by Joey W. Hill
“Count on it.” The soldier met Alistair’s intent blue eyes with a direct look from his own. If he felt unsettled by the razor sharpness of Alistair’s regard, he didn’t show it. “Next transport leaves in two hours. She’ll be on it, and headed back home. Would stow myself away with her so I could look forward to my mum’s roast, but these bastards can’t wipe their arses without me.”
She registered a volley of responses to that from the other side of the crates, which produced a tight smile from her tea-bringer. His gaze touched her again, briefly, then returned to Alistair, a harder look in it as he reinforced his words with more forceful intent.
“We’ll get her home safe, mate.”
Alistair nodded, then glanced back at her once more. One more lingering moment.
And then he was gone.
Chapter Five
Three years later
Salt water. Helen holding her hand. The soldier on the beach, also gripping her hand, before he was shuffled off to his death. Gunfire. Staring, dead eyes.
God help us.
Nina came out of sleep with a scream on her lips, but it happened so often, her subconscious managed to stifle it before she woke everyone in the boarding house.
That scream escaped, though cut short, as the screen door downstairs clapped closed. It was the wind, she told herself. It was the middle of the night. The wind would lift the door and release it suddenly. Happened all the time.
She settled back into her pillows, clutching one to her breast, bringing her knees up beneath it. She’d sweated through her nightgown again, damn it. She’d have to wash up in the sink in the morning to be clean enough for work.
Such thoughts didn’t stop her shaking or soothe the spiked ball in her throat that wanted to become a choked sob. Though she despised her weakness, she thought of another set of hands to steady herself.
The memory of his hands, reaching out to her in the water. Holding onto her, bringing her onto the boat. Carrying her out of the ocean, pressing her against a tree. Clasping her throat. Alistair’s hands. His eyes and mouth.
She shut her eyes and gripped the pillow tighter. A few hours from now, when she rose from her bed to go to work at the hospital, she’d look at things with clear pragmatism. She’d finish up the nightmare ritual the way she always did. By reminding herself she was a sexual innocent who, until her encounter with Alistair, had done nothing with a man. Letting a boy equally as inexperienced as herself paw beneath her blouse and give her kisses during a summer romance hardly qualified. A three-centuries-old, sexually experienced vampire could easily brand himself on her brain like the be-all, end-all of romantic lovers.
But since the memories often helped her get back to sleep, she wouldn’t reject the gift.
The war was finally over. It didn’t seem to matter to her subconscious, though it didn’t take a genius to know why she couldn’t seem to get past it.
Yates and the others had gotten her home safe. But there were times she wished she’d never set foot on her homeland again. She’d been checked out by a doctor, who confirmed the bullet had been a graze. He’d indicated she was bruised, a little dehydrated, and had experienced a fairly severe bout of shock, but otherwise was no worse for wear. Which somehow seemed obscene when she thought of Helen floating in the water, her staring eyes.
She jumped at loud noises, disappeared into her own head, losing time. For the first few days back at her parents, she’d barely been able to get herself out of the bed. But then she remembered she could tell someone. She could make sure that someone knew that her friends had not “merely” been sunk on a boat attacked by Japanese planes.
“You can’t do that, love,” her mother had said.
The matter-of-fact calmness had brought Nina up short. She’d just finished telling her parents what had happened, which had been far harder than she’d expected. Her father had leaned against the wall, listening, while her mother sat on the edge of her bed. Nina knew they were worried. Her mother had come in to coax her out of bed, offering her a chance to join them for a late breakfast in the kitchen. Instead, the whole horrible tale of what had happened, the sinking of the boat, the massacre on the beach, had spilled out of Nina. She’d also told them how Alistair had rescued her, after meeting her sometime before that at her hospital in Singapore. She hadn’t included any of the stuff that she wouldn’t be explaining to anyone, though she wondered if she needed to confess it to Sher.
Yes, she knew what Alistair had said, but what people said and what they felt were often very different things, and she wanted Sher to know…what? What reassurance could she offer? That it didn’t mean anything? Because at the time, it had meant everything. It had kept Nina from losing hope, from letting herself sink to the bottom of the sea and drown with everyone else. And every day she got further from it, she felt she was being drawn back to the sea and into those depths. She was drowning again now.
“What do you mean?” Nina asked slowly.
Her mother looked toward her father, drawing Nina’s gaze there.
“Because of our connection to Alistair, we can’t do anything to incur public attention,” he said quietly. “Your story would make national news. Don’t worry. Someone else will report it. I’m sure there’s another survivor. Or maybe not all the soldiers were executed.” Her father tightened his jaw over the terrible words. “Perhaps some were taken to prison camps and will tell the story after the war is over.”
“I’m not going to tell them about Alistair. I’ll say I drifted up to shore and a kind stranger brought me to the base in Timor. But I have a responsibility…”
“Your first responsibility is to your family, isn’t it?” Her mother’s voice had that note that baffled and hurt Nina at once. Implacable. Devoid of understanding. Sharp. “If you draw attention to yourself, you draw attention to your family. To Sher. If she draws public attention, it will draw attention to the vampire world. I’m sorry, Nina.”
