Lies in Blood

by A. M. Hudson

  “What’s up, Em?”

  “Blade just told me,” she said, as quiet as a mouse.

  “About what?”

  She drew a jagged breath, wiping her wrist along her nose. “David went to Mike—told him about this dagger.”

  My blood ran cold. “And . . . what did Mike say?”

  “He. . .” She scraped repeatedly at the back of her hand with her thumbnail. “He threw things, yelled, screamed. They fought, but he…”

  “He what, Em?” I edged forward.

  She placed both hands slowly on the bed beside her legs. “He promised David he’d take care of you—make sure you didn't do anything to stop him.”

  “What!” I sat up and shoved my laptop aside. “Why would he do that?”

  “David's kind of right, Ara.”

  “How? How is he possibly right to go to his death!”

  Emily braved a sideways glance at me, her shoulders wrapping her ears. “Who else can?”

  “It doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to kill Drake. We can reason with him, or…I don't know, anything. But not death. That’s eternal, Emily. Don't you care?”

  “Of course I care.” She spun around on the spot to look at me. “You know I love David. But I love you, too, Ara, and I care about the future of our people, and that means we need you alive because we need an heir to the throne—David’s blood or not.”

  I hid my face slowly in my hands. “Why can't anyone, ever, just take my side?”

  She appeared beside me, sweeping my head against her shoulder. “I'm on your side. But, I…I just don't know how to talk sense to him, Ara. All I can do is accept what he thinks is best and just go along with it.”

  I uncovered my face. “You’re afraid of him.”

  “I'm not afraid of him.”

  “Really?” I smirked. “’Cause you . . . you’re kinda pale.”

  She adjusted her seat. “No. I'm just…cautious not to aggravate him.”

  I laughed. “Precisely.”

  “I'm not, Ara. Not really.”

  “Okay.”

  We both sat smiling for a few seconds, but inside, a part of me was battling with the other half that thought telling Emily my plan to have a child with Arthur was a bad idea.

  “What if there was a way I could save him?” I said, still talking myself into involving her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if—” I sat up more. “What if there was a way I could crown someone else king?”

  “So David wouldn’t be the one who had to kill Drake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’d say do it. Yeah. Whatever it takes, Ara.” She nodded, becoming more convinced by the second. “I'm on your side. If there’s a way we can save him, let’s do it.”

  “It would mean…” I hesitated. “It could hurt him, though.”

  Her eyes went dark, her chin slowly rolling upward, making her shoulders straight and her spine tall. “You mean jure uxoris.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” She brushed her skirt down her legs as she shot to her feet and took a few steps backward. “No way.”

  “Why?”

  “If you have even half a brain in that head, Ara, you won't do anything of the sort.”

  “Why?”

  “I'm not getting in the middle of that. If that’s your only plan—” She walked over and opened my door. “You're on your own.”

  “Fine,” I said to myself as she slammed it behind her.

  Every summer, as a little girl, I’d leave the wintry cool of my home in Australia and fly a couple of thousand miles across the sea to my dad’s house. I only ever stayed a few weeks at a time, but it meant everything to him. I knew that as deep as I knew my own soul. Every night, when he’d tuck me in and kiss my head, he’d take a minute or two to sit by my bed and tell me a story—always some tale about love conquering all—before winding the mechanism on the base of my music box, setting it down on my grandmother’s dresser, and closing my bedroom door. I’d fall asleep to the gentle hum of his voice lingering in my ears and the soothing chimes of a lullaby. Now, whenever I hear rusty clicks moving a string of notes toward the end of a song, it always takes me back to the sweetness and innocence of childhood. But, this tune was different.

  I lay staring at the dome of stained glass above my bed, imagining that little girl in the picture had grown up and lived some amazing life. But the score to my imagined story, chiming through the night from the silver box David gave me the night before our wedding, conflicted the joyous past I tried to create with a quite sombre, rather daunting one—bringing more sorrow and mystery than I think the composer intended. The notes rolled off each other in ghostly succession, the melody so intrinsic it took on what felt like solid form, floating in the summer air above me—a foggy white light, littered with tiny sparkles.

  No one ever taught me the words—given that they were in the Ancient Language, but somehow, I’d sung the translated version the day David died at Elysium. Lying here now, though, I couldn’t recall even one lyric—didn’t even know the title.

  “Mort de l’Amore,” a small voice whispered. “Death of Love.”

  My eyes moved from the glass dome above to the child beside me. Her golden hair fell in long, crinkled waves over her shoulders, framing the eternally youthful face of pale skin, unblemished by life. She sat toying with the golden apple, spinning it carelessly between her fingertips.

  “Mort de l’Amore,” I said it quietly to myself, sitting up a little. “Do you know the words?”

  She nodded, her small mouth opening, waiting for the gears to spin back around to the song’s beginning. And her voice was high like a child from the choir of angels—the words of the song touching my ears for the first time, despite once having moved my lips. I closed my eyes and listened for the meaning—catching a moment of sorrow within it that was quickly retrieved by the deep undertone of love. Eternal love.

