by Joey W. Hill
She was waiting for him at the entrance. When he offered her a hand, she took it, her hand small and tense inside his grasp, but given to him willingly enough.
Out in front of the building, they walked side by side in silence. She took him around the front of the vending machine warehouse to reach her favorite loading dock, the one where he’d sat with her a while ago. It made him wonder what she had in mind. He couldn’t tell. She was doing that thing she did, her mind empty. He could dig for it, but he wouldn’t. Not when it was clear she intended to tell him what she was thinking. He’d give her the right to organize her thoughts the way she wanted.
She walked up the short set of steps rather than asking him to lift her, as he would have. Wolf followed her as she walked, her on the dock, him on the ground. She moved to the yellow line painted along the dock edge, intended to catch the eye before someone stepped off into nothingness.
She put her arms out like wings to balance herself, and walked on that edge like a balance beam. When she tottered, Wolf clasped her hand, keeping her steady, and she sent him another smile. This one sadder.
She reached the mid-point and, still holding his hand, folded herself gracefully to a sitting position. Wolf drew closer, leaning against the dock edge, his hand on her thigh.
“It bugs me,” he said abruptly. “That way you have of clearing your mind. Like clouds. But the weather changes. Sometimes it’s like clouds on a rainy day. Sometimes clouds on a sunny day. Today, it’s clouds over the ocean.”
She grimaced. “I learned to do it to control my temper. I used to get really, really angry about certain things. A therapist at the homeless shelter said I had too many turbulent feelings, with no way to process or resolve them. I wouldn’t take drugs, so she taught me the meditation.” She sent him a wry look. “It’s more effective when I actually do it. I didn’t tonight.”
He squeezed her hand. “You won’t accept any blame for that. Besides, Allan won’t admit it right now, but it impressed him. You’re a hell of a stealth weapon. Though for future information, if you only want to beat up a vampire, it’s best not to go after him with something that’s considered a lethal weapon. Go with an aluminum bat next time.”
“Oh. I guess I didn’t think of that. That’s why Lord Richard…why I’m in such trouble?”
Yes. He kept that thought to himself, though, and merely brushed a knuckle of his free hand along her cheek bone. He thought of what Gideon had said, about how Wolf had already delivered the worst punishment possible. He didn’t want to make her feel any worse, didn’t want to admonish her, though at another time, if they made it through this, he would enjoy punishing her in a far more sensual way for risking herself so recklessly. “You aren’t in any trouble. You are trouble. The good kind.”
She had her head down now, was watching his fingers move with hers as they twisted slowly together.
“Wolf, I need to ask you something. Will you answer?”
“If I can.”
“Why is Haru auditioning to be your full servant, when you told me you can’t third mark me?” Her voice trembled, but she lifted her chin. “I don’t care about the punishment issue. I just…can you please tell me why? If I can know and understand why, I can bear it. You’ve said it’s not me, so I need proof of that. So that I don’t torture myself with it. Okay? Tell me what’s really happening. Then, whatever needs to happen can happen. But I just want the simple truth. Please. If you feel that’s something I deserve to hear.”
No one deserved to have that shit dumped on them, but that wasn’t what she was asking. She wanted to know if what she’d endured so far, what she’d endure after this night, was enough to deserve the truth.
It was. And yet opening his mouth and letting the words come out was still absurdly difficult.
He let go of her hand and turned, leaning against the dock. This was where she’d told him what happened to her family. Appropriate.
He was still close enough her dangling leg brushed his hip. He shifted so there were a few inches between them. Staying close, but he needed to keep a line in the sand, across which he couldn’t invite her.
“No matter what I say, don’t reach out and touch me until I say you can.” He looked out into the night, looked for the words, even knowing the images would surge up from his gut the second he spoke them. They were always ready to be called, in maximum, hi-def color.
“Okay. I won’t, Master. I promise.”
She’d recognized it as a precaution, not a preference. Sweet, smart girl.
