Gilded Destiny (Vesper)

by Nola Sarina

  Vomit launched itself up my throat and I puked onto the ground at my side, straining to muffle the sound of my heave. I sucked in a gasp, desperate for air, and sat bolt upright to see if I’d been noticed.

  All the fear and all the awfulness… it was over just like that. Levitiqas’ minions were stomping Nycholas’ rusted pieces into powder on the tracks. They finished up and followed their master back into the train, and the great metal beast pulled away as the last few were still climbing aboard.

  Levi was last to board the slowly moving train. He perched atop the steel monster with his arms folded across his chest, watching the train roll over the rust. And then he snapped his head around to stare straight at me. Fuck! I held my breath, and he tilted his head, the pitch black of his eyes piercing across the space between us, his long, black hair playing out beside his shoulders in the wind of the train’s motion.

  I was frozen. I stared, dumbfounded, lost. Levi ducked into the train for a moment and then sprang from the roof, his booted feet planting firmly into the soil where he broke into a stroll directly toward me.

  Shit! Not what I expected. I scrambled to my feet and shook my head to free the tears from my lashes. I made my way down the hill and then hopped into a run back toward Portland, though I had no idea how far it might be. The night seemed lighter and somehow less full of frights, now that the one thing I feared most – hostile Vespers – were undoubtedly chasing me from behind. I knew what lurked in the shadows.

  I ran. I didn’t fall. A vague fantasy prickled in the back of my mind, that Nycholas’ soul might have been guiding my feet, helping me stay hidden in darkness, keeping me alive from beyond his rusted grave as the Vesper chased me.

  As I neared the edge of the treeline, the border of the suburbs twinkling beyond the branches around me, I slowed. He’d have caught me by now, if he was chasing me still.

  I jogged, but I didn’t stop until I rounded the corner of a familiar street. Blair’s street! Relief smoothed some of my anguish and fear, but as the terror slid aside, it made space for pain, for grief, for loss.

  I reached Blair’s doorstep – the two-story house was a light blue and quite square with no unexpected corners or shadows. I sank to the step, took one deep breath to calm my slamming heart, and then I shattered and completely hit bottom.

  Everything I’d had, I lost before. Every piece of it I gained back, Levitiqas ripped away from me with his hand stuffed down Nycholas’ throat. I wrapped my arms around my waist and doubled over, and the motion was reminiscent of the way Nycholas lurched forward on his knees as Levitiqas grabbed his insides. I pressed my forehead to my knees and begged the memory to go away, my sorrow spinning my heart around in senseless circles of tears.

  And then I shook my head at myself, disappointed. How dare I wish for the memory to leave me, after the four years of hell I spent with amnesia? Watching Nycholas die was gruesome and the image was burned into my brain forever, but at least he knew I was with him even in his most wretched hour. I’d run with him for a year from certain capture, torture, and death, and I’d never have left his side if he hadn’t forced me to forget.

  I forgot him. I shouldn’t have forgotten him…

  I wanted to hate him for taking away four years I deserved with him, four years he deserved with me. But as the hollow of the truth crept through my core – that Nycholas was dead - I couldn’t feel anything but the void of loss within me, filled with liquid, aching love. Nycholas.

  He wasn’t willing to die without seeing me again, yet he knew that seeing me before his death would put me in harm’s way. It was the ultimate price, which he paid happily: that he refused to die before tasting me again, regardless of the danger our reunion posed to us both. I couldn’t be angry, even as my ankles burned with pain from running through the woods on uneven, slippery ground.

  The darkness of midnight sent a chill through my blood, so I snugged Nycholas’ trench coat tighter around my waist and stood. I dried my eyes and took a few breaths, and slipped in through Blair’s back door, grateful it was unlocked.

  I hung Nycholas’ coat on the rack, but not before burying my face in the collar to try and catch a hint of his scent. The warmth of leather lingered in my nostrils, but the steel was gone, and the material felt hard… not like silk, not like Nycholas.

