Almost Everything

by Tate Hallaway

  Luis, who had been slapping the back of Captain Creepy, stopped dead. He turned around slowly. Standing in the foyer, he looked between Elias and me for several beats. The humidity stuck in my throat. “Is this the truth?”

  “Check with my dad if you don’t believe me,” I said.

  “Are you calling my daughter a liar?” Mom added, waving the pie slicer menacingly. I shot her a you’re-not-helping glare.

  Luis looked around me to Elias, who nodded and said, “Yes, Your Highness. It’s true.”

  “I see,” Luis said slowly. His eyes roamed up and down Elias, as if looking for hidden solutions in every angle of his form. “I must consult my advisers,” he said at last. Finally, as he looked at me, his eyes were dark with disappointment. “Your offer honors me, and I wish to accept it with all my heart. But, if Constantine is truly rogue and has no allegiance, there is little value in such an alliance. I came to make a treaty with the Northern Region, not with one man, a prize though he may be.”

  In that dramatic way that only vampires seem to pull off, the entourage swept out the door and was gone.

  When the door shut, Mom let out a loud sigh. “Can we have a normal tea now?”

  I snorted. When were they ever normal? The freezer cheesecake continued to melt where it sat on the table. Mom moved to sit, but Elias frowned at the door, his eyes darkly intense. I brushed the back of his hand with my fingertips. “Are you okay?”

  He shrugged, pulling away from me. The fan clicked as it swiveled from side to side, punctuating his silence.

  “I didn’t mean to offer you up like that, you know,” I said desperately, following him as he made his way to the table to take his customary seat. “I had no idea Luis would just pounce. That was totally creepy, right? I mean, yikes. He acted as if you were some kind of prime steak or something.”

  “I didn’t like him,” Mom agreed, taking a big bite of the dessert. “Any of them.”

  “It would have been an acceptable pairing,” Elias said, picking up his fork.

  “Seriously?” I asked. “Did you not see Captain Creepy?”

  He glanced up briefly, catching me with those silver smoke eyes. He quickly turned his attention to pushing around bits of the cake. “Captain Valois has a formidable reputation, it’s true. But then, so do I.” He took a small taste. “Or at least I did.”

  Oh, not this again. Ever since my dad exiled Elias, he’d been moping around, acting all man-without-a-country. I could guess now why he was all gloomy. “If I hadn’t brought the exile up, you could be married to some dude right now. Would you really prefer that?”

  “You shouldn’t confuse vampire confarreatio for modern marriage or even the ancient Roman version,” Mom said, her voice taking on that professorial tone she used when she lectured. “I’m pretty sure the whole idea of a wedding cake came from this practice, but we’re talking about a property exchange, the building of a household—or a kingdom. …”

  I ignored her and watched Elias’s face.

  His jaw twitched, but he didn’t look at me. Abruptly, he stood. The chair made a moan as it slid across the maple floorboards. “Excuse me; I must go.”

  “What? Where?”

  “That might be good,” my mom muttered. I was surprised at the sudden irritation in her voice, but I focused on Elias.

  “Your father should be warned that Prince Montezuma has come seeking restitution,” Elias said, starting for the door.

  My flip-flops lay in a pile of discarded footwear by the Parsons bench. I hurried to slip into them. “Then I’m coming too,” I told Elias.

  He was already outside, on the porch. The screen door snapped shut in my face.

  I wrenched it open and ran after him. My mom yelled something about not staying up too late because I had driver’s ed in the morning, and that she’d be changing the wards, so I should be careful when I came back.

  “Wait for me,” I shouted after Elias’s shadowy form as he disappeared down the mulberry-lined walk. In the warm evening air the seeds I crushed underfoot smelled slightly fermented. “You can’t just waltz in there as if nothing’s happened, you know.”

  Elias’s purposeful stride hitched as though my words had literally tripped him. In the darkness, his voice echoed softly. “How could I forget?”

