Black Abby watched with a chilly indifference as the child's face fell beneath the weight of his grief, as his little hands once again tightened into red knuckled fists and the look in his too large eyes bounced from despair to hope and back again. She knew the look, had seen it in a million different faces throughout the years; Bernard Wilson wanted more than anything to believe that the news of his mother's death was a lie, that if he could posture against her then he could somehow take it back.

"You look silly," hissed Black Abby, her entire body swaying into a doxy's lean against the lamp's post. "People die, Bernard, and yes, you may not enjoy that news, but one day you will understand." Her eyes strayed from the boy's tear riddled face to moon peeking at them from behind the clouds. While Bernard's world came crashing down further, Black Abby smiled as if she were chasing the tail of some fond memory.

"You don't know that mum died. You can't." His words were choked with tears even as his bottom lip quivered to stall their fall. Before he could speak again, Black Abby moved so quickly that his knees buckled. Were it not for the presence of her finger suddenly at his lips, Bernard would have fallen back onto the cobbles. Her skin was as cold as it appeared. To his horror, Bernard's rattled brain fished forward the memory of how his father's corpse had felt when they had pulled it out of the Thames. He had simply brushed his father's hand in passing, an innocent unknowing and gesture, and even though his mother had torn him away the second that it had happened, he remembered the feeling. Cold like potter's clay.

Black Abby's eyes went wild. "Your mother loved you a great deal, perhaps more than I shall ever understand, and while you may grow to resent her one day in a different way than you resent me now, do not forget that your mum cared for you more than anyone ever will. I tell you this because I, in my own way, care that she cared."

Suddenly Bernard found himself enveloped in Black Abby's arms. The embrace was cold and hard, but all of the anger that the child felt rushed out in a series of sobs against her shoulder. For all that the hug may have surprised Bernard, the fact that he eventually returned it shocked Black Abby all the more. It sparked the fire of memories best left alone, of a life lived so long ago that it may as well have belonged to someone else.

"It is because she cared, Bernard, that I care about you too."

Black Abby tried to hide the hitch in her voice, but Bernard heard it and from that moment on, he belonged to her. When his small, warm hands clasped against the back of her neck, Black Abby carried him with her to her feet.

Normality was never something that Bernard would receive from his life with Black Abby, but over time he grew to love her for all of the things that she was; though it would be some time before he could reconcile himself with the strange things that she did. He wasn't allowed in her bedroom during daytime hours, nor was he allowed to venture outside by himself unless she accompanied him. She never aged, even though he did, and she never ate, even though he did.

In those days Bernard had questioned this behavior as children were want to do, and Black Abby always replied with silly little answers.

"Why don' you age, An'Abby?"

"Father Time owes me five quid."

"Why don' you eat? Things gotta eat."

"That would be 'Everything has to eat', and I do. It isn't polite for a lady to eat in front of people."

But Black Abby was no lady, no matter how she presented herself to the world. Most of the people he had seen her interact with listened to the pristine snap of her educated accent, looked at the way she carried herself, and seemed strangely ignorant of the things that marked her as anything but one of those women who had never done an ounce of work on their own because they had always paid people to do it. They didn't see the cold chill in her eyes, mistook her air of wrongness for the pressures of dealing with her imaginary, invalid mother. She was quick to steer conversations back around, calculating in the way she handled any affair, from buying apples for him to stabbing at a poor pillow to 'get all of her anger out'.

They never knew what she did when he wasn't around, but for that matter neither did Bernard. She always left him with pencils and paper and books to read when she would venture out. In those hazy days, Bernard could always count on the fact that no matter what, Black Abby would be her room by night's end and only after making sure that he was as safe as houses in his bed.

He never forgot his mother, never forgot her softness or her scent, but her face began to blur away as time marched on, just as his father's would. As the seasons rolled over one another like a gaggle of playful puppies, as one birthday turned into two and then three, Bernard began to piece together the bits of his broken heart. Though the stitches would be forever visible, the child slowly but surely found himself again. But there came a point when the answers that Black Abby had always humored him with began to satisfy Bernard less and less, for he was a smart child, an observant child, and he wanted to know about his dear 'Aunt' just like he wanted to know about the rest of the world.

So when the day came that Bernard, a healthy, if not precocious eight years old, had steeled his nerves just enough to really get down to brass tacks with her caregiver, it seemed too that Black Abby was preparing herself to deal with his curiosity. While fathers spoke to their sons about death (which Bernard was well versed in), and the birds and the bees (which Bernard was most assuredly not), Black Abby scooped him up as if he weighed little more than a kitten and plopped him down on her lap in the dust streaked study of their home.

There, without even a glint of amusement to show that she was lying to him, Black Abby told him about vampires, about how they called themselves Kindred and Cainites and a variety of other things. Her tone never lifted beyond the neatly clipped inflection that she often used, even when Bernard simply wanted her to stop, or when tears from that ripping of the veil stung his cheeks. Black Abby, *his* An'Abby was one of these creatures, dead but not dead, and unable to feel the pleasures of most of the things that she may have enjoyed during her mortal life. There were clans and hierarchies and different sects. She didn't eat his food because she couldn't, because she had to live on the blood of living creatures. Living creatures like him. She told him of werewolves, of their hatred for her kind, while painting neither beast as truly good or truly evil. She spoke to him like a doctor might a patient, not a mother to a terrified child, and he clung close to her because she was all he had, good or bad, natural or not, and he wished he could take his questions back. Wished he didn't know the reasoning behind her cold flesh or nocturnal habits. Bernard wanted everything to go back to the way it before had before and he sobbed against her breast because that would never happen.

After awhile, after they both set there in silence, his stunned and Black Abby's pensive, Bernard with his big heart began to sob for her. Black Abby would never get to see the colors of a sunrise, a display he had often enjoyed on his father's knee, or be delighted by the taste of some food that she was trying for the first time. She would never get to hold a child, never get to wonder what the future had in store for it, or blush or cough or any of the things that Bernard and the rest of humankind took for granted. It was dismal and terrible and it made him feel so small, like an ant in a sea of pecking robins.

She was a monster, and despite everything that she had told him, all of the horrible things that he would never be able to forget, Black Abby still held him like she loved him. She still rubbed his back and doted on him, and why?

It wasn't long before that swirl of awful emotions that were festering inside of him came falling out as he lurched against her, covering the only dress that he had ever seen her wear with bits of his dinner. It was that very same monster that lifted him up and placed him gently in his bed, her dress still stained in his vomit, and it was that very same monster that pressed a cool rag to his face and promised to lay by his side until he had went to sleep.

He should have run, or screamed for help, for that was what one did when faced with such a threat, but he didn't. Out of all of the humans in the world, it was Black Abby Dekker, fearsome beasty, that said without force or falseness that she loved him every night. What did that make Bernard, that something he had been taught to fear was better to him than his own kind?

The child didn't think he would ever sleep again, but he did. His dreams were troubled faceless things that left him tossing and turning, but every time a particular vicious nightmare would awaken him, he found her sitting there watching him until sleep claimed him again.

Eventually he would understand the cruel irony of it. It wasn't the monsters that lurked in the shadows that you had to worry about, but the ones that you aligned yourself with. Those were dangerous.

Somehow the bedtimes stories had left that part out.