  I crept up the stairs and peeked in on Dizzy. She rolled over when the floor creaked beneath my feet and her lips parted in a wide, toothless smile. I wondered when she’d finally start to get teeth, and staring into her green eyes beneath the tightly-curled locks of fire red dangling along her temples, my sorrow was dimmed by a cold sort of certainty. Nycholas was gone, so this… madness… the insanity of loving an immortal was over.

  Back to mortality. Gazing at my beautiful niece and her little knuckles clenched around the bars of her crib, mortality didn’t seem so hollow after all. My heart ached with guilt as I so easily put Nycholas aside in the company of sweet Dizzy. I pressed my finger to my lips and shushed her, and then paced down the hall.

  I knelt by Blair’s side of her bed that she shared with Joseph and whispered.

  “Hey.”

  Blair jolted awake and I cringed, remorseful for startling her, for scaring her with my disappearance… and nauseated anew as my sister’s motion resembled Nycholas’ final choke, too.

  “Shit, Calli! Shit! Where the hell have you been?! The cops are looking for you and… you’re filthy!” She sat up and picked a stick out of my hair, which gathered around my neck in knots.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

  Her voice morphed into something like a hiss. “You promised me, never again, after last time!”

  I nodded. “I know. I have a hard time remembering things.”

  Blair threw the blankets off and rose to her feet, angry. Joseph rolled over and frowned at me, surprised and a bit annoyed, I figured.

  “Can I shower, first?” I asked. “Can I… just get clean, and then explain it all to you?”

  Blair folded her arms across her chest and sighed. “Shower quickly. You have a hell of a lot to explain.”

  I knew she probably figured I ran off with Freddy… No, Blair, Nycholas – my immortal boyfriend who faked my car accident to protect me from his violent master – ate him in one gulp. Like Popcorn-Freddys. A giggle almost escaped me in my stupor of turmoil, and Blair glared at me as the grin played along my lips.

  The heat of the shower was another absence: the absence of cold, the absence of velvet and absolutely no pain. I washed thoroughly with soap, admiring the bruises around my wrists, wondering how much of the purple on my hips was from Nycholas and how much from my treks through the woods. I pinched my nipple too hard – just like he would have done – but it wasn’t the same, and I sank to a crouch and let the steam have me for a while.

  I emerged from the shower and wrapped myself in Blair’s bathrobe. The chill of the air outside the bathroom was a better familiarity than the heat, and I soothed my thoughts with a fantasy that I was surrounded by the chill of Vesper breath.

  Blair wasn’t in her bed, so I stepped slowly down the stairs, wondering if she and Joseph had gone to sleep on the couch, for the lights were off. I rounded the corner at the bottom of the flight and flicked the light on, and I couldn’t even suck in a breath to scream.

  In the middle of the couch sat a Vesper.

  The tall one with the long, black hair.

  Levi.

  Beside him, spread over the couch, was Nycholas’ coat, and I was so fucking busted, screwed, and dead that fear refused to crash around me, and I didn’t feel like fainting. My shoulders pressed back and I lifted my chin, defiant and totally ready to die.

  “Where are they?” I demanded.

  Levi regarded me with an impassive expression, and spread his palms before rising to stand above me. Fuck! His height dwarfed me with menace and authority.

  I refused to be weak. “You fucking ate them.”

  Levi tilted his head and dropped his
chin once: a nod. A confirmation.

  My sister and her husband and Dizzy were dead.

  “Let me explain where you stand right now, mortal,” Levi said, his voice ringing with that lyrical quality I remembered from the train tracks. “I am to find whatever creature watched us finish our brother from a hill beside the tracks. I am to bring it home.”

  “To the Pit,” I spat. Nycholas had never described the place to me, so I had no idea what it meant for my suffering of the future, but it was called the Pit. That was enough to make fear brew within my stomach.

  “Yes. I am to bring you to Levitiqas.”

