Karhi Emelyn

TW rape, body horror, murder, torture mention, self-harm, cutting. Skip to the highlighted portion to avoid the rape and murder.  Quick summary is that Karhi’s sisters and mother were assaulted and killed and Karhi couldn’t stop it because he was knocked over the head.  To skip all of it, go to the next highlighted section.  The man who killed Karhi’s family was killed by Ilona and she strung him and his entrails up.

The sound of crying whimpers roused him.  His head lolled on his shoulders as he tried to sit up.  It throbbed painfully with every movement; he felt something sticky and wet on his cheek.

Everything was out of focus.  He blinked hard, trying to clear his vision.  The scent of blood was heavy in the air, like when a cow had just been slaughtered.

When his eyes focused, horror and bile rose into his throat.  Tears filled his eyes, and he couldn’t stop the terrified sob of agony that burst from him.

Helena lay on the floor, eyes like cold grey glass on him.  The fire cast harsh shadows on her, light flickering in the pool of blood around her.  Blood stained the side of her mouth, dripping down her cheek and disappearing into her blood-soaked blonde hair.  Her neck had been sliced so deep, it opened up like a smile, the skin parting to reveal dark flesh.  Her clothes had been torn from her body.

She was only fourteen.

“Oh, you’re awake now?”

He tore his gaze from Helena’s dead glass eyes to see Pirjo on the floor, tears streaming down her cheeks.  Her hands were at her face, the nails broken, her fingers covered in blood.  Her mouth was frozen in a silent scream. 

A man hunched over her, jerking against her body.  With every movement, Pirjo whimpered, fresh tears welling.  Karhi couldn’t see the man’s face in the shadows from the stove, but he knew the man was watching him as he raped Pirjo.

“Pirjo,” Karhi gasped, barely able to get the words around the painful grogginess.  That word alone was too much, and he passed out again.

He came back to slapping at his cheeks.  Emerald eyes danced above him and a smile too white to be natural appeared.

“Ah, hello, my pet,” Ilona said.  “I was worried you were already gone.”

Karhi turned his head and the same sight as before met him.  Helena, dead.  And now, Pirjo, also dead.  Her throat had been slit and her nightgown was shoved up on her stomach, revealing naked, bloody skin.

“Äiti,” he croaked, looking for his mother.

“Oh, she’s dead outside,” Ilona said.

“Isä?” he whimpered, tears filling his eyes.

“Also dead outside.”

“Why?”  He had never heard his own voice sound so small.

“I didn’t do it, pet.”  She glanced behind her.  “He’s dead, though.  If that’s any consolation.”

Karhi followed her gaze and screamed.

The thing tacked with knives to the wall wasn’t even human.  Not in any way that he could identify—ribs wrenched opened to the air, intestines strung up like garlands, skull split open like a cracked egg.  Its arms and legs were spread out and it looked like some horrible spider.

“Wh-what—” He tried to speak, but his fear and terror had all but cut his tongue from his mouth.  He couldn’t focus, eyes darting from the horror on his wall to the horror of his sisters on the floor.  What had happened?  Why—

He woke with a start, sitting up straight and looking around wildly.  His vision spun, forcing him to stop until everything stilled.

Vision normal again, he moved slowly, looking around.  Where was he?

He saw crisscrossing wooden slats on the wall, each cross holding a bottle of wine.  The floors were stone and there was a set of steps disappearing up one wall behind wine racks.  He couldn’t see more than three steps up from where he sat. 

His legs were below a table, and his eyes were level with the bottom of the tabletop.  Looking behind him, he saw an overturned chair. 

A wine cellar.  Right.  He had run into Sevilen earlier (how much earlier?  What time was it?) when he was running from Sloane and Mira.  He wasn’t quite sure how he had gotten through the conversation; he had been so overwhelmed. 

He brought his hand to his face to push his hair away.  He hadn’t had a nightmare about the night he’d been turned in decades.  But, if it was going to happen, it might as well be now, right?  When he already felt like rubbish?

