by Izzy Shows
I gulped. I felt a wave of self-hatred pour over me—because I wanted to know. I wanted to know where he’d gone and I wanted to know what he’d felt, and I wanted to reach out and comfort him. And God, why did I want him to pour all of that out to me? That would hurt him so much, and it wasn’t something that I should want to know about him.
I needed to remember the boundaries I’d set in place.
Where was the girl who could keep him in line?
She’d died at Tyburn Tree.
“I’m sorry, Mal. I-I didn’t realise…” My voice trailed off. I should have realised, though. That was something I should have known, you don’t call it your worst nightmare because it’s all kittens and rainbows. And he was a demon, a Fallen, and so he had to have even worse nightmares than anyone else in the world combined. That was probably what it was, his nightmare had been of the day he Fell. That made sense, even more so because he’d refused to tell me about it when I’d asked.
“Was it the Fall?” I asked, and immediately wished I hadn’t.
He stood up, paced away from me and dragged a hand through his hair again. “Why won’t you leave that alone? I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not going to tell you, Blair, you just need to accept that.”
I stared at him, shocked. A simple yes or no would have sufficed, I would have let it go if he’d just said ‘yes it was the Fall and I don’t want to talk about it.’ How hard would that have been?
How hard would it have been for you to just leave well enough alone?
Touché.
I stood up and walked over to him. “I’m sorry,” I said, laying a hand on his back. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard, and I’m sorry. Come and sit down, and I’ll get you another drink.” He nodded and I led him back to the couch, then went into the kitchen. I poured the whiskey into a glass and carried it back out to him.
After he had a sip of the alcohol, he seemed to settle a bit more. “OK. So. Where was I?”
“Oh, Mal, you don’t have to finish the story.”
“No, it’s OK. It’s got a good ending to it. You’ll like it.”
I smiled and sat down in my chair, curling up a bit. “OK, then, if you insist.”
He smiled, his eyes lightening at last. “I do.”
1924, The Compound
I awoke with my head pressed against the cold marble floor, vaguely aware of a sucking sensation at the top of my head—Nuala pulling the nightmare beast off me. I pulled in a breath, thankful that it didn’t take too much effort and then greedily sucked down another one. I felt so empty, so drained, and my heart was heavy with the reminder of so much that had been lost.
I had begun to regret the entire escapade, and wished that I had opted for something tamer. Even if all the other mishaps had occurred, and this one hadn’t, it would have been OK. But with the Nightmare, I just didn’t have anything left in me.
Nuala walked into the centre of my vision and knelt in front of me, running a hand through my hair. I looked up into her eyes, saw the same emptiness there that I felt within me. She nodded, seeming to understand the pain that I was in.
“We have to get up. I’m not sure how long we were under the effects of the Nightmare, and we don’t want to risk being found,” she said.
I nodded, groggy, and slowly stood up. I did not ache, but every inch of me felt my sorrow in ways that I could not describe if a gun was to my head.
“Have you woken the others?” I asked even as I glanced around the room and saw both Bastian and Aisling laying on their sides.
“Not yet. I had to get you out first.”
“I was the last to go under, I should have been the last to wake,” I snapped at her and walked quickly to Aisling’s side, pulling the creature from her head. She began to stir, and I stomped over to Bastian then to yank the creature from his head as well.
Nuala said nothing in her defence, and I decided to ignore her. I don’t know why she had woken me up first. The only reason that I could come up with, was that she had somehow guessed the Nightmare I’d been living in, and her crush on me had not allowed her to leave me in it for any longer than was necessary.
I owed her for getting me out of it, and I hated owing people.
I waited in silence for the others to catch their breath, come back to themselves from the disorienting world I knew they’d just been in. I wasn’t altogether myself, and I had a suspicion that I wouldn’t be for quite some time. Luckily, I am quite skilled in the art of denial.
I just wasn’t going to acknowledge that anything at all had happened, pretend that I was OK, and I knew that I would be soon enough.
The pain could come for me later.
“How did you get out, Nuala?” I asked.
“My Nightmare was reality. I knew that it had already occurred, though it took me some time to remember. Once I figured it out, it ended,” she said, shrugging.
“All right, well…” I said, looking around at the other. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I shifted to the next topic. “Time to get up. We’ve got to get moving again. Good news is there are no more traps, so we can breathe a little easier now,” I said.
“Yeah, well, you thought we could breathe easier the last time,” Bastian said.
I glanced at Nuala. “I thought we could.”
She hung her head in shame. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what went wrong, it felt like it was working, I could feel them around us and I could feel the mental shield. But they slipped through. I guess I used too much energy earlier.”
I nodded. “It’s OK, Nuala. This entire trip didn’t exactly go according to plan. You all have my apologies for that.”
Bastian glared at me for quite a few minutes. “This is beginning to feel a lot like it isn’t worth it, to me.”
I managed not to betray the shocked sensation that rushed over me at his words, and I glanced at the two Fae to see if they felt similarly. Bastian was clearly making a demand for a greater reward, or a reward at all considering this was all supposed to be for the satisfaction of pulling one over on a dragon. The two Fae were staring down at Bastian as well, so I could only guess that they disagreed with them.