  Did I mention Elias was taking this exile thing kind of hard? Elias used to be my dad’s right-hand man. He was the king’s sword, his Praetorian Guard, his confidant—the big effing deal. He did not like being just some vampire who lived in my basement. I wondered if he enjoyed tea with my mom so much because it was all about the past, a place he really preferred over the present these days.

  I managed to catch up with him when he stopped to lift the latch of the wrought-iron gate. “I’m not sure you remember how mad my dad was.” For my part, I sometimes woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night with the image still reverberating in my mind of Elias having been chained in my father’s court and whipped like an animal. “I really don’t think it’s smart to go back.”

  “I must warn my king.”

  I wished he could just call, you know? But my dad’s underground kingdom was literally under a ton of rock and dirt—no cell phone reception, even if vampires carried cell phones, which they didn’t for some stupid reason. I guess they all preferred living in a time before modern conveniences. At least Elias had a car.

  “He’s not your king anymore,” I told him bluntly.

  “He was my lord and liege for more than two hundred years.”

  “And he threw you away in a minute because he was feeling petulant. I don’t think you owe him anything,” I said. “Besides, what makes you think he doesn’t already know Luis is in town? There’s apparently some kind of troop of vampires camped along the banks of the St. Croix. I mean, you’re really awesome and everything, but I’ll bet Dad has a couple of other scouts who might have noticed an entire army.”

  Elias let out a little chuckle, though, as he set the latch back in place, he only grudgingly agreed with me. “Perhaps,” he said.

  The streetlamp painted the edge of the glossy, pointy leaves of the mulberry in an artificial yellowish glow. Elias didn’t move out onto the main sidewalk, but he didn’t seem ready to turn back yet. His eyes looked over the rooftops in the direction of downtown. A crescent moon rose low on the horizon.

  “If I came to him with this news …,” Elias started, but ended with a heavy sigh.

  I shook my head because I knew why he stopped—if Elias came with news of the Second Coming, Dad still wouldn’t forgive him. My dad was nothing if not stubborn. I’m not even sure my father really meant to exile us that day, but he’d said it in front of his whole court and, by Goddess, he was going to stick to it.

  Elias’s eyes found mine. “I know it’s difficult for you to understand, Ana, but I would have gladly accepted betrothal to the Southern captain because then, at least, I would belong to a kingdom again. I would be a knight of the realm. I could …” Without finishing that last thought, he shook his head sadly.

  “Yeah, but that guy freaked me out.”

  He laughed. “Me too.”

  It surprised me to hear that. I didn’t think anyone could spook Elias. “You’ve got a pretty serious reputation, huh? The guys in the South sure think you’re something else.”

  The crinkle in his eye showed he knew I was fishing. Thing was, Elias’s past was a mystery. Thanks to Mom’s evening tea sessions, I knew all about his opinion on human politics for the last forty years, but I didn’t know anything about who he was as a vampire. Heck, I didn’t know much about vampires at all, despite being the princess of some of them.

  He didn’t look as though he planned to enlighten me, so I poked him in the ribs lightly. “Cough it up, Constantine. Tell me why those Southern boys want you so bad.”

  Leaning on the gate, he regarded me with a slight frown. The crickets, which had hushed with our approach, started to chirp softly. “If you had a former gladiator as a slave, what woul
d you do with him?”

  “Have him clean my room?” I joked. “Take out the garbage?”

  “He’s not known for his cleaning skills, my lady,” Elias said seriously.

  A mosquito buzzed my ear, and I swatted at it. “I didn’t think it mattered very much what you were before … as a human,” I said carefully.

  Elias and I had never really talked about what I’d learned last spring about the way vampires were made, and I didn’t want to offend him. Vampires came from a place “beyond the Veil,” an otherworld that people might confuse with hell, though it was much, much older. But they didn’t just step out, like walking out of a closet. What they were became bonded with a human host, irreparably destroying the former person’s soul, but not killing the body.

  “Physical memories remain,” he said quietly, as if lost in a thought. “Consider the alternative. If our bodies didn’t remember how to walk or speak, what use would we be?”

