[Mousen]

3 Years Ago. The House Under the Hill, the Brodnax Estate, Jawan.

Things definitely could have gone better, Chester reflected grimly as he spat a mouthful of black blood onto the floor. He pushed himself into a sitting position, and the woman watching him said, "Careful." Her tone was clipped, arms folded across her chest.

"You managed it, then." His voice was scratchy, sticking in his throat. He was sure there was more to say on the matter, but he couldn't seem to manage anything other than dull surprise. Maybe it'd come back to him, somehow.

His sister looked towards the door before answering him, as though debating whether she could just walk away. "You remember what happened?" He stared at her. They had the same blue eyes, the family nose and chin. Before Boris' growth spurt, there was a time when they could have been mistaken for each other. She didn't look up from the floor, and Chester could see her fingers, scrubbed raw, digging into the flesh of her arm. It struck him suddenly that she was afraid.

"You pushed me onto an ornamental staircase finial," he said, vaguely aware that it was an entirely ridiculous way to die. "which, I don't suppose would have been a problem if I'd been anything other than shockingly unlucky⁠." He tapped the left side of his chest, and realised there wasn't even a scar. Huh.

"When's my birthday?" she asked suddenly.

"What?"

"Answer me."

"Uhh.... March? May? Brennus normally⁠—"

"It's you," she sighed. "You can never tell with necromancy."

"I can't believe you fucking killed me," Chester said, the whole situation hitting him at once. "Dear god. I was already dead and you killed me."

Boris moved sideways, taking a step closer to the door. "It was an accident! I fixed it, didn't I?"

Chester swung himself off the metal table, and his legs buckled beneath him. He gripped the counter for support, slowly righting himself. Boris didn't move to help him, and Chester was forcibly reminded of why they'd never gotten along. "I don't know," he said. "Did you?"

Boris edged back into the room, reaching over to her notes. Occasionally her eyes would flick up to Chester, who was still, leaning against a counter top. It was only in that moment of quiet that Chester realised they weren't still at the house. The Estate, as large as it was, did not extend anywhere close enough to the sea to be able to hear it from inside. They were in a small basement room, a room that Boris was obviously using as a workshop. There were bottles and jars across one wall, a couple of chest freezers in one corner and a set of metal worktables.

"I've long held the theory that vampires were simply a subset of ghoul. Essentially, they're created the same way, they're both graveyard spirits. Only difference is that a ghoul is incorporeal, a vampire corporeal. And even that isn't strictly true, as a vampire grows in power it finds that it can slip through locked doors, disappear into mist or appear in the guises of different animals. All of this indicates there is an essential substance, something that may linger after death. I modified my usual methods and stole some things from an Aldrectian thesis on ghoul creation, and ta-da," she gestured to him without much enthusiasm.

"What's wrong?" Aside from the obvious reasons she didn't want to be here, he'd rarely seen Boris so keen to get out of his sight.

"I haven't slept in 36 hours and I've been convinced for most of them that Elias was going to snap my neck once he found out what happened to his heir. Then, once I'd succeeded, I realised that there was nothing to stop you doing the same."

"Someone loosing their temper and hurting their sibling?" Chester laughed. "I wonder which of us that sounds more like." Everything felt off, like he was three inches to the left of his body. Even his teeth felt strange in his mouth, like they weren't really his. "You haven't even apologised, and you're telling me you only tried to fix the mess you caused so you wouldn't get into any fucking trouble?"

"I got scared and made a mistake! I'm sorry. But do you have any idea how hard I work to be respected in this family? How talented I am? You don't have to work for anything."

"Get out. Just get out."

"I—"

"Go!"

[Mousen]

Once alone, Chester found a silvered mirror in the bathroom and checked his reflection. Vampires, contrary to popular belief, did have reflections. They just weren't necessarily accurate ones.

The creature staring back at Chester looked particularly dead and inhuman, he was aware that his features were slightly sharper, thinner and more animal. His teeth sharp all the way along, thinner and greyer than he'd remembered them being. No wonder his mouth felt so off, he thought to himself, part of him aware that all of this was upsetting but not quite finding it within himself to feel it yet. Instead he sat down on the bathroom floor, the tiles cold and covered in a thick layer of dust.

After a moment or two, he curled his arms around him and screamed forcefully into his knees.

__

He wasn't sure when he made the decision to clean the house, but after picking himself up the bathroom floor, most of the blood on his clothes hidden by the dust, he'd found himself cleaning. The kind of heavy-duty everything in the house put out on the lawn and the floor scrubbed until you can't feel your arms kind of cleaning. He dug old buckets out of the pantry, found some cracked bars of soap in the kitchen and dug through Boris' lab for supplies.

Really, the house wasn't as bad as he'd first thought. The sparse furniture was generally good quality and had withstood the years it'd been left without dustcloths. The cottage was small, made of sloped walls and rooms at odd angles with itself. The rooms where the house had been built into the cliff were quite rough, just carved stone with whitewash. The kitchen was large, in comparison with the rest of the house, and Chester had cleaned out the wood burner and scrubbed the old table down. The soft furnishings in the living room, amounting to a battered sofa and an armchair were a little moth eaten but fairly serviceable, and the bedrooms dusty but the furniture had managed to avoid any woodworm.

