“That was naïve.” I smiled.
David smiled too. “I know that now.”
“So, that’s what you were doing when I came out of the bathroom?”
“Yes.” He laughed, wiping a hand across his jaw. “You actually snuck up on me—for once. The evidence was still in my hands. I had to leave it on the windowsill and hope it didn’t blow away while you were standing there.”
“You could’ve just told me the truth.” I stepped into him, tucking my arms along his ribs. “That would’ve made me change my mind.”
“I’ll remember that for the future.” He kissed the crown of my head.
“So, what punishment?”
“Huh?”
“You said they’d punish you if I published any facts. What would they do?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe a seven-day-burial, a month being tortured by the First Order, or a personal favorite of my Set: a complete draining,” he said casually.
“Draining?”
“Mm.” He nodded. “They drain every ounce of blood from your arteries and leave you parched and partially insane in a dark room for a few weeks.”
“How do they drain you? You heal like superglue—how do they get the blood out fast enough?”
“They place metal retractors right here.” He pinched his fingers then spread them outward a few inches above his wrist. “It holds the arteries open. Prevents closing and healing of the wound.”
“That’s horrible.”
“That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. I knew you’d ask these questions and not let up until you had all the gory facts. Well”—he stopped with a noncommittal shrug—“either that or not speak to me for the day.”
“Okay, well, with that in mind, a paper on angels will be great.” I pointed into his face. “And I better get an A.”
David laughed. “Don’t worry, you will. So”—he scratched his nose—“an outing then?”
“Where to?”
He walked away and opened my bedroom door, then turned back with a grin. “I thought I might teach you a little about history.”
“You know, I live with a History professor.” Our hands linked back together. “There’s not much you can teach me.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he mused. “Come on, meet me at the front door in twenty seconds.”
“Twenty?”
He kissed my cheek and, with less than a sweeping breeze, disappeared out the window—closing it behind him.
“Ara?” Sam called a moment later. “Prince Charming just pulled up.”
“I told you not to call him that, Sam.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“Argh. You’re such a pain!”
“Better than being a troll.” The front door opened. “Hi, David.”
“Sam,” David said.
Do me a favor, David, I thought, tie his shoelaces together when he’s not looking.
“I see you two still haven’t managed to find common ground.” David walked in and looked up expectantly at me.
“Hard to find a way to relate to a serpent,” Sam said, keeping his nose in his book. “Maybe I’ll just have to dumb myself down a little so we can hold a decent conversation.”
“See what I have to put up with?” I said to David, grabbing my coat as I shut my door.
“Good morning, Ara.”
“Morning.” I stomped down the stairs.
“Sleep well?” he asked, pecking me on the cheek.
“Better than ever before.” I grinned, because I always slept well when he slipped into my bed at unholy hours.
Sam groaned, rolling his eyes. “Get a room.”
“Grow up, Sam,” I said, shutting the front door behind us, but an almighty crash on the other side of it stopped me in my tracks.
“Hey!” Sam’s high-pitched screech echoed across the street. “Who tied my laces together?”
I looked up at David.
He shrugged and smiled.
* * *
The car door opened and a cool breeze eased the dread that the cemetery across the road brought. Slanting trees with wiry branches guarded its iron gates, warding visitors away from the dwelling of the dead or, perhaps, imprisoning them. And the worst part was, something told me that that was our destination.
“David?” I grabbed his sleeve, folding myself against his arm. “What are we doing here?”
“Come on—it’s okay. I wanna show you something.” He took my hand and led me through a gap in the creaking gates, lifting the heavy chain so I could duck under. The air smelled murky with rotting leaves, mingling with the diluted scent of dead roses, their brown petals blowing away in the wind and littering the cobblestone path like confetti.
“I don’t like it here.”
“You will. I’m taking you to an older part of the cemetery. There are trees there and it’s not so”—he looked around the yard; I looked too, at the way the low cloud in the sky made everything dark gray and… “—eerie,” he finished.
“Yeah, eerie is exactly what I was thinking.”
He laughed softly and held me close as we strolled past rows and rows of headstones. In the distance, a murder of crows blackened the grass, gathering at the feet of a caretaker tending a grave. They cawed loudly, their sinister fables setting me on edge.
“See that grave there?” David pointed to a cracked plaque, barely able to stand within the stone grasp of its template.
“Mm-hm. Marcus Worthington—died eighteen forty?”
He nodded. “He’s a friend of mine. Goes by the name of Philippe now.”
“So… he’s not actually buried there?”
“Nope. In fact, some of the graves in any ancient cemetery are actually empty. The bodies either still living, or removed for scientific research hundreds of years ago.”
“Freaky.”
“Mm. I suppose it is.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re not in one of these graves.” I snuggled against his shoulder.
“That’s just the thing.” He pointed to a towering oak tree at the top of a small hill, sheltering five headstones from the threatening storm. “See that line of graves up there?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s my family’s plot.”
