Terrible Praise

by Lara Hayes

  She nestles back into her own seat, gathering her dignity in the tense silence that follows such an intimate exchange. She flips the visor down, wiping the corner of her mouth with the cuff of her black satin blazer. I watch her every move. Did she see Elizabeth? How could I have been so careless? But Lydia says nothing. She flips the visor back into place and turns to the passenger window.

  “How are you feeling?” Because I cannot ask her what she knows.

  “Better.”

  When it becomes quite clear that we have said all we intend to say to each other, I pull the car from its parking space and adopt Lydia’s muteness. Panic will only draw her attention to Elizabeth’s significance, and what proof do I have that Lydia had the strength to glean my thoughts while we were entwined? She was nearly mad with hunger.

  Lydia places a gentle hand on my arm. “Thank you, Stela.” She will not look at me. I doubt she has ever thanked me for anything and meant it.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  * * *

  The sound reaches me softly, as though crossing a great distance, piercing the black edge of sleep. Shallow breaths in rapid succession, little more than a tempestuous breeze. My body prickles with the presence of another, spiking action into my limbs while my mind grapples with what I cannot see. My fingers trace patterns on the sheets which are at once familiar—my own bed, thankfully. The frightened breathing—at once familiar—echoes in my ears. Citrus fruit, lemon, and orange peel. Open your eyes. Open them.

  My body bolts upright. A timid step thuds as loudly as a brick dropped on the floor. Erebus crouches low to the ground, coiled at the foot of my bed. The coarse fur down his spine stands on end. I put my hand out to him and part the bunched burgundy tapestry hanging from the corner of my bedpost.

  “Elizabeth?”

  Her sweet brown eyes are thrown wide in unmasked horror, locked on Erebus’s every move. The delicate veins in the milky skin of her wrist bulge blue and brilliant as she tightens her grip on the bedpost. Erebus edges back on his haunches, prepared to lunge. I throw myself between them. Elizabeth places her hands on my shoulder blades, pushing me toward the hound, and Erebus’s answering growl is a warning shot.

  “Lie down.” I point to his nest in the corner, but the hound stamps one large and defiant paw at my feet. He tosses his head, teeth bared and eyes wild. There is a human in his home, and his only purpose is to ensure that any mortal in the tunnels never leaves.

  “Erebus.” I crouch in front of him and hold his attention. I reach up and take hold of Elizabeth’s hand. Seething, Erebus edges away from me but will not turn his back. He remains low, shuffling backward to his nest, his protest made abundantly clear through a mix of harried growls and high-pitched whines.

  I rise unsteadily, expecting the vision of Elizabeth to disappear the second I turn around. But her hands, soft and warm, are as real as her lingering scent. She does not vanish when I face her. She wears the same black dress she donned for her evening out with James, the same simple shoes, hair in long heavy curls. I can scarcely make out the deep purple bags beneath her eyes. She looks beautiful. Rested for a change.

  “How did you find me?” I cup the side of her face and she leans into my touch. “Do you have any idea how dangerous—”

  She places two fingers to my lips, the blush rising in her cheeks as she presses her body against mine. She shakes her head and silences me with a lopsided, mischievous smile. I curl my hand around the back of her neck and press my forehead to hers. Her fingers slip down to my naked chest. Surely the others heard her approach in the corridor.

  “We have to get you away from this place. You cannot stay here.”

  She slides her hands along the exposed skin of my abdomen and up the sides of my breasts, locking her arms tightly around my neck. She buries her face in my hair. My body is rigid with fear, but her heart beating against my own and the gentle cadence of breath against my ear are my undoing. Slowly and selfishly, my desire begins to outweigh my terror.

  I ought to push her away, to chide this reckless disregard. Instead, I wrap my arms around her waist and she presses a deliberate kiss to my jaw, my cheek—and with a challenge in her open eyes—my mouth. Another kiss, this time with her eyes drifting closed and her lips lingering in solicitation of a response. My hands tangle in her hair, and my mouth opens to her intrusion while my brain is still screaming in alarm. Erebus maintains his litany of deep growls.