His sisters and parents were just the first in the long line of people he had let down.  He had been useless that night, opening the door for a traveller at dusk.  He was the one who had allowed the stranger to stay in their barn.  He was the one who had opened up their home to a man they didn’t know.  A man who turned out to be a monster.

And he had continued failing since then, hadn’t he?  He had failed Lunette on more than one occasion, unable to break free from Ilona to help her.  He had let Ilona take her to be tortured for no other reason than because she could.  Sometimes, it had even been because Ilona felt Luna took up too much of Karhi’s time.

He had failed all of his siblings, really.  He was the eldest—he was supposed to be the protector.  He was supposed to be the one they could look up to.

Just like he had failed his human brother.

His mother and sisters hadn’t been the first people he failed.  Really, the first would be his brother.  Karhi was the one who had pushed their parents to lock him up in an asylum.  He had thought it would help.

And wasn’t that the thing?  So much of the time, he thought he was helping.  He had thought he was helping Veli, having Isä put him in that asylum in Porvoo.  It had turned out that he was tortured for years before he finally escaped.  And then he had thought he was helping Lunette, teaching her to use her powers.  But Ilona had punished her for it.  For “taking Karhi away” from Ilona.

And Sloane.  He had tasted the cancer on her breath.  And he wanted to help.  He wanted to give this girl—this young woman—a chance to live.  A chance to continue doing whatever she wanted.

But he had been drunk and horny and stupid and, for once, not thinking about Ilona.

And now Sloane was here.  Dealing with Saeran.  Reliving painful memory after painful memory.  Being dosed with dead man’s blood on three separate occasions, two in Montana alone.  She had died.

This was his fucking fault.

He went to stand up and banged his head on the table, immediately sitting back down on the floor.  Something hit the floor and shattered.  He cursed, his hand going to the top of his head.  He winced, the spot tender and throbbing.

He looked to see that he had knocked an empty bottle to the stone floor.  It had been a gin of some type. 

He got to his knees, swaying as his vision tilted again.  He expected it this time.  He was still drunk. 

He needed to clean up the glass.  If someone walked in and cut themselves, that would be on him.

Pain seared across his thumb, and he hissed, dropping the offending piece of glass that had cut him.  He looked down at his thumb just in time to watch it seal up. 

He tilted his head, looking at the smooth skin of his thumb.  The cut had hurt, but it hadn’t hurt as much as it would have if he was sober.  And the pain had pushed away some of his guilt.  In fact . . . he felt the slightest bit lighter.

He looked down at the glass that had cut him.  It was a large piece, maybe as long as his pinkie and about two fingers wide.  Flaking blood dusted the edge where he’d cut himself.

He sat back down, letting his knees splay out to the side as he took the glass again.

He eyed the glass for a moment, looking from it to his hand.  He flipped his hand over, so the back was facing up, looking between his hand and the piece of glass.  He had known people over the years who would hurt themselves to feel better, but that had never been an interest of his. 

But he couldn’t get his normal self-medication for feeling like this.  If there was heroin in the castle, he didn’t know where to get it.  Maybe it was time to try something new.

He dragged the glass across the back of his hand.  Blood welled up as the glass passed over his skin.  A thick line of red that grew with every second. 

The pain was sharp and bright, but it was easily bearable.  He watched the skin knit back together and the ache in his heart was just a little less.  The thoughts of Sloane and his family and everything he had done to them faded just a little more to the back of his head.

This, he could do.

Time passed with Karhi making steady cuts up and down his arm.  He would try a new spot after a few passes over the same spot.  He healed fast, but the skin started to feel raw after a bit.

He wore a dark green sweater.  He had pulled the sleeves up to his elbows to give himself some room to work with.  At one point, he swapped arms.  The cuts on his right arm with his left hand were more jagged.  No one would ever even hint that he was ambidextrous.

It still did the trick.

This was fucking great.  Why hadn’t he discovered it sooner?  Pain he could control.  Pain on his own terms.

And if he drew shapes, he got to see them light up with bright red as he moved before they sealed up, leaving flaking blood in the shape of whatever he had drawn.  A heart, a square, a rhombus. 

