by A. M. Hudson
“And. . .” I took a jagged breath and steadied my tears. “Who’s my father?”
“I’m sorry, Ara.” Dad shook his head. “I went to find him a few years ago, but all I found was his sister Mavis. She told me he’d been deployed to Iraq after nine-eleven, and was killed in the line of duty.” Dad hung his head. “He never made it home.”
The reality sunk through me, dragging my body into the ground. I was too late. If I’d found out when I was younger, I might have at least seen my father, even once, and the weight of the unknown came down on me hard, undoing all the hopes I had for future where I knew him. How was that possibly fair? “What was his name?” I asked, pressing my thumb to my chin to stop it shaking.
“Hayden Matthews, and he looked. . .” Dad smiled, but his eyes held all the sadness of things gone by. “He looked very much like you.”
“Dark hair?”
“Yes.”
“Blue eyes?”
“No.” His smile warmed. “Those were from Rose.”
“And . . . you say you’re her brother?”
“Yes.” He nodded, and I almost believed him, save for the fact that David told me this man, who I called my father, had a ‘distant’ ancestral connection to me. Certainly not close enough to be my uncle. “Were . . . were you her adopted brother?”
His eyes narrowed. “Why would you ask that?”
I turned away.
“Ara, honey. Look at me.”
My eyes shifted sideways. Dad’s arm was right in direct line of the camera. I knew his hand was against the screen—trying to reach out to me. “I know that everything you thought you knew about yourself has just fallen apart, but I love you, and I—”
“I love you, too, Dad.” I placed my fingertips to the screen. “I’ve just got so much going on right now. I . . . I don’t know how to cope with it all. And I’m not mad at you. I’m not upset. I just. . .”
“You just need a hug?”
I nodded, wiping my cheeks.
“Where’s David?” Vicki asked. “He should really be here for this.”
“He’s away on business,” I said, sobbing. “And I can’t get hold of him.”
“Why?” Dad asked, his tone flooding with worry.
“He’s just not answering his phone.”
“Did you have a fight?” Vicki asked.
I shook my head.
“But things aren’t okay, are they?” Dad said.
I shook my head again. “Dad? I . . . was anyone in my family ever. . .”
“Ever?” he prompted.
“Infertile.”
He sat back in his chair, looking at Vicki. “Honey, are you trying to have a baby?”
I didn't even have time to speak; Vicki butted in with, “Ara, you're too young. You're barely—”
“I know how old I am, Vicki, and I don't mean to sound nasty, but it’s not up to you.”
“Why would you want a baby, Ara?” Dad asked. “You’ve only just married, and—”
“David’s going to die,” I said, and my eyes went wide around my shock. I didn't mean to say that, but it just slipped out. I guess I just needed to tell someone—needed someone to know how helpless and scared I felt all the time. But as I looked into both Dad and Vicki’s mortified faces, I wished I hadn’t said it.
“I'm so sorry, Ara.” Vicki reached out and touched the screen. “Is it cancer?”
I looked at Dad, swallowing the lump in my throat. “I . . . yeah,” I said, because I wasn’t sure they’d understand if I told them he was going to kill a vampire to void an ancient contract.
“Oh, Ara.” Vicki burst into tears. “I'm just so, so sorry.”
“How long?” Dad asked, broken inside but composed outside, as he always was.
“A few months.” I wiped my nose, sniffling. “We were hoping to have the happy news of a baby before he…” My voice broke.
Dad sighed, lowering his head into his hands.
“It’ll be all right, Ara,” Vicki said, rubbing Dad’s back.
“Why do people always say that?” I buried my face too. “You know it won't. He's going to die. And we can't even fall pregnant. What if it’s me, Dad?”
He looked up.
“What if it’s something wrong with me? That means I ruined his only chance to know he was gonna be a dad before he. . .” I stared at the wall for a second. “There’s nothing after this for him. He doesn't get to go on. He’ll be gone, and I wanted him to know he was going to have a little girl before he went.”
“Oh, Ara, please don’t think that way,” Vicki said. I could see how badly she just wanted to hold me, but we were divided by what they thought was thousands of miles. “It’ll happen. I’ll pray for it everyday, I promise. You’ll have your little baby before he dies.”
“If prayers could make me fall pregnant, Vicki, I already would be. But I just don’t think I’m meant to be a mom.”
Dad reached out and touched the screen again. “Maybe you should come home for a bit. It might—”
“I can't do that, Dad. We have a life here. We have friends and responsibilities.”
“But you have family here,” Vicki reasoned.
“I have family here, too,” I said softly. “David can’t leave, and it’d break his heart if I did.”
Vicki exhaled; I could see the loss of hope in her eyes. Neither her nor Dad knew what to say or what to do. And right on time, as if it were a bell to save me from further explanation, my phone grizzled, making a fuss, the caller ID swallowing Dad and Vicki’s faces.
“Is that David?” Vicki asked, clearly noticed my eyes light up.
