Lovers Awakening

by R. A. Steffan

  “What? What is it? What’s happening?” she snapped.

  Tré held up a hand for silence, and she thought she’d have a breakdown right there and then.

  “It’s over,” Tré murmured eventually, his hand dropping back to the desk.

  “The battle?” Trynn clarified.

  “Yes.”

  “What about Eris? Are the others okay? What’s going on? When are they coming back?” Trynn knew she was firing off questions without giving him a chance to answer, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  Della stood and moved behind Tré, her hands closing on his shoulders. The picture made Trynn’s heart—which already felt like it was lodged somewhere in her throat—ache with longing.

  “Eris is badly injured,” Tré answered in a faraway voice. His eyes were glowing with that eerie silver light.

  “How badly?” Della whispered.

  “Badly. Snag is trying to help him, but he was severely weakened in the battle, as well. Apparently it was pretty much a cluster—” His voice trailed away as his eyes flickered toward Trynn and away again. “Well, let’s just say it wasn’t the smoothest rescue mission ever conducted.”

  In her mind, Trynn recalled the agony that Snag had shared with her, the result of hours of torture that Eris had been subjected to. She swallowed hard, and made a decision.

  Taking a deep breath, she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “I have to get to him now. I don’t care how dangerous it is.”

  Tré opened his mouth—to argue, she was sure—but Trynn saw Della squeeze his shoulders.

  He craned around to look up at her, his brow furrowed, and they communicated silently for a moment before Tré relented.

  “I understand, Trynn,” he said. “Just as you need to understand that Della and I have vowed to keep you safe. But… let me see what I can do.”

  Trynn nodded tightly and hugged herself, trying to stay calm while she waited for Tré to do whatever it was he was doing.

  After a quick consultation with Della, he pulled out his phone and started placing calls. He seemed to be arguing with whoever was on the other end, trading sharp words in a Baltic language Trynn couldn’t quite place.

  “Don’t worry,” Della said, sitting next to her and curling a leg under herself like a contented cat. “I’ve been exactly where you are right now. We’ll get you to him. I’ve never seen Tré fail yet.”

  Tré was apparently multi-tasking, because he paused in the sharp exchange long enough to cover the phone’s speaker with his hand and quip, “Your lack of faith wounds me, draga. Failed yet, she says…”

  In the end, his cockiness was not completely misplaced. All in all, it took Tré about an hour and a half to secure transportation to Damascus for them.

  “We’ll have to wait for nightfall,” Tré told her when everything was settled. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it if you want to arrive with living bodyguards at the end of the journey, rather than matching piles of ashes.”

  Trynn shivered. Almost two days had passed, and Eris had been the prisoner of a vicious sadist for much of that time. Had he suffered the effects of the sun’s rays? She let out a growl of frustration at the idea of waiting, and pressed her fingers against her temples.

  “You should try to get some rest,” Della suggested. “No offense, sweetheart, but you look like hell.”

  “Fine,” she replied in clipped tones, and more or less stormed off to the bathroom.

  Trynn couldn’t really argue with Della’s blunt assessment as she gazed at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Dark circles were smeared beneath her eyes like smudged mascara. She looked raw and edgy, as if she were on the verge of crawling out of her own skin.

  After cleaning up, Trynn collapsed face down onto the bed. Maybe she’d overestimated her own endurance, because she immediately fell into a deep, blessedly dreamless sleep.

  What seemed like seconds later, Della was shaking her insistently awake.

  “Come on, Trynn, you need to get up. We’ve got a flight to catch. Trynn.”

  Della obviously wasn’t taking no for an answer, and Trynn tried to reboot her groggy brain. “Huh?” she asked, sitting up suddenly and pulling her arm away.

  “We need to leave,” Della said, slowly and clearly. “We have a flight to catch.”

  That brought everything back in a rush.

