🔥 For the Record 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Coven’s Last Human by Maeve Hollow

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place on the night the final chapter of The Coven’s Last Human ends, behind the bedroom door. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

One night, one recorder, the red light left on. Explicit content — 18+.

For the Record

I switched the Sony off at her bedroom door. I’d like that noted, since this is the one about the record.

Ten minutes before, in the study, she had switched it on herself and said I love you into it on purpose, and then Print it, and I’d answered her on tape like a professional. Then I’d followed her up through the dark house with my thumb on the switch. At the door I did what I always do. Click. Red light gone. Inside, I set it on the chest at the foot of her bed, face up, so she could see it was dark.

I made that rule in October and never told her it was one. Every time she touched me, before she touched me, off. She had never asked why.

She was looking at it now.

She was at the window in the grey cardigan she wears over everything since her blood remembered winter, with her hair half down and real snow stacking on the sill behind her. Nobody’s snow. It just fell. The second quilt was on the bed, folded at the foot. An hour ago I’d asked for it, along with a desk by the study window, a drawer only I can open, and a key to the front door, and she had said yes to every one. It had been a very good day.

“May I ask you something,” Rhea said, “that you are entirely free to refuse?”

“That’s every question you ask.”

“This one more than most.” She came away from the window. Her knees cracked on the first step and she let them. “You turn it off. Every time. Since the stairs.”

“I know.”

“I have wondered whether it was for my sake or yours.”

“Mine.” I didn’t have to think. “Everything I’d ever done that mattered went on that thing. I wanted one thing that didn’t.”

She nodded, slowly, the way she does when she’s filing it beside something older.

“Then I should like to ask for the opposite. Once.” Her voice stayed level. Her hands didn’t. “Turn it on. Not for the paper. Not for Jo, nor the State of Vermont, nor anybody who will ever stand in a church and read it aloud. For your drawer. One copy, under your key, and I’ll never ask to hear it.” A breath. “I have spent three hundred and ninety years being the only witness to my own life. I should like there to be one night of it on the record that I didn’t write down myself.”

The room was very quiet. The snow was ticking on the glass.

I’ll tell you what went through me, because that’s the deal now. First the old reflex, a hand going up: mine, this one’s mine. Then the check. Feet or reason. My feet hadn’t moved. And under it, the reason, arriving first and being extremely inconvenient: I wanted it too. I’d wanted it since a Saturday in October when she said Whose are you and I’d had nothing to play it back on.

“Terms,” I said.

“Of course.”

“One copy. My drawer. You never hear it unless you ask, and if you ask, I can say no.”

“Agreed.”

“I can turn it off any second without a reason, and so can you. You say off, it’s off.”

“Agreed.”

“And I’m going to talk to it.” I picked it up. “Like it’s a source. Like I’m getting it all down. You don’t get to be embarrassed about anything I say into this machine, because you asked.”

Something went over her face that I’ve learned is her trying not to smile with her whole mouth.

“I should be disappointed,” she said, “if you were anything less than thorough.”

I thumbed it on. Red light. I held it up between us.

“For the record,” I said. “Tuesday the twenty-sixth of January, about ten at night. Rhea Thorne’s bedroom, top of the house. It’s snowing and it’s nobody’s fault. My name’s Anya Serrano. Subject, state your name and what you’re asking for.”

She looked straight into it. She has never once lowered her eyes, not to a camera, not to me.

“Rhea Thorne. I am asking to be fucked, Miss Serrano. Thoroughly. With the machine on.”

My knees went. I’m putting that down too.

I set the Sony on the nightstand, angled at the bed, the way I’d set it on a motel table across from a sheriff. Then I took her cardigan off her and talked while I did it.

“Subject is wearing a grey wool cardigan, which is now on the floor. Under it a white shirt, buttoned to the throat like it’s 1890. I’m undoing it. Six buttons. Her hands are at her sides. Nobody told her to put them there. She just does that now.”

“Anya—”

“No comment from the subject at this time.” I pushed the shirt off her shoulders. No camisole. She’s stopped bothering; she says the house is warm enough and I am warmer. “For the record, she has the best tits I’ve ever had my hands on, and I’ve been asked to be accurate. Heavy. Pale. Nipples already hard, and it’s not the cold, because she’s been standing next to the radiator for ten minutes waiting to ask me this.”

