She’s dying. I can feel her dying in my arms, can fell all of her strength, all of her life leaving her.
“Virago, just use the magic…” I whisper to her, taking a deep breath. “Please use the magic to make yourself better. You can make yourself better. Please.”
From somewhere far away, I can hear voices. Yelling. People running across the lawn toward us.
Carly skids to a stop next to me. And Aidan, too, my brother paling immediately upon seeing the sight of so much blood, blood that continues to stream out of Virago’s middle, soaking the lawn beneath her.
Suddenly, I know what to do. It’s the slightest chance, but it’s the only possible thing I can think of. The only thing I can think of that might save her.
“Aidan,” I tell him, gritting my teeth as I choke down another sob. “Can you make the circle appear? Can you make the portal?”
He stares at me, eyes wide, already shaking his head. “I don’t know, Holly…God, maybe? The rest of the coven members are going to get here soon, and I don’t know if I can do it without them…anyway, why do you want the circle? Where’s the beast?”
I shake my head. “The beast is a woman now. Like in the story Virago told us,” I tell him when he stares at me blankly. I jerk my chin toward the woman lying in the grass, paling as blood pools out of her side, too. “Listen, this isn’t about her,” I tell him quickly. “Virago’s dying. She won’t wake up. She healed herself before, right? If we can get her to her knights, they can probably heal her.” He stares at me with confusion, and I shake my head again. “Aidan, it’s the only way. She’s dying. I can feel her dying,” I whisper. “She needs help.”
He rubs his face, takes a deep breath. “Okay. I mean, maybe I can make the portal appear. I don’t know. But you’ll have to help me, you need to concentrate, too. Carly, concentrate. Imagine a big white circle on the grass, okay?”
“Like, white light, or just a white circle?” asks Carly, her voice strained.
“Don’t be so literal about it,” Aidan mutters. “Just imagine a glowing white circle on the grass, okay?”
I close my eyes and imagine the glowing portal we saw before. It might not work. God, it might not work at all. There might not be a portal, and even if there is a portal, why would the knights still be waiting in the field for her, and even if the knights are waiting in the field for her, what makes me think that they can heal her?
I think about Virago. I think about her standing tall and strong in front of me. I think of kissing Virago. I think of her smile and her laughter. I think of her kindness and her grace.
She is the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my entire life.
She can’t die. Not like this. She deserves a beautiful, quiet death at an extremely old age, after having a million adventures. I want to have a million adventures by her side. I want to be with her for my entire life, I want to spend all my days with her.
She deserves a full life.
She deserves to live.
Behind my tightly closed eyes, I begin to see a light…
I open my eyes with a gasp. There’s the portal in the middle of my lawn, a circling, glowing door of light. Aidan crawls over to the edge of it and stares down and in.
“Oh, hello,” he says, with a grimace. “Um…you’re friends of Virago’s, right?”
“We are,” comes the commanding voice from one of the female knights. I recognize that voice. Was her name Magel? “Where is Virago?” she asks firmly. “Where is the beast?”
“Well, uh,” says Aidan with a shrug. I can tell he’s desperately nervous. “Um, Virago’s hurt,” he says, speaking too quickly, that nervousness making his words short. “She needs your help. And, uh, apparently the beast is now a woman?”
“Virago’s hurt? How so?” snarls the woman.
Carly helps me move Virago gently, or, really, as gently as we can. She takes up Virago’s boots, and I try to pull Virago by her shoulders. We get her over to the edge of the portal.
There, about six feet down, is the other world. The scent of meadow assaults me, but the scent of sweet grass and bright flowers is stronger now because oddly enough, it’s day there now, not night, and the sunshine is so bright, it’s almost blinding. Magel stands with her feet planted wide, hands on her hips as she stares up in trepidation, until she sees Virago.
“Oh, Goddess,” she murmurs, breathing out, her face stricken.