“For fuck’s sake.”

Karhi looked up sharply, in the middle of drawing a jagged circle on the inside of his right elbow.

Aoife, Mira, and Sloane stood at the base of the steps.  Sloane was the one who had spoken.  Seeing her, a pang cut through the sense of tranquillity that the cutting had produced.  The euphoria ballooning in his chest deflated, its carcass left to outline the guilt and shame it had been hiding.

“What are you doing here?” he asked stupidly.

“Same reason I knew you were at Madam Bovary’s,” Sloane replied.  She looked from the glass to Karhi’s arm to Karhi.  “Karhi, are you kidding me?”

“What?” he snapped defensively.  He tightened his grip on the glass, letting it cut through the flesh of his palms.  It was a dull and steady pain.

Sloane waved around him.  He looked to the floor for the first time to see flakes of blood everywhere in front of him and at his sides.  It would take longer for the flakes to decay.

“Wow,” he said, looking at the flakes.  “That’s a lot of blood.”

“Yeah, it fucking is.  How are you feeling?  Are you thirsty?”

He looked up the ceiling, contemplating it.  He searched for that familiar feeling of adrenaline.  He couldn’t sense the normal shakiness associated with it, though.

“No,” he finally said.  He continued to squeeze the glass.  Blood dripped down his hand, following the curve of his arm to his elbow.

“Great,” Sloane said.  Karhi felt her emotions, but his mind was sluggish to interpret them.  Frustration, maybe?  The tone in her saying “great” wasn’t friendly.

“Sloane,” he said.  “I’m sorry—”

“For what, Karhi?” she snapped.  “I don’t want any more fucking apologies for the night you turned me.”

He fell silent.  She had hit the head on the nail.

The nail on the head?

“Why are you doing this all alone?” she demanded.

Doing what alone?  Cutting?  Because alone was the best way to do it?  Drinking?  The answer was the same.

He didn’t have an answer for her, and he saw the way his silence made her mouth twist in anger.  “I can’t,” she said, shaking her head.  “I’m not doing this.  Someone else gets to deal with this.  I’m out.”

He felt her anger and her pain.  She was hurt. 

It was his fault.

Before he could say anything, she was gone.  Mira gave him a last look before shrugging.  She followed Sloane out.

Aoife muttered something in Irish that Karhi only caught part of.  It sounded like some sort of request of God.

“Aoife,” he said.  But he didn’t actually know what else he was going to say beyond that, and he fell silent.  The peace he had found in the blood was fading into something ugly and uncomfortable.

“Come on, you duarcán,” she said, kneeling in front of him and picking up the glass.  “Let’s get you sobered up and get some blood in you.”

He knew that word.  She was calling him a wet blanket.  “I upset Sloane again.”  A deep, enervating sadness settled inside of him, weighing down his limbs and freezing his joints.  He couldn’t do anything right.

“Well, my understanding is that she tried to ask you about siring, and you froze her out.”  Aoife reached up to put the broken pieces of glass on the table. 

His brow furrowed.  His eyes stung and his lip trembled.  “Froze her out?  No.  I wouldn’t . . .”

“So, she asked you about siring, and you gave her your thoughts on her siring Alice?”

He blinked.  “No . . . she asked me about the night I sired her.”

“Yeah?  And why would she be interested in that?”

He knew that Aoife was on to something, but what she was on to?  Trying to think was like slogging through molasses.  His thoughts were slow, and his understanding was even further behind.

Aoife finished cleaning up the glass and looked at him.  “Karhi.  I need you to let go of the glass.”

He looked down and saw that he still held the glass tightly in his hand.  When he opened his hand, pain tore across his palm, and he hissed out.  He could see bone.  And his hands were moving just as sluggishly as his brain.  A bit more jerkily, though.

“You cut some tendons,” she said, taking the glass from him and depositing it on the table.  “You’re going to need blood to heal those.  Come on.”

Aoife brought him back to his room and had someone bring them blood.  A half hour and two bottles of blood later, and Karhi was finally sober.