“I’m sure someone else will report it,” her father repeated. “But you cannot be the one to do so. Do you understand, Nina?”
They weren’t loud or angry about it. They’d never raised their voices about anything, so controlled and disciplined about everything.
She argued, she cried. They stroked her, patted her. Destroyed her. Eventually, worn down, she’d told them she understood. Yet when they hugged her and left her to finish her tea in bed, she felt like they’d simply put it out of their mind. If their daughter didn’t talk about it, it hadn’t happened.
Back in the present, Nina left the bed, padded to the window. Stared down into the empty street. There was a bank of trees and a pond on the property across from the boarding house, and she watched a child’s sailboat float aimlessly across it, likely left on the bank’s edge by its owner when called to dinner the night before. The wind had decided to take it for a sail.
A few weeks ago, with the rest of Australia, she’d learned about the nurses on other life rafts. The ones who’d washed up at different places onshore and been taken prisoner. They’d spent the last three years in internment camps. She also learned there had been one other nurse who’d been with Nina’s group and survived the beach. Vivian. Bull, they’d called her, for she was a tall, strong woman, even taller than Nina.
Her story was printed in the papers. Another survivor, one of the soldiers, had indicated that he’d returned to the beach to find bodies of soldiers and nurses, some in the water, some not. Which gave Nina a permanent vision of the faces of those she’d known, bobbing in the water like corks, or strewn up on the beach like rotting fish.
The full details of the nurses in the internment camps hadn’t been made public yet, but from contacts Nina had kept in the AANS, she’d learned that many of them had starved to death or succumbed to disease during those years. The survivors were emaciated to a shocking degree. They were currently feeding them up and providing them care at an undisclosed location before bringing them home, for fear of what public reaction would be to their appearance.<
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Three years ago, when she’d returned to Australia, she’d been reported as one of those who’d made it back to the Australian mainland “without incident.” Those two words, combined with all the rest, could plunge her into a quagmire of guilt and regret. If she’d been able to tell her story then, would it have made a difference to those in the camps? There’d been rumors of nurses surviving, but nothing confirmable. She couldn’t have confirmed it either, but knowing that other life rafts hadn’t made it to her shore, that they might have made it to land elsewhere, might have galvanized efforts to find them sooner. Help them.
Had Vivian been where she and Alistair could have found her? She thought of the faces of the nurses who might have survived, women she’d known. She imagined them wasting away from hunger and the diseases that came with malnutrition, their staring eyes joining the ones she dreamed of nightly in the water.
It flooded her with a despondent sense of futility. The silence of her rented room was as stifling as a coffin.
She returned to her bed, drew her knees up, put the heels of her hands against her eyes. She rocked, and began to hum, a desperate measure she’d developed for staying out of that sucking mud of her subconscious. Sometimes it worked. Especially if she added in the drone of a two-seater airplane, a lullaby laced with images of Alistair, and her trip to safety.
She’d found work at one of the hospitals overflowing with soldiers enduring rehabilitation. It had been far enough away she no longer had to live under her parents’ roof. She eagerly embraced the long hours and volunteered for more when the matrons there would let her.
She loved her family, but it was clear that they saw her as out of step with them, the family member who didn’t quite get it. Whereas she felt she was the only one who saw things clearly.
Or she had. Of late, everything was far less certain. Only work made sense. Helping the boys put their bodies back together she could do. Her heart ached at their struggle to put everything else together, but she understood that in a way she might not have before. One of the matrons had praised her recently. Told her that out of all the nurses, she had the best rapport with the soldiers. “You connect to them, help bring them back from the edge, Nina,” she’d said. “They feel like you understand.”
Yes. She did. She was just as lost as they were. When the war had ended, in the initial flush of relief, the whole country, the whole world, had celebrated. They’d all heard the news while she was at work. She’d looked at the faces in her ward. Many of the boys had been cheering. But she’d seen others caught in the shadows of their minds, a prison wall they were trapped behind that kept that feeling of victory out of reach.
But for most it was a blissful if temporary respite. The relief and celebration would eventually be re-infused with the more sobering reflection of the great cost.
She did celebrate, was genuinely glad there was an end in sight for the stream of broken men brought in from the battlefronts. But she also went to the supply closet and cried and shook, a fist stuffed against her mouth to muffle her sobs.
For the first time in her life, she was glad that the demands of Sher’s training had cut her twin’s visits home to only upon approved request. According to reports to their parents, Sher was one of their stars, and glowing even more brightly with every passing day. During the war her letters had dropped to once every few months. From what she said—and didn’t say—in them, Nina realized her parents hadn’t told Sher what had happened to her. She thought Nina had simply been evacuated from Singapore and come home before any real significant fighting had occurred there. That she’d been discharged and was working at the hospital.
Were you able to bring home that charming necklace you found in that Singapore clothing shop? Did you meet any handsome officers before they had to spirit you back to our poor old boring Oz?
Nina could have told her differently in her letters, but she didn’t. But it was worse than that. During her first year back, Nina had learned from her parents that Sher was going to be able to come home for their birthday. The first chance she’d had to see her twin since before she’d left for the war.
