“Never could?”
“Ara fed on other vampires before. So did I—well, on humans,” I explained.
“Really?”
“You can’t live off just one person,” I said. “It gets old, like eating a grilled cheese sandwich every day for the rest of your life. But I trusted her. I knew she wouldn’t betray me—”
“I won’t either, David—”
“I don’t know that.”
“Well, then you’ll just have to trust me.” She grinned sweetly. “You can’t know that you can trust me if you never trust me to see if I can be trusted.”
I chuckled, taking in the sharp corners of her smiling eyes, her tiny little fangs and her bright cheeks, still tinged a little orange from our cupcake fight earlier. “Just don’t hurt me, okay?”
She offered her pinkie.
I skipped the promise though and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “I’m trusting you.”
“I won’t betray your trust,” she whispered. “And besides, I’m just gonna feed him. I’m not drinking today.”
I stood back as the elevator opened, facing her again once I was inside. “Drink, Ara,” I said, pressing the button. “You’re pale and cold and you need blood.”
“Okay.” She nodded, the elevator doors closing before she turned away.
* * *
Harry caught the bat I tossed to him and we both charged for the pumpkin, bellowing out our loudest warrior calls. Orange blotches splashed all over the yard, the bats and our jeans, the sound of Mike and Emily’s laughter rising above our own.
Down the bottom of the driveway, Vicki handed out the leftover candy from last night’s party to neighborhood kids—another family tradition—and Falcon stood waiting for his turn with the pumpkin and the bat. It was strange having him here for this—here as family, not as an employee. In the years past, Ara would be beside me too, either here at Mike’s house or at our own home back in America, but after Cal’s first feed on Lilithian blood yesterday, I hadn’t heard from her. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but as I lay awake last night, trying not to cry, I could only take it to mean one thing.
I had to talk with the dumbass side of myself out loud to convince him that she would never betray me. I knew that, but it hurt that she never came back to the party—never called to say she was okay.
When I looked past Vicki and saw Ara walking toward us, the midday sun a spotlight on this beauty in blue jeans and a yellow tank top, my battle charge ended short of the pumpkin. I stood watching her instead, waiting for her to confess last night’s sins in a loud voice across a long driveway and a yard of grass.
“You keep at it, Harry.” I patted his shoulder affectionately. “Give it hell for me.”
Falcon swept in, taking my bat as I walked down the slope toward Ara. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She stopped in front of me, her arms folded, looking flushed in the cheeks and so much healthier and prettier than she had in the last few weeks. She’d needed that feed, and I felt bad that I tried to stop her from having Cal turned. “Just so you know—”
“Don’t.” I put my hand up between us, moving it past her head then to grab her and pull her in for a hug. “I know you didn’t do anything with Cal. It was stupid of me to worry.”
I deserved it, but when she laughed, shocked by my sudden turnaround, it hurt. I’d been so unkind to her and so controlling that she really did think that was normal for us. It would take time now to prove otherwise.
“Everyone’s looking at us, you know,” she whispered.
I glanced back, catching the eyes of our entire family before quickly looking away—a terrible effort at being inconspicuous—and laughed. “They’re probably waiting for me to strike you or commit some other horrible act of spousal abuse.”
Ara leaned back and slapped my arm playfully. “There you go. Now I’m the bad guy.”
I laughed again, aiming my thumb to the scene up by the house. “Hey, you wanna join us? It’s a family tradition.”
“What is?” She looked past me to our pumpkin-covered son. “Beating up innocent lanterns?”
“You got it. Well, they’re not the lanterns. Just the pumpkins we didn’t use in the end.” I took her hand and started up the hill. “Come on.”
Mike dropped the next victim onto the mess of the previous one and stepped back to where Emily stood on the porch, her hands cupping the roundness of her growing belly. I smiled at her for a moment, remembering how much I loved the feel of my children moving inside of Ara, and looked away before the pain became unbearable.
