The Secret Ingredient Is Love. No, Really

by RoAnna Sylver

  Her shoulders sagged as she sighed, staring at him with half-mast eyes. “Jude… I’m tired.”

  “I know,” he said, heart sinking. He felt every bit as worn out as she did, had for five years. The only difference between them was how they responded. “And you have every right to be, and I’m sorry I keep doing this to you. I wouldn’t if I could possibly avoid it, please believe me. I’m trying. It’s about…”

  “About what, Jude?” Eva prompted, pinching the bridge of her bruised nose. It still looked like it hurt.

  “It’s about someone important to me.”

  After the words were out, Jude was only mildly surprised to find they were absolutely true. And that he didn’t just mean the shocking revelation about Felix—though the horrible knowledge was so momentous he could barely think about it without collapsing. He didn’t know exactly when his dynamic with Pixie had shifted from reluctant partnership to… something else. But it had. And the thought of him alone and surrounded by hostile vampires made Jude’s stomach drop nearly as much as it did when he thought about the alien look in Felix’s eyes.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she said, taking a step back, away from the door, and nodding for him to follow. She was going to hear him out, just like he’d prayed. Not known, not counted on, or taken for granted. Eva would have been so very justified to blow him off after this. But she was listening. It was all he could ask. “The truth, Jude. No vampires. No full moon. Just… the truth.”

  “My missing upstairs neighbor, Pixie,” Jude started as he followed her inside, slowly, measuring his words. There had to be a way to distill the truth, tell her the crux of his crisis without getting into dangerous territory. “He’s not so missing anymore.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Eva said, blinking and looking a little nonplussed at the anxiety on her friend’s face. Clearly she’d expected a different direction. Jude took this as encouragement and continued. “Glad to hear he’s okay.”

  “Yeah. And he was helping me deal with some… troublemakers,” he said, unable to help raising his eyebrows meaningfully. “Kids at first, but then a bigger, meaner one appeared last night—but then he…”

  Felix. Jude couldn’t possibly tell her yet. It was too much to process, too much for him to even make sense of yet. It was almost more painful to think about Felix now, knowing in what form he’d survived. How much he had to have suffered for five long years. There had been nights where Jude thought Felix had been the lucky one. But Felix had received no merciful release of death, no cessation of pain—instead granted what appeared to be a half-living servitude. This was almost worse. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know until this was over.

  “Someone took him,” Jude finished a little weakly. He was suddenly so, so tired.

  “To the maintenance tunnels?” Eva said, studying him, as if carefully searching for a lie in anything Jude had said. She wouldn’t find one. But she knew she wasn’t getting the whole truth either, Jude could tell that just by looking. They never could keep things from one another, even the most painful or unbelievable. As Jasper had recently observed, there was more than one way to tell a lie to someone, ways that involved no words at all. None of that had a place here.

  “That’s where Jasper thinks they went,” Jude said with a nod. “The—the bad people, that’s where they’ve got Pixie. So we have to hurry and get down there too.”

  Eva brought one fist up to her face, gently tapping it against her mouth and nose, elbow propped up with her other hand. She let out a long sigh through her nostrils, looking at Jude as if he were a puzzle she’d been so close to solving, but suddenly discovered a new, ill-fitting piece. “Jasper’s going and I’m not?”

  So close. Their next few words would determine so much more than one night. It felt like a friendship and hard-won trust hung in the balance right along with Pixie. Jude took in a slow, deep breath, and let it out. “I want to know you’re safe.”

  “That’s a cop-out and you know it,” Eva said, eyes narrowing. He’d known it was the wrong answer when he said it, but didn’t have anything better to offer. “If you’re going somewhere really dangerous—which I’d say you are—you need me.”

  “I need someone on the outside to call for help if I don’t come back,” he said, a shake in his voice he refused to acknowledge. “Two in, two out, remember?”

  “By my count, there’s two in, one out.” Was it his imagination, or did the specter, the ghost of a smile flit across her face when he reminded her of the old firefighting maxim? Always work in pairs. Never leave your partner. Two go into an active building and two come out. Her smile was gone before it really materialized, and only her careful, searching stare remained.

