by Emma Glass
The guard went quiet. “As your friend?”
“Of course. You’re all my friends! What other friends could you possibly think that I even have on this world?”
Pensively, she gazed off into space. “Friends. I have not… thought of it like this.” Asarra slipped into a brief, contemplative state. Her eyes visibly saddened; I placed a tender hand on her shoulder. When she didn’t flinch or try and brush me off, I felt the closeness warm up my heart.
“There was a moment there where I lost faith in Nikki Craven,” I admitted to her. “Of course I thought she’d turned on me; she overpowered the three of you, took me away to a dungeon, and started acting even crazier than I’ve ever seen her.
“But the reality was a lot more complicated. Nikki exposed a threat in the castle; she just chose to use me to do it. I’ll leave it up to everyone else to decide whether what she did was right, but I know her heart is in the right place… I can feel it.
“She deserves my forgiveness, Asarra.”
The guard watched me carefully. When it was clear I wasn’t changing my mind, she bowed her head in resignation. “Fine. I will do this. But we must wake the others. Wilhelm and I will look in different places, and Viktor will watch you.”
I beamed a smile and threw my arms around her. “I know you don’t understand. But thank you for going along with this, Asarra.”
“Wilhelm is right,” she shook her head while I held her close. Especially for her, I sensed warmth in her even tone. “You are a very peculiar human, Clara Blackwell…”
Viktor and I didn’t talk much in the hour it took them to find her.
He looked exhausted. I let him spend most of our time together staring into space while I idly flipped through my book. Somehow, the thrill of being thrust into danger had sort of tarnished my excitement for finishing the story.
When they did arrive with her, Nikki looked sheepish at Asarra’s calm, collected side. “There,” the knight grunted. “I have found Lady Craven.”
Nikki glanced at me like a pitiful dog with her tail between her legs. “Hullo, Clara…”
“Hey, would you guys mind letting me talk to her in private?” I asked, taking her surprised hand in mine. “You can follow along behind like before when Lorelei asked for me, but I want privacy.”
The Knightly Trio shared a look. “Sure, I mean why not?” The usually cheerful Wilhelm shook his head. “At this rate, if Lord Elliott has anything to say about it, today is gonna outlast me!”
“That is not so good an idea,” Asarra replied.
“Consider it the same as Lorelei’s request.”
“Her Royal Highness didn’t have you almost passed off to a traitor,” Viktor narrowed his eyes. “Or hit all of us with incapacitation spells.”
“Sorry about that,” Nikki guiltily tried to grin. “Hopefully, the sluggish after-effects will wear off soon. Although you in particular look more than a little worse for wear…”
When Viktor leveled a weary, angry glare her way, Nikki evaded it by turning back to Wilhelm with a twisted smile. “I hope you at least liked my apology drawings? I worked really hard on them.”
Wilhelm smirked, unable to contain himself. “Actually, the duck was a nice touch.”
The insane vampire evilly returned his grin.
“Focus,” Asarra harshly snapped at Wilhelm. When his smile dropped, she turned back to me. “Why is this important to you, Clara? You know that Lord Elliott will be angry if we say yes.”
“Angry is an understatement,” Viktor noted.
“Just trust me,” I reassured her.
The faces of the Knightly Trio, even Wilhelm, cycled through various stages of complete bother. “You know what?” The merry knight shrugged. “I don’t even care at this point. I’m already screwed. If Lord Elliot doesn’t have my head by afternoon, it’ll be a total miracle!”
I gratefully hugged all three of them. “I can’t thank you guys enough. Just follow us behind and keep an eye out.” Teasingly, I threw an angry look at my guest. “And if this one tries anything, just go ahead and carve her to pieces…”
Surprising literally nobody in the room, Nikki Craven deviously grinned at the sound of that.
“Now we’re talking.”
27
Clara
After waking up on a dungeon floor and sleeping off a horrible recurring nightmare, the last thing I wanted was to spend any more time indoors.