“Can you help her?” I ask, tears streaming over my cheeks, falling gently onto Virago’s face. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t stir. She’s hardly breathing anymore.
The woman glances to me, then back to Virago again. “I do not know. But we will try.” She holds up her arms.
As gently as we can, we push Virago down and into the waiting arms of her fellow knight. As we do so, though, the pulsing white of the circle begins to falter around us.
“Quickly!” Magel shouts. “The beast! Send down the beast!”
We gather up Cower, though—admittedly—a bit less delicately, and throw her down onto the ground, where she staggers up to her hands and knees, coughing up blood.
“This one will be well,” says Magel with a shake of her head and a sneer as she turns away from Cower. “And Virago—”
The portal falters again, the scene before us fading in and out.
“Please concentrate, Aidan,” I mutter to him, and he’s nodding.
But, from one instant to the next, the light goes out. And in that instant, the circle is gone. It’s just…gone. It’s as if there was never a circle on my lawn to begin with.
“What?” I ask, shock making my body shake. I crawl forward, I thrust my fingers into the grass, press down against the earth, tears streaming down my face. “Oh, my God, no…Virago…Aidan, please, can you bring it back?”
“I’m really trying, Holly,” murmurs Aidan, eyes wide as sweat begins to appear on his brow. “I’m trying really hard. But I just…I can’t, nothing’s happening. What if I can’t the portal appear without Virago?”
Panic begins to consume me. “No, no, no…she could be dead. I have to see her,” I tell him, shaking his shoulders. “She could be dead,” I whisper.
Aidan grips my arms tightly, shaking his head again as a single tear leaks out of his eye and makes its way down his cheek.
“Holly, I’m so sorry,” he whispers, searching my face, his eyes wide. “I’m so sorry. I don’t think I can open the portal again.”
He’s right. Even when the coven members arrive, even when they concentrate, sitting in my backyard for an entire half hour, hands linked and joined together, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing appears. There is no circle of light, no doorway to another world, no meadow and flowers and knights.
No Virago.
And there is no portal.
Aidan and Carly give me a tight embrace and hold me close as I sob.
Virago could be dead. She could be alive.
But I’ll never know.
Because she’s gone.
Chapter 15: Remember Me
That night I spend in the waiting room of the emergency vet as they operate on Shelley. I cry in the waiting room, cry and don’t care who sees me, Carly holding tightly to my hand and watching me with a pained expression as I weep into box after box of tissues.
Shelley lives. It’s a miracle, the vet tells me. They send her home with a cone, antibiotics and pain pills. I lift her into my bed at eight o’clock in the morning, and curling around my dog, we both fall into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
I wake up, halfway through the day. I give Shelley her pills, don’t even have to give them to her in peanut butter. She takes them obediently from my hand, flopping her tail weakly on my bed as she stares up at me with soft brown eyes. I’ll have to wash the blankets from her wound dressing, but I don’t really care.
My dog is alive. It’s really the only thing I care about at this point.
Honestly, I don’t care about much else. Because everything else is too painful to think about.
There are messages from Carly on my phone. A few messages from Aidan. He’s called another emergency meeting of the coven, trying to get them to open the portal again. He apologizes over and over again in his texts. It’s not his fault. I tell him that in a text back, put my phone back into my purse, stare out at my destroyed backyard.
Weeks pass. Time goes on, caring little for the pain I feel, caring little for my broken heart.
Did Virago live? Is she alive somewhere, somewhere impossibly far away?
Then, as more weeks pass, I half wonder if all of this was a dream.
But it wasn’t. I know it wasn’t. Because Wolfslayer remained in my backyard, that beautiful sword that Virago loved so much. I dragged it in. I washed it off, polished it. I set it gently on the couch.
Every time I wonder if it was a dream, I wonder if Virago ever even existed…I go and I sit down next to that sword. And then I curl my hand over the hilt, holding it as tightly as I can.
It’s real.
Virago was real.
