by Am Hudson
“Stop being such a helicopter parent, David. He’s nineteen years old—”
“Almost nineteen,” he corrected. “We were turned just shy of our nineteenth, Ara.”
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. He’s not a child. And you said he could have the journals.” I flopped back on the bed. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t just told me he’s been in that room all day!”
“Well, he hasn’t come out in tears either,” I noted. “So maybe he’s just taking it all in.”
David stopped and rested his head against the door.
“Why don’t you go in and talk to him?” I suggested. “Just knock on the door, announce yourself, and ask him how he feels.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?” I laughed.
“I just… can’t.”
“David.” I sat up. “That makes no sense.”
“We were just never really like that.” He sat down on the bed beside me. “We never had that kind of relationship.”
“Well, he doesn’t know that.” I presented the door, meaning Jason. “What do you think he’ll say if you go in there and say, ‘Hey, bro. Just wanted to check and see how you’re doing’?”
“Go away,” he stated. “He’d tell me it’s none of my business.”
“Maybe the old Jason would—the one you fought with, hurt, the one whose girlfriend you killed.”
David closed his eyes slowly, clearly feeling those regrets sink through.
“You have a clean slate right now, David. Go in there and tell your brother you were worried about him and you wanted to make sure he was okay.”
After a moment passed, where David said nothing, I thought for sure my words had reached him—that he would stand up and go in to his brother. But he looked at me and said, “Can you go? Please?”
I poked him playfully in the arm. “Coward.”
He curled his hand around my finger and pulled it until I landed against him. “Thank you.”
“Thank me if I come back in one piece,” I said, standing up.
As much as I wanted to roll into my cosy bed and sleep this night away, I dragged my hesitant self into the hall instead, closed my bedroom door on the hopeful face of David, and knocked on Jason’s.
“Yo!” he called in a much cheerier voice than I expected.
I pushed the door open and hovered on the threshold, my eyes moving up past his bare feet, over his hairy legs and to the boy sitting propped up on his pillows in nothing but pyjama shorts. “Just wanted to see how you were doing.”
He was surrounded by what I guessed were about a hundred journals, plus the packing boxes they came out of, and the aged paper and rotting spines mingled with the smell of human boy under the layer of cologne, giving the room the kind of smell I remembered my dad’s office having at school.
Jason lowered the book he was reading and studied my face, a smile moving in. “You were expecting me to be a wreck, weren’t you?”
I took that to mean he was okay, and stepped fully into the room, closing the door. “I was worried, yes.”
“This isn’t me.” He held up the book. “Okay, I guess, I know it is, and I know all this stuff happened to me, and don’t get me wrong—” he put the book down and sat up a bit, making room for me on the end of the bed, “—I feel bad for my past self. I do. But it just feels like a story I’m reading—about some other guy.”
My face split into a grin of relief as I sat down, closing my dressing gown across my chest.
“I know I’ve got a lot to be sorry for,” he added. “I did some awful things, but the person I was feels so far removed from who I think I am.” He touched his chest. “I mean, I would never sleep with my brother’s wife. How could I do that? It feels… out of character for me. So I don’t want to remember who I was, because I like who I am a whole lot more. But—” he shrugged, flashing me a toothy grin, “—the fact that I’m here, with you and my brother, means you guys probably already forgave me for all that, right?”
I nodded. “Right.”
“So, then it’s time to move on.” He grabbed a journal and tossed it over his shoulder; it hit the wall just above his head and landed in an awkward fold on the floor in the nook between his nightstand and bedpost. “I’ve got a life to live, and it doesn’t sound like I did a whole lotta that while I was a vampire. It actually sounds like I had it pretty darn hard.”
“You did,” I whispered softly, feeling a surge of pity for the Jason that lived in the tiny bedroom back at the castle.
“And now I’m human again,” he stated, showing his arm, where there once was a black band—the Mark of his oath to the Old King. “And I’m free. I’d say things turned out pretty good in the end.”
“But it’s the end that David’s worried about.”
“What d’you mean?” He sat forward and shuffled over on his knees, pushing journals off the bed until he sat right beside me. “What’s he hiding?”
“Jase.” I looked deep into his eyes, hardly able to see him through the tears. “Something horrible happened to you before your head got damaged.”
“Okay,” he said, prompting me onward.
“The person that damaged your brain, well… one of the reasons she did that is because you had this incredible ability to read minds and control objects through telekinesis.”
“No kidding?” he said, his eyes drifting off as he thought about that. “That’s awesome.”
“It was, yes, and you helped me a lot when I started developing those powers.”
“Then I wasn’t all bad,” he said, a playful glint in his eye.
“You weren’t bad at all. In fact, you’re the purest soul I—”
“Yeah, I read that,” he cut in with a sarcastic edge to his tone. “And David is all the evil of the world, right?”
I heard David laugh from the other room.
“Something like that,” I said. “But he’s not evil, Jase—”
“I know that,” he said casually, turning so his legs sat over the edge of the bed. “I’ve known the guy for six months, well five, if you don’t count the month I was asleep and—” he shrugged, “—he’s the best friend I got.”