  “And thank God for that one,” he said, meaning every word. But the old rule had another meaning—two venturing inside, two staying outside, in constant radio contact and ready for damage control. That was the one he needed her to remember. “Eva, I trust you more than anybody else on the planet. I want you to come with us. I want to show you everything. But it’s not about that anymore, it’s about staying alive and the only way I see us coming out of this is if you’re out here keeping an eye on everything before it goes to hell. Just like how it used to be. I could run into anything if I knew you were watching up above me.”

  “But I’m not,” she said, and now he could hear the anxiety in her voice. But it wasn’t rejection. It wasn’t dismissal. It was the fear that came from being in the trenches right beside someone, the deep breath before you both took the plunge. “You’re not going to have cell reception down there. You’ll have no way to call for help.”

  “I know. It would be too late anyway,” Jude spoke quietly, words coming out faster now. “But I’ll call you as soon as we’re out. I promise. If I don’t—Eva, I’ve broken a lot of promises lately. But if I break this one, if the sun comes up and you haven’t heard from me? You’ll know it’s real, and it’s over, and we need that extraction...”if there’s anything left to extract, went his unspoken conclusion. He had no doubt that she’d understand that much at least. ”So just... please,” he said, looking directly into her eyes with a fervor he hadn’t felt in years. He recognized the energy flowing through him now, the conviction, the desperate hope. He’d seen it in Jasper’s eyes not long ago. “Give me one last chance. When I’m done, I’ll either show you everything, or I’ll be dead. Either way, it’ll be over.”

  Eva didn’t answer right away. For a few second she held absolutely still and then, slowly, sank down onto her own living room sofa—black leather and a lot less ragged than Jude’s. She sat there, staring at the opposite wall, while Jude stood there and silently waited, hating the infusion of tension and unaccustomed awkwardness between them. Eva was quiet for a long time.

  “When the sun comes up?” she asked at last, very softly, and Jude knew, knew with his entire heart, what she was really asking. In a way not entirely unlike Jasper knowing Felix’s face at the end of all things, Jude knew Eva’s voice. He knew the exhaustion, the just-one-more-step resolve, the wanting to believe, but being unable to muster the hope.

  He also knew he would never be able to lie to her. Not when she asked him in that voice. Not ever. Jude shut his eyes and readied himself for the end. “Yes.”

  Silence stretched between them. The silence he’d been waiting for, for years. She’d been entirely within her rights to cut him off, him and all his ridiculous vampire bullshit. They had very different coping methods, as she’d say. Jude obsessed and clung to evanescent ghosts and ran full-tilt through the very fire that burned him. Eva did her best to move on and hold herself—and them—together. Do her job. Make life better for the people left.

  He had no right to ask this of her. She deserved to heal on her own, away from all of this. Away from him. If that was what it took, he wished her resolution, closure, and peace with all his cracked and fire-tarnished heart.

  The words that finally broke the silence weren’t the ones he expected to hear. But they were als
o the impossible culmination of the wild, foolish hope he didn’t know he’d been praying for, even as he knew exactly how impossible, how unfair it all was.

  “I’ll help,” Eva said softly and Jude felt his painstakingly-built defenses crumble in the most beautiful way. “Do what you need to do. I’ve got your back.”

  Tears stung at his eyes and he gasped out a sob. It was never the panic in the midst of a crisis that got him, it was the relief after. Kindness, not pain. That he was never prepared for.

  “Thank you,” Jude whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. The tears came anyway but, right now, with her, he didn’t care. He never did. “I… thank you. So much. I can’t even say how much this means.”

  “I think I have a pretty good idea,” Eva said, and Jude didn’t need to open his eyes to hear the smile in her voice. The last thing he expected or deserved. But coming from her, it felt natural. Right. Being together always did. “But this is the last time. I’ve been saying that too.”

  “I know,” Jude said, opening his swimming eyes and blinking her back into focus.