Beside me, Harry gave Ara a quick lesson in baseball—how to hold a bat and how to swing it—then they both took five good steps back and grinned at each other, charging for the pumpkin at full speed. Ara’s battle call was something of a hilarity in truth, but kind of cute, not at all scary. If I were that pumpkin, I’d be more concerned by the eight-year-old beside her. That kid would one day make a great warrior.
As they struck the pumpkin, Ara’s strength became apparent though. It burst open under her wooden bat, while Harry’s mighty hit left only a slight dent.
“Wicked!” Ara’s eyes lit up. She repositioned herself for another strike, but as she swung the bat and her hands came back down, the bat didn’t. It took us all a second to realize it had slipped away as she swung back and was currently flying through the air toward the bushland across the road with impressive speed. An explosion of leaves rained from a tree and an even bigger one of laughter erupted around the front yard.
I looked back at my son, on the ground, laughing harder than I think I’d ever seen. Ara, however, looked like a vexed kitty. She folded her arms, huffing.
“I’ll get it,” Mike said.
“No. I’ll get it myself,” Ara said crankily. My head wheeled around then when I heard the muddy crack of vegetable beneath four gasps, Ara yelping as she dropped hard onto her ass in a mass of smashed pumpkin. No one breathed, waiting for her to cry, and then that moment of perfect silence imploded, starting first with Harry, then me, the rest of them breaking into bursts of laughter. If she wanted to cry, she hid it well once we all started laughing. But she’d have laughed too if she could only see how ridiculous she looked sitting there on that pumpkin like she just laid it.
“Stop laughing,” she said to me, setting her jaw.
“I…” I folded in on myself and then rolled onto my back, trying to catch my breath, knowing my face would be red right now—something my Ara would never have seen on me. “I can’t.”
“It looks like you did a big pumpkin poo!” Harry yelled through his own laughter.
Ara managed a smile then, turning to Harry before she picked up a big handful of orange slime and smudged it onto Harry’s back pocket. He stopped laughing and looked at his mother.
“Now you’ve done a big orange poo too,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” Harry squatted down to pick up a handful of pumpkin guts, and an all-out war began. I tried to stand back—act like the mature adult watching on—but Mike smothered my face in it, which obviously required a revenge attack, and by the time there was no guts left to spread, the front wall, the windows and the entire garden looked like an atomic pumpkin went off. I barely recognized Ara and Harry, like two little orange swamp monsters, slipping their way back up the slope to the house, laughing so hard they were bent over.
“Look at you two,” I said, shaking my head.
Ara flicked the mess off her hands and wiped a chunk off her eyebrow. “Our son is too quick for me.”
“And I hit a car, Dad!” Harry said, the hilarity making his voice five times louder than normal.
Ara laughed harder. “I ducked,” she explained, “and his ammunition hit the bumper—”
“They didn’t even notice!” Harry said.
“When they get home”—Ara tried to console herself—“they’ll be wondering how the hell they got pumpkin on the back of their car!”
“Guess I better start the cleaning then,” Mike said wi
th a laugh, bending to untangle the garden hose from the saddle on the wall. “Remove the evidence in case they come back.”
“I’ll go get lunch started,” Em said, turning to Vicki.
“Lunch?” Ara looked at her watch, scraping a pumpkin seed off its face. “It’s too early.”
“It takes a while to cook,” Em said.
“You’re cooking lunch today?”
“We usually have a pumpkin soup the day after the party,” Vicki informed. “It’s tradition.”
Ara nodded, propping her hand on her hips, breathing heavily as though she was exhausted from the fight. I wondered if that was a habit—to play human—or if she really was worn out.
The crass sound of water hitting a pipe made me start then, my heart racing as cold water sprayed back off the windows in front of me and cooled my face. Mike motioned for me to move aside so he could spray the front porch, but Vicki stopped him.
“Let me get everyone inside before you clean this off.” She nodded at Ara and Harry. “They’ll just walk it all back through.”
