“He didn’t tell me that.” I drifted away from the tent, looking around at the other humans. I had to warn them.
“No!” Jason inched closer, laughing nervously. “Don’t do that. You’ll be killed instantly.”
“But—”
“Ara, you have to go,” he stated, growing taller. “If David knew you w—”
“David? He doesn’t care if I get eaten. He left,” I yelled, letting all the fury of that fact reach Jason in my voice. “And what’s it to you, anyway? You tried to wipe me from the face of the Earth. Now you get your chance, don’t you?”
“Ara, please?” His shoulders slowly came closer to his neck. “You have to go. Now.”
“I’ll go when I’m ready.” I folded my arms.
“For God’s sake.” He pinched his brow. “Why are you so stubborn?”
“I’m not stubborn.”
“Yes, you are. You’re about to die, for Christs sake!”
I squealed as he grabbed my arm.
“Problem?” My vampire escort finally appeared, sipping a Slushy through a smile.
“You?” Jason barked.
“What’s up, man?” Eric gently pressed two fingertips to Jason’s wrist, pushing his hand off my arm.
“Why did you bring her here?”
“She’s fine,” Eric insisted, sipping his drink again. “I’ll get her out of here before midnight.”
“You have exactly three minutes.” Jason looked at his witch.
“You can do a lot in three minutes,” Eric teased. “
“She’s not yours to take risks with, De La Rose.”
“Cool it, Knight,” Eric said with same spite. “She’s not your problem either.”
Jason’s jaw tightened, his eyes narrowing, awakening the monster I knew too well. But Eric didn’t notice it—he didn’t see the slight shift of Jason’s feet, see the way his fist tightened—and like a flash of lightning, even I didn’t see it shoot out and catch Eric in the jaw; the only sign was the empty space where Eric had been, the now collapsed tent behind him and his Slushy hitting the ground at my feet, splashing my leg with red ice.
“Why did you do that?” I screeched, dusting the cuff of my jeans.
“That guy pisses me off.” Jason grabbed my arm and started walking, dragging me along like a naughty child.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Ho—” His words ended on the wave of high-pitched screams that filled Karnivale then, coming to gurgled ends in tents all around us as the lights went out, flooding the fair with pitch-black fear.
“What is that?” I said into the sudden darkness, hoping Jason was still there.
“That’s… the buffet.” He twisted his wrist, pulling me closer to the shield of his torso.
“Buffet?”
The silence under the screams spread like ashes over the night, and dying carnival light flickered shadows onto the grounds around us, revealing shifting figures with each flash. My head whipped up to the left, a fraction after Jason’s.
He stood taller. “We need to go—before this gets bad.”
“Bad? It’s already bad. People are dying, Jason.” I gasped as his name slipped from my mouth so easily. I wasn’t sure I’d ever said it aloud. I felt dirty using it.
He let go of me and smiled, but dropped it quickly when he looked behind me, waving a hand past my ear. A knee-jerk reaction sent me ducking, but as my hands covered my head, the popcorn stand behind me exploded into a spread of glass and corn.
“Stay back, Meredith. This one’s mine,” Jason ordered.
“I’ll fight you for it.” She jumped agilely up from the mess, her snarling face barely recognizable as the candy-floss woman.
Jason offered an arched brow. “You really wanna take that risk? You know what I can do to you.”
“Fine. Skinny-ass bitch’ll taste like ash anyway.” The woman backed off, melting into the shadows until she turned and bolted away.
“You okay?” Jason asked, taking me by the arm to help me stand straight again.
“What do you care?”
We both glanced up then as blood-curdling cries overtook the night, blending with the dark as if the sound were merely a hundred people enjoying an evening at a carnival. But they weren’t. They were dying. All of them. Probably even the man on stilts.
“Ara?” Jason said softly, swiping a tear from my cheek.
I brushed his hand away, my jagged breath escaping freely. I didn’t even try to stop sobbing.
“Ara, you’re safe. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
When I met his eyes, they seemed to hold the same softness that confused me the night he tried to kill me. I made myself smaller, blocking out the images in my mind—the memory of what he did to me that night and the fear of what was happening to all those frightened humans around me right now. “I just wanna go home.”
“Come here,” he said, cradling a very willing me into his chest, his widespread fingers cupping the side of my head and blocking out the sound of terror around me. “I’ve got you.”
And somehow, I heard the truth in his promise. My shoulders slowly relaxed and I drew a longer breath against his black cotton shirt, taking in the warmth and the flavor I’d missed for so long in his brother.
“I’m going to carry you, okay?
“Okay.”
He bent slightly and scooped me up like a rescued damsel. I wrapped my hands around his neck and buried my face there too, holding tight. I knew what was next.
The only sound remaining under the spin of the earth beneath us was the whispering wind and the beating of my own heart, like a soundtrack playing through headphones in my ears. I bit down on my knuckle, bunching the skin between my teeth, waiting for it all to stop—everything: the dizziness, the movement, the fear.
“You’re okay now.” He rolled me down and placed my feet to the squishy ground, stepping quickly away from me.
