Tower Hill

Tower Hill, January 22^nd, 1552.

The first thunk of Edward Seymour’s head as it hurtled downward from his shoulders and bounced perfectly into a straw-clad basket, haunted Marcus Atticus.

In all of his two thousand years of tortured glory, nothing had quite seared itself into the surface of his brain like the scene before him. Marcus’s eyes swiftly clammed shut at the first sight of clumpy crimson fanning out from the bone-ridden stump left behind by the executioner’s tissue-drenched axe.

The vicious scene rolled on and on in his head, playing on repeat without end. The look upon Edward’s face burned itself into Marcus’s psyche and for a drawn-out second, white noise rippling through the crowd of blood-thirsty villagers surrounding him, Marcus forgot in his own disgust, the one person whom Edward’s death would really affect.

A fist crashing into his upper arm caught him off-guard and tossed him off his feet like a ragdoll. He stumbled downward, dragging an onlooker down with him. The woman yelped and scrambled out from underneath him; as her body no longer existed to cushion his fall, he sank into the puddles of rain and mud, elbow squelching over the soaked earth which slowly mixed with dribbling blood.

Marcus looked up, hauling himself from his elbow onto his hand, wherein his signet ring submerged into the puddle. His eyes slowly trailed upwards, absorbing the deep ocean-blue of his sister’s gown. Aurelia stood before him, her features contorted in hatred and in grief. The depth of her resentment crept through the air and plunged into the earth. It hit him like a lightning bolt, as though the Gods themselves had struck him down. He stared at his sister and started to reach out, breathless.

“Aurelia…” Marcus whispered, but before he could touch her hand, she was gone. In the blink of an eye, she was gone, and Marcus, though he searched for her for the next hundred years, learned once more that misery did indeed love company, until the day he finally gave up on finding her.

Fortingall, Perthshire, November 13^th 2020.

SMS: Just finishing work now, meet me by the yew tree C x

A steady smile spread across Marcus’s lips as he glimpsed down from the hallway mirror which was shaped like the morning sun and played host to an array of tumbled stones. His eyes flitted onto the mobile phone atop a shelf directly below the mirror, then glanced back at his reflection. He adjusted his tie, brushed a few stray hairs back from his face, then wrestled a small velvet ring box from inside his jacket pocket. Inside the box, a white gold ring lay embellished with rubies, designed by hand for Cecily’s birthday.

With a final once-over, Marcus nodded to himself, satisfied that he was as ready as he ever could be. Nerves did knot together in his stomach, but they were miniscule in comparison to his confidence in what he expected Cecily’s answer would be. He tucked the ring box back into his pocket and breathed out gently, then stepped back from the mirror.

As he twisted to face the front door of the tiny bungalow he shared with Cecily, his partner of some four hundred years, he noted the outline of a woman on his front step. He tilted his head curiously, then watched as her hand rose, and as she pressed a long, spindly finger against the doorbell, Marcus’s curiosity died.

His blood ran ice-cold. Goosebumps rippled across his skin. The temperature inside the bungalow also took a sharp downward plunge. Marcus swallowed thick lump after thick lump as they formed in the back of his throat. Her absence in his life screeched to a halt, but he felt no hope, no relief, just exhaustion and fear.

Glancing over his shoulder, Marcus wondered if he might make an exit before she could catch up to him. The last time he had seen her, it had just hit a new year. Early hours of January 1^st, 1886, in the blankets of snow settling comfortably upon the cobblestones, only a few people brave enough to put on their housecoats and step out into that cold night to smile and natter away under the starry sky.

Aurelia had approached as he walked home with Cecily from the butcher’s trullo across the road from their former home in Locorotondo, but he hadn’t anticipated what would follow that sighting. In her rage, still burning three hundred years on, she had set his home ablaze with all his belongings trapped inside. Marcus didn’t want to stay in Fortingall any longer than he had to, if this new encounter were to go south like he expected it might. He certainly didn’t want to watch his new home crumble to dust if she still maintained such suffocating resentment towards him.

Part of him, however—the part that ultimately kept him rooted solidly to the ground—knew that he couldn’t let this feud spill over for another three centuries. He couldn’t keep ignoring the matter. He hadn’t wanted to before, when she decided it should drive her as it did that night in 1886. Surrendering the concern and the reservations, Marcus took one tentative step towards the front door, and then another, having to drag each foot forward.

Each movement was agony to endure, on account of what Marcus could only think was some forcefield trying to pin him down, stop him from going to her. His breath died, then quickened, then finally breezed through his lips in something closer to a wheeze as he came to rest just behind the door.

His fingertips trembled so violently as they grazed the old brass doorknob and twisted halfway, that Marcus considered abandoning all hope, all will-power, and thought of conceding to his instincts to leave through the back door, grab Cecily, and disappear.

He doubted his desperation to atone for the harm he had done her in refusing her the power to save Edward Seymour was enough to quell her temper. He doubted, after all of his prior efforts had fallen by the wayside, that sticking around now held any merit at all. But there was a niggling wonder as to why now? Why had she come now, when every other time she had reacted with such hostility, such violence?

He wanted Aurelia back in his life, but he had known her from her first seconds of life. He knew better than anyone that her temper far outweighed her capability for forgiveness; that her selfishness eradicated her sense of kinship, or compassion, or empathy.

