by Noir, Mila
The next night broke cloudy and misty and rainy. We were relieved to have such typical UK weather. A bright, shiny moon would have been a bit of an issue. And apparently rain was something almost all supernaturals weren’t overly fond of. It dampened their heightened senses or something.
I let the rain fall on my face as we left the hotel. It felt normal and earthy to just let myself get rained on. I’ve always liked rain, although I prefer to be enjoying it from a dry, warm place. It fell onto my upturned face like dropping tears, gliding over my eyelids, down my cheeks, over my lips. I sipped some.
“What are you doing?” asked Robert, giving me a soft smile.
“Enjoying being alive,” I said. He quirked a brow.
“We need to leave,” he said, offering me an arm. I saw Dimitri come out of the building, then spotted something else. An apothecary sign.
“Can you wait for just a minute? I need some lip balm for the ride,” I said, heading over.
“Lip balm? Now?” Robert asked. I nodded.
Inside the apothecary was bright neon light, harsh and yellow, the kind that makes everyone look really sick. I knew I only had a few minutes, but I wandered the aisles anyway, picking up a candy bar, some chocolate for Tina, and idly looking at makeup. I had this feeling it could be my last time making a pointless drugstore hit and I wanted to enjoy it.
As I went to find the lip balm—my lips really were feeling dry—I saw something else in another aisle that made me think of a plan. It was a long shot, and it would require a whole series of events to play out perfectly…but if they did, there would never be a better way to stop Stoller. For good. So I picked up a little bottle of what I’d seen and some cherry lip balm, and checked out.
When I came out, all three were looking at me like I was the most unbelievably silly human being in the entire world. I just smiled, quietly pocketed my purchases, and handed Tina the candy.
I looked out at Trafalgar Square, the tall gold statue, the steps to the National Portrait gallery, which even at this time of night and in this rainy weather had lots of people coming and going. I took a deep breath of the damp air.
Then I turned to the car and got in.
Inside was warm but quiet. Robert and Dimitri made room for me between them, which felt very symbolic and heavy with meaning. Tina was driving. In the seat across from us were various pieces of equipment they might need. Rope. Stakes. Silver crosses. Apparently the cross itself wasn’t particularly useful but the silver was. There was also salt, which I found odd. And there was a lumpy duffel bag that contained I had no idea what.
We’d all dressed in stretchy black, which suited Dimitri and Robert exceedingly well. Their lithe, broad limbs were complemented by the form-fitting fabric. I felt a little lumpy but also soft and curvy. Since we were dressed for stealth, I didn’t much care if I looked good or not. I’d made sure to wear a supportive bra, though. I hate the things usually, but you can’t rescue someone if your boobs are getting in the way or bouncing painfully.
You’d think sitting between two hot guys you’ve been sleeping with would be awkward. And boy would you be right. I felt like the proverbial sore thumb. Which has always been a weird saying as far as I’m concerned. I’ve had a sore thumb; it didn’t stick out any further than usual. Maybe they meant a broken thumb? Anyway, I felt weird.
“So, this is a very awkward silence. We might all be dead in a few hours. We should try to guess each other’s favorite color or something,” I said brightly. They both looked at like me I’d sprouted a new head. So I smiled.
“Mine is blue, but the specific blue the sky gets in spring at six p.m. on a day when it’s been raining but suddenly gets clear,” I offered.
“That’s…very specific,” said Robert, smiling a little.
“Well, what color is your favorite says a lot about a person. If you just say ‘blue’ or ‘red’ it’s like, well, what kind of red? Or blue? There are so many tones, shades, moods. There are angry reds, sexy reds, cool reds, warm reds. Some blues are more green. So you have to know what kind you mean,” I said, aware I was rambling. It filled the otherwise awkward silence.
“I think mine might be gray,” said Dimitri quietly.
“Really?” I asked, curious.
“Yes. A soft, deep blue-gray. The kind you see in the sky before a daytime thunderstorm,” he said. I looked at his profile. It was a strangely poetic thing for him to say. His voice was sad, almost regretful.
