He looked mildly impressed, contradicting what was in his eyes with a shake of his head as he rubbed the hairline above his forehead. “Yeah, well, you might wanna tell David you two have become a thing.”
“A thing?”
“An item—that you’re seeing each other.”
“For your information, until now, we’ve been hanging out—nothing more.” I folded my arms and sat down in the seat across from him.
“Hanging out, huh?”
“Yes,” I said, showing my index finger. “And, I was going to add that, as of today, he and I have officially decided to date.”
“Date?”
“Yeah.”
“But…” He looked around the room. “There’s nowhere to go on a date. We don’t exactly have a movie theatre—”
“Well, it’s not like we’ll go on dates, but we’re—”
“He’s your boyfriend.”
My throat seized up. “Um, well, I… I wasn’t really ready to use that word, but—”
“But, he’s your boyfriend,” Mike stated dryly.
“No.”
“What would you call it then? Because, excuse me for being ignorant, Ara, but I can’t find any other name for it.”
I sat back, the weight of a commitment I wasn’t ready for bearing down on my shoulders like an extra pound of gravity.
“So… have you told David you’re dating?”
“Mike, I haven’t seen David in over three weeks. Not since he left for the Ninth Order—”
“They have phones in Paris.”
“Oh-yeah-right, and he’s gonna accept a call from his ex-wife saying, ‘Hi, honey, by the way, just thought you should know, dot, dot, dot…’” I waved my hand around to let the sentence end in Mike’s mind without need for my narration.
He laughed lightly. “Okay, fine. But… maybe I should tell him then.”
“Why? He’s probably never even coming back, so what does it matter?” I slouched on the backrest of the chair.
“Actually.” Mike grinned, leaving me hanging.
I sat straight. “What? He’s coming home?”
“Next week.”
“Why?”
“He’s finished his business at the Order. Prisoners are all free, he’s appointed a new House leader and a new Parisian Chief of Security, and I just got word that the new Lilithian-ruled Set leaders are in place around Europe, so he’s got no reason to be there.”
“Great.” I slouched again.
“Why? What’s wrong with that?”
“It means he’ll bring that heavy feeling home with him. I was just starting to feel good again.”
“He can’t live in Paris forever.”
“Why?”
“This is his home—what would people think?”
“I don’t care.”
“Ara, he has to come home. Like it or not.”
“But, ever since he found out about”—I lowered my voice to a whisper—“the affair, he’s made my life a living hell.”
“He hasn’t even been here,” Mike said dismissively, making a face like I’d just told a ridiculous joke.
“But you didn’t see what he was like when he was here.”
“Well, maybe now he’s had time to cool off, he might be different.”
I looked down at my bump, how it sat out just enough to roll the top of my shorts over, and wondered how disgusting he’d think it was now—since it was so much bigger than when he left. “Yeah, and maybe there’s a new breed of pigs that can fly, too.”
Mike laughed. “Give ’im a chance, Ar. He just had his heart broken.”
“I know. I was there.” I set my hands on the table and pushed myself up to stand. “And I don’t really want him to come back.”
“Why? I thought you were waiting out for forgiveness and a happy ending.”
“That’s just it, I was.” I sat down again, hooking my ankle under the leg of the chair to slide it under me. “But then…”
“Then?”
“Then the goddess I speak to on my dawn walks told me that I need to—” I stopped and bit my cheek, studying Mike carefully before deciding whether or not to continue. I knew what he’d say when I told him she encouraged me to be with Jason, and his first words would be “Ha! Convenient.”
“What’d she say, Ar?” He leaned forward and reached across the table for my hand. “You can tell me.”
I eyed the fading tan line where his rolled-up sleeve usually sat, considering more than just the offer of his thick, square palm and confidence. “You won’t like it.”
“Try me.”
“No. It doesn’t matter.” I decided, folding my arms and propping my feet across from me on the chair beside Mike’s. “Fact is, I’m not ready to see David yet, and I’m not ready to be with Jason, either. Dating, maybe, you know, just to see where things lead over time, but I can’t just jump in with both feet yet.”
“Okay,” he said, gently unfolding my arms. “No one said you had to.”
I bit my lip again, realizing I’d just raged at him over a conversation he knew nothing about. It wasn’t his fault the Mother wanted me to forget what my heart felt for David, forget trying to fix our relationship, and just jump ship and swim to the proverbial shore of eternity with Jason. “I know,” I said. “But I feel like having David back will put pressure on me to decide either way.”
“Either way?”
“Mm-hm.” I nodded.
“But… there’s nothing to decide. You either want to be with Jason, or you don’t. There’s no David option anymore.”
“I know,” I said, thinking back to the last fight David and I had. And I knew Mike was right. The David option was gone. Long gone. But I still had a choice over whether or not I let my heart believe that—let my heart give up eternally. The shitty thing about hope is that it clouds reason, makes you believe in things that probably aren’t possible. Except, while he was alive and I was alive, I still stupidly held on to a tiny little bit of hope.