Nikki shrugged. “Want a walk with a view?”
“Actually… that sounds wonderful.”
After a quick elevator ride down Craven Keep and fifteen minutes of walking later, that’s how we wound up along the battlements. From atop the guarded walkways we could see the bustling little village within Stonehold Castle, gaze over to the surrounding woods, or glance up at the starry mid-afternoon sky.
“I still can’t believe that you get stars during the day here,” I gasped. “I’ll never be used to that.”
Nikki looked up too. “That’s right! The human world doesn’t have that, does it? That sounds so boring… so then, what’s your sky like?”
I’d never had to think of how to describe it.
“Well… it’s usually a deep, rich light blue. On some days, there isn’t a cloud up there, and it’s like a gigantic, lifeless ocean above us. Other days, the whole thing turns into this sea of puffy white clouds. They can be stringy and strewn all over the place, or in these grand, hulking masses that are just so impossibly huge that they make you feel tiny in comparison.”
Nikki smirked. “That sounds fantastic.”
I finally looked down from that mesmerizing view to reply. “Don’t you get any of that here?”
“You can always see the stars, Clara.”
It was true that they’d been out every time I’d been able to see the sky. I guess I’d get tired of them too, if they never actually went away… I started to realize how my bland-by-comparison sky might sound exotic to the denizens of this world.
We pulled our attention away. Staying at her side, I began to stroll with Nikki Craven along the stone walkways atop the castle walls. I found myself avoiding the passing glances of patrolling guards and busy workers.
Every so often, I spared a brief look over my shoulder for the Knightly Trio. Strangely, I didn’t spot Wilhelm – the only ones following us seemed to be Viktor and Asarra, sticking back but looking very ready to close the distance in a heartbeat.
After a few minutes, I broke the silence.
“So, I guess you can do magic?”
Nikki smiled faintly. “Sure can.”
“And it never occurred to you to perform that ‘stop trying to drink Clara’ spell on me because…”
“Well, I’m… not very good at it.”
I scoffed lightheartedly. “Sure, okay. I think you did pretty well, going up against a powerful sorceress. Unless I’m mistaken, not a whole lot of people can do that and live to tell the tale.”
“You aren’t exactly wrong,” Nikki shrugged noncommittally. “But the only way I could pull it off was with those binding runes. And from what I heard, they didn’t even properly manage to do the job in the end…”
I shuddered and tried to avoid thinking about Sabine’s ultimate fate.
“You see, Clara, my magic is instinctual; I put those runes there to stop her spells just as much as my own.”
“Why’s that?”
Nikki cut me a serious look.
“Do you really want to know?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
The vampire sighed wearily and lowered her face. Her platinum gold hair hid it from view until she looked up at me again.
“You should know that I wasn’t born crazy.”
The grave expression on her face dared me to ask, although I couldn’t help but worry. “Oh?”
By now, I’d been around the deeply disturbed Nikki Craven for long enough to see that she had her moments of sharpened clarity; whenever they came, her demeanor switched, like da
y and night. It wasn’t quite the same sort of thing as multiple personality syndrome, but there was something undeniably difficult to pin down with the special blend of crazy that she had.
“Did something happen to you, Nikki?”
Her solemn eyes deepened in powerful regret. “Yeah,” the vampire whispered sadly. “I guess you could probably put it like that.”
What do I say? I wanted to offer her comfort somehow, but I was at a total loss. What can I do?
Nikki Craven took a few short steps away; she wrapped her fingers around a railing and silently leaned against it for support. I had never seen her so utterly broken before.
As her haunted gaze drifted into the distance, I quietly took a spot next to her. Instinctively, I dared to place my hand over hers.
“You can tell me,” I reassured her.
That’s when I noticed that Nikki was crying. I stayed quiet, following her gaze over her mother’s beautiful gardens. It made for a solemn backdrop to the sudden weight of our conversation.
