Our eyes met, and we were saved from a sappy outburst of emotion when I stiffened with alarm, registering the arcing power signatures from Octavian and Gisele as they entered the restaurant. They had done an excellent job of cloaking their arrival, and my preoccupation with Alicia had helped. My shield went up automatically, cloaking both our minds, and Alicia felt it.
“What is it?” she asked, adrenaline flooding her system at my reaction.
“Gisele,” I replied in a whisper, the tendons in my neck cording and bunching as I strived to keep my head from whipping around to look for the visitors. From out of nowhere, a secretly harbored thought bubbled to the surface of my mind like a three-day-old floater. It smelled as bad, too.
Even without a foray into Gisele’s mind, I knew the purpose of their visit; I had absolutely no doubt. Gisele had played the Octavian card, and he was happily dancing along to her fucked-up tune. A sharp, jagged blade of jealously sliced my guts with a whisper, and the only thing that stopped me from jamming Octavian into the vase centerpiece on the table was the fact that this was partially my fault.
“What?” Alicia gasped.
I felt them approach and forced my body to relax. It reluctantly obeyed, and I was grateful. The most important goal of this encounter was now to take as much satisfaction away from Gisele as possible. It would be nice if I could also get Octavian to realize what a fool he was being, but that was probably too tall an order. “No matter what, play it cool. You’re not surprised or bothered by their arrival. Be casual and invite them to join us when the moment presents itself.”
THEM, her mind gasped even as she forced herself to follow my instructions. A lifetime of acting fine despite being scared out of her wits aided her, and her faith in me did the rest. In this particular situation, the latter might have been misplaced.
Looking through Alicia’s eyes, I saw Gisele and Octavian approach. Octavian looked guilty, and Gisele appeared contrite, but her eyes flashed with a smugness that made me wonder if I had been too quick to dismiss my ability to kill her.
“Hello, Gisele,” I stated calmly, a small smile on my face. “Octavian.” Alicia smiled warmly as well. Moments later, Gisele passed into my field of vision, Octavian in tow like a puppy. Alicia’s reaction threw Gisele; she had expected me to hide my shock, but not the token mortal. I could feel her gentle probing at the wall of my shield; she was focused, but she had no hope of penetrating it.
“We apologize for the interruption, but we needed to speak with you,” Gisele said through her teeth, further irritated by her inability to control the anger that flared at our calm response to her intrusion. I resisted the urge to slap her extended psyche like a man who had just whispered the wrong name to the wrong woman at the wrong time.
“You should’ve called first,” I chastened, my tone light as my eyes speared hers. I’m not sure what made me choose to call her out, but Gisele’s reaction proved it wise.
“Jason!” Alicia gasped, falling into the routine she knew was expected of her. “I apologize, Gisele. I think he wanted me all to himself tonight, but we can’t always get what we want, can we?” she asked airily, an apathetic shrug making the comment appear benign despite the fact that it had been an intentional and impressive bullet to Gisele’s already-wounded heart. I had to work to stifle a smile at her boldness. “Would you care to join us?” she asked sweetly, gesturing expansively with her hands.
Gisele wanted to murder her; I could feel the flames of her rage licking at my skin. She was mightily pissed, and I was pleased as punch. So far, the encounter was going in my favor.
Uncharacteristically diplomatic, Octavian took in all the reactions and tried to smooth out the bumps. “Thank you,” he replied, pulling out the nearest chair for Gisele. Gisele looked at him as if he was offering her a hemlock cocktail, and when he did not relent, she sat down woodenly as if this universe and everything in it no longer made any sense to her.
Smiling warily and watching Gisele closely, Octavian rounded the table and took the last free chair. We sat there for several moments, each surveying the others for intent, state of mind and determination. The sommelier returned with the wine before any of us spoke. He looked at me, silently seeking permission to bring more glasses. I nodded once, and he made a slight gesture to someone else. Two fresh glasses were shuttled in and put in front of Octavian and Gisele as the sommelier opened the bottle in his hands and set it on the table to breathe.
