by Martha Woods
“Maybe that’s how you should sell the place to him, ‘Hey if you decide to be a complete coward this place might be nice, you should check it out!’” Damon laughed, “You think he’d appreciate that?”
“I think that I might appreciate it, not so sure about him.” Tapping my chin with my index finger, I reached for my phone and tossed it over to him. “Would you mind talking to Julian about that? My head is just… fucking killing me, I don’t think I can hold a phone to my ear like this.”
“Yeah, no problem at all. You want me to call him now?”
“Please.” Settling into my seat, resting my head against the window, I let the cold of the glass sooth the growing ache in my temple, surveying what I could see for any sort of weakness that could be exploited. I wasn’t going to forget about Cara’s warning about us being ambushed, and if it was going to happen then the meeting was a good occasion, we just had to make sure that they didn’t decide to capitalize on the opportunity.
“Yeah Julian? It’s me,” Damon said, leaning back in his seat and assuming that face that he always got when he discussed business, “We’ve got an idea for a meeting place, if you’d be interested in helping out. Yes with guns. No with killing on sight.”
Well, I could hardly fault Julian for his enthusiasm.
“It’s the park on… Turner and Rakefield, do you know where that is? Cool, I’ll let you handle it then.” Ending the call, he tossed my phone back into my lap and grinned. “He’ll have someone out to look at the sightlines in the hour, we can go on and handle anything else that we need to take care of in the meantime.”
“If we leave it in his hands everything should go fine,” I said, “I don’t know why I haven’t talked to him before all this, he’s wonderfully competent.”
“He’s not really big on networking, he prefers to let his reputation do the work for him. And well… you never really pay attention to people’s reputations, so there’s no way you would have known who he was. He has been pretty quiet the last few months though.”
“He sure came back with a bang, it took my ears about two days to stop ringing when he shot one of his own men in the leg. I thought he was a complete maniac for a moment there.”
“Oh he is, no doubt about that, but he’s the good kind of maniac. The kind that, you know, doesn’t actually just go around causing random havoc whenever they feel like it, he just… likes being unpredictable.” He scoffed, “God knows that he’s given me more than a few heart attacks over the years from some of the shit that he’s done. Did you know that once his idea of defusing a fight that a bunch of hunters were getting into was to pop the pin on two grenades and shove it into their hands? He figured that if they were too focused on not dying then they wouldn’t have it in them to fight anymore.”
“That… definitely sounds like the man that I met,” I laughed, “What did he do after that?”
“He sat down and kept reading while the two of them shit all over themselves, so did everyone else in the bar, half of them were scared of the grenade and half of them were freaked out that he could be so calm. So him shooting that traitor in the leg… yeah, that didn’t really come as too much of a surprise.”
“We make weird company,” I chuckled, relaxing for a moment before gripping the wheel, “You want to get out of here? I could use a little time to think for a bit, somewhere away from this.”
“Wherever you want to go,” He said, pointing forward with a lazy salute, “Lead the way and I’ll follow.”
Where I wanted to go took us right to the edge of what we considered safe, up on a hill that overlooked the forests on the outskirts, already feeling like there were dozens of pairs of eyes staring at us and watching our every move. For some reason though I felt… completely safe up here, the eyes on us didn’t matter, I felt like there was no way in hell that they were going to attack us right now, no matter how alone we might have seemed. The fight that happened today probably has something to do with it.
“It’s been a long time since I was out here,” I said, resting against the hood of the car and tapping my foot in the dirt, “The last time I came out here was… God, must be about four years ago now.”
“A quiet place?” Damon asked, taking in the chill night air and seating himself next to me, “A good place is hard to come across, especially in the middle of a city. How’d you find it?”
“It was after a pretty rough case, you know, compared to some of the stuff that I usually investigated. Some guy was kidnapping people and… leaving them all cut open on the corners of whatever streets they passed by, one of them got found right outside a school. After we found that and had to make sure that the kids were taken care of I just drove off, Rick didn’t do anything, he looked like he understood.”
Clearing my throat, I tapped my fingers along the hood. It was still hard to think of him sometimes.
“Anyway I… I just kept driving and kept driving, until I turned left and headed out towards the forest. I was thinking that I’d go and scream at a tree, maybe punch one until my knuckles were shattered, but instead I found here and stopped for a while. There was no one else around, no cars, no people, no noise, just me and the air blowing over me, it felt… like I was actually finally alone for once. It gave me a few hours to myself before I had to go back into the real world and jump back into the blood. That few hours gave me all the time I needed to think properly though, we ended up catching him the next week before he could kill anyone else.”
“What happened to him?”
“He got thrown in jail for life, Rick was hoping that he’d do something stupid and get killed during the arrest but he just surrendered peacefully, and for everything that he was… Rick wasn’t a murderer then. Now though… I think that they’re actually in the same prison, maybe even the same wing. Funny how things work out like that.”
