by A. M. Hudson
I didn’t smile back. It was so very good to see him, but when my feet were planted to this stage, in front of hundreds of people from my community, I had to be their queen—I, essentially, had no friends.
I moved my stern gaze away from Eric, all the way across the crowd to Walt’s very surprised face. “Next case, Walter.”
He cleared his throat. “Uh, yes, Your Majesty. Case number fifty-five. Harrison versus Yeardley.”
Above the court, David looked down on all the people, nodding toward me once before slinking back into the shadows. But I heard his voice enter my thoughts, distracting me a little from court as he disappeared, Good job, he said. I’m proud of you.
I smiled at my feet then turned my focus back to the case report.
“Ara.” Eric threw his arms around me.
I hugged him back fiercely. “It’s so good to see you again. How have you been?”
“I’m good, yeah.” He leaned out from the hug. “Band’s doing well. Just released our first album and, well, I’ll have to tell the public that Lice is in rehab or something for the next seven days but, yeah, we’re all good.”
“I feel bad for you, Eric. I know Adri—I mean, Lice, is a friend—”
“No.” He stepped back to stuff his hands in his pockets. “Say no more. He knew the rules.”
I nodded. “And I’m sorry you had to kill that girl.”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? Ara, I’m a vamp—”
“Yeah.” I palmed my head. “Right. I forget you don’t mind a bit of homicide.”
His easy smile brought me back to my hometown for a moment, flooding me with memories. “S’good to see ya again, kiddo.”
“You too, Eric. I missed you.”
He went to speak, but stopped, looking up as David approached. “Hey, man.”
“Hey.” David hugged him, and they both broke into a series of manly back pats. “Long time, man.”
“Yeah.” Eric stood back, allowing room for David to stand beside me. “It’s been a good run. How you been?”
David shrugged. “Been better.”
“Yeah. Tough break, man. I heard about the Dagger.”
David nodded, but quickly pasted a smile in place. “You stayin’ for dinner?”
Eric grinned, looking at me. “Depends what’s on the menu.”
David laughed, wrapping his elbow over Eric’s neck as we walked out of the Throne Room. “We both know what will happen if you ever taste my wife’s blood.”
“Worth the risk,” Eric said.
“On the bright side,” I cut in. “It might just be a way to resurrect you from the dead, David.”
***
“Hey, kiddo.” Eric landed in a lazy heap on the leather sofa next to me, making it squeak with protest, the sound echoing through the library.
“Hey, Eric.”
His cheeky grin spread across his face like a wild party, promising exciting things if only I let myself go with him. “What y’up to?”
“Reading.” I tucked my legs up to one side, leaning more on the arm of the sofa to angle away from him. “And you’re too close for my husband’s liking.”
His smile grew. I didn’t see it, but I felt it. “He’s not here to protest.”
I shut my book. Clearly, Eric was out for some fun tonight or, at the very least, some fun company. “Can’t sleep?”
He shrugged, his shoulders looking kind of bony in that plain back tee. “Haven’t seen ya in ages. Just wanted to catch up without the ‘fold’ around.”
“By fold, you mean. . .?”
“The followers.” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “The many who love and protect their queen. Most of all, that power-hungry vampire you call a king.”
“Hey.” I backhanded his arm. “That’s my husband you’re talking about.”
“Really?” He sat back, resting his hands in his lap. “Coulda fooled me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean. . .” He leaned on my thigh to push himself up, then wandered across the room to pore aimlessly over book spines. “He’s changed, Ara.”
“So everyone keeps saying,” I said flatly, dumping my book on the end table. “He’s just under a lot of pressure.”
“So you keep saying.” He waited a few seconds, then turned at the shoulder to flash me a grin. “So . . . what you readin’?”
“Oh, um.” I reached across and laid my notepad over the title of the book. “Just researching.”
“Researching,” he said slowly, as if drawing out the word would prompt an explanation from me.
“Stuff.”
“Stuff, huh?” His whole body bounced with his casual nod. “Aide-Memoire de l’Auress.”
“Hey!” I stood up and grabbed my book from his sudden thieving paws, shoving his chest after.
He took a few steps back, kind of stumbling from the force, and jammed his hands in his pockets, laughing. “Don’t try to hide things from a guy two-times faster than you.”
“You had no right to do that.” I put the book back down on the table he’d stolen it from.
“Then don’t lie to me.” He stepped back into my circle of fury. “Why are you reading that? What happened here while I was gone?”
I pressed my hip distractedly. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” he said, suddenly beside me again, but this time lifting my top.
I yanked it back down. “Get off.”
“What happened to your skin?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing, Ara. Come on.” He held both hands out, palms raised. “Talk to me. You know I got your back, kiddo.”
My lip quivered for a second before I drew back the grief and replaced it with fighting strength. “It happened after the lighthouse.”
“The lighthouse?” He followed me to where I sat back on the sofa. “After you fell?”
I nodded. “But Petey says it’s a Mark of Betrayal.”