  The words faded away then to nothing but a soft breath, a few seconds after the endnote. Eve looked down as if the golden apple had been mentioned in the lyric, and held it up, giving it a gentle turn to show a small hole in the side.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s a keyhole.”

  “A keyhole?” I reached for the apple; she drew it away. “What’s inside?”

  “The secrets.”

  “Can you share them with me?”

  Her gaze went to my collarbones. “Only you hold the key.”

  I touched my necklace. “This key?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, slowly reaching across to cup my hand with her tiny, cool fingers, then turned my palm upward, laying the apple there.

  “But the hole is too big for this key.”

  “Then you’re not looking at it properly,” she said, and a coy smile moved her lip, her hand coming up a second later to swipe the apple. It rolled, bouncing off my fingers in a series of failed attempts to catch it, hitting the ground with a thud, then disappearing under the bed.

  “Eve?” I looked back at her, but the only thing beside me now was the peacefully sleeping man sprawled out like a starfish, taking up way more than his fair share of the bed. I waited a moment to see if the thud woke him, holding my breath as I watched his chest move rhythmically up and down, the cool air coming from his nose, moving across the sheets and brushing my pinkie where my hand rested, propping my arm up against the sheets.

  Satisfied he wasn’t planning to wake up and accuse me of conspiring with imagined figures, I rolled onto my belly, hooked one hand to the underside of the bed, and hoisted myself over the edge toward the ground—lifting the bed skirt to search beneath the mattress. The blood rushed into my skull in this half upside-down position, making my eyes want to pop. But I had to find that apple. The only gold things under the bed, though, were the intricately-weaved letters on the spine of the book Petey showed me last month: Aide-Memoire de l’Auress.

  Auress? I sat up again, frowning. I’d heard that word somewhe
re before. But couldn’t place my finger on it. Not that it mattered right now anyway. The apple was gone, as if it had never been in my hand in the first place. Yet, I could still feel the chill of Eve’s skin.

  Maybe it was a dream. Maybe not. But one thing was for sure: that apple held some kind of key to some kind of secret Eve wanted me to know. I’d looked at it many times—spun it around in my fingertips, just as Eve had, but I’d never seen a keyhole there before. What did it all mean?

  I threw the covers back, my nightdress unravelling in layers of silk around my feet as I wandered over to the fireplace, briefly glancing back to see if I woke David. He didn’t wake, not even when the door to the secret passage squeaked fiercely, as if it’d not been opened in a hundred years.

  Cobwebs broke across my nose and throat as I walked the dark steps downward, placing my toes gently to each one in case it caved under my weight. Normally, in these situations, I’d tell myself not to be scared, that silly things like ghosts and vampires didn’t exist but, for some reason, I just couldn’t take my word for it.

  I reached the base and stood for a moment in the dusty darkness, considering turning back and at least getting a lantern. There was no light in that room, and the dawn was still a good hour or so away. But, if I went back upstairs and David caught me sneaking around, I’d have to either justify my mission or come up with some lie. And there had been enough lies between us lately. Enough that neither of my two options was all that appealing. So, I pushed the door open, cringing as the groaning hinges screeched their protest in an echo through the tunnel for all who may be waking in the manor to hear.

  “Ara?”

  My quick steps halted immediately, and the figure sitting on the edge of Eve’s bed resolved itself into a man, his elbows on his knees, holding something rag-like in his hands. “Jase?”

  “Hey, Ara.” He looked up from the floor between his feet, offering a weak smile.

  “Hey, what are you doing in here?” I walked over, letting the dense relief swim through my limbs and relax them.

  “I like to come here to think.”

  “Why here?” I motioned around the dusty space—its ancient fabrics and trinkets making it look like a haunted house. “It’s so eerie.”

  “Same reason you came down here, I guess.”

  I frowned at him.

  “It’s a secret. No one in the world can find you here unless they know about this room.”

  “So you wanted total privacy?”

  He slowly cast his gaze to the floor again. “Something like that.”

  “Then, I guess that means you heard about David's little suicide mission?” I swung around the bedpost and came to rest on the mattress beside Jase, stirring up a dust cloud as I landed.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think? I mean—” I cleared my throat. “How do you feel about it?”

  He stood, dumping the thing he was holding on the chair as he passed it. “Like cutting a hole in my gut to drain out all the guilt, all the pain, all the fear.”

  “Jase?” I stood too. “I'm so sorry.”

  He nodded to himself. “Growing up, we . . . we’d fight. We’d play pranks on each other and, sometimes, we’d do things brothers really shouldn't do—nasty things. But I always loved him, Ara. I've always known he’d be there after to make up with or punch in the arm every day for a year until we got over whatever little feud it was we had at the time. And I was okay with that—it was how we were. But. . .” He sat down in the chair on top of what he’d just thrown there. “I can't even imagine him not being here. I can't comprehend the idea that my brother will be gone . . . for forever.”

  I wandered over and squatted before him, resting my hand gently over his. “I won't let this happen, Jase. I swear. I will find some way to stop him.”

  “How, Ara?” He stood, brushing past me. “You know what he’s like. I saw the argument you had.”

