic dreams. Those only have a chance of actually happening, and she knows many of them probably won’t. She sees all sorts of possible happenings, and she’s learned to tell the difference between what will come true and what won’t. This one won’t, because the Chosen One would never get angry at her. She hopes, at least. You can never tell with vampires.
Seven or nine days, and she finally gets to meet the Chosen One. Solly already has her best clothes ready and everything.
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A day into the journey, Mama stops at a gas station to fill up the hearse, and Solly goes into the shop armed with ten pounds to buy some sandwiches and juice. The guy behind the counter stares at her openly, and she looks at the floor, then at the sandwiches. She ends up grabbing two egg and cress sandwiches and two prawn mayo sandwiches, as well as a two litre bottle of Tizer. She stops to look at some tabloids and newspapers, reading the silly titles and furrowing her brows. After a few seconds, she shakes her head and walks to the counter, setting the food, drink and money on the surface. “Pump 2, please.” Solly says quietly as she looks up at the guy. A young adult man with zits all over his face and neck, smiling down at her smarmily and trying to peek down her top to see her cleavage. Creep. Solly’s eyes unfocus for a second as she glimpses into his future: drank himself to death at 30, in some rubbish dump of a house. She blinks back into focus as her Mama walks in behind her, adding a packet of cigarettes to the pile.
Solly shakes her head and puts it back before the cashier can reach it. “No, Mama, you said you’d quit.” She looks up at the cashier, a blank look on her face so as not to give him any leverage over her. She learned early that no matter how old you are or where you are, men will always look at you. “Do you have a phone we could borrow by any chance? We live without electronics.” Solly watches the guy hesitate for a second, then he nods and slides a flip phone across the counter. She waits for him to let go of it before picking it up, not wanting to touch his greasy, nicotine stained fingers. Solly looks up at Mama, who’s staring at the cashier with open disdain. “I’ll call the school, you go pee.”
She steps outside, clearly in the sight of the cashier to show she isn’t gonna take off with his phone. She flips it open and navigates to the right app, typing in a phone number she memorised from the vision she had by the stream the day before. She hits the dial button and presses the phone to her ear, plugging her other one.
Solly listens to the ringing, before a pleasant woman’s voice enters the line. “Hello, this is Miss. McCauley speaking.” She lets out a sigh of relief before reciting the speech she prepared. Solly recites a lot of things, it’s easier than coming up with conversation on the spot. “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Madame Evangeline Morgenstern, she sent a letter to your office a few weeks ago, an application to teach Home Economics?” Solly sent the letter in her mother’s name, and Mama knows this. She trusts her daughter to do what is best for their little family. She waits with bated breath for Miss. McCauley to respond.
“Oh, yes, I got the letter yesterday. Madame Morgenstern seems like a perfect fit for teaching Home Economonics, and we are looking forward to her coming to our school to teach. When will you be arriving, Miss…?” The voice on the line trails off and Solly panics. She wasn’t planning on being asked who she is. “Uh- I’m Madame Morgenstern’s child. She is otherwise occupied right now, and she isn’t very up to date on electronics-” Mama doesn’t fully understand how phones work, so Solly has always been the one to handle them while Mama does everything else. “We’ll be at the school in a week, maybe just over a week.”
There’s a few more compliments and small talk, and then Miss. McCauley hangs up. Solly breathes out the breath she was holding, then heads back inside to hand the phone back to the cashier. The cashier gives that smarmy smile again, and Mama drags Solly out of the shop, holding a cheesy green bag with their sandwiches and drink. “Did you call the school?” Mama’s tone is as confused as always when it comes to modern technology. The poor witch hadn’t moved past the first time they introduced colour TV, much less modern flip phones. Solly nods and takes the bag from her, guiding Mama back to the hearse. She doesn’t look back at the cashier, instead she just gets into the passenger side and opens one of the prawn mayo sandwiches, taking a big bite and immediately getting the mayonnaise all over her face, like she usually does. Mama gets in as well and backs out of the gas station, back onto the road and towards the school.
Solly leans back, devouring the sandwich in her hands and thinking about what she usually is occupied with. Green eyes, being a Seer, being a witch, and how her future is going to go. These things swirl around her mind, but currently she sees those angry green eyes aimed at her and she can’t bear to close her eyes and see only them. The anger scares her. What if it happens? What if it will be something that comes true and he gets angry at her and then Solly becomes the next Boudīkā? Maybe that’s where she went. Sethius got angry at Boudīkā and drained her. Solly shivers and wraps her arms around herself, not wanting to imagine that. The Chosen is meant to bite her, but not to kill her. She hopes, at least. Vampires are volatile and you can never truly anticipate what they are going to do and who they are going to do it to.