  That made a certain kind of sense, and I could see how witches might use that to their advantage. “So sometimes host bodies were chosen because they had specific physical skills?”

  “Yes, now you see.”

  I started to ask what he was good at, when the moonlight reflected the intense ice of Elias’s eyes. “Oh.”

  “‘Oh,’ indeed,” he said.

  “So you were …” What did I say here? A killer? An assassin? How about if I just left that blank? I dropped my gaze and continued on. “For the witches?”

  “I did as my masters commanded.”

  Except they were mostly “mistresses,” being witches. Vampires had been brought from this other dimension by the First Witch, who bound their will to hers with a talisman, a statuette in the shape of her snake-headed goddess.

  A couple of hundred years ago, Elias managed to get his hands on that talisman, even though he was a slave at the time. He lost it, but without the talisman, the witches’ power over their slaves diminished. There was a big war. The vampires call it the secret war, and many vampires were freed. Some stayed with their old families, but the rest broke up into underground kingdoms, like the one my dad ruled.

  The statue had been rediscovered last year. Nikolai, my ex-boyfriend, had stolen it from a traveling Smithsonian exhibit. I destroyed it. I still had a small scar on my hand, actually. As it turned out, blowing up the talisman put an end to the witches’ ability not only to control vampires, but also to make new ones, because, as an extra-special bonus, the path to that other place was forever closed with a big, old bang.

  I must have been looking at the tiny white line on my wrist with the memory, because Elias took my hand into his. “When the talisman was lost, I was free to be who I wished, but by then my path was already laid. There was a war; I was a warrior.”

  “Wait—are you saying you were a killer for my dad too?”

  I hadn’t meant to say that word, or to jerk my hand away so forcefully, but I did. From the stricken look in Elias’s eye, I knew it was too late to take it back.

  “I did as my king demanded.”

  “Well, that sounds like a cop-out. When are you going to do what you want? Maybe this exile is a blessing. Maybe you can finally stop doing everything people tell you to.”

  That was apparently not the thing Elias wanted to hear. His eyes narrowed dangerously, and I saw the hint of fang in his snarl. In one deft leap, he cleared the garden gate and stalked down the sidewalk.

  This time I let him go. I figured he just needed to clear his head. I’d see him later tonight.

  Mom was nothing if not a fast worker. When my foot hit the porch stairs, I could feel the house vibrating with energy. Thanks to being half vampire, I can’t actually work True Magic, but I didn’t know that for years because I’ve always been extra sensitive to it.

  As I took another step, my foot started to prickle. Even through the flip-flops, I got the sensation of pins and needles. On the porch, the house really started to resist me. My feet dragged with numbness, and my stomach soured. I thought I was going to barf. A feeling that was amplified as my head began to spin with vertigo. I lurched toward the doorknob like a drunk. It took all my strength to pull and then heave myself through the screen door.

  And I lived here.

  “I think the wards are a bit high, Mom,” I shouted from where I stood, doubled over and panting on the welcome mat.

  “You got through them. They’re fine,” she insisted.

  “Are you freaking kidding me?”

  Mom was sitting at the table, eating a second piece of freezer cheesecake. She looked up guiltily when I came in and hastily pushed the plate aside. She cleared her throat. “Accidentally or not, I managed to invite three strange vampires into our house. Vampires who are apparently at war with your father’s kingdom, or will be when they confirm your proposal of alliance was a sham. You’re just going to have to deal.”

  “Will Elias be able to get back through?”

  “It’ll probably be a bit harder for him, but he’s a big boy … and apparently some kind of superstar vampire. I’m sure he’ll be fine.” She sounded a touch angry, as if upset by how little she knew about him after all this time as well. She picked up her fork and then put it down. Looking over my shoulder, she asked, “Where is he, anyway? I thought he’d come back with you.”

  I shrugged. “He’s off brooding, I guess.” I didn’t want to tell my mom that we’d had a kind of falling-out over the whole killer thing, because I felt so awful about it.