  “And this time I mean it.” The finality in her voice and face was unmistakable. After five years of promises desperately made and hopelessly broken, neither one of them had the energy required. “Don’t make me regret it, Jude. Please. Make it worth it.”

  “It’s worth it. I promise, it is.” He dragged a forearm across his eyes, rubbing so hard it hurt. “You didn’t have to say yes. It’s not fair to ask you anything, after all the shit I’ve pulled. I know that.”

  “Yeah, I know it too,” Eva sighed, and they both had to smile just a little.

  “So then why are you doing this?” Jude never knew how to handle the non-worst scenario. Even now, with a found and hard-kept sister he trusted so much more than his own fool self. No trust could keep him from questioning.

  She pulled him into a hug so tight he couldn’t breathe. He sobbed again, forehead against her shoulder, and hugged her back like both of their lives depended on it. “Because it’s about someone important to me.”

  “Pixie. What am I going to do with you?” Cruce’s grating voice was conversational. The rebuke was almost fond, a soft disapproval, like one might show a pet who’d made a mess on a fancy rug. Pixie felt sick.

  He also couldn’t move. Restrained, he thought. Somehow. Pixie hung in the nebulous state between unconsciousness and waking, head heavy, eyes throbbing, limbs feeling like lead. But that meant he had human arms and legs.

  Pixie remembered snuggling down into the cozy warmth of Jude’s pocket. Then, yelling. Fear in Jude’s voice. Poking his head out and smelling more fear on the breeze, along with another, familiar, inhuman scent. Then being seized in a tight grip, desperately flapping to get away before being restrained, rushing through the air, a crushing impact, pain—

  Then, nothing.

  “I’d say I didn’t want to do this, that you pushed me here, but that would be a lie,” Cruce’s voice continued, unwaveringly light and casual. “And I do try to avoid direct lies. Particularly when the truth is so much fun. I’ve been looking forward to every minute of this.”

  He moved away then, and Pixie heard more than saw him pick something up. Instinct flooded back along with barely-restrained panic from fragmented memories; Cruce enjoyed working in the dark. Fortunately, Pixie’s strongest sense was no longer sight. He’d never known if that was an advantage, or if Cruce used that sensitive hearing against him. Hearing without seeing and never being able to stop whatever came could be even more terrifying…

  “I will say, however,” Cruce said with a sigh, as if ruminating over tragic regrets. It sounded like he was behind Pixie now, and the realization sent a wave of fear crashing through Pixie’s entire body. He wanted to curl up into a ball. He wanted to turn back into a bat and fly away. He couldn’t do either. Couldn’t even move. Even if he could, he knew what would happen if he did. “Part of that is true. This is all your doing. You knew what would happen the moment you ran. And you did it anyway! I wasn’t the only one disappointed, let me assure you.”

  Cruce gave a rueful click of his tongue from somewhere Pixie couldn’t see. Pixie shivered.

  “And now, you’ve put me in a very uncomfortable dilemma,” Cruce continued, voice low and smooth. He ran one finger down Pixie’s neck, drawing a frightened gasp and shiver, and tugged lazily at his scarf. Pixie clamped his mouth shut, barely suppressing the whimper that badly wanted to escape—but couldn’t keep in the relieved sigh when Cruce’s claw released his scarf and moved away from his neck.

  “You see, no matter how glad I am to see you again, and particularly under these circumstances,” Cruce continued, sounding an odd combination of smug and vaguely annoyed. “Our master was very clear about the condition in which I’m to see you returned. That being ‘good as new, no marks, no damage.’ But, I’m afraid, sometimes things just don’t work out as we planned.”

  Pixie gasped as something painful pressed into the palm of his left hand. A sharp object with a terrible point, but he couldn’t identify exactly what. Cruce was still behind him, stretching his arm to an awkward, uncomfortable angle. He let out a faint whimper, but immediately clamped his mouth shut over it. He knew from experience that Cruce didn’t just feed on blood. He liked the fear that preceded it, too.