Solly hands the other sandwich to Mama, staring into the empty road ahead of them. She doesn’t want to be on the road for a week, but Mama hates the city, especially Liverpool, and Solly could never convince Mama to drive through the city. Even if it would shorten their journey significantly. Solly sighs, looking down at her hands, covered in crumbs, mayo and random scribbles of things she needs to remember. A date, a reminder to tell Mama about the letter to the school, a reminder to herself that everything will be okay soon. That she’ll no longer need to hide herself from everyone.
She thinks back to all the lessons that Mama held, the ones about being a Seer. About the duty Solly will have to fulfill once she meets the Chosen One. About how she’ll have to devote her life to him and he’ll devote his unlife to her. About how she’ll have to sleep during the day and function during the day like a vampire does. Solly will probably eventually need to be turned, but she doesn’t want to think about that. Being Crone enters her mind.
Mama is the Crone of a coven made to protect the Seer. Mama is about four hundred and seventy three years old, as all Crones can live very long, at least until their successor is able to overtake them. Solly is nowhere near this point, and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever get to it. Her magic is lacking. Being Seer is all she really has going for her, and somehow she’s managed to suck at that too. When she had her first vision five years ago, she cried because she thought that her entire life was over. In some sort of somber way, thirteen year old Solly was right. Her life was over.
She never went to school, never really made friends, never really got to be normal. She was homeschooled, only has Mama really, her entire life revolves around Seers and covens and vampires.
This is the first time she’ll ever go to school. She’s going to Garside Grange Independent Day School, just on the other side of Liverpool to where Solly and Mama were staying in their cabin. She’s going to go to a school, wear a uniform, and finally make friends… And complete her destiny as a Seer.
Solly isn’t angry. Seers don’t get angry. Mama made that very clear to her early on, that Seers are always in control of their emotions. They can’t risk getting angry or extremely sad, or anything such, because it tampers with their powers. They need to control their emotions and stay constantly calm. So instead, she does breathing exercises, listens to music on an old Walkman she rescued from a car boot sale, and draws the Chosen One. That’s why she has so many drawings and paintings of him, because she does it to control her emotions and not erupt into anger like a volcano.
She can’t wait. She’s so excited, but she keeps it in check. While Mama finishes her sandwich, Solly sneaks a silver locket out of her bag and opens it, careful to keep it hidden from Mama. The front of the locket has an anatomical heart engraved on it, with a stake running through it. Solly thought it was the most perfect thing for the images she put in it. Two tiny, detailed paintings of the Chosen One, of course. She considered putting a drawing of herself in it, but she decided against it as she thought she wasn’t pretty enough. She stares down at the two paintings. The one on the right depicts a smile on his face, while the one on the left depicts him as he sleeps. She closes it gently and slips it back into her bag, then goes back to staring at the fang on the rearview mirror.
Six or seven more days, and she’ll meet him, finally.
Six or seven more days, and her soul will finally feel complete.
Her eyes dart to Mama, who’s tapping a ringed finger against the steering wheel, along to the beat of the song on the radio. Solly reaches over and turns the music up enough that she can feel it crowding her eardrums, can feel the bassline pound through her soul and caress her veins. Until it feels like the blood running through her, the blood that she’ll need to offer up to the Chosen One in the future to cement their bond as far as they can.
Solly can only hope that the Chosen One was properly informed about this whole malarkey as she was, that he’s spent all of his life anticipating her arrival in his life the way she’s anticipating his. If all has gone well, he has the book. The Praedictum Impaver, which houses all the knowledge of Sethius about being Chosen, about what having a Seer means. Solly doesn’t even want to consider what it would mean if he didn’t know, if he didn’t care or acknowledge her existence and arrival.
Solly doesn’t want the anger in those soulful green eyes to be real, much less directed at her.
Solly wants Vlad Dracula to accept her and love her. She certainly loves and accepts him as much as humanly and inhumanly possible.
She wants Vladimir Dracula to be utterly obsessed with her existence.
Six or seven days, and they will finally meet.
Six or seven days, and the First Meeting will be fulfilled.