by Sara Thorn
I looked at him and immediately started to sob as he pulled me into his chest and wrapped his arms around me. I buried my face against him and tried to listen to his faint heartbeat to calm me as it had done before. But nothing could calm me now. I was too overwhelmed with sorrow and guilt. I felt his tight hold and pressed into him as I tried to wish our bodies together and block out everything else, including the sight of Sen’s peacefully pained face in my arms.
The echoes of fighting sounded like they were coming closer again. The vampires had definitely won by now and were scouring the perimeter for anyone who had tried to escape.
“Quinn,” Cassius said with urgency in his voice. “Do it now. Take us to the human world.”
My eyes were open as Cassius held me, but I couldn’t see what Quinn was doing behind my back. The only thing that I saw was the deep indigo glow that seemed to spread across the ground by our feet. For a second, it felt like I was breathing in a gulp of dust instead of air. But the feeling quickly dissipated. With my head still up against Cassius’s chest, all I could see was the ground, which suddenly changed from tall, dark grass to a concrete street. I felt Cassius loosen his arms around me, and I heard the sounds of car horns and people talking. When I slowly lifted my head and looked around, I couldn’t believe what was in front of me. Right in front of my eyes hung a green, rectangular street sign—Boylston Street. We were back in Boston.
It must have been winter because, as I looked up, I felt the tiniest of snowflakes stick to my eyelashes. The bitter cold immediately bit at my skin, and I shuddered in the thin dress that I was still wearing from Athan’s stronghold as my bare feet stood against the icy pavement. It took only a moment for Cassius to notice that my lips were starting to turn blue, along with my toes. He picked me up again, this time swinging my legs over the side of his arm and cradling me against his chest as I tried to suck in as much body heat from him as I could. That wasn’t an easy thing to do, considering he was half-vampire and colder than most human flesh. I felt like I was dreaming, that Sen’s death was just part of an awful nightmare and that I was now reaching the conclusion of the dream in a delirious climax that ended with the sweet smell of Cassius’s skin against my cheek. I heard the two of them talking, but their voices echoed in my head as if they were far away.
“We need to find a place to hide,” Cassius said. “It won’t take them long to figure out that we’ve left Mystreuce and come looking for us. We need to try to blend in with this world.”
“Mara, do you know a place we can go to?” Quinn’s voice sounded so small and far away that I barely heard it. “Mara?”
I lifted my head and saw the snow swirl around my face. My focus rested on the snowflakes falling just in front of my eyes, and each one of them looked like tiny, pointed worlds of ice.
“Mara.” This time the voice was Cassius’s, and the sound resonated between my ribs.
I turned my head to look at him, and the snow between us seemed to slow as if it were being carried on his breath as he spoke to me. He leaned his face toward mine, and his breath, which was slightly warmer than the air, pulled me in. “I’ve got you, Mara. Just tell us where we can go, and then you can rest.”
I looked at him and thought about what an amazing creature he was—both man and vampire, hero and villain, savior and captor. For a moment, the singular thought that I had in my head was that I only wanted to love him forever and nothing else. But his black eyes bore into me until I realized that I needed to answer. A place to hide, a place to blend in with the crowds of people.
“Copley Square,” I said.
“Good,” he whispered as he kissed my forehead and then pulled me back against his chest. “Rest now.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against his chest as he and Quinn started to walk. I could hear the words he spoke vibrate through his chest wall, and they sounded louder to me than if I had been hearing his voice. Quinn and Cassius were trying to figure out where I had told them to go, where Copley was, and once they did, they took off at a fast pace toward the destination.
I should have told them about the subways and about how commuting worked in the cities on Earth. It would have saved them a great deal of time and fatigue. But instead, I nestled against Cassius’s shirt and even slid my fingers inside between the buttons so that I could feel his skin. Every so often, I felt him tip his head down toward me and rest his chin against the top of my head as if he were reminding me that he was still there. But I knew he was here. The small piece of contact between my fingertips and his skin felt like a tether that held me into place.
When we finally stopped moving, I lifted my head again and felt the cold wind smack against my flushed, warm cheeks. In front of us stood the buildings of Copley Square, the Copley hotel and mall, even the enclosed overhead walkway with all of the rushing traffic underneath. I tried to force myself back to a more lucid state of mind because I knew that neither Quinn nor Cassius would know how to navigate things such as apartments or hotels, and I had no idea where they expected us to stay.
“You need money,” I said as the city’s surroundings saturated my senses. “To stay at a hotel or in an apartment—any sort of dwelling here requires money.”
Cassius glanced over at Quinn, and I could tell that Quinn was reluctant to do whatever it was he wanted him to do.
“You realize that the cost for all of this will come due sooner rather than later,” Quinn warned Cassius. “And it won’t be a simple matter of payment such as the trivial pieces of decorated paper currency that the mortals use.”
“I’m aware,” Cassius said firmly. “Do it, please.”
Chapter Four
I didn’t really remember getting up into the hotel room, but I remembered seeing Quinn suddenly have a whole stack of hundred dollar bills to pull out of his pocket and Cassius saying they would take the entire top floor of the building.
