Bound by Secrets

by Angela M Hudson

  I walked down to the bottom step and pressed my hand to Ara’s waist, gesturing for her to sit. The others gave us a little alone time then, slinking off to different corners of the house, and I put my arm around my wife—the old Ara she was for this split second—while Harry sat on her knee with his arms around her neck.

  “Are you back forever?” Harry asked. “Will you live here with us again?”

  Ara clearly hadn’t thought of that. Neither had I, come to think of it.

  “I can’t, Harry,” she said softly, sounding so much like her old self that I had to look away.

  “Why not?”

  “I…” She tried to look at me for the answer, but I wouldn’t give it to her. If she didn’t want to love me, she could damn well deal with the consequences of that herself. All of them. “You know how sometimes other kids’ parents live apart?”

  Harry nodded, but he clearly saw the truth in her head then—that she just didn’t love me anymore—because he looked at me and placed his tiny hand on my shoulder sympathetically. I smiled, patting it to say I was okay.

  “Did…?” Ara’s eyes went wide. “Did he read that on my mind?”

  Harry nodded. “You don’t love my dad anymore,” he said, but the tears he’d been holding back broke through before he finished.

  Ara clearly felt like a monster. She tried to hold on as Harry climbed into my lap, but he didn’t want her to. He pushed her away and I could tell that hurt her. A part of me didn’t really care.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as much to me as to him.

  With one arm around Harry, I gently patted her leg. “It’s okay, Ara. No one expects you to love me.”

  “But she did before,” Harry wailed. “Why did she wake up broken?”

  Ara just looked at her feet, the weight of all this dragging her face down.

  “Harry, Mom and Dad still love each other,” I said. “It’s just in a different way now.”

  “No.” He sat up and looked right at me, moving to touch my face, but I stopped him. If he’d seen the truth in her heart, I didn’t need to see it too. Hearing it every day was enough to cut me.

  Ara stood up. “I have to go.”

  “Don’t go, Mom!” Harry jumped up and grabbed her sleeve. “Don’t go yet.”

  “I…” She looked at me, her brow woven with new lines where the agony inside her put about ten years on her otherwise youthful face. “I didn’t think you wanted me here now.”

  “I do,” Harry said in a small voice, eyes on his feet.

  Ara smiled and wiped her tears with the heel of her palm, trying to put all of this aside. “Hey, why don’t you show me your room—and some of your favorite things? We can talk about other stuff for now.”

  Harry nodded, but wasn’t yet in the spirit. I could tell Ara was nervous about being around Harry when he could so easily see her thoughts, but hopefully all that would do is make her less prone to have those kinds of thoughts—the ones where she didn’t love me.

  I got up off the stairs and went back to my room, closing the door so I could let my heart break in private.

  * * *

  Ara shut the adjoining door to Harry’s room and stood looking at me where I sat on my bed. Half of me wanted to put down my book and ask if there was something she wanted to say, but the other half just wanted her to go away. The awkward moment lingered for what felt like a full minute, until she sighed and looked away, making an obvious appraisal of my bedroom. As she stepped out from under the bookshelf above the doorway, her hand instinctively brushed along the columns of books surrounding its edge, giving it a little push.

  “Cool,” she said, testing her theory in full. “It’s a door.”

  “Yes,” I said dully.

  “So Harry’s room is a hidden room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that deliberate or just how the house came?”

  “We had it built to protect him if we’re ever attacked.”

  “Attacked by whom?” She spun around, horrified.

  I got up off the bed and shut the door leading onto the hallway. I could hear Emily and Mike laughing and talking in their bedroom—something they hadn’t done in months—which meant Ara could certainly hear them, and I didn’t want their happiness infecting Ara’s fragile status here.

  She watched me, her eyes staying on me as I walked across the room to the fireplace and grabbed a chair for her to sit on. Then, thinking better of it, left it where it was and sat down, offering her the one across from me.

  “Is it because of vampires?” she asked, sitting down opposite me in the dark, cold space.

  “Yes,” I said finally. “What we… my brother is the king. If anyone were to…”

  “I get it,” she said with a nod. She sat back then and looked at my bed—big enough for two—her eyes moving back to the bookshelf around Harry’s doorway and then to the window beside it. The curtains were spread wide apart still, letting in the moonlight, and for a moment, as she stared at it, I wondered if she remembered making love right there on that spot just a few Christmases ago.

  “If I could make you remember,” I said, and her head snapped around to look at me, “would you want to?”

  The flicker in her gaze destroyed all my hope. “No,” she said. Which meant this wasn’t the life she wanted. Even after our pleasant afternoon with Harry at the park and a warm dinner with good conversation.

  “So what now then?” I asked, throwing the full weight of my affronted tone at her. “What’s your plan?”

  “My plan?” she said.

  “Like Harry said, are you going to live with us? Keep going to school? Get a boyfriend?”

  Her jaw stiffened. I could see she was biting her tongue.

  “Answer me, Ara! Because I can’t do this—”

  “Do what?”

  “This! All of this. I can’t be so casual with you when I’m dying inside.”