“My magic,” she whispered. “Like I told you a moment ago, it’s instinctive. I can’t control it well. When I get too angry, or scared, or if I feel danger, I lose my grip on it and it… works without me.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“It happened nearly a century ago.”
I sensed her fear. “What happened?”
Nikki kept her attention forward, focusing on the gardens below. Her clenched fist on the rail spasmed under my touch; she distantly released her grip and held my hand, but she was careful to not crush it in her grasp.
Even then, I noticed that Nikki wouldn’t turn away from Lorelei’s gardens below us. She tightly clamped her eyes shut, holding back more tears. “A century ago,” she repeated gravely from the deepest throes of despair. “That’s when Fiona died in the accident.”
“Fiona?” I blinked. “Who’s Fiona?”
She opened her eyes again, tearfully staring at the flower hedges. “Our older sister... I killed her.”
Nikki Craven’s words struck me to my core.
“Elliott and you… you had an older sister?”
Her face lowered beneath the weight of a dark and powerful depression. The fleeting traces of a demented smile twitched at her lips, but she was in too deep for them to take hold. “Yes, Clara. My brother wasn’t the oldest of our generation. Fiona came one hundred thirty years earlier.”
I struggled to process this. Elliott said that she went on a self-imposed exile about a century ago… if some awful tragedy happened, then Nikki must have just run away…
“Is it okay if I ask what happened?”
She blinked away a tear. “Yeah. I’ll tell you.”
After she briefly leaned against the railing and composed herself, Nikki let out a deep sigh. “It was an argument. The worst part is that I can’t even remember what started the stupid thing.”
She paused briefly, holding her gaze over the gardens. The starry night sky was just beginning to twinkle over us; as it settled over the area, its supernatural glow made the majestic courtyards look even better than before.
“Guess it doesn’t really matter anymore,” she shrugged. “We were in the middle of a fight. It got out of hand. Hurtful things were shouted – things that I guess neither of us can take back now.
“Fiona was always like that. She never backed down, never accepted defeat. Everything had to be her way. I suppose I wasn’t really much better at the time.”
I nodded empathetically. “Fiona Craven, huh? Guess that makes you Fiona, Elliott, and Nikki…”
“That’s right. No idea how Mother dealt.”
“So what was Fiona like?”
Nikki grinned to herself. “Defiant. Rebellious. Always headstrong… she took on all challengers. Our sister was a true warrior at heart. She always bit off more than she could chew. But when you thought she was down for the count, she’d figure out some ridiculous way to still come out ahead.”
“It sounds like you really admired her, Nikki.”
The vampire’s grin faintly buckled. “We both did. Elliott and I… well, we always looked up her. Fiona helped take care of us while we were young. For all her eagerness for battle, she didn’t have a diplomatic bone in her body. Instead, she taught us to fight; she taught us to never back down from a threat, to take what was rightfully ours.”
“She sounds awesome,” I smiled sadly.
Nikki snorted. “Mother always thought Fiona was lucky. She even started coming to our sister’s sparring matches, once Fiona began channeling her lust for challenge into physical combat. After she started routinely humbling the royal guards, it became a rite of passage to face her in the field. The whole reason we invested in a medical bay is because she showed no mercy to her enemies…”
“I’m gonna be honest, she sounds hardcore.”
She laughed heartily. “That’s one word for it.” Nikki’s mirth slowly faded from her expression. “Everyone in the entire hold knew that, someday, Fiona Craven would sit on the Stonehold throne. But overpowering your problems is only one way of solving them. Lorelei wanted to tame the rage in her daughter’s heart and teach her diplomacy.”
Nikki started doing a great impersonation of her mother. ‘Fiona Craven, you’ll sit on the throne for over five centuries! Not every threat can be so easily punched into submission!”
It was my turn to laugh. I could easily picture Lorelei wagging an angry finger with her furious and almost indifferent expression.
