by Am Hudson
“He came to me after—a while after. And it wasn’t exactly a hold-me-in-your-arms reception either.”
“Did you punch him?” Sam asked.
I shook my head softly. “Do you want to punch him?”
“Will I get the chance?” he asked, that teenage adrenaline filling his eyes out with a look of egotism. “Is he ever coming back?”
“That’s why I’m here—telling you this,” I said. “He asked me to… soften the blow before he returns.”
“All this time…” Vicki’s voice and her eyes trailed off to emptiness. “How could he do that to us?”
“I’ll never forgive him,” Sam assured us, his face twisted up like he’d eaten a lemon.
“Can I say something?” I interjected. “And you don’t have to take anything from it, but I just ask that you hear me out.”
Vicki gave a nod. Sam shrugged.
“When he died—after the funeral, I don’t know what thoughts went through your mind. And I was in a bad place then—with David. With everything. But all I can remember about that day is thinking that I would give anything to have him back. No matter what.”
Vicki looked up; I made deliberate eye contact with her and held it there.
“No. Matter. What,” I repeated sternly.
She lowered her eyes and just nodded.
“Be angry at him,” David said, his deep voice such a shock among the softer, higher voices so far. “Hate him for a while if you need. But after that, try as hard as you can to understand why he did what he did.”
“Why should I?” Sam spat.
“Because he is your father. Because you are a soon-to-be very powerful vampire. And because he loves you and you love him,” I said. “You owe it to your heart to give him a chance.”
Sam looked down at his lap, but before I could speak to answer a question in Vicki’s mind, Sam looked up again and said, “Will I drink blood—and kill people?”
“Samuel!” Vicki spun around to look at him.
“What?” He rolled both hands out in a dismissive gesture.
“No, Sam,” I assured him. “Not human blood, anyway.”
“Don’t tell me it’s animal blood then.” He screwed his nose up. “I’m not gonna sparkle am I?”
David and I laughed. Vicki just looked at Sam blankly.
“No, buddy,” David said. “You’re a vampire-hunting bloodsucker. Your species are called Lilithians.”
“Lil-what?”
“Lil. Ith. Ians,” I stated. “It’s what I am, too.”
“And Dad?”
“No, he is Vampirian, and his other son is a…” Crap!
“Other son?” Vicki screeched.
“I have a brother?” Sam’s feet tapped excitedly under the table.
“An older brother. Centuries older,” I added, when Vicki’s mind went down the road of betrayal. “His name is Drake.”
“Jake?” Vicki said.
“No. Drake.”
“Drake?” She grimaced. “What kind of a name is Drake?”
David and I laughed.
“So where is he?” Sam said. “Dad? Where is he now? Why didn’t he tell us this?”
“Because he thought you might freak out too much to listen, but,” I added, holding a finger up to shush the sudden protest, “he has been keeping an eye on you both—because he cares.”
Vicki’s facial muscles went slack and her cheeks dropped as she put two and two together.
“Yes,” David said with a laugh. “The dog.”
“What!” Sam barked, leaning right forward. “The dog?”
I nodded, grinning at Vicki. She was thinking all the same things I had when I found out: did I do anything in front of that dog that I wouldn’t want my dad, or in her case, husband, to see?
“That explains why he scratched at the door so badly when I—” Sam stopped, his eyes flicked sideways onto his mother, then he bit his lip, his cheeks going red.
David rocked forward and slapped the table top, burying his nose in his fingertips, laughing so hard it was silent.
“What?” Vicki looked at David then back at me. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” I put my hand on David’s—a warning not to overload their brains with the truth about our powers—or the fact that David just saw so many things both Sam and Vicki would never have wanted him to see. I didn’t see them, but I could imagine what they might have been.
“Will he be back?” Vicki asked. “The dog?”
“I don’t think so.” I looked at David to see what he thought.
“No,” he confirmed, blinking back the tears of laughter. “He doesn’t need to be the dog now. But we do need to move you both to a safe place.”
“Safe place?” Vicki gasped. “Why?”
“There’s going to be a war—”
“War?”
“Between Drake’s Warriors and our Knights—”
“War?’ Vicki said again to herself, shaking her head. “This sounds insane, you do realise that?”
I nodded. “The people that want us dead may come for Sam—because of who he is.”
“Why? What did I do?”
“Nothing. Neither did I,” I said. “But Dad made an agreement with someone a long time ago—to give them something. But that something is evil and he wants to back out of the deal, so they may try to kill those he loves most in the world.”
Vicki stood up. “Then we have to pack. Now!”
“You have a week.” I stood too. “Nothing needs to happen until then.”
“But what if they come tonight—while we’re sleeping? What if—”
“It’ll be fine, Vicki,” David insisted, appearing at her side.
She took such a quick, sharp breath that even Sam jumped out of his skin.
“How did you do that? Appear out of nowhere like that?”
“I’m fast,” David grinned, appearing by the window. “Once you become a vampire, Sam, I’ll teach you how to do it.”