He was in the process of scrubbing the front step, bucket of water in the doorway when Grim appeared beside him.

"You look fucking rough, mate."

Chester swore, tipping the bucket forward and over the threshold. He looked to the creature stood above him, not only covered in blood and dust, but with filthy water soaking up his trousers and for a moment thoroughly wished Boris had left him dead. "Its been a bad few days."

Grim was floating a few inches off the ground, his arms folded behind his head as he leaned luxuriously back into the air. "Yeah? Your old man sent me to check on you."

"He's not my old man," Chester snapped automatically. "And have some respect."

"Lord Elias was fretting."

Chester quite suspected that Elias could not fret if he tried. "I'm not coming home. N-not like this."

Grim raised his eyebrows at the wobble in Chester's voice, and set both his feet on the floor. He offered Chester a hand, which he took, and helped him to his feet. Chester watched his expression change as the demon got a good look at him, it must be bad, he thought, to elicit anything close to sympathy.

"what actual fuck is going on, Chester?"

He shook his head. "Get Brennus to send me my things from the Estate. Explain I've argued with Boris and I'm moving into the cottage for some space. And if you could get them to send over some general spare house things--"

"Chester. what happened."

He looked up suddenly, past Grim and towards a noise in the distance. He could make out two figures in the dark, coming closer by the moment, one of them half carrying the other, arm around their waist. Even at this time of the evening, with sunset hours away he could make out the red hair of his cousins.

"Looks like I'm not the only one having a bad day."

[Mousen]

Alice was half-way to a sprint, dragging her brother along behind her, one hand round his waist, another holding his arm around her shoulder. His head lolled as they moved. As they got closer, Chester could see rips and scratches on their clothes, blood showing through Thomas' white shirt. He pulled his jacket around him, trying to cover up the worst of the damage.

Grim looked to Chester, and then to Alice. Chester shrugged minutely.

"Alice!" Grim called, taking a few long strides towards her. He took Thomas' other arm, and Alice gestured frantically.

"Quick! Quick, into the house!"

"Alice?"

Chester held open the door as they dragged Thomas inside. Alice looked to him briefly and mouthed "what", catching sight of his appearance.

"we made a mistake," Alice said, once they were far enough into the threshold, and Thomas had been set down on the moth-eaten sofa. She paced as she spoke, and Chester did his best not to wince at the mud she was leaving on the flagstone floor.

"Boots. Please," he said.

She looked towards him and rolled her eyes, settling herself on the armchair. "Priorities!"

"I've just scrubbed that!"

"Priorities!" Her red hair cascaded down her shoulders, although the events of the night had left it tangled. She was a tall woman, certainly close to six foot and the shape of her face and the colour of her eyes marked her as a Brodnax. It looked like something with claws had had a go at her tights and the edges of her polka dot dress. "we're in trouble here, Chester."

Grim butted in. "I can see that."

She looked over briefly at her brother, who had not stirred since they'd brought him in. "Thomas... Thomas was testing out an old book, I was giving him a hand with it. Something for his novel? An invocation? And... And it went wrong."

"what happened?"

"I think... Looking back now, that it was never an invocation. It was a curse. It was," She barked out a humourless laugh, "To ward against writer's block. But two spirits appeared and attacked us instead. They called themselves Bad and worse."

"Not particularly imaginative," Chester said bluntly.

"I think that might have been the point," Grim said, biting his bottom lip in thought. when the others turned to look at him, he elaborated. "A spell to ward off writer's block? That makes two evil spirits with terrible names appear? That's one hell of a motivation."

"Oh," said Alice, the realisation dawning. "You don't think that it worked?"

"I do, yes."

"Shit."

"Do you think they might come back?" Chester asked, leaning against the doorway to the living room.

Alice nodded. "The wording was to ward off writer's block in perpetuity. So, if we have done the spell right, then we've really fucked up." She buried her face in her hands, making a noise of despair at the back of her throat.

"Grim, why don't you move Thomas into the attic room? It's clean. Then if you could--"

"Get Brennus to put all your things together and I'll bring them back with me?"

Chester nodded. Grim picked up the sleeping figure easily enough, Alice watched him to with concern writ across her features.

"And you?" she asked, once they were alone.

"Not important," he replied firmly.

Alice stood and strode over to him, he'd forgotten how short he was in comparison; he didn't even come up to her shoulders. "I don't know you well enough to trust you, not really." Although he and Alice and Thomas were all roughly the same age, Chester hadn't particularly interacted with the more human side of his family since he was a child. "But I'm tired and scared and I don't know how I'm going to explain this to the family and if you dare--"

"I'm not going to rat you out to Elias. I'm more worried about our ridiculous nursemaid."

Alice smiled at the comment. "whoever thought getting a demon to look after us all would be a good idea."

"Elias, apparently."

"Pff. It's no wonder he doesn't have any kids," she paused for a moment. "Chester, seriously, what happened? You look awful."

"I just need a bath and some rest."

He could tell from her expression that Alice wasn't convinced, she seemed to tired to push the matter. "Fine. Go sort yourself out, I'll check on Thomas."