  Elizabeth pushes my sternum, leading me down to the bed and climbing into my lap. Despite our frenzy her smile lingers, her hair curtains our faces, and I resolve to whisk her quietly away as soon as we have finished. She presses her palms to my chest, bidding me back, and the momentary break in contact gives my mind room to wonder.

  Has Claire’s heart finally stopped its futile but stubborn beating?

  Elizabeth trails her mouth along my neck and I pull her up to face me by the sleeves of her gown. The glossy black fabric shreds in my hands. She looks down at her now bare shoulder and smiles back at me. That same satisfied grin I have come to adore.

  “I can buy you another…”

  She flips her hair out of her face and kisses me roughly. Her hands hold my face with surprising strength. My responses are slow. My fingers trace the frayed stitching, moving down her left shoulder. My hand tightens around her left bicep, her injured arm, but she does not flinch. I can feel the heat of my want evaporating from my skin as a cold dread settles in my bones.

  I burned this dress the night she was shot.

  “Forgive me, my Lord. I did not recognize you.”

  The body on top of mine stills and large hands wrap around my wrists. The face in the crook of my neck stalls, and then pulls back. Fane laughs so loudly it drowns out Erebus’s frightened whimpering. Fane keeps his hands firmly on my wrists as he leans back and settles between my bent legs, laughing wildly the entire time.

  “Oh, my dove. A moment longer and the game would have become much more interesting.”

  He extricates himself and smacks the side of my thigh so forcefully my legs twist off the side of my bed. A tight embittered smile is my only response as I reach for the sheet to cover myself. Grabbing my hand, he stops me sharply and wraps his arm around my shoulders.

  “Stay as you are. You have never been modest.” Fane is clothed in dark jeans, and the left shoulder of his white shirt is ripped, dangling down his arm. I try to straighten my back and he tightens his arm around my neck. He gives my head a shake, made to appear endearing or playful, though it is neither.

  “We have to get you out of here. It is not safe,” he intones with forced fright. “Come now, a human in my home, Stela? With Erebus’s pack roaming the tunnels?”

  He turns his taunt from me to Erebus, who has crept up to the foot of the bed. “Which is exactly where you belong, old man.” He thrusts his finger into Erebus’s face, his voice dangerously loud.

  Erebus slinks to the service entrance, his hackles still standing on end as he disappears through the narrow passage. I listen to the heavy pad of his steps fade into nothing.

  “It was ignorant, my Lord. I was not thinking clearly.”

  Fane grips the back of my neck and twists my face to his. With my protector gone, he is not hiding his malice, fighting to control his bottomless rage. His clear blue eyes are half crazed with the undertaking.

  “That is the most honest thing you have uttered in months.” He does not release my neck straightaway. He stares me down, tight-lipped, almost smiling. His anger vibrates in his fingers pressing against the top of my spine. Is this my death? My neck severed in his iron grip? Fane releases me with a shove and his lips curl as he grits his perfectly white teeth. My head snaps back from the force, but I will not shrink from him. I am in a hell of my own making. Besides, if there is one thing he appreciates it is bravery in the face of assured defeat.

  I sit straighter, feet on the floor and hands folded in my lap. He looks over my face with what can only be described as disgust.

&nb
sp; “I wanted so much to be wrong,” he laments. The threatening smile is gone.

  He quits the space beside me and begins pacing the floor, his head hung in disappointment, hands clasped behind his back.

  “I am loath to anger you, my Lord.”

  It is a half-truth, but true nonetheless. His disapproval aches like a gaping wound. But I acted knowing full well that this would be the outcome, and I persisted all the same. His footsteps still as he towers over me, peering down into my eyes. His icy glare reaches deep, pulling the strings of truths I can no longer conceal.

  “How could you deceive me this way, Stela? Did you honestly think you would not be found out?”

  “How could you?” My first action is always to placate him, and we are both shocked by my outburst. I had imagined that when this moment finally arrived, I would tell him how desperately I feared his reaction. That I was certain he would find me out sooner rather than later. But it is no use. I barely have time to register the pressure of his hands around my arms, let alone apologize. One moment I am seated, bracing myself and marveling at my own arrogance, and the next, I am soaring across the room.