“So… look, I don’t like Jason all that much, you know that,” Mike said. “But you’ve liked him for a lot longer than any of us even want to think about. It’s not like you just met him. It’s not like you need to establish a new relationship, or anything. You pretty much left David for Jason—”
“No.” I held my index finger up. “That is not how it was.”
“Ara,” he reasoned, pausing for a moment. “You slept with the guy. He might as well make an honest woman out of you.”
“So, you want me to marry him?” I asked, almost falling off my seat.
“No. I mean, yes. I—” He bit his lip, breathing out through his nose like a bull. “He did this. He wanted you; he wanted David gone, and he got it—”
“Mike, he—”
“And I don’t blame him, Ara,” he said, raising both hands defensively. “I’d have done the same thing”—we both stopped and smiled for a second—“but if you really do love him then you need to stop being afraid and just decide, with your own heart, what you want.”
What I want?
All I ever wanted was to save David. And because of that, this whole Jason thing had blown up into a massive disaster—no, an apocalypse, where, in the smoke of the aftermath, I saw a side to my husband I never wanted to see. One I always suspected was there. One that sometimes made me wish we never got married.
But now, I couldn’t tell Mike about how I ended up in bed with Jason, explain what I really wanted, because how could I stand there and say I had sex with someone, who they all knew I had feelings for, and convince them it was just to save David? How could I say it was all because I didn’t have the courage or strength to do it with Arthur?
He had to believe, just like anyone else who knew that I slept with Jason, that it was an affair—a love affair and nothing more—because otherwise, he’d tell me how stupid I was for believing that lie about the dagger. He’d tell me how I ruined everything, all because I acted on a whim, took things at face-value. Didn’t talk to hi
m about it.
They all forget what it was like then—how we didn’t know what we knew now. But he’d judge me on the knowledge we have today, not the isolation and confusion I was lost in then.
Fact is, I was stupid to believe it. Stupid to believe Jase could become king by having a baby with me. But so were Jason and Arthur. Yet they wouldn’t look stupid. I would.
So, what did I want?
I wanted to go back and tell myself it would all be okay; that David won’t die, and if I just followed my gut, called Drake and talked with him, none of this would have happened.
“I don’t know what I want,” I said simply.
“Yes, you do. I think you do,” he said, nodding once, maintaining complete eye-contact. “I think you love him, want to marry him, but you’re holding back because you’re afraid it’s too soon.”
“It is.”
He nodded again, leaning back in his chair. We sat in silence then for a time, the songs of birds outside fading into the distance as they flew away, the gentle hum of the refrigerator homey and warm in the comfortable space behind me.
“Reason doesn’t change your heart’s desires,” he said softly.
“And desiring it doesn’t make it right.”
“Then take all the time you need, baby.” He was staring right at me when I looked up at him. “And when you’re sure about what you want, I will support you one hundred percent.”
“A whole hundred, huh?”
“A whole hundred.” He winked at me. “Even if you choose the mad scientist.”
“Thanks, Mike,” I said into my lap, not really sure he’d keep to that once the time came. “That means a lot to me.”
“I’m your best bud, Ar. I’ll always support you.” He stood half way and kissed my cheek. “And, on another note, I expect to see some of these new skills at training tomorrow.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can come up with.”
“Okay,” he said softly, patting my arm. “Well, I gotta go. I’ll see you in the Round Room later.”
“Yep. See ya.”
* * *
A whipping breeze scaled the rolling hillsides around Loslilian, plucking loose leaves from the trees and leaving them carelessly in swirling clusters around the cream bricks of the manor. The days had grown so cold these last few weeks that I’d taken to wearing sweaters outside while, inside, every fireplace in every room was roaring with hot orange flames, the constant burning of wood leaving an almost permanent but very cozy musk over the landscape.
I walked slower now across the countryside than usual, enjoying the comforting smell of approaching winter, but the thoughts of pumpkins and the scent of cinnamon cakes being prepared by staff fit too jaggedly with my childhood memories of October.
It would be well into a crisp, warm spring in Australia right now, with the golden sun brightening the beaches, and the sweet, plastic scent of sunscreen filling the air. I’d be shopping for a new swimsuit today if I were back home. Instead, I was a ball of wool, trying but failing to keep my scarf in place as the icy gusts kidnapped the ends and raked them outward with my hair.
As far out as the eye could see, the once lush Enchanted Forest had been scaled down to creaky branches and such a sad state of undress that, when I walked in the forest at dawn, even I felt kind of naked. Which is why I chose to spend time at the lab this morning instead.
I watched its red rooftop rise on the head of cream bricks over the hilltop as I trudged downward, smiling coyly to myself at its grandeur. In issuing this building as the lab—a twenty-minute walk through a grassy meadow from the manor—I knew, and everyone else knew, it’d been David’s intention to put Jason out of sight. But Jase and his unlimited budget had outdone themselves. No one would ever have known it was once a stable. The horse crap and moldy hay had been swept aside for an entirely new interior, complete with a sterile room, a morgue for all the bodies he tested on—or rather, failed on—and even observation rooms. I wasn’t sure exactly what kinds of experiments he planned to perform and why those observation rooms needed soundproof glass and steel doors but, at his core, he was a vampire and I expected a certain level of sadism and some questionable medical ethics from his kind. I knew not to ask, because I knew I wouldn’t like the answer. Still, the morgue had me concerned.
