Dark of Night

by T. F. Walsh

  “You brought me here, Caleb,” she accused, tiredly, leaning back into her cot away from him.

  He continued to whisper, “I have tried to free you. I swear it. Over the last few weeks. You have no idea. I have worked to … they simply will not permit me to release you, and I am limited in what I can do. It’s complicated, but I need the Council’s approval to become king, and I cannot gain their approval while seeking your release, and I cannot grant your release until I gain their approval. I — ”

  “Ok. Fine. Let’s say I take that at face value, and I assume there is worse out there, what are you trying to save me for? What do you want from me?” Shaking her head and berating herself for once again asking the wrong questions, she took a breath and tried to focus on what really mattered here. “You know what? Forget I asked. What you need — it has nothing to do with me, so if you want my help, you should start with what is in it for me.”

  “Libby, I swear to you, I would not have you here. You won’t let me speak of what has happened to you, but — I — I never — I have been at odds with everyone here since the death of my father. Damn,” he muttered, defeated.

  Unable to ignore Caleb any longer at the mention of his father, she glanced toward him and his face was earnest, as sincere as she had ever seen him. He was looking at her intently, as though he needed her to understand something vital, but her misery over what had happened to her surged again. Caleb had actually stopped her. She’d been so close to freedom. The guard had managed to kick the keys in her direction as the stone wolf approached him, and after releasing herself, she released the guard from the spell. In his shock and terror, he had simply let her leave. She had actually been through the outer gate when a wolf, Caleb in his shifted form, pounced on her and held her down.

  If she were up to being objective, and she wasn’t up to that, but if she were, she could admit that his posture had seemed protective. He had bared his fangs at the vampires, not at her. But she wasn’t ready to forgive him yet … not after what happened after she was caught. “What do you want, Caleb?”

  Clasping his hands together and leaning his arms on his legs, he rested forward, glancing at the floor. He seemed hesitant, confused, maybe even embarrassed.

  “Over the last few months I have made continued — ” he paused, trying to find the right words “ — missteps, misjudgments.” His voice was normal again, calm, the voice of a king. “My logic has been flawless, but my strategies, well, they have been faulty.”

  “Yes, you poor genius, you.”

  “I have routinely failed to consider or anticipate the emotional decisions of my opponents.”

  “Emotional decisions?” she asked, a little intrigued.

  “Take Sorley and Lukas. I was sure they would attack me, but they were both motivated, by emotional reasons, to target you. I need your help to understand this.”

  “So. You’re emotionally stunted. My dad is, too. What can I do about it?”

  “You can use your magic. I know you can. You’ve done it before, I’ve seen you.”

  “Do what, Caleb?”

  “I don’t know exactly what you do, but you can somehow manage feelings. You’ve shared your feelings with others. Back in the trials. And a few nights ago, somehow you knew what Se’ feared most. I want you to share what you know with me. I have convinced the Council that it is in our best interest to trust your care to me and to allow you to visit me regularly in the palace.”

  She matched her formality with her own: “And if I can? What’s in it for me?”

  “You will be permitted to leave the prison regularly to work with me in the Capitol. There you will receive meals. You can shower. You will have as normal a life as I can give you right now.”

  “They’re going to bathe the dog before playtime with the king.”

  “I told you, Libby. I am not the king.”

  Cutting him off, she barked, “Oh, yeah. The king who has no power, but has flunkies to bring in chairs for him to sit in. Yeah, ok. Life sure is tough for you. So, you need my help. I repeat: what’s in it for me?”

  “I told you. I’m not king,” he repeated, though she wasn’t sure why he insisted.

  “And I told you, I’m not doing anything if there isn’t something in it for me.”

  “I am hoping that your cooperation with me will garner some sympathy and trust with the Elder Council, Libby. I am working to free you. I swear it.”

  Exhaling in frustration at her situation and how desperately she wanted to believe Caleb, she forced herself to look directly at him. She wanted to feel nothing, or at least seem as though she felt nothing. A little pride went a long way, she thought as she clipped, “Fine. I accept. I would do just about anything for a shower right now and a hot meal.”

  Caleb nodded his head once, frustrated, disappointed, a little sad.

  “Libby, are the guards — are they hurting you? Did they — ”

  “Oh, no,” she interrupted. “It’s a regular party down there.”

  “Libby, would you tell me what has happened? Please.” He waited for her to answer, but, when she just glared at him, he continued in a quiet voice, “I wish there was some way you could believe me. I don’t want you here. It — it hurts me, somehow, to see you here. I worry about how to free you continuously. It is truly all I think of. Is there no way to convince you?”

  “There is. But you won’t like it,” she answered tersely.

  “Well?”

  “I use a spell, touch you, and basically I just open you right up. I see inside you, and there is no hiding from me. Whatever you’re thinking. Whatever you’re feeling. I see it,” she said, forcing herself to smile, because strictly speaking, that wasn’t precisely true.