Mike bent the hose and stopped the flow of water, offering the way ahead.
“You go on,” I said to Ara, turning away. “I’ll get the bat out of the tree.”
“Oh, I forgot about that.” She followed me.
“It’s okay.” I waved her back softly. “I’ll get it.”
“Dad, can I get it?” Harry asked with a big grin.
“It’s too high, Harry,” Ara insisted. “You can’t climb that high, surely?”
“Not climb.” He grinned at me, and I grinned back.
It had never occurred to Ara that if our mixed-immortal-blood son could read minds, he might also develop telekinesis. I’d left that out of the equation for now and hadn’t trained with Harry in months, afraid he’d frighten Ara with his budding abilities, but it was time. He was ready to show her, and I was ready to let her see.
I ruffled Harry’s hair, my fingers snagging in the tangled mess of drying pumpkin. “Yes, Ara.”
“Yes what?” Her wide eyes moved onto mine.
“Yes, exactly what you were just thinking.”
“Did you just read my mind?”
“No. Your face.”
“So he can…” Her head turned and her eyes focused on the tree across the road. “He’s telekinetic?”
“Dad’s teaching me,” Harry announced proudly.
“But…” Her brows came softly together in confusion. “Dad doesn’t have those powers anymore. How can he teach you?”
“You never forget how,” I said, laying my hand to her lower back as we walked. “And in some cases, especially once you’ve unlocked the abilities of the mind, losing immortality doesn’t take away what you learned as a telepath—”
“Like with Uncle Jason,” Harry said.
“So can you still use telekinesis?” Ara asked.
I shook my head, checking the street for cars before stepping out. “But I can instruct.”
“Could you instruct me, do you think?”
“Of course,” I said with a laugh. The way she asked that sounded like she thought I’d say no. Which, for a moment I found amusing, until I realized what that meant.
“It’s not that,” she said.
“Not what?” I said, as Harry ran ahead to the tree line and stopped, angling his chin to the sky to find the bat.
“It’s not that I thought you’d say no,” she offered.
I stopped dead.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, exactly what you think.” She gave me a coy grin.
Worry tightened my chest. She was getting stronger. Not a bad thing, but certainly a concern if I was to now guard my thoughts around her all the time. There were things I just wasn’t ready for her to see in there.
“Everything is working better after a good feed.” Ara showed her arm—the veins now a healthy pale blue under her skin. “I can hear thoughts so much clearer than I could yesterday.”
I looked at her arm, hesitating before I picked up her wrist and brought it to my lips. She tasted like pumpkin as I kissed her hand and remarkably like regret after.
“What’s wrong, David?” she asked softly.
“Dad! I found it,” Harry called, circling on the spot at the base of a tree.
“We’ll be there in a sec, Harry,” Ara called, turning her attention back to me.
“I hate that you’ve only seen the cruel side of me—”
“David—”
“No, let me speak, Ara,” I insisted gently. “You naturally expect the worst of me—”
“I really don’t—”
“You do. It’s in your body language. It’s in the tone of your voice. You’re cautious around me, uncertain—”
“I’m still getting to know you—”
“Yes, and from what you know, I’m a controlling and cruel man.”
She didn’t say anything. It hurt that she didn’t defend that statement. I wanted her to tell me I was being foolish and that she never saw me as anything but a loving man.
“Dad!” Harry called. “Come on.”
“Coming,” we both called, the deep and the high voice mingling together in perfect harmony. It made me miss the days when we’d sing together.
“David.” Ara stopped me. “I don’t think that about you—that you’re cruel. And I didn’t expect you to say no to teaching me. You’ve got it all wrong.”
I nodded, walking away. She read my mind just now, which meant she was simply telling me what I needed to hear. It didn’t mean she felt that way.