  “Then don’t.” She stood up. “Harry is my son, and I will continue to see him, and where I live or what I do with my life will have no bearing on that.”

  I hated her right then for being so bold, but I also felt great respect, seeing her stand so tall, so in control, like the queen she once was.

  “If you pressure me, David, you’ll kill our friendship—”

  “I know.” I sighed, burying my head in my hands. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re in pain.” She sat down on the arm of the chair beside me. “Anyone can see that. And I know you just want your wife back. I know you need to make her okay so you can be okay again”—she was spot on; again—“but please don’t push me away just because I don’t feel the way she did. She had a long time to get to know you and fall in love with you. At least give me that before you hate me, okay?”

  I smiled into my hands, rolling my face up to look at her. I didn’t want to point out that, right now, she was more like my Ara than she ever had been before. I knew it would enrage her to hear that. Trouble was, she was so much like my Ara in so many ways that it was that personality trait stopping her from wanting to be like my Ara. I had to laugh. It was all I could do.

  “You’ve lost your mind.” She stood up again.

  I grabbed her hand, sobering myself. “Don’t go. Stay.”

  She pulled her hand from mine. “Why?”

  “Because I want us to be friends, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes today—said things I wish I hadn’t. I just want us to get back to a place where we can be in the same room without you hating me for trying to love you.”

  She softened and a smile moved out across one side of her face. When she sat down in the chair across from me, my heart leaped around in my chest with joy, but I made a promise to myself to contain that and just be her friend tonight. And nothing more.

  27

  Ara

  David placed a coffee on the table in front of me and laughed as I griped at the clock. “Who invented six-thirty in the morning?” I groaned. “I really have a few things to say to that person.”

/>   He chuckled again, moving back to get his coffee. “You never were a morning person.”

  “She was never a morning person,” I corrected him. “I just didn’t get any sleep last night.”

  He put his cup down behind him and folded his arms, leaning on the counter. “Was the couch uncomfortable?”

  “No.”

  “Is everything okay?” he asked delicately.

  I sipped my coffee, my taste buds rejoicing. “I had some bad dreams.”

  “About?”

  My mind, for the first time since I was ripped from my sleep in shock, allowed me to look back on those dreams. Flashes of blue and of hard wind in my lungs surfaced first, the enraged scowl of this man coming up a close second, making me look away from his face. “It’s not the first lot of bad dreams I’ve had about you.”

  I heard him gulp as he swallowed. He came to sit down beside me then and just waited patiently until I was ready to talk.

  “I was running from you,” I said, “in a forest—terrified.” My voice crackled a bit. “You caught me and… I don’t know what you did to me, but I woke up when you threw me from the top of a tree. I jumped so high before I hit the ground that I actually fell off the couch!”

  I waited, looking at him, my eyes wide with fear, but David didn’t say anything. He just rubbed his mouth, wearing a strange look, like he was going to say something but wasn’t sure he should.

  “What?” I said.

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “It… your dream.” He closed his hands in front of his mouth, resting his chin on them, then he opened them nervously and laid them flat on the table. “It was a fragment of a memory, probably sparked from seeing Jason’s face in the photo album yesterday—”

  “So it was him? Jason? The King?”

  “Before he was King.” He looked at me apologetically. “He…”

  “He hated me?” I said, a few things making sense then, like why he fought so hard for me to have a better start this time around. It was regret. Guilt, maybe.

  “He came to love you later, and saw the mistake he’d made trying to kill you—”

  “Why did he want me dead?”

  “Because I…” He buried his head for a second, his hair sticking up between his fingers. “This is going to make you hate me.”

  “Spill it. Now.”

  “I killed his girlfriend.” He looked up from his hands. “She was pregnant at the time—with his child.”

  The horror of his confession made the air thin, made Jason’s actions seem justified in comparison. “Why would you do that?”

  “It was the law, and I was a Council Leader,” he explained. “She… he didn’t have approval to tell her about our kind and…”

  “And you were just doing your job?” I snapped haughtily. He was right; telling me this would make me hate him. I never realized he was the kind of man that could kill a pregnant woman. Force a girl to kiss him. Break promises.

  “How can you hold this against me?” he said in a high voice. “Ara and I have been through this and she chose to let it go.”

  “That’s because she was fucked in the head, clearly!”

  David stood up, his eyes going dark, and I suddenly saw in him what had been lingering just beneath the surface all along: the darkness. The monster. The vampire. “You have no right to comment, because you could never understand the love that led to her choices; so say what you want, judge me, but it’s water off a duck’s back, Ara, because, like you keep telling me, you’re not her.” He shoved his chair back and walked away. “Why should I give a shit what you think?”

  Before I could toss my coffee cup at him and declare that his wife was insane for ever loving him and that I would never be that stupid, Elora appeared from nowhere with her arms around my neck.

  “They told you!” she squealed.

  All my anger flushed from my system at the feel of my daughter right beside me. I jumped up immediately and hugged her with arms that hadn’t held anything so precious in their entire lifetime. “I think I always knew anyway,” I said.