Please, please, please let Virago be alive.
That’s what my life is now. I go to work. I walk Shelley. I read books, and I slip into the stories, because it’s the only escape I have from the heartbreak that is my life. And I think, over and over again: Please, please, please let Virago be alive.
That’s what my life is now…until one night. One late July night.
A night to remember…
---
“Honestly, I don’t care, Carly,” I tell her gently, cradling the phone between my chin and shoulder—no small feat with a slim smart phone.
“I really wish you would care,” my best friend grumbles. I proceed to chop the carrots against the cutting board, sigh as I swipe them off into the boiling pot on the stove.
“You and David can show up whenever you want. You could come over now. Whenever you want is fine,” I assure her, giving a quick stir with the wooden spoon.
“I’m sorry I invited us over—” Carly begins, but I clear my throat.
“Hey, I appreciate that you did,” I tell her quietly, stir the boiling water again. “I mean, I know I’m kind of a homebody these days. I just…” I trail off, hold the spoon poised over the water as I gaze out the window at my backyard. The divots that the beast made out of the earth were carefully pressed back into the grass by Carly and her boyfriend, David. The broken boards of the shed were taken away on David’s flatbed truck. My neighbor Clark repaired the fence between our properties.
Honestly, my backyard looks like nothing ever happened in it.
But I know better.
“It’ll get better, honey,” says Carly quietly. “I promise it’ll get better.”
“Yeah,” I say, the word coming out a little strangled as emotion chokes me. “Just…whenever you get here is fine,” I tell her with false brightness. “I have to finish making the soup base, okay?”
“Soup in July?” asks Carly, mystified.
“You know my love for chopping vegetables,” I tell her, and she actually chuckles at that.
“We’ll be there in a half hour,” she tells me, and she hangs up.
Shelley lies patiently in the center of the kitchen, waiting for her third meal of the day with a forlorn nose on crossed paws. I pat her head absent-mindedly as I cross the kitchen to throw the leftover carrots into their bag in the crisper in the fridge. I straighten, holding a heart of celery, consider the rest of my fridge. I think about what else I have to put into this soup base. Maybe some thyme. Yes, a pinch of thyme would be really good, it’d go well with the flavors, I think.
Out in the backyard there’s an odd flash of light, like a spark.
I stare out the window into the backyard.
The celery falls from my hands to the floor.
It’s impossible, what I’m seeing. But it’s true.
She’s here.
Virago.
I’m running out of the kitchen, through my living room, and out my sliding glass door. My knight strides across my backyard, clad in new armor, a new leather shirt and pants and boots, but the only thing I really see, the only thing I have eyes for, is her eyes, her bright, flashing eyes that consume me utterly.
Her smile is so brilliant, it eclipses the sun.
We collide, she and I, her arms wrapped tightly around me, spinning me around and around as her mouth finds mine. We kiss together, my arms around her neck, holding her close like I don’t really believe she’s here, as if I don’t really believe this is happening, as if I’ll never, ever let her go again. The warmth of her mouth on my own—it’s real. The softness of her mouth, her tongue…all of this is real. I don’t really believe this is happening…
But it is. The scent of sandalwood and leather rises all around me, her ink-black hair pools over my hands, and her full, warm mouth covers my own.
Virago is alive.
My entire body sings where it presses against her. Shelley is barking joyfully, bouncing around us when I disengage from the kiss, not because I want to, but because I need to look her in her eyes, just…just to make certain that this moment is actually happening, I suppose. I need to be grounded in this moment, in this moment I imagined over and over but could never dare hope for. I press my forehead against hers, feel a sob begin to tear through me, but I shake my head, hold her tighter.
“You’re alive,” I whisper, the words coming out in a hush. I’m almost afraid to speak them, as if speaking will destroy the magic between us.
