Rosemary felt warm.

She felt as though she was sleeping; not like the dead, but like the living, restless and restful and cradled in a cocoon of soft blankets. Agnes fingers seemed to burn her face, seemed to flow through her hair like water. Her lap was softer than pillows. Rosemary did not wish to move.

Above her, there was chatter. Agnes and Aster, talking like old friends. Then, the swinging of the door, and a third voice in the harmony– Minerva.

What were they talking about? It was like a cacophony, a kind and gentle symphony. Rosemary nuzzled her face into Agnes with a smile.  

She heard Agnes’ laughter through her bones, a deep vibration. “Tired?”

Rosemary nodded. “Exhausted.”

“But are you comfortable?”

“I am. Because of you.”

Some time passed. The conversation above her grew soft; Agnes’ hand never left Rosemary. When some time had passed, she blinked awake. Unwilling to sit up a moment, Rosemary observed the library around her; the moon had been replaced with sunlight spilling through the glass, golden and warm. Honey. Minerva had a smile on her face, Aster too.

His gaze drew down to hers. “You need to drink more blood,” Aster said.

“It is odd,” Rosemary answered, sitting up. “I have had only a little, and yet I am energized as though I’ve finished a whole bottle.”

Agnes kept her hand upon Rosemary’s shoulder. “Could it be the sleep?”

“No,” said Rosemary, and remembered the moon’s old whispers. 

Connection beyond the gaze. Contact. Gravity, a binding sinew. To drag the oceans, to drag the blood. Incomprehensible things that had spilled from Rosemary’s lips as messenger, which Nyx had recorded in books that Rosemary could no longer find. 

The one difference between today and all other days: Agnes was touching her. 

Perhaps this had something to do with it.

Rosemary looked to Agnes. Her eyes were as silver as the moon. There was, she thought, something heavenly about them. Something that pulled. How lovely, that Agnes was now in her orbit! Rosemary smiled.

Agnes blinked at her, expression odd. She did not smile back, but that was okay. She rarely smiled, unless there was some joke. Rosemary did not expect her to be any different than exactly what and who she was: a trustworthy friend.

A trustworthy friend for whom Rosemary seemed to feel... something.

She was still uncertain of this. Rosemary watched Agnes and felt for the oddness in her heart. She was not quite sure how to describe it, except perhaps that, like with gravity, she seemed to... enjoy closeness, if enjoyment is what this was.

Perhaps Rosemary should make herself delicate and frail forever. Then Agnes would carry her everywhere and touch her often. 

Oh, but what if Agnes grew tired of that? What if she did not wish to carry Rosemary? What if she wanted to leave?

Rosemary grabbed the bottle of blood and poured herself a great cup.

Minerva, of all people, laughed. “Thirsty?”

Rosemary looked to her with an eyebrow raised. Minerva had not spoken to her in centuries, and unlike Aster, they had never discussed plans to be closer.

“I suppose,” said Rosemary. Then she asked plainly: “why are you here?”

Minerva’s lips curved into a frown. She adjusted her round glasses, and sighed deeply. “Do not think that because I cloister myself here, I do not see how this castle changes. You have changed, Rosemary. Little by little. I would like to meet the Rosemary who does not push us lower night creatures away.”

“Lower?” Agnes asked. As usual, conversation about the state of night creatures interested her. She must be sad, Rosemary thought to herself, that her entry to the world of night creatures was so sorrowful. And yet, instead of defaulting to hate, she was interested in what she had missed! 

Rosemary wished for a moment to oblige, before Minerva’s words registered.

“I would not describe it that way.” Rosemary said.

Minerva scoffed. “We are all night creatures, but Rosemary is the first and so the greatest. You spent centuries flaunting that distance!”

Rosemary frowned. It seemed Minerva was still angry.

Aster cut in. “We created the distance as much as she did. And there is no reason to enforce it now.”

“Why distance?” Agnes asked.

Rosemary thought back to those early centuries. To the church, the nuns, the oldest vampires. To Nyx’s resentful, and then awestruck, and then determined face. To Aster, hiding in the back of a closet with fear in his eyes, then overseeing the building of Castle Rosemary. How even to describe it all? How best to explain her actions? How to explain a thousand years of emptiness? 