“No, really.” She grabbed my wrist, forcing me to stop. “I think you’re forceful in your opinions and very commanding,” she added with a breathy laugh. “But I’m learning how not to be intimidated by that, because I know you don’t mean to be that way. It’s just your nature and if I ever challenge you, you back down. I can see you’re not a cruel man”—she moved in and lowered her voice intimately—“but you are a man to be feared by those that don’t know you. As it should be. And I like it that way.”
I smiled, closing the last of the small gap between us. I was highly aware of Harry watching on from across the grassy plane, but I didn’t care. Not in this moment. “I was always the hard outer shell that your softer heart and soul needed,” I said. “We were complete that way.”
Her mouth moved up into a pretty, pumpkin-y smile. “I love it when you get all corny.”
I laughed, tossing my head back as I did. “Yeah. Sorry, that was a bit corny.”
“Dad!” Harry demanded.
“Come on.” I took her hand and turned my shoulders away from hers, certain that if I remained here, I would embrace her lovingly and never let her go. “Come see how clever our son is.”
By the time we reached him, Harry was already focused, his eyes fixed on the beige bat hiding among the leaves higher up than the roof of our house. I stood on one side and Ara stood on the other, trying to spot the long object of Harry’s undivided attention.
“How can you even see that up there?” she said.
“My eyes are just that good, Mom,” he said, and she laughed. “But, really, I don’t need to actually see it. I can imagine the object that I’m looking for, and my eyes just take me there.”
Ara nodded, her eyes shrinking as she obviously attempted that, widening as she succeeded. She didn’t say anything though—just logged it as a new skill. “So now what are you doing?”
Harry put his arm around her shoulders as she squatted down to his level, aiming his finger to the highest point of the tree. “It’s really hard for me still, but I’m imagining the bat falling to the ground.”
“And that’s all?” she said.
“Mm-hm.” He nodded.
“Why is that hard?”
“Think back to when you learned to walk again, Ara.” I squatted down on Harry’s other side. “It sounds easy to do, but teaching your brain a new skill can be exhausting.”
Ara nodde
d.
“In telekinesis, you have to simultaneously connect with the object as well as not connecting,” I said, laughing then because I knew that was confusing. “It’s the same as picking up a coffee cup. You don’t necessarily sit there and ‘instruct’ your brain to do it, but at the same time you also do.”
When Ara nodded this time, it was without that confused little frown. She got it instantly, as if the instruction connected to the knowledge she already had buried deep inside her subconscious mind. A second later, the bat fell from the tree, splintering as it hit the footpath that snaked through the grass.
“I did it!” Harry squealed, running for the bat. But as Ara and I stood up, I gave her a knowing smile.
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered apologetically. “It just happened.”
I lowered my head to hide my smile, wrapping my arm around her tightly. “You are amazing.”
“Yeah. I kinda am, aren’t I?”
“It broke,” Harry called, holding up the bat.
“Bring it home anyway,” I called back. “We’ll chop it up for firewood.”
“No way!” He ran to catch up. “We need to frame it, Dad.”
“Why?”
“Because it was Mom’s first time using telekinesis.”
Ara and I stopped. “How did you know?” she asked.
Harry tapped his ear and just kept on walking, glancing back to flash us a cheeky grin as he reached the road.
“That kid misses nothing,” Ara said.
“Tell me about it.”
Harry crossed the street with us close behind and ran straight up to Mike. The evidence of a pumpkin skirmish had almost completely been removed now, making Harry and Mike look like fake Halloween zombies as they stood there covered in mess by the webs and skeletons we had yet to pack down. As we stopped by the wet wooden porch, Harry was just finishing his lengthy explanation of what his mother had done, and Mike smiled—that smile we all seemed to exchange in the middle of a long and stuttered tale told by Harry. I offered back a sympathetic one and kept walking with Ara, jumping out of my own flesh when she screamed. It took us both a second to realize what happened, and when another blast of ice-cold water came at us again, I quickly sidestepped, leaving her to cop the brunt of it on the back of her orange-stained jeans.
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