Pretty Broken Things

by Melissa Marr

  I had hints, but after the night terror, after realizing that she felt the need to be hurt, after hearing her screams, I believe that Tess is alive because of a combination of ruthlessness, luck, and intellect. Whatever she fled when she left Edward/Reid may have been more than I can express in a novel. All along I’ve been excluding things in my pages, softnesses and delusions, but those aren’t the things that readers won’t be able to accept. Like Hardy’s Tess, my Tess isn’t so easily situated in the role of sympathetic victim. There is a darkness in her that would make the masses hate her—and I want their emotions to be more sympathy or pity. She’s in control when she can be, vicious as needed, and I am both afraid and entrapped by her. She controls me.

  People prefer monsters to be wholly monstrous. We like our heroines to be battered but morally intact. Tess manages to be both simultaneously. I don’t know if she could be one without the other.

  I cannot write her as she truly is.

  Right now, she’s humming. She been doing that more since we left New Orleans, as if the lack of music that rises up in every shadowed alcove of that city could be corrected by her attempts at song. Or perhaps she hears that music in her mind and the humming is a consequence of it. It’s hard to say with Tess. What I do know is that I’d doubted her when she said she couldn’t leave the city, but having been here with her, having woken to her terror-laden shrieking, I think she was speaking a truth that I couldn’t have understood before this trip.

  “Did you kill that bum?”

  Tess frowns at my question, and after a moment, I realize that it’s not over the accusation of murder but over the act of remembering. She’d not sure if she did or not.

  “When?”

  “In the Marigny. Luke or Lee or . . . I don’t know. The drunk.” I watch her as I repeat the question, “Did you kill him?

  “Lucus!” She smiles, proudly, as she recalls the man she may have murdered.

  I confess my amateur sleuthing. “I went to look for him. I couldn’t find him. No one saw him after that night.”

  “I gave him money so he could leave.” As if that excuses what I expect her to say next, what I know she is about to admit. “Sometimes when people know things . . . it’s not safe.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  She sits up, stretches, and stands. “Is he dead? Maybe I did. I think I might have. I can’t always be sure, but I might have done.” She nods, her humming and nodding flow into the off-kilter cadence of her words. “Lucas knew things.”

  She smiles at me as she admits that she will kill, that she has killed. I hear it, the warning in her words.

  Careful to sound casual, I ask, “So if people know . . . too much, you kill them?”

  “I haven’t killed you, Michael.” She laughs. “Lucas knew secrets. He drank too much, and he might have talked when he was drunk. That happens. It’s dangerous though.” She pauses, tilting her head in thought like a child might do. “It’s very important that no one tell tales. Reid taught me that. All the pretty things . . . none could talk when they went home. They couldn’t leave if they would tell stories. Telling tales is bad. That was a rule. Even the pretty things have to follow the rules.”

  “The pretty things?”

  Tess kisses me. “I need to shower. That helps keep infections out of cuts. We’ll need some antibiotic cream too. You can put it on me later.”

  It’s weirdly seductive when she says it, as if treating the injuries that I’ve left on her body is intended to be sexual. She watches me to be sure I understand, and when she’s satisfied, she strips and walks out of the room.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the way I feel now. I’d cling to my own illusions: I thought of her as the broken sparrow, a fragile thing, but now I realize that there’s something more akin to a bird of prey in Tess. She’s still been victimized, still broken, but she’s swallowed a bit of darkness along the way. People aren’t always one way or the other, not really. The interesting ones are several things at once, often contradictory things at that.

  Logic kicks in and tells me I ought to be afraid: I'm sleeping with a killer. That should upset me, but it evokes a very different reaction I can't look at too closely.

  There is something glorious in power. It's why I want to succeed in my career. If I’m completely honest, it's why I "date" the sort of women I do. Sometimes, however, the temptation to squeeze a little tighter, shove a lover down a little harder, push them to do things I can tell they don't want to do . . . it's there. Tess saw it.

  Whatever Reid did to her is why she wants me. It's not my money. It's not my body. It's something in me that most women pretend not to notice. A rush of shame fills me at the thoughts that rise up in me. Tess is the sort of broken that means she has very few limits; she's already showing me that.

  How far could I go? Would she let me act out the kind of fantasies that I would never have admitted aloud before her?

  Unbidden, a darker thought comes to me—or maybe it's just a different shade of dark: Tess has taken lives. She's willing to talk about it. How much more would she be willing to do? I want to be able to understand what it means to take a life, but there’s never been anyone who was willing to let me into the world that Tess knows.

  When The Ruins of a Carriage House failed, I was the man at the back of the kinds of bars where the dim light hid what I was pretty certain were bloodstains. I didn’t necessarily want to draw blood, but I want to witness it. I want to see it done. I want to let my senses fill with it. How else am I to write it properly? I want to be a master of words, of realistic darkness. That takes research.

  Tess somehow sees that need. For all of her madness, I feel like she understands me in ways no one else ever has. I wonder if it’s why she came out to dinner with me that first night. She said it so casually, told me about Reid’s history as if it was mundane. He killed a few people. How do you reach that place where death is casual?