Fae are oddly loyal like that.
“If you feel you haven’t been properly compensated, you can take it up with management,” I snapped and stalked towards the exit. “Come along.”
I heard their feet beating against the floor as they hurried to keep up with me. None of us wanted to be in this room for any longer than necessary, much less alone.
The room exited to a corridor, which we walked down until we found ourselves standing in front of the vault door. It was just as grand and ostentatious as you would expect a dragon’s vault door to look. There were no guards here, which made sense to me in a funny sort of way—who the hell would be able to get through that last room? We almost hadn’t.
I looked to Bastian. “Through the door.” I said.
He nodded and shifted into his mist form without a word, drifting towards and under the door. He was immediately sprayed backwards, and hit the wall behind him with a heavy thud as he reverted to his physical form.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, brows furrowed.
“I don’t…know…” Bastian wheezed. “I can’t get through.”
“Do you think the system learned?” Aisling spoke for the first time since she’d gone under. “If the system is even semi-intelligent, it would have noticed the way Bastian breached the previous door, and adapted to prevent it from occurring again.”
“Well it doesn’t matter how it happened, it just matters that it happened, and now we have to figure another way around it,” I said.
“What can we do?” Nuala asked. “It’s spelled against everything we could possibly do to get through. Bastian was our ace in the hole, and now we’ve got nothing.”
“Not…quite…” I murmured, my hand drifting to my trouser pocket, reaching inside and wrapping around the chain inside. I produced the necklace from my poc
ket, lifting it up so that the pendant swung in front of my face. I could feel their eyes on me, as well as the confusion that had entered the room.
None of them could even begin to understand what I was about to do. To be honest, I barely understood it myself, and I wasn’t entirely certain that it would work. It wasn’t something I’d ever done before.
I pressed the pendant to my lips, parting them slightly to murmur a few soft words.
And was promptly flung back down the corridor I was standing in front of. Or, I suppose blasted might be a better word.
The door had blown off its hinges, and thrown all of us back I assumed. I clambered back to my feet, pocketed the necklace, and walked down the corridor again to rejoin the group.
“What did you do?” Aisling asked, just now beginning to stand up. Understandable, she’d have impacted with the wall behind her much faster than my eventual stop in the corridor, and would have been more dazed than I was.
“To be perfectly honest, I have no earthly idea,” I said, and strode into the vault.
It was full of more treasure than I could possibly have imagined. Priceless paintings leaned against giant piles of gold, mixed in with various amounts of crowns and jewelry. It looked exactly like you would expect a dragon’s hoard to look like. I began to walk around the room, eyes drifting over the various piles in a lazy fashion. I knew I would find what I was looking for, and I knew they wouldn’t be buried at the bottom of a pile of gold.
“Whoa,” said Bastian. “There’s so much shit.”
I cast a glance over my shoulder at him, rolling my eyes. Of course, he would say that, he was such an immature kid.
The two Fae glided into the room, milling about and looking at all the various trinkets.
“So what are we looking for?” Nuala asked.
“I’ll let you know once I’ve found it.”
“Oh, so that’s it for us then? We’re all done now that we’ve got you into the vault?”
I sighed. “No, not quite. I wanted to leave something in here, in the place of what I’ve taken, so that he’ll know who it was that robbed him.”
“What does that have to do with us?”
“We’re going to take a picture, duh,” I said, reaching into my pocket again and this time pulling out a small, instant print camera I’d procured in a future era and brought back. Probably should have been horribly damaged in all the commotion we’d just been through, but my pockets were heavily spelled. Not really intended for protecting cameras of all things, but it worked out this time.
Nuala rolled her eyes at me, but Aisling giggled.
“A picture? Oh, that’ll be so funny,” Aisling said. “I know just the pose we should use, too!”
“Nothing complicated, Aisling, just a simple ‘haha I robbed you’ picture,” I warned her.
“No, no of course not. But it’ll be good.” She winked at me.
I rolled my eyes again and got back to searching. I was looking for a pair of earrings, which was admittedly a very difficult item to find in such a big room with so much in it, but I was certain that it wouldn’t be too difficult. Logic said that if I told them what we were looking for, they would be able to help me find it.
But it wasn’t just the fact that I needed it that spurred me, I also needed to be the one who found it. I wouldn’t be happy if one of the others had gone hunting around the room and produced the prize I sought, while I screwed around in some other part of the room. No, I needed to be the one to find it.
I continued to move through the room, my eyes drifting across multiple statues, ornate settees, and I was certain that was a throne over in the corner. I wondered whose throne it was, or if it had ever belonged to a reigning monarch, but I found it most unlikely. Meticulous records were kept for those, most likely this was just an exorbitantly expensive show piece.
I came upon an altar, with five boxes sitting on top of it, and felt my heart start to pick up. Was this what I had been looking for? Were the earrings inside of one of these boxes? I had to hope so, because I was running out of areas to check in the small room.
