I woke up late the next morning to the sound of my door opening, and someone storming down my steps. It was normally concerning, and yet now I didn’t care in the least bit as I felt Lord shift his weight against me and my eyes slowly fluttered open.

  Tara was standing above us, wearing a crumbled looking pink dress, looking like she’d barely slept. She seemed angry, and even as Lord happily declared Tara! She asked me, “what the fuck were you thinking?”

  I knew what she was talking about, but I was tired and so I asked, “what do you mean?” to buy myself time to finish waking up.

  “Something was fucking gnawing at me last night, so I decided to read your fucking letter to me,” she said, pulling the envelopes out of her purse, “then I panicked and started reading the other letters, trying to find out where exactly you were going because my calls weren’t going through to you. You fucking… Mary, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I didn’t want to leave you all without an explanation,” I said, frowning as I sat up in bed, Lord laying next to me as he looked back and forth between us in confusion.

  “You left me in fucking charge of distributing your suicide notes,” Tara snapped, suddenly pacing the floor in anger, “you left my fucking boyfriend a note saying he shouldn’t feel guilty that he was the one that drove you to your death! Do you never just…fucking think, Mary?! What the fuck did you expect from that, did you expect us to shrug and pretend you never existed?!”

  “Why not?,” I answered as I looked down to the ground, a thousand words trapped in those two, bringing a dull ache to my chest, “I’m a fucking monster, I’m barely held together, I’m just going to end up dragging this fucking Covenant down the next time I break down and eat someone. Why the fuck shouldn’t I just go and let y’all move on with your life?”

  Tara watched me, and I desperately tried to hold myself together as she stared down with some look I couldn’t explain. Not until she lunged forward, my eyes closed ready for her hands around my throat…and she hugged me. She fucking hugged me again, and I hugged back as the damn broke and I sobbed into her chest. Any possibility for words or even or voluntary noise drowned by the sobs, my vision blurred until I closed my eyes, and I loosely hung onto her like she was a raft in a stormy ocean.

  Tara sat beside me on the bed, and I curled against her to bury my face deeper against her. The fingers of one of her hands wound themselves in my hair, and the others stroked my back in a way that somehow didn’t bother the wolf. My tears flowed and they flowed and they didn’t stop, each time they came close a new wave crashing against me as I remembered yet another part of what my life had been.

  “I’m a fucking monster,” I croaked out, not even sure the words were coherent, “I’m a fucking monster and I don’t know how to be anything else.”

  Tara didn’t respond, and instead she held me until I could no longer do anything except stay there limp. Tears continued coming on, though they were not full sobs, and while I was not yet numb the pain was almost manageable. The grip of my arms around her waist never loosened, and she never asked for it to as she continued to hold me hard enough to crack ribs. At some point Lord deciding to join me in bringing some small comfort as he found his way between us, without pushing me away, and started to give a comforting purr.

  “He wouldn’t kill me,” I said, feeling like I was going to throw up, “I’m a monster, and he wouldn’t fucking kill me. I deserve to fucking die, I needed to die, and I don’t know what fucking happens next.”

  “You’re supposed to live,” the woman said softly, turning my face to look up at her, “Mary you’ve made mistakes, we all have — not all of us in the Purists but the point stands — and you were in a really shitty position when you made them. You have time to make up for it though, if you want, but living your life miserable or dying isn’t going to do anyone any good. You have time to find out what you actually want to do, be normal, make up for it once you’re able to live like that.”

  “I don’t know how to be anything other than a monster,” I said, shaking my head in disgust, “Tara, how the fuck am I supposed to be normal?”

  “One day at a time,” she answered, and I didn’t respond as I laid against her.

  I’d eaten someone’s heart, I’d killed them and enjoyed their death, it’d fucking made my heart beat like nothing else. That wasn’t even two days ago, and I wasn’t fucking changing anytime soon. It didn’t matter how hopeful she was, how many days I woke up wanting to be normal, I was never going to be anything resembling normal again.

  Maybe I could pretend though.

  Maybe that’d be enough.

  “You have friends here, Mary, and we’re here for you,” Tara said, and I nodded at the comfort.

  I finally pushed away from her and muttered, “I don’t know what to do right now.”

  “Anything you want,” Tara said, smiling as she took my hand in hers and squeezed it, “you can make your life, and that means it’s your choice.”

  She was right, and yet I told her, “Hunter proposed to me.”

  That caught her off guard, I saw the flash of it in her eyes even as she tried hiding the fact. All the same, she nodded and admitted, “that…explains what I picked up in the letter you wrote him. Have you decided what you’re going to say?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head as I drew my knees close to my chest, “I…I still love him, I know I do. He was my first real love, the first guy that ever treated me like a girl, you know? I want things to be…I don’t even know, close to normal as they could be. I want him to come here, I think it’d be good for him, you know?”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “I feel like there’s a ‘but’ hidden in there,” Tara said softly.

  “He makes me worse,” I agreed nervously, “I’m not a good person, I know that, but with him…I feel like I have permission to be my worst when I’m with him, and I give in to those desires. I have fun being like that, and he likes to see me like that, and neither of us ends up happy in the end. He said that…he said if I married him he'd leave the Purists, and that would be good, right? I mean, we’d get to be happy, we’d get to be together and all that. That should be good, right?”

  “Mary,” Tara said, stopping herself a moment as she seemed to reconsider something, “I…I can’t make the choice for you, you know that, but you do need to keep in mind that you can’t just live for others. You can’t sacrifice yourself for someone else, you deserve to be happy as much as anyone. If someone — if Hunter — doesn’t want to change on his own, because he wants to change, then you can’t sacrifice yourself on the chance he does.”

  The words hung in the air for a long while, and I let them sit as I slowly told her, “thank you, Tara.”