“I suppose he doesn’t have any excuse to not take care of unfinished business at this point then,” Damon groaned, stretching himself out along the hood and staring upwards, “Do you think he’s looking at the same stars that we are right now?”
I looked up, into an absolute sight of oblivion and darkness, so much further than anything that we could possibly ever imagine with our tiny little bodies and our infinitely tinier minds. What would our struggle look like to someone who’s strolled through the stars themselves? Who’s seen the surface of Jupiter with their own eyes and walked through molten rivers? It struck me occasionally how… completely invisible we all are in the grand scheme of things, yet all of us could still stare up in wonder as one, to sit there and dream about something much bigger than all of us.
“Yes,” I said, “I think he might be looking at the same place we are.”
Damon was silent, mulling over his words before he exhaled a cautious breath and pushed through two false starts to speak. “You miss him, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” I said, laughing lightly at the shock on his face. I guess he’d expected me to be more stubborn. “So many years as a mentor, you think that didn’t imprint itself on my very soul? You saw the condition he was in the entire time he was trying to kill me, it utterly destroyed him. How do you think I feel?”
He nodded slowly, trying to feel out how to respond when he sighed, “Sometimes I miss Tristian.”
That didn’t come as a surprise, not really. Not when I’d seen first hand how they’d almost been considered a package deal when we first met, when Tristian was willing to lie to me just to make sure that Damon could have some amount of mental safety. He was a monster, there’s no denying that, but at that point in time he loved his friend at least.
“I’m so sorry for the way things ended Damon.” I reached over, taking his hand in mine and squeezing gently. “If things could be different…”
“He would have needed to be a completely different man for anything to be any different, the route that he went was the route I think he was always going to go if I’m being honest. I just… sometimes I think maybe if I’d just turned
a little before we hit, let myself take all the impact, maybe he would have ended up in a jail cell too. Maybe then I could have… talked to him or something.” He looked over at me, eyes full of understanding. “If you could do it different, would you let Rick go?”
“No.” I was unsure of many things, but that wasn’t one of them. “No, he deserves to be in jail, there’s no doubt about that. He wanted to go to jail, he would have ended up there one way or another. You can’t deny a man the punishment that he desires I guess.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow does it? Knowing that… that whatever you had with someone is just gone, that all the time you had together doesn’t even add up to the time that you’ll lose.”
“It sounds like you’ve been thinking about it a lot.” It also sounded like he wasn’t just thinking of Tristian when he thought it. And with what Vincent had told me… it’s not hard to guess at what was eating him up inside. “You can talk to me Damon, please…”
“I know, I…” His mouth flapped open and closed, trying to will his throat to not close up and halfway failing. “I’m scared Amy, I’ve been scared for months now, and I’m not sure that I can actually take it anymore. I don’t think that I’m strong enough for this, not like you, not like Vincent, I don’t think that I can watch anyone else that I love die and leave me.”
“Damon…” Yep, it was exactly as I thought. “I’m not going to-”
“Yes, you are,” He said, eyes starting to water with blood, “You’re a human, and I’m not. Like it or not, there’s a time limit on how long we have left with each other before… well, chances are that it’s not going to be me who goes first if we actually have peace, is it?”
At first I didn’t say anything, part of me just grateful that he’d finally gotten it all out in the open, but with that came a great wave of sadness, the knowledge that he’d been carrying this with him all this time… no wonder he’d been so miserable over the last few months. “Oh Damon…” I sighed, reaching up to cup his cheek and run my thumb along his skin, “I’m so sorry, I had no idea…”
“I haven’t exactly been talking to anyone about it have I? I suppose… I just wanted to pretend that everything was going to be ok for a while, and then the shifters show up, and we’re supposed to be getting into yet another fight… I haven’t exactly been doing much to think about all of this.”
“But we should have been there for you too!” I said, “We’re the ones who are supposed to listen to you and tell you that everything is alright, I don’t want you to feel like this is your fault because you were dealing with pain! That’s such a natural thing to feel, you shouldn’t feel embarrassed or ashamed of it.”
“What can I say?” He laughed, shrugging heavily, “Can’t beat the hunter out of me overnight, anything too serious just gets buried beneath everything else. It wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t talk to you about it, it’s that I thought that I shouldn’t.”
Now that I definitely understood, how many things had I kept to myself over the years because I didn’t want anyone else to worry? Where would I be now if I’d just trusted half of them to help me through whatever it was that I was going through, if I’d just taken a chance on trusting that I wasn’t being needy or pathetic? Honestly… I think I could have been an entirely different person if things had gone another way.
“You can talk to us now Damon,” I said, my voice heavy and thick, “We’re both here for you, and we’re not going to go anywhere.”
“I guess I’m really that bad at being quiet, aren’t I?”
We both turned to the back of the car, spying Vincent smirking at us and leaning on the trunk. “Vincent! Oh I didn’t actually see you there!”