I walked forward and opened the box in the very centre, and was disappointed to find a diamond bracelet inside. I proceeded to open every other box, containing two rings, a necklace, and at long last the pair of earrings I’d been looking for. They were breathtakingly beautiful, and I quickly slipped them into the same pocket the necklace was inside.
“Guys!” I shouted. “Over here!”
They all came over.
“Are you quite done yet?” Nuala asked.
“Yes. So, let’s all get together so that we can take our group picture, leave it behind for dear old Riordan to find and scream about, and then we can get out of here.”
“Fantastic!” Aisling joined in. She held out her hand for the camera, and I gave it to her cautiously. The girl was so high energy, sometimes it was hard to tell if she was going to spin out all over the place or if everything would be fine.
Aisling held out her hand with the camera facing us, and squeezed the four of us together so that we all had an arm looped over the other’s shoulders.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Oh, hold on,” I said, dropping my right arm down and flipping the finger at the camera. “Now go!”
“Ugh,” she groaned, but straightened herself up and took the picture.
“Happy?” She asked, taking the picture out of the camera as soon as it had printed and handing it over to me.
I waited for the ink to load in, and smiled when I saw it. I murmured a brief word, and was suddenly holding a copy of the picture in my other hand. “I think I’m going to keep that. Bit of a memento,” I said.
They all smiled at me.
“All right, let’s stop acting ridiculous and get the fuck out of here,” I said.
I placed the picture on the altar where the earrings had been.
Modern Day, Blair’s House
“And that's all there was to it. We made it in, we got the earrings, we made it out again," Mal said with something like a smile on his face. It wasn't quite happiness that I was seeing there, but I suppose it wasn't entirely sad either.
I didn't speak for several moments, just looked at him, trying to make head or tail of what I had just been told. It was a hell of a story, I had to admit. Breaking into a dragon's vault...I hadn't been expecting any of what he had told me.
But it was so sad at the same time. It was sad what he'd gone through in that vault, the cost to him and his friends, and all to get a pair of earrings? I would have turned back after the first room if there wasn't a world hanging on the line waiting for me to get to the other side.
"You did all of that for earrings?" I asked at last.
"Well, yeah. Really, really nice earrings, though." He grinned, clearly trying to make a joke though I did not smile back or laugh. "It was just supposed to be a joke, nothing serious, you know. Riordan and I have a bit of a game going, where he pulls a prank on me and then I pull a prank on him and so on and so forth."
"So you're friends? And he almost killed you for a game?"
"No, we're not. We're not friends," he said, frowning. "It's not a friendly game. It's just something that we do. We don't try to kill each other, because then the game would be over."
I stared at him, not able to understand any of what he was saying now. "What in the hell are you even talking about?"
"Listen, you're making it sound a lot worse than it is. Don't overthink it. It was just a game, and I won. And no one got hurt, and that's all that matters to you folks, right?"
"Mal." I leaned forward and put my glass on the coffee table, uncurling my legs from beneath me and planting them firmly on the floor. "You have got to see how ludicrous that story was. How do I know you didn't make it up?"
"I didn't!" He frowned. "Why would you think I'd make up a story?"
"Because you didn't want to tell me any of the stories I asked for, so I gave you an opportunity to pick one, and you took advantag
e of that and told me a fake one. It makes sense, I suppose, since you aren't really the type that shares any information about yourself freely, but it's still a bit shitty, don't you think?" I quirked an eyebrow up at him, shaking my head. I had hoped for more, but this was the most sensible answer to all the questions.
"I didn't make any of it up, Blair. I've never lied to you, and I certainly wouldn't start over something as silly as a story," he said. "Besides, I...I told you about the Nightmares. I wouldn't have made those up."
No, that was true. I highly doubted he would make up stories that horrible about people he'd seemed fond of. And he'd been so upset when I'd asked him about his own Nightmare...
I guess he hadn't been making it all up, then.
"OK, well then if you didn't make it all up, what in the hell did you need those earrings for?" I asked.
"I told you, it was just a game," he said.
"Oh, bullshit," I snapped. "Are you forgetting that you told me, in your story, that you were the one who needed to find the earrings? If it was just a game, you wouldn't have been so hell bent on them. You wouldn't have cared who found them."
He stared at me, locking his eyes with mine so that I had to avert my gaze. We never really made eye contact, not for long anyways. Brief flashes here and there, but nothing where I might feel vulnerable.
"Fine." He stood up and paced over to the fireplace, fiddling with one of the knick-knacks on the mantle. "The earrings were for a woman."
"A woman?" I gasped. "Well, that just does not sound like you. I can't even begin to imagine...you would never get a woman you were sleeping with jewellery." I looked down at my drink on the coffee table, trying to work out the puzzle. It just didn't make any sense at all.
"I wasn't just sleeping with her, Blair," he said at last. "I loved her." His voice was rough, he sounded like he was choking on something, and I realised that it was possible—just barely possible—that he might be about to cry.
It was a hard debate about whether to stand up. I wasn't sure how it would be received, I wasn't sure if he would want me to be anywhere near him when he was feeling this way. I didn't want him to push me away.