The girl at the front desk looked at him like he was insane, but when she quoted him the price for a two-week rental of the penthouse and Quinn plopped down the cash onto the counter in front of her, she eagerly took it and handed over the keys. I guess it helped to have magic at your beck and call.
The penthouse room was beautiful, but for some reason, it seemed less beautiful than I had expected. I found myself thinking about the golden castle on Mystreuce and wanting to see what was inside its halls. My mind wandered toward the sprawling hills that stretched out around the castle and the deep forests that lined the edges of the land. Suddenly the most luxurious penthouse in one of the most extravagant hotels in Boston seemed so completely underwhelming and even a little bit stifling to me.
There were three bedrooms inside the penthouse, along with two baths, a full kitchen, a bar, and a giant great room that looked out over the city. Everything was immaculately decorated and fully stocked with amenities. Quite a change from sleeping on the floor next to Dregon’s bed.
Cassius walked into one of the bedrooms and set me down on top of a high mattress piled with mounds of soft blankets.
“Lift your arms,” he said softly.
I did it without asking him why. He gently grabbed the sides of my dress and wriggled it out from under me, then pulled it up over my head and tossed it off into the corner on the floor. I sat naked on the bed as he struggled to stare directly into my eyes only.
“You will never again wear anything that Athan tries to put on you or Dregon.” Without letting his eyes trail over me, or his hands be tempted to touch me, Cassius pulled one of the soft blankets up around me and placed his hand behind my head as he laid me down against the pillow. For a dhampir, and a vicious warrior and ruler, he acted as tenderly toward me as if I were comprised solely of a handful of glitter that he was trying not to spill. Then, he turned to leave the room.
“Stay,” I heard myself call out to him, almost as if I didn’t realize the word had come from my own lips. “Please.”
Cassius hesitated but then turned to walk back toward the bed. He was covered with
blood and dirt from the battle, and his sword still hung at his waist with the stains of slain enemies marring its sheen. He kicked off his boots, set his blade beside the bed, and lay beside me on his back above the covers with his hands clasped over his ribcage. I turned to face him and then moved close enough to rest my head against his shoulder. I opened the blanket that covered me so I could set my leg over his and covered him with the corner of the soft, white blanket, which looked in stark contrast to his dirty, tattered garb. Then, I reached my hand onto his chest and slid it beneath his. For a moment, he didn’t move.
But then he opened his arm to hold me, and I moved my head to lie on his shoulder with my face buried against his chest. I felt his fingers clasp around my hand and the rise and fall of his breaths. I listened to the faint heartbeat that had become my most solace sound. The feel of my bare skin against the rough cloth and leather of his clothing made me feel like a flower against the tip of a steel blade, and when I thought about the image of those two opposing things, I also thought about Sen’s delicate face amidst a sea of bloodied horrors. And that was how I fell asleep, too troubled to have any more tears left to shed and too comforted by Cassius’s presence ever to want to move from this spot again.
The morning brought with it a whole new set of things to consider. Quinn and Cassius had only been to the human world less than a handful of times and trying to get the two of them to blend into the city posed no easy task. Before we could think about making any plans for the future, we first had to make sure that Athan and his followers didn’t find us. Fortunately, the hotel was attached to a mall, and with the right amount of money, the concierge would do just about anything for you, including shopping for new clothes.
Cassius turned to face the other way as I slid on a pair of black jeans and black T-shirt over top of the really expensive undergarments the hotel concierge had picked out. I wondered how much money Quinn had conjured up and how much of a cost he or Cassius would have to pay for it in something much more expensive than currency. When I finished getting dressed, I turned back around and saw Cassius’s bare back after he had just finished pulling jeans over his hips. He turned around with the jeans still unzipped and halfway hanging open against his waist. Then he picked up the shirt and black leather jacket from the side of the chair and walked toward me. Quinn walked into the room just as Cassius was tucking a piece of my shirt into the front of my jeans. Quinn’s eyes immediately went to Cassius’s hand just barely inside the top of my pants, and the fact that his jeans hung loosely open at his hips. After an awkward second, he cleared his throat and looked up at me instead.
“All black?” he asked as he motioned toward his own outfit, which was essentially the same as everything else that I had asked the concierge to get for us. “Is this some sort of cultural thing?”
“It’s the best way to blend into the city in winter,” I said. “Everyone in Boston wears black in the winter.”
I could tell that Quinn thought I was overly simplistic about the fashion choices, but I knew he was in for a shock coming from a colorful fae world into the dreary winter streets of Earth.
“How does anything grow here?” Quinn asked as he looked out the window onto the concrete jungle below.
“Things grow here on Earth,” I said. “Just not usually in the cities. Unless you count the small scattering of rooftop urban gardens.”
He looked at me with a blank expression that meant he had no idea what I was talking about.
“How often have you two been to Earth?” I asked them.
