If the Great War were still going on, stupid things like this are exactly what would get me killed. I was so focused on my personal rivalry with Ben that I forgot to think about how he and I are both former soldiers, as is the hunter I was trying to deceive. It could have been a very, very expensive mistake.
I know that even with the hunter’s work interrupted, she may still be watching me. If not her, somebody might be watching that GPS tracker on my car. To pop it off would be too suspicious, but my travels recently are aiming straight at Ben and Ivy.
I can’t just go out and warn them myself. I call Grandma to tell her what I’ve found, but get routed straight to voicemail. I leave a brief and cryptic message to let her know somebody needs to get word out to them. I try Nathan, too. Now that I know what he is, I figure he may have some means of getting there completely undetected, but I get the default voicemail message that came with his phone, the one I’m used to, and that he refuses to change. As I get frustrated that I can’t get one of the two of them out to warn Ivy and Ben, I feel the wolf rousing itself even more. It’s going to want to act, but this new knowledge I have is something even it can’t help but heed. I feel its blood heating up as it feels wisdom restraining its actions, but it seems willing to control itself for a while.
I go to my kitchen, drink more water while cooking breakfast and making coffee for myself. I try to distract myself by doing some studying for final exams this coming week, but there’s way too much on my mind to concentrate on anything at all. Neither Grandma nor Nathan calls me back, which doesn’t help calm me at all, but I’m still able to keep my impulse to go warn Ben and Ivy myself under control. As soon as I have some food in me, I hop in the car and drive into town.
Kate is certainly at home and buried in books, and right now, I would like the comfort of her company. Nathan is known to hate his phone and simply not look at it, sometimes for a couple days at a time. So he may very well be at home, in which case I can talk to him directly and get something done.
I’m just putting my dishes in the sink to rinse them when there’s a knock on my door. I dry my hands and reach under the sink for a silvered fighting knife. I don’t think the hunter would be bold enough to just walk up and knock on my door, but if she wants to get inside my house, she does need me to invite her in. If it’s any other sort of trouble at the door, if she has some human helpers like most zombies do, well a knife is a knife is a knife.
I stand look through the peephole in my door. Whoever is knocking is carefully standing outside of its range. I shift a little bit, so I can keep the knife hidden from view, but still at the ready, and open the door a crack to peer onto the corner of the stoop that’s hidden from the peephole.
And I see Ivy standing there.
Chapter Thirty-One
Ben Wake
Watching Ivy get into Nathan’s car just pulls the heart right out of me. Seeing her get into any car at this moment would, but somehow it seems to pull at me harder that she is driving away from me with an old friend that she has known for most of her life. If she had caught a ride with some random stranger coming up the highway, it would have hurt to know that I was sending her away, breaking her heart, because we are not meant to be together. That would give me a sense that she is continuing to live her life, to keep moving on with her life after our brief happy and troubled time together. All relations between vampires and the warm have to end with the warm one moving on somehow, whether by simply leaving the relationship, dying, or turning.
But seeing Ivy greet Nathan and leave me behind. It gives me some sense that our time together was an anomaly, a step outside of the life she was living. Like she has her own path she is on, and had only briefly flirted with a different life before deciding it was not as good as the one I could give her.
I think I can understand another piece of how some of my kind become so furious and contemptuous of the warm after a while. Since I was turned, I have always been stronger than, faster than, smarter than, greater than, more than any warm mortal. For the first time ever, I feel like I am lesser than them, and it is making me furious as much as it is making me sad. It’s like this petulant child inside of me is railing against her. I was offering her a life that only a tiny handful of warm will ever have. As a vampire I can take her places, show her things, that almost nobody will ever know and see. But she is giving all of that up to live the same uninteresting and mundane life that the other seven billion short lived warm on the planet are living. All of this fury burns through me even though I am the one pushing Ivy away, I am the one who decided to send her one way while I go the other.
I sit down on the ground, my attempts to see if the hunter is out there all but forgotten. Even when I consider the possibility that she is following Ivy and Nathan, I cannot summon up any concern. I come back to myself long enough to examine my feelings and try to count how many different emotions have just blasted through me in the last few minutes. All tied to a single word, ‘Witch’, and the last thing Sonia Vătafu ever said to me.
“Someday, young Benjamin, one of us Negre is going to bed a witch, and every one of us will feel the sun. Not a one of us will escape the sun, not a single Negre, not a single drinker of any other clan. Only the one who raises the sun will escape the sun.”
When she spoke those words to me, her eyes took on the pale gray of a body drained of all blood, and her voice came from a place a million miles deep within her. She was speaking truth about the future, immutable truth. Most vampire sensings are warnings – keep walking this path, and this is where it leads. What Sonia Vătafu was speaking was not a warning, it was an inevitability. Unfortunately, some others heard the words, for she spoke them to me at the clan castle, and there are no secrets there. Papa Racoviță recognized that such knowledge is power, and has carefully hoarded it. He almost killed me just for having heard the words, but he knew that he could not keep the secret completely to himself. He needed a select few others that knew of Sonia Vătafu’s vision that would be able to recognize if the secret had spread and would be able to stamp the knowledge out for him. This information I have is probably part of how I ended up framed for a murder I did not commit, and why I was always certain that Papa Racoviță wanted me to die for it. This is why I am so dangerous to them as a renegade. This is why I need to get Ivy as far from me as possible, because if any Negre ever suspects she is a witch, they will destroy her and her grandmother.
