“Shut up,” Jason ordered.
“Don’t blame yourself, Ara.” David ignored his brother, edging forward, but as he reached out his body shot back with belligerent force, Jason’s foot at the heart of his chest.
“No,” I screamed as he fell, narrowly missing the fire behind him.
“Do not attempt communication with the Lilithian, brother!” Jason moved back quickly and stood beside me. “You know the law.”
David struggled to his knees again, masking his cry of pain under a roar of rage.
I angled my head away as lightning flashed outside, turning the glass window beside me to a mirror for a second, showing the horror David had witnessed in looking upon me. My swollen lip and eye looked infected, shiny and weeping, while blackened cuts scattered across my skeletal frame, barely covered by my tattered brown dress. But the deep, hollow shade of my eyes shocked me the most: the blue completely swallowed by black, just like David’s when he was hungry.
“Ara?” I could feel the pain in his voice, saw him in the reflection reaching out for me. “Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it,” he repeated, losing his voice.
I blinked, wishing I could make my eyes blue again. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re blood hungry,” both boys said at the same time, David’s tone soft, loving, Jason’s impatient.
“Enough!” someone yelled from behind, and suddenly the room spread out around me.
It was no small room at all, but the same room I came to stand before the Council and be judged just days ago. Except, this time, we stood between the windows and the council table—the men facing us, like passengers on a station platform.
“Time is wasting.” Drake moved away from where he stood behind Jason, and seated himself on the chair among his councilors.
“If you think you’ve won,” I said, looking at Drake, “you’re wrong. I won’t kill him, and—”
“You”—Jason grabbed my chin and squeezed—“will do what I say.”
“Ara,” David called, his voice fused with desperation. “Ara, don’t try to fight him. Just do what he says.”
“No.” I shook my head slowly, tears filling my eyes. “I can’t kill you. I can’t live without you, David.”
“How touching,” Jason spat and grabbed my arm. “Then I will hurt you until you do.”
“I don’t care. You can do what you want to me, but I won’t kill him.”
“So now you find your fight. Pity you didn’t have this much fire down in the dungeon,” he taunted.
“Ara. My love.” David shuffled forward on his knees. “Just do it, please. I’ll see you again. I promise. I’ll wait for you in the afterlife. You will have eternity with me.”
My mind vaguely noticed Jason drop my arm and stomp over to David.
“We’ll be together there forever, I pro—” The vowel cut short with a heaving breath as he folded over Jason’s fist.
“Stop it!” I screamed, reaching for him.
“I said”—Jason clutched David’s shoulders, then jammed his knee upward, backing away as David fell to bound hands—“do not talk to the creature.”
“Ara,” David continued anyway, clutching his stomach where he lay on the hearth. “This is the last thing I will ever ask of you. You cannot disobey.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Jason said, grabbing my arm again. “She will do it, and when she’s done, I will erase you from her mind. She’ll never even know you existed.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” David pushed up and turned his head to look at Jason, wiping the blood from his lip with his knuckle. “She is bound to me. She will never forget.”
“That’s where you are wrong, brother.” Jason lifted me to my feet. “She is bound to me. I tainted her spirit before you even tasted her blood. She will forget you.”
“What did you do to her?” David roared. “Ara?” He softened. “Ara, did he touch you—please, what did he do to you?”
“Nothing.” I shook my head. “He never—”
“You may remember a dream,” Jason hinted. “A long time ago, where you made love to Mike.”
I didn’t remember anything. And then it hit me like a rock: the dream I had when David and I first met. He saw that dream. I’d said to him the next morning that the face was Mike’s, but the body was… David’s.
“But what’s that got to do with a spirit bind?” I asked.
David dropped his head, disgorging his anguish in a singular cry.
“In your mind,” Jason said, “when you made love to Mike, you became bound to me. Your mind is confused, tangled up in the spell.”
“I don’t understand.” I looked at David, who kept his gaze to the ground.
“I cast that dream, Ara. It was I you were with, under disguise of your best friend.”
My mouth gaped. “So, it wasn’t a dream? It was like…” Like the meetings we had?
“Precisely.” Jason grinned.
“That’s why I can’t get over Mike?” Shock forced tears into my eyes. “You… you touched me!” I gagged, my body forcing down the vomit as I remembered every scene from that dream, every touch of Mike’s hands, every kiss of his lips.
“Yes, better than you imagined, I believe were the words you said after,” Jason said, wearing his wicked smile like a trophy.
That’s why I trusted you in the first place, wasn’t it? I looked up at him. Not because you’re good; because you bound me.
“Yes,” Jason said, his smile dissolving.
“David?” I looked over at the hunched, closed shell of my husband. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I thought it was just a dre—”
“Stop talking!” Jason covered my mouth. I tugged at his fingers, hard.
“Get off her. Don’t touch her,” David yelled through his teeth, but he stayed down, did nothing to get up and defend me or protect me.
“He can’t,” Jason mused, holding me closer to his body, his cool, honey-scented breath brushing across my lips. “Not even if I do this.”