“I was only here the one time,” Quinn answered. By that, he meant the time that Cassius took me to the Boston Opera House and we were captured and returned to Mystreuce by Dregon and Athan’s cult of vamp warriors.
“I’ve been here a handful of times,” Cassius said. “None of which I care to think about.”
I knew that the time he had brought me here had ended in disaster, but I wondered what was so awful about his other visits here that he didn’t want to talk about them at all.
“Okay,” I said, feeling slightly more able to focus this morning than I had last night. “If we’re planning to stay in this hotel for an extended amount of time, we need to get some food and supplies.”
“What kind of supplies?” Cassius asked.
“Well, probably more than one outfit of clothing to change into would be a good idea. But you know, we also need a toothbrush, soap—”
“Wine,” Quinn interrupted.
Yeah, I have a feeling we’ll definitely be needing wine.
“We can’t be spotted in the city,” Cassius said. “I am sure that Athan will send men to hide in the shadows here to try to search us out. If we are going to go out ourselves, then we need to do so as carefully and infrequently as possible.”
“I know this city inside and out,” I said. “I can get us everywhere we need to go without being noticed. The trick is to be in the midst of so many people that you become invisible.”
They both looked at me with contorted expressions and raised eyebrows.
“Come on,” I said as I grabbed the hotel key from the nightstand. “Trust me.”
***
It was a little bit like taking a bull into a china shop, or more accurately, a dhampir warrior into an eclectic and crowded market. I figured that places like Quincy Market and the public market would be less obvious and eminently more crowded places for us to shop than just going to the mall. I was right about that part but totally wrong about their ability to blend in. Quinn was so distracted and intrigued by every single one of the vendor carts at Quincy Market that it was an unceasing job just to keep track of where he kept darting off to. And Cassius seemed to turn the head of almost all the girls he walked past in the public market, which didn’t do much to help our attempts at laying low. By the time we had picked up a few changes of clothes, all the essentials, and several bags of food, both men were laden down with packages and bags and struggled to navigate the turnstiles at the subway.
“Are you sure this was the best way to go about this?” Cassius asked me once we had finally gotten seated on the train and were headed back toward the hotel.
“Yes,” I answered. “Even with all of the, uh, issues, it was still less conspicuous than shopping in the mall.” I expected to hear protests from both of them the entire ride back, but instead, they were both silent and looking out the window of the subway train as if it were magical.
Neither of them said much as we made our way back into the hotel and upstairs either.
“So how long are we planning on hiding here?” I asked as I sat on a barstool inside the penthouse while Quinn uncorked a bottle of wine and poured it evenly into three tall glasses with rounded lips.
The way he poured wine made it look like the red liquid was dancing in twirls as it cascaded into the glasses below. I was curious if that was magic or just a special touch that he had. I looked over at Cassius, who was eyeing the wine in a rather primal way, and it quickly reminded me that he was half-vampire.
“How often do you need to drink blood?” I asked before either of them had even had a chance to answer my first question.
“Can we go back to the last thing you asked instead?” Quinn said.
Cassius glared up at him with his eyes only, without raising his head. “We all have our sins,” he said to Quinn.
Quinn put his wineglass to his lips and drew a long sip into his mouth. It seemed like he was doing it to keep himself from saying anything else.
“We’ll hide here for as long as we can or as long as we need to,” Cassius said as he reached for his wine. “As long as it takes to figure out a way to regain my reign over the vampires of Mystreuce and to keep you safe.”
I watched as he sipped his merlot and saw him lick the lingering red droplets from his bottom lip. I didn’t know why, but I felt a surge of longing sweep over me that made me want to lick the deep, red wine droplets from his tongue. I quickly grabbed my glass, accidentally sloshing some of its cont
ents onto the counter as I tried to put it in my mouth before I did something stupid and impulsive.
Both of them stopped drinking to watch me with a confounded examination as I emptied my glass as quickly as I could.
“Uh, would you like more?” Quinn asked when I set my glass back down.
“Yes.”
Definitely, yes.
***
That night I couldn’t sleep.
All three of us had gone to bed in our separate rooms, which felt odder to me than it should have, but I supposed it was a good thing considering I could barely contain myself while we had wine earlier. I had tossed and turned for a good portion of the evening until eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore and just needed to get up. I walked out into the living room and stood in front of the large windows that stared down at the city below.
I loved Boston. It was still bustling enough that you could see people walking the streets at all hours of the night, but not as crazy-busy as New York City. It was just the right amount of energy; at least I had thought that it was until I found myself in Mystreuce. And now, even with all of the horrible things that had happened there, I longed for that world, which was not my own. It was as if Mystreuce had found a way in between the small spaces in my joints and had settled there and refused to move.
“Hey,” Quinn said quietly from behind me.
I jumped a little because it was dark and in the wee hours of the morning, so I hadn’t expected anyone else to be awake.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, it’s okay,” I smiled. “I couldn’t sleep, and I just needed to walk around a bit.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Quinn came up beside me to look down at the city, too. His face looked tired and sad, and the brightness of his green eyes seemed to have faded slightly.