When he was gone, I watched the silent communication between Gisele and Octavian. He was pleading and she was balking, still extraordinarily angry. Alicia looked back and forth between the two of them, waiting for one of them to state their purpose for coming, but neither seemed quite ready to do that yet. She nervously twisted the napkin in her lap, realized what she was doing, and then decided to speak.
“So, aside from allowing us the pleasure of your company, what brings you to Seattle?”
Gisele’s mouth fell open; she was too stunned to get any angrier, and Octavian gaped too, his eyes flickering comically among the three of us. I chuckled rather loudly - actually, it might have been a snicker - successfully drawing Gisele’s animosity away from Alicia. Octavian regarded me with a look reserved for the clinically insane, and maybe I was.
Before I could say any more, the sommelier returned, and four pairs of eyes acknowledged his presence immediately, which he took as prompting to continue. He lifted my glass, and I shook my head, pointing to Alicia. Nodding his head once in an apologetic half-bow, he repositioned himself next to her and poured a generous amount into her glass. Alicia placed her fingers on the base of the wineglass, pinning it to the table and stirring the contents with what appeared to be practiced movements but was really just a wonderful way to work off some nervous energy.
The scent of the wine unfolded as it tumbled around the glass. She lifted the glass to her nose, smelling deeply and then sampled. She did not pretentiously swirl it about her mouth like mouthwash, instead simply holding it in and working it around casually with her tongue. I found myself unable to tear my eyes away.
When she swallowed, her brow furrowed in judgment. When she smiled and nodded, the sommelier offered a small smile of approval and proceeded to fill the rest of the glasses, starting with Gisele and ending with Alicia. When all the glasses were full, the sommelier set the bottle on the wine tray and all but vanished.
Alicia raised her glass. “To leaving this restaurant alive,” she toasted, her voice bearing the slightest hint of a tremor from wondering if she had just crossed the line. I could hear the imaginary sound of Gisele’s and Octavian’s jaws hitting the table at the same time.
Seizing the opportunity, I put my hand across the rim of my glass and fixed both Ancients with a searing glance. “You should both consider drinking to that.”
Hello, sand. It's just me drawing lines.
Gisele flinched as if I had just taken off a glove and slapped her, her anger choking on the fear that flooded her delicate features. While it sputtered, regret jumped into the fray, and I saw sanity flash behind her eyes for the briefest of moments before anger recovered and neatly beheaded them both. I felt a short, sweet stab of elation that died with a whimper as realization struck me hard: this was going to get bloody, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
The question was: how bloody?
Octavian had already raised his glass by the time I turned my attention to him; he was now beyond regret. He had boarded this train willingly, and he accepted with equanimity that he was along for the ride until it chose to let him off. That had pretty much been the story of his life since awakening from his prolonged Slumber, so he had ample practice at accepting events over which he had no control. I admired the fact that he took responsibility for his actions.
Gisele looked back and forth between the two of us, her glare the unlikely union of quiet fury and dismay. At length, her hand moved to grasp her glass, and her expression said that she was watching the whole thing from outside herself,
her limb moving entirely on its own.
They say that self-preservation is the strongest instinct in mortals, and my personal experience agrees. In revenants, however, it always falls well short of the BloodHunger, and often pride outranks it as well, so it was a trip to see Gisele’s subconscious assign it top priority.
Even Alicia recognized the gravity of Gisele’s capitulation; instead of shrugging off my threat or matching it with one of her own, she directly acknowledged it, indicating a tacit understanding that it was real. That she showed such vulnerability in front of a mortal was shocking enough; that it was a mortal she despised gave me a glimpse into her mind that I wasn’t ready to deal with.
