by Am Hudson
“I know, right?” I said. “I made her myself.”
“With a little bit of help from me,” David said, pushing the door open.
Morgana tensed, sitting up away from me and the baby.
David’s evil eye swept over her, changing as it landed on Falcon. “The helicopter’s arriving in five. We need you down there to help move Jason.”
“Helicopter?” I gasped. “What’s going on?”
“The IVRS got word—”
“About Jason?” I asked. “How?”
“People talk,” Falcon said simply. “And there are enough Lilithian, Human, and Vampirian officials crawling over this place now to fill a stadium.”
My wide eyes moved to David.
“There’s a big mess to clean up out there,” he informed. “Not just the blood and the bodies, but the ‘bureaucratic’ mess, too.”
“So what does the IVRS want with Jason?” I asked.
“They want him back—at full capacity,” David said. “They won’t let anyone else handle his treatment. They’re moving him to a state-of-the-art medical facility in New York.”
“And… what if they can’t help him?”
David shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. In the meantime, I need Falcon.”
Falcon looked at me. “Anything you need before I go?”
“I’m fine.” I cast my gaze down to my suckling baby. “We’ve got everything we need right here.”
“I’ll stay with her in case—”
“The hell you will, Morgana!” David snapped his fingers, pointing at the door. “You can stay with me until I decide what to do with you.”
“Hey!” I cut in. “Leave her alone. You’ve done enough to punish her already.”
“You said if I helped you find Ara, you’d give me my freedom—“
“Not to be alone with her—“
“David, we’d never have found Ara without Morgana’s magic,” Falcon added. “She’s earned forgiveness in my books, and Ara’s. She’s not going to hurt either of them.”
“I swear,” Morg said with wide eyes. “She’s my sister, David. That changes everything!”
David clearly bit his teeth together inside his mouth, not wanting to enter this debate in front of others.
“I can take care of myself,” I stated. “Go take care of things out there.”
“We’ll be talking about this later, Ara,” he said through his teeth.
“Ooh, I quiver with fear.” I rolled my eyes. “Just go. You’re making me tense and that’s not good for the baby. She can feel it.”
His fists balled up by his sides and his jaw set as he turned and followed Falcon, closing the door quietly behind him.
Morg sunk down on the pillows, looking dead ahead at the roaring Cerulean fire, her thumbnails clicking over each other. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She stayed quiet for a moment then, watching me feed the baby, her eyes travelling back to the door with her thoughts. “Does it bother you?”
“What?”
“That I’m your sister and I’ve been with your husband—in this bed.”
“Ew!” I sat up off the pillows a bit. “Morgana!”
She laughed. “I’m sorry. I did actually intend to express genuine curiosity. It wasn’t meant to taunt you; it just came out wrong.”
“Well, now that you mention it.” I sat back again, but I didn’t really want to. “That is a bit disturbing. But, I guess I’ve slept with his brother, so we’re kind of even.”
Morgana laughed—a sound I was sure I hadn’t heard from her all that often. “I like that you have a sense of humour about it.”
“What else can I do?” I shrugged my shoulders loosely. “Fighting or crying about it won’t change things. I think I just need to start fresh and forget the entire past.”
“I like the sound of that.” Morgana settled back comfortably on the pillows. I took a good look at her then, comparing us to Drake, and I wondered how I had never seen it before. She had my chin and the same hairline as me, and even our hands were alike. But as I looked a bit closer at the ring of dirt around her neck and the remaining bloodstains on her arms and cheeks, some of the things David did to her before he killed her became clear. I actually felt a drop in my stomach and a foreign sense of anxiety, as if I wished I’d been there to protect her.
“When did you wake up—from death?” I asked.
“I don’t actually know.” She toyed with her fingertip, brushing some dried blood out from under it. “They told me one of the Knights found me wandering the kill suite corridor early this morning, my head barely attached to my shoulders, and when Drake came back to rally the men and rescue you, he and David were brought down to see me. It took a few gallons of Drake’s blood to wake me up, but I healed really fast.”
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, what made you heal so fast?”
“Maybe it was Drake’s blood.” She rocked her mouth in contemplation. “I’ve had it plenty of times in the past and it always healed me faster than any other vampire.”
“Is that because he’s your father, do you think?”
“Maybe.” Her face lit up with the thought of it. “It would make sense.”
And that just made me wish even more that he was here. I wondered about that moment she woke up then—her mind still lost in the past, on a scary evening when David beat her and killed her. I wished I’d have been there as they woke her, and I made a mental note to steal the memory from David later. I was glad Drake was there, but I imagined David might have been very cruel in those first few moments.
“What happened when you woke up?” I asked, holding back a grin. “Did you try to kill David?”
“Yes. But Drake held me down,” she said simply.
“Did David try to hurt you again?”
“He said I didn’t deserve to be alive and that if it weren’t for who I was to you now, he’d kill me again just for the sport of it.” Her face broke into a smile, her eyes distant. “Drake threatened him then—said if he ever said anything like that to me again, he’d rip out his tongue.”
I smiled, knowing how much that would’ve pissed David off.