  “You deserve to be happy, Mary,” the woman said another time, as though she were trying to hammer it into me as she rose to her feet. She tossed most of the envelopes on my bed, before holding one out to me. I frowned, looking up at her confused, and slowly took the letter, turning it around to see dad written on the back. “I hope you can forgive me for reading the letters like I did. They were… well, depressing, mostly, but there was something in them. Lord’s I was not going to read out loud to him despite your instructions, no idea what was going on there.”

  What the fuck did you write to me? The cat interrupted, looking up at me in confusion.

  “The others though…I think you know on some level you have friends Mary, and I’m glad for it,” Tara said, playing with her hair with a small smile, “Andrew’s aside, and the whole ‘mostly a list’ part of mine, they showed you cared. I think…I think maybe you should write to this Martin kid, or get up to see him if you can. I think you should tell Vergil and Calliope what you wrote about them. And, I think if you really wanted to, you should rewrite that note to your dad to not be about your death and finding Martin immediately, and send it to him.”

  “He doesn’t even know I’m trans, let alone a werewolf,” I said, letting out a small laugh as I tossed the letter onto the floor, “he…he doesn’t need to know.”

  “Then why did you want to tell him?” the woman asked, furrowing her brow as she glanced at the letter.

  “It seemed right,” I muttered, shaking my head as I rose to my feet, “I…Tara, I’m legally dead, at least as far as the legal part cares. My dad probably thinks a werewolf killed me, and he thinks I died as his good, and aspiring to be like him, son.”

  “Was he, like, transphobic?” Tara asked, frowning as she hesitantly added on, “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking. I mean, I know the werewolf thing would also be hard to-”

  “My dad was a monster hunter,” I interrupted her, a brief look of surprise coming over the woman. “He was also very happy about having a son to carry on the family name, not sure about the opinion on trans people. So yeah, those are two big reasons for it, understand? Other than that…if I’m alive when I tell him, he’ll find me and we’ll need to talk. I’ll need to tell him what I’ve been doing since I left, he’ll find out what I did, and…Tara, would you want to tell your dad you were in the Purists? Would you want him to know you've killed and ate people? That he’s probably investigated some of the scenes you’ve made?”

  The woman took a moment to answer, and when she did she told me, “I understand, Mary. You should wait if you don’t want to, or you never have to do it. I just think what you said made it sound like you had something you needed to say, you know?”

  I nodded, and a smile crossed my lips, knowing what she meant as I said, “thank you, Tara. For everything.”

  “Like I said, Mary, let me know if you need anything,” the woman muttered, her smile only faltering as she seemed to come up with something new to say. “You are coming to the county fair on Friday though. Least you can do after that stunt, alright?”

  “Yeah, yeah, babysitting your niece,” I said, giving a small laugh as I remembered what she was talking about.

  “It’s not even babysitting, we’re just getting you out on the town,” Tara said, rolling her eyes at the thought, “Well, maybe babysitting, depends on if she almost gets fucking arrested again, but you know how that is.”

  “Ah, I get it, bringing me along to ensure that if trouble starts it’s definitely my fault,” I said, giving a faux gesture of understanding. Tara giggled at the joke, and I asked, “she know about the whole werewolf thing?”

  “My family’s a werewolf family,” Tara agreed, sounding rather proud, “my brother and her didn’t get a transformation, but they’re pretty in the know.”

  “Can we keep the Purist angle down?” I asked, a little worried about that getting out, “might not be the best first impression on the family saying I’m a mass murderer.”

  “Yeah, I’ll make you a deal. You decide how you want to introduce yourself, and we’ll back you up on it,” Tara said, giving me a final nod as she went up the stairs out of my room.

  I was left with Lord, and the cat walked up, rubbing against my leg and purring as he asked, so can I read that letter to me?

  “No, I thought I was gonna die when I wrote it, and I knew you’d get one last laugh out of it from me if I humored you,” I said, giving a small chuckle as I walked over to the box by my dresser. “Hey you hungry? I’m thinking of making a pizza for a lunchtime breakfast. I can probably make you something small and fancy to go along with it, or at the very least get you a can of tuna. Maybe we could watch a movie, I have a couple good horror movies I think you'd like.”

  Mary, Mary, Mary, Lord started, shaking his head as he walked over to sit in front of me, are you asking me out on a date? After all these months of playing hard to get, has my elegant skill with the word finally paid off?

  “No, I’m bored, I’m pretty sure Misha’s had to go to some meetings today so we can’t talk, and you’re my best friend, weird as that fucking feels to say,” I said, rolling my eyes as I sat the box on my bed, digging through it and occasionally holding up items, “also you saved my life, and I still haven’t properly thanked you for that one.”

  Oh Mary, you grace me with your time, you are a goddess granted flesh, a-

  “Lord,” I interrupted, getting the cat’s attention as he turned back toward me, “I want to be clear I’m doing this because you saved my life, and that if you manage to tell anyone about this I will shave you bald and make you wear a pink bow for the rest of your natural life.”

  The cat started to ask what I meant, and before he could I lifted up my shirt. I felt utterly ridiculous, and like I probably should have been put on some sort of list as I flashed the cat for a few seconds. He, for once in his life, remained silent and gentlemanly, and I dropped my shirt back in place as I continued rummaging through the box.

  Message received, happy to save your life anytime, the cat declared, walking up the stairs as he sung a happy little song. I let out a chuckle at his reaction, and my smile only broke as I drew out what I’d been looking for this whole time.

  In my hand rested a golden necklace, crafted in the shape of a heart with a purple stone set within it. I turned it over, a void in my chest as I looked it over, and I shook my head as I slipped it into my pocket.

  I needed to make a few phone calls.