Monster

13. A Reunion

Unknown date and time

A Reunion

Elsa's dress was torn and brown with old blood; she did not care. She raced back into town in hopes that she might discover what had happened to her home, her father, and Matilda.

Her bones creaked and her bare feet were torn to shreds by the time she made it to the cafe she had talked to Ronan in that day over tea. Inside guests stopped to observe her; the state she was in certainly called for it—her hair was a bird's nest, her skin paler than the moon and so thin, purple veins stood out like poison snakes buried in snow. Her lips were chapped and blue, and the hems of her dress stretched in rags to the floor, where her poor, swollen feet left scarlet marks with each step she took.

"Good heavens!" a round woman cried from the closest table. "What has happened to you, young lady!?"

Elsa stood, speechless, as so many eyes scrutinized her. She finally spoke, and her voice, to her horror, was barely there. "My father." Eyes zoomed toward her neck where they saw countless punctures, swollen with infection. Elsa was a hideous mess, bless her soul. "Where is he? My house. It's covered in dust and drapes."

Nobody answered, and she stood, staring into every confused, helpless face, until at last someone stood. "Your father ran the SKS, didn't he?"

Elsa started and turned to see that the person who spoke was a man. He wore a black tweed coat and pants, and had a curly mustache, the kind Elsa had only ever seen in Paris, when she and her father had visited one winter.

"Yes," she answered, hesitantly. "How do you know?"

"Everyone knows," a woman next to the man declared. "He was killed by a vampyre, dear. After that, the SKS had started to fall apart. Tragic." She fanned herself and turned back toward her tea.

Elsa could not feel her feet anymore, or for that matter her entire body. Even her face went prickly with shock. She stumbled back a step or two and ran into the door just as someone was trying to open it and walk in. She turned, shoved the person out of her way, and raced out of the cafe. Someone called her name but she ignored it. The news she had just heard frightened her; if her father was indeed dead, killed by a vampyre, then she had nothing left in life.

So to stop herself from breaking apart, she ran, as though she could outrun what she'd heard, what she knew, what she had to face. Her bloody feet only took her so far before she collapsed on the steps of the library. She had wanted to escape into the shelves for solace, where a lot of the worlds in those pages were instead perfectly tragic; the beautiful kind that told a story one should never forget.

She sat on the steps, and without realizing it, she was gasping for air that felt too thick to breathe. A shadow fell over her minutes later and she froze. Slowly her eyes rose to meet a pair warm as the sensation of a fire in the dead of winter.

The man looked familiar in a way, but it did not take long before realization brought Elsa to tears. Ronan. His reddish hair was askew with wind, and his freckles stood out more profoundly, all over his face. There were faint crow's feet at his eyes. His lips were wrought into a frown and his brow was swooped into concern deeper than the wounds in Elsa's neck and wrists. He gingerly took her wrist and examined it, and then a tear slipped from his eye and landed on her scar; it stung a little.

"Elsa," he half-whispered, his eyes on her wrist, never moving.

"Ronan," Elsa choked, "you look so different. Older..."

"That's because seven years have passed, Elsa."

Elsa's vision went blank for a second and then she slowly shook her head. "No, it hasn't."

Ronan finally lifted his gaze from her wrist to her eyes, which were as wide and red as the cut along her collarbone. "Yes, Elsa. It has. You have been missing for seven years... where have you been?" He tilted his head at her. "You look the same as the last day I saw you... at the ball."

Elsa closed her eyes. "I don't know," she whispered. "I was captured... by a vampyre named Sven... I am not sure how seven years passed... and my father." She swallowed, trying to clear her throat; tears started to stream from her eyes uncontrollably. "I don't know what to do," she choked, and then sobs overtook her.

Moments passed before Ronan pulled her into his arms. Her body ached from the the impact, but quickly it was replaced by warmth, and all the solace she could have hoped for in the library.

Ronan could not turn back the seven years, resurrect her father, or heal all of her scars, inside and out, but he could comfort her heart, or at least try to.