No one answered.
Slowly, Fable stepped down, still leaving breadcrumbs behind her, as if she were afraid she'd lose her way back up. She reached the last step down, where the shadows of a few candles shimmered upon the walls.
"Shew?" Fable repeated.
This time, she got something back for an answer. Not words. Only hiccups and sobs.
Fable rubbed her eyes and neared the sound of sobs. She ignored her utterly terrifying shadow on the walls. Finally, she found Shew sitting in the middle of the room, her arms wrapped around Loki's coffin.
"Is he breathing?" Fable's curiosity was piqued. There was no need to say "good morning" or that kind of fluff. She was sure Shew's mind was so occupied with the complex mystery of the Grimm fairy tales that there was no room for such gestures anymore.
Shew nodded absently, arms hugging Loki tighter through the open coffin. It was the coffin Axel and his nerd-fighter friends had made for him. Loki was lying on his back with closed eyes and crossed hands. Sillily enough, Axel had dressed him in a tux with a yellow cravat and tucked a bouquet of roses between his hands. Loki looked beautiful when asleep, almost like a comatose prince in need of a resurrecting kiss.
Why couldn't a girl's kiss revive a boy's life in fairy tales? Why was it always a prince charming and not a princess charming?
Closer to Loki, Fable realized this was actually Shew's coffin in the castle, now fixed and used to accommodate Loki. Two lovers were taking turns in their coffins. The sweet and sad irony. The thought made Fable teary, pulling her real personality out of her tomboy frame for a moment and bringing her back to her usual self.
She wondered if what was happening to her was something that came and went away all throughout the day. Was that some kind of madness, or had she really messed with her own mind through some wrong spell?
She washed the thoughts away and neared Shew then patted her on the back.
Shew was not only crying. She was sweating and shivering. Her face was drowned in sticky tears, and her paleness mixing with reddened cheeks made it almost look like she never was a vampire. Her beautiful black hair was wet and stuck to her cheeks, and swirled like a choking snake around her neck. Fable remembered how Shew had scared the hell out of her in the Schloss a few days ago. She looked unbelievably weak and vulnerable.
"I killed him." She stared at Fable, her eyes pleading for forgiveness, as if Fable were a priest offering her redemption. With her boyish attitude, Fable wasn't the one you'd turn to in such situations. Didn't anyone know how fragile she was herself?
"You did what you had to do," Fable said, clinging to her weird manly attitude on purpose this time. Normally, she'd be weeping until she could no longer see through her glasses. But she wasn't now. The tears that were threatening dried with the blink of her eyes. The weird manly feeling inside her seemed to help a lot with the situation. Could it be that she was only growing up and learning not give in to her emotion?
"No, I didn't," Shew objected. "I didn't have to kill him. I was angry he hurt Cerené. I was angry he became the Huntsman again. I didn't kill him out of necessity, but out of anger, which I should be able to suppress, since I'm the Chosen One." Shew's fangs stuck out—not in a threatening way, but in a purely vulnerable gesture.
Fable winced. She even took a step back. The fangs reminded her of Shew's demonic temper in the Schloss again. "No. It was necessary to kill Loki. You had no choice." Fable nibbled on the breadcrumbs to calm her fears. She thought they tasted incredibly good. "Mircalla, I mean Carmilla, controlled Loki through his Fleece in the Dreamworld. In order for one of you to survive the Dreamory, the other had to die. You didn't make the rules." Fable tried her best to make it easier on Shew. But mentioning Carmilla had her thinking about why she'd disguised as her foster mother all this time. What was so special about Fable and Axel for her to do so? "Besides, sometimes Loki is just annoying when he plays bad boy," Fable continued. Oops, why did I just say that? Who am I? It's like I woke up this morning and became someone else.
"I'm not talking about that." Shew hiccupped. "I'm talking about me failing to read his message in the World Between Dreams."
Save me!
Both girls sighed at the same time. Fable dropped more breadcrumbs.
If there were words to solace Shew, Fable didn't find them. She watched Shew nodding speechlessly, not for lack of words, but under the intensity of her sadness.
Silence crept like a poisonous spider on the walls of the cellar for a while. It was odd how silence was such a scary thing. Sooner or later someone had to break and cut through its invisible cobwebs.
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