by Martha Woods
“You’re puking?” Claire asked, that familiar voice immediately making me perk my head up and forget all about the pounding in my skull for a moment, “That sounds serious, what’s wrong?”
“My head hurts, it’s nothing,” I said, trying to push aside the concern for a moment to get at what was important, “Why are you calling? Is something happening? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” She said, “but you definitely have a concussion, and you should get it treated as soon as possible. But for why I’m calling… Well, I think that we might have a bit of a problem on our hands.”
Already I was shutting the door behind me, clipping my seat belt back on and getting myself back on the road, phone turned on speaker and placed on the dashboard. I’ve already got a concussion, I’m not looking to relieve the pressure by hitting a tree and painting my window with my brains. “A problem on your side or a problem on my side?”
“Yours, but it could spill over to mine. I think that I’ve found out which spies we have walking in your city, but… well, I don’t know who they are for certain, I just have a couple of leads.”
“Leads?” I asked, “They don’t fill you in on everything?”
“I’m just someone that they can point in a direction to smash things, I’m not their spymaster. Hell I’m not even really that high up, I’m just someone who hangs around and gets bossed around by the spymaster.” She cleared her throat, sensing that perhaps she was getting off track. “Anyway, I figured that I should tell you whatever I can, there’s something very important to know about them.”
“Well don’t hold me in suspense, tell me already!” I’ve got precious little patience for dancing around the point right now, I didn’t need an extra headache on top of everything.
“Actually,” She said, speaking above the din of nearby traffic, clearly she was still in the city if that was the case, “Do you think that we could meet first? I think that it’s something that you should hear in person, you and Damon both, it’s probably going to be a personal insult to you both.”
“Oh wonderful, that sounds fun,” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose and trying to will the spots in my vision away, “Sure, let’s say two hours at my office?”
“All right, I’ll be there. I… thank you, for doing this.”
“You’re the one who’s telling me about spies,” I said, not blind to the fact that she was likely thanking me for far more than just seeing her for an appointment, “Just make sure you’re not followed and everything’ll be fine, don’t worry.”
“See you then,” She said, the call disconnecting before she could find it in herself to say anything else. I’d only met her briefly, and in hindsight I’m been concussed for most of it, but she struck me as someone who had a lot to say and was frequently denied the opportunity to do so. Hopefully this would give her a good excuse to vent if that’s what she needed.
But first, I had to pick up a likely very confused Damon and explain to him that I’d forgotten it was the middle of the day and I was supposed to cart him across town to my office, to meet with his long-thought dead sister to tell us who was spying on our every move. Always an adventure.
“I’m sorry, Claire is what?”
As expected, he hadn’t been expecting her to get in contact with us this soon, if at all, so it’s understandable that he wouldn’t quite be prepared for that. How would you react in this situation?
“Claire is wanting to tell us about the spies who’ve been… well, spying on us recently, and given that one of said spies broke my nose and gave me a concussion, I’m pretty invested in finding out who exactly it was that decided that was a good idea.”
“I understand that, believe me, but… wait, concussion?”
“Something to be checked out soon, but it can wait,” I said, “I’ll go to a doctor after this meeting, I promise. Now keep going, what are you thinking?”
“What am I thinking?” He asked, shrugging heavily and trying wordlessly to speak his mind, “I don’t… I don’t know what it is that I’m thinking, everything is just such a jumbled mess when it comes to her, I’m trying to hard to remember which one is the Claire from my memories and which one is the Claire from now. I thought… I thought she was dead Amy, I’ve barely known otherwise for twenty-four hours.”
He hadn’t had time to process, and that was maybe the worst part of all this fighting. Our social lives didn’t get put on hold, it wasn’t that simple, we were granted the illusion of being in control without having the opportunity to actually absorb anything that we were doing, we were allowed all the ability to love and to have fun without being able to process how we actually felt about any of it. It was something that snuck up on you so easily when you least expected it, if you ever expected it to begin with, and many people wouldn’t. It was bad enough when it came to people that you knew now, but when it came to such a tremendous revelation, a revelation that at any other point in time would be cause for rejoicing and celebration? That hurt, that really hurt.
“Damon…” I said, stepping forward and squeezing his bicep, “I know that you’re scared, and don’t deny that you are because it’s the reaction that anyone would have, but I think… she genuinely wants to meet you again. She circled you out specifically, I didn’t say that you were going to come along, she said that it was best that she tell the both of us personally. If you really meant nothing to her then she would have just… told me whatever bad news it was and then gotten me to tell you, don’t you think?”
“I suppose she would have, yeah.” Damon smiled. “She was never really one to mince words with me growing up, she tore my ear off so many times I’m surprised that I can still actually hear now. But she always had my back, every time something bad happened at school, every time my dumbass got heartbroken, she was always there, never sugar coating, but always comforting.”