And he was in a world of pain.

“So fucking stupid,” he growled at where Aoife had had to bandage his hand from the damage the glass had done to it.  From the damage he had done to it.

“Getting drunk and bloodletting yourself into feeling better without actually treating any of the underlying issues leads to psychosomatic wounds that won’t heal,” Aoife said from where she sat opposite Karhi at the small table in his room.  She was working on a bottle of blood he hadn’t drunk.

“What?”

“You feel bad.  You drink a lot.  You bleed a lot.  You don’t feel better.  Physically or mentally.”

He leaned his head back against the wall behind his chair, groaning.  He had a hell of a fucking headache on top of all of it. Alcohol wasn’t supposed to give vampires headaches.

“Karhi.  I searched for you for hours to get back to the questioning.”

He didn’t say anything, but shame settled in his stomach.  It was a feeling that was so familiar by now that he felt empty without it.  He had agreed to help Hazel.  And the minute things went poorly, he completely shut down.

“Why did you freak out about Sloane?” she asked.

“I didn’t—”

“Faren reported to me before he went to sit with Mira and Sloane to stoke Sloane’s emotions.  He told me what happened with you.”

He couldn’t argue with that.

“What is going on with you?” she asked.

He shrugged one shoulder, refusing to look at her.  “You said it yourself.  I’m the least stable vampire.”

He didn’t have to look to know Aoife was glaring at him.  He felt it.  Without really thinking about it, he reached for her focus.  It was tight like Amara’s had been.  Tighter even.  He couldn’t pull at Aoife.

“Stop that,” she snapped.  “You can’t make me forget shit because you don’t want to talk about it.”

He didn’t reply, but he did withdraw from her head.  He kept his eyes on the ceiling.  It was smooth and white.

“The only reason I’m letting you get away with this is because you have proven invaluable time and time again.  But I need you to put your head back on right and get back to what we need you to be doing.”

“Then put it as a black mark against me,” he said.  “Kick me out or whatever.”

“Karhi—are you angling for me to punish you like Ilona did?”

He sat up straight, as if electrified, his head snapping to look at Aoife.  “Is that a threat?”

“No, but it’s the first actual fucking reaction I’ve gotten from you.  You are Free, Karhi.  She is gone.  She has no control over you anymore.”

“Right.”  He said the word as a bitter chuckle.

Aoife didn’t answer and when a minute or two had passed, he couldn’t resist the urge to look at her to see why.

She was studying him.  There was a sort of grim curiosity on her face.  She met his gaze, and something settled in hers.  “Just because the monster is no longer a threat, doesn’t mean it’s gone from your mind.”

He leaned back against the wall, looking at the ceiling. 

“You feel guilty about turning Sloane and bringing her into the fray that was being one of Ilona’s children.”

“I let myself get carried away and turned her,” he said.  He clenched the fist he had injured, and pain seared across his palm.  It was a reminder.  “And then she had to go through all of this.  It’s my fault.”

“So?”

That had not been the answer he expected.  “So?” he parroted back, unsure of what else to say.

“Sloane doesn’t seem to be angry with you about your turning her.  She doesn’t blame you for what Ilona did.”

“She should.”

“But she doesn’t.  And maybe you should ask her about that.”

He unclenched his fist, the pain easing.

“Karhi, I’ve known you far longer than I’ve known anyone outside of the house.  I did make that comment about you being unstable.  And that was unfair of me.”

He turned his head sharply to look at her.  “Unfair?  It was accurate.”

“Except it wasn’t.  My first recommendation to Hazel, when I was back from assignment, was to contact you.  Even before I knew about Sloane or Mira or anything else going on.  You are, undoubtedly, an emotional fucking trainwreck.  But you’re very fucking good at what you do.  And you’re not stupid, by any definition of the word.”

He didn’t know if he agreed with that last statement.

“You’ve always borne the weight of the world on your shoulders.  As if you can control what people do.  You took care of all of your blood siblings.  And every time that Ilona did something to any of them, you took that on as your own failing.  As if you had any say in any of it.  And Ilona fed off of that self-loathing and blame.