  There were varying classes of skill that could make her claims more-or-less true, but she personally only had that ability with an established connection to another or with a whole lot of contact. And even then, if he knew about her spell and understood how it worked, he could resist and push her out, and she would only get sensations of feelings, not actual thoughts. With training, she could do it. With practice, she could do it. So right now, she was speaking theoretically, not practically, hoping that, if he were lying, he would back down, his fear of her power making him more vulnerable.

  After considering a few minutes, Caleb answered. “Fine.” He seemed nervous, but not entirely unwilling.

  “Fine,” she said back, leaping off of her cell cot. “Don’t move,” she ordered, moving fast. Almost a blur. Without warning she placed her hand on the back of his neck, and cast the spell.

  • • •

  It was all happening too quickly, though that was probably Libby’s plan. She would want him off balance to make him more susceptible to her magic. Libby had always been shrewd and calculating, but she had never been so toward him. She’d changed since they had last meet. She’d learned to distrust him. Throughout the trials, he had felt anger at her refusal to learn fear, to practice caution, but Libby was finally wary of him. But this only saddened him now. Now, when he wanted her trust. He needed to submit to her spell, to show her the Elders and to help her understand the situation they were in, but he was wary of her seeing too much. He didn’t want her to suspect what he was. Better her fear than her disgust. But how could he keep these things from her, if she wanted to see them, if she used her spell? It was all happening too fast.

  Suddenly, her hand on his nape warmed, and then, although he had not moved at all, he felt thrown into the air, into the unknown, like a human child he had seen in a movie once, swept up in the emotion of riding some man-made metal contraption, his face a mix of terror and joy.

  With such little contact, with no bodily movement at all, his mind, all his thoughts, rushed past him, blurs of images, almost unintelligible to him. He saw his own past, his own dreams, his own fears zoom by and knew them as humans
might know a green blur outside a car window and recognize it as grass. The momentum of his thoughts was not his own; she was moving his thoughts, shuffling them around somehow, his mind jerking, flipping round and round, twisting in large circling sweeps forward and backward. The process made his body heavy and weightless at the same time. Just as he had no control over his own mind, his body felt beyond his own control, separate from him and slightly elevated from the floor, trapped in a strange inertia. He couldn’t move his head to look and his eyes were blind, seeing only what she saw, seeing only the blur of images in his mind.

  Abruptly, she paused and the images in his mind slammed to a stop. She was looking at something, studying it. His memories from recent weeks. She was flipping through them slowly. She saw him talking with Elder after Elder, saw him speaking with his brother. She moved again, and again his thoughts were streaks of color. Then she paused again. She was looking at him, alone. She was staring long at the image of his face as he sat in the window looking at the prison. Embarrassed by the memory, he could not understand what fascinated her. She seemed to focus inordinately on his expression. She moved farther back to the day she arrived at the city, observing a jumble of images: the Council meeting, the mourners, the soldier.

  There was too much he didn’t want her to know: his excitement and eagerness at her arrival, his mourning at her imprisonment, his relationship with the Elders. As she and he stared at the Elder’s faces, their fear, Libby seemed to search his mind for a reason, leaping back and forth in his memories, searching for a connection. Her focus cleared and he saw his conversation with Nevan: “You ran toward her, toward the prison.”

  He didn’t want her to see any of this. He tried to move his mind beyond this scene, but the memory was beyond his control. Nevan continued, “The wolf wanted to be there. The wolf wants her, protected her from us.” He could not let her hear this, his only hope that she would be confused, thinking of the stone wolf. He could sense her, searching for more information, but it seemed that her spell had limits. She couldn’t see everything. She couldn’t see what Nevan had meant. That connection simply and thankfully wasn’t there.

  At a loss, she started to look farther back. She was in the woods around her village, in the woods, moving toward the waterfall. She was moving toward the waterfall where he had shifted. No, she could not know this. No. No. She could not see this. No.

  What could he do? She could not know what he was.

  He forced his mind to a blank, forcing his thoughts to break the gravitational pull of her spell. Visualizing black and deeper black and falling into blackness, he found himself stumbling forward, losing his balance a little. He righted himself and looked back at her.

  “I see,” she said vaguely, though she looked disturbed — whether by his ability to break the spell or by his memories, he could not be sure.

  “And did you see enough?” he whispered, afraid to ask if she had seen too much.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t do this now,” she mumbled quietly, turning from him. “Return tomorrow, Caleb. I will meet with you then. Return tomorrow, but only if you can ensure that no others visit while you are gone. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “Yes, I — I think so,” he stuttered nervously, worried, hopeful.

  “Until tomorrow then,” she said, stepping around him toward the prison cell door, where she stopped and waited. She was asking him to leave. After all that she had seen, she was telling him to leave without wasting a word, without saying anything of what she now knew. Libby was always so eager, so urgent to share and talk, to laugh, but now she had nothing to say.

  “Libby, I’m sorry,” he said again, though he knew it would do no good. “Libby,” he muttered again, because he wanted to change this, to fix it, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t know her feelings. He didn’t know his own. Resigning himself to more waiting — at least until tomorrow — he stood up and walked out of the cell.