  “Shit!” Trynn immediately sprang from the bed, straightening her rumpled, borrowed shirt and rummaging around for her things. “I’m up. How long have I been asleep?”

  “Hours,” Della answered with a shrug. “You were really out of it; I could barely wake you. I don’t doubt you needed it, but now we have to move.”

  Trynn tossed all of her scattered possessions into the duffle bag she had brought from her own hotel room. When she had everything—and there wasn’t much, really—she threw the bag over her shoulder. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  Tré and Della had clearly not been idle while she slept. All of Eris’ and Snag’s belongings had been packed and were now waiting by the door.

  To her relief, she realized that they would not be returning. That suited her fine. She didn’t know how much more of being solicitously guarded and confined to this room she could stand. It might have been gilded, but it still felt like a cage.

  Della hailed a cab, and the three of them rode through the restless streets of Nicosia. Trynn was more than a little shocked to see the extent of the damage in parts of the city. The fires had damaged or destroyed whole blocks, and many of the roads were impassable.

  Eventually, they made it out and into the suburbs beyond. Their destination, it turned out, was a small, private airstrip just north of the city.

  “How did you manage this, anyway?” Trynn wondered aloud as they pulled up to the small facility.

  “Persuasion,” Tré retorted in a dark voice.

  “And by persuasion, he means money,” Della added wryly.

  Trynn peered at them in the dim light of the cab’s dashboard. “So you’re rich, then?”

  “Long-term investments become simpler given our… unusual circumstances,” Tré said, still grim. “But no one said I used my own money. Actually, I used Eris’. It only seems fair under the circumstances, and I daresay he can spare it.”

  She’d known, intellectually, that Eris was well off. That much was obvious from the hotel room and his own thoughtless, casual elegance. Plus… art thief. So maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. She just hadn’t quite made the connection between staying at the Merit Lefkosa kind of money, and chartered flights from a private airfield on short notice kind of money.

  Movement caught her attention through the back window, and she tensed as a private security team approached the car on foot, guns drawn. Their cabbie began making frightened spluttering noises and put his hands in the air.

  “Our apologies, my friend. Please relax—you’re in no danger,” Tré assured the man. Trynn wondered if there was a bit of vampiric suggestion behind the words, because the cabbie seemed to grow very relaxed, very quickly under the circumstances.

  Handy, she thought, as long as it’s not being aimed at me.

  Tré stepped out of the vehicle with his hands raised at shoulder height in a token of non-aggression.

  “Peace, my friends,” he said in the same arresting tone of voice.

  To Trynn’s astonishment, the men, who had been walking towards them quickly and with purpose, slowed. Their steps faltered and they stumbled to a stop, standing under the glow of a streetlight and looking vacantly at Tré.

  “Who are they? And what did he do to them?” Trynn whispered to Della as they pulled their bags from the trunk of the car.

  “I imagine they’re airfield security, and were coming over to check our documentation,” Della said, keeping an eye on the men but not seeming overly concerned. “He just temporarily stunned them. They’ll be perfectly fine in a little bit.”

  Trynn nodded knowingly. “Ah. The mind-whammy. Right.�
�

  Della let out a bark of surprised laughter, and quickly covered her mouth with one hand. “Oh my god,” she said from behind her muffling fingers. “You call it that, too? You should have seen the look Tré gave me the first time I said it…”

  Luggage in hand, they walked around a low building to where Trynn could hear the sounds of a helicopter’s engines starting up. The unmistakable thwack thwack thwack carried across the small airfield.

  Within moments, they were approaching the nervous-looking man standing just outside of the zone of turbulence created by the chopper’s blades.

  “You have the cash?” he demanded in a low voice, throwing a look over his shoulder as though he expected someone to be spying on them.

  Tré pulled out a thick wad of Euros folded into a money clip, and held it up for the man to see. Immediately, the pilot’s hand snaked out and grabbed it, flicking through it to make sure that he was not being shorted.