“Mine would be pink,” said Robert. Which was even more surprising than gray.
“Pink?” I said.
“Yes. The intense, vivid pink you get in a sunset, streaking with orange clouds, in the summer,” he said. Given that the last time he’d seen a sunset, he’d still been alive, that seemed like a pretty vivid memory. I wondered if I’d miss the sunset (or sunrise) if I made the choice to turn.
“Well, you both surprised the hell out of me,” I said and smiled. The tension was at least somewhat broken and we eased into a more comfortable silence. It no longer felt hostile and tense, though there was still that looming sense of expectation. I guess I was a little excited about what we were going to do. Which I felt a bit guilty about. We were all in incredible danger and Tasha was being held prisoner. I knew what that felt like.
I put my head back and closed my eyes, attempting to rest. But my heart was beating fast and hard, and I felt keyed up, like I’d just drunk six espressos and topped it off with speed. Every part of me wanted to jump up and down or run or do something that burned off a bit of this excess adrenaline. Underneath all that, I was tired, almost bone weary. I hadn’t slept well and the combination made me feel wired and drowsy.
Instead of resting I fell into a strange half-sleep where I had what I can only think of as visions. Maybe being around so many supernatural beings had rubbed off somehow. Or maybe I imagined it. But they felt real and prescient and predictive of things to come.
Most were fleeting, just glimpses of images without context. A face here, a voice there. Sometimes just a flash of color or a night sky over a city I didn’t recognize. I heard my mother call my name the way she always did in the morning before school.
The most vivid of these visions, however, was strangely simple. And familiar.
It began with a hallway of doors. The ones on the left were blue, the ones on the right, red. I knew that the ones on the left were past, the ones on the right, future. It was cold in the hallway; I could see my breath.
The first door I chose was blue. It opened onto my room back home, with its childish bed and floral décor. My stuffed animals were all neatly arranged on the windowsill. Clearly my mom had been in there; it had none of my usual extreme clutter.
I touched different, familiar items. My favorite teddy bear, Mr. Snuffles. My old-fashioned hairbrush I’d found at an estate sale and insisted on buying even though it was tarnished and couldn’t really be used. The bristles were sharp against my palm. My bedsheets, well-worn flannel with a tiny rose print. They were soft and comforting. I sniffed them, the fresh scent of dryer sheets with a hint of lemon.
From somewhere downstairs I could hear my mother humming, incredibly off-key. I made my way down and watched her in the kitchen. She was wearing her plaid nightgown with the Little House on the Prairie neckline. It was so worn and faded it looked gray but had once been blue. A little like her eyes, which had shifted in a similar way over the years from sun and age.
She bustled, her small, plump form moving easily and confidently around the stove. I could smell the pancakes, hear the pan sizzling when she spooned the batter in.
“Mornin’, sunshine,” she said in her slightly gravelly voice. I smiled. It’s what she always calls me.
“Hey, Mom.” I sat down at the small kitchen table we rarely used. “Where’s Dad?”
“At the store. He wanted to get ahead of the holiday rush,” she said. I was eyeing her graying curls, sticking up a little crazily in the back from sleep.
“Oh, right. It’s Chri
stmas,” I said quietly, realizing I smelled pine and that it was three years ago, when I visited for a whole week. She was so happy to cook for me, I must have put on ten pounds between all the pie and extra-thick sandwiches and ice cream. Not to mention the pancakes every morning.
She handed me a plate piled high and I looked at her face. The morning light was unforgiving, showing every line and crease. She looked older than I remembered. I guess love can give people a kind of agelessness in your mind. It lights them in only the most flattering ways, smooths wrinkles. But I loved seeing these flaws. They were a part of her. The humanness of her.
“I love you, Mom,” I said. She smiled.
“Love you too, Ems,” she said, kissing my cheek. I could smell the coffee on her breath.
“How’s work?” I asked, stuffing pancakes in my face. They were perfect, just a little crunchy on the outside, damp with butter, thick with syrup. I sighed, feeling more at peace than I had in months.
“Work-like. How’s school?” she asked, getting herself a plate.