I shook my head, my cry muffled as Jason wrapped his lips around mine. And David did nothing. He just watched, his eyes filling with hatred as Jason sucked the bleeding gash on my lip, delighting in my agony.
“You see?” Jason pulled away abruptly as I cried out, pressing my hand to my lip. “He’s weak. Always has been.”
I fell to my knees and stared at the man by the fire. “David? Why?”
“I’m sorry, Ara.” He looked down, defeated. “I should’ve known. I—”
“You don’t love me now I’m bound to him,” I concluded.
“No, Ara, no,” he pleaded. “It wasn’t your fault. It was a dream. Just a dream. You we’re still a vi—”
“Enough!” Jason grabbed David by the hair, forcing me by the elbow to the ground in front of him. My hands fell against David’s bound arms as I steadied myself, feeling nothing of the crack my knee wore; all pain masked under the joy to be within inches of his breath once more.
David cried into my hair, touching his fingertips to my face, whispering things over and over that I couldn’t understand.
“I’m so sorry,” I said softly, pressing my brow into his sweet kisses. I just wanted to fall against him, let him hold me, let him make everything all right again. Just to go back to that night, and in my dream, tell Mike no. Say what my heart wanted me to say. All of this. All of this was my fault. I trusted Jason. I let him into my world and he betrayed me. He made me feel things that weren’t real. I ruined my life; I ruined David’s.
“Yes,” Jason said. “You did, and now you’ll kill him.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I won’t.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Drake interjected. “Jason, get this over with. I’ve seen enough.”
“Not to worry, Your Majesty.” Jason smiled, keeping his eyes on me. “She will do it, if not because I tell her to, then from the hunger, the thirst for his vampire blood. See that?” By force of his grip on the back of my neck, he
moved my lips closer to David’s bleeding nose. “It’s blood. Smell it.”
“No.” I tried to turn my head.
“Then taste it.” He forced David’s head against my lip as we both struggled to break apart. “Go on, taste it. You want it bad, don’t you? You can feel how smooth it would be in the back of your throat; how one lick would stop the burning there.”
My mouth watered, the smell of his sweet blood saturating my nostrils, pulsing the hunger through my fingertips and teeth. But the desire to kiss him was so much stronger right now, giving me enough strength not to lick the small drop I could feel on my lip.
“I love you, Ara. I know you can do this.” David’s voice stayed calm.
“No.” I looked down.
“Just do it. For me, because you love me.”
“That’s not a reason to kill?”
“Then do it to save your life—for me, because what he will do to you if you don’t will be far worse than my death, sweetheart.” His voice broke, tears coating his black eyes. “Don’t let me die with that thought. Please?”
“He’s going to hurt me anyway, David.”
“Ara, not like this…” He moistened his lips. “If you disobey the king, he—”
“Enough!” Jason said. “Bite him.”
I ignored Jason and looked into David’s black, reflective gaze, seeing the hollow-eyed girl glaring back. “I love you too much to kill you.”
“Then fulfill my last wish: let me die by your hand, not his.” David’s bound hands parted to cup my face. “It will be the last time your lips meet my skin, the last time I feel your breath, the last time you taste my blood. Please, Ara.”
My lip quivered, air leaving them in the word “Okay.”
David nodded, accepting his fate.
Trying to steady my hands, I touched his neck, running my finger over the teeth marks there. Who did this to you?
He didn’t answer.
David? I tried again, but it was like he couldn’t hear me at all.
“You’re wasting precious time, Ara,” Jason said, impatience growing in his tone.
My knees shook so hard under me that my hands trembled too. I touched his face, drawing a breath as my lips parted. Then I pulled away. “I can’t do it.”
“Do it!” Jason forced my face against David’s neck.
“Shh, it’s okay, Ara. It’s okay.” David turned his head slightly and kissed the top of my ear. “I’ll be waiting for you, okay? I’ll be waiting.”
“I love you,” I squeaked, and the hunger took over, erasing everything in my heart. My lips parted and my tongue moved forward, searching his flesh, tasting him until a tight bone-deep desire to bite tingled in my teeth. And flesh fell under my tongue, popping open with a release of warm, sugary milk. His blood was thin and weak, he was ill, I could taste it. And it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t satiate the burning hunger in me.
I angled my head and forced my shoulder against him, biting harder, deeper—feeling a cool rush of fluid shoot into his flesh from my fangs, changing the flavor of his blood.
He cried out as it coursed deeper through his flesh, and my heart stopped, my lips froze, the blood spilling past his open throat and down my chin.
What have I done?
All sound in the world drained to silence as Jason ripped my hands away from the last grasp they would ever hold of this beautiful man, tossing me into the window across the room. It cracked under the weight of my spine, but held fast, not breaking, like the stillness that surrounded me.
“David?” I covered my mouth, looking back.
His body stiffened all over, the wrap of death rising from his limbs to his face, turning it to stone. But the terror he withheld from the rip of venom through his limbs was restrained only a second more before breaking apart in the most desperate cry I’d ever heard. He fell to his side, his body thrashing around just inches away from me, close enough to reach for, close enough to hold onto and make okay. But Jason stepped in front of me, blocking my path, my view, just standing there with his arms folded, watching on like this was some cheap entertainment.
