Bound by Secrets

by Angela M Hudson

  “But to forget the place I just moved from? It made me feel so…” I put my head up. “Lost. And alone.”

  A wash of sympathy liquefied his smile. “You are never alone, Ara—”

  “But I felt alone. And I’ve never felt like that before.”

  “Then that’s an emotion you can add to your little book,” he offered, making me smile. He was right. I could reflect back on it later tonight while I wrote in my day and described it to the me in the future that understood it all so much better. She’d know what to do with it. But for now, all I could do was experience it and write it down.

  “Do I have to actually write it though? Can’t I just use the speech-to-text and—”

  “If you don’t write it down with your hand, you’ll never get it to stay in your brain—”

  “But the computer writes it for me.”

  “So you can copy it, Ara. Not so you can be lazy.”

  I huffed. “I’d much rather be lazy.”

  “So?” He slid my afternoon snack closer to me, ignoring that. “Did you make any new friends?”

  “I met a boy named Cal,” I said, picking up some cake and stuffing it in my mouth. Chewing while talking was one of the first skills I’d acquired. “And I sat with his twin sister Bree and her friends at lunch.”

  “Hm.” He nodded, clearly a little worried. “Did you… did you like them? The girls?”

  “Yeah.” I tried to remember any of their names. “They’re really nice. And funny.”

  “And what about that David kid—the one we met this morning? Did you like him?”

  “I didn’t really see him.” I washed my cake down with a swish of milk. “But he sits behind me in class—seems like kind of a douche.”

  A strange crackling sound came from the back of Brett’s throat. He cleared it, but obviously couldn’t squash down whatever thought made him laugh, because it burst out of him boldly, warming the entire room and covering me in cake crumbs.

  “What? What’s so funny?” I asked, wiping my arm.

  “Nothing.” He got up and took my half-finished plate of cake with him. “I guess I got the impression this morning that you thought he was… I dunno, cute or something.”

  This time I laughed. “He’s not my type.”

  The plate clanked as he dropped it in the sink, a little harder than I think he intended. He turned slowly, casually, and leaned his butt on the counter. “Really? You have a type?”

  I nodded and shrugged, reaching into my bag to get my homework.

  “So uh… so what’s your type?” he asked delicately.

  “I’m not totally sure, but when I watch TV and movies, I always tend to like the guys that are bigger built and with lighter features. David’s dark and kinda skinny.”

  “But you like green eyes, right?”

  “Did he have green eyes?” And had I ever said I liked green eyes? I thought I was more partial to brown. But what would I know? I’d only known me for a few months.

  “He did,” he stated dryly. “And you always liked green eyes—before.”

  “So I’m supposed to be friends with this guy because he has green eyes?”

  “No. I just…” He struggled for a moment with himself and then headed for the exit. “Forget it.”

  “Brett?” I called, but he grabbed his cap from the hat stand and left through the front door. “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  4

  David

  “She thinks I’m a what?” I yelled without meaning to.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Falcon said, hands raised.

  I forced my shoulders down and painted on a smile for the sake of my son sitting at the other end of the dining table. Seeing Ara for the first time today, after I was certain she would never awaken, had left me fumbling, caught off-guard, and I knew I came across as a bit of a dork, if not a complete douche.

  “Why is my brother doing this?” I said, struggling to keep the impatient pitch from my voice. “Why wasn’t she placed in my care—”

  “Believe me,” Falcon said, “I originally advised against this decision, but he thinks…” He pressed his lips shut, his jaw sliding forward in irritation.

  “Thinks what?” I sat down at the table, taking the look on his face to mean exactly what I’d always suspected of my brother. “Jason doesn’t believe she ever loved me,” I stated. “He went behind my back and kept her from me so he could experiment—”

  “It’s not that—”

  “No, it is,” I insisted. “He believes she fell in love with the vampire, as humans do, drawn to my dark nature, and he wants to see if she would love me under different circumstances.”

  “Is there some truth to it?” he asked softly, cautiously, remembering I was once his sovereign king. “You did admit that you lured her—”

  “Yes, I lured her! Once!” I hit the table with a closed fist. “Accidentally, but she was in love with me before that!”

  “No one falls in love that quickly, David—”

  “She did!” I demanded, my head falling into my hands after. If I thought my heart was broken after she died, losing her again like this would be the final straw. I couldn’t live without her, and I certainly couldn’t live in a world where she didn’t love me.

  “Dad, don’t!” Harry yelled, throwing his arms suddenly around my shoulders.

  “Aw, Harry.” I rested my hand on his head. “I didn’t mean it, son. I’ve told you before, you can’t assume that people will follow through on thoughts just because they have them—”

  “What thought?” Falcon asked, his concerned eyes questioning Harry.

  “It’s nothing,” I cut in. “Harry, go upstairs and do your homework, okay? Daddy needs to talk to Uncle Falcon.”

  He backed away, but I noticed an exchange of thought between him and Falcon as he left. He’d mastered the ability to place a thought in another’s head now, and I often found myself frustrated with not knowing what he was saying.

