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Sylas dabs at his mouth with a white kerchief. The initials are blotted out by blood. There’s maybe the rib of a J, the broken limbs of an M. The chest of an R?
He tosses it, ruined, to the side and begins to busy himself with Delilah’s bodice.
“Mmm,” she sighs. Sylas feels the artery gurgle against the scab forming on her wrist, her wrist on his neck, her arms looped around his neck, less arms and more a neat noose of pulsing blood. Capillaries, veins, pooling and drawing back.
He chuckles against her throat. “You’re always in a mood, after,” Sylas murmurs.
“What can I say? It does me good to see you alive, love.” She says love like she says decomposition like she says Sylas like she doesn’t say Vecna.
“There might be something to it - to me,” continues Delilah, brown eyes stealing something violet from the evening sky. One of her many magic tricks. “The fact it was my pact with Vecna that brought you to this life? Or - hm. I do like the hypothesis that it’s the long-term necromantic magics-”
Sylas dutifully hums and purrs as his wife dabbles in her speculation. Offers himself, as usual, as her test subject. Pry him open, cut him apart, take his rib and make him again. He wouldn’t mind. She would, is the trouble, and so she takes out her frustration on something. Things that would not be missed, before. Now anything that takes her fancy. Almost.
She’s moved on from the necromancy-vampirism interactions to something like livestock breeding. “There should be a good source of magic to the girl, is the thing. These families have hardly had any outcrossing, bred back to eachother for generations at such a pulsepoint of the leylines. And that tree, too, and the ziggurat.” He’s moved on from her corset (gone) to her dress (not yet, only because she would be cross if he tore it. He wants to.). “And yet not a lick of magic in the main line, or the offshoots! No, it’s this baseborn little thing that is tapped in.”
Tapped, tapped. Tap, tap, her fingers on his chest. “So much potential, the both of them. I could make them both. Make them, Sylas. Build them into something grand.” Delilah’s face twists into a sneer, twists into his neck. The damn buttons are giving him trouble. Fucking claws. “Little rats don’t appreciate any of my work.”
“Darling,” soothes Sylas, “you killed the pup’s family.”
She frowns at him, indignant. “Not the other one’s - not dear Matilda’s. She I have saved from slaving in the fields, wasting resources, wasting potential, wasting. Besides - it’s a favor, being rid of the heirs. Cassandra would have been wed to some middling lord, some cousin, and bred like a show mare. She will do better with me. With us.”
“They will,” he agrees. Perhaps it does not make much sense to him, how the girls might appreciate them. But he has been wrong about many things before - the Assembly, the Empire, death. Delilah has always been right.
Almost.
Later, after. Sylas makes himself into mist to drift from her grasp. He cannot bear to part with her while made of flesh. The form reduces his hunger, too, from a spitting suffocation to a dry heave to every movement. Less wet.
She does not suffice. If she were to, he would kill her, and he can’t.
And so he finds himself a nice young man, counts his ribs beneath his thumb, and fancies him that half-elf he got but a taste of before sinking his teeth into that dusky throat and tearing a cup of flesh from which to drink deep.
All the blood tastes the same as hers, and for that sin it is disgusting.
(He sees the cupbearer the next day. Head lolling, held by few tendons, rot already taking to him greedily.)