It was difficult to pin down how I felt as she jerkily brought her glass to her lips and drained it with one swallow, but I can tell you that it was not triumphant. Octavian followed her lead, his eyes locked onto her face over the rim of his glass. I could feel him willing her all of his strength, and out of left field, I felt glad that someone was on her side through this. The road she had chosen was a lonely one, lined on both sides with fear, uncertainty and doubt, and suddenly, I did not want her to walk it alone.
It was my first pure desire for Gisele in so long that it startled me. Hmmm, that's sort of like saying Little Boy startled Hiroshima. And by pure, I mean completely divorced from the goal of furthering any of my own desires, wants or needs: something that ran so contrary to my own interests that only love could have inspired it.
Real love. Not quite the kind that agrees to take a flogging, a crown of thorns and three nails, but it was as close as we could ever get. Only a love like that could possibly endure the lunacy of being what I am.
Something inside me broke, or maybe it mended. The entire world shrank down to the head of a pin that was quickly boring through my skull. A mushrooming fireball in my head incinerated every thought before it had a chance to form. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything except get bowled over by my expanding consciousness. Surely this was the only heaven my kind could ever reach, the kind of enlightenment Buddha could never have fathomed.
I felt myself leaping up from my chair, knocking it over backward, prepared to throw myself at Gisele’s feet and beg her forgiveness. To rain her with kisses and make her feel every ounce of my love while I attempted to share this wondrous new knowledge with her. I could see the three of them staring at me as if I had truly lost my mind, and a jumble of overlapping thoughts finally pierced the veil of enlightenment. Save for one, they were all ways for me to make Gisele understand the totality of what had just fallen upon me.
It was a shout. It was trumpets. It was singing. It was blinding light. It was speeding down miles of joy highway in a German work of art with the top down. It was sublime. It was intense.
It. Was. All.
But most of all, it was fleeting. Eventually, my mind processed the single, discordant thought, and my enlightenment gasped its last breath. With a silent wailing of anguish, all that liquid joy slipped through my fingers so quickly that it felt as if it had never been real at all.
What I had found could not be shared. It was not a place that could be fed into MapQuest.com. I could not pass it out like candy to all my friends or take Gisele’s hand and pull her into it with me. If she could not find it on her own, she could not join me, and that realization put me face-to-face with the cosmic irony of the universe: if she couldn’t be there with me, it no longer mattered that I had found it myself.
I can’t describe the agony of losing it, but it consumed me utterly until I barely had even the memory of what my brief moment of transcendence felt like, never mind what it entailed. It was a dark, yawning void, an abysmal chasm of mind-numbing size and depth that swallowed whole every trace that something beautiful had once filled it.
Said irony had also painted me into a corner; giving in to Gisele was no longer an option. Without real understanding, she would think that her conclusions were correct, that my surrender was the result of her misguided actions instead of my new understanding of my own heart. She would finally convince herself that she knew how to love, that she had finally managed to teach me, and because of that, she would never surrender herself.
Even worse, by thinking she had all the correct answers on this subject, she would forever lose her chance to actually find them.
My only remaining option was to keep playing this demented game and hope beyond all reason that she found the right answers before our love gasped its final breath...
Or she did.
The world whooshed back as my breath rushed out, and I noticed that, in addition to my three tablemates, quite a number of people were now staring at me. Gisele regarded me with a triumphant expression, so sure that she was reading me correctly. Poor Gisele, perpetually one moment behind the times. By stopping to savor her victory, she failed to notice that the game had changed.
Alicia was holding her breath. Because I shielded both of our minds, our thoughts should have been meshed. She should have shared all that had just happened to me, from the highest high to the lowest low, but in some kind of bizarre preservation of universal secrets, my shield had separated into two distinct parts during it all, an impossible psychic feat. In order for one mind to shield another, both must merge into a single, common thought stream, but I could no longer hear her thoughts or feel the weight of her consciousness.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around it (pun intended), no doubt because I was back to being my old, stupid self. Apparently, understanding divided consciousness is only for the gods...
By the way, that was a figure of speech. I have never actually thought I was a god. I know that I sometimes talk and act like I do, but deep down, I know better. A god wouldn’t be this fucked up.
