“Alexa?”
My eyes went wide and I spun around. Standing in the doorway to the sitting room was Tommy, his eyebrows drawn together in concern. “Who are you talking to?” he asked hesitantly, his sky blue eyes darting around the room.
I sighed. “Myself,” I muttered, looking down at the boots on my feet.
Tommy was silent for a moment, and I peeked up at him through my lashes, embarrassed. “Okay,” he said slowly, “Would you take a walk with me?”
I almost said no, but remembering how I’d felt just a moment ago, when I’d been left all by myself, I nodded. “Okay,” I said.
Tommy smiled then, just one side of his mouth lifting in a ghost of his characteristic smirk. His pale hair was messy like usual. But unlike usual, it didn’t looked like he had spent hours trying to make it that way. I noticed the shadows under his eyes then, the dark circles that said he hadn’t slept well. He was wearing dress pants and a light blue button-up shirt, but he hadn’t bothered to tuck it in like he always did. His hands were shoved into his pockets, his wide shoulders just the slightest bit too tense. He pulled his right hand out of his pocket and held it out to me.
I stepped forward and took his hand, and his fingers were warm and strong in mine. For a moment I thought about what Kayden would think if he were to come in and see us this way, how he would react, but I shoved the thoughts away. Wherever Kayden was, it wasn’t here. I could feel the distance between us the same as I could feel the grip of Tommy’s fingers. I would not run after Kayden, as much as I wanted to. I was too damned tired of running.
“He doesn’t hate you,” said Tommy, as he led me down one of the glass tube hallways connecting the cottages.
I looked up at him, wondering if he had somehow read my thoughts. He tilted his head at me, his mouth still pulled up in that weak version of a smirk. “It’s written all over your face,” he said, pushing a door set into the glass that led to the outside. He held it open for me as I passed through. “It’s just got to be hard for him, you know? Sitting by and watching everything that’s happening and completely helpless to do anything about it.” He paused, closing the door behind him and glancing around at the city before him. “I’ll give him this, he’s remarkably stoic. I’m not sure how I would do if I was in his position, and by his face you wouldn’t even know any of it is affecting him.”
Tommy pulled me forward again and led me down a red dirt path that winded off to the north. The city was the same as it had been before, almost too much to take in. But unlike yesterday, the spectacular sights that it offered did not make me feel a sense of wonder. The Fae people, with their long hair and tattooed wings who stared at us as we passed, slipped by me like the trees beside a highway, barely noticed and of no concern. The Pixie’s that frolicked between the bright flowers blooming along the path were nothing more than butterflies, beautiful, but no longer worth examining.
Sometimes, when I was a little girl, I would dream of a land such as this, wishing that I could be like the heroes in the stories I read, travelling to exotic places and mingling with fabled creatures. I could remember longing for some great quest, wondering if such things were even possible any more.
Now, as I walked the red pathways of the Outlands, my hand clutched in a Vampire’s hand, surrounded by and faced with the very things that had seemed so enchanting on late nights when sleep wouldn’t find me and I’d sat under my covers with a flashlight and a book fantastic of wonders unfolded before me, I thought about how naïve I had been. It was like some sardonic, twisted joke, having been given the things that as a child I’d yearned for, only to find out that the price of admission was too high. Way too high.
“Where are we going?” I asked, suddenly wanting very much just to sit down.
“It’s not much further,” Tommy said.
We continued on down the path, which led off into a line of trees that bordered a row of tiny cottages. Little brown men with pinched faces waddled by, carrying little wooden mallets and other tools to wherever they were going. Tommy took me through the patch of trees, and I stopped when we came to a large blue lake.
I stared at the lake’s surface, not the brown or dark blue water I’d seen in lakes in the human world, but blue; blue like summer skies and tinted crystals and Tommy’s eyes. It shimmered lightly in the sunlight, reflecting the suns glow like millions of diamonds tossed into the air just above its surface. Red maples dotted the lakes perimeter, their scarlet leaves drifting lazily down to the water and floating there, like drops of blood on a blue plate. The shore was a pale white mixture of sand and something like dirt, but not quite.
“Pretty, right?” Tommy asked.
I looked up at him in surprise. I had forgotten he was even there, though his hand still held mine. “Yes,” I said. “It’s beautiful. Is there a giant demon under its surface that comes out at night and devours small children?”
This made Tommy laugh. “Um, I don’t think so. What would make you think that?”
I shrugged and sank down to the sandy ground, crossing my legs underneath me. After a moment of eyeing his clothes, Tommy sat down beside me. “I guess,” I said, “because the more beautiful something is in this messed up world, the more dangerous and deadly it usually turns out to be.”
The humor had left Tommy’s tone. He spoke now with the grave voice of a tortured soul. “I think you made the right choice,” he said.
I looked over at him, my eyes wide and my mouth hanging agape. I struggled with the words that seemed to be stuck in my throat, fought against the sudden burning of unshed tears in my eyes. “How could you think that, Tommy?” I asked, my head bent forward, my eyes studying the scars on my small hands. “Knowing everything you know, how could you think that?”
