A Distant Echo: Book 1 (Grim's Labyrinth Series)

by Grim's Labyrinth Publishing

  “What happened?” she managed. A dry laugh escaped him, sounding rusty from disuse.

  “Did you ever read Beauty and the Beast?”

  “I saw the movie, why?”

  “In the folktale, she leaves the beast and forgets him and when she finally remembers and returns, it’s too late. He’s dying.” A sob was ripped from her throat as she looked up and met his eyes.

  “Please. What can I do?”

  “Come back to me.” He shut his eyes and his words were barely audible. Paxton pulled him into her arms.

  “I was a fool. Let me stay with you this time. Let me be with you always, Elias Not the Fifth…” She broke off, tears streaming down her face. “Does the beast die?”

  “He does but her love breaks the spell.”

  “So are you really a prince?”

  “No. I’m only another reckless, ignorant Mick like my father before me and two hundred years haven’t improved my temper, Paxton, but I’m yours if you’ll have me.” She buried her face in his shoulder, shaking her head.

  “I was always yours. Even when I left. Even when I sent back your flowers.” She kissed him. “I loved you all along.”

  There was no flash of brilliant light, no fairy tale magic to transform him into a whole, mortal prince for her happy ending. There was only Elias, kissing her back, his fingers knotting in her hair.

  “Do you need to…have you fed?” she faltered. He shook his head slowly. Paxton swept her hair to the side, exposing the pale column of her throat to him. She felt him tense and turn away, could practically hear the quickening of his body toward hers. He shook his head again. “Be reasonable. This is the most efficient way right now…see, I’m speaking your language…efficiency. It will take too long to run down to the lab and get your samples. Besides, I might mess them up and switch labels around just to be contrary.” Paxton was as persuasive as she knew how to be. He turned away from her, tried to brace himself on the wall and struggle to his feet.

  Paxton ran to the kitchen and returned with a knife.

  “Stabbing me in the heart won’t do you any good, dear. The organ long since ceased to function as a life-sustaining muscle.” He staggered to his feet, leaning heavily against the wall, and tried to walk away from her. “I will go to the lab to feed after I rest.”

  “Vampires don’t need to rest,” she said through gritted teeth, drawing the blade across her left wrist awkwardly, wincing.

  She grabbed his arm and pressed her wrist to his lips. She felt the heat of his tongue as he tasted her blood, salty and hot against his mouth. He straightened, reached back and hauled her against him, covering her mouth with his. He kissed her so long she was breathless, her vision going dark because she would not pull away from the swirling dark intensity of his kiss even for air. He dragged his lips from hers and kissed his way down her jaw to her neck where his fangs sank into her flesh with a sigh between relief and ecstasy. She clawed at his shoulders, tangled her hands in his hair to pull him closer, her leg wrapping around him, anchoring him to her. His palm was against the wall behind her, supporting his weight as he drank deeply from her, feeling the singe of fresh blood run through him until sparks danced behind his eyes. When he drew back from her, licking his lips, they sank to the floor together in a tangled heap.

  They lay on the floor, Paxton languorous and warm against Elias’ coolness. His fingers trailed along her jaw tenderly, brushing back hair from her temple. He pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her head. Sighing, she levered herself up to a sitting position and smiled at him, a small Mona Lisa smile that held more secrecy than mirth. She opened the buttons on his shirt, spreading the fabric and stroking his chest in lazy circles. Relaxed, his eyes dropped shut and Paxton’s hand closed over the hilt of the knife.

  Swiftly, Paxton scored his chest with the blade, a shallow slice across the place where his heart would have beaten years before. Beads of blood formed along the line and as his eyes flew open and he sat up in surprise, she bent her head and licked the blood from the scratch. He seized her, his hands on either side of her head, an agony of compassion in his eyes warring with betrayal.

  “You’ve no idea what you’ve done, Paxton,” he said, sorrow naked in his voice.