Thanks to the Code of Enlightenment, Alicia had absolutely no idea what was going on in my head, and what she knew about shielding told her that something was clearly wrong. While she attempted to sort through the paradox, I marveled for a moment at my split shield before fixing my gaze on Gisele. She was about to say something, but I beat her to it. I couldn’t keep the hollowness inside from seeping into my words.
“I know why you’re here, Gisele, but I wonder, does Octavian?” Gisele’s triumphant expression melted away, replaced by apprehension as she wondered where I was going with this.
“We’re here because it’s right that you hear this from us. We owe you that,” Octavian answered immediately, his voice starting out convicted, but a glance at Gisele’s expression put a sizeable dent in it.
“No, Octavian. That’s why you are here. Gisele-”
“Jason,” Gisele interrupted, her voice low and full of warning. And fear. She had come here to draw the line, to throw down the gauntlet, and she wasn’t prepared for me to do it first.
I floated Gisele a lazy look, pointedly ignoring her interruption and continuing. “Gisele is here to cut a deal.”
Eyes flaring, Gisele shot to her feet. She put her hands on the table so swiftly that everything on it rattled. She was about to rip into me when Octavian’s quiet question silenced her. “What kind of deal?” Stunned, Gisele turned her attention to Octavian, but he wouldn’t look at her.
“Gisele seduced you into sedition, and you went willingly, despite your recent oath to me. She thinks she understands both the significance of that and how I’ll feel about it, but she’s mistaken on both counts.” Octavian snapped his attention to Gisele just in time to see her fix her incredulity on me. “All it means to me is that she’s cunning, which I’ve always known, and that you’re a fool... again, no surprise. Not a fool for standing against me, but a fool for thinking you’ve won her heart. Gisele doesn’t listen to her heart, so she has no control over it; she certainly couldn’t have given it to you.”
Gisele opened her mouth to interrupt, but I held up a hand. “Close your mouth!” I growled, making everyone flinch. “You started this, and now you’re gonna let me speak.” Her mouth closed with an audible sound, and she sat woodenly into her
chair. Anger slowly drained from her features, replaced by sadness.
I returned my attention to Octavian. “Do you really think she loves you? Did you even bother to question the timing? To examine her motivation? She’s had more than five thousand years to figure out how she feels about you, and more than two hundred to act on it. Why now?”
I watched each word impact on Octavian like a depth charge, and I got a grim satisfaction from it. If my love for Gisele was about to perish, it was only fitting that his should as well.
“She used you, Octavian, quite skillfully, and it would’ve been perfect if I didn’t know her so well. I know she doesn’t love you, which is why I don’t care if you pounded her into a sarcophagus yesterday. She can’t win anyone else like that, and she’d have a hard time doing it any other way, so I don’t care if she tries.” I paused for effect, taking a sip of my wine, allowing the bitter taste to mingle with the bitterness churning within. “And I don’t care if you take her from me. It’d be a fitting punishment for your foolishness to spend eternity with someone who doesn’t really love you. Better you than me.”
Gisele stood once more, Blood tears in her eyes. They were real, but the words she used to back them were not. “I came here because I thought I owed you the courtesy, but your cruel words have made me realize that I owe you nothing, least of all my loyalty. I am beginning to wonder if you even deserved the effort.”
Ohh bravo; she deserved an Oscar for that one. I felt like applauding, but instead I calmly replied, “I haven’t deserved a lot of things that have happened to me, Gisele. I’m getting used to it.” I looked briefly at Alicia, who was doing a good job of keeping her expression neutral.
“Come, Octavian. We are finished here,” Gisele said, turning and stalking from the table.
“No,” he whispered, the pain in his voice inducing my sympathy. His words brought her to an immediate halt. She whirled around, fury building quickly.
“What?”
He regarded her oddly, a distant look of resignation. “I said, ‘No.’ Where you’re going, I can’t follow.”
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