Please don’t let this be happening, I cried, covering my mouth, but the wet brush of his blood on my lips made me numb. There was no sound, no breath. I could not feel, nor hear. The emptiness of the fact that I just erased him from this life—that in only a moment from now he would cease to exist—swayed my world in a dizzying swirl of white, clouded fog.
A ghostly tune attached itself to my soul then: a song I heard so long ago in a dream I couldn’t remember. It haunted my heart now as the words travelled softly onto my lips.
Jason turned stiffly around and stared down at me through glazed, squared eyes until the song ended, the screaming stopped, and every man in that room held his breath.
The last of David’s life slipped away from his unmoving body, but as his pain receded to the bliss of the other side, he came back to this world for one, single moment, black eyes washing away with the green that could only belong to his soul.
“I’ll see you again,” he whispered, and turned his face away, sparing me the terrible grief of watching his life leave him.
I dropped a hand to the ground, holding the other tightly across my body. My heart knew. It knew what I’d done. I couldn't take it back. I needed to go back—just two minutes. Just two minutes and everything would be okay.
David.
Jason towered over the lifeless corpse, smiling as he lifted David’s eyelids with his thumb. “Never thought I’d see the day.”
Pools of tears filled my eyes, refusing to spill, like the ache in my heart wouldn’t allow me relief. I wanted to scream, to run, to throw myself from a tall tower, but none of it would do any good.
“Ara,” Jason looked over at me. “Breathe.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to breathe. My heart was gone, it stopped beating when David fell, but my breath wouldn’t give me a chance to die—kept coming in gasps, forcing me to live.
“Jason.” Drake stood. “You know what to do.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Jason lifted David in his arms like a soldier carrying the wounded home.
“What are you doing?” I cried.
“Finishing what I started.”
I screamed out for him as Jason turned and threw David’s lifeless body on the blazing heat behind him. “No!” I gripped my hair, ripping at it. I needed control. I nodded to stop it. “Jason, please!”
He stood back and watched the raging flames as they licked David’s skin, his clothes, melting his face, dissolving his hair. He just burned. He lay there, so still—not breaking free, not running, not moving or thrashing about—just burning. Burning.
Audible gasps grated the back of my throat, my pleas trailing off to soft whimpers.
Jason squatted beside me and turned my face away from the light, away from David. “I will erase this from your mind, Ara. You won’t know him anymore. Then you will—” Jason looked up suddenly, his wide eyes flicking to the door when a deep raging scream echoed from somewhere in the hall.
“Guards.” Drake pointed. “Secure the castle.”
Bodies moved everywhere then, scuffling apart in all directions.
“Wait here,” Jason said, then disappeared too, leaving me alone with the melting remains of my husband.
Everything went quiet. The screaming and yelling outside stopped. The breathing in the room had stopped. The only mentions of existence under the stillness around me were a ticking clock, crackling coals, and my sobs.
I crawled to the fire, whimpering his name.
One hand lay outstretched on the tiles by the gleaming embers, two fingers undamaged by flames—the last proof that he was once alive, that he once held me, loved me: a reminder that I would never feel his touch ever again.
My shaking hand moved slowly across the space between us, but the door swung open and banged loudly on the wall, Jason ripping me away before I had the chance to touch David.
“We need to move. Now.”
“No.” I reached out, watching the distance grow greater between our eternal separations. “Please, I need to say goodbye,” I cried, but Jason dragged me from the room, leaving me with a broken farewell and a deep, burning desire to trade places with my dead husband.
* * *
The blood rushed to my head as I hung limply over Jason’s shoulder, all fight in me burned away with the life of David. My lip began to heal with the blood I’d taken from him, making me want to vomit. I couldn’t stomach the fact that his body was dead, but his life force was left behind in this creature that killed him, healing me.
I slowly reached up and slid my fingers between my teeth.
“Don’t!” Jason flipped me around into his arms and held me like a child, his vehement glare a warning. “If you throw that blood up, you’ll lose the last bit of David you’ll ever have.”
My chin quivered. I ran my tongue over my lip, forcing it against my teeth to break open the gash that healed because of his death.
Jason shook his head, breathing out as he ran, so fast I barely even saw the corpses carpeting the halls. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “That was silly.”
“I don’t care,” I said wearily.
“Not now. But you might one day.”
I knew he was right. I just didn’t understand why he would care. But underneath all my confusion, dizziness and exhaustion, a lick of curiosity moved up in my thoughts. Something had happened here tonight while I destroyed my life, and whatever it was, Jason was scared. The people in the castle were scared, screaming and running about. I could hear the distant echoes of metal clinking, voices yelling and the quiet hum of terror.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They’ve come for you.”
“Who?”
“They won’t hurt you.” His voice split the sudden darkness we entered, and the icy chill of the underground once again swathed my limbs with fear.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Believe it or not, somewhere safe.”
“Why?”
A door creaked, and Jason bent forward, gently placing me on a soft bed.
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 123
