Shadowkissed (A Hemlock Grove fan fiction)

and so it begins . . . again.

Somewhere deep in the woods, there is the sound of screaming again. Footsteps thumping. Horrible laughter echoing through the trees. Blood, warm and thick, pumping the life out of someone's veins.

But if there's no one else around to hear it, does it really make a sound?

They are coming.

 -------------------------------------------------

He graduates the last week of May. Technically he receives a diploma in the mail and a note from Principal Gibbons with the respectful suggestion—or desperate offer, depending on how you look at it—that he doesn't walk on account of the fact that his mother is missing, his cousin has died two months prior by giving birth to an incestuous abomination that now resides in his own home, and his sister has recently been revealed to be Hemlock Grove's most wanted serial killer. He doesn't take it too personally; after all, why would anyone want a monster like him flaunting success of any kind after all the destruction he and his family has caused this sweet, picturesque little town? It's bad enough he's going to be heading the Institute now that his mother is gone. Pryce has promised to get the word out that she committed suicide, unable to handle the backlash from Shelley's exposure, by the end of summer around the time that he'll come into the throne. It's better than the truth, at least.

Roman doesn't really give a fuck either way. The whole graduation process means less than nothing to him, now especially. It won't be long before he is a legal adult, sole beneficiary to his late father's entire fortune. Education is not necessary—in fact, Pryce and his little minions would probably like it much better if Roman was an uneducated little vegetable, lest he get in the way of any of their sinister projects. He's been to the White Tower only a few times since the day he was there with Peter, for Letha, and it's unbearable even for him. There were rumors flying around before, about the town's monstrous killer being an escaped something from the Godfrey Institute—of course, that wasn't the case, but now Roman might have once believed it was.

He spends graduation night dodging phone calls, getting fucked by the memories and voices that aren't really there, listening to a beer bottle rolling across the basement's empty pool. The sound of it is dissonant and beautiful, and he thinks Peter would have liked it, somehow. He snorts so much coke that the nosebleeds seem never-ending, and even then he can't tell if they're from the drugs or the compulsion he constantly seems to be using. It's stronger now that he's come into his own. He's still not sure what he is, or how to control it, and he's had one hell of a time trying to make sense of the shit Google hands him. It's interesting, though, figuring himself out. Gives him something else to do besides wait, and remember, and drink until he passes out, too exhausted to dream.

But tonight it doesn't work. He can't halt the thinking or hide from it either. He can't force himself into forgetting, into making his heart still, even if the beating of it already has. He's jittery and he knows exactly why. Why else?

Where are you? he texts sometime around midnight. He can barely keep his eyes open and focused long enough to type, and even then they jumble up on the screen.

The phone stays silent for the rest of the night.

* * *

He turns eighteen in early August, as the heat is slowly dying out and nights are getting shorter, though nothing seems to change much. He spends it getting drunker than ever on the roof, watching the summer sun sit high in the sky over the forest that races to meet the edge of his back lawn. Sunburns stopped mattering the moment his heart ceased to beat, but it still feels nice to sit there in the stillness of afternoon, heat unable to pass through the thick protective layer of his skin. The mansion beneath him is empty, but he hasn't bothered to notice silence for months now, there or anywhere.