He supposed, with some painful self-reflection, that this was little different from himself. The only difference was that Marcus, from all he’d seen her do over the course of their long and bloody lives, all the people she’d killed, all the blood she had shed by her own hand or through puppeteering others—Marcus still drowned in guilt each time he thought of Edward, or any of the countless others who were hurt because of him.

His hate was inverted. He loved his siblings, but he had not tried nearly enough to bear them from their resting places. Every time he thought of Aelia or of Remus rotting in some God-forsaken land heaven-knows-where, no-one to rescue them, Marcus was left in some of the most soul-crushing quandaries he could imagine.

Continuing to stare at her through the crystallised double-glazing, Marcus exhaled, then finally peeled open the door. She stood on the front mat in all her glory, only superficially different from the last time he had laid eyes upon her. Her blonde hair was cropped just above her shoulders, but her blue eyes were still lit by burnt orange eyeshadow and a burgundy lipstick, and this time, she sported a sleek black A-line dress.

She breezed in past him without a care in the world, and the same old dread and disappointment mingled together. His eyes rolled back and slivers of white peeped through. He swung the door shut and swivelled to face her.

“What have you done to Jimmy?”

“Oh, was that his name? Pity that. He looked more like a…”

“A landlord you could murder so you don’t have to ask for permission to enter someone’s house?” he asked bitterly. “What do you want, Aurelia?”

“To talk about our family.”

His eyebrows rose. He held a lid firmly over the glimmer of hope threatening to bubble up to the surface. Holding up a hand, he interjected before she could continue.

“You never talk about them. Why do you suddenly care? Aren’t you the one who said you would rather see them all dead to punish me for my part in Edward’s death?”

“Some things… loathe as I am to admit it, are bigger than me. I meant every word I told you because you deserve no less, but this—I need your help.”

Marcus said nothing, simply gestured for her to go on.

“Cato is awake.”

He felt the wind knocked plainly out of his sails. What little colour he could muster zapped instantaneously from his cold cheeks. His mind raced. Any fear he’d had over Aurelia’s anger, justifiable or not, paled in comparison to the carnage he expected would follow Cato like a plague.

Aurelia was bad and Marcus had always tried to curb her impulses, but Cato was a scourge ten times as chaotic; even at her worst, as inhumane and monstrous as she could be, there was just something about Cato that had been born wrong. Something that had misfired and left him with no inhibitions and nothing to sway him from any course that he set himself upon.

“Where?”

“Last I heard, Slovakia.”

He nodded. Wrestling with the conflicting demons now facing him, Marcus measured the likelihood of at least a tentative union with his sister to put Cato back in the ground before his insatiable appetite could wreak untold catastrophes upon the world, against whether such an allegiance could ever acquit him of his remorse in Edward’s murder. If they succeeded, he thought he might stand a chance at reuniting.

If, on the other hand, they could not contain Cato, then his scorn would undoubtedly pursue them to the brink of exhaustion. Marcus had never known any other who was so wholly evil as their youngest brother, and the thought of him slipping through their fingers like a snake was not an impossible outcome. He couldn’t risk that. With all of these troubling thoughts swirling around in his head, all the self-loathing, he whispered a centuries old-apology.

“I am so sorry, Aurelia, for what I’ve done. I know it’s just words, but if I take it back, I would in a heartbeat.”

“Do you dream of him still?”

Marcus tipped his chin just a fraction and tore his eyes away.

“I do,” he murmured. “Every night and it kills me.”

“How can I believe you?”

“Because you caused me this same pain two thousand years ago.”

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as he felt Aurelia’s gaze harden. He looked at her and his jaw locked, tension dissolving into his own frustration and defiance.

“She didn’t love you.”

“That doesn’t make death any easier a burden, Aurelia. I loved her, but because she had the misfortune to fall for the same men as you, you had to play God.”

“She started it by pretending to be Venus. Julius was just incidental.”

“And Mark?”

He could see a glint of a smile flit quickly across her lips.

“That was a masterpiece; but alas, you are distracted from the real issue at hand. Our common goal. My enemy is your enemy.”

Marcus submitted in defeat.  “If I help you—”

“Yes.”

Hesitation radiated steadily from him, but Marcus pushed the last words out.

“There may be a chance for us to get past this?”

“I may consider it. I won’t forgive you, nor ever trust you again, but I will think of it.”

Knowing that this was the best he could hope for, he clung to this hope. Tugging out his mobile, he unlocked the device onto Cecily’s text and jabbed out a response, before hitting send with a heavy heart.

Change of plans. Aurelia’s here and Cato’s awake. Come home x

A quiet sigh fell and he cast his eyes toward his sister. The weight of this new dilemma came to rest hard upon his shoulders and he did not know if, even with Cecily’s support and any alliance with Aurelia, he could bear it through to any success in restraining Cato for good.

His eyes flickered past Aurelia into the depths of his kitchen and allowed his mind to home in on his one greatest regret, and wondered how different things might now be had he just let Aurelia turn Edward into one of them. How much better, how many years he would not have missed out on with her. He would rewind time and rewrite history for her in a heartbeat, consequences be damned.