“Betrayal?” He almost slipped off the seat. “What the hell’d you do, girl?”
“I’m not sure. I . . . I don’t remember.”
“Cah!” He scoffed, flipping his hair back with one hand. “Convenient.”
“I really don’t, Eric. I’m not lying.”
His head turned very slowly until his foggy brown eyes met mine; he searched inside my soul for a moment then looked away. “Do you suspect foul play?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you told David you think it’s a Mark of . . . Betrayal?”
“He thinks it’s a rash. He hasn’t seen it since it went dark and took on the shape of letters.”
“So, you haven’t had sex with him?” he asked playfully.
I wasn’t sure if I should answer. “Last time we did, the rash wasn’t as bad but . . . after I woke up the next morning, it was searing hot and the symbols had taken on real shape.”
“So, what, making love to your husband makes the rash worse?” he suggested as well as asked. “Maybe you’re allergic to him.”
“Ha-ha.” I reached over and flicked his earlobe. “Funny.”
He sat back, exhaling rather loudly for the quiet space we were in, then lopped his arm over the back of the sofa and around my shoulders. “Forget reading for tonight. You can investigate memory loss and icky rashes all day tomorrow. But you’ve only got me for one night.”
“And what do you suggest we do?” I sat up and removed his arm from my body.
“Jog your memory.” His lips angled into that sharp grin I loved.
“How will we do that?”
“Go jump off a lighthouse.”
I held my awkward smile, not sure if he was kidding or not, shaping it into a frown when he stood up and offered me his hand.
“Come on,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe if we sit up there and watch the sun rise for a bit, you might remember something.”
“Okay.” I took his hand and stood. “But Quaid’s coming with us.”
“Quai
d?” He looked over his shoulder. “Why him?”
“He’s my night guard. I take him everywhere.”
Eric’s brows shot up to his hairline. “Wow. Things have changed around here.”
***
“I’ve missed this place,” Eric said, dangling his legs over the platform and into the abyss below.
I sat down beside him, hugging the railing with both my arm and my chin. “So, if you miss it so much, why not come back to us?”
“I can’t. I finally have a life, Ara.”
“You had a life here.”
“I had a job here, following you around and offering advice. No offence.” He bumped me with his elbow. “I got better things to do with my eternity.”
“Fair enough,” I said, casting my attention then on the yellow glow reaching out to sea from behind us, lighting up my hands and making eerie shadows of the rocks below each time it passed. The fierce wind roared up here, whipped past the metal railing, shaking everything that wasn’t made of iron, while the sea called beneath us—hundreds of meters down where it bashed the rocks in some angry attempt to prove greater might than the land. My hair moved around my face in a wild dance, strapping my eyes every few seconds, leaving them kind of teary with the sting.
“I love the way the ocean smells when it’s late at night,” Eric said.
“Mm.” I smiled, watching the dark sky with almost new eyes. “I think the glow of the stars gives it an almost richer, more dreamy flavour.”
“God, girl. Don’t go all poetic on me.” He reached into his pocket. “The king might have cause to worry ‘bout your intentions.”
“What, between you and I?” I scoffed. “In your dreams.”
He just smirked, looking out to sea again, tapping a small, silver case about the size of a card deck against his leg. “I sat in on a class today.”
“Class?”
“Yeah. Down at the barracks.” He flipped the case open and offered me the contents. I declined with a scrunched-up nose. “Mike’s got some pretty good stuff goin’ on down there.”
“I know. I came to sit in on the ‘How to Kill a Vampire Without Venom’ and ‘Putting a Vamp Down in Three-Seconds’ lectures last month.”
“Blade was giving that one today—to the newbs.” He lit a smoke, cupping his hand around it so the flame wouldn’t blow out in the wind, then shook the match and dropped it over the edge. “They’ve got this one move, where they jam a dagger into the back of the neck—” He used the two fingers holding the smoke to make a line over the top of his spine, “—slip it between the third and fourth vertebrae or something,” he said suggestively.
“Yeah, severs the spinal cord and sends them down fast. Takes at least a day to rejuvenate.”
“Unless you’re Lilithian.”
“In which case, you die.”
He drew on his cigarette, puffing the fumes out with “And the guns are new.”
I laughed, thinking about Mike’s face when he first opened the crates. “The bullets are spiked, you know? Some with Created and some with Pureblood venom.”
“I know. Mike gave me one—a gun.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Just the Created venom, though. Told me to watch out for Drake. Said it was standard issue now—all guards and knights keep one on their sword belts.”
I nodded. “They all keep a syringe handy, too—just in case they need to arrest someone that puts up a fight.”
“I know.” He took a puff of that smoke again and blew it out. “They took Lice down with it today.”
“Did they?”
“Yeah. Once they got him around the corner, they jammed it in his neck.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“S’okay.” He moved his shoulder up. “He was puttin’ up a bit of a fight.”
“I would have, too.”
He laughed then, nodding. “Yeah.”
“So, did Mike show you how to shoot a vampire? ‘Cause those bullets won’t go through bone.”