“You’re not God, Karhi.  The closest thing to God in any of these situations was Ilona.  She did this to you.  She’s the one to blame for everything that happened to you these past five centuries.  Continuing to blame yourself for her failings just perpetuates the pain that Ilona loves to inflict.  If you continue like this, Ilona will live long, long past her expiration date.

“Don’t let that bitch live a second longer than she has to.”

It was a nice sentiment, but it was a pipe dream at best.  Ilona hadn’t just left her mark inside of him—she had branded it.  Ilona could be dead, and she would live on in him until he himself was dead.  She would never die.

“What?”

Karhi only then realized he had spoken out loud.  He went back and forth for a moment on whether to respond before finally deciding fuck it.  “Even if Ilona dies from what Sloane did—she’ll never really be gone.  She fucked us up.”  He shook his head, looking down.  “She went into our heads, time and time again.  She wreaked havoc—she made us feel what she wanted us to feel.  She rode our intentions and desires to force us into doing the things she wanted from us.  Ilona fucked up my brain.  And my siblings’ brains.”

“No, she did—”

“I didn’t fight at first when the original vampires attacked us after the meeting with those mages.”

Aoife stopped talking, her brow furrowed in curiosity.  “Oh?”

“It hurt.  It was painful.  They were savage.  And I froze.  Because the pain I felt with their attack was too similar to what Ilona used to do.  Tearing and clawing and hurting.  And with Ilona, if I fought back, it would get worse. 

“It wasn’t until Mira broke through and yelled at me telepathically that I realized what was happening, and I could fight again.  I needed to be given some sort of permission.  What kind of fucked up conditioning is that?”

Aoife remained quiet, watching him.  And her silence opened the flood gates.

“And then when Sloane was poisoned, she was feeling so much.  And even though our connection is the reverse—I’m the sire, and she’s the fledgling—it still felt the same.  I felt her pain and anger and sadness like it was my own.  The way that Ilona used to force me to feel her emotions.  And Mira said I was making things worse.  And she forced me to leave.  The same way that Ilona would, where she rode my impulses to do what she wanted.  I tried to leave, and Mira made me move and get out faster.

“And the nightmares.  Fuck, the nightmares.  They haven’t stopped since Samhain.  Every night.  They’re not the same, but they’re always around a theme: Ilona is back, and she’s furious.  She has me back in a dark room.  I can’t see anything, but I can hear.  And Sloane’s there.  And she’s doing the same things to her that she’s doing to me.  And all I can hear are Sloane’s screams.”  He pressed his wrists against his ears, bracketing his head in his arms.  “It’s not real, but it’s all I see when I close my eyes.  She’s gone, but she’s not.  She’s still there.”

Aoife frowned thoughtfully.  “You can’t let go.”

“How could I?”

“Karhi—do you know why I was sired?”

He hadn’t expected that.  “What?”

“Do you?”

“What does it matter?”

“Humour me.”

He didn’t want to, but he did anyway.  Maybe it meant he could get out of here faster if he did.  “Some war involving the Plague.”  He didn’t know much past that.  He had never gotten the details on what “war” was fought during the Plague outside of the Hundred Years’ War and various skirmishes and campaigns.  But none of them were caused by the Plague, just exacerbated by it.  Not that he had really cared to ask.  The big outbreak of the Plague had been two centuries before his time.  And then the third big outbreak had been in the mid-1850s, and he had more important things to be doing than worrying about dying humans.

“Correct.  And I was the sole survivor of a family of over twenty people.”

Karhi paused. 

“I never got sick during the Black Death.  I was the sole survivor, cursed to watch everyone around me die.  I lost everything except my life.  My parents, my siblings and their families, my husband, my children—they all succumbed to the plague.  My youngest was the last to die.  By my hand, because I couldn’t bear to see him suffer.”

“Are you saying that I should put myself out of my misery?”  He had never had a particular attachment to living . . . that could potentially be something new to try.