  “I’ve become like you. Ambitious, opportunistic and now immortal, darling. I knew you were trying to protect me. That’s why you wouldn’t turn me yourself, so I made the choice. You can’t blame yourself for anything I suffer because I decided this. I am sorry that I had to cut you to do it, but you seem to have healed already.” She pressed her lips to the place on his chest where the cut had been only moments before. “I wouldn’t let you starve yourself out of grief and I refuse to leave you even for death. Abide with me a while and the worst will pass.”

  “You don’t know what’s ahead. I would have given anything to spare you.” He kissed her forehead, her eyes, her lips. “I’m sorry.”

  “How long will it take?” she asked, a little anxiously. She felt less bold now that the moment of crisis had passed.

  “Days. It feels like your limbs are being pulled apart, your head being crushed. You’ll scream for death before it ends. There is nothing, no drug I can give you, no way to relieve you. I found strength in the pain but it may be my undoing to see you endure it.”

  “Days?” she said softly, a pang of regret spiking through the fear in her. He enclosed her in his arms. “How long before it starts?”

  “You have a few hours. If there’s anything you’d like to do…call in sick to work, speak with Gillian…”

  “I’ll text my boss and tell him I have food poisoning from my celebration dinner. Right now I want to be with you. That’s what this is all about.”

  “How odd. I had heard that something called the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about,” he said.

  “You must be really nervous if you’re trying to joke with me, Elias. I’m strong. I can handle this. Just give me this time with you, let me pour my fear out into you for now.” She kissed him sweetly, beseechingly.

  Chapter 8

  If the next days would be a hell beyond her imaginings, then the intervening hours were her paradise before the fall. After weeks apart, Paxton spent her last moments in the arms of the man she loved. Knowing the agony she was about to experience left Elias filled with dread of the coming days, but what he had initially felt as the betrayal of her taking his blood he now knew to be the way she took back the choice for herself. Instead of waiting for him to make the decision to allow her to become a vampire, she had disenfranchised him by taking control of her own life and death.

  “I would not have had the courage, Paxton,” he whispered to her. “I could not have condemned you to the horrors of the change even to have you forever. My fortitude failed at the thought of you in pain. It is a weakness I hadn’t known. It is better that you made the choice yourself,” he admitted as he twined a curl around his finger again and again just to watch it unfurl.

  “I knew what I wanted and whatever comes of it, I did this. It makes the fear easier somehow, to know I took it for myself.” Her lips brushed his and he held her close, waiting.

  “It helped me to keep a focus. I thought of my father, of having to burn damp rubbish to warm him because coal was too dear and too closely guarded and wood was too large to steal…I thought of how weak I had been and how strong I would become, how I would stop other fathers from dying such a death. Think of the children you work with, to give yourself a point of light. It can keep you from losing yourself in the pain.”

  “Then I’ll think of you. Or I’ll think of myself at fourteen years old, and know the pain to be a penance. It will be my crucible, to burn the sin out of me.”

  “What happened, Paxton? It’s time for you to tell me. You were too young to have been driving when your mom was killed in the car accident. How can you blame yourself?”

  “I don’t blame myself for her death. I blame him.” She imbued that single syllable with such venom Elias nearly shrank from her. “Rick C
hambers, her husband, was the drunk who was driving the car she was in when she died. It was his fault that Mama bled to death while he walked away with nothing but whiplash and a truckload of self-pity.”

  “Was he charged with a crime?”

  “No. He flipped the car, walked away from the crash and left my mother there, injured and dying, and never called an ambulance, never called the cops. He had his buddy come help him get her to the hospital but that was after he’d sobered up…so he didn’t have a Breathalyzer test, didn’t have to answer questions until after she was pronounced dead and then he was a grieving husband and the noble creature who was going to raise his wife’s bastard child alone.”

  “The police didn’t question him after that sketchy behavior? Leaving the scene of the accident?”

  “He claimed he was disoriented and had a concussion and would never forgive himself for leaving her but I know he was drunk and was only interested in saving himself.”

  “So you lived with him after she died?”