“In the 1960s, I was sent to Vietnam. I came back from the war messed up, mentally and physically.”
He’d pretend he was talking about another vet, one he did sessions with, not him. “You’ve seen how Don is, the nights he comes to me in particularly bad shape. That was me, only maybe a lot worse, a lot further gone. Shell shock, PTSD, whatever the fuck they call it from generation to generation, they’re just buzz words for finding out just how easy it is to kill one another. The ways to do it, experience it, they’re limitless. And every one of them is a self-administered poison that gets in your system and never gets out. If they’d leave you in the thick of it, maybe you’d never realize it. But they don’t. They send you back home, and you’re trapped in your head, like you’re inside a crate, watching your parents, your wife, your kid, your friends who were your friends before the war…”
“‘Some part of the world still cares what color the kitchen is.’”
The bitter half laugh broke from his raw throat. He bit back unexpected tears. Fuck, she understood so much, listened so well.
He opened his mind a little, let her see a short montage of it. Blood, fire, screams. Another reason he was glad she wasn’t his third mark, so there’d never be any chance he’d dump the whole of what was in his soul into hers, during some unguarded nightmare of his own. With a second mark, it was just words, some vague images. Which were bad enough, if her indrawn breath and the hand he felt rise and then close, short of touching his back, were any indication.
Time to move on. This wasn’t a therapy session.
“Eventually, I couldn’t hack it anymore. I talked myself into believing my family were better off without me.” He stared into that darkness and had no idea if he was looking at the night or inside himself, the emptiness, the abyss that still beckoned whenever he thought of it.
“I killed myself.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
For a moment, Ella thought she’d misheard him. But from the corpse rigidity of his upright body, the way his gaze sought the night as if he were suddenly far away from her, she knew she hadn’t.
“I’d put a bullet in my brain. I was drunk as hell when I did it. Though I’d entered brain death, my heart was still pumping. Nolan, soon to be my sire, was living in the basement of the shitty motel where I was staying on the first floor. I didn’t know he’d been watching me, considering me as his next turning candidate. He heard the shot, came, and turned me before I could get away to the other side. A hospital would have pronounced me dead and unplugged me, but he had the juice to bring me back.”
Wolf rubbed a heavy hand over his face. “When you become a vampire, something changes in your base makeup. I was still this fucked-up guy who’d killed himself, but I was also now the type of predator whose sense of self-preservation is so strong, suicide isn’t an option. At least not in the first few centuries.
“Fuck, I hated him so much for it, for so long. It was a wonder he put up with me. In later years, I realized he’d been damn close to where I had been. It was the only thing that made sense, his patience. His damn stubbornness, because anyone else would have staked me after dealing with half of my self-wallowing shit.”
He straightened and moved along the loading dock, trailing his hand on it, then made his way back. Not once did he look at her, and he stopped a foot away. His long dark fingers tapped the yellow safety line, a restless movement.
Ella had seen Don do tics like that. Her heart tightened with th
e desire to reach out, but she didn’t. She waited, and listened.
“When I killed myself, I was married.” He swallowed. “I had a son.”
As she clutched her hands in her lap, she closed her eyes. This was the crux of it.
“You saw that scar on my body. The war…I was injured in a bad firefight, an explosion…” He shook his head. “The day in the alley, that was a bad moment for a lot of reasons, but it took me back there. When I saw your face over me, for this insane second, I actually felt so much relief, realizing it had been a bomb in the here and now. That I wasn’t back there again, only with the knowledge about what it would mean already injected into my head.
“I was too badly injured to return to combat. I could move, but not really well. So many muscles had been severed, destroyed. I should have died from those wounds. But I was the team leader, a stubborn, strong son of a bitch who thought he was some kind of invincible hero. Death wasn’t going to take me from my family. When I was shipped back home, it never entered my mind that I couldn’t heal from anything I survived.