  “It’s all there. Let’s get moving—we have a long journey ahead of us.” Tré seemed mildly irritated by the delay as the man rubbed one of the bills between his fingers as if to ensure it wasn’t counterfeit… though he hadn’t batted an eye at the outrageous cost of the flight.

  “Yes, yes, let’s go,” the man said in a heavy Greek accent as he turned towards the chopper.

  Trynn followed the others to the sleek aircraft, keeping her head ducked to minimize the turbulence from the spinning blades. Having never been on a helicopter, she didn’t know exactly what to expect. She found a headset with earphones and a mic sitting on a seat across from Della and Tré, so she picked it up and slid into the seat, adjusting it over her ears.

  “Buckle up,” the pilot’s voice barked over the radio, and she hastened to obey.

  All in all, the flight itself wasn’t too bad. The takeoff off made her stomach drop uncomfortably, but the rest of the time they simply hurtled through the dark night towards their goal across the narrow stretch of sea.

  It was a testament to how exhausted she was that she dozed off halfway through the flight, only to jerk awake when a hand fell on her arm.

  “The pilot says that the place where we need to go is too badly bombed out for him to land and take off,” Tré told her. “He’s going to land in a vacant area close to the airport, so we can avoid having to answer awkward questions. We should be able to find someone willing to rent us a car from there, though we may also have to travel some distance on foot. Snag indicated that the roads around the building where they’re staying are blocked by rubble.”

  Trynn nodded, but did not speak.

  She wondered how much Tré had told the pilot about their journey, and guessed that the man actually knew very little, other than their destination.

  Behold, the power of large wads of cash.

  By the time they touched down in Damascus, Trynn was beginning to feel a jittery sense of anticipation. She needed to see Eris with her own two eyes before she would believe that he was still alive. She needed to, like she needed air and water and food.

  “Della,” she whispered as they stood waiting for Tré to finish haggling with a man about the price to rent his battered four-door Skoda. The pilot had taken off practically the instant they’d disembarked and moved out of the landing zone, which made Trynn wonder what threats or coercion Tré had used to get him to take the job in the first place.

  “Yes?” Della replied.

  Trynn swallowed. “Did you ever question whether or not you really were one of these…fated mates of a vampire?”

  “There were times that I did, at first,” Della recalled. “The whole story was so crazy and out-there that it seemed insane.”

  “I hear you on that,” Trynn muttered.

  Della snorted, then grew thoughtful. “And yet… I had these dreams. It’s like my heart was saying yes, but my mind just couldn’t accept the reality. It’s a tough place to be, especially since I didn’t really believe in the paranormal beforehand. But… the more I was involved with Tré, the more distant those doubts became.”

  “Really?” Trynn’s voice was wistful as she thought about how little time she’d truly had with Eris, to try and figure things out.

  “Yes, really. It will be the same for you, I’m sure of it. You and Eris have barely begun getting to know each other again. Soon, you’ll be sharing memories, and when you’re together you’ll realize that you’ve just been half a person without him.”

  Trynn raised her eyebrows at the flowery proclamation, unable to help herself. She’d just never been a hearts-and-flowers kind of girl.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Della chided. “I’m serious! You’ll see. You’ll be amazed what you find once you have a chance to truly be alone together and talk.”

  “Maybe,” Trynn replied evasively. “Honestly, I think I’m still in shock.”

  The driver stopped arguing with Tré and reluctantly handed over the keys just as Della leaned closer, bumping shoulders with her.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty normal,” she said. “If there even is a normal for this situation. It’s a lot to take in all at once.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” Trynn admitted as Tré took the keys and handed over another, smaller wad of cash.

  “Of course you will,” Della retorted. “I feel now like I was always meant for this life. Kind of like I spent all those years as a mortal hurtling forward towards the moment when I met Tré and then was made a vampire a few short days later.”

  Trynn had been trying really hard not to think about the being turned into a vampire part, but—

  “Did it… hurt?”