Sam’s world changed then. Everything we’d told him sunk in on a different level and the sun rose in his eyes. His dad was alive—was a vampire; and one day he would also be really cool. “When? When will I become a vampire?”
“When you’re about twenty-five—unless you drink vamp blood before that.”
“So blood turns me?” he asked, looking with wide eyes to me then David.
“It does,” David said in a warning tone. “But if you make the change or, as we used to say, ‘trigger the curse’ too young, you’ll be that age forever. And it’s not fun, trust me, having to show ID every time you want a beer.”
Sam nodded. “Right. So just wait until it kicks in naturally then?”
“That’s the smart option,” I said. “Look at me; I’m stuck at nineteen.”
“But nineteen and beautiful,” Vicki offered in that motherly way.
“Aw.” I cocked my head. “Thanks, Mom.”
***
Thinking about everything that happened today with Sam and Vicki, and the fact that Mike was on a plane right now—headed back to fight for me—and that Jason was, as we lay in bed, driving toward the lake house, I just couldn’t sleep. I threw another log on the fire and sat at the dining table, peeling the skin off an apple so it looked like a snake. When I finished, I held it up and went with it back to a day after school where I made one of these for Sam. He’d always been such a kid at heart, and to see the news about his father destroy him that way hurt me deeply. It hurt David, too, but he didn’t say it. The fact was, one day, Sam would be a member of our immortal community, and right now neither David nor I was all that sure what kind of a community this fun-loving little brother of mine would enter.
A dark flicker outside caught my eye then, and as my heart sped up in panic a shiny black crow landed on the porch railing, tucking its wings gracefully behind its back. He looked through the glass and through the curtains directly at me and cawed once, taking off again.
I put the apple down and kept the knife as
I stood up, my ears pricking to listen for the guards outside. They were still there, right by the furthest evergreen, where they always were. But it seemed odd that a crow would be skulking around at this hour. The sun was still a good hour away from rising and none of the other creatures outside had yet awoken.
The crow made another crass sound then, this time from the other porch.
I walked over and unlocked the door, sliding it quietly open, and the freezing winter chill crept in silently along my cheeks and hardened my skin. I wrapped my arms around my chest and stepped outside, looking down at the crow.
It cawed again, as if making a point.
“Shhh.” I put my finger to my lips. “You’ll wake the King.”
It flapped its wings heavily and rose off the ground, turning slightly to fly away into the shadows of predawn, so I grabbed my coat and my scarf off the rack by the door, slid it closed again and, tucking the apple knife into my pocket, took off after the crow.
Drops of morning dew on pines gave off a citrusy smell—one of my favourite things about this place—and I picked up a slight hint of rain on the horizon as well, perhaps as far away as the interstate. I wasn’t sure it would come as far south as this, but the chill in the air certainly made a compelling argument against that.
As I walked in my ugg boots over the bumpy, uneven forest ground, hardly able to see two feet in front, I started to wonder if following a random crow without reason was a good idea. Okay, so, no, it wasn’t a good idea. I knew that before I left, but for some reason I just got the sense that it wanted to show me something.
I checked behind me for the guards, but they hadn’t followed.
“Amara.” A familiar voice through the dead quiet startled me, even though I recognised it right away. I reeled back a little as a figure stepped out of the shadows behind a tree, rolling a shirt down over his bare chest. He approached me with quick steps and a friendly grin, bowing low as he reached me. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“Scare me?” I touched the hollow between my collarbones, where my heart was racing so hard my skin pulsed. “Not at all.”
Drake laughed, looking at my hand on my chest. “I apologise, my dear. But I needed to speak to you without David hearing.”
“Why?” I angled my head to look back at the house, but it was sheathed in darkness.
“There are some things I need to say, things I need to tell you—”
“Like the fact that you’re a crow?” I said, putting it all together.
“I’m not a crow,” he stated, tucking his black t-shirt into his pants. “I can become a crow—much the same way Lord Eden becomes the dog.”
I looked at his hand for a blood garnet ring, like my dad’s.
Drake reached into his pocket and drew out a red stone. “I never had mine set into metal. I carry it in my pocket usually.”
“I so need to get one of those.”
“And you will,” he said, putting it away. “When we win back Loslilian.”
I folded my arms, half because I was cold, and the other half to look irritated that he’d dragged me out here in the middle of the night, when I’d be seeing him this afternoon anyway. “What did you come here to tell me—that couldn’t wait?”
“Amara, there is no way any one of the men that love you are going to leave me alone with you this afternoon so we can talk.” He buried his hand in his pocket, reaching forward with the other to unfold my hand from the warmth of my arms, then laid a warm coin in my palm. “I want you to keep this with you.”
“What is it?” I studied the small brass circle; it wasn’t a coin like any I’d seen before.
“It’s just a bit of metal. But I’ve used a watching spell, so that I might check up on you when I need to.”
“Check up on me?”
“I can see you—as if that coin were a phone and my, yes, it’s cliché, I know, but my crystal ball were the other end of the line.”
“And why would I give you the power to see or hear what I’m doing at any time?”