“The injury…I couldn’t have sex with my wife. I never would be able to again. I couldn’t play ball with my little boy because I could barely lift my arms. They talked about wheelchairs, walkers. I wasn’t thirty years old yet. I discovered drugs and alcohol, lost myself in them. My inability to get myself back a hundred percent dragged me down into other things, things I’d seen and done in Vietnam that I couldn’t forget.”
He was tapping more rapidly now, uneven notes, and then abruptly, he just stopped, staring into the night as if he’d bore a hole into that darkness. His body was so stiff there was a vibration of energy around it. When he spoke, his deep voice was higher, hoarse.
“Sheila. My wife. She wouldn’t give up on me. Month after month, into two years. Maybe three. Can’t remember now, which fucking pisses me off, because I deserve to remember every minute of what she endured. She was so strong. And yet I found the way to break her. You know how I couldn’t contemplate being less than I was? She couldn’t believe that love wouldn’t be enough to save our family. She put her money on the wrong horse, the wrong love.”
Ella had tears running down her face. She was hurting so much for him. The knot of her hands in her lap had become painful as she dug in her nails, to keep them there and honor what he’d requested, not to touch him. He kept looking anywhere but at her, yet she felt his full focus on her, revolving around her.
“When I woke up as a vampire, Nolan told me I couldn’t go back to them. If it had just been Sheila…maybe. But not Ross. He was a kid. You can’t bring a kid into our world, for obvious reasons. But beyond that, I was in no fit state. For the next five years I was more raging, wounded beast than anything resembling a civilized human. Wasn’t much of a change from the piece of useless shit I’d been since I’d been wounded, to tell the truth. I was the same asshole, just in perfect, superhuman health.”
He took a breath. “Didn’t matter. I still couldn’t wrap my head around it, the guilt of leaving them, until Nolan pointed out, rather ruthlessly, that was exactly what I’d done when I killed myself. I’d believed to my marrow they’d be better off without me. I couldn’t handle the shame of being what I was, failing them, breaking her heart all the damn time. I’d lost my chance. It was done.”
His voice broke, but he snapped himself to attention like he was on a parade field, as if he’d admonished himself for showing weakness. The next words were said in a flat tone.
“I missed something, though. Nolan didn’t point it out because I was such a mess, and he knew I wasn’t up to it. It took me a decade to get my shit together, and I didn’t make any attempt to see them for all that time, because it was as hard as kicking an addiction. The more I wanted to see them, reach out, the farther away I went. I saw more of the ass-end corners of the world in those ten years than I can remember. I spent time with Fort and Nolan, helped them with things, things they could do with their special skillset to make the world a better place, even as vampires.”
A grim smile touched his mouth. “There are special ops guys out there who don’t know how close their night missions came to being fucked. We were three shadows, making sure they achieved their objectives and got home safe. And somewhere during that eleventh year, I had my head together, and made the connection. I couldn’t be part of their lives anymore; I accepted that. But I sure as hell should be checking in, seeing if there were things I could be doing, unseen, to help make their lives better. It would be tough, but I owed them that. I owed them everything. I was the head of the family.”
That strangled, bitter chuckle came from him again. “I was steeled for the worst. You know what I imagined that was? That they’d moved on, that Sheila had remarried, and I’d have to see some other guy in her bed, raising my son, playing catch with him.”
He paused. Ella heard a cricket start up somewhere, that chirrup, chirrup noise. Wolf looked up, and she followed his gaze. Only a scattering of stars penetrated Atlanta’s urban sky.
As the silence drew out, and that stiffness in his shoulders didn’t ease, she realized, with a terrible dread, that there was more.
“Sheila hadn’t handled my suicide well. She’d gotten hooked on prescription drugs. My strong girl, so strong for me and my son, reached her breaking point. She’d OD’ed, three years into my turning.”
“Oh, Wolf.”
Now he looked toward her. The pain in his face had vanished, back behind the impassive mask. Yet she didn’t see the mask anymore. She felt everything from him as he pivoted and walked toward her. Three steps, every heavy footfall precise, as if he were walking that yellow line she’d been following along the dock edge. When he reached her, he cupped her face and brushed her tears away with his thumbs. Slow. When she twitched, she heard it in her head, a reminder.
