It's the beat of her heart saying

“Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row.”

Marian Spencer likes a slow burn and a long kill. That’s one of the benefits of being a Charun—she can draw out the deaths as long as she likes, so long as the death is there in the end. She spends a hundred years thinking, learning, and trying to become better than she is, working to craft her masterpiece. She wants to be remembered for the brilliance, for the simplicity of it all.

She wanders from city to city, town to town (but not Chicago, never Chicago) making small kills here and there, but they were all just practice. She is waiting for the moment when she’ll find the circumstances will be just right,

She locks eyes With Mason Connor across a subway platform in the middle of a crowded New York station, and she knows within an instant that he’s it. He’ll be her grand masterpiece, and she loves him more than she’s ever loved anything before.

Maybe one day he’ll love her too.

They’re married six months after they meet, in Saint Peter’s cathedral, because that’s what Marian wants. She wears a long white dress, and smiles politely at all his friends, quietly plotting the ways she’s going to take them away from him. She wants everything that he can give her, is willing to drain him of everything he has, because the more he gives to her, the less he’ll have for himself.

Eventually, he’ll have nothing, and she’ll have the thing she wants the most.

( *** )

1882 words