I kept my eyes closed, reaching for the safety of his arms until I felt a cool breeze. Everything was so dark and quiet I was afraid we might be in a forest again, but the familiar smell of moss and rainwater sprinklers made me chance a look at my surroundings.
“Where are we?”
“Home.” He nodded across the road to a small house with a white picket fence and the homely glow of a porch light calling me to its embrace.
I broke into gentle sobs, covering my face. “How do you know where I live?”
“I’ve always known.”
My fingers parted slightly as I looked through them to my house again, knowing Mike would be in there—that he’d be so afraid to know I was right across the road, standing with the man who stole my life.
“Please don’t cry.”
“How do you know where I live?”
“Ara, if I wanted to hurt you, I would have.”
“You need to leave. Now.” My index finger straightened, but I wasn’t brave enough to direct it at him. I aimed it at the floor instead.
Jason nodded, his eyes looking to nothing, and my heart tore for how much he looked like his brother. I wanted to hold my locket—the one I gave away; left behind in the life I was supposed to forget.
“Can I just say something before I go?” he asked.
“No.” The strong girl in me folded her arms and walked past him to her house, but the one in control right now—the weak, scared little girl—just looked down at the ground, afraid to move.
“Ara. Please. I need to explain something to you.”
“Why did you save me?” I demanded, cutting him off.
“I—”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I continued. “You wanted me dead. You hate me!”
“Will you let me explain?” he asked softly, extending a downward palm.
“Explain what?”
“Why.” He paused for a moment. “Not just why I saved you, but… why I never killed you in the first place.”
“Why should you have the satisfaction of an eased conscience?”
“Not for my benefit
, Ara. For yours.”
I wiped a tear from my cheek, considering things. “Fine. I’m listening.”
“Can I sit?” he asked, motioning to the park bench.
I think I nodded.
His lips turned up softly.
“Don’t smile like that.” My voice shook, but I felt stronger. “That’s David’s smile. Don’t do that.”
He did it again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just… sorry.” The man of my nightmares leaned on the backrest of the bench and studied me for a second, looking so human, so… not evil. “Ara. I’m a monster. I know you know that. But you have to understand something—”
“No. I only want you to tell me why you saved me after you tried to kill me.”
“I never wanted you dead. Not really.” He exhaled heavily. “If you died, if Eric killed you, what do you think David would’ve done?”
Knowing what I knew now about David? “I’m not sure.”
“He would rip apart everyone Eric loves. Destroy his entire bloodline, then torture him slowly.” Jason cast a gaze to the moon. “I loved Rochelle—the way David loves you. And I only wanted the same revenge he would seek had Eric let you get killed tonight.”
I shuddered at the idea, wondering if Eric would’ve just handed me over to Meredith to avoid a fight.
“I couldn’t breathe after I lost her, Ara,” he continued. “I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even feel anymore. Until after I’d hurt you.”
“How did that change things?”
“I’m not sure how to explain it.”
“Try,” I said coldly.
“I… well, when we become vampires, a lot of our human nature is burned up. We don’t typically feel for humans, unless we love one. Which, even then, is deemed repulsive in some circles. When I fell for Rochelle, it was as if the world had opened up and turned on a light I never knew existed.” His eyes watched the lake, full of wonder, which washed away quickly as he closed them. “But I only got to have her for a short time, because David killed her.” He looked at me, his voice bearing the weight of that statement, as if making sure I understood. “He killed her, and I can never see her again.”
I gagged on the pity I felt inside
Jason leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at the grass between his legs. “The pain haunts me; it tears me apart. I was in agony for fifty years, burning to the core, unable to make it stop. Nothing but hate and pain and the prospect of revenge.”
I sat down heavily on the dewy grass, crossing my legs.
He watched me, clasping his hands together before going on. “I’ve done things in the past to ease that burn of vengeance, but nothing made the pain go away because he’d never been in love, so he didn’t know what it was like to lose that. Then, he found you.”
My heart picked up a little.
Jason drew a deep breath, unable to look at me. “I came to your room when he’d go hunting. So many nights I watched you while you slept, all the while planning how I’d hurt you.”
“I don’t want to hear this.” I went to stand.
“No—” Jason landed beside me, a gentle hand to my shoulder. “You need to hear this. I’ve come to you so many times to tell you, but I just didn’t want to scare you.”
“That’s ridiculous, Jason. I have a right to be scared of you.”
“I know.” He dropped his hand. “I know. But, I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
“Your promises mean nothing to me.”
“Just sit back down. Please?”
Shaking my head at myself, I sat back on the grass. “Why would you want to tell me this? What does it matter?”
He sat quietly for a long moment, enough that I thought he wouldn’t answer. “It matters because you still cry. Because you still look over your shoulder, check your window before you sleep, and I… I never meant for this—any of this.”
Those words flooded my body, taking the nausea in my stomach and turning it into heat. I scratched anxiously at the base of my thumb, forming a rise of reddened, sore skin.
Jason cupped my hand, drawing away quickly when I scowled at him.