  “Goodbye, Caleb,” she said, shutting the cell door as he walked out.

  “I will come tomorrow at dusk. Libby, I hope — ”

  “It is nearly dawn now, Caleb. You need to go. Good bye.”

  “Goodbye,” he whispered, turning away from her and starting down the corridor.

  After he had gone far down the hall, he heard her call out, “I still don’t trust you, but I will help you. For now. You better be telling the truth about that bath though, Caleb.”

  He was too far down the hall to return to her without seeming strange, but he thought those words held some of her usual humor. He started to have some hope.

  Chapter 15: BLOODY BUSINESS AND BUSINESS AS USUAL

  Since Caleb left, she had done little except think about him, about what she had seen in his memories, and about what he had said. The look on his face as he sat night after night was one she couldn’t forget, but she couldn’t trust it, either. Caleb was smart enough to control what he shared with her. After all, he figured out how to break the spell on his own.

  Even though his memories suggested that he was less to blame than she originally thought, she couldn’t simply continue to wait for Caleb to save her. This wasn’t a game. If she was ever going to be free again, she needed to rely on herself. She had a plan, but that’s all it was at this point: a plan, and she needed to practice. So she would begin today.

  Buildings aged, as surely and as predictably as anything else. Their life followed an unchanging pattern. The story of the building was a long one, but it was one that she could manipulate. She could see the building for what it would be. Dust. Piles of dust, if time was given its sway.

  She closed her eyes and tried to shrink the space between, rushing the stone to the prison’s only possible resolution, tried to see the building’s story flattened out, all its time used up. She saw it as a ruin, crumbling under the weight of time, turning slowly and steadily from stone to dust. She opened her eyes. It was working. Well, sort of.

  A line of dust had fallen to the floor and the stones on the wall behind her had started to crack a bit, all of which, when the spell had run its course, would return to normal. This was going to take practice and lots of time, maybe weeks of it. She laughed, weakly, but she laughed. She had time. She had plenty of it. The next full moon was coming in three weeks — she could be ready by then. If she wasn’t, then she had the next full moon and the next one and the next one. She had plenty of time to get it right, and she would get it right. Her father would be pleased at her diligence. Prison was going to work wonders on her craft. She laughed again, and flopped back down onto the bed, smiling, hopeful again.

  • • •

  Libby had been so utterly changed. They had been so changed. Whatever easy camaraderie they had before seemed wiped away in the face of what had happened since their last meeting, since he had decided to bring her into the city.

  He had known, the moment he turned her feet toward the gates, that there was only one place he could take her, and yet he had still brought her inside. He had known that she suffered, had known it minute by minute, yet he had not worked quickly enough to free her. For all that, he accepted full blame.

  But what he had not known, what he could not accept, was that, while he had stayed away, others had come. The old guards that watched her now, they were appointed by Elders he trusted, and, like Se’, had considerable respect for the orders of their masters and their prince. Even though they did not like the wolf, they would not treat her roughly, yet she had been hurt. Caleb, though, had his own spies, too. After seeing her injuries, he had gathered the names of those responsible.

  He would deliver her vengeance.

  The vampires rested easily now, thinking their greatest threats were wolves outside the city gates. He would teach them today that there were greater things to fear. He would remind them today that their king was as God to them — something they had forgotten since the death of his
father. The Blood of the Race, he gave life and he took it away. That was the role of king. And this king, like their most hated enemy, strove in the day.

  And if he could not return Libby to herself …

  According to vampire law, a vampire could not, for any reason, take the life of another, by accident or by design. The act was wholly forbidden, even to the king. Yet there remained the Sealing, a power reserved only for the king and his heir.

  A vampire’s life was immeasurably long, but like all things, as Libby would say, a vampire’s life had a cycle. They grayed. They grew old. They died, like all things. Their long lives were owed to the blood they continually drank, new life and new life ever and again giving them the gift of longevity. Animals, humans, vampires … all part of a cycle that kept his people young. To break the cycle was forbidden, but the Sealing, unlike Libby’s imprisonment, was completely within his purview. The King and his heir must, at any time, be the eyes of Justice. Both could deliver the doom of the Sealing.

  All vampires needed fresh blood. All vampires except Caleb. Drain a vampire completely of blood and you had the shell of man; little more than a mummy, he was nothing, less than a ghost. Seal him away in a steel casket. Let him rot until he’s forgotten his own name. A thousand years pass. He is given life again — a new one, because he cannot remember the old — his name is gone, his memories.

  Today would be the first time the sun would see it. A dawn Sealing. He smiled darkly, his face a mask of eagerness and anger. This bloody business would not cheer Libby, but she would be more at ease knowing that the vampires who harmed her could not touch her again. A dawn Sealing. Justice. Blood spilled as penance to the pain brought to Libby.

  He had not realized how badly he had wanted to hear her laughter until it was gone.

  • • •

  Caleb returned to the prison before sunset, and this time he came without a retainer. Even Se’ was still sleeping, slumbering without the slightest awareness that his prince stood beside him, waiting outside her cell.