  “I won’t let that happen, Harry,” Falcon called as Harry went upstairs. “You have my word.”

  I didn’t need to ask what he meant. “He doesn’t need your solemn vow, Falcon,” I snapped, standing up. “The fact is, she did fall in love with me before I ever lured her, and she will again if I have to go to the ends of the earth to make it happen.”

  “Have you ever considered that maybe…”

  “If you’re going to say that she’s a different person now—that life moves on and that maybe I should too, don’t. I’ve been there and it’s not what I want.”

  “But what about what she wants?”

  “She doesn’t know what she wants,” I yelled again. “She hasn’t been alive long enough to know herself, let alone what she wants.”

  “Then what makes you think she’ll want you at the end of it all?”

  “Because I know her—to her core—and I know how to woo her.”

  Falcon smirked. “She’s an entirely different girl to what you knew.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “She’s not. I just need to get close to her.”

  “And how will you do that if she thinks you’re a douche?”

  I sat down again, numb of body but not of mind, racking my brain for an idea. Nothing came, though. After all this time, all the long nights dreaming of her face, seeing her smile, the way her eyes became a shade of darker blue when she’d cry—how I’d seen her cry more often than was fair—tossing and turning every night, imagining her in my arms, I couldn’t think of a way to woo her because all I wanted, to the deepest part of my heart and along every nerve in my arms, was to hold her. Just for a second. Just to breathe her in and know that she was real, solid, alive.

  My gut tightened into a cruel knot until I felt it press against the corners of my eyes, wet and unwelcome. I expected a call months ago—informing me that she was close to waking and that I could come to her, nurse her back to health, as my wife. I was never prepared for her
to be thrown into my life as a stranger, and from what I knew of her now, she would reject the truth of our past with a kind of passiveness that would leave me very broken. It was a hard fact to face, but I knew my only option now was to keep moving on this path my brother had set—accept it and just plan all the ways I would get revenge later. My anger, frustration, hurt and confusion would do nothing to progress our future.

  “I need time to process this,” I said. “I need to gather my thoughts and realign myself with the entire universe. I don’t know what to do, Falcon—”

  “Then don’t do anything,” he advised. “Just get to know her again—”

  “But she hates me! She hasn’t even spoken to me and she hates me. How is she going to fall in love with the dark monster I am—”

  “That you were. You’ve changed since you became human—”

  “But is it enough for her? For the girl we all know she is inside?”

  “You don’t know anything about her,” he insisted. “Without the circumstances that led her to you in the first place, without all that heartache and tragedy, she’s very different. She’s not as cautious; not as caring, I might add.”

  The way that sardonic laugh rolled off the back of his throat had me concerned. “What do you mean?”

  “She used to be compassionate to a fault, and empathy was one of her strongest gifts, but nothing about her is the same, not even her elemental strengths. She is an entirely different girl to the one that died in that tomb.”

  While he said that casually, my blood iced with a very sudden rush of guilt and panic, the nightmare of those dark days rising to the surface for the first time in so long. I fought to hold myself together as the flashes of my wife’s naked body jabbed holes in my heart, her flesh burning, melting off the bone before my eyes. I needed to tell her how sorry I was—to hold her now almost more than I needed to guard the secrets that tomb held over me—but I knew if I let myself fall apart right here, right now, too many questions would follow that I could not answer.

  Falcon would not stay here and protect Ara if he knew.

  He would take her away from me.

  He would see me for the monster I am because, by admitting what happened to her, to me, I’d be left with no way of avoiding the truth. After that, she would be eternally lost to me, and the horror of my nightmares would leak into my waking life if the hope of ever holding her again became a cold and harsh denial, all because of the truth.

  But if I was ever to recover from this, from the detriment this nightmare brought to my life, I needed her in my arms. Right now, I would take just one moment, just one breath where I could feel her against me, to breathe her in and finally convince myself that she was all right now—that she was no longer in that tomb, screaming for me to help her. Screaming for me to stop. Screaming for me not to hurt her anymore.

  I looked at Falcon for a long moment, wishing I could kill him and steal Ara away; wishing I had the freedom that my position as king once granted me, even if that freedom allowed me only one command: to hold my wife again.

  And that gave me an idea, loosely based on a YouTuber Harry had been watching once.

  “Free hugs!”

  “Huh?” Falcon shook his head, confused.

  “Free hugs,” I said again. “I know what to do.”

  5

  Ara

  Bree ran toward me with Jane and Kenna in tow, waving around a piece of paper. “Ara.”

  I stopped just beside my classroom, for some reason making it look like I was walking past it not to it. “Hey, guys.”

  “Hey.” Bree stopped, a bit puffed out, and handed me the paper as explanation. “Birthday party,” she huffed. “Mine. Next weekend.”

  I studied the printed sheet of paper that informed me I, Ara, had been invited to Bree’s 18th birthday party at ‘Bree’s House’. But it didn’t tell me anything else, like what to bring, and what sort of gift I should buy or… I looked at Jane. Did birthday invitations usually list that sort of thing?