Don’t touch me, baby girl.
His hands were cold, and she suspected the rest of him was too, as if all his heat and life had gone somewhere else. He was turning into the marble statue he needed to become to tell the story that broke him, and kept breaking him, with every retelling.
“My son had practically raised himself, while taking care of her, best he knew how,” he said flatly. “He’d been put into foster care.”
“No.” She thought distantly what a strange picture they must make. Her back hunched against the sobs, hands knotted in her lap, her tear-stained face cupped in his hands, while he stood straight and unmoved, at least to those who didn’t know where to look. Her eyes were on his, and she saw past the flat exterior to the ravaged depths. But his thumbs never stopped moving over her cheeks and lips in that slow caress, taking away tears.
“Now do you understand?” he asked. “It’s never been you, Ella.”
He saw himself as a stone, one that had landed in the pond of their lives, his wife, his son. The ripples that he’d caused had kept expanding outward, drowning them in the consequences of his actions. Until only he was left on the banks, howling his pain.
She lifted her arms, a mute plea and offer, and Wolf moved into them. He couldn’t unbend, couldn’t let it all spill out, but now he wanted her arms, her hands on him, like he hadn’t wanted anything in a very long time. So he clasped her hard to him, almost bruising, and spoke the harsh truth into her hair.
“Sheila and Ross, they were gifts in my life. And I pissed those gifts away, so I don’t get anymore.”
She nodded, held him, ran her hands over his back, his shoulders, wept some more for him. “I understand.”
She spoke it, thought it. Her heart broke for him, while her arms held him as if she’d never let go.
Nolan, Fort, everyone else who’d known him since he’d become a vampire, they’d understood parts of it, but they hadn’t understood enough not to get impatient with him, feel like he should move on. When Ella looked at him, he saw she did understand. She understood. And she accepted.
“You’ve are the best damn gift I’ve ever received, since Sheila and Ross,” he said gruffly
.
Her gaze flickered with pain, but she nodded, with that resolute set to her chin that told him just how tough she was. He wished he didn’t know how fragile she was as well, but Sheila had taught him that, and it was a lesson he’d never, ever forget. They all had their breaking point.
Actually, the first one who’d tried to teach him that was himself. Allan had said it, right? For not being the superhero you believed you were, that nobody is, not a hundred percent of the time. Unfortunately, Sheila had to be the one who drove the truth home.
Ella had another question for him.
Your son…do you know what happened to him?
“Yeah.” On that at least, his heart could ease, even though it was accompanied by the bitter knowledge Ross had come out on the other side in spite of his dad, not because of him.
He eased back, but let her keep her hands resting on his chest, kneading, kitten movements of reassurance for them both, a reminder of her presence.
“He landed in a good foster home, and then he was adopted. The dad’s a travel writer, the mom a cooking expert. My son’s been all over the world, knows about four languages. He works with diplomats, has even been a translator at peace talks. He looks like me, though he’s a bit slimmer, fine-boned like his mother. He’s gay.”
Wolf gave a deprecating half-chuckle. “I probably would have given him a hard time about that, since like most straight men of my era I thought being gay was the most fucked up thing that a son could be. I like to think if I’d stuck around, been his dad, love would have taken me past that, helped me figure it out and know that it was okay. But since I was so clueless about so much, maybe not. His adopted parents…Joan and Rob, they saved my boy.”
His lips twisted. “The irony is that, for years, I’ve put most of my sexual focus on men, because it was safer. A vampire’s nature is to enjoy men and women, so it was easy to make that transition. I know I can enjoy sex with a man, but I can never feel for a man the way I could feel for a woman. If I was going to fall in love again, it would be with a woman. So I’ve stayed away from them, or gone only with the really safe situations, a woman I know I’m not in danger of that with.”