  “My mom was a foster kid, so I didn’t have grandparents or anything and it was either Rick or go into the system that failed my mother. It was okay for a while. He seemed sorry and for a few weeks he wasn’t drinking as much, he shopped for groceries and stuff. But he took leave from work when she died, and when the leave was up, he just quit. He was a truck driver and his excuse was that he couldn’t leave me home alone for ten-day runs so he needed something closer to home. I don’t remember him looking for a job though. So he was home all day drinking or at a bar with his friends and I stayed away as much as I could, crashed at Gillian’s house or with some other people we knew, but it was summer so school was out and there wasn’t really anything for me to do since I was too young to get a job.”

  “You were stuck at home with a drunk all day?”

  “Our power got turned off because he didn’t pay the bill. He took away my phone after my mom died so I couldn’t even call Gillian when he was raging. He used to get mad and break stuff and he had hit my mom when she was alive. One night—” She took a big breath and shut her eyes and made herself go back to that night. “I remember I had on my Hello Kitty nightgown, that Mama got me for my birthday when I was twelve…it was probably too short by then but I loved it and it was hot with no air conditioning. I was in bed reading with my flashlight and I heard him come in the front door and I knew he was wasted because he took big heavy steps. I heard him on the stairs and there was no reason for him to go up the stairs because he slept on the main floor. I turned off my light and pretended to be asleep but it didn’t stop him. I remember my heart just hammering in my ears because I knew he was coming for me.” She was shaking, had edged away from Elias to tell the story. She sat up and hugged her knees looking unaccountably young and childlike as she remembered.

  “Rick opened my door and threw my covers back and I was on my feet. I took off for the hall and said I had to go to the bathroom and acted like I was glad he woke me to tell me he was home safe because I was worried, which I wasn’t really but I wanted to make it something harmless even though I saw how he was looking at me. There was enough light from the streetlamp outside my window to see a leer on his face and he was cracking his knuckles. I almost made it to the bathroom when he caught me by the arm and dragged me back. He said I should be grateful he kept me and didn’t I want to thank him and then, I should have shoved him off and run, I should have locked myself in the bathroom but I was so shocked and the—the horror of him looking at me like that when I was a kid and I was scared and it was like my brain couldn’t even understand it at first. Rick hauled me up against him and tried to kiss me and I gagged and he had my arms trapped but I bit him, I bit his tongue. I could vomit just thinking of it.”

  “This man killed your mother and then molested you? I’m almost sorry he had an accident. I would like to exsanguinate him myself,” Elias commented, his hand stroking her hair softly, unassumingly as though he didn’t want to intrude.

  “When I bit Rick, he backhanded me and when I fell he yanked me by my hair. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to have somebody pull your hair like that? Much less someone you trusted? I threw my arm up to block him from hitting me and he twisted my arm so hard that I saw stars. I was crying and begging him to let me go and he tore at my nightgown, the one with Hello Kitty on it. He grabbed at me and I did what they showed us in gym class. I dropped straight to the ground and kicked sideways behind his knees to sweep his legs out from under him and he went backward down the stairs. I didn’t realize we were that close to the steps. He had dragged me further by the hair than I thought, I guess.” She started to cry in spite of herself.

  “Did the fall kill him?”

  “Almost. I crawled away and I was afraid to look for a long time and then I went back to my room and put on some clothes and pulled my hair back and when I went halfway down the steps—I was still afraid to get close to him—he had hit his head and there was a lot of blood everywhere but he was awake and he saw me and he said ‘help’ and I—I kicked him and said ‘go to hell’ and went back upstairs and out my window to Gillian’s. She’s the only one who knows what really happened. She came up to my room with me and turned on a battery-powered radio and jacked up the volume and we talked and she said I should say I was asleep with the radio on and didn’t hear anything and he must have got drunk and fell. So I went to the neighbor’s to call 911 and she had told me to cry so I cried a lot about how scared I was that he might die and I’d be alone and everything but I hate him and I was glad I killed him, Elias.”