Nina had expressed her excitement and pleasure. Then called back two days later to tell her mother, regrettably, she wouldn’t be able to make it. Work schedule conflicts.
Sher was the person she loved most in the world. Her twin, the person closest to her soul, no matter their differences. Nina just couldn’t bear being that open to anyone. Couldn’t bear to look into her sister’s face, tarnish the brightness of her life and purpose with the darkness and listlessness that had taken over Nina’s own. She didn’t have the energy for it. Just for the work. She convinced herself Sher was better off not seeing her.
She had tried countless times to write to Sher about it. She’d started with Alistair’s role in it all, because that was the easiest part. She could confirm his heroism, bravery and kindness to her. She’d written a dozen different versions of it and everything else, and couldn’t find the will. Just wasted her money on the lost paper.
As far as the more intimate things that had happened between her and Alistair, she wouldn’t put that in a letter anyway. She’d told herself she’d share that with Sher when she saw her again. Maybe. If Sher would understand, just as Alistair had said, that helped Nina rationalize her silence. If it didn’t matter to anyone but her, she’d rather keep it to herself, not tarnish it with the indifference of others. Or make it less significant by having to pretend it wasn’t.
Nina curled back up on her side, hugging the pillow, and stared out the window once more. Weariness was gripping her, pulling her back down. She didn’t know if it was physical or emotional, but either way, she was headed for blessed oblivion. If she did the one thing that usually ensured it.
She didn’t know why she resisted it so strongly every time, because it always worked. If she’d do it before the nightmare, maybe it would eradicate them completely, at least on the occasional night. But she always started the night determined to deal with it herself. Or maybe it was that she felt like she deserved the punishment of those nightmares. And she resisted the path she took afterward because the respite it brought felt like an undeserved reward.
Or maybe because, as a nurse, the fight to keep control over the uncontrollable was endless, and she had to resist until the final moment, until she had to admit his will was stronger than hers, and she could commit herself to his care.
A fantasy, but it came down to that. When she was so exhausted she couldn’t fight with herself over it anymore, or try to solve the puzzle of why it helped so much, she would give in to it. To the temporary relief it brought.
She closed her eyes, brought back his face, his voice. She’d kept the shirt he’d given her and, insane as it was, even washed repeatedly, she thought she could still detect his scent. She slipped off her nightgown and put it on, lay there in it and her knickers, the covers off because it was easier to imagine his body pressed down on her that way. She slid one hand under her arse, giving her that impression of her hands bound behind her back, lifting her body up to him.
The other hand went to her throat as if pulled there by a rope tied around her wrist, as sure and strong a grip as his hand had been. A couple times, she’d looped her robe sash around it, the other part around her throat to hold it there, to increase that sensation. She didn’t tie it when she did that, merely kept the slack looped over her hand, but one time, she’d started gathering it up, tightening the hold on her wrist and throat, and kept doing it until her vision started to blacken. The way her heart had speeded up, the eagerness she’d felt to keep doing it, had frightened her. She wouldn’t let herself use the sash anymore, though her gaze would often turn to her robe, hanging on the door peg, as she did this, and she’d imagine it. Crave it.
It would have been easier to put her hand upon herself from the front. Doing it from the back put a strain on her arm over time, but she did it as he’d ordered her to do it, and somehow that effort, complying with the discomfort
, imagining the set of his mouth, the intensity of his eyes as she struggled to do his bidding, helped her put the other things away, lose herself in this.
She’d tried to masturbate just for herself, imagining one of those handsome officers Sher had teased her about, and her body was so unresponsive she worried that she’d lost the desire for intimate physical contact altogether. But the moment she followed Alistair’s directions, put her hands upon herself at his imagined command, she came alive, the nerves between her legs pulsing madly, her body moving restlessly, hips pushing into her touch, hungry for it. She didn’t touch them, because it had not been part of his direction, but her nipples became firm, aching points, and behind her closed lids she imagined his mouth on them as he held her fast with the grip on her throat, his other fingers stroking through the slick heat of her cunt.
That was what he’d called her sex, and it had been erotic in a way she never would have imagined the word to be. Her breath quickened, a whisper of breath in her silent room. Corpses didn’t moan like this in their coffins. She was alive. Connected to this life, even if only by her work and this thread that got her through the night.
Beg for it…
She waited until her forearm was aching fiercely, her back was arched to the point where to go further would snap the spine, and the waves of arousal were crashing against a wall of self-restraint. No, not self-restraint. It wasn’t her will holding that release at bay.
“Please…please let me.”
And because it was just her and him here in the graveyard hours of night, she did the one thing he hadn’t commanded, but which she needed to go over that edge, to find release and a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
“Please…Master.”
She was wrong. She did have another nightmare, but this time, it was something different. Or rather, a mix of things. The salt water, the shore, only she wasn’t in the water or standing on the beach. She was driving along it, and there was a steep drop to the beach below. She could see the pounding waves, and she felt excited, exhilarated, because they had the top of the car down. A glance at the mirror showed her she wasn’t her. She was Sher, with her gorgeous long hair whipping back behind her head scarf, her smile flashing to the other two women in the car, at the man driving.