Tommy’s arm went around my shoulder, and on its own my head rested there. His words blew out on a deep sigh. “Because I know that doing the right thing isn’t always easy. Sometimes, I think you have to do the wrong thing, because it is the only choice you have left that you can live with.”
I tilted my head up to look at him. He was staring out over the lake as if looking at something very far away. His forearms rested on his raised knees, his hands, the hands of a fighter, scarred and discolored from past injuries, dangled at the ends of them. I rubbed my face against the soft fabric of his shirt, as if drying the tears that hadn’t fallen from my eyes. “That sounds just like something my sister said to me once,” I said. “A long time ago.”
Tommy peered down at me through thick, fair lashes. “What happened?”
Now I was staring out over the water, remembering that long ago day. “We had this dog. Well, it wasn’t our dog. My Mother never really let us keep any pets because we moved around so much, but when I was about ten years old, I think, we lived in this small town in Kansas, out on a rural country road in the middle of nowhere. There was this dog that would come by the house sometimes. Nelly would feed it and we would play with it out in the yard when we didn’t think our Mother was watching.” I paused for a moment, the memory somehow more painful now than it had ever been. “It got sick. Rabies, I think. It went after Nelly. I killed it. It was one of the first lives I ever took.”
“Well, that’s not so bad,” Tommy said. “You were just protecting your sister.”
“Yeah, but me killing the poor animal wasn’t really what Nelly was talking about when she said sometimes we have to do bad things. She was talking about the way I killed it. She knew, even back then, what I was. She knew I enjoyed it. That I would do it again and again. She always knew. It was like her way of preparing me. Giving me a…a license to kill, permission to go about my nature.”
Tommy said nothing to this, and the only sounds were bugs skimming over the surface of the lake and the swish of the red maples’ branches swaying in the wind. I felt the words tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop them. “And she still loved me,” I said. “When I knew nothing else, when I hated myself for the horrible things I would think about doing, Nelly still
loved me. She…she saw goodness in me, I think. Even with all the darkness, Nelly made me believe that there was some part of me that was really, truly good.”
Now a single tear sprung from my eye, and I made no attempt to wipe it away. I could feel that it was the last tear I had left in me, maybe the last tear I would ever cry, and I tried to memorize the feel of it rolling down my cheek. It reached Tommy’s shirt and dried up there. As if he felt it through the fabric of his shirt, his hand came up and stroked the braid in my hair.
“Oh, Alexa,” he sighed. I smiled a little despite my mood. It was nice to have someone call me by my name. “I know you don’t want to believe me, but I don’t think all is lost. I think Nelly is just trapped inside herself right now, and she just needs you. The same way you’ve always needed her.”
I lifted my head from his shoulder, something finally occurring to me when it already should have. I’d been too worried about my own situation to pay much attention to the positions the others were in, just like I hadn’t remembered Patterson’s relationship with my Mother until after she died. This made me feel like a crappy friend, but among everything else I was feeling, it was the slightest of the sorrows. “Tommy, what do you think is going to happen with your father when he finds out you left?”
Tommy’s shoulders lifted, and I could tell that this was a question he had been asking himself for a while. “I don’t know what he’ll do,” he said. “He’s loyal to King William. He always has been. I imagine he won’t be too pleased with me.”
I put my hand over his. “I’m so sorry, Tommy.”
He smirked, but there was no humor in it. “Don’t be. He’s always been radical, an elitist. He really does believe that Vampires are better than all the other races. He’s been trying to drill that into me since I was a child, and when I was younger, I actually believed him.” His head tilted, making his pale hair fall to the side. “Maybe I still kind of do, but I don’t realize it. That’s why I always walk around acting like I’m better than everyone else.”
I shook my head. “That’s not true. You don’t act like that.”
Tommy looked over at me for the first time since we’d sat down. The blue in his eyes was shimmering slightly with the hurt of a thousand years, though I knew Tommy was just eighteen. My age, just barely not a child. “Not to you, maybe,” he said. “But then, I’m different with you than I am with other people. Most people I meet don’t even enter my radar.”
“But Nelly did,” I said quietly.
At this Tommy smiled, a full smile, not the crooked smirk he always wore, but a real one. “Yeah, she did. Which is why I don’t want you to be sorry, and I don’t want you to beat yourself up about the decision you made back there. I know how special she is. I…I get it.” Tommy punched me playfully on the arm. “I would have been pissed if you’d decided otherwise.”
I stared at him. “What you said before, about loving Nelly, you meant it didn’t you?”
Tommy nodded once. “Yeah, as crazy as it sounds I think all of us that she touched love her. I don’t think it would be possible not to. We were all open to each other when she took us, and she was open to us as well. I could feel the power and strength and goodness in her, and I could see that the more she used it, the further she was slipping away. It…hurt, Alexa. It hurt worse than any kick to the ribs or stake to the heart. And I wanted to help her. We all did, but there was nothing we could do, and that hurt even more.”