“School-ish. You know. Studying. Tests. The usual,” I answered with a smile. She didn’t smile back.
“I worry about you, Ems. You don’t go out and do enough,” she said, sitting down. I sighed.
“I know, Mom. I just want to get through this semester and then I promise I’ll go to a party or two, okay?” I said.
“Promise?” she asked, a crooked, beloved smile on her face.
“I promise. I even promise to do something mildly irresponsible like drink a beer,” I said.
“Good girl! Now eat. You’re too thin.”
I watched her pour syrup over her own pancakes and then the image froze, liquid mid-drop, her face stuck in a fond smile. My chest felt tight, squeezed in a vise of love and regret. I hadn’t gone to any parties. And I hadn’t visited more than once or twice after that. I’d been too busy. With what, I don’t know. Nothing that seemed important anymore.
Then I was back in the hall, tears on my cheeks. This time I chose a red door. Maybe it would be less painful.
It wasn’t.
I stood on a precipice, a cliff overlooking an angry sea, crashing against the shore with white foam. I could feel the salt spray against my face, even so far above.
A stunted black rock beach was below, the rocks shining wetly in the moonlight like thousands of irises staring up at me, unblinking. I felt dizzy from the height and yet I couldn’t look away for some reason.
Two figures, pale, appeared on the shoreline from the left. Then two more, from the right. Then more. They moved fast and almost seemed to glow against the darkness below. I held my breath. Something was going to happen when these two groups met. Something bad.
They fell on each other like the tide that was rolling in, inevitable and sure and strong. They tore at one another, ripping limbs and flesh. I was too far up to be able to see that, and yet, I did. As though I was up high and down below at the same time. From on high I could see the tiny pale figures becoming a red mass. From below I could see them feeding. Consuming.
It was impossible to tell who was winning or what the sides even were. They were, however, mostly vampires. Yet I also made out werewolves, what could have been changelings, skins shifting in the meager light into terrible shapes and things.
I felt compelled to look away, toward the cliffs to my right. And I saw them. Dimitri and Robert, gazing at each other across a chasm of bodies. Their armies devouring one another. They had blank faces, terrifying in their lack of any warmth or emotion. I tried to call out to them, to tell them to stop. But my voice was pulled away by the wind, by the sound of the waves, by the battle below.
So I closed my eyes and leapt…
And was back in the hallway, doors on either side again.
Is it possible to be exhausted in a dream? Or vision? Because I was. I felt wrung out. And I was really sick of this hallway that I’d dreamed/vision’d in at least twice now. Stupid doors leading to a past I couldn’t change and a maybe-future that looked like about as much fun as wars generally do. Which is to say: none at all.
I walked down the hallway determined not to open any more of these entryways to emotional future revelations or breakfast with my mom. I mean, really. How much more manipulative and sentimental could my brain get?
The answer was, unfortunately: quite a bit.
The hallway never seemed to end. I walked and walked, feet and legs getting sore, back tired. The doors seemed to crowd together now, closing in. They stretched, warped, became like fun house mirrors.
I kept walking.
Suddenly the floor tilted and I was thrown through a door on the right. I tried to grasp at the frame but my fingers slipped. I was falling.
I was standing, this time in a warmly lit house I didn’t recognize. I was in a room that at first confused me. Then I realized: it was a nursery. There was a white crib, mobile, dresser, and soft gray carpeting. Pictures of animals hung on the walls. In my hands I held a tiny little outfit with a cow on it.
When I looked down I saw that my belly was huge, painfully so. My ankles felt swollen and I felt a kick, from inside, and gasped, clutching at myself.
Warm arms were around me, a man’s, but I couldn’t see his face.
I put my own face in my hands and whispered, “No. Not this future. Go away.”
It dissolved and I was back in the hall, still holding my belly. Still crying. And getting increasingly angry with my subconscious and its need to torture me. Shouldn’t your own brain be kinder to you?
I started to run down the hall, the doors beginning to crack and peel. I ran and ran until I found, somehow, a ladder. It only went up, so up I went. I climbed for ages, until my arms ached and my knees felt weak.