Plus, Sonia Vătafu’s words tell of the end of all vampires. As much as I feel the ennui of immortality, I have thus far done nothing to hasten my own death. In fact, my time with Ivy showed me that even though I’m now an immortal, it is possible for me to still live and to feel genuine and real joy. Why would I choose to give that up so soon after I found it? I have to laugh at the cruel irony that I had to give up the person that taught me that so soon after learning it.
I look to my right, and see the kitchen knife that Ivy had modified into a ritual blade. It reminds me that I did send Ivy away to protect her, and that there is still more I must do for her. I owe it to her on so many levels. I need to make sure there is nothing at all on the property that would give the hunter even the slightest suspicion that Ivy is a witch, just in case she is aware of Sonia Vătafu’s words.
I pick up the knife. The symbols scratched into the handle are scored too deep for me to sand them out. I could file the handle down, but that would be immediately apparent as well. The knife needs to be destroyed. I pick up the rifle Ivy had dropped, and carry it down to the cabin. As I approach the front porch, I try to look at it with critical eyes. Witches are very secretive about their practices, and each line does things very differently. I could spend years studying them, and after all of that, still not be able to scratch the surface of all of the practices and habits and signs that are out there.
But I do have just enough knowledge to know some commonalities, and from there, I can try to extrapolate meaning from things. Like recognizing the kitchen knife for what Ivy had turned it i
nto. Almost all lines use physical objects to focus will and intent, and almost all of them use a blade or a wand, as these are things you can aim and point with. Seeing Ivy focusing on a knife, then seeing that she had made modifications to the handle gave me just enough evidence to consider the possibility that I was watching her do magic.
So I stop before I step onto the front porch of the cabin. I noticed that when I was showing Ivy around the property on our first few days, she very quickly picked up on the placement of the stones that marked the emergency caches by the highway. It seemed intuitive to her, so I start looking at the ground. Sure enough, I eventually notice a pattern of alternating dark and light stones completely circling the cabin. Just small stones, pebbles not much larger than a quarter, with a good couple of feet between each, but the spacing between them is precise, as is their distance from the cabin. I decide to take a walk toward one of the places I’d set up to funnel the motion of any vampires on the property. Sure enough, there are lighter and darker stones flanking the path. I go back to the cabin, and notice something else. I had noticed couple of times that Ivy was moving plants around the land. She was very careful with it, only small ones. I had assumed she was just settling in for the long haul, and wanted a few of her favorite food plants and cooking herbs closer in, but in light of what I know now.
I go into the cabin, and look at the kitchen. There is one knife that she always kept in an empty can on the countertop, never in the drawer with the rest of the cutlery. There are a few other cans that hold sprigs of different herbs clustered around it. I wonder if that knife, like one I have in my hand, had been redesignated to special use, which is why it was kept separate from the other knives.
I wonder how many other clues somebody more knowledgeable in the ways of witches might pick up from the cabin. I decide the risk is too great to leave an unknown number of hints laying about. I go out and pick up as many of the carefully arranged stones as I can find on the property. I set the two knives Ivy seems to have put to different use onto the stove. With a little bit of fiddling with the propane tanks, and judicious application of cooking oil, crushed candles, and lamp oil to different areas, I set the cabin up to destroy it completely as possible.
Even though I only lived in it for a short time, those few weeks were by far the happiest of my life. I feel a tremendous sorrow knowing I need to burn it all down. But I still cannot let anything happen to Ivy. So I leave as little trace of her behind me as I take myself far, far away from Stokers Mill.
I set things up to have the cabin explode in about an hour. It takes me just ten minutes to see a car with Nebraska plates on it coming up the highway. A little bit of compulsion, and I’m on my way to Omaha.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Nathan Marsh
Some hours later, getting on toward three in the morning, Ivy wakes up with a start. She opens her eyes, and I can see the light dawn in them when she figures out where she is, and remembers why she is laying there curled up against my side, both of us still naked. She burrows closer to me for warmth and I feel her starting to drift off again.
“No, dear girl,” I say, gently shaking her shoulder. “Time for you to get into your own bed.” She opens her eyes again, rubs the sleep from them, and stretches. The ground of her circle is not the best for sleeping on, and honestly, I think that more than anything is what convinces her that she should get up.
Getting our clothing back from the other space where I had tucked them is easy, but the garments are unbelievably cold when they come back. I have to bundle Ivy’s clothes up and hold onto them for a few minutes to warm the up before she can get dressed. We walk, hand in hand, out of the wood together and toward the house. Emily is sitting in the den with the lights on, and watches us as we approach.
