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[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

What do you do when you find your limits?

Fay Blackwood couldn’t shake that thought. It niggled at her, it gnawed at her. When she settled in the still cool library to read, those words seemed to float across the page. When she went for a walk, pacing along gravel paths between clipped boxwood hedges, the words seemed to whisper to her on the wind.

What do you do when you find your limits?

“The family should be gathering soon,” Marcus said that evening, as they sat down for supper at the kitchen table. He smiled in quiet satisfaction. “I hope you don’t mind, but I rather let our news slip to mother. She was overjoyed.”

Fay smiled back, her cheeks tight with nerves.

“No,” she said. “No, that’s fine…”

It wasn’t fine. It was never fine in this house, with this family. It couldn’t be fine, as long as the shadows writhed and twisted after dark, and as long as the whispers came bubbling down from the attic. Once, Marcus had told her, two boys had tried to hide in the attic, whilst their stepfather hunted them down. You could still hear one of them praying sometimes, late at night, over and over again, with a desperate croak in his voice. It was why he had bought this house.

Fay hadn’t realized when she had first come here that Marcus had bought this house. She had thought of it as the family home; had imagined generations of his ancestors walking these same corridors; had thought that the pictures on the walls were those of the Harpers gone by. But in actual fact, Marcus’ family came from New England. He had been born in upstate New York. His accent came from boarding school, at sixteen, and then three years at Oxford University. He had come to Norfolk in his thirties, looking for a house with ‘history’. He had meant ghosts, of course, which Fay realized almost immediately.

Back then she had been mildly dazzled by him. He was unlike anyone she had met before, and there was something terribly attractive about his frank honesty when talking to her. There was no hypocrisy in him, no attempt to play by the rules, or hide the fact that he broke them. He set his own rules, he took what he wanted and for a while it had been amazing that that had been her.

And now…

Had she found her limits?

Sometimes Fay wasn’t sure. She still loved Marcus, she thought. She had once thought he loved her, in his own way. He saw her as a kindred spirit. They walked their own path together, and damn the rest of the world. She loved their life; the money; the houses; the power.

But Fay had now known she was pregnant for two months, three weeks and eight days.

She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant. She suspected that Marcus had. He been not been surprised when she had told him, had been too pleased, too firm that an abortion was out of the question. The family phone calls, the sudden plans for a gathering also struck her as suspicious and scared her.

Marcus wasn’t paternal. Marcus wasn’t the kind of man who cared about small cute babies. For chrissakes, he had a foetus preserved in formaldehyde in the study. But he cared about this baby, and there was something in his tone that Fay recognised.

He was going to gain something from this child.

He had begun to look at her differently as well. Suddenly, he worried about whether she was eating or not, he fussed over whether she was sleeping well. Some would have seen a concerned father-to-be. Fay saw something else. In the way he treated her, she was reminded of his concern for his lab rats. She wasn’t a partner in crime anymore. She was something else. She was a project, an incubator.

She was being used.

And that Fay thought, was her limit. It wasn’t a good and virtuous limit. She hadn’t reached some kind of moral boundary, where she realized she could go no further. Neither was she suddenly transformed by the small parasitic entity growing inside her. She actually, she realized with mild surprise, didn’t give a damn about the baby. She hadn’t wanted it in the first place, and owed it nothing for its unbidden existence. She was, she knew, as selfish as she ever had been. It was, in fact, that selfishness which provided her with her limit.

She would not let herself be used.

She wasn’t a good person. She had never thought she was. She was a necromancer, who had stared into the abyss so long she could probably tell you its favourite Beatles song. She was a bad person, a murderess, a thief, and a liar. However, there were a few traits in her personality that she was proud of. She was independent, she took control of her own destiny and she didn’t let people control or manipulate her. In some ways, her independence was her one redeeming feature, the one thing about herself that she could look at and say “say what you like about me, I have this”. It was something she was proud of.

She wasn’t prepared to let Marcus take that away.

But what could she do to stop it?

It was not really as easy as just walking away. Marcus, it was safe to say, took losing badly. He didn’t like to share his toys, and his response to anything he perceived as ‘theft’ was bordering on the psychotic. She was fairly sure he viewed the spawn inside her as ‘his’.

Still, she thought, as she sat up in her bedroom after dinner, gazing out across the treetops of the park, the fact that he did view the unborn parasite as ‘his’ gave her some leverage at least. Sadly, aborting the child was out of the question. If she fled and did that, then hell itself would seem like a pleasant mini-break compared to what he would do to her when he caught up with her. Running and keeping the child at least meant that she might have a bargaining chip if he did catch up with her.

She’d need somewhere to run to, of course. She remembered a Guardian of the Veil she had met once, some years ago. He might not help, of course, she wasn’t exactly Guardian Pin Up Girl, but it was worth investigating. She could change her name, of course, which would help. She considered several different options, before rejecting most of them as uninteresting. She was running from her abyss serving boyfriend, not signing up to the Women’s Institute.

In the small hours of the morning, alone in the house, Fay packed a bag, quickly and furtively. She took her clothes, her personal possessions and a number of small, but valuable artefacts. She wasn’t going to leave this relationship penniless.

What do you do when you find your limits?

Fay Blackwood knew, at last.