“See? That doesn’t sound like a heartless monster to me, even when she was transporting what was just an ordinary prisoner she was nothing but polite to me, even fun to talk to. She didn’t even know me, yet she extended the same courtesy to me that she would anyone else.”
The thought was obviously of comfort to him, his face softening again and the corners of his mouth twitching in memory. “I really want things to work out Amy, I’m… scared that it might not. Fuck, I’m terrified that she’ll be disgusted with what I am now, you’ve seen how hard it is for people in this alliance to come to terms with each other, she’s been brought up by a fanatic for years now, that’s got to leave scars no matter how wonderful of a woman my sister was.”
“If she has those wounds then I’d say it’s our duty to help heal them, that’s what you do for family. And if she decides to back away, if she doesn’t want to be around you just because you’re you, well at least you can say that you tried, right? At least you can say that you extended every branch you could to her to try and get her back into your life.”
“That’s true,” He said, “she'd probably be more disgusted if I just gave up and convinced myself that it could never work, we were brought up that way. It was her advice when I first got interested in the girls at school, she told me to just stop screwing around and just be honest with my feelings, that if I can’t be honest with someone and if I can’t be willing to humiliate myself for them then whatever I was feeling for them probably wasn’t much at all.”
“She sounds pretty smart.”
“She is… I forgot that lesson after I thought she died, I guess I just didn’t want to feel anything nice for someone and just have it be taken away from me. Everything I had with people after that… well, you can guess, it was mostly just meaningless fun, nothing more.” Reaching for me, Damon stroked his thumb across my cheek and smiled at me, gratefulness flowing gently in his eyes. “You taught me that lesson again, or at least made me remember it. You’re just as incredible a woman as she is, you’ve both taught me so much, you’ve taught me to be the person that I truly want to be. God help me if you ever start seriously g
etting along, I don’t think I’ll be able to survive.”
“You’ve survived everything so far,” I laughed, “to be honest, I think at this point you might just be unkillable!”
He huffed a laugh, leaning down until his forehead was resting against mine. We stayed there, just like that for a moment, letting the hum of distant cars and the tweeting of close birds tick the seconds away, our breaths synching and our hearts beating gently. The small moments like this, the ones where I can just let the world carry on by and feel like everything is all right, they were disappointingly rare nowadays, though I suppose that everything good becomes scarce in the times of violence. To be able to steal away a day, an hour, even just a second for yourself to keep yourself sane, well that was something as precious as gold as far as I was concerned.
“Are you all right?” He asked me, pulling back just enough to look into my eyes, “I know that this is stressful for me… but are you handling everything ok? You seemed rattled when you walked in, I didn’t want to say anything but…”
“It’s… been a day,” I said, taking his hand and leading him towards the sofa by the window, “I talked with Anthony, he offered me a solution to our problems which I just… couldn’t take.”
Sitting by my side, Damon simply remained silent and held my hand, his sure grip anchoring me as I tried to sort through my thoughts to form something coherent. More than anything I appreciated that he knew when the right response was to give none at all, to just allow me the time to sort through my own feelings rather than jumping into trying to make me feel better. I think that’s maybe one of the hardest things to learn in a relationship, especially one where you care for the other person as much as we do, you always want to comfort them, even if that might not be what they need.
“He killed the original elder of the clan, that’s what made them pull out of what had been territory that they had been fighting hard for. He was his best friend until he went off the deep end, and in spite of that friendship Anthony took it upon himself to kill him to end the fight and save everyone else.” I clenched my fist, finding it hard to say the next part even as I’d gone over it a hundred times in my head. “His daughter was there at the time, she saw Anthony kill him. You can imagine the kind of effect that had on her.”
“Yeah,” Damon said, eyes distant and in the throes of memory, “I can imagine that.”
Of course he could, and I could hardly judge her harshly for going through the same journey he has, especially knowing the pain of losing someone that you loved right in front of you.
“He blames himself for all of this, every single shifter that’s died since, and every one that will die if things go badly, he just wanted everything to be over and he knows that the Hunter won’t stop until he annihilates them. So he… offered himself up.”
“Himself?”
“He said that if I just took him out into the forest and handed him over to them, then maybe they would be satisfied with that. Maybe if they got their hands on the elder’s murderer they would let the rest live, and go back to living wherever it was that they pleased.” I shook my head. “I couldn’t let him do that, I couldn’t Damon.”
“No, of course you couldn’t,” He said, rubbing along my forearm in comfort, “You want to save everyone, not sacrifice them. How could anyone blame you for wanting something like that?”
“Pretty easily. What if more people die Damon, what if ten more people die from them when I could have killed one and saved them that way? I just… I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, but I haven’t felt that way this whole time anyway.”