  I swallowed hard and took a deep breath, suppressing the gag that rose in my throat as I detected the humidity of the room, the acrid odor of a digested human being.

  My goddamn sister, you fuck! I wanted to scream it at him, but I kept silent.

  “However, I feel it prudent to explain to you where I stand, right now.”

  I clenched my fists. What would he demand from me? Some kind of fucked up arrangement to satisfy his violent lusts? Not like I’m not used to that! Worse things had happened to me, that night.

  “When I return home, I will no longer be permitted to remember my brother, Nycholas. That’s what Levitiqas does to us, you see… he forces us to forget things that remind us we were human, once. Aiding in the death of a brother pains me on a moral level, so it is something I will not be permitted to remember for long.”

  Was he seriously talking to me about guilt in the room fogged by the steam of my sister’s goddamn corpse?!

  “And as all Nycholas wanted was to escape this hell… something all of us crave, but none are so bold as to seek freedom, as Nycholas was… I identify with his reasons, and I am sorry he’s gone.”

  “You told Levitiqas where to find him.” He spoke of my lover like a lost set of keys… just “gone” rather than betrayed, beheaded, or murdered.

  Levi grinned, a ghastly sight of spotless, beautiful, neon teeth in a pallid face. His eyes seemed darker than Nycholas’, his face framed by his black hair and the pulsing veins of an immortal killer. “You have never, ever known torture like I’ve known, female. A man – human or Vesper – can only take so much before he breaks.”

  That stalled my anger and fury. Levi spoke of torture, of pain. Nycholas spoke of those things, too… but not with the look of simultaneous defeat and armor that Levi carried in his eyes. How could a man look so haunted and strong, so terrifying and hopeless, all at once?

  Wrath and compassion warred in my chest. I swallowed my hateful words and stared him down, refusing to speak.

  “So I have a proposal for you.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” I sneered, fully prepared to provoke him to kill me rather than give my body to his desires.

  Levi chuckled and shook his head, and then stepped forward and closed the distance between us, looming over and around me and blocking out all of my sight except the black of his trench coat, the black of his hair.

  “I have another moral qualm, and that’s with killing innocents. Yet the child upstairs… she saw me.”

  “So you killed her.”

  “No. So I left you alive, because the steam of the shower masked my certainty of your scent. I took the adults first, and was left with the two of you.”

  What? He didn’t kill Dizzy? I snapped my head around to stare up the stairs as I heard a sound – shifting against blankets, the rustling of a babe in her crib.

  I stepped back from Levi and gazed at him with shock. Dizzy was alive! My baby niece was alive! My soul rang with joy in my ears and I felt the rush of a faint in my brain, so I clenched my fists tighter to keep blood moving in my body.

  “Yes,” Levi hissed, excitement in his eyes. “I’ll be punished, have no fear. But it’s a qualm my master knows I have, a flaw he expects from me. Therefore, it is not terribly unbelievable that you slipped out of my pursuit because you put a child between your body and my jaws. If you hid behind her, I’d have a hard time capturing you without harming her, especially if you fled into the sunrise.”

  My heartbeat picked up in my chest. Seriously? Was he giving me an out?

  I moved toward the stairs, but he stopped me.

  “This time,” Levi said, “you’d better run hard. When I get home, I’ll take my punishment and hand my master my memories, and we will hunt you down.”

  I nodded and stepped around him. Upstairs, I slipped into two layers of Blair’s clothes, stuffed Dizzy’s diaper bag with supplies and gathered her precious little body up in my arms. She whimpered and her lip quivered, but I kissed her rosy cheeks and shushed her with a smile. I bundled her in layers, too, to save on space in the diaper bag… and prayed Levi would be gone when I got back downstairs.

  He was still there, so I huddled Dizzy against my chest and refused to let her look.

  Don’t look, Nycholas had said to me. Dizzy would follow the instruction where I failed, if I had anything to say about it.

  I snagged Nycholas’ coat with my half-full unbroken hand and moved to the door.