  Worse, I’d forgotten to ask Elias about our betrothal. Had it just been a political thing for him? Was that why we’d never kissed?

  “Situation normal, eh?” She looked wistfully at the remains of the dessert but wiped her mouth with a cloth napkin instead. “Weird night.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, slipping into my spot. I examined my own abandoned slice, but I couldn’t muster any interest in eating it. It reminded me too much of the whole disastrous meeting with Luis. “Did you know that Elias was a gladiator … um, before?”

  My mom’s eyes widened; I guess she didn’t. “I suppose I should have,” she said. “Constantine was a Roman emperor. Elias must have been one of the last ones. When Constantine adopted Christianity, he was under a lot of pressure to stop the games.”

  Vampires took the surname of whoever was ruling at the time and place of their bringing over. My dad, for instance, was named after an Egyptian pharaoh.

  I didn’t mention the other bit of information I’d learned about Elias. I wasn’t sure my mom would continue to let Elias stay here if she knew he used to be an assassin. It was one thing to be a bloodsucker, but vampires needed to kill only once every human generation to live.

  When I looked up, Mom was smiling. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “I keep trying to see Elias as Russell Crowe in that movie. You know, in a funny little skirt and sandals,” she said.

  My mind rebelled at the image, but I had seen vampires bring scimitars and katanas to a fight. I could easily picture how deadly Elias would be with a Roman short sword. I swallowed hard, thinking what it must have been like to see him coming down some dark alley on the orders of his witch masters.

  My stomach twisted, and I pushed away the plate I hadn’t touched. “Yeah, that reminds me—I should … uh, do my summer reading.” Great Goddess, that was a lame lie, especially since I’d finished it ages ago. Still, I knew Mom would never protest the idea of my doing schoolwork. I got up from the table and headed to my room before Mom could ask anything that might blow my cover, as it were.

  My room was one of three upstairs bedrooms. It was one of the smaller ones, but I liked it because it had a dormer, a cubbyhole-like section with a low, slanted triangular ceiling that followed where a window jutted out. It was big enough that I wedged a desk in there against one wall, and a makeshift bookcase against the other. Manga, graphic novels, and books of all sorts were piled everywhere. The rest of the room was occupied by my bed and more overflowing bookshelves.

  I’d
left the top of one case bare. It was the only section of the room not smothered in reading material. It was my altar. I hadn’t changed it since the dark moon meditation I’d done a couple of weeks ago. It was still covered in a simple square of black cloth. Two silver candleholders held one black and one white candle. A round mirror from one of my compacts lay faceup between them. I’d forgotten to put away my athame, a black-handled ritual dagger, and it sat next to the mirror. There used to be a snake-headed Nile goddess figurine in a place of honor on the altar, until I discovered, last year, that the talisman was in the same shape. Now it was stored in the bottom of my desk drawer, collecting dust.

  After I closed the door, I grabbed my cell phone from where it was charging on my desk. I intended to distract myself by checking in with my sometimes BFF, Bea, but discovered a dozen or so texts waiting. Lying down on the bed, I scrolled through them.

  Thompson wanted to know if we were going to try out for Renaissance Festival together tomorrow. I sent him a quick reply that he could pick me up after driver’s ed. I also warned him that from what I’d heard from Lane, one of our other theater friends, the whole audition was improvisation—not something either Thompson or I was any good at. One of the reasons I loved theater so much was that it came with a script—something I found lacking in real life. Improv was all about making stuff up on the fly. As weird as it might sound from a longtime theater geek like me, I really didn’t like all the pressure of people staring at me while I tried to be clever.

  Bea had left a couple of messages about this big midsummer picnic that was supposed to go down this weekend. Our coven—actually, since I failed Initiation, it was really more Bea’s coven—had this “open house” every summer where the Inner and Outer Circle were invited to a potluck at Como Park. You could even bring mundanes, non–True Magic people, and Bea wanted to know if I was bringing Thompson as a date.