In this moment she was terribly beautiful, her nose and mouth spilling forth blood as wicked as her ancestors that danced under the winter moon. Those golden eyes stared at me as if to ask one final question. Her skin was still warm under the robe she sometimes wore when practicing her finer craft.

I lifted her off the floor. Her head hung far back and her hair waggled in her blood, like the fine tip of a large paintbrush. Hugging her was all one could do. Silence. I had never been in a place so quiet, not even the old cellar or the furthermost grave.

My own blood roared. I told myself she’d gone back to revel with her kind; wrought not of our world. And though this made me feel no better, after a moment the silence seemed broken by echoes from some far off place, a place I partly understood her to be. All of this could have been my own wishful thinking, of course; maybe the worms were the last to taste my sweet Somyellia.

I laid her on her side of the bed and went through her satchel. After, I went through our drawers and chests.

With a handful of silver, I laid beside her. She’d never once spoken about her burial wishes, an amazing feat considering the nature of our usual talks. She may have wanted a spiraling funeral pyre, an obsidian mausoleum, to be hacked to bits and fed to the night creatures she loved so dearly.

I kept her for days. Telling myself I was waiting on Irion worked for a little while. He was, after all, the only family member she’d ever introduced me to, and proper burial was I figured a family affair. But he never came, and as a day or two passed that reasoning melted away. Not being able to say goodbye stood firmly in its place.

To clean her meant moving her to the kitchen table. I walked around her studiously, solemnly; death had managed to steal many of the features we are so accustomed to.

An urge entered me as I circled the table. Pulling apart her legs, now heavy and cold, I positioned myself. In all the sexual voyages between us, all the desecration of graves, and juices spent, I’d never done this. How could I? She had on occasion teased me of my appetite, and joked I was capable of such “selfish indulgences.”

As usual, she was right. I entered a place that was always so inviting and warm, now a rough tunnel. In the midst of my efforts I heard grunting. I believed for just a moment that I had thrusted her back to life. It was I who grunted, and the moment’s realization came right as I did.

I wrapped her in a sheet and prepared to enter the streets. Much coaxing and the coins I’d scrounged up days earlier got me a mule to carry Somyellia to the Pauper Morgue.