“If you gave him over, they could have just killed him and kept on killing the rest as well. When I was a hunter one of us would occasionally be captured, whether it be by vampires or werewolves or… whatever. Every one of us knew that if one of us was captured we couldn’t afford to do anything in exchange for them other than fight, if they asked us to throw our weapons down we kept them in our hands, if they told us to leave then we stayed, and we would stay until the hostage either got free or… well, they didn’t get free very often.”
“That must have been hard to do.”
“It was, but it taught me a very important lesson when I’d been starting out as a hunter, back before I knew anything about how all of this worked. A hunter got captured, his comrades didn’t know what to do because they were just as green as I was, so they did exactly what they were told and dropped their guns to get him back.” He closed his eyes, shaking his head to himself and exhaling sadly through his nose. “By the time we managed to fight them back and get out of there about half of us had been killed, including the one that had been taken in the first place.”
“Oh god,” I gasped, covering my mouth with my hand, “I’m so sorry Damon that… that sounds awful.”
“It was, but in hindsight it’s what we should have expected isn’t it? Because if someone really has you up against the wall, if they’re holding something of yours and telling you to throw away the one thing stopping them from taking the rest of it, why would they give the thing back to you in the first place?” He glanced out the window, searching in the direction of the forest. “If you handed him over to them then they would have killed him and kept doing what they are now, except now they would know just how desperate you are. And once they know that it would be no trouble at all to keep hammering at you until they take everything.”
“And all I would have left is guilt knowing that I delivered one of them and it did nothing…” I huffed, curling my arms around myself, “That should make me feel better knowing that, but it doesn’t. I still feel like there is so much more that I should do to protect people, so much more that I’m just not willing to do, because I’m selfish I guess.”
“It’s not selfish to want to do things without resorting to violence, but it’s… a bit naive if you want me to be honest.” He raised his hands expecting some protest, but I didn’t give any. All I did was indicate for him to keep talking, whatever it was that I needed to hear could be valuable. “Expecting to be able to solve every situation just by negotiating and talking is a very nice idea, but it’s just not one that can be applied to the real world, or even to every hypothetical scenario.”
“I should always try…”
“You should, but you also need to realize that some people really can’t be negotiated or compromised with, even if you really want to believe that they can be. Say someone wants to kill all of you and you want none of you to die, what’s the compromise you can make there? Let them kill some of you and then leave with no repercussions? That sounds more like a loss for your side, no matter what way you slice it, and it sounds like it may have just been a better idea to jump right to fighting in the first place if that’s the kind of person you were up against.”
“I just never wanted to see the world in black and white, everyone around me was so convinced that fighting back was just as bad as being the one creating the violence in the first place. I never went that far but… I still don’t like violence.”
Damon hummed, “I can understand that. But those people around you that thought that? They… sound like absolute morons. Defending yourself is in no way as bad as being an abuser, not even close. For people that are so convinced that not everything is black and white, considering any act of violence to be evil seems pretty black and white to me.”
“I suppose it does, doesn’t it?” I definitely didn’t have it in me to think too hard about the philosophical and moral implications of violence, not with the headache that I was nursing, but I would definitely put it in the back of my mind as something to bring up some other time. “Well, we’ve got a few hours until we have to go meet her anyway, I think that time would be better spent trying to figure out how I’m going to get you over there in bright sunlight.”
“Ah,” He said, staring out through the tinted windows and shielding his eyes from the glare, “Yeah that… does seem like a concern.”
Chapter 5
“I kn
ow that I’m a vampire, and I should rightly be used to uncomfortable situations by now, but I want you to know that this is absolutely the most uncomfortable that I’ve been in a very long time.”
“Don’t worry about it, as long as it keeps you safe then what does it matter?”
“It matters because I look like a snowman that fell into a discount clothing bin on his way to masturbate in public.” Damon shook the sleeve of the massive coat that he was wearing, though the movement was stiff from the three separate layers underneath. “This is concerning Amy.”
His hands were covered in thick leather gloves, scarves wrapped around his neck so thickly that they covered the skin up to his chin, he rest of the skin of his face covered with a cloth pulled up to his nose, thick sunglasses shielding his eyes and a thick, oversized hood pulled over his head. Not a single inch of skin was showing, and so far it had worked out somewhat successfully. I don’t think that it would stand up to being in hundred and twenty degree heat and sun, but with the partial cloud cover that had rolled in a quick test of sticking his arm out into the open was successful, no signs of burning, or melting, or anything so horrifying as what we were expecting.
So far the only real downside had been him complaining about the heat, something which I didn’t even think vampires were capable of anymore.
“When you peel me out of this, and you will have to peel me out,” He said, “for the love of god do it somewhere that isn’t carpeted, I don’t want to drench the entire floor and have it be damp for the next three weeks.”
“Can you even sweat anymore?”
“I think we’re going to find out, because this is absolutely boiling Amy.”
I snorted, unlocking the door to the car and helping him inside, the amount of clothing he was wearing somewhat restricting his ability to bend over. “Don’t be such a baby, it’ll all be over soon.”