  I spoke to a man she killed.

  There was a man I spoke to, and now he’s dead.

  Tess did that. She ended his life.

  When she gets out of the shower, she stares at me with such an odd smile. “You want to know about dying.”

  “I’m a writer,” I start, quickly pushing away the things I'd been thinking.

  Tess doesn't allow me even that much distance, that scant comfort. She crosses her arms as she stares at me, and I realize that there is an odd sanity that darkness seems to allow her. I wonder if the way she is, that floating disconnectedness, the almost desperate hurtling toward violence in the dark, is something she’s always carried or if the years with Reid created it.

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Really, Michael?”

  It's a bargain. There are terms to everything with her, and I'm beginning to understand it more and more. I exhale. “I want to know everything."

  “Well, let’s go then.”

  “Go?”

  “Hunting.”

  A part of me wants to ask what she means, but the rest of me is afraid of the answer. I can’t decide if I’m afraid that it’ll be what I expect or if I’m afraid it won’t.

  We leave the building and walk for several minutes in silence. I’m not sure what to say, and she’s not offering. After walking for an hour, I almost forgot what we were doing.

  “The first key,” she whispers from my side, “is learning to assess them. Not every lamb is created alike.”

  “Lamb?”

  It’s like she can sense it. She pauses mid-step, and consequently, midway through an intersection. “That’s what you want isn’t it? To find the lost lambs?”

  I stare at her. There are layers twisted into Tess’ words.

  “You can’t cull the herd if you don’t know which are lambs and which are other things.” Tess is seemingly oblivious to the cars now honking at us. “There are lambs, and there are hunters.”

  I take her hand and tug her toward the sidewalk. “What are you?”

  “It depends on the
day. I used to be a lamb, but I bled so very much.” Something darker than I want to face slides into her posture and voice. “I won’t be a lamb again, Michael. Not ever.”

  Almost as if the words are forced from my tongue, I ask, “What am I?”

  She waves at a man who yells obscenities at us as we stand along the street. “A lamb who wants teeth.”

  “I’m not a killer,” I tell her or maybe I tell myself. I’m not sure which of us needs to hear it more. A part of me thinks that it’s me.

  “Everyone is a potential killer unless they want to be a potential victim.” Tess shrugs. "I want to live. So, I will never ever be a lamb again."

  I want to ask how many bodies litter her memories. I want to know everything. In time, I will.

  She speaks as if reducing the world to those who kill and those who die is a casual truth. For her, I think it is. Tess had to decide to be a killer in order to survive. That’s the key, the secret, the thing she’s willing to share now—because I hurt her when she asked me to do so.

  As I stare at her, Tess walks away, leaving me standing at the edge of the street. Logic says I ought to fear her. Logic says I ought to contact the police. There is no statute of limitations on murder. I should act.

  But the people she killed are long dead.

  Except Lucas.

  Do I care about a drunk vagrant? In public, I would say yes. In the privacy of my mind, I think that Tess did what Tess does: she protected herself. It makes me realize that he died for the very thing I could: he knew her secrets.

  Is my life in danger?

  Despite that niggling fear, I want to know more. I need to. I'm never going to meet anyone else like Tess.

  She’s waiting, leaning against a building, smoking.

  “You left because he killed people. Reid.”

  Tess shakes her head. “No. I left because if I stayed he’d kill me. For a long time, I thought that if I was good enough, did everything right, he’d stop killing them and I’d be safe. Everyone would be safe.”

  “Did he kill . . . many people?”

  Tess looks away, staring at a group of young men laughing and talking as they prowled the street. They were the same sort of men you can see in every city, every town, young and full of confidence. These were dressed well enough to mark them as affluent, but that was the only true difference I could see.

  “I was raised with more money than you might think. I know you realize that I come from money, but”—Tess lowers her voice—“you’d recognize my family name, Michael. We’ve likely been at the same galas, the same tedious events where everyone believes they are so much better than whichever unfortunate will benefit from their latest charity donations. I left that world . . . and Reid found me.”

  This is the story I thought I wanted, but it’s not. I’m not sure what or why, but there is more to Tess’ past than she’s revealing, even now. “And so, you knew he was a killer after you were with him?”

  “I always knew that he wasn’t a lamb.” She twines her fingers with mine and pulls me closer. “This is what you want, isn’t it? To understand?”

  We walk for a while, and Tess makes no further comment. She doesn’t comment on the people we pass or ask me any further questions. She hums to herself for a while, that strange little song that seems to lack any similarity to music or actual song. I don’t know quite what to call it other than music, but it’s a discordant tumble of sounds more than anything else.

  We’re standing in Times Square when she speaks again: “Sometimes it’s the way people watch you, the way their eyes follow you like they want their feet to do. That’s part of collecting a lamb. You need to see them clearly.” She lets her attention drift visibly to a young woman who is watching us. “That one has promise, but she’s the sort of girl you can’t manage quickly.”

  “Manage?”