“I didn’t care what he said, though. I wanted him dead and nothing was going to stop me.”
“What did stop you?”
“Aside from being held down by a more powerful vampire?” she said with smirk. “Drake yelled over the top of my screaming—told me that he had a secret to share—about my sister. I stopped fighting him and told him I didn’t have a sister anymore, that Eve was dead, and that’s when he said I did, but she’d been taken by my grandmother Safia and we needed to rescue her.”
“So you knew Safia was your grandmother?”
“Well, I grew up thinking her son Callon Le Fay was my father, remember? I just never imagined that it was actually because my mother was Anandene, but it does explain my witchcraft and my immortality—the combination of witch and vampire.”
“Right,” I said, my eyes wide as I nodded. “I wonder if your birth is what triggered the idea for Safia and Anandene to get their own immortal bodies—seeing that it was possible.”
“Maybe.”
I thought of another question then. “So, all this time, did you know Safia was linked to Drake—her immortality?”
She shook her head.
“Would you have killed her if you’d known?”
She shook her head again. “But, if she had my niece and was threatening to hurt her, I guess I would. So I don’t blame you for doing it to protect your daughter.”
I smiled down at the baby, forgetting all of my problems for that moment as she pushed the bottle from her mouth with her tongue and pursed her little lips, stuffed as a fat pudding.
“Have you named her yet?” Morg asked delicately, braving another inch of closeness.
“Not yet. I thought about naming her for David’s mother, but—” As the words bled through my thoughts,
bringing the memory of Arietta and then her death, Arthur popped to mind. “Oh my God.”
“What?” Morg sat to attention, looking around for danger.
I put the bottle down and shuffled forward to the edge of the bed. “I left Arthur down in the cells—half dead. Well, as dead as a vampire can be,” I added.
“Do you want me to go get him?” she asked.
“No, it’s okay.” I turned and laid the baby on the bed. “Hand me that bag.”
Morg grabbed the diaper bag off the bench and placed it near the baby’s head.
“I’ll just change her and take her to Emily, then I’ll go down and heal him up before David finds out what Drake did to him.”
“What Drake did?”
I nodded absently, peeling away the very wet nappy from the baby’s skin. “He took him shortly after…” I stopped. That whole story needed to stay in the past. “Arthur betrayed him in the worst way, and Drake promised he would punish him for that.”
“He’s unforgiving in that way—if you betray him,” she said, her head down.
“Well, Arthur certainly suffered.” I wiped the baby clean and placed a dry nappy under her bottom. “But he’ll be okay. Eventually.”
“Not when he finds out what happened to Jason.”
The blood left my face, making it cold. “No one can know about that, Morg. David intends to erase it from his mind—if he ever remembers, and the more people that know—”
“I get it,” she said, her hands up to stop me. “I won’t say anything.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I care about Jason, too, you know.”
I smiled at her, bagging the soiled nappy. “I know.”
***
All around the castle, people were rejoicing. Men that hadn’t been in the branch of Drake’s army that attacked had joined the force to help their King, and not one of them right now was aware of his passing. Knowing him now like I did, I could understand why his people had loved him so much—and feared him. I knew they would grieve him, and I finally knew why so many of them stayed under his reign when I offered them an alternative. I wanted with all my heart to go back up to that tower and piece him back together—live a life with him in it. But it would never be worth the risk that Safia would also live. The spell she used on Jason to connect David broke when she died, as did the spell that gave the spiders life, but what if the spell she used on Drake was more powerful? Older? Maybe it had taken a stronger hold.
Maybe I would resurrect him when the baby was older, I told myself, because it was the only way I could stop my chest from shaking and force myself to hold my head high. Right now, after all that had been undone, my people needed a strong Queen to put our world back together. David needed a strong wife. And my baby needed a strong mother. There would be time to grieve one day, but that was not today.
I walked the halls around the castle as if I’d grown up here, taking turns and tunnels quickly until I reached the stone passage to the underground cells, and stopped. The silence down there was eerie. There were no screams echoing deep within the tunnels. No cries. No whimpers. And it seemed all of the guards had regained consciousness and moved on, but I stepped very carefully just in case, not wanting to crush one of their removed… appendages, as I blended with the darkness down the stairwell.
At the three-way crossroad, it took me a moment to figure out which tunnel to take, but a brief sniff of the air pointed me in the right direction. Arthur was still down here. I could smell him. I just couldn’t actually see anything and had no idea how far down the last cell was.
I shook my hand out and brought the gentle glow of my Cerulean Light to a fingertip, aiming it around in search of a lantern. When I found one hanging on the wall between two cells, I took a quick look around for some matches, realising, with a shake of my head, that I could just transfer my blue glow to the wick.
I wandered forward then with the lantern raised, checking each cell for prisoners that might need to be released, but when I came upon the last cell and shone the light into it, I couldn’t see anyone. I thought maybe I’d taken the wrong passage.
“Arthur?” I whispered.
A soft murmur bounced off the very back wall. His throat cleared then, and I heard my name in a stronger voice than before.
