prologue
For months now, Loveday Dearborn had been planning to hurl herself out of this world as horribly as she’d come into it – three shades of purple, dripping with enough blood she could have bathed in it. Maria Dearborn had not had an easy time of birthing her second born child, though she probably wouldn’t mind all that much to see her go.
It wasn’t supposed to have been such a drawn-out ordeal – as soon as Loveday had decided that she’d had enough, that had been that. She’d settled down with an old sounding record Dottie had left behind, wasting no time crushing up the little tablets she’d nicked from the back of the pharmacy so she could get them all down easier. She’d woken up three hours later, sprawled out across the tattered rug on the floor to Georgie tumbling down the basement stairs with a bruise on his nose and a bib covered in pumpkin juice. With a grumble, she’d hauled him up onto her hip, brushing away any evidence of crushed up pills with her sock covered foot.
About a week later she’d settled for chucking an old bit of rope over one of the wooden beams in the attic. She’d put on a pretty blue dress and brushed her hair out – the least she could do to make what would be a horrific sight a little more agreeable to the eye. Dru’s favourite Beatles song (Eleanor Rigby, of course) had been halfway through playing – and Loveday's neck had started going purple by the time the miserable old rope snapped in two and sent her coughing and spluttering to the floor, annoyed but very much alive. That night she’d sung Georgie to sleep, voice hoarse and scratchy.
She’d tried it all – another round of pills in March (they’d only given her indigestion); she’d jumped infront of a bus in April (only for it to screech to a stop about a half inch away from the tips of her wellies); a jump off the rooftop in May (a broken ankle that had healed up alarmingly quickly). The note she’d written, addressed to her siblings and uncle had become rather moth bitten, and the portkey she’d bought to send Georgie to Uncle Caradoc’s flat in London had started to gather dust in the toybox. She didn't even want to think about the half-assed cliff dive she'd carried out in June.
July had been a bitter affair – for Loveday had spent the better part of the previous month planning everything to the finest of details. She’d waited until the bathroom was lit only by moonlight, waited till the Georgie had fallen asleep in his bed, made sure Caradoc wasn’t coming over that evening. She hadn’t needed to find appropriate clothing this time – no, she was leaving exactly how she’d arrived in the first place. Besides, what would she need clothes for once she was dead and gone?
So there she sat, at the end of July, stars winking at her through the open window of the ground floor bathroom of Hawthorne House. She’d set up her little cassette player on the edge of the bath, playing a second-hand copy of Rumours she’d borrowed (and never returned) from a girl at school. She supposed she could have put flowers in her hair, or brushed it out a little nicer, wild as it was.
And then she did it – and bathed in it – scarlet tiles, crimson water, hair soaked red and barely a shade darker than it naturally was. It was only when her thoughts began to fade that she regretted it – not putting the flowers in her hair. She could have been Ophelia in Millais’ image, blue lips, eternally framed in gold cornice. The reds, and the blues, and the stars – oh how the stars shone, waving her goodbye, fading to black as her nails drained to white.
When the tape sputtered to a stop, she woke up disappointed, bath water a red so dark she couldn’t see her feet and the silver scars on her arms such a stark white she couldn’t miss them. And the moon – so cruelly waxing. Sometimes she’d laugh about it – if not for trying not to weep about it – for it truly was nature’s sadistic twist that the one thing that caused her such torment was the very same thing that kept her from the one thing that could put an end to it once and for all.
See, it wasn’t by some destined order of bittersweet fate that Loveday Dearborn was having such a hard time dying. Loveday Dearborn was a werewolf, and that was the unhappy truth of it all. Her blood clotted before it could spill out, her skin knitted together faster than it should do, her bones put themselves back together by themselves.
And yet, once a month, Loveday Dearborn’s bones would snap, her skin would break, and her blood would stain the floor of the basement room she was confined to when the moon reached its final phase. She wasn’t special like her brothers and sisters; she hadn’t inherited the special gene her no-good mother had passed down to the rest of the Dearborn litter. A squib, some unpleasant third cousin had once called her – but Loveday knew the truth of it. She’d taken after her father, whoever and wherever he was in the world.