  Tess smiles, a secretive little grin that frightens me a bit. “She’s looked at her phone several times while we were standing here. Either she is texting or on social media. People know where she is, possibly even know that she’s headed somewhere else. Livestock like her aren’t impossible, but they’re not as easy to cull.”

  “I thought you said Reid was the killer.” The question is clear even if I don’t phrase it as such.

  Tess shrugs. “There are things I learned. He watched them, all the time. The pretty things who would be dressed in red . . . Little lambs who lost their way . . .” She steps away from me then. “I tried to stop him. I tried to be good. I really did, but . . . I was never enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugs. “I survived, Michael. What I did was survive. Until he finds me, I’m alive.”

  I’m not sure why, but until that moment, I’d thought Reid was dead. I stared at her. She’d lived with a killer and left him.

  “You’re hiding. He’s still out there, and you’re hiding. Why would he look for you? It’s been years, hasn’t it?” I think back over everything I know, the bits of her past, the stories I know and the things she’s admitted today.

  “I’m his wife.”

  “You’re . . .” My mind boggles at this revelation.

  “And Michael? Teresa Morris was my name then.”

  I have no words. The woman in my bed is the wife of a known serial killer.

  Tess is still talking. “The missing heiress? Escaped or most likely killed by the Carolina Creeper?”

  The last piece is too much. Teresa Morris, Tess, Tessa in my book . . . This woman was a victim of the Carolina Creeper. The only known survivor. There was no way I could keep all of this to myself. There was no way I could avoid talking to the police.

  33

  A Girl with No Past

  Being with a man like Edward changed me. He saw me, the potential and the weaknesses both. I didn’t know how unmolded I was until he started to shape me.

  “Why, Tess?”

  “So, I understand.” I swallowed the blood in my mouth. He was always gentle with my face. It made him sad when he had to hit my face, so he always did it carefully. His palm open, more slap than punch. Rarely did he punch me now.

  In our earliest months together, I was disobedient more often. Now, I am much, much better.

  “You know it hurts me that you make me do these things.” He kissed me, roughly enough that he could taste my blood.

  I didn’t resist.

  When he pulled away, I promised, “I can do better.”

  “And you will.”

  “I will.” I reached out to touch him, to make up for my slip-up tonight.

  He looked past me to the source of my mistake. The girl in our bathtub wasn’t awake, but that didn’t mean that I should’ve bothered him.

  “What do you want me to do?” I bowed my head like he preferred. “To make you happy?”

  “Be good,” he reminded me.

  “I try, Edward. I do. I want to be good.”

  He kicked me. “Please don’t interrupt me, Tessie.”

  The thud of my body hitting the wall didn’t wake her. The girl in the tub kept her eyes closed, and I was grateful for that small mercy.

  I leaned forward and put my hands on the floor to push to my feet. Simply trying to stand up hurt. I’d learned to brace myself when he’d hit my stomach or ribs.

  “Stay down.”

  “Yes, Edward.” I stayed on all fours where I was. I didn’t even look up at him.

  I wanted to ask for instructions, but I was afraid that this was test. Sometimes he changed the rules but forgot to tell me.

  Slowly, I counted to fifty. He still hadn’t spoken or touched me by then, so I reached up with one hand. He slapped it away.

  “Look at her.”

  I did. The girl in our bathtub was a little older than me, brown hair, short-shorts and a tank top.

  He grabbed my hips and jerked me to my feet.

  My back was to him, and he shoved me forward again, not quite punching me between my shoulders but hard enough that I’d have a new brui
se there.

  “Look at her!”

  “Yes, Edward.” My face was close enough to the tub that I’d had to put my hands out to stop from tumbling in on top of her. I gripped the edge of the tub and stared at the woman he’d left in the tub.

  “Is that what you want to be? Is it?”

  Tears were on her face. I wasn’t sure if she was crying for me or for herself.

  Edward stood beside me then. A knife was in his hand. He was so angry lately. Nothing I did calmed him. Nothing appeased him. He’d taken several weeks of his vacation time from the company. We were on day ten, and I wasn’t convinced I was going to survive the last four days.

  “Do you love me, Tess?”

  I nodded.

  “Enough?” He ran the tip of the knife over my side, drawing a line of blood that stung. He was good at shallow cuts, ones that barely scarred. I had scars, of course, but a lot of pain doesn’t scar.

  “I try.”

  “Would you do whatever I needed, Tess?”

  I froze. I wanted to give him the right words, but sometimes, even after three years in his house, I didn’t know them. It took several tries, but I managed it finally: “I would.”

  “Deal with this.” He walked out then.

  “Run,” she said when it was just us.

  I was crying. There were things I never wanted. I tried to be good enough that he didn’t steal women, didn’t torture of kill them. I was never strong enough. Eventually, I was too injured, and he brought someone home.

  “I want to rescue you,” I whispered. “I try. I try all the time.”

  “Kill me.” She grabbed my arm. “I want it to end. Please?”

  The girl in the tub went home that night. I set her free. I cried the whole time.

  Edward carried her to the car and took her away then.