Time After Time (Cora's Bond)

by V M Black

  Clarissa snorted. “You couldn’t have possibly expected it to be.”

  “I guess not. But I hoped that it was, anyway.”

  She pulled onto the highway. “I suppose there is that.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “What was it that you wanted to say again, Lisette?”

  Power rang through those words, and Lisette, who had been humming tunelessly under her breath, brightened up. “I was just thinking, Cora, how you have enough money for grad school pretty much any place you want to go. Even if you don’t get a great fellowship or an assistantship or something.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I can go anywhere I want to go.”

  I thought about the stress of this semester and how I was being torn in between Dorian’s world and my own...except that Dorian’s world was mine, too, and was becoming more so with every day that passed. I thought of the applications I’d received answers to the week before—not my application to Stanford or University of Chicago but the ones I’d mailed at the last minute, just before the deadline. When the first had arrived, the fat packet hadn’t felt like giving up, as I’d been afraid it would, but like another victory in my decision to take charge of my life and make the best choices for myself.

  University of Maryland. Where I was already attending—and where I would be close to Dorian if I chose to go to grad school there, too. The Georgetown acceptance had arrived soon after, followed by the one from George Washington, which had been my backup plan.

  The decision deadline was coming up for all three in a few months, and I’d already ditched George Washington from the serious contenders. But I still didn’t know for sure what I was going to do. There were factors at play now that were greater than the ranks of the schools—greater even than my desire to be near Dorian, if that was possible.

  But I was taking charge of my destiny, even if it was shaping up to be something quite different from what I’d expected. And I was determined to be ready for it, whatever it might bring.

  Chapter Five

  I deposited the check—in the outside teller machine, despite Lisette’s exclamations of horror—and we parted ways with Clarissa and returned to our apartment building just as dusk was settling into full night. My last shifter guard lingered in front of the elevator as we entered our unit, waiting for Lisette to go inside before she took up her usual position.

  For some reason, I had an itching sense of unease, like I’d forgotten something important, so I jumped on my laptop to check all the dates of my upcoming tests. There was nothing.

  The feeling got worse through dinner, and as soon as I’d washed the dishes, I went to my room and tried to call Dorian. The phone rang—not just once or twice but at least half a dozen times before finally I was finally transferred to his answering service.

  “Good evening, madam,” the familiar light baritone voice said. “How may I help you?”

  “I’d like to talk to Dorian, please,” I said, suppressing my surge of apprehension. Since the first day that I’d woken in Dorian’s house, he’d never failed to take my call himself.

  “I’m sorry, madam, but the master is in a meeting at the moment and is unable to speak to you. I’ll leave him a message that you would like him to contact you as soon as he is free, however.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Please do that. Thanks.”

  I hung up, feeling more out of sorts than before. With nothing better to do, I started wading through the files that I’d lazily saved to my desktop, sorting and deleting with abandon. Half an hour later, my phone buzzed with an incoming text message, and I picked it up.

  It was from Dorian, and my heart leaped to see his name. But all it said was, We’ll talk soon.

  My apprehension only got worse as the minutes ticked on into an hour with no more reply than that. Finally, I set my laptop on my bed and stood up with a noise of frustration, unable to bear sitting even one minute longer. I went into the living area, where Chelsea and Christina sat streaming Hulu on a laptop and Lisette puttered around in the kitchen. She’d announced over dinner her intention to make oatmeal-raisin cookies “as brain food, because they’ve got oatmeal and raisins, so that’s healthy, right?”

  It was, by all accounts, a completely normal Wednesday night. So why did I feel so anxious that I wanted to climb out of my own skin?

  I prowled around the room, stopping occasionally to peek at the parking lot between the metal slats of the miniblinds before starting up again. I could feel the gazes of my roommates on me, but I couldn’t stop moving as a sense of urgency built stronger and stronger inside of me.

  Finally, Christina snapped the laptop closed with a noise of frustration. “I can’t even look at the screen with you circling around the room like a vulture,” she said. “Come on, Chels.”

  Chelsea followed her into her bedroom, my weak apology following behind.

  But even that didn’t make me stop until Lisette put the metal mixing bowl into the sink with far more force than was required. “Look, did something happen between you and Dorian?”

  I shook my head, unable to put what I felt into words much less come up with a justification for it.

  “Are you upset about your grandmother?” she hazarded.

  I shook my head again.

  “Okay, then I’m not being a jerk to let you know that I can’t cook in my bedroom, and you’re driving me nuts, too,” she said. “Either put a lid on it or go for a walk or something.”

  But I couldn’t go for a walk—or at least I shouldn’t, not without my full complement of bodyguards.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go to my room, okay?”

  She gave me a thumbs up. “Awesomesauce. I’ll see you when the Adderall you’ve OD’d on wears off or whatever.”

  But once in my room, I found myself making tiny circles in the small clear space in the center of the floor. I took a deep breath and forced myself to stop with all my will, and then I just stood there, quivering, until my eyes landed on one of the boxes from my Gramma’s house that still crowded the room. Boxes that were mostly full of things that were of no use to me anymore, now that I was marrying Dorian.