I stopped walking. David grinned and walked ahead.
Oh boy, when he said history, I had no idea he meant this kind of history. I caught up and stood beside him, watching his nostalgic smile fall on the first headstone.
“See this?” He pointed down.
“Here lies Thomas Arthur Knight. Beloved father and husband. Died nineteen-oh-four,” I read aloud. “Who was he?”
“My father.”
My head whipped back up to look at David. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, a cheeky grin spreading over his face.
“You were nine when he died?”
“Turning ten.”
“Well, who was this?” I stepped around the base of the grave, so as not to walk on the dead, and dusted some dried orange leaves off the next stone. “Mary Elizabeth Knight?”
“My mother.” His tone softened on the word.
I looked back at the grave with wide eyes, kneeling down to dust a few more leaves from the base. “Died in childbirth, eighteen-ninety-four.”
The inscription on her headstone made me sad. She never made it to motherhood; they couldn’t even give her the dignity of citing that she’d been a beloved wife and mother. Only died in childbirth. It seemed so cold.
“It wasn’t cold, sweetheart. Not intentionally.”
“Even still,” I said, dusting off my jeans as I stood back up, “it sounds cold.”
“I know.” He nodded, considering the grave. “My father was destroyed when she died. He was expected to put up a strong front, but his grief went so deep that he became a recluse—couldn’t even make arrangements for her burial. In the end, Father John had to step in and take charge.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Yeah. The worst part is”—
he pointed to the word Mary—“no one ever called my mother by her real name. She was known as Elizabeth. That name should have marked her final resting place, but the priest didn’t know.”
“Why didn’t you change it?”
“Uncle Arthur wanted to. He and my mother were… close, but my father forbade it. Even when Father passed, Arthur would not go against the right of a husband.”
“How noble of him.”
“Well”—David took my hand and led me away—“he’s been around a while. He’s old-fashioned.” When we stopped in front of the next two headstones, David smiled, rocking back on his heels. “These two are the best.”
“Jason Gabriel Knight. Nineteen sixteen,” I read aloud, but it was the second one that grabbed my attention straight away. My heart jumped into my chest when I saw his name written there, even though I was standing right beside him: David Thomas Knight—beloved son and hero. 1894-1918.
“Why did you die?”
“There was an explosion. A bomb.” His tight smile caged a memory. “There was no way anyone could’ve survived it. Pertinent to our laws, I had no choice but to move on and become somebody else.”
“Were you the only one killed?”
“Thankfully, yes. But I had established quite a good life for myself; had plenty of money in the bank, a house, friends, but no last will and testament. So, with my brother and only kin supposedly dead, my estate went to the government, and I had to start all over again.” He laughed. I covered my mouth. “Talk about learning from your mistakes.”
“Well, what good would mistakes be if you didn’t get to learn from them?” I shrugged then looked down at the next headstone in the plot. The name didn’t match the others though. Hers was Deveraux.
“She was my mother.” David answered my thought. “Aunt by blood, but mother by choice.” He stepped away and drew the dried brown vine hugging the stone top away, revealing a name and an inscription on the bronze plate:
Arietta Mary Deveraux
Beloved Mother and Aunt.
Sent to the earth with child in arms.
Safe for eternity in the embrace of the Lord. 1908.
My skin tightened with little bumps. “Child?”
“Yes,” David whispered. “She died the second the child was born.” He focused on his toe as he scuffed up a chunk of grass. “We buried them together.”
“Nineteen-oh-eight? So you were only…” I counted in my head for a second.
“I turned fourteen a few months after she died,” David said.
I watched the grief trickle across his brow before he contained it. “After all these years, you still feel it? You still feel her loss so strongly?”
He bit his lip. “There are some things you can never move on from, Ara.”
“So, she died in childbirth—like your mother?”
“No.” The way he said that, his voice laden with detest, made my blood run cold.
“Will you tell me what happened?” I asked cautiously.
David looked up at me quickly. Then, leaving my words alone behind him, walked over and sunk down on the grass with his back against her stone, as if he’d sat there a thousand times before. “You look like her,” he said.
“I do?”
He nodded. “Her hair was long like yours, but as gold as the sun. And her eyes”—he closed his, dropping his head with a soft smile—“as blue as the ocean. She would have loved you.” He patted the spot next to him.
I sat down with my legs crossed, my back against the stone.
“She would have been proud of me to have found such a sweet girl,” he added.
“I’m sure she knows—somehow.” I wanted to take his hand, but there was an air of tension around him that was threatening, like he’d explode if I touched him.
“So you believe in the afterlife?” he asked. “Believe they’re watching over us?”
I shrugged. “I guess I have to. Otherwise it all just feels too final.”
“It is final,” he said coldly, obviously not realizing how deeply that hurt.
I nodded, looking down at my hands in my lap, hoping to God that I never believed that.
“Ever since the day she came to retrieve us from the orphanage, after my father passed away, she treated Jason and I as if we were her own sons,” he said coldly. He wasn’t being cold to me, I could tell—just cold to the memory.