  The writing desk lies in splintered ruin, shards piercing my back, and fragments embedded in the wall. My laptop, largely spared from the impact of my body, is crushed under my foot as I struggle to stand.

  I deserved that.

  Fane approaches with all the nonchalance of a deadly storm and hoists me to my feet by my hair. His fist tightens, nails scraping my scalp. A trickle of blood oozes down my temple, halts, and recedes back into the wound. “If you dare to accuse me, Stela, say exactly what you mean.”

  I knock the splintered wood out from under my bare feet as the fragment of a drawer is expelled from my spine. The skin puckers and seals shut again. I stare intently back at him, my rage going much deeper than this charade. “Why match me deception for deception, my Lord? You could just as easily have set fire to the bed while I slept. You could have roused the whole house and had me executed for treachery.”

  Fane laughs, silently this time, shaking his head. He clamps his hands on either side of my face, nearly lifting me off the ground. He covers my mouth with his, and though this is the same intimacy he has shown me thousands of times, I did not realize how one-sided the act has become. Has his kiss always been distasteful to me? How is that possible?

  When he has finished, Fane releases me just as abruptly. I land firmly on my feet. “Public execution of my only child? My blood?” His eyes remain violent, but his voice softens like a song. “Do you think me monstrous?” Fane turns away and stalks around the foot of my bed, disappearing into my washroom. He emerges with my black silk robe draping it over my shoulders and tying at my waist. With his every move my body tenses for attack, waiting for the next assault. He avoids my eyes until I am covered, and threads a lock of my hair back behind my ear. There was tenderness between us once, I swear I remember.

  “I had only a suspicion that teetered on the edge of certainty,” he says. “Collins gave me a name. Lydia gave me a face. I had to know what this human was to you.”

  So, the failure is mine. When I shared my blood with Lydia, I let myself linger in thoughts of Elizabeth and then Fane seized the image from so many others when he drank from her last night. He showed me my heart’s desire to gauge the depth of my affection.

  “I will not use Lydia’s allegiance to you to mount a defense for myself. I cannot deny my mistakes. And I will not work to deceive you any longer.”

  Fane tilts my chin up with the tips of his fingers.

  “I want the unmitigated truth,” he warns.

  A fair request. I place my hands on his broad shoulders and stare unobstructed into the pale blue of his incisive eyes.

  “As you wish, my Lord.”

  Scattered images flicker before me, dredged from the depths of my mind by the fistful. Random and unrelated, a toppled box of photographs. Fane reaches through the tangled web of memory as easily as cobwebs, brushing all else aside. One holds his attention: the image of Elizabeth still damp from her shower, running a towel through her dark hair. Her long legs dancing in the doorway to her bedroom, a knowing smile on her face.

  He tugs the string tied to this innocuous moment, and a flood of remembrance surges from within me with such force I rock forward on my feet, against his immovable frame. The sensation reminds me of a buried human joy, waking at first light and stretching into the fragile morning.

  The pictures start to knit themselves together in a line. They find their sequence under Fane’s direction and animate like a child’s flip book. I see the hospital room marked four-twelve and William Moore’s graying corpse. Elizabeth in her unflattering scrubs, red-faced and righteous. Her mother Claire taking a spill in the kitchen while Helen stands in the front room on her mobile. A vision of Elizabeth fast asleep. Elizabeth dancing in that crowded basement club with James’s hands on her thighs. The single gunshot. Derek pinned to the wall of the crematorium as I altered his memory of the evening. The truths I told Elizabeth that were not mine to tell. Collins, with and without a face. And then like a hailstorm: Elizabeth’s hand in mine, my thumb settling in the cleft of her chin, the weight of her ankles on the small of my back.

  All the feelings that are beneath Fane, or any other Moroi. He reaches for one more moment, and I am tracing the bloom of a calla lily, wondering if Elizabeth would try to stop me turning off the machines that keep her mother’s body anchored to this world.