“Fear,” Rosemary finally said. “And I suppose... a lack of understanding. Time and distance. Pain.” Then she winced at the incoherent nature of her thoughts. But one thousand years was a very long time to witness. 

“She was once quite powerful,” Minerva explained. “Perhaps she still is. Rosemary remains the only vampire to ever access the moon.”

These statements were true and untrue. “She speaks, if you will listen.”

Aster sighed. “Rosemary heard her. And the moon elevated her to a higher power.”

“And away from us,” Minerva said. “Agnes, these concepts are left unspoken and yet understood among vampire kind. I have served in this castle for a few centuries now. There is a distance that only now Rosemary appears to be closing.”

Rosemary could not even deny it. “When one lives, as long as I have, and ventures nowhere, and sees nothing but the same castle every day, how can she still perceive it all? How does one prevent the stones from fusing in her gaze, color from growing dull, people growing quiet. What conversations are left to have after a thousand years? I may as well have just slept in my coffin for eternity.”

“Your problem,” Agnes said, “might then be that you haven’t left the castle?”

Rosemary frowned. “Well.”

Aster hummed. “She always seemed so resistant. Rosemary, you should know, there is nothing to fear about the outside.”

“I find walks to be most bracing,” supplied Minerva. The angry tilt to her brow seemed to have softened.

“I would love to go outside,” Rosemary said, “but I cannot.”

“Why not?” This was Agnes. 

“Because,” and here Rosemary took a deep breath. “Nyx forbade it.”

Minerva pressed her lips together in an old sign of displeasure. Aster brought his hands to his temple. Agnes looked the strangest of all, her beautiful face contorted and unreadable. Her hand, on Rosemary’s shoulder, clenched tight. It felt quite nice.

“And you listen to her?” Agnes finally said.

“When a vampire is forbidden from entering a place, they must obey!” Rosemary explained. “If you told me I was unwelcome in your room, then I could not enter for any reason.”

“Why did the moon do that?” Agnes asked.

“Something about boundaries,” Rosemary said. “It was a long time ago.”

“Surely Nyx doesn’t have control over the whole world,” Aster said.

“I was told long ago that I was unwelcome anywhere but in the castle.” Rosemary finally sipped her blood. It congealed like mucus in her throat. “Nyx made herself my conduit to the world. She told me the world could not abide me, and so, I cannot enter it.”

Aster’s scowl was dark. “Then I’ll tell you now, you are welcome in the outside world.”
“Nyx has the final authority,” Rosemary told him. “She told me herself; she was the conductor of my future. So that isn’t going to work.”

“How about this then?” Agnes pressed a hand to her heart, and leaned in close. There was an earnestness in her silver eyes, her gaze unwavering, unblinking. It seemed she was as serious as a soldier. “You are welcome wherever I go. Even if you are unwelcome in the wider world alone, you are welcome when I am there. You belong wherever you wish, and not where Nyx keeps you.”

Rosemary’s lips parted. “Do you mean it?”

“I would never lie,” Agnes said. “Not about this. If I am somewhere, then you can be there too.”

Agnes’ hand slid from Rosemary’s shoulder to her collarbone, then to her heart. It rested there, warm. Her heartbeat was steady, and Rosemary felt its vibration through her hand, and for a moment it was as though she, too, had a heartbeat.

Rosemary felt, strangely and suddenly, like a real thing. 

As though she existed and was a true, physical presence on the earth. Someone who took up space. 

An hour ago, beside Nyx, Rosemary had become nothing. She had, as always, allowed desire to seep out of her with her blood, allowed herself to melt into dust, into air, into ashes. An eternal emptiness. She was not herself but a mote of nothing, watching Nyx through the tower window.

Now, Rosemary felt, for the first time in centuries, that she had a body.

She looked down and saw her hands. They were pale, the skin nearly translucent, the claws long and sharp. She saw a strand of her hair spilling down her shoulder, silver atop the blood red of her gown, which obscured her chest, which obscured her ribs, which cradled lungs that breathed and a heart that did not truly beat but still felt.

These feelings only existed because Agnes had spoke to her. Because Agnes had touched her. Agnes made her feel real. 

Agnes made her feel, for once, human.