“I was waiting to make a dramatic entrance, thank you for giving me the chance.” He stepped around, walking to the front of the car and taking his seat next to Damon, before reaching down and clasping his own hand around his. “I know that sometimes we don’t get along, and in many ways that I’m… responsible for the condition that you’re suffering from. In many ways I’m solely responsible, and I want you to know that it’s not a burden that I carry lightly. So when I say that there is nothing that you could come to me with that I would consider frivolous and pathetic, I want you to know that I’m telling the truth.”
“When do you ever lie?” Damon asked, squeezing back his hand just as hard and breathing a deep breath, “I know that I can talk to you two, I could trust my entire life to the two of you, and I have… I just needed to do some thinking for myself, and come to some decisions about myself.”
The worry on our faces must have been obvious, because he chuckled and shook his head. “I’m not running away, not anymore. I’ve learned at least that much watching the two of you drag yourselves up from whatever hell you’ve been pushed down into, what kind of self respecting person would I be if I didn’t learn a little something from that? I just… I don’t know how I’m going to deal with the inevitable when it happens, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take seeing you leave my life and never being able to hold you again, as strong as I am… that’s not something that I’m prepared for.”
It was little wonder that he’d been such a mess, torturing himself with questions on being prepared to lose his loved ones with no emotional backup or shield. But the least that I could do for him was to start now, and give him the support that he’d deserved for so long.
“Damon… there are so many ways that we should have died before now. I almost didn’t walk away from a fight today, mostly because of dumb chance, I could have just as easily been torn apart by those shifters, or… or shot by those hunters all those months ago, death is just a part of us now. I wake up every morning terrified that it’s going to be the last day that I see either of you, whether it’s because of something that happens to me that I can’t control, or something that happens to you that I never saw coming.” I leaned into Damon’s touch, sniffing back a tear and shaking my head. “But I don’t want to let that fear be all that I ever feel around you, I don’t want to spend so long being petrified of losing you that I waste all the time that I still have you for. I need to enjoy the moments that we have together, for however long or short they are, whether it’s for the next few decades or the next few weeks, I don’t want to spend a single second not being absolutely grateful for every second that I’m around you.”
“Regret held me back for so long,” Vincent said, nodding in agreement, “I lost an entire century because I was grieving for what I had lost, what I’d left behind, can you imagine what I could have done, what I could have experienced in that time if I wasn’t so focused on what was gone? I can tell you for a fact that this life involves pain, and it involves loss, that is our curse. But our gift is that we get to have an entire existence unaffected by time, where we can experience joy and love in so many different ways, to be able to spend entire lifetimes with people and do what we can to transform their lives into something miraculous.”
“And the people that you’ve lost?”
“I miss them every single day, all of us do. Do you think that Joseph has a single hour where he doesn’t think of the brother long passed? Do you think that Mika and Ivanka don’t occasionally look into the mirror and weep because they remember a parent who had their exact face?” He looked away for a moment, and in that moment I swore that he was quivering. “I had a sister, much like you do, so, so long ago. I lost her a long time before I became this monster, and even before the end of my natural life I had allowed myself to become swallowed in grief, to the point that I considered death to be a mercy. But now… the way that I honor her memory, the way that all of us honor those who have been lost, is to keep moving and to make new memories, new connections. Those that cared for us wouldn’t want us to die never having experienced love ever again, would they?”
“But… what if we end up alone?”
“You won’t Damon, look at me.” Vincent leaned in, placing his hand on Damon’s shoulder and squeezing tightl
y, their foreheads resting against each other as they stared into each other’s eyes. “I give you my word, whatever happens, wherever it is that you go and whatever you decide that you want to do, I am not going to leave you. For however long you want me around, I will be right by your side through everything, do you understand?”
Slowly, as though he was afraid that he would break in the process, Damon nodded and let himself relax into our hold, the tension in his shoulders leaving him for the first time in what must have been months, or very well may have been years. With the two of us sitting on either side of him, with our arms wrapped around him, he breathed a sigh of contentment and just let himself go.
It was about time.
I lost track of how much time passed us by while we just lay there staring up at the stars, but as these things always do I found our quiet time interrupted by the soft ringing of my phone, my hand scrambling to grab it before I could miss yet another crucial call and wind up losing the entire war with my luck.
“Hello?”
“Hello Amy,” Julian replied, moving the phone away from his mouth to whistle at someone on his end of the line, “I just wanted to tell you that we’ve scouted everything out, if we get people posted up now and ready for the meeting then the whole area should be secured, I can make the arrangements with Christine and Joseph if you’d prefer.”
“Yeah, yeah that sounds great,” I said, hopping off the car to stand by the railing, “Do you have any recommendations? Time that would be best, where we should have the meeting?”
“I’d say right in the middle of the park, we’ve got a good sightline over just about every part of the park, but the middle means that he’ll have quite the distance to run if things go south. That’d be enough time to either kill or capture, depending on what you wanted us to do. I would also suggest late afternoon edging into night, the vampires will be able to fight at that point, and most of my guys have thermal, so our sight wouldn’t be an issue.”