She made a small sound through her nose. I put my thumb on one nipple and rolled it, and the small sound turned into a breath, and I bent and put my mouth on the other and sucked until she put a hand flat on the bedpost.

“Subject is holding on to the furniture,” I told the room, against her skin.

“Subject,” said Rhea, a little unsteadily, “would like her trousers off.”

“Ask properly.”

“Take my trousers off. Please.”

I did it kneeling. Buttons, wool, the soft old drawers she still won’t give up, all of it down her long legs, her hand coming to my shoulder for balance when she stepped out. I stayed down there. I put my mouth on the inside of her knee and worked up, slow, and talked into her thigh where the Sony could only just catch it.

“There’s silver in her hair here too. I like it. She’s wet. I can smell her from here, cold apples and salt. She’s shaking a little. Rhea. Tell the record why you’re shaking.”

“Because you are a quarter-inch from my cunt,” she said, very clearly, “and you are narrating.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“It is a description.”

I laughed against her, and she felt it, and swore in a dialect that hasn’t been spoken since Suffolk had wolves. Then I licked her. One long flat stroke, root to tip, the way she first did me on her stairs, and her other hand came off the bedpost and into my hair.

She tastes like the end of a long day. I’d tell the paper that if it were any of the paper’s business.

I didn’t stay long. I wanted her on the bed. I stood and walked her backward till her calves hit the frame and she sat, then lay back, her hair across the quilt, her knees falling open without being asked. Her spectacles were still pushed up on her head. I took them off and folded them and put them by the Sony, and she watched me do it like it was the most indecent thing that had happened all night.

“Ask for the next thing,” I said.

She knew. Her eyes went to the chest at the foot of the bed, and then back to me.

“The applewood,” she said. “On you. In me.”

She turned it in 1924 for a woman who took the Boston train. She used it on me in October with my wrists held in light, and I came so hard a gale put out two hundred and six lanterns. It had never once gone the other way.

I got the harness on standing at the foot of the bed with the Sony listening to me swear at a hundred-year-old buckle.

“For the record, these buckles were designed by a sadist.”

“They were designed by a saddler in Montpelier. I am given to understand there is a difference.”

“Not from here there isn’t.”

When I had it, I oiled the wood the way she does, from the flask, warming it between my palms, and I took my time, because she was propped on her elbows watching my hands and I wanted her to have to watch. The wood is pale gold. It caught the lamp. Standing over her with it, the brown stone hanging hot at my throat on its cord, I felt about nine feet tall.

“Describe what you see,” I said. “For the record.”

She wet her lips.

“A woman of thirty, with a scar in her lip and ink on her hand. A silver tree over her heart. My stone at her throat. My wood at her hips.” Her voice dropped. “She is looking at me the way she looks at a document she is about to make public. I am very wet, and I should like her to stop admiring the furniture.”

“Spread your legs.”

She did. She put her heels on the edge of the mattress and opened, and held my eyes, and that was the bravest thing I’d seen her do since the church.

I set the head of it to her and pressed, and stopped.

“Tell it what you want.”

“Slow,” Rhea said, to the room, to the red light. “All of it. Slowly. I want to feel each inch of it and I want it said that I asked.”

So I gave it to her slow. I watched her take it. I watched the wood part her and disappear, and her mouth come open, and her hands fist in the second quilt, and I narrated every inch, low, into the quiet: halfway, she’s tight, she’s taking it, God, look at you, there, till my hips met her thighs and the base of it ground against my own clit and I had to stop and breathe.

“Oh,” she said. Just that. Then, unsteadily: “Anya. Move.”

I moved. Long and slow at first, my hands under her knees, her heels coming up to my back. Then less slow, because her hips started to answer, and then she said “Harder. Please. Harder,” and I’m a reporter, I give the people what they ask for. The bed knocked. I didn’t care who heard. Nobody on that hill shushes anybody anymore.

“Talk,” she gasped. “Keep talking to it. Don’t stop.”

“She likes it hard,” I told the Sony, between strokes. “She likes it when I hold her knees open. She’s so wet I can hear it, can you hear it? She’s been aching for this since dinner. She put her hand on my thigh under the table at Tamsin’s and didn’t move it for an hour and thought nobody noticed. Everybody noticed, Rhea. Agnes noticed.”