Aoife moved too fast for him to see and flicked him in the forehead.  He felt it and heard it in his skull.  It was like getting hit with a rock.  “Aoife, what the fuck?”  he cursed, rubbing where she hit. 

“I’m not suggesting suicide, Karhi,” she snapped.  “What I’m telling you is—do you think, after seven hundred years, I have forgotten that pain?”

He still remembered the night his sisters and mother had been murdered.  “No,” he said quietly, his voice barely above a rumble.

“Exactly.  The experiences we’ve had and the pain we’ve been through—it never leaves.  But it does dull.  If you make the effort to move on.  And if you don’t, the pain will still be as fresh as the day it happened.”

He hadn’t known that bit of Aoife’s history.  He had always assumed she was sired because she was dying of the Plague when Hazel found her. 

She had lost her entire family.  She had lost her children and her siblings and her parents—everyone.  All to a force beyond her control.

“How long were you alive between when they died and when Hazel turned you?”

“Four months.”

He had lost his whole family before becoming a vampire.  But it was hours before he became a vampire.  And he didn’t have time to think about it for a year because of Ilona’s torture.

When it finally hit him, he grieved for years.  He was alone for years.

Until he met Lunette.  And then he wasn’t alone again.

And he had never lost any of his siblings to Ilona.  For all the agony and torture and mutilation they had been subjected to, they had still had each other.  And they were closer than he had ever been with his flesh-and-blood siblings.

“You made a family,” he said.  Hazel and Matadi and their children.  Sevilen.  She had devoted her life to the House of Living Vampires, and in return, she had received a family.

“As did you.”

He had.  Aoife’s devotion had been a choice.  Karhi knew it was, because Aoife had been Free for over two centuries at this point, and she had stayed by Hazel’s side.  She would have long since left if it wasn’t something meaningful to her. 

Aoife opened her mouth before closing it, as if deciding against what she was going to say.  Then she opened it before closing it again.  She did it one more time before he finally said, “Say whatever you’re going to say.”

“Sloane asked this earlier, and I didn’t really get what she meant, but I think I do now.  Karhi, why are you doing everything alone?”

He had been devoted to Ilona.  It hadn’t been a choice, by any stretch of the imagination, but it had been devotion.  And the circumstances had been terrible.  But he had also gotten a family out of that devotion.  A family he took care of and nurtured and did his fucking best to protect.  And when he couldn’t protect them, he had taken it on as a failure.  He hadn’t ever been willing to admit that he had no control over what Ilona did.

He sighed, finally looking at Aoife.  “I guess, if I admitted that I couldn’t do it alone, then it meant that I never really had any choices.”

Aoife’s answering smile was sad, but it was kind.  There was no pity.  She reached over and clapped her hand on his shoulder.  “You didn’t, mo chara.  But you do now.”

He tapped his piercing against his teeth.  “Why are you being so nice to me?”  He would never have called Aoife a mean person, but he also wouldn’t have ever thought to go to her for any sort of heart-to-heart.  You don’t really get emotionally vulnerable with the Fist of the Ruaidhrí House.

“Because I called you an unstable mess.”

His brow furrowed in confusion.

“I regret saying that. Because I know that I’m one of the few people who has seen the wreckage Ilona leaves behind with her children.  You, especially.  And no one could be put together after that.  Yet, time and time again, you’ve been put together.  You’ve been reliable and you’ve done good, solid work.  You really don’t act like an unstable mess.  Not when you’re needed. 

“But it got bad enough that you disappeared in the middle of interrogations.  And then we find you in the wine cellar cutting yourself?  Things had to be fucking bad.  And I understand ‘fucking bad’. 

“She’s gone, for all intents and purposes.  But living in fear of a nightmare for five hundred years is a big fucking weight to suddenly have taken off.  I understand why you’ve been so off balance.  Who wouldn’t be?

“So, I’m being nice because I’m sorry.”

He wondered how many people had gotten an apology from Aoife Muireadhach.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Yeah.  You should probably go find Sloane.  And maybe don’t apologize to her.  That seemed to really piss her off.”

“Yeah.”