“Yeah. I gotta go.” I held my finger over the button to accept the call. “I really need to take this.”
“Okay, call us back later, Ara, or we’ll worry,” Vicki said.
I nodded, offering my most reassuring smile. “I’m okay, you know.”
“We know, honey,” Dad said. “We’ll talk later.”
“Bye.” I ended their call and put David to my ear. “David!”
“Hey, sweetheart. You called?”
“Only like fifty-thousand times.”
“Oh, come on now, it wasn’t that many,” he said playfully. “It was more like—”
“Mom and Dad called,” I interrupted.
“Ah, good. And how are they?”
“I told them you have cancer.”
“Why?” he said slowly, dragging the word out.
“It kind of slipped out that you’re gonna die. And I had to make up some comprehensible explanation. I mean, they picked up on my extreme sadness anyway.”
The silence on the other end of the line lasted too long. “You're sad?”
“Is that a joke?”
“No. I just thought, for the sake of appearances, you’d suck that up around your parents.”
“Suck it up? Suck it up! David, would you suck it up? Would you—”
“Okay. I'm sorry.” His voice got louder. “Just . . . don’t yell at me. I really don’t want to fight with you.”
I released my fury with a groan. “Sorry.”
“No, I'm sorry, okay. I just . . . what’d they say?”
“They were devastated.”
“Really?”
“Yes! They love you, David. They want to do anything they can to help.”
He laughed. “Aw, I really wish we could tell them the truth. Actually, I kinda wish your dad was a vampire.”
“Why?”
“You know how he always has that way of solving problems—or making you feel like they can be solved?”
“Yeah.” I smiled.
“I bet he’d have some clever way we could fix this Drake contract.”
“Yeah, and I bet you’d actually listen to him.”
“As opposed to whom?” he asked.
“Me.”
“I do listen to you.”
“Huh! You so do not.”
“Okay, maybe my track record isn’t that great. But you gotta admit things hav
e gotten better lately.”
“Yeah.” But they’d be better if he was actually here, with me.
“I thought about it, you know,” he said after a while.
“About what?”
“Turning him—your dad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I think we should discuss it. I think, even if he couldn’t find a way out of our situation, at least he’d be here to take care of you—for eternity.”
“I’m not a little girl, anymore, David. I don’t need an eternal dad,” I snapped, then calmed myself. “But, I mean, it’d be nice if I didn’t have to bury him one day.”
“Okay, well, we’ll discuss it further when I get home.”
I nodded. “I'm worried about his heart, though. He looks sick, you know. And he’s playing it cool, but—”
“He’ll be fine. If he gets worse, I’ll turn him myself.”
I smiled. “But you don't know the secret of how to turn a human.”
“Don't I?”
“Do you?”
“This is getting off topic.”
“It is? Because I don't remember setting a topic for discussion,” I said playfully.
He cleared his throat. “How’s training?”
“Great. Now.”
“Why now?”
“Because Jason saved my head from exploding yesterday.”
“What? How?”
“Things got . . . bad.” I shivered at the memory. “Jason comes bursting in, grabs me and hauls me outside and, no joke, as soon as he puts my hands in the ground, like, forces them into the soil, the pain stops.”
“You're kidding?”
“Nope. He said I need to ground my power, and added something about closed circuits, or whatever.”
“How did he come up with that?”
“He’s been thinking a lot about it. Guess he had an epiphany.”
“That’s . . . I gotta admit, I don’t know much about science, but that was pretty clever.”
“And that's why I want him to have a lab, David. He can help me. You don't know how much stress he's taken off my shoulders by figuring out why I'm getting those headaches.”
“You were stressed about it?”
“Of course I was. How would you feel if you had to put yourself in that kind of pain every second day, and no one was going to help you…and no one cared? You all just told me to get over it, but he never stopped thinking about it—researching it.”
He took a really long breath and let it out right into the mouthpiece of the phone. “Fine. Okay.”
“What’s okay?”
“You can have the lab—”
“What?” I jumped up and out of my seat.
“But, it comes with a huge but.”
“I’m okay with a but.”
“I want a guard with you at all times when you’re together. Do you think you can handle that?”
“Yes. Oh, David, thank you. He’ll be so happy when I tell him. I wish you were here right now so I could kiss you.”
“I'm smiling just thinking about it.”
I smiled too.
“And…” he added.
“And?”
“I want full reports on everything he's doing with you, and why.”
“Sure. Of course. I know he won't have any problem with that.”
“All right then. Go see Walt and tell him to set up an account for Jason.”
“Okay. Thanks, David.”
“Right. And just remember, Ara, I'm doing this for you, not him. I want answers, and I want to see something concrete by the time I get back.”
“But that doesn’t give us much time. You're coming back Sunday, right?”
“I was. But, things…” He sighed. “Things are bad here.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I need to transport a few prisoners to the Vampiric Institution for the Insane.”
I covered my mouth. “What happened to them?”