  “For example, I wasn’t supposed to leave scars. But sometimes exceptions have to be made.” He could hear the cruel smile in Cruce’s voice. Could tell that he’d heard Pixie’s soft, fear-filled sound. Of course he had. “And after all, you weren’t supposed to run away in the first place. I’d call that even.”

  The sharp pain in the middle of his palm intensified. But, strangely, it didn’t feel like Cruce was digging it in. The point in his palm burned, as if it were metal, superheated. Pixie could almost smell his own scorched flesh. Only one thing could burn his skin like that now, he thought, despairingly.

  Cruce moved into his field of vision now. His smile was every bit as wicked as Pixie had imagined. And the hammer he raised over his head shone as brilliantly silver as the nail he held against Pixie’s hand.

  “Keep your eyes open,” he whispered, making Pixie’s stomach twist in agonized, nauseating terror. “And keep quiet. It’ll all go easier if you do.”

  The hammer fell, and Pixie disobeyed one more time.

  Eva’s key was as good as her word and that, as always, was very good. The door to the maintenance tunnels opened at the turn of the key. Jude and Jasper followed the Witch’s lead as she stepped over the threshold, leaving the mall, and the rest of the world, behind them.

  Jude had made a brief stop at his own apartment before joining them, looking for anything he could use for what promised to be a harrowing night. The first thing he found was the empty bottle that had once held the alleged holy water, which seemed no more effective against vampires than regular water. An empty bottle was even more useless. For the first time, Jude wished he’d actually invested in the archetypal anti-vampire weapon, a stake. He’d never bothered to obtain one. Somehow having a real weapon would have made everything even more real and terrifying—but he didn’t have time to examine his motivations, and instead grabbed the only item that might actually be helpful. Another bottle. Red, long-necked, and filled with sauce instead of holy water.

  Now, as he headed down the corridor with Jasper and the Witch, he kept touching the cool weight in his inside jacket pocket, somehow reassured by its presence as they went. The walls and ceiling gradually changed from the uniform lines and angles of constructed concrete to rough stone. Bare-bulb lights hung from the ceiling, just a bit too far apart for comfort, casting strange shadows as the rock surface grew irregular. The corridor’s shape grew more organic, until they were walking down a round-walled tunnel that sloped continually down.

  After around ten minutes, they reached another door set into the stone. It looked just like the heavy metal door to the mall’s sub-basement they’d passed through, but something about it felt… wrong. Jude stopped several
yards away from it, heart speeding up.

  Going through that door was a bad idea, he just knew. The very thought made cold terror rise through his chest, freezing around his heart and lungs. Behind him, Jasper stopped as well, making no attempt to pass Jude or keep walking—the Witch, however, didn’t break stride.

  As she continued toward the door without hesitation, she raised her hands, then made a sweeping motion as if pushing something aside, or opening invisible curtains. With two more unerring steps, she reached the door and took hold of the handle with both hands, pulling it open with only a soft sound of exertion. When she was done, she stood to one side and gave a slight bow, gesturing grandly to it with both hands.

  “So that’s my end of the bargain held up,” the Witch said, sounding satisfied with her part in the operation. “Or the first step, anyway. Feel better?”

  Jude gave a shaky nod, breathing more easily. The moment she’d opened the door, the dread that had once built up in his chest was gone. It felt like that door had been radioactive, giving off every possible danger sign, intangible but impossible to ignore until she’d found the magical ‘off’ switch. Beyond the open door, the corridor continued.

  “Thank you,” Jasper said, sounding as disoriented as Jude felt. He looked from the Witch to Jude, then back at the door, seeming to struggle with something internally. “Ah, did either of you happen to feel…?”

  “I definitely did,” Jude confirmed, remembering the negativity radiating off that door with a chill. At least it was over now. There seemed to have been an atmospheric shift, and everything felt a lot lighter, as if the air were pressurized instead of high-altitude thin. “It didn’t feel like a good sign.”

  “It wasn’t a bad one, either,” said the Witch, sounding enviably unbothered. “Expect some more strangeness as we go, but nothing we can’t handle.”

  Jude gritted his teeth, kept his reservations to himself, and followed.