I gripped Tommy’s hands then, staring desperately into his eyes, my chest rising and falling. “Just tell me that it’s okay, Tommy,” I said, and my voice cracked. “Tell me it’s okay to risk everything, everyone just for a chance at saving her. Tell me you can see the good in it, in me. Please.”
Tommy brushed his fingers along the side of my face, and I closed my eyes. “I can see the good, Alexa,” he said. “I always have. You’re the one that needs to see it.”
Alexa
Tommy walked me back to Silvia’s cottage after that. We didn’t say much else along the way, but I had to admit that I felt a little better, if only marginally. I noticed more people staring at me than I had on the walk to the lake, whispering in each other’s ears as I passed by, shooting glances at me and the silver that crawled up my right arm. I kept my chin up and pretended not to notice them, but I wondered if I would ever get used to be stared at everywhere I went. Probably not.
Tommy gave me a long hug before parting to go to his room, and I hesitated with my hand on the doorknob of the room Kayden and I were sharing, wondering if he was waiting for me on the other side. I pushed the door open and went inside.
He wasn’t here. I went over to the bed and sat down on the soft comforter. My hand touched something and I looked down to see that someone had washed my old clothes and left them in neat pile on the bed. Next to them was a small brown book with a blue satin ribbon tied in a bow around it. Tucked under the ribbon was a note. I lifted the book.
To occupy your mind. ~S
Great, now Sasha was leaving me gifts. I sighed and tossed the book aside, flopping back on the bed so that I was staring up at the painted flowers on the ceiling, feeling nothing. I wondered where Kayden was and considered the possibility that he might very well have had enough of me, that he may have decided that the cost of being close to me were too high, too hard. I thought about this and I just laid there and stared at the ceiling, blinking my dry eyes.
It doesn’t matter, does it? It doesn’t matter so much to you anymore, Warrior. That’s all. This feeling of emptiness in your gut is a trick of the mind, an illusion. We have a purpose. You’ve made a choice. Stick by it. Live with it. Make peace.
“And now you’re a guru or something? I have made peace. I’m not crying right now. I don’t even want to cry right now. And if there was ever to time to cry, it is right now. I’m fine. I’m starting to think that making peace and feeling nothing is the same thing.”
Silence, then: Ah well, now that is one of the most depressing things that has ever passed through your mind, Warrior. Just sad.
I crawled up the bed and pulled back the covers, thinking that sleeping right now beat the shit out of arguing with the voice in my head. I was just pulling the covers up over my shoulders when a knock sounded on the door. I cursed and got up.
No rest for the weary.
I rolled my eyes and strode over to the door. I could feel a little anger rising in me at whoever was disturbing me. I just wanted to go to sleep. And if it was Kayden, he wouldn’t have knocked. So whoever else it could be was almost certainly someone whom I didn’t wish to speak with or even see. I threw the door open, my hand going to my hip.
Then it dropped back down to my side, and a small smile found my lips. A real smile. It was Soraya. Catherine stood behind her with her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “I hope we aren’t disturbing you,” Catherine said. “Soraya kept insisting on seeing you though, so do you have a minute?”
I stepped back, letting them into the room. “Of course I have a minute. I always have a minute for Soraya.”
This made a huge smile set slightly crooked by a harelip light up Soraya’s adorable little face. Her hair was pulled up into two dark curly pigtails, and she wore a yellow sundress printed with white flowers and white sandals on her little feet. She looked like an entirely different girl now, and I realized with a twist in my calloused heart that she had never had her basic needs taken care of so completely in her life. She’d showered, combed out her hair, had a few full meals, and she was just as beautiful as ever, only less feral-looking. But, these things couldn’t have so easily wiped away all of the evidence of Soraya’s past. The deep blue bruises on the tops of her hands and in the crooks of her elbows, where the King had slowly been milking her of all her blood, stood out like black eyes.
Now I felt something. Now I felt like shit. I hoped my Monster was happy. Catherine took a seat in the chair over by the window and Soraya came and sat next to me on the bed. I ran my hand over her hair. “You look beautifu
l,” I said. “Like a little princess.”
Soraya’s nose scrunched up. “I know. I didn’t pick this dress, that girl Sasha gave it to me. I don’t know what she was thinking.”
I couldn’t help a laugh. “But it really is very pretty on you.”
She smiled again. “Thanks, but I don’t see you walking around in that silver thing I saw she picked out for you.”
It felt strange to be having such a normal conversation with someone; nice, even if that someone was a seven-year-old little girl. I shrugged. “I don’t think that it’s ugly. Just not my style. I’m not big on dresses. They make me feel stupid.”
Soraya gave me a very adult look, like I was dense. “My point exactly.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Too smart for your own good you know that?”
She nodded, her pigtails swinging about her face. “Yes, but it’s better than being too stupid for my own good.”
I laughed at that, and I could tell that Catherine was hiding a smile too, but she said, “Alexa is probably tired right now, sweetheart. Tell her what you came to tell her.”
The Rise (The Alexa Montgomery Saga) Page 17