Just when I thought I couldn’t go any further, I reached the top. I pushed at the final door, round and green, with all my might. It creaked open and bright, blinding light shone down. I slipped on a rung, nearly fell. But I held on, pushed out.
I was looking at myself in a mirror and I was old. Very old. Age spots dotted my papery, creased skin. My hair was thin and white and wispy around my head. But my eyes still shone with a fierce light. When I looked at myself I could see a spider climbing up the wall behind me. I followed it as it crawled up and up, then over, then sat in a corner. And waited.
I looked back at myself, at those fierce eyes and lined skin, and thought: I will die soon.
And then I woke up.
Dimitri was looking at me strangely and so was Robert. The car was still.
“Are we there?” I asked, acting like I hadn’t just had a really weird series of dream visions. Maybe I’d talked in my sleep, given the odd looks on their faces. Or maybe they were just being weird. Vampires, am I right?
“Nearly. We’ve stopped at a spot one village over to scope things out,” said Robert. He was putting on gloves in a fussy way that made me smile.
“How far is the castle?” I asked, relacing my boots so I’d have something to do.
“About two miles. Shouldn’t take longer than an hour to get there if we take it slow,” Robert said, opening the door for me. Tina was already outside looking off beyond a pretty dense-looking crop of trees. There were a few street lamps but it was otherwise pretty dark.
“Which we should,” I said. Dimitri had his hand on the small of my back and I felt it move lower to cup my ass. I gave him a look that said, “Are you kidding? Now???”
“I’m good at taking it slow,” said Dimitri with a wink. I rolled my eyes.
Tina had put the car under the cover of some trees and overgrown bushes so that, from only a few feet away, you’d have to know it was there to see it. We crossed the small road and made our way into the woods.
Vampires and changelings must have crazy good night vision because I could barely see anything and no one was using a light. I basically had to hold on to Dimitri’s shirt back to keep up and not end up in face first in a ditch or pile of dank leaves. It was eerily quiet, too. You expect to hear bi
rds or rustling or something. But the air was very still and only the sound of us walking could be heard. And we were being very careful.
It felt odd to me, as we walked, that we ran into absolutely nothing resembling a guard. Given the amount of werewolves that had been at the place in Naples, I felt sure we’d have seen some. Robert and Dimitri could even sense them if they were close, and Tina said she could actually smell other kinds of shifters. But none of them seemed to be getting a wavelength on anything as we went.
That worried me.
Not that I wanted to run into some massive wall of werewolf sentinels or something, but I just didn’t buy that Alexis and Stoller would let anyone get even this close. I could actually see some of the castle up ahead. There were lights on in some windows and it was a bit hard to miss such a looming, solid shape.
We were very clearly walking into a trap.
As we walked, I thought about my future. I realize that walking towards an obvious trap during a rescue mission with vampires, werewolves, and shifters is an odd time to do that, but I couldn’t see much and my mind tends to wander when I’m even mildly anxious. Right now my fear meter was off the charts. It needed a distraction. Plus, I mean, I could be walking towards my inevitable doom. You often take stock at a time like that.
I thought about my odd car vision/dreams. Possible futures, hazy past that was becoming a little Norman Rockwellian in hindsight. I mean, yes, my mom loves me and her pancakes are the best. But we had our issues. She wanted me to get married, have kids, and live next door. And I’d thought I’d wanted that. It was one of many massive lies I’d told myself for years.
But that “idyllic” life had come with a father who was emotionally complicated, distant, and barely involved. He and my mom didn’t talk much and didn’t even seem to like each other very much anymore. They were just growing old together because it was easier than not. It was a kind of complacency I no longer wanted in my life.
I’m not complaining: my life had been, you know, good. Easy. Uncomplicated.
Also, very boring. True, when most of us say we want a more exciting or interesting life we don’t mean anything supernatural. We just want, like, better clothes and a vacation by the ocean. We sometimes imagine the world is more magical, but don’t expect it to be. And we don’t really get that “magical” also means “really dangerous.”