  Della didn’t answer for a moment, but dropped their small bags into the trunk of the car before sliding into the front seat next to Tré. Trynn got in behind her and sat in the back, staring out of the window at the lights of Damascus.

  It seemed like a very long time before Della answered.

  “It did,” she admitted. “It was physically and psychically painful, it’s true… but I don’t really remember it.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, not really. It faded in the face of what came after. Trust me… the joy and all the amazing feelings of being with the one you were meant for more than make up for it. That’s what I remember.”

  They fell into silence, each consumed by their own thoughts. Trynn was assailed by a sudden image of Eris screaming in the moonlight, flailing in the sand, his fingers curled toward her like claws.

  She caught her breath, her heart beating faster. The memory was startling, especially since Trynn didn’t know where it came from or how it got into her head.

  “Do you know exactly how Eris was turned?” Trynn asked, breathless.

  “No, we weren’t there,” Tré answered. “Except for Snag, Eris is the oldest of any of us, by quite a stretch.”

  “You were the only one that was there,” Della reminded Trynn. “In a manner of speaking, anyway.”

  Even though neither of the vampires in the front seat could see her, Trynn nodded, trying to follow the memory further.

  There was a confusing rush of sounds and darkness. Even in these odd dream-memories, Trynn could feel a pounding sensation in the back of her head that made her think she’d either been struck by something, or had fallen to the ground and hit her head.

  Trynn could remember stumbling blindly into the swirling darkness, choking on the horrible stench that filled her nostrils. She’d fought her way towards Eris, feeling as if she were battling a cloud of stinging insects that scrabbled against her exposed skin.

  Screaming filled Trynn’s ears and with a rush of surprise, she realized that it was her own voice raised high, shrieking to the heavens. The dark cloud solidified around Eris, making an impenetrable barrier that kept them apart. Trynn flung her body forward over and over again, unable to get through and reach her beloved.

  Refusing to give up, she lunged forward the final fraction, and was able to touch him.

  “Trynn?” Della’s voice b
roke through the memories in which she had become lost. “You still with us, there?”

  She blinked. “What? Uh… yeah. Sorry. I… think I’m starting to remember more details about the night Phaidra died, is all.”

  Saying it matter-of-factly like that helped Trynn feel more in control, despite her fluttering heart and the clammy sweat breaking out on her skin. It felt like she could bring it into reach and understand it better if she owned it, rather than hiding from her past.

  Della only nodded, a sad smile pulling at one corner of her full lips before the expression collapsed into sympathy

  “How much further?” Trynn asked, trying to focus on the present.

  “I don’t really know,” Tré answered. “Though we’re definitely going to have to walk to our final destination.”

  “Then we’ll walk,” Trynn replied, brooking no argument. She was not going to let a little rough terrain stop her from reaching Eris tonight.

  About an hour later, Trynn, Tré, and Della reached the end of the road. Quite literally, in fact. There was a makeshift roadblock in front of them, illuminated by the headlights. Behind the roadblock the pavement appeared to be gone, leaving only a pile of twisted rubble.

  “I think this is our best bet,” Tré murmured, getting out of the car. “They’re directly ahead of us, and I doubt we’ll get any closer via a different road.”

  Della and Trynn got out without a word and grabbed their bags from the trunk of the car. Tré hefted the bag containing Eris and Snag’s belongings and peered into the darkness before them.

  “This could be a rough journey,” he warned. “Especially with human levels of night vision.”

  “It’s fine,” Trynn said. “Let’s go.” She couldn’t understand why they were standing around talking when they could be making their way towards Eris. When the two vampires started their trek, she hurried ahead, clambering over large embankments of concrete that had been ripped up.

  After reaching the top of a portion of the street that had buckled around a bomb crater, Trynn looked down into the pitch black hole beneath her. The lights from the occupied part of the city no longer reached this far, and the rest of their path was cast into shadow.