  “Never been to a birthday before, huh?” Bree said, folding the paper and stuffing it in my shirt pocket. “Just bring yourself—”

  “And a date if you have one,” Kenna added.

  “And what about a present?” I cringed. “I’m sorry to ask, but people on TV bring presents and I’ve never actually bought a present for anyone before. I wouldn’t know what to get.”

  “I have a list for her,” Jane said.

  “A list?” Was it a long list? Was I supposed to bring everything on it?

  “We’ll explain at lunch,” she said, clearly finding this whole thing amusing.

  “Say hi to Cal for me,” Bree said.

  “And for me,” Kenna added with a wink as she backed away, falling into step with the others. As I watched them leave, laughing and having fun, I wished I could go with them. But I still hadn’t mastered anything other than writing my name. I wasn’t sure why I’d expected to be able to read and write in the first week of school. It was clearly going to take a long time, and as much as I liked sitting next to Cal, I really just wanted to be in the mainstream school with my other friends. I had a life to live after I finished school, and I wanted that to happen as quickly and with as high a score as possible.

  When I walked into class, Cal moved his bag off my seat and grinned at me, waving.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting down and dragging the chair in with my feet. “And Bree says hi. So does Kenna.”

  He laughed. “Kenna too, huh?”

  “Yeah. Why? Is there a story there?”

  He just laughed again, opening his pencil case to take out a pen and a ruler. He turned then and placed a pen on David’s desk, even though he wasn’t here yet. “We dated once.”

  “Oh. And I take it things didn’t work out.”

  “They don’t usually at our age, Ara. It was just a bit of fun.”

  I nodded, recording that on my mental list of things I needed to know about boys and relationships. “So, note to self: don’t get too serious about a guy until you leave high school?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Brett.”

  “Brett?”

  “My brother.”

  “Oh.” Cal nodded. “He’s on your case about that stuff, huh?”

  “He just doesn’t want me to get hurt.”

  “Why not?” he scoffed. “That’s a part of growing up—of finding out who you are.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I guess… because you don’t really know yourself until you know how you handle rejection or heartache or betrayal.”

  I looked at him for a long time, even though he didn’t look at me. Sometimes he just sounded so mature and worldly.

  The teacher set us to our tasks for the day then and, after promising to return and help me learn my letters and sounds, she wandered away, leaving Cal and me to talk quietly between ourselves.

  “So, how come you never asked me?” Cal stood for a second and then sat back down, taking his phone from his back pocket.

  Across from us, the teacher pored over the lesson with another student—one worse off in the mental department than Cal and I put together—so, certain she wouldn’t catch us talking in class, I leaned in and whispered, “Asked what?”

  “Why I was sent to juvie.”

  “Oh.” I felt the hot rush of social awkwardness flood my veins. “Was I supposed to?”

  “It’s just… most people do.”

  “Does it matter?” I shrugged. “They let you out, so you can’t be too bad a guy.”

  He laughed. “They let murderers out too, Ara.”

  “After they’ve served their time.”

  He studied me for a moment, as if he was trying to figure me out.

  “So?” I prompted. “What did they lock you up for?”

  “I stole a car,” he stated, “but it was a cheap piece of shit and I did it on a dare. Although, technically, that’s not why they locked me up.”

  �
�Then why did they?”

  “I told the judge to go fuck himself.”

  I covered my mouth, trying not to laugh out my shock.

  “Safe to say, I’ll never do that again,” he said, turning to face the front as the teacher moved to the board.

  “And six months in juvie was enough to land you in Special Ed classes? You missed that much in six months?”

  He extended his legs, crossing his arms behind his head. “Nah. I’m playing dumb so I don’t have to do as much work. You’ve seen what Bree gets.”

  I nodded.

  “As long as I’m in here, I can get an A in all my assignments, and I ain’t gotta do jack to achieve it.”

  I laughed. But secretly I was angry at him. I’d give anything to be intelligent or educated enough to get real homework. “Bree thinks you’re in here to avoid being in the same classes as your sister.”

  “She would say that.” He sat taller, picking up a pen. “Because she’s stupid.”

  “Cal!” I elbowed him.

  “Ara, I’ve been in the same classes, same room, same matching stupid clothes as her since I was born. Why would it bother me now?”

  “You share a room?”

  He laughed at the horror on my face. “It’s the least of my worries, believe me.”

  “Then what’s the worst?”

  “Ara. Cal,” the teacher gently reminded us, directing our attention to the whiteboard.

  When she turned away, Cal leaned in again. “Wanna catch up after school—at my house? Maybe I’ll tell you then.”

  I nodded, looking up as David walked in and handed the teacher what I assumed was a late note. He looked wrecked today, like he hadn’t slept in a week or had maybe just run ten miles in heels with a homeless man wrapped around his neck. As he sat down behind us, he didn’t say a word—no hello, no smart-ass remark. I turned in my seat and tried to catch his gaze.

  “You okay, new guy?”