  Fane rears away from me so suddenly that he shoves me hard against the wall. The oak paneling splits against the back of my head as I clatter to the floor. Pain is relative to the organism. But as I begin to straighten my limbs from their tangled heap and my shoulder snaps back into its socket, my stomach turns. I fear that I might become sick before I remember that such a reaction is not possible for our kind.

  Fane rages, tossing his head about like a riled horse, as though he can shake the emotions from his mind if he just keeps moving. I thought the same thing. What an inconvenience this must be for him.

  I do not get up from the floor. Perhaps if I stay down he will not drag me upright again, this time to my death. But then, I have seen him crush his enemies underfoot. I have no idea where we go from here, and I cannot imagine that I will be going very far. There is a poetry to the moment, a beautiful alluring uncertainty of tomorrow. The thought of never standing again, of an end, seems so much simpler than facing another night, because it requires nothing and handles everything.

  Fane’s gait has grown steady and purposeful. He brings his hands to his temples and grits his teeth. A sound like fracturing marble fills my ears, and reluctantly, he opens his eyes. He appears almost dazed. He wraps a steadying hand around the post of my bed and perches on the edge of my mattress. The ensuing silence seems eternal. “Why did you hide from me this way?”

  Because I knew you would never understand. Because I was terrified that you would destroy her. Because you want me entirely to yourself, and you always have. Because you would never give Elizabeth a place in your home.

  Fane rakes his hands up and down his thighs, waiting for my reply. “Did you think I would laugh at you? Refuse you? Have I ever refused you, Stela?” A pleading tone betrays him and he clears his throat.

  My eyes dart around the room, everywhere but him. I realize quite suddenly that there will be many tomorrows. The moment is too precarious to jeopardize with careless words.

  Fane rises sharply and runs a hand through his flaxen hair. He walks toward my hatch as though preparing to leave, and stalls just short of my legs. He regards me distantly, with the detached curiosity of a stranger.

  “You proved your strength this evening,” he says. “Lydia herself called your performance at Opes and Sons ‘a remarkable feat.’ I would imagine it took a great deal for her to praise your actions to me. Andrew was positively brimming with gratitude when he called, that you were able to conduct yourself so admirably in the company of his daughter.”

&nb
sp; No longer bound to a fate of infinite blackness, I struggle to my feet on wavering legs. I stand tall in his presence and sweep the hair back from my eyes. He leans forward slightly, as if to whisper a secret.

  “And how did you find the Opes heir? Our Christine?”

  We share a tenuous, satisfied smile.

  “She is everything we hoped for, my Lord. Twice the mind of her father, I am certain of it.”

  He nods his approval, and struck with an afterthought, turns back on his heel. I flinch and hate myself for it.

  “Your Andrew insists that he be permitted to continue his work under your eye, and yours alone. I too insist that you be the sole liaison between our family and his.”

  I know I wear my heart on my face. I can scarcely contain my pride. “If it pleases you, my Lord.”

  Fane rubs his hands together, as though washing the issue away. My position is intact, my life escaped from his fury, at least for now.

  “Stela…” He takes a step in my direction, deliberate and firm. “Killing Collins was an act of treason. He was not yours to take and you ended his life for foolish, selfish reasons.”

  His eyes fix themselves on mine, the portent of a bargain in the air. I meet his glare steadily, and with my utmost humility. “Yes. It was.”

  He takes another step closer, crossing his trunk-like arms over his chest. I have to tilt my head up to his face.

  “But protecting Christine was an act of loyalty. Aiding your sister home, despite your unyielding rivalry, that too was an act of loyalty,” he decides. “I will consider the safe passage of Lydia and Christine as payment for the life you stole from me. On one condition.”

  I lift my empty palms between our bodies. “Anything, my Lord.”

  “Bård offered an interesting and lucrative venture with Mr. Collins. You must supplement that enterprise. The details are yours to fret over and arrange, but I expect delivery of an alternative.”

  Overcome with generosity for his leniency, I kneel before him. I do not know why in light of all that I have concealed from him he would spare me so readily. And I am in no position to question. “I swear it, my Lord.”