“Yeah.” He flicked his cigarette bud over the edge and the little flickering orange glow burned its way out of sight. “He said to aim for the eye—that the bullet bounces off the skull of a vampire and stays inside, just jumpin’ around.” He tapped his head. “Mashing up the brain.”
I nodded. “Yup. Or go for the belly.” I made a gun-like motion to my own belly. “Balls work well, too.”
“Ha! I bet.” He leaned forward and stuffed his smoke case in his back pocket. “So, do you get a gun?”
“Nah. I have a sword, but I don’t walk around with it on me.”
“Why not? King does.”
I thought about how sexy David looked with that sword hanging down by his leg, all tall and strong and stern, kinda like an eighteenth-century prince. “I have a dozen or so guards that carry swords. I don’t need it.”
“Fairs enough.”
I smiled, resting my chin on the railing. The night seemed to have worn on to morning across the far horizon too quickly, leaving the ocean with an almost red glow as far out as the eye could see. “Sailor’s warning,” I said, nodding toward it.
“Huh?”
“The red sky. They say that if it’s red at night, it’s a sailor’s delight—”
“Right.” He nodded. “Red sky in morning, a sailor’s warning.”
“You’ve heard that one before?”
“Kiddo, I was in the Navy for a decade.”
“What Navy?”
He looked slowly away. “It was a long time ago.”
“When you were human?”
“Yeah,” he said, his shoulders sinking a little.
“Do you miss being human?”
His lips moved quickly into that coy grin, making his eyes light up. “Not even a little bit.”
“Good.” I wrapped my arm across his waist and gave him a little squeeze. “‘Cause I like you as a vampire. You’re cocky and kinda sadistic, but there’s no one else like you, Eric.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It is, silly.” I laughed, and he laid his arm over mine, patting my elbow a few times.
When I first met him, I always thought music was the way David connected to the deeper, more soulful part inside himself. He never played for show, never paraded himself or his musical talents, and was never arrogant about it. But I never saw in him the emotion I saw in other true musicians when they’d play alone—when they thought no one else was around. I could sit at the piano and play for hours, tears streaming down my cheeks, the very soul of the song coming to life because of me. And I’d watched David sit for hours, too—snuck up and hid behind the door to the Great Hall—waited for the sad song he was playing to draw some raw emotion from him. But never. Not once. He played, but he never let go.
I stood by the bedroom door, my arms folded, and watched him where he sat on the bed with his guitar across his lap, his thoughts somewhere out there on the day over the balcony ledge. He played a sad song, sitting slightly more hunched than he usually did, and sang the words as if he was compelled to, yet wasn’t really performing either—he was just singing for himself. And this—the curve of his spine, the angle of his chin against the grasp of the world, and the very absence of that smile in his eyes—was his tell. This was his raw emotion shining through. He would never bleed tears into an empty room. He would never let emotion come up on its own and steal his composure, but his body couldn’t pretend he felt no pain in his heart.
I walked over and sat behind him on the bed, wrapping one hand under his arm and turning it to cup his shoulder, laying my cheek on the other. “Everything okay?”
He received my affection with what sounded like a breath of relief, gently resting his jaw against my eyebrow. “It is now.”
“Good,” I whispered back, smiling into his shoulder blade.
“What you doing?”
“Just watching you sing.”
He glanced back at the open door and sighed, shaking his head as he turned his gaze
on the day again. “I thought I shut that.”
“You did. I opened it.”
He nodded to himself.
“Hey, David?”
“Yes, my love.”
“I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“About. . .” I sat up on my knees and massaged his shoulders. “There’s something . . . wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s this lighthouse thing.”
“What about it, my love.” He laid the guitar down on the bed and turned when I didn’t answer, taking my hand off his shoulder to hold it. “I can see how upset you are by this. What is it?”
“It’s . . . I get this feeling.”
“Feeling?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, not really sure how to explain it. “Like I’m forgetting something.”
He laughed and hooked his arm behind my back, pulling me around and into his lap. “You are, my love. You have amnesia.”
“But, I . . . I have a really bad feeling about it.”
“Of course you do,” he said simply. “You’re missing a part of your life, a section of events that happened, resulting in extreme pain and near death, and your mind is trying to make sense of it. It’s your instinct to survive, to find a reason something occurred and prevent it happening again.”
My shoulders relaxed. “You think?”
“Yes.” He lifted my hand from the buttons I was toying with and kissed it. “I’m sure of it.”
“But, I feel like something bad happened.”
“It did.” He laughed. “You fell off a lighthouse.”
I laughed, too, patting his chest before resting my face in the curve of his neck, his stubble prickling my eyebrow. “You’re right. I guess I’m just not used to the sensation of losing my memory.”
“You mean mind,” he joked.
“Be nice.” I gave him a soft slap on the thigh. “Besides, it’s not just me who lost their mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mike did, too.”
“Ara, what. Do. You. Mean?” he said each word more firmly, but with a hint of a smile in his tone.