Forget Ever After

by Kallysten

  Forget Ever After

  By Kallysten

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 2007 Kallysten

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The right of Kallysten to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First Published 2007

  All characters in this publication are purely fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Edited by Tracey W. and Zoe G.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Forget Ever After

  The words in front of Lena’s eyes were becoming blurry, melting together on the paper in an incomprehensible mess. She slipped a bookmark between the pages of the heavy medical textbook and leaned back on the bed, arms spread out to each side of her. She closed her eyes and she tried to review the definitions she had just gone over, but her memory refused to cooperate. The bits of sentences that were coming to her mind in random order might have described the inner workings of an alien from a faraway world, but in no way, shape, or form, could they possibly apply to human anatomy.

  With a deep sigh, she rolled onto her side and opened her eyes again. On the bedside table, mere inches from her face, the picture of Liam looked back at her with serene blue eyes.

  “You can do it,” his quiet smile seemed to be saying. “You’ll ace that test. I know you will.”

  Lena’s hand trembled a little while she reached out to run a finger along the image in a gesture as habitual as it was comforting.

  “For you,” she murmured and sat up.

  She found the place where she had stopped reading and started again, forcing her mind to focus on the definitions she had to memorize.

  It was Friday night and the exam was scheduled for Monday morning. She would be ready—she was ready—and confident that she knew all these terms when she wasn’t too tired to string words together in a sentence that made sense. However, as Liam had often said, reviewing a little more couldn’t hurt. It wasn’t as though she had anything better to do anyway.

  After a while someone knocked on the door, Lena was so absorbed in what she was reading that she almost jumped, startled. She looked up at the door, and it opened before she could call out an invitation. Alice stepped in and Lena blinked. Her friend and dorm-mate seemed to have grown horns and a tail since she had last seen her at breakfast.

  “You might want to have someone check these,” she said with a quiet snort, pointing at the glowing horns attached to Alice’s head. “Tumors that size have to be malignant.”

  Alice completely ignored her attempt at a joke, her lips not twitching into a smile for a second. Instead, she stared at Lena, looking consternated.

  “You’re not ready,” she commented flatly. “I’m guessing it’s my ears I should have someone check, because I could have sworn I heard you promise you’d be ready at nine.”

  A quick look at the clock on the wall and Lena grimaced and tried to look contrite. She had lost track of time as she studied. Or maybe her subconscious had been all too happy to forget about the Halloween party her friend had tricked her into agreeing to attend. She had a tendency to forget this kind of things ever since Liam…

  Shutting down that line of thought, she offered Alice an apologetic smile. “Sorry?”

  Alice crossed her arms as she frowned. “Sorry isn’t going to cut it this time. Don’t you dare move.”

  With that warning, she walked out, and through the open door, Lena could hear her high heels clicking down the hallway. The sound ceased before it became too faint to hear, then resumed after a few seconds. When Alice reappeared, her smile was ferocious.

  “There,” she said, handing a plastic bag to Lena. “You can wear these. I was going to put them on with the horns but I changed my mind.”

  With some trepidation, Lena pulled out of the bag a bundle of white tulle and glitter. A moment of confusion passed before she recognized what she was holding.

  “Wings?”

  She raised a dumbfounded look toward Alice, who eyed Lena’s jeans and plain white shirt critically.

  “You won’t make the classiest angel, but I guess you can pull it off as long as you smile. Come on, let me put these on you.”

  Lena glanced back at the wings in her hands. She could see that Alice had good intentions, and her friend’s support was the reason why she hadn’t quit the school during those first few weeks after Liam’s disappearance. But good intentions or not, the prospect of dressing up to go to a Halloween party seemed even more silly now than it had every time Alice had mentioned it over the past week.

  “Listen,” she said gently as she stood and folded the wings back in a bundle, “you’re the best for asking me to come along—”

  “The next words out of your mouth had better not be ‘but I’m not coming’,” Alice cut in. “You love Halloween. You’ve always loved Halloween. You’ve made me dress up in ridiculous costumes for three years in a row, there’s no way I’m not returning the favor. Now hurry up and give me those wings. Carlos and his friend are probably waiting for us by now.”

  The casual mention of this ‘friend’ didn’t escape Lena and she tensed, knowing all too well what Alice had in mind. Her eyes flickered toward the bedside table—toward Liam’s picture—in an almost instinctive glance.

  “It’s not a good idea,” she protested again, looking back at Alice. She expected more reproaches and protests, but not the sad smile that tugged at Alice’s lips.

  “You’ve been locked up here for months, Lena. If you’re not in class, you’re at the library or in your room studying. And if you’re not studying, you’re putting up posters and pestering the police. Do you really think he would have wanted you to stop living?”