“You should go,” she says, turning toward me. She lifts herself up on tiptoes to kiss me. I gently embrace her, as we exchange a reasonably polite kiss. I want it to last a lot longer, knowing that what had just happened between us is most likely a singular occurrence, and that this may be the last lovers’ kiss – even if it is relatively chaste – that I will ever get from her. “I made this mess. I need to deal with it.”
I am not surprised when Emily opens the door, because I felt her moving across the house, but Ivy is startled, and jumps with a little yelp.
“Both of you, inside,” Emily says.
“I am not bound to obey you,” I say.
“Just, come in, Nathan,” Emily says. She seems more weary at the moment, exasperated, than upset or angry.
As Emily walks toward the den, Ivy says, “I really need a shower before we do any of this. Please?” I am very well aware that Ivy and I smell like we have just had very hot and sweaty sex, and judging by her posture, I suspect that is part of her current discomfort as well. But she also likely just needs it as a way to figuratively wash off the stress of the day, to reacclimate to the house and to the presence of her grandmother, and take a little time to gather her thoughts and her emotions together before what she suspects is going to be a very difficult conversation.
Emily nods her assent, and says to me, clear enough for Ivy to hear it as she heads upstairs, “You might as well clean up, too, Nathan. Looks like you two did a lot of running through the woods.”
I head for the smaller bathroom, off of the guest bedroom on the first floor of the house. The dresser and closet in that room have a few changes of clothes for Kate, Carl, and myself. I step into the shower, careful to not turn the hot water all the way on, as Ivy and I need to share. As I clean the delicious scent of Ivy’s body from mine, I can feel the water also extinguishing certain fires that had still been burning bright within me since Ivy first gave me that come hither look in her circle. The memories of her body do not fade as the physical evidence is washed away, but they seem to transform by the act from things I desire to do again, to something I did once and will always remember with warmth. I hope that Ivy’s feelings toward what we had done are making a similar shift, so she can go to Carl without being burdened by a continued fire for me.
The water upstairs is still running after I am dried off and dressed, I detour through the kitchen to pour a pitcher of water, take a large glass from the cabinet, and assemble a plate of fruit. I set these on the end table beside Ivy’s chair. Even without what she and I have just done, the poor girl has been through quite a lot in the last few hours, all of it emotionally intense and physical. She needs to eat and drink, to nourish her body and to help her center and ground herself.
“I will keep up the fiction that I suspect nothing,” Emily says, as I sit down. “As long as there are no lasting effects.”
It is clear that she is talking about what happened between Ivy and I in her circle, but I cannot tell whether Emily is upset with me or not. I can tell, but the way she is sitting and the tone of her words, that she wants absolutely no details.
I briefly consider letting her know that it was initiated completely by Ivy, that I had no thought of any such thing at the time, but feel if she is not upset at me, any attempt to explain my part in it will make her so. I content myself with just a simple nod of thanks.
“But you can tell me why you two are together right now. I didn’t think you knew where she was.”
“You know that I followed Carl,” I say. “You’ve talked to him within the last hour.”
“So where is Ben?”
“From what Ivy tells me of their last conversation, he is making a very fast escape from here, doing as much as he can to make sure he gets the Negre’s attention. He knows she is a witch now, and has implied that he knows something of the future, that it is a very, very bad thing for him to get involved with a witch. She knows I am a demon, now, by the way.”
“How?”
I laugh a little bit. “She asked me what my big scary secret was, so I told her.”
“She took it how?”
“Between Ben outing himself and Carl both, she seemed unsurprised. I think it would have troubled her if I were
just a plain mortal and not something other, after the events of the past few weeks of her life.”
We both hear Ivy’s tread on the squeaky step of the staircase, and stop talking about her.
Ivy sits down, and quietly mouths, “Thank you,” to me as she pours herself a glass of water. I reach over to the plate of fruit, and she slides it a couple inches my way, taking a glance at me. We lock eyes for just a second, a silent agreement that we understand that what happened inside of her circle will not be repeated, but is not regretted. That is the best outcome possible for either of us in the current situation, so I smile to her. She smiles back, and starts to tell her grandmother the story of what happened the morning she vanished, and the events that have transpired right up until the moment she saw my car parked along the highway.
“And now here you are,” Emily says, to make it clear that she has no interest in that window of time between her getting into my car, and us walking into the house. “You must be exhausted, Ivy.”
“I am. I think I could sleep for a month right now.”
“And I should get home as well, before my family knows I’ve been out all night again.”
Ivy hugs us and heads upstairs.
Emily walks me to the door. “Her feelings about Carl?” she asks quietly.
“She told me that her time with Ben made her realize what she had in Carl, and I think she looks forward to seeing him again soon. I have done my part for the piece of the future you have burdened me with, and I have not yet suffered any misfortune for it. Do not ever lay another such weight upon me again.” I make sure she understands that last part is not a request.
“I shouldn’t have, I know,” she says. “Please understand how much else I have not told you, and how much I am continuing to keep to myself.”
A Witch's Fate_A Reverse Harem Romance Page 27