My whole heart melted. “He sent me in here,” I said quickly, hoping David wouldn’t burst in and cover my mouth.
“Why?”
“He was worried about how you’d feel after reading the journals.”
“Why didn’t he just come in himself? Oh,” he added, his eyes drifting to the books in a pile on the floor. “We weren’t close.”
“Right. But he wants to be—”
“I gathered that,” he said. “Or he wouldn’t have me here.”
I nodded. “It’s just gonna take time for him to… open up to you.”
“He’ll get there. I was pretty hostile to him—in the past.” He motioned down to the books again. “Maybe when I’m a bit more receptive, he might feel a bit safer to get close.”
He sounded just so much like the old Jase then that I had to laugh. “Yeah, sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
“I’d like to think so.” He patted both knees and leaned forward, looking at me with his brows raised. “So? This woman damaged my brain to stop me using my powers?”
“For one, but she mainly did it because you were hysterical after a man, who was more powerful than you, used that power to hold you down while he…”
“He?”
“While he extracted…” I cleared my throat. “While he molested you.”
Jason’s face sunk and the wind left him. He swallowed hard, looking away.
“Jase, you okay?”
“That’s pretty awful, I gotta say.”
“Jase?” I whispered softly, my whole body screaming to comfort him.
“But… it didn’t happen to me. It happened to the other guy.” He squinted for a moment as if he was trying to remember it, then he just lifted one shoulder and dropped it again, laughing o
nce. “And all I can say is I’m glad I don’t remember that.”
“But you might,” I said. “And that’s what David’s worried about.”
“Because he doesn’t know how he’ll deal with it if I do?”
The way he said that sounded like an attack, but he was right. That was David’s biggest fear: how would he handle the situation—what would he say to make Jason better if he remembered? What would he see in his eyes in those moments before he erased it all?
“I’d be the same,” Jase admitted. “If it were him. I’d be more worried about what I was gonna say than how he might feel.”
I sighed. “He loves you, Jase. So don’t think for a second that he doesn’t worry about how you’ll feel—”
“I know.” He put his hand on my knee, then looked at it and drew it away quickly. “But I’ll be okay. I’m alive, I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and I know I’ve got a brother that cares—if I ever do remember.”
“So you won’t try to deal with it alone?”
“Or take your own life?” David asked in a stern voice, standing suddenly in the doorway.
“That’s what you’re worried about?” Jase stood up.
David looked at the ground, keeping his arms folded.
“Bro?” He moved closer. “If you’re worried I’ll take my own life, I can tell you now, that’s the last thing I’d do. Why would I do that?”
“Because death may be more acceptable than living with what Hans did to you.”
Jase’s face softened and he shook his head. “This is because of Arthur—our uncle, right?”
David didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
“You’ve never had to face losing him before—or me, because vampires couldn’t die?”
“It was a shock,” David admitted, leaning against the doorframe, running one hand through his hair. “I still can’t believe he’s gone, and I don’t know what I’d do if I…”
The pause lasted so long that Jase laughed. “If you lost your brother—your only brother.”
David nodded, averting his eyes.
Jason just stood there in the middle of the room, grinning, and held both arms out wide. “This calls for a bro-hug. You know that, right?”
The awkwardness coated David like gravity. He looked at me, his mouth popping, and then looked at his brother, softening as he took in the wide, human smile. And they hugged—Jason wrapping his arms around David a little tighter than David did him, but as the seconds passed, free of back patting or manly grunts, David held on a little tighter too, and let himself love his brother the way brothers should.
When they broke away, Jase winked at me, coming to sit down beside me again.
David moved back and sat on the floor, his back against the wardrobe wall. “How far through the journals did you get?”
“I started at the most recent,” Jase said, toeing one of the books on the floor. “But it was all scientific mumbo-jumbo. I barely understood a word of it.”
David and I laughed.
“So I went back a bit,” he added, “about two years.”
I nodded, knowing what he would have read.
“I couldn’t find anything on what Sam was talking about—this… whatever it was I did to you.”
“That journal’s still back at the castle, I think.”
“What would it have said?”
“You reference it in your later entries,” I told him. “The masquerade.”
“Oh. That.” He nodded to himself. “And that was all? I didn’t… do anything… else, did I?”
“No.” I patted his knee. “And we made amends.”
“No kidding,” he scoffed, his wide eyes landing on David. “Sorry about that, by the way. Not sure if I ever said it but… I’m sorry I slept with your wife.”
David tried to hold it in, to straighten his face and take it seriously, but a smile broke through and he covered it with the back of his hand, losing it then to a short burst of laughter.
Jase and I laughed along with him, finally feeling enough distance from the whole situation to see the funny side. Part of it was in the way Jase just so casually said it, too.