“Anya—”

“She’s close. Her stomach goes tight first. Then she stops breathing. Then she says my name like she’s angry about it.” I slowed down. Almost to nothing. She made a noise that would have been hail six months ago. “Not yet.”

“You wretched—”

I reached for the nightstand.

She saw what I was doing. Her eyes went wide. I held the Sony up where she could see it, thumbed back, found the spot. I’ve known exactly where it was since ten o’clock. It’s two minutes and eleven seconds before the bedroom door.

I pressed play and laid it on the pillow beside her ear.

Her own voice came out of it, small and tinny and level.

I love you. I’ve said it where nobody could hear. I should like it to exist somewhere I can’t take it back.

And then mine. I love you too. That’s two sources.

Rhea Thorne went over like a roof coming off.

I drove into her through it, deep and steady, the base of the wood grinding me where I needed it, her heels locked in my back, her hands gone from the quilt to my shoulders and her nails in, and she came saying my name and yes and yes and something with no consonants at all. I went right after her. I couldn’t have stopped it. I came with my face in her neck and her voice still playing next to my ear, telling me she loved me, telling the record.

The tape ran on after. It was mostly the stairs, and me breathing, and a door. I let it.

“You,” Rhea said, when she had a voice, “are not a journalist. You are a menace with a press card.”

“It’s in the job description.”

I eased out of her slowly. She made a small sound and caught my wrist when I went to unbuckle.

“Leave it,” she said. “Come up here.”

“Up where?”

She showed me. She drew me up the bed by the harness straps until I was kneeling astride her chest, and then further, her hands on my hips guiding me, until I had a knee either side of her head and the headboard under my hands and her looking up at me from between my thighs with her hair spread across my pillow. I’d moved my pillow up here in December. I don’t remember deciding to.

“I believe it is my turn,” she said, “to be thorough.”

She pushed the harness aside with two fingers. She didn’t take it off. She just moved the strap where she wanted it, and put her mouth on me.

“Rhea. The record.”

“Then tell it,” she said against me, “what I am doing.”

I tried. I want it noted that I tried.

“She’s—she’s licking me. Slow. She does it slow on purpose, she always does, she likes it when I—oh. She’s got her hands on my ass. She’s holding me down on her mouth. She’s—fuck. Her tongue’s inside me. Rhea. Rhea, I can’t—”

“Full sentences, Miss Serrano.”

“I can’t make full sentences, you’re—”

“That,” she said, “was nearly one.”

She sucked my clit into her mouth and I lost the next four words entirely. I had the headboard in both fists. I was riding her face in short hard jerks and she was letting me, she was holding me there, and every time I got a word out she rewarded it, and every time I didn’t she slowed down till I begged. I don’t know what the Sony got. I think it got please a lot. I think it got her name in a voice I’ve only ever used once before, on a church step, at sunrise.

When I came I came hard enough to rattle the frame, curled over the headboard with my forehead on the wood and her mouth working me through every wave of it, slower, slower, gentler, the way she brings me down. Somewhere in it the stone at my throat went hot. Just for a second. Outside the window the snow was still only snow.

I slid down beside her eventually. I don’t know how. She pulled the second quilt up over both of us, harness and all.

The Sony was still running on the pillow, its little red eye open.

“Did you get all that?” Rhea asked.

I reached over and picked it up. I looked at the counter. Fifty-one minutes.

“Every word,” I said. “Two sources.”

“And the drawer?”

“Tomorrow. Soon as I’ve got a key.”

“I shan’t ask to hear it.”

“I know.” I held it up between us, so she could see the light. “You can turn it off. If you want. You’ve got standing permission on this one.”

She looked at it. Then at me. Then she reached up, slowly, and put her thumb on the switch, the way I’ve done a hundred times at a hundred doors.

She didn’t press it.

“Not yet,” Rhea said. “I should like it to hear me fall asleep. I’ve never had a witness for that, either.”

So it did. It got the snow, and the radiator, and the long slow breath she does right before she goes under, and me saying goodnight, and her saying nothing back, because she was already gone.

I turned it off myself at ten past one. The card’s in my drawer now, under my key. The label says SOURCES. It’s the only thing in there that isn’t for the paper.

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