“I just want you to feel safe again,” he said.
“What changed?” I tucked my sore hand under my thigh. “Why did you change your mind and leave me alive?”
“I didn’t.”
“Huh?”
“I had to talk myself into hurting you. I—” He bit his knuckle, then dropped it. “I’m sorry. This is really hard for me.”
“Hard for you?”
He smiled, and the resemblance of his brother didn’t irritate me quite so much. “Dancing with you that night… I was never supposed to do that.”
“Why?”
“That was… it just wasn’t the plan. None of it happened the way I’d planned it. I”—he seemed to smile at something distant for a second—“you were suddenly real. When I held you in my arms and we danced that way, you weren’t just a victim anymore, and I had to battle with myself, angered by the weakness in me; the weakness that tried to make me turn and walk away from you.”
“That wouldn’t have been weakness.”
“I know.” He sat down, running a hand through his hair. “But I told myself it was. It’s always easier looking back on a lesson learned, but in that moment, the part of you that started that journey desperately tries to hold onto that resolve. I thought about Rochelle, made myself feel the anger toward my brother, and then I looked back down at you, seeing you as an extension of him and everything I hated about him.
“And you came with me, so easily,” he continued, shutting his eyes tight. “I hoped you’d fight me. Anything. It would have taken only one thing and I would have left you. But you came, all the while pleading in your heart for David to save you.”
That feeling—how alone I felt in those moments—came back to haunt me, heavier as I remembered realizing David wasn’t going to come for me.
“I knew that,” Jason said. “I knew he wouldn’t come because I was the one who organized his meeting.”
“You did?”
He nodded to the ground beside him. “And, looking back, I wish I hadn’t set that up, because he’d have come. He’d have been there at midnight to dance with you, and none of this would ever happened. Or maybe it would have, later…” He rolled his bottom lip between his teeth, biting it. “But—”
“What do you mean?”
“If I hadn’t done that… if I hadn’t hurt you, Ara—see, it was the pinnacle that brought everything to light—when I dropped you from that tree; it was the moment I woke up from whatever it was that had blackened my soul dark enough to drop you in the first place.”
My tight fist came up to cover the small squeak of devastation escaping my lips. I cried into my hands for a second.
“I’m not sure I can ever explain the reasons for everything I did. I… half of it, I… I just can’t believe was me.”
“You bit me,” I said, becoming hysterical. “You undressed me, you were… you were going to rape…”
“No.” He rose to his knees, his hand out again as if to settle me. “I know that’s what I said, but I would never have actually done that.”
“But you—”
“I know. And I am more ashamed of that one thing than I am of anything I’ve ever done in my life.” He shook his head, biting his lip as he sat back down. “It was stupid. I did that to torture my brother’s dreams, but even the threat wouldn’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Because he knows I’d never rape someone,” he said simply. “He was furious at me for threatening it, but if he thought for a second I’d actually have done it, I wouldn’t be walking around in the living world.”
“But you can’t die.”
“He’d have found a way.”
My breath shuddered into my lungs, moving my shoulders as it went.
“Can I tell you something else?” he asked, then continued without a response. “I know it’s no consolation, but… that”—he pointed
to my neck—“I did that for a reason.”
“Why?” I touched the scar.
“To change you.” His voice dropped to an almost whisper.
“I can’t be changed.”
“I didn’t know that then.”
“Bull crap.”
“I didn’t. I swear. How could I have known? I just… in the seconds after I dropped you, I couldn’t bear the thought that this would be the end for you—that you were so young and so innocent, and you’d barely lived a day in your life. All my anger just… it just slipped away,” he said, spreading his fingers out in the air like a bomb blasted from his palms. “I knew then that I would never be able to live with what I’d just done, like waking from some horrible dream only to find out it was real. So, I bit you… to at least try to save your life.”
“So you just suddenly got over Rochelle?” I asked sarcastically.
“No.” A wave of silence passed between us for a moment. “I will never forgive my brother for what he did, but I will never again hurt another person to get to him.”
I searched his eyes for truth. Either he was a great actor, or he really meant that.
“I’m sorry you had to be that mistake,” he continued. “I’m sorry I didn’t learn that lesson until it was too late, but you’re safe now, Ara—from me, from everything, everyone.”
“No one’s safe. Safety is an illusion,” I said to the ground.
“Not for you, it’s not.”
I looked up at him then.
“You have more people to protect you than you probably realize.”
“What, and you’re one of them?” I asked spitefully.
“Yes.”
“You can’t make up for what you did to me by seeing my future-safety, Jason. It doesn’t work like that.”
“That’s not why I’m doing it.”
“Then why are you?”
“Because…” He swallowed so hard I saw the lump shift in his throat. “ After all the time I’d spent watching you, planning to hurt you, when I finally held you”—he looked into my eyes, the brilliant emerald-green standing out—”I realized that, at some point in all those weeks that had passed, I’d fallen for you.”
An invisible branch swung down from the sky and knocked the wind out of me.
“Ara…?”
“No, that’s sick! You’re lying.”
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 85