  I started by dragging them all out, pulling them off my desk and my dresser and out from under my bed to pile them on the floor and on top of the mattress where I could sort through them.

  Most were household goods that I’d kept in anticipation of living in an apartment or unfurnished grad housing next year, things I’d need when starting out in my own place—dishes, pots and pans, kitchen tools, linens, and the like. With the roiling feeling deep in my gut deadening me to everything else, those were easy enough to choose to discard. I grabbed the first one and marched into the living area with it. Lisette looked up from the kitchen with a deep frown and started to speak, but when she saw what I had in my arms, she stopped herself and pretended to be absorbed in flipping the cookies onto a kitchen towel to cool.

  I stacked the boxes up against the window in the living room, and before I could change my mind, I sent a message through the house app to the butler Rojek to arrange for them and my Gramma’s old sofa and chair in the living area to be donated and the extra mattress stacked on my bed to be discarded.

  Lisette probably thought that the boxes themselves and their contents were the source of my keyed-up state. But they weren’t. They were just a distraction from the gnawing, irrational fear that came from somewhere else.

  From Dorian.

  I let myself think it for the first time. I had no objective reason to believe that anything had happened to him, but what I felt ran deeper than reason. If he could feel strong emotions through our bond, why couldn’t I? Right now, I felt an overwhelming sense of danger, and it centered around him.

  But there was nothing I could do about that, nor could I keep him from ignoring my calls and texts, so I put my fear to good use, plunging into boxes I hadn’t touched for more than a year.

  Some things I knew without question I wanted to keep, like my box of off-season clothes. Others took more
examination, like the four boxes from my old room. I snorted at the piles of stuffed animals and the high school trophies, and from them all, I took out the things that I really cared about and condensed them down into a single box.

  The rest went out into the pile in the living room. It was long past time to let them go. All that was left then were two boxes of books—which were staying—and three boxes of sentimental items that had belonged to my grandmother.

  Even in my agitated state, I couldn’t part with any of them. So I closed the boxes back up and shoved them deep under the bed on its cinderblock risers, along with the others I’d kept. But now the dresser and the desk and even the floor of the closet was free of boxes, and for the first time in over a year, my dorm room then looked like a place where someone actually lived rather than merely a place to store things, with hardly any room for me.

  But it didn’t felt much like a victory, not even after I turned my agitation into a whirlwind of dusting and spraying and wiping. I couldn’t feel any kind of triumph with the constant warning buzz going off in the back of my head.

  I kept checking my phone, expecting a call, a message, something from Dorian. I texted him back, and then a second time, and as the time crept toward midnight, I risked calling him again.

  I got his answering service again, and if anything, the man at the other end of the line was even less helpful than before.

  So I took my shower and climbed into my bed and stared across the tiny room that suddenly seemed too big for me. And at some point in the wee hours of the morning, I fell into a restless sleep.

  I woke up to a nightmare-shadowed morning, feeling more tired than I had when I’d gone to sleep. My apprehension had grown to a state of physical nausea. I managed to stumble to my classes, but I didn’t process a word that the professors said.

  When the promised call finally came right in the middle of my financial markets class, I practically elevated out of my seat as I answered it. Ignoring the professor’s disapproving gaze, I mumbled an apology and stumbled from the room, Clarissa shadowing me, as always.

  “Hello?” I said. Or rather, I tried to say because the word had a hard time getting out of my suddenly dry throat. I swallowed and tried again. “Hello? Dorian?”

  “I can’t talk long, but I wanted to return your call.”

  Even though his voice was perfectly neutral, almost flat, I sagged against the wall at hearing it, closing my eyes.

  “Why haven’t you called? What have you been doing?” I demanded. My voice was too shrill, and another student passing in the hall gave me a contemptuous look.

  I’m a crazy girlfriend? I snarled the thought at his retreating form. Let’s see how you handle an eternal vampire bond that turns your brain inside out. Especially when you’re certain your vampire is doing something stupidly dangerous and won’t even tell you about it.

  “I called a series of councils, both closed, strictly among the Adelphoi, and open, allowing others to make their cases,” Dorian said, as if I had casually asked how his day had gone. “Together, we had to assign official responsibility to the Kyrioi and decide on what actions were permissible to take in response to this insult to our faction. We established jus ad bellum, and we are now taking further steps as a consequence of that resolution.”

  I shook my head in frustration even though I knew he couldn’t see me. He had to know that none of that made any sense at all to me. That could only mean that he was hiding things from me by making them difficult to understand to keep from breaking his promise that he’d never lie to me.

  “Is that why I’ve been so upset for no reason since yesterday evening?” I demanded. “Because I don’t think it’s coming from me. No, scratch that. I know it’s not coming from me. It’s you. Something’s up with you, and it’s big and it’s bad, and you’re not telling me, dammit!”

  “I’m very sorry that this has affected you, Cora,” he said coolly. “I would do anything to spare you the least mental disturbance, if I could.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. If he’d been in front of me right then, it would have been very hard not to punch him. But he wasn’t. I was on campus, and he was...wherever he was. And in such terrible danger that I could taste it.