“Because I can better protect you that way. But you mustn’t tell David about it.” He huffed out through his nose, looking off in the direction of the house. “He disposed of my last spelled object.”
“The bracelet?”
“It was never a secret that I’d put a spell on it,” he said defensively.
“Yes, it was. You didn’t tell me. That means it was a secret.”
“You didn’t ask,” he said simply. “If you’d asked, I’d have told you.”
I bit my teeth together, the coin in my hand getting hotter and hotter, and slightly heavy with the weight of my anger. I dropped it to the floor and kicked it away. “No. I’m not keeping that thing.”
“Amara!” Drake scuffled around looking for it, giving up after a few seconds. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I don’t know if I can trust you. There are too many contradicting facts, Drake, and until I’m sure, I’m not giving anyone the power to see or hear what I’m doing whenever they like.”
He squatted down, obviously seeing the coin, and picked it up, dusting it off as he stood. I caught a whiff of his musky cologne then and it carried a grassy smell—like a mix of herbs—with it. “You can trust me, Amara. I am the only person in the world that you actually can trust—aside from David.”
“Prove it.” I folded my arms again.
“Ask me anything.” He spread his arms out wide as if to imply he was an open book.
So I thought of the one question I hadn’t yet asked—the one thing no one could tell me but him. “Do you still love Anandene?”
His arms dropped to his sides again and he exhaled a short, despondent breath. “I will always love her.”
I took a deliberate step back.
“However, the real questions is, do I want her resurrected?”
“Do you?”
“In truth?” He paused. “No. I haven’t done for some time.”
“But I thought that was the plan from the beginning—the reason she cast the spell that led to the plague, the reason—”
“It was. But it was her wish. Not mine.”
“But I thought you wanted her to be immortal.”
“I think, perhaps, I did—for a time. You see, when I fell in love with Anandene, I fell hard and I fell fast. It was messy and irrational; she was all that ever mattered to me. And because of that, I looked past her… transgressions—forgave them when I should have punished them.”
“Transgressions?”
“When I met her, there was no such thing as psychology—there was no one that could diagnose sociopathy by analysing the actions of another. But she brought horror to an otherwise beautiful world. Tortured small animals and delighted in the way they reacted to pain, hurt children for the thrill of their cries, and I was blind to it—saw only the sweetness of this girl I fell in love with.
“It took ten years after her death to realise I could live without her, and by that time I had already taken action to resurrect her, with the help of her mother—”
“Safia?” I said.
“So you know.”
“We’ve been connecting some dots.” I nodded. “Dad said Safia’s name was in their family bible as Anandene’s mother, but he wasn’t completely sure it was true.”
“It is,” Drake confirmed.
“And, so, Safia won’t let this be, will she?”
Drake shook his head. “I fell in love with another woman once—twelve years after Anandene’s passing. I went to Safia and told her I wanted out—wanted the key to my sister’s sarcophagus so I could resurrect her and end this—”
“Wait, Safia had it?”
“Has it. Yes.”
“But… I thought I had it.”
“You have a key, but it will not open her sarcophagus.”
“Then what does it open?”
“Her tomb—where we keep it. But in it lies only the skull. As you know, we hid another piece of bone in the dagger, so that only two on th
is earth knew where to find the last piece of my sister.”
“Where are the other pieces?”
“Only Safia knows—as an insurance policy.”
“So you tried to back out and now she’s forcing you to help her, and that’s what she held over you—all this time? Your sister’s bones?”
“It is one thing, yes.”
“And the other?”
“My daughter.”
“You have a daughter?”
“I had two. But she knew of only one.”
“Knew of?” That sounded very past-tense. “And, what, she doesn’t know about her now?”
“My wife was a hated woman. For all the evil she brought to the world, she did at least bring one good thing. But when my child was born, an assassin was sent to kill her. Anandene’s family took the child away and swore to protect her. A few years later she was brought to Loslilian, and the people were made to believe she was the child of Anandene’s brother—an ex-lover of my sister’s. It was never said, but only assumed that the child was Lilith’s—”
“Morgana?” Tiny bumps crawled out on my skin. “Morgana was your daughter? Not Lilith’s?”
Drake nodded once, his face tightly pinched with the pain inside of him.
And my heart broke a thousand times over then for what David had done to her. “Did she know? Did Morg know?”
“No.”
“So Safia threatened to kill her own granddaughter if you refused to help resurrect Anandene?”
He nodded again.
“Oh my God!” I covered my mouth, and Dad’s theory about Safia and her blood sacrifice fell away for a new one. “Is that why you really killed the children—she told you to avenge her granddaughter?”
“I wish it were so. I wish with all my heart that it had been an order, but it was a choice.”
“Explain it to me.” I looked right into his blue eyes, vibrant even in the dark. “I know there’s more to it. I need to understand.”
“It was not for revenge. It looked that way, but I was coming to kill them anyway.”
“Why?”
“It was the lesser of evils, Amara. Twelve had to die, and those children did not have parents to love them yet and so, would not cause as much harm to a heart as the loss of a child a woman had held to her breast.”