“So, if it was an argument you two had…”
The vampire sighed again. “I couldn’t control my magic. It spiraled out of my grasp. All I really remember is how much I struggled to hold myself together.”
Nikki released her free hand from along the rail, flexing it open and closed. “I felt it building, Clara. I felt it rising inside me… so full of hate and anger. I tried to put some distance between the two of us, but Fiona didn’t care for the coward’s retreat, as she called it. It wasn’t enough for her to not back down. She needed us to not back down, either. Our sister was headstrong to a fault, and she never really listened to us…
“Then… one minute she was there, shouting in my face and holding back from hitting me…” Her face grew pained. “And then the next…”
The implication hung over the hard silence that followed. The heaviness of our conversation choked in my lungs and at the base of my throat, but I wasn’t willing to stand down from this.
Nikki Craven was baring her soul to me, in the most coherent state I’d ever seen her; through the spasms of her trembling hand, I could clearly feel just how hard she had to mentally cling to her current level of clarity.
“Then she was gone,” I finished for her.
Nikki’s lip feebly twitched as the tears started to flow. “Elliott doesn’t talk about it,” she bitterly added. “Same goes for Lorelei. Neither of them let me bring up the accident. After our mother found me sobbing and cradling my sister’s body, I think it snapped something inside her.”
“What do you mean?”
Nikki finally looked at me. “Why do you think she became obsessed with planting this garden?”
It hit me like a stack of bricks.
“Fiona loved flowers,” she noted sadly.
“So the gardens are for Fiona?”
“They were originally going to be a present for her, a way of showing her what can be made without always trying to conquer your problems with violence. But now?” Nikki glanced over them again. “Now, they’re more of a memorial…”
Everything was starting to make sense now. I turned away, overcome with emotion.
“They might tell this part of the story better,” Nikki continued. “My family, I mean. The magic did something to me that day…”
“Something like what?”
She gazed up at the starry sky.
Darkness was slowly falling across the castle. The sky gradually darkened with it, bringing that now-familiar mixture of dark purples and bright, sparki
ng pinks and reds. The night sky twinkled with an abundance of beautiful stars, bathing the tragic Nikki Craven under its shadow.
“I can’t always fight it,” she muttered. “I don’t want to be a danger to the people around me… but when tragedy mixes with magic, it has a habit of fundamentally changing you.” Nikki lowered her face and stared ominously at me. “It becomes a complex problem when you’re born with innate magic that’s infected with madness. There’s just no stopping it now. I can’t turn it off. Clara. My natural power courses through my veins, but for the past century it’s been fueled by sorrow and total chaos…”
In the descending darkness, her radiant eyes shone with a devious glint. She took a long stride towards me; I stood my ground and held her gaze.
“My darling little snack,” Nikki sadly smirked, lifting my chin with a finger. She studied my eyes with a dulled smile. “You don’t have an ounce of fear in there, do you now? Even with me…”
“Of course I’m scared, Nikki. At least a little,” I quietly admitted to her. “But I believe that fear and courage can share the same space. I think that you’re afraid too. I think you’re afraid of what you think you’ll become.”
“Your courage may get you in trouble…”
“Maybe. I’m young. I’m pretty reckless. Maybe Asarra is right, and I forgive too easily. But I don’t let the fear get in the way of my courage. Which is why I can look you in the eyes and tell you the one thing you’ve never heard. The thing I think that you’ve needed most.”
She tilted her head, licking a fang. Clearly, her coherency was slipping – judging by the look in her eye, Nikki was growing madder by the second. “And what might that be, little human?”
“That I won’t give up on you.”
The devilish mirth slipped off Nikki Craven’s face as she heard the words. She stared down into my eyes, and for the first time her gaze was a pane of two-way glass.
In her desolate eyes I saw the crushing fear, the bitter abandonment, the fierce betrayal, and all of her painful longing. I gazed deep down into her salted wounds and the thorns so mindlessly driven into her torn, broken spirit.