  They’d had this discussion a dozen times over the past weeks. Alice had supported Lena for months, but like everyone else, she had eventually accepted that Liam wouldn’t return, nor would he be found alive. Everyone accepted as much, save for Lena. She refused to let go of hope. It was the flame that kept her sane, day after day, that allowed her to keep living and keep waiting for Liam.

  However, after hearing Alice repeat it with increasing force as the weeks passed, it was slowly sinking in that what she had been doing, since her fiancé’s disappearance, couldn’t be called ‘living’. At most, she was surviving. Moreover, that wasn’t something Liam would have ever tolerated. He would have glued those wings to her back if needed, and dragged her to the nearest club. He would have made her dance, then smile, then laugh. He would have made her love him even more.

  Without a word, she handed over the wings to Alice and then turned her back toward her. Alice was equally silent as she slipped the translucent straps onto her friend’s arms before tightening them, securing the wings on Lena’s back over her shirt.

  Alice was beaming when Lena turned back toward her.

  “You look lovely.”

  With a murmured word of thanks, Lena stepped over to wher
e she kept her shoes by the door and slipped a pair of sneakers on. She had to force herself to smile when she asked,

  “Are we going, then?”

  When she threw her usual glance at the bedside table before closing the door, Liam’s grin, for a second, seemed a little brighter.

  * * * *

  Lena almost changed her mind about the whole shindig when the car stopped and she stepped out with the others in front of the club. She had never been there before, but one look at the name scrawling in blue neon over the entrance—On The Edge—told her all she needed to know.

  She gave Alice a hard look. “We’re going to a vampire bar?”

  Carlos rolled his eyes at her as he encircled Alice’s waist with his arm.

  “It’s not a vampire bar. It’s just more…friendly to vampires than other places. And tonight, there’ll be more humans in there than vamps anyway.”

  He started pulling Alice toward the entrance, and she looked back at Lena with an encouraging smile.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun. Half the campus ought to be here tonight.”

  Lena was still hesitating when she noticed the fourth member of their little group, Carlos’ friend whose name she had already forgotten.

  “It’s quite safe, really,” he assured her a little shyly.

  Still unconvinced, Lena watched Alice disappear through the entrance. “I’ve heard people were killed by vampires in this bar.”

  “Not in it,” the guy corrected her. “You’ll be safe as long as you stay with—with the group.”

  She could have sworn he had been about to say ‘with me’.

  “And there haven’t been any deaths linked to the club for a while, now,” he added when she kept staring at the glowing sign.

  Its color had now turned to a bright red, and it seemed to bleed over into the crisp darkness of the night. Hardly the best of augurs, a small part of her wanted to comment, and that thought jolted her into action. She was being ridiculous, if she was putting any faith into supposed signs and what they might mean. Liam had often urged her not to look for meaning where she would find only coincidences.

  She started moving so abruptly that the man—was his name Tony? She thought it might have been—needed to take a few quick steps before he caught up with her. He proceeded to walk by her side, offering to buy her a drink only to lead her down the club’s suspended staircases and bridges when she politely declined.

  Lena had heard friends describe the club before, but what she discovered was nothing like what she had imagined. In her mind, a place that openly catered to vampires had to be dreary, with dust, cobwebs, and cold stonewalls illuminated by torches, or maybe candelabras. On The Edge, she soon had to admit, had none of these dubious attributes. Metal staircases gave access to the lower level, the dancing floor, where pulsating lights played over the dancing crowd, following the fast beat of the latest rock hit. The only flagrant difference that Lena could see from other clubs was the conspicuous absence of mirrors anywhere in sight.

  “Would you like to dance?”

  She almost didn’t hear the question, Tony’s voice all but drowned out by the sound of the music, but he leaned closer to her as he finished. He had blue eyes, she noticed, full of hope as Liam’s had once been.

  Her answer was a tiny nod, to which Tony answered with a beaming smile. He took her hand and pulled her after him to the dance floor. Lena got a glimpse of Alice and Carlos in the middle of the crowd, but she lost sight of them too fast to suggest joining them.

  At first, Tony kept her hand in his as they danced. It made Lena uncomfortable, not because they had to look rather ridiculous holding hands when everyone around them was dancing wildly, but rather because she wasn’t used to anyone other than Liam holding her hand. Tony’s hand was too large, too clumsy, too…different.

  Under the pretext of dancing more freely, she liberated her hand and tried to enjoy the music and the atmosphere of sheer enjoyment emanating from the costumed dancers around her, but one song ended, then another, and still Lena kept wondering what she was doing there. Not only that, but she could practically feel someone watching her intently, and combined with her earlier misgivings about the club, she grew increasingly uncomfortable as time passed.

  After she gestured to Tony that she was going back upstairs to the bar, she didn’t know whether to be glad or annoyed that he accompanied her. His presence soothed that little voice screaming of danger; yet, on the other hand, she had little interest in spending time with him and no idea how to tell him without being rude.