  “That’s what you feel guilty about that you want to forget? Paxton, what happened was entirely Rick’s fault and was better than he deserved.”

  “I let him lie there and bleed to death. I refused to get him help. I told him to go to hell.” Her sobs choked her as she scrubbed tears from her cheeks.

  “That was a waste of time. I doubt he needed directions to get there. You were trying to defend yourself from a rapist. That’s not murder.”

  “Now you know why I said you weren’t a monster when you joked about it. Because I’ve seen a monster and I killed him myself. But it was wrong. I could have gotten him help, saved his life. My mother would be so ashamed of me…every day I wake up knowing I took a life, Elias. When I killed him I became the monster, the violent creature I’d grown up afraid of. This way I have to live with it forever, but maybe it will get smaller after a hundred years, maybe it will recede. Do you think it will?”

  “No, I don’t, Paxton. I think that horrible night helped you grow as strong as you are. I think it was the making of you. You fight to help some children who have no one else to speak for them or draw attention to their needs. You’re righting wrongs that were done to your mother and to you. To me, a few kids here or there don’t make much difference in the long view. They get sick and die or they get shot or they grow up and have kids of their own and everything goes on. Individual cases aren’t as interesting to me as demographic trends and patterns of disease. But you see the kids themselves and I think that’s a gift you gave yourself by being strong.”

  “No, I think you’re the gift I gave myself.” He opened his arms and she nestled back into them. “I’m glad I told you even if you can’t forgive me either. Think of it as my deathbed confession.”

  “There was never anything to forgive,” he told her. She drifted off to sleep in his arms.

  When she woke, she was chilled to the bone, shaking as if with fever. She mumbled and thrashed, delirious. Elias ministered to her, sponging off her face with a cool cloth, restraining her when she pulled on her own hair with such force that he feared she would tear it out by the roots. For hours she screamed, wailing and begging for relief. He knew the pain too well and did all he could think of to comfort her, but it amounted to cradling her in his lap and stroking her hair and she wept, her hair lank and tear-damp around her flushed face. Once, her delirium seemed to clear and she looked directly at Elias, her gaze fixed on him. He saw with horror th
at the whites of her eyes were bloody red and had to force himself to be calm and recognize that she had merely screamed so hard that she burst blood vessels in her eyes…those would clear in time just as her hoarse voice would return to normal when her throat healed from the hours of hopeless cries.

  “Darling,” he crooned softly. The only thing he did that seemed to console her was singing…he recalled Irish lullabies his mother had sung to him, the ones she’d taught him so they could sing them together to the baby brother who didn’t survive. “The Castle of Dromore” he sang again and again, unable to remember all the words. “Though autumn vines may droop and die, A bud of spring are you.”

  Paxton had been his springtime, in a long life of autumn chill. He loved the brightness of her smile, her enthusiasm and passion, her loyalty to Gillian and even to himself. The way she’d turned so trustingly into his arms when they were walking in the woods on her foolish owl hunt and the mule deer startled her…even the ridiculous owl call she’d attempted…every memory made his throat tight, his eyes ache to weep as she suffered and twisted in agony. He was an empiricist, unlikely to deal in bootless worries but Elias found himself fearing that she’d lose her mind or her personality in the transformation, that the misery might bleach away the wonder and courage that he’d fallen in love with.

  Elias kept watch over her and held her in his arms when she at last went limp and lifeless in his arms. He whispered vows against her hair that he had sworn never to make. Sorrowfully, he kissed her lips and lay her on his bed like a fairy tale princess and willed her to wake. He knelt beside the bed, a supplicant keeping vigil over her unnatural slumber, the stillness of death. Her hand grew cold in his own. Gone was the answering warmth he’d grown accustomed to, the pulse at her wrist, the flush of her cheek. Paxton lay motionless beneath his gaze, without even the soft ebb and flow of her breath that had lulled him to sleep so often. He pressed his lips to her hand and dropped his head onto the quilt.