“Why were you in an orphanage?”
“It was temporary, while they waited for her to arrive from England.” He seemed to watch the memory on the grass between his feet. “But we were treated kindly there.”
“So no Oliver Twist scenario?”
David laughed once. “No. Nothing like that.”
“What about your uncle? Why didn’t he take you?”
“Set rules,” he stated.
“Oh.” Of course, silly me.
“Well, in Arthur’s defense, when Arietta passed, he managed to have many rules bent in order to have us in his charge. It’s never been done before, or again.”
“Whose butt did he kiss?” I joked.
“The King’s.”
“Oh,” I said, and something in the brevity of his words made my curiosity on that subject expire. “So, how did Arietta die?”
He picked up a dead star-shaped leaf, scratching the veins with his thumbnail. “I knew you couldn’t resist asking me that again.”
“Sorry. You don’t have to tell me.” I folded my hands into my lap and looked up at the tree above us. The leaves rustled lightly in the breeze, sounding a bit like rain on paper, and despite this being a place where the dead rotted, I felt comfortable here, like it was just some pleasant picnic spot—somewhere to sit and think about the past.
“She always wanted children,” he said out of the blue. I sat still, holding my breath in case he should change his mind. “She loved my brother and me, but she used to play hopscotch with the little girls on the sidewalk outside our house, and I knew how badly she wanted a daughter.”
“I love hopscotch.”
David smiled at me. “The summer after my father’s passing, Arietta was walking to the market when a sailor stopped her on the roadside. He asked if she was okay, and she asked why he would inquire such an odd question to a stranger who showed no signs of distress. When he said he was concerned for her pain, since it must have hurt when she fell from Heaven, she fell completely and unconditionally in love with him.”
“Well, he sounds charming.” I grinned woefully. “In a corny kind of way.”
“He was charming. And kind. He treated Jason and me as if we were his own sons. Victor Stronghold was his name, and soon became Arietta’s. And we were happy.” He nodded. “Victor took us fishing and camping, taught us how to play baseball and showed us maps of the world. But happiness was short-lived. They had tried for so long to have a child, and when the days of waiting for the stork to arrive became years, we all lost hope.
“I was nearly thirteen when Uncle Arthur came to visit. Within the two years of his leave, he and my aunt became close. Victor was called away to duty in the Navy for six months and”—David scratched his brow—“when he returned, Arietta was pregnant.”
“So it was your uncle’s baby?” I asked, my eyes wide.
“Yes. Victor was devastated and humiliated. He left town for a few months, but returned later and begged her to stay with him, despite her indiscretions.”
“He must have really loved her.”
“Apparently. But she refused. Repeatedly. I remember them fighting about it… at night… while we cowered in our beds, frightened Victor would hurt our aunt. Until one night she announced to him that she’d be marrying Arthur. So he left, and life went on.”
“Wait. So, just to be clear: Arthur was a vampire then?”
He nodded. “He was. He planned to change Arietta after the child was born.”
“Wow.”
David plucked the dry edges of the leaf in hand and flicked the debris onto the wind. “The doctor predicted the ch
ild would arrive in spring, but the snow had started to melt and the days turn warm, and still, nothing happened. I stayed home from school for more than a fortnight to watch over her until, one day, she packed my lunch and sent me out the door—told me she would be fine.” He rested the back of his head against the stone. “I remember it all like it was yesterday. So many things aligned to allow tragedy to upturn our lives that day.”
“Like what?”
“Uncle Arthur was running errands on the other side of the Port, a day’s travel by foot,”—he straightened his leg—“and Jason and I would not be home until sunset at the earliest.”
“So…” I waited, but he’d obviously continued living the story inside his mind, forgetting to share. “What happened then?”
“I—” He rolled his head sideways to look at me. “I just don’t know if I can talk about this, Ara. It’s too…” I watched his flat palm smooth circles over the left side of his chest. “It’s too painful.”
I nodded. “That’s fine.”
“But…” He sat up more and reached for my face. “I could show you, if you would let me.”
“Show me?”
“I can share memories,” he said, his voice trickling with hope. “It’s… it won’t be very clear, since I haven’t mastered this technique yet, but it will save me the lengthy monologue.” His lip quirked on one side.
“Okay.” I grabbed his hand, rolling my cheek against it. “Show me.”
“Close your eyes.” He shuffled closer and rested his other hand on my cheek. “Try not to fight it when you see memories that don’t belong to you. Just watch, like a film.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
A faint image—like a photo taken on a sunny day then placed in a dark room at a perpendicular angle—appeared on the backs of my eyelids. I drew a deep breath and watched the slanted image, kind of squinting a little, even with my eyes closed.
“Sorry. I’m unpracticed at this.” David’s breath brushed softly against my ear. “Does it hurt?”
“No. Is it supposed to?”
“No. But it can.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and settled back internally to watch the movie.
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 44