  Lena would gladly have sat at the bar, surrounded by other partygoers, some of whom she vaguely recognized from having seen them on campus before. However, Tony led her to one of the private alcoves at the back of the room. Lena slipped into the booth, sliding to the very far end of it and reclining against the back cushion only to realize she would damage her wings if she did that. Annoyed, she sat closer to the table, leaning onto her elbows, which had the unfortunate effects of bringing her closer to Tony.

  A waitress came and took their orders, then returned with tall glasses. Tony started talking, and Lena made the appropriate noises in all the right places. However, the entire time, she paid no real attention to where she was and what was going on around her. Her mind was back in her room, which she shouldn’t have left, and she was mentally reviewing the definitions she would be tested on the following Monday.

  It was no wonder, with Lena being so distracted, that she didn’t see at first the man who slid inside the booth to sit opposite Tony. She only noticed him after her companion had fallen silent. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw him staring intently at her, and for a second Lena told herself that she had to be hallucinating. There was no other explanation. Then the man reached toward her to brush the back of his knuckles against her cheek, and suddenly she could breathe again.

  “Who do you think you are?” she heard, vaguely aware that the upset voice belonged to Tony. “You weren’t—”

  “I’m Lena’s fiancé. And who would you be?”

  Four words sufficed to erase seven months of pain, fear, and anxious waiting. Four words and Lena slid over the cushioned bench to be as close to Liam as she could, and threw her arms around his neck. There would be time, later, for the questions that had haunted her for all these months. Time for answers too, she hoped. Right now, all that mattered was that Liam had returned.

  For long moments, they remained entwined and hugging in the small booth, oblivious to the music and chatter of the club, indifferent to Tony’s huffy departure. Lena had dreamed of this moment many times before. But the tears, laughter, and words she had been sure would spill forth remained at bay, their reunion too intense for her to express in any way other than with her arms around him.

  Eventually, it was her need to see him, to look into his eyes that made her move. She pulled back, and smiling, she brushed her knuckles over his cheek, just as he had done to her a few moments earlier. His skin was as she remembered, smooth despite the tiny prickles of hair, although cooler, paler as though he were recovering from a long illness.

  “I’ve missed you,” she murmured, choking on the words.

  His smile held both pain and apology, but she could also guess his joy through it. “I’m so sorry, Lena. I didn’t want to disappear like that, but I wasn’t given a choice. Finding you here tonight was the best surprise I’ve had in a long time.”

  She waited a few seconds, but he did not explain any further.

  “I looked for you,” she felt necessary to add. “I put flyers all around town, and I kept hoping…”

  Her throat tightened and she couldn’t continue. Liam’s hand rose to cup the back of her head, his fingers weaving through her hair.

  “I know. I saw the flyers. I wanted to call you and tell you I was okay. I was afraid you’d drop out of school…You didn’t, did you?”

  Liam seemed relieved when she shook her head.

  “I’m glad you didn’t. It would have been a terrible wast
e. I can’t follow that path anymore, but you’ll make a fantastic doctor, I know it.”

  Practicing medicine had been Liam’s dream just as much as it had been Lena’s, and she couldn’t understand how he could be so cool, as he talked about letting that dream slip away. Part of her was afraid to ask and finally know why Liam had disappeared months, what he had done, where he had been, but her need to understand was greater than her fear.

  “Why?” she asked, putting all her fears, all her hopes, all her pain in that simple word.

  Liam nodded, as though he had been expecting the question and pulled back from her. Lena wanted to protest the loss of contact, but as she was about to, Liam tugged at the collar of his shirt, exposing two jagged scars at the crook of his neck. Her eyes widening, Lena leaned forward and brushed her fingers against the healed skin. It was cool to her touch, cooler than it ought to have been, and no pulse beat beneath her fingertips.

  Understanding came in a white blaze that made Lena blink and lose her breath. She barely heard Liam’s quiet explanation.

  “I was caught coming back from running. It happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to realize what was going on. It’s only when I woke up in the lair that I understood.”

  Her hand dropped to the seat between them, and she used the support to hold herself upright. She stared at Liam with a different gaze in regards to this new knowledge. This was why he had disappeared without a word. This was why there had been no trace of him. This was what had kept him away.

  Didn’t he know she wouldn’t have cared?

  “What’s it like?” she asked, her voice gentle despite the weight pressing down on her chest that made it hard to breathe.

  Liam’s smile was unlike any he had ever offered her. “It was strange, the first few nights. It was as if I was seeing the world for the first time. I never imagined there was so much I couldn’t see, or hear, or smell…”

  His eyes seemed to lose focus for an instant, and Lena ached a little more. How much had he experienced, in those first nights, in the months since, that he’d never be able to share with her?