Page 52 of The Villa

They’re not words anyone has ever said to her.

“I… I was dreaming,” Pierce gulps out, his hand shaking as he reaches up to grab Mari’s wrist. “But it was real, Mare, it was so… so fuckingreal.…”

She doesn’t bother reminding him that this is why they’d agreed that while booze is fine, he should lay off the drugs. They always mess with his mind like this, make him see things or hear things or have these horrible nightmares he can never shake. He’ll be ruined for days now, she knows. No music, no writing.

“What was in the dream?” she asks, trying to make her voice soothing and steady. He looks at her, his face somehow going even whiter in the moonlight.

“You,” he says, and then she shakes his head again, pulling his hand back from hers. “You were covered in blood. Reaching out. And it was… it was like you were so tall, and I was so small, I was crouching at your feet.”

Pierce breaks off then, putting his face in his hands. “It was so fucking wild. I was looking up at you and all that blood and thinking,she’s inevitable, she’s inevitable,like this fuckingdrumbeat.…”

Mari lifts his face again, looking into his eyes. “It was just adream, Pierce. See? Look. No blood.” She holds up both her hands. “Just me.”

He gives another shuddering sigh, leaning forward to rest his head against her breasts, and she keeps stroking his hair, feeling his sweat and tears soaking through her nightgown.

When he seems calmer, she can’t stop herself from saying, “And, you know, Pierce, that line you said? ‘She’s inevitable’?”

Pulling back, Pierce blinks at her, and she goes on, her heartbeat speeding up. “That’s really good. It’s so cool and could be foreboding, but could also be romantic.…”

His brow furrows. “What are you getting at?”

“I just think it’s a line you should use. Like in a song.”

Pierce pushes her away, his hands on her arms, his movements shaky as he stands. “No way,” he says on a breathless kind of laugh. “I just want to forget that shit and go to bed.”

But Mari doesn’t want to forget it.

She’s still thinking about it long after Pierce goes back to sleep, breathing softly beside her, and when she can’t lie there anymore, she gets up, goes to her notebook and the little desk under the window.

Victoria’s story has been frozen in amber for weeks now, but suddenly Mari feels it coming back to life.

She’s inevitable.

Pierce’s vision of Mari covered in blood comes back to her as she starts to write.

She’s inevitable.

Victoria, covered in blood. Whose blood? It doesn’t matter, not yet. She’ll figure that out.

The well, the cave into hell. There’s something there, maybe. Something, too, in the shopkeeper’s story about a suicide in this house. Years and years ago, but everyone in the town still remembers.

Houses remember.

Now the line makes more sense to her, now she knows how to use it.

Not a love story at all.

Or yes, a love story, but there’s horror inside of it. There’s death and loss, blood and sweat. Just as there is in every love story, after all.

Mari’s pen moves faster and faster as the story starts taking shape.

By the time the sun rises, she knows the book she’s writing and she understands why she couldn’t write it before.

It needed Pierce’s dream to show her the path.

Pierce wakes up, eventually, presses a kiss to the top of her head, but thankfully doesn’t bother her, drifting out of the room with his guitar in hand.

After a moment, she hears him begin to play in another room, and that seems to make her write even faster. She likes it, this sense of them both creating at the same time, near each other, but not together. Her writing inspiring his playing, his playing inspiring her writing.

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