  “Take me home,” I said abruptly.

  “What?” he asked, a note of surprise jolting through his stonily neutral tone of voice.

  “You heard me. Take me home. I want to be where you are.”

  “No, Cora.” The iciness of his words froze my heart over the phone. “You must stay there. I’ll see you on Friday, as we’ve already arranged. Not a moment before.”

  “You can’t do this, Dorian,” I said. “Whatever it is that you’re doing, you have to stop!”

  “We have no laws, but we have customs, and they are the only thing that prevents the old times, the bad times, from returning,” he said flatly.

  Just then, class ended, and students began to pour out of the rooms on either side of the hall, their joking and chatting creating such a din that I had to strain to hear him.

  “I know that these proceedings will be difficult for you, but it will all be over soon, one way or another,” he continued. “And then we can attend Hattie and Jean’s funeral in peace and continue to strengthen our side against the enemy.”

  I started to protest. “But—”

  “No ‘buts,’ Cora,” he said. “I will send for you on Friday. And I will see you. I promise. Whatever it takes.”

  He was gone.

  Looking pale herself, Clarissa escorted me back to my dorm, and with a quick, meaningless quip, she left me there alone with the shifter guard outside my door.

  I paced the empty apartment until I thought I’d wear a track in the carpet. As the time edged closer to six o’clock, I forced myself to slow down long enough to start dinner. I ripped open the frozen bag of a skillet dinner and poured it into a frying pan. And just as I heard Lisette’s key in the door, I doubled over and fled to my bathroom, where I vomited my guts into the toilet.

  The pain was a hammer on my body, beating out my brain, flowing down my throat and into my belly, where it sent everything else rocketing up again, over and over again. Never had I felt anything like this before, not even when I’d suffered the conversion that had rewritten every cell in my body. Never could I have imagined that someone could bear this and survive.

  “Cora?” Lisette said from the doorway. “Cora, what’s wrong? Can I do anything for you? Get you anything? Call for help?”

  I shook my head before another spasm took me, and I leaned over the toilet, not caring that I was clutching its rim in both hands, not caring about anything except the pain that wracked my body—and Dorian.

  Dorian, Dorian, Dorian. Something terrible had happened, something unspeakable, and I was helpless in the mere backwash of his pain.

  How much more must he be in?

  I tried to fumble for my phone, but another wave of nausea struck, and then I was beyond all thought or reason for a very long time. My existence was pared down to nothing but my agony and the spasms that seized me, shot through with terror whenever there was enough of my mind left over to feel anything but pain.

  During a brief respite, I came to myself long enough to register the cold rim of a glass being pressed against my lips, water sloshing into my mouth. I swallowed reflexively and then groaned, and my eyes focused on Lisette’s worried face.

  “Hey, Cora?” she said softly. She moved my arm, and I realized that she was retrieving something from under it—a thermometer from my armpit. She frowned at it. “You don’t have a temperature. You couldn’t have eaten something bad, could you? You’ve had all the same things I had today.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. I was leaning against the bathtub, the cold of it creeping into my bones, but I couldn’t make myself move. I felt another wave coming, far away for the moment but gathering to overwhelm me. “Dorian,” I managed.

  “Yeah, you keep saying that,” Lisette said. “I called, but I can’t
get through to him. His secretary keeps picking up. Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  I shook my head again, unable to explain as the pain rushed closer. I wasn’t sick. I couldn’t become sick anymore, not in a way that a human could. Only injury could make me feel this kind of pain—injury to me or through my bond with Dorian.

  And then the pain arrived, barreling through my head and down into my stomach, and I heaved over and over again, long past the point where there was nothing more to come up.

  The next hours were a blur, but nothing was as bad as that first blast of pain. Finally, sheer exhaustion overtook me, and I slumped against the wall across from the toilet as my eyes slid shut helplessly against it.

  When I opened my eyes again, daylight was creeping through the open doorway that led to the living area. I forced my body to straighten, and it did, stiffly, my cognatic healing sluggish and unresponsive.

  I didn’t want to die. That was my first thought. And because I didn’t want to die, Dorian must still be alive.

  I fumbled for my phone, which I’d dropped on the floor, and forced my clumsy fingers to text Dorian. Where are you? What happened?

  His reply was instant. So glad to hear from you. Be well. I’ll see you tonight.

  I stared at it in disbelief, unable to connect the hell I’d just gone through with those words. If what I’d suffered had been merely the echoes of what his experience, what had happened to him? Why hadn’t he warned me about it? And why wouldn’t he tell me now?

  I called, but the phone rang over to his service again, and the light baritone that answered was adamant that Dorian couldn’t be disturbed—even for me.

  “Is he all right, though?” I demanded. “Why won’t you let me talk to him?”

  “Mr. Thorne has requested that he not be disturbed right now under any circumstances,” the man said impassively.

  “But is he okay?”

  “I’m afraid that he doesn’t keep his entire staff updated as to the state of his current constitution, but I have not heard anything that would lead me to believe that he is not fine, madam,” the man said.