  “You saw that?” I spun on the balls of my toes to watch him.

  He tapped his temple.

  “Oh.” I got to my feet slowly.

  “It’s over,” he said, defeated. “I tried. I’ve tried so many things to—” He stopped on a break in his voice. “But nothing worked. I'm sorry. He’s going to die.”

  “I can’t accept that, Jase.”

  “It’s too bad,” he said kindly. “He won’t wait for you to accept it, Ara. It is what it is.”

  “Why won't he help me help him?” I said, breaking to tears on the last word. “I thought by coming to him, by getting it all out in the open, maybe we could change things, maybe we could work together—do something.”

  “I know. And it was the right thing to do, but. . .”

  “But, it didn't work. He doesn't care. It’s like he wants to die.”

  “Or maybe he’s just already accepted it.”

  “Hmpf. Easy for some,” I muttered, wiping my nose.

  “No. It’s not. Don’t you see, Ara? It’s not that he doesn't care or that he wants to die, but that it’s taken him so long to accept his fate that he’s worried it’s all gonna come undone with one word of hope, and then he’s going to lose all that again when whatever plan you had fails.”

  I swiped a tear from the very tip of my nose. “I get that. I do. I really understand what he's gone through to cope with what he has to do, but I don't care. I just. . .”

  “I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “I know what will happen to you when he’s gone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ask yourself this,” Jase said, stopping in front of me. “What does it mean to you? What will your life be when he’s no longer in it?”

  “Nothing. Empty,” I answered quickly.

  “No. Think harder. Think about that first day, when you wake up and there's a shift in the paradigm. When you look out the window and suddenly that sense that he's out there, that you'll see him next week or that you'll argue with him about something he said, will be gone. Like staring at a blank canvas.” He rolled his shoulders back slowly, watching the realisation form in front of him. “There’ll never be any way to paint over that. There will never be any way to fill that hole, Ara, and I love you, you know that, but even I can't fill that hole for you. I know. . .” He sighed, dropping his hands to his knees for a second before standing tall again. “I know you’ve messed up from time to time when it comes to him and the way you love him. But you do love him, and that’s what counts in the end, Ara, because after a hundred years with one person, that's the only thing that keeps you together. God knows.” He rubbed his brow. “I tried. I . . . but we failed, and it breaks my heart so immensely deep that you'll have to suffer that—that you'll have to feel that way for even a second. I would do anything. . .” His fists tightened. “Anything to keep you from that, because your life won't just be empty without him, Ara, it’ll be like living without air.”

  I stepped closer, my eyes wide. “Jase?”

  “He know this, too, Ara. He knows all that his death will do to you, and he is still going to go—still going to let you suffer that, because his reasons for dying far outweigh anything else he might care about.”

  “What reasons?”

  “That’s just it.” He offered a gentle smile; just one corner of his lip turning up, gifting me with the presence of his dimple. “I don’t even know.”

  “Ara?”

  I spun around quickly. “David.”

  “What are you doing in here?” He glared at Jason as he walked over and placed his arm around me possessively.

  “I was already in here when she came in,” Jase said flatly.

  “Fine.” David looked from him to me, then back again. “Then tell me what’s going on.”

  “We were just discussing your recent decision,” I said.

  “Ara?” He sighed, stepping away. “Get back to bed. We’re not having this discussion again.”

  “Don’t do that to her.” Jason moved in, coming up fast in front of David. “She ha
s the right to fight for you. There has to be another way.”

  David just smiled. “Would I be going to my death if there were?”

  “Look, I understand that, but—” Jase’s words stopped, his eyes going smaller. “Where did you get that information?”

  “What information?” I asked, stepping into the conversation.

  David glanced back at me once, his shoulders sinking. “Don't you get it, brother? This has to end with her.”

  “David, what do you mean?” I curled my white fingertips over his forearm. “Please don’t leave me in the dark anymore, David. I’m begging you.”

  He looked at Jason one more time, who nodded, almost as if agreeing with something, then softly spoke my name—all the fight, the strain, the depth leaving his voice in defeat. “What you know of the prophecy so far is wrong.”

  “What . . . what parts?”

  “All of it. It’s backward, misinterpreted.” He started pacing. “This child, this Blood of Knight and Lilithian, that’s not you. Nothing has been foretold. Only promised.”

  “Promised?”

  “What those pages are is—” David stopped and looked away. “They’re not a prophecy, Ara. They’re a contract.”

  My eyes darted to Jason. “So Jason was right.”

  David frowned at him. “You told her it was a contract?”

  “I did.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Arthur didn’t tell me,” Jason said, answering an unspoken question. “I only had to read it to see the truth.”

  “And still,” David said, turning away to rub his head. “It seems even you missed the proverbial left hand while you were watching the right.”

  “So it would seem.” Jason nodded once then looked at me. “Ara, you’ve not only been mislead, pretty girl. You’ve been lied to.”

  “What do you mean? By who?” I asked Jase, but it really was aimed more at David, because I already knew the answer—could feel the tension coming off David’s soul in waves.

  “Me,” David said.

  “And Morgaine,” Jason added.