“I do have to add…” Jase looked down at the distance between our legs and moved away an inch. “I don’t feel anything for you—as the person I am now. I mean…” He nodded at the books again. “The old me did—he admitted it in his recent journals—that he’d never stop loving you. But…”
“That’s a good thing, Jase,” I said, cocking my head. “I’m glad you’re free of it now.”
“Me too.” He blew a breath out through the corner of his mouth, wiping his brow. “What a sad, pathetic ending that would’ve been.”
We all laughed again, and as I looked at David I could see his spirits lifting with relief. He’d never really known this version of his brother—the version I knew. And I could tell that, with time, maybe just a short amount, he and Jase would be really close. David wanted it, and Jason was an easy person to love. It was the perfect recipe for a good relationship.
“I do have just one question, though,” Jase added.
“What’s that?” David said.
“The baby.” Jase looked out through his door into my bedroom. “She’s not mine, is she?”
“No,” I said simply. “Why do you ask?”
“I talk about her like she is—in one of my journals.”
“I was a bad husband,” David said. “And you picked up the pieces of Ara that I destroyed. Had it continued that way, you would have married Ara, and Elora would have grown up knowing you as her father.”
Jase cringed. “For your sake, seeing the way you obviously love your wife, I’m glad things didn’t turn out that way.”
I smiled at David and he smiled back at me in the same way.
“Me too, Jase,” he said. “Me too.”
***
While David took Jason out for one final driving lesson before his test, Vicki, Elora and I sat in the garden under the old oak tree with a picnic and few of Elora’s favourite teddybears and dolls. I could tell from the way Vicki poured the tea for the dolls and showed the baby how to feed them that she was really enjoying this as much as I was. She even put on a very poorly-done English accent as she made the dolls talk.
When my phone rang, I yanked it so quickly from the back pocket of my denim shorts that I nearly dropped it in the pink teacake, hoping it would be David. But Mike’s name showed up on the screen instead.
“Hello, you!”
“Hey,” he said, dragging the word out. “How’ve you been?”
“Great!” I beamed. “Really great. How’s Em?”
“She’s great,” he said, pausing with an awkward-sounding “Um.”
“Uh-oh. What is it?”
“Nothing bad,” he said quickly. “Just um… I just don’t want you to laugh.”
“Okay. I swear,” I crossed my fingers behind my back, grinning at Vicki, who I knew could hear the conversation perfectly with her immortal ears.
“Liar,” Mike said. “I know you too well, Ara.”
“Okay, I promise I’ll try not to laugh. Now what is it?”
“Um, so… Em and I are… we’re engaged again.”
“What!” I screeched, jumping up to my feet. Elora stared up at me with those big green eyes, totally confused. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” he said, and I could just picture him looking back at Em, running a hand over his hair. “We, ah… we’re having the wedding here in Oz—we hoped you might all come.”
“No way.” I dropped to my knees again to give Elora the plastic teacup as it rolled away. “Of course we’ll come. All of us.” I looked at Vicki to confirm. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world. When is it?”
“We were thinking April next year—autumn, for us, that is.”
“Sounds perfect!” I pictured it all in my head—the dress, the flowers, the park where they might hold the ceremony.
“And Em says yes,” he added.
“Yes to what?”
“Yes you can help plan it all.”
I laughed. “She knows me too well.”
Mike laughed too. Then it stopped and he went all serious again. “And um… there’s one more thing.”
“Okay…”
“Um, she wants… well, we want… uh—”
There was a shuffling noise and Mike suddenly turned into Em. “Ara, I want you to make me human after so I can have a baby.”
After the initial shock wore off, my stomach did flips of excitement. “Of course, Em. Of course,” was all I could say, my mind already picturing a little Mike-Em-combo running around. “Aw, Em, you guys will have the cutest babies!”
“Baby,” she corrected in a dull tone. “Singular. We already have two kids.”
“And what do they think of all this?” I asked. “Are they happy?”
“Over the moon. They asked me first.”
“Asked you what?”
“To marry Mike.” She laughed. “And I told them he had to ask me. A week later, he got down on one knee, ring and all—new ring, not the old one—right there in front of his mom and dad and the boys.”
“Aw, he’s so sweet.”
“I can hear that,” I heard Mike say from the background.
I smiled, letting it all fill me up with happiness. In a way, I should have seen this coming. Mike’s call last week felt a little off—full of probing questions about my feelings on his relationship. I think he was worried I might tell him he was better off without Em, or maybe that she was better off without him. But as that conversation replayed in my mind just now, I remembered him saying that he regretted their breakup and that, had she not been with Blade, he would have tried to make amends. I told him he needed to tell her that, and that he needed to tell her he didn’t blame her for the abuse David inflicted on her, but I wasn’t sure he’d taken my advice. I hoped so, because she thought for sure last time we spoke about it that Mike saw David as the victim. And I knew for sure that he was just really bad at saying what he felt—especially when it came to things like that.
I sighed. “I miss you guys so much.”
“Well, we’re coming over soon—to visit,” Em said. “I wanna see Jason and we’re gonna have to tell my parents in person.”