  “I had a feeling.” She drew back and smiled at me. “I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to find out. I’ve missed you so much, Mom”—she hugged me again—“and I’m so glad you’re back.”

  I hated that—people telling me I was ‘back’. But I couldn’t say that to Elora. I had to keep that illusion alive for her and Harry, so I just smiled and nodded. “It’s going to take some time getting used to it, but—”

  “You have all the time in the world,” she squeaked. “You’re immortal, and now that you’re you again, I can finally get married!”

  “Married?” My eyes went wide to take in the giant diamond ring she waved at me. “I didn’t know Eric proposed.”

  “He did a long time ago, but I said I wouldn’t get married without my mom there.”

  That was sweet, and it made me wish I was the Ara they all knew. She was still a part of me in a lot of ways, and if I wanted to be at Elora’s side when she got married, I knew the other Ara would have too. I felt bad for her then that she’d miss it and, instead, this imposter would stand in her place.

  “We’re setting the date for November—”

  “That’s only a few weeks away.”

  “I know.” She jumped on the spot, taking both my hands. “We’ve been planning it since the year after you died, and everyone’s going to be here,” she trilled excitedly, suddenly seeming so much younger to me. “Uncle Jase is coming and Aunt Lily—”

  “Elora.” I stopped her. “I don’t know who these people are—”

  “Oh, sorry.” She smiled apologetically. “I forget that sometimes. Well, Uncle Jase, he’s dad’s brother—”

  “Oh Jason?”

  “Yeah. And Aunt Lily—Jason’s wife—is the other half of your soul.”

  “My what?” I reached for something at my chest then, even though I wasn’t wearing a necklace today.

  “You…” She looked at the doorway where David had stormed off. “They didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” I sat back down, offering her a seat.

  “Uh…” She looked at that damn door again. “Maybe I should—”

  “No. Tell me. Now,” I demanded. “My past doesn’t get dealt out at David’s discretion.”

  Elora was clearly shocked. I wasn’t sure her mother had ever been that harsh with her.

  “Um… Just before you died, your soul was taken from you,” she said, sitting down. “Your sister, when she failed in her original plan, had to go to her next—”

  “What was her original plan?”

  “To… she wanted to place your soul in me so I could bear a child with my own uncle that would be the reincarnation of her birth mother Anandene.”

  None of that made any sense to me. Not one bit. “What did my soul and your uncle have to do with her birth mother?”

  “Well, a long time ago, your father, Drake, had a wife—Anandene—and she wanted eternal life, something that isn’t naturally possible for witches—”

  “So my sister’s birth mother was a witch?”

  “Yes. And so was she.”

  “But you said immortality isn’t naturally occurring—”

  “Not usually. Morgana was the first case ever, and that’s where Anandene got the idea.”

  “To do what?”

  “Morgana was born of immortal blood, right, so because she was born that way, she could still be a witch without it going against the laws of nature. So Anandene and Drake tricked Lilith, Aunt Lily, into killing Anandene so Drake could guilt her into birthing a reincarnation.”

  It was hard to follow, but I think she was saying something along the lines of: Drake wanted Lilith to give birth to a reincarnation of Anandene so that she would be immortal… “Because Lilith was immortal, right? So her children would be too?”

  “Right. But it failed. After many attempts and more research, they discovered they needed a new wom
b—”

  “A new womb?”

  “Yes, Lily had had children before, so it would never work. They created a spell to remove her soul and put it temporarily into another child—one she gave birth to. God”—she buried her head for a second—“I’m messing this story up, Dad would be better at telling it.”

  “Just keep going.”

  “Well”—she griped, frustrated—“so Lily gave birth to a child that Safia—Morgana’s grandmother—made sure was born soulless so they could insert Lily’s soul into it. A part of the reincarnation ritual called for the soul of the murderer to be the one to rebirth it. So, with Lily’s soul and a pure womb, and immortal blood, they tried to get Anandene born again. But it failed, and another soulless child was born in its place. At a loss again, they had to do more research and found that they needed a pure being to father the child, so—and this is after they tried to use noble blood, like knights and stuff—they created a spell to see the impurities of man filtered out of one specimen, and waited. They knew the pure child would be the firstborn in a set of twins—one boy all the purity of man and one boy all the impurity. But generations passed until the twins were born, and in that time, the child carrying Lily’s soul fell pregnant and they had to repeat the process all over again. After a while, Drake started to realize the error of his ways and he decided to do everything he could to stop Anandene being reincarnated—”

  “Why?”

  “She was pretty evil,” she said nonchalantly, “and she was with him at a time in his life when he enjoyed that sort of thing. But time did change his heart, and he became the man you know today—”

  “I don’t know him. I met him once, but I don’t even remember it.”

  “Oh.” She blinked a few extra times, obviously floored by that. “Okay. Um… well, anyway, he made sure that each soulless child was taken care of and hidden, but he had to do this in secret so Safia couldn’t find out.”

  “Why?”

  “She wanted her daughter back—Anandene. And she would go to any lengths to get that.”