“Where are you?” I could smell his blood mingling with dirt—aged and putrid and slightly dried. If I didn’t love him so much, I would have backed from the cell as the stench licked my nostrils, and made this David’s problem. But I couldn’t let that poor man suffer another moment.
I spotted his shadowy figure and ran to his side, where he lay flat on his back, his arms spread wide, a pool of black blood surrounding his legs. His chest moved rapidly with shallow breaths, like a wounded dog, his shirt and hair soaked with sweat.
Propping the lantern in the dirt by his hip, I knelt over him, smoothing his hair away from his face and wiping the sweat back with my hand. “Arthur. These are fresh wounds,” I noted, taking in the cuts on his face, the defensive wounds on his forearms, and the pool of blood around his legs. “Did someone hurt you while I was gone?”
His head twitched to the right, his eyes scrunching tight, as if he fought the fog of agony to come to the surface.
“I’m going to give you my blood, okay?” I lifted my wrist to my teeth, but as I opened my mouth to bite down, his hand shot up and covered mine, his ice-blue eyes fixed around a plea.
“Bite me, Amara, please—just let me die.”
“I’m not going to do that, Arthur.” I cut my flesh open with my teeth, bringing my bloodied wrist down to his lips. “You’re going to live—”
“I have no reason to live.” He scrunched his eyes tight, arching his back as a wave of pain rolled through him, his fists tight by his sides.
When it settled, he cried for a moment, keeping his eyes closed as he spoke. “I am a disgraced man—”
“No. It’s over. All of it. David will forgive you—welcome you home as his uncle. I know he’s sorry for what happened between you that night, I—”
He shook his head fiercely. “It’s no matter to me now, Amara. I cannot stay here on this godforsaken earth another day. I’m old. I’m tired.” He sounded so weak too. “I want to go home—back into the arms of my beautiful Arietta and our stillborn child.”
“But, Arthur, there’s still good left in this world for you.” I leaned down and kissed his clammy forehead. “You have a great-niece now. I gave birth—”
“I’m sorry, Amara.” He opened his eyes then and looked at me, revealing the depths of the wise man I knew so well. My confidant. My friend. “It brings me…” He strained to get the words out, wincing as he shifted his legs. “It brings me great joy to hear this news, but I’m damaged beyond repair, I—”
“No, we can heal you. We can heal everything.”
“Not the emotional damage.” His eyes went cold again, and he looked upward, the muscles in his face twitching as images moved through his mind, dragging him down to a very dark place. “I just want to die. I beg of you—have mercy on me.”
“Okay.” I rocked back on my heels, bringing myself into a squat, and covered my mouth as I tried to figure out a way past this.
“Ara?” David called cautiously into the dark.
“Back here.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Um…” I looked at Arthur, shaking and sweating, and stood up, walking to meet David at the cell door. “Who told you I was down here?” I whispered.
“Emily.” He tried to look past me; I blocked his view. “What’s going on?”
“Arthur…” I put my hands against his chest to keep him there. “He asked me to kill hm.”
“What did they do to him?” He pushed past me and rushed to his uncle’s side, taking his hand as he knelt beside him. “Uncle?” He shook his shoulder. “Uncle?”
Arthur groaned, bringing himself awake against his better wishes, and looked up at his nephew.
“Uncle, what happened?”
“David, my son…” His weak voice broke at the end. He reached up with his other hand, turning slightly at the shoulder, and as he cupped David’s neck, I saw the patch of darker blood on the seat of his jeans. “Son, forgive me.” He broke down then and rolled his head into David’s lap, sobbing his pleas for forgiveness.
“I forgive you.” David curled around his uncle’s head, kissing his hair. “I forgive you, Uncle. Please. Just let Ara heal you—”
“No,” he whispered coarsely, shaking his head as he came back up again slightly. And feeling the obvious pain, laid back down again. “My heart aches for them, David—every day.”
“For who, Uncle?” David asked, and Arthur looked across the room, his smile landing on the empty space in the corner.
“My beloved Arietta.”
“Don’t look at them, Arthur.” David made him turn his head. “You’re not leaving me. You can’t leave me here alone—for eternity.”
“You have her.” Arthur smiled, reaching back for me. I moved over and knelt down, taking his hand. “She will make you strong—love you as I have loved you.”
“No,” David demanded. “I won’t let you go. Not like this. Let us heal you, make you human again, if that’s your wish, and then you can decide. But with a clear head, Uncle, with—”
Arthur moved his head in a no, smiling at that place across the room again. And as if his touch connected me to the vision he saw, when I followed his gaze to the darkness I saw them too—a picture of feminine perfection, her gentle eyes fixed on her beloved, a small child in her arms, tangling her golden hair around its tiny hand.
My quick intake of breath made David look too, but he clearly didn’t see it.
“Uncle.” He grabbed Arthur’s face again and turned it away from the spirits. “Uncle, look at me. Don’t look at them. Uncle—”
But Arthur’s eyes wandered again, and he reached up as the apparition appeared on her knees beside him, leaning closer to show him their daughter. “My Arietta,” he said, touching her face.
She looked at me then, and offered a warm, familiar smile, as if she’d known me my whole life.