“It’s . . . the vampire mind is still very human. There’s only so much one person can handle before they . . . well, before they lose it.”
I waited for a second, tense, feeling a kind of energy in David’s voice that made me wonder if one of those prisoners was. . . “Is Pepper one of them?”
He coughed, then cleared his throat. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the prisoners, Ara.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“Did she go nuts because of what you did, or was it something after that—”
“Have fun setting up the lab, Ara. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I went to speak, but he hung up the phone, and all the things I wanted to tell him about my birth parents suddenly went on hold, boiling up like bad news, making me so mad not to be able to get it all out. I opened messages on my phone and wrote: Just thought you might like to know that I found out about my birth mother. She's dead. So is my father.
As soon as I pressed send, though, I felt worse.
The phone rang a second later.
“Ara.”
“David. I'm sorry. That was really petty of me, I—”
“No, my love. I'm sorry. I shouldn’t have hung up on you.”
“It’s okay. You've told me not to ask about Pepper. I should respect that.”
“No, you shouldn’t. You're my wife and you do have a right to know, but I . . . Ara, I did that to her,” he said, his voice shaking, “and I’m dead ashamed of myself.”
I held still in case the door to his emotions slammed shut in my face. I wasn’t sure what to say or how to move this conversation forward without forcing him back into his shell. “When . . . um . . . when was the last time you saw her?”
“About a year or so before I met you.”
“Was she . . . like that then?”
“Not as bad.”
“Then you didn’t do it to her, David.” I practically laughed with relief. “Maybe time has, or . . . I don’t know. But you shouldn’t blame yourself.”
“Thanks, Ara. You’re sweet to say that, but you don’t know the full story.”
“I would if you’d tell me.”
“One day. Maybe.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see it. One day, maybe, was good enough for me. “So, how do you know she’s insane? Like, what did she say to you when you saw her?”
“That’s just it. She didn’t even recognize me.”
“At all?”
“She was too busy peeling her own skin back and eating it to notice anything other than a passing rat she could mutilate.”
I let out a shaky breath. “David, I’m so sorry.”
“It is what it is. So. . .” His tone changed, taking the subject with it. “Your dad told you about Rose?”
“Yes. Wait. I never mentioned her name.”
“I know. I've known about her for a while. I was waiting until I had news of a nice family somewhere out there waiting to meet you before I said anything, but . . . I never found anything on your biological father.”
“I'm okay, you know. I still have my dad and Vicki.”
“And me.”
“For a while.”
“Yes, but I'm still here, and I love you, and I'm sorry we’ve fought today.”
“Me too. I hate fighting.”
“Me too.”
After a long silence, with me lost trying to think of something else to say to keep him on the line, he said, “Ara?”
“Yeah.”
“I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered. “Love you.”
“Love you, sweetheart.”
Chapter Nine
“Jase.” I leaped off the last step and ran into his arms at full speed, well, full human speed.
He caught me gracefully, gave me a quick squeeze, and placed me gently back on the ground. “You’re awfully cheery today, Ara. What’s up?”
“He went for it, Jase. I don't know if it was just pure luck or if David woke up on
the right side of bed, but he approved it.” I stood back, swiping my hair from my face.
“Approved what?”
“Your lab, silly!”
His eyes narrowed, his brows forming two lines in the middle, just like David when he was utterly confused. “When?”
“I talked to him on the phone this morning, then I went to see Walt to get the budget plan. Jase, you have the full backing of the House, and an unlimited budget.”
He laughed. “Really?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Ara, that’s. . .” He scratched his head, still looking a little mixed by his emotions. “That’s great!”
“I know, right?” I tapped his arm once. “There’s a condition, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I have to have a guard present whenever we’re researching or training.”
“That's—” He nodded, smiling. “Yeah, that's more than fine. More than fine.”
“I knew you'd say that.” I clapped once, bouncing on my toes. “We have to celebrate.”
He grinned. “And I know just the place to go.”
“Out on the town?” I joked.
“Better.” He patted my arm as he walked past. “Have everyone meet at the lighthouse tonight.”
“Ooh, lighthouse party.”
“Yeah.” He walked backward, the reality clearly having sunken in to his smile. “It’s a tradition around these parts.”
“To celebrate on a lighthouse?”
“Yeah.” He started up the stairs. “And tell Blade he better be there.”
“I will.” I watched him disappear into the second floor corridor, then turned to look back at Falcon, who was standing inconspicuously in the shadows nearby. “You coming, Fal?”
He stepped forward, his hands clasped in front. “You’ll understand if I don’t.”
“So, you don’t approve.”
“I can’t say I do.”
“Of what? The lab or the party?”
He cleared his throat. “Blade’s in the library, preparing for your lesson on royal popularity, if you’re looking for him.”
“Right.” I nodded once. “I get it. You don’t approve of either.”
“Only because both situations put you in position to end up in trouble.”
“Blade will be there tonight, and you’ll be there at every training session.”
“I wish I could say that gives me comfort.”