But nothing can destroy the magic of this moment. “I’m alive,” she whispers back, “thanks to you.” My toes curl in pleasure at the sound of that perfect voice, her words low and gravelly and full of velvet as she practically purrs, lifting me up again so that my mouth meets hers, her arms wrapped strongly about my waist, holding me tenderly but with such strength that my feet leave the ground.
“How did you find me?” I whisper breathlessly, then, when she sets me down gently, when her mouth moves down, down to my cheek and my chin and my neck. She straightens, looking down earnestly into my face, searching my gaze, her bright blue eyes piercing me deeply as she gazes into the very heart of me.
“You call to me,” she says, lifting my hands to her mouth so that she can press a kiss to the back of each of them, her warm lips brushing over my skin and making me shiver in delight. Her low tone is a growl as she breathes the words against my skin: “And my heart answered you.”
Overhead, the very first star edges its way out of a purple sky, drowsy and swinging low to the west. A waning moon, bright and beautiful, dips toward the horizon.
And far, far down below, on a planet I always thought was perfectly normal, my dog barks and makes crazy circles around us, bounding joyfully around her two favorite humans.
And my knight in shining armor literally sweeps me off my feet.
I honestly don’t know what the future holds or what lies ahead of us. But I do know that there will be more adventures than I can even imagine.
And we’ll build our story together.
The End
If you enjoyed A Knight to Remember, you’ll love Bridget’s Sullivan Vampires.
The following is an excerpt from “Eternal Hotel,” the first novella in the Sullivan Vampires series, a beautiful, romantic epic that follows the clan of Sullivan vampires and the women who love them. Advance praise has hailed this hallmark series as “Twilight for women who love women” and “a lesbian romance that takes vampires seriously! Two thumbs up!”
…So this was the staircase from last night, next to the front desk. The Widowmaker. It must be. I’d never seen a steeper set of stairs. From up above, they looked simply like the rungs of a ladder in a barn—so steep and so tall and almost impossible to even think of taking.
It’s not that I don’t like heights—I’m pretty okay with them. But these stairs were something else. I wasn’t taking these steps—I’d have to circle back somehow and find the other spiral staircase down to the first floor
As I tu
rned, I caught the first floor out of the corner of my eye. Because of the cathedral ceilings of that first floor, it seemed much farther away then I’d thought it was.
It was then that something strange happened.
The ground seemed to spin under me for a moment, bucking and heaving like I was trying to walk on waves of carpeting, not good firm floor. Or did it really? Was it just a trick of the eye? Either way, I took a step backward as a shadow fell in front of me, but there was no floor beneath that foot stepping backward, then, and I was tumbling backwards, shock cold enough to burn me flooding through my body as, impossibly, I began to fall down the stairs.
A hand caught my arm. I hung suspended over the abyss of the air, my back to the emptiness, and in one smooth motion, I was pulled back.
Saved.
The hand was cold, and the body I brushed against as I was hauled out of the air felt as if the person had stepped out of a prolonged trip through a walk-in freezer. I looked up at the face of the woman who had saved me, and when I breathed out, I will never forget it: my breath hung suspended in the air between us like a ghost.
She was taller than me by about a head, and I had to lean back to gaze into her eyes. They were violently blue, a blue that opened me up like a key and lock as she looked down at me, her eyes sharp and dark as her jaw worked, her full lips in a downward curve that my own eyes couldn’t help but follow. She wore a ponytail, the cascades of her silken white-blonde hair gathered tightly at the back of her head and flowing over her right shoulder like frozen water falling. She wore a man’s suit, I realized, complete with a navy blue tie smartly pulled snug against her creamy neck. She looked pale and felt so cold as her strong hand gripped my wrist, but it was gentle, too. As if she knew her own strength.
I saw all of this in an instant, my eyes following the lines and curves of her like I’d trace my gaze over an extremely fine painting. And, like an extremely fine painting, she began to make my heart beat faster. That was odd. I was never much attracted to random women, even before I dated Anna, even before Anna…well.
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