  “One more thing,” Levi’s musical voice, laced with pride and humor, echoed in my ears.

  I faced him, knowing the fear in my heart was as plain on my face as the boundless obsidian sky as I did.

  “When we meet again,” Levi said, “he will want to make it painful, for you. When that day comes… I want it to be quick. I’ll bite you myself to get the job done without agony.”

  I nodded fiercely – grateful and certain that the day would come, indeed. “Will you remember that promise?”

  “Whether I remember it or not doesn’t matter. I don’t break promises.”

  Levi cocked his head to the side and regarded the bundle in my arms. I hugged my niece closer.

  “Such a peculiar child with such colorful eyes,” he whispered, though I couldn’t be certain he said it… and then he spun on his heel and glided to the window where he disappeared into the night.

  I swept out the door and ran.

  Runaway Trainwreck

  I ran from place to place. I made money how I could, no matter what that meant I had to do. Dizzy was my only priority, and I worked long, grotesque nights to afford the childcare I found in each town. I was a nomad, a gypsy, travelling and hiding from something so dark no one dared to ask why I came with no history. All they saw was a broken woman with a baby in her arms, and they didn’t bother to pry.

  Every night, the shadows felt too cold, and I only managed a month in each place before fear of being caught by them overtook my will to stay, to provide security for Dizzy… so I left.

  She grew beautifully and called me Mama when she started to speak. I didn’t correct her. She didn’t need to know the truth: that her Mama was dead because of me. And Dizzy was the only one I allowed to see my tattoos, and she learned all the names of the colors by lying with me in the mornings - after I relieved whatever babysitter I employed - pointing to the flowers, naming them. College-aged girls were good sitters, I quickly learned, and they looked after Dizzy for cheap wherever I went… so I worked, and I was her Mama.

  I only let her go outside if the sun was bright and shining.

  I stared at myself in the mirror one night before hitting the town and the corners I worked. Stress and age drew my face taut, accentuating my scar and sharpening the angles of my bony figure. Dizzy was healthy, neither too plump nor thin, but I was wasting away.

  One night, a John I entertained three times a week in the town of Spokane, Washington, where I’d lived for five weeks, took a phone call as I put my clothes back on. He was a decent John, a generous payer and not on the violent side, compared to some of my other regulars. He chattered in Japanese, and I tried to ignore the gun inside his coat as he swung it over his shoulders. And then, mixed into the language I didn’t understand, I heard the word.

  “Vespers.”

  I grabbed him hard and jerked him to face me, and he startled and pulled out of my grasp… but as he stared at the terror in my eyes, he
dismissed the caller on his phone and put it away. He sat me down on the bed and asked me what I knew.

  I told him I wouldn’t answer him unless he gave me a promise to help find my daughter a safe place to live… because the Vespers were coming for me.

  The offer perked excitement in his chocolate eyes, and he agreed. For whatever reason – the overwhelm of lurking at night while carrying the weight of such secrets or the craze of being alone for so long, or perhaps by some fucked up plan of the bitches of fate, I told him everything.

  Everything. Right down to the night when Levi left Dizzy alive and dismissed me to run, until we should meet again.

  The John listened closely, and then he made another phone call. He wouldn’t tell me much about his organization… just that they had skilled warriors seeking the Vespers for reasons he couldn’t disclose. He said he had a place that was safe from them… completely safe. A boarding school of sorts, with a focus on martial arts and business education.

  They were called the Shinobi, and they had been the sworn enemy of the Vespers for hundreds of years. Their safe place was a guarantee, because they knew what to watch for in darkness.

  But I knew no place with me in it would be safe from the Vespers.

  I asked him to take me to the place before I decided, and he agreed. The following night, he took me to a little house with four old women inside, all Japanese and all very sweet. They made me drink tea and called me too skinny, which was seriously true. He said Dizzy would live there until she was old enough to enter the formal martial arts school, but they’d be cautious not to introduce her before she could defend herself, since they didn’t have many girls.