“Ara?” Jase called, catching up at a run.
I stopped and waited for him, fighting off my hair as the breeze parted it at the back and wrapped it around my face like a pair of stringy hands. “Hey, Jase.”
“Hey.” He stopped beside me. “You here to see those results from last week’s test?”
“Mm-hm.” I nodded. “You got them back from the Manhattan lab yet?”
He nodded, his lips splitting wide with excitement. “And you won’t believe it, Ara. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. I’ve gone as far as to seal your records—classified them Top Secret.”
“Why?”
“Come on.” He grabbed my hand and dragged me along. “I’ll show you.”
* * *
We passed through a narrow hall between the two observation rooms and entered the wide open space of the greater lab. A giant steel wall cordoned off the morgue at the back where, through the open door, I could just make out foot ends of seven-or-so gurneys lined up ready for bodies, and the control panel for a giant freezer that I knew already housed a few dead humans. The only light in this windowless space was the glow from a wall of computers, blinking and flashing with information to my right, and the flicker of flames under test tubes being heated on a giant table in the center of the room. The whole lab had that real mad-scientist feel to it, infused with million-dollar modern technology and sleek, clean surfaces. I thought of it as “Frankenstein meets modern science”. It was the dream lab of anyone in Jason’s field, he’d told me. But even as he’d said that, I’d noticed something oddly regretful under his smile.
He led me to the big wall of computers and pulled out a chair, offering me a seat, then leaned over the keyboard and focused hard on the smaller screen right in front of him, his face glowing blue.
“Shouldn’t we turn on the lights?”
“Nope,” he said, typing away. “That experiment in the corner needs a dim room.”
“Should I ask why?”
He turned his head and grinned at me. “Only if you want a lengthy explanation.”
I laughed. “Right. I’ll take silent wondering, thanks.”
He loaded up my test results and sat on the chair beside me, sliding back a little too far, then pulling himself closer again with a steady hand under the desk. “Go ahead. Check it out.”
I leaned in and peered at the graphs and numbers on the screen. “What am I looking at?”
“Your results, Ara.” He pulled himself closer to the keyboard again and started typing. “Your electrical readings are off the chart. They’re some kind of crazy mix of static and… I don’t even know. It’s just a mess. But you, and those tiny little hands of yours, are more powerful than we’ve realized.”
“And you made me heat up water while we were in it?”
He winced. “Had I seen these, I might’ve thought twice about that.”
I sat back, slapping my brow.
“Anyway, you might not understand these numbers, but look at this.” He typed again at a-hundred-words-per-second, and a video came up on screen. “Remember when I filmed that training session last week—when you shot Falcon?”
“Yeah.”
“Check this out.” He offered the screen, and I watched the replay, seeing Falcon’s body shake as it absorbed the energy from my hands, lifting off the ground a second later to fly back and hit the wall.
“Okay, so we should upload this to the Internet. It’s very cool, but I don’t get what I’m supposed to be seeing.”
“Look now,” he said with a grin, typing something else.
The video slowed, and I practically put my nose to the screen, squinting like an old lady reading fine-print.
“See th
is?” He pointed to a very thin blue line of light coming from my hand—wispy and branch-like.
“Yeah.”
“Now, look here.” His finger moved off to the far left of the screen—to where one of my knights stood watching, laughing—and the same kind of spark was there, emanating off his head.
“What the…?” I leaned closer. “How did the spark get there?”
“Simple. He’s a vampire, Ara, not a Lilithian.”
“So?”
“So… do you know how lightning grounds itself?”
“Um… I think I remember something from primary school.”
He laughed and sat back, folding his arms. “Well, there are many different types of lightning: cloud-to-ground, ground-to-cloud, intracloud; heaps, right?”
I nodded.
“But, basically, all lightning is essentially the same thing: just an electrostatic discharge. It’s the conditions that affect the way it discharges, and how we, essentially, see it appear in our atmosphere.”
“Okay.”
“So,” he started, using his hands to demonstrate as much as his words. “Imagine a negative buildup of energy shooting from the base of a cloud, taking off through space and time in what we call a stepped leader—which is basically like a branch of negative protons rushing toward the earth. You following?”
I nodded.
“Before it gets there, though, objects on the ground sense the electric field and respond with their own positively charged streamers.” He made a separating motion between his hands as if pulling a string of invisible clay up from the ground. “When the stepped leader meets those streamers, or in layman’s terms, the negative and the positive meet, this violent charge of electricity can then drain toward the earth, right, creating a massive flash of light that we call lightning.”
“Okay.”
“But, it began as a negative charge looking for a place to ground itself,” he said with hinting eyes.
“So… I’m the negative charge?”
“Right,” he continued. “When you use your power this way”—he tapped the screen—“that’s exactly what you are. And it really got my brain ticking,” he said, now tapping his head, leaning forward eagerly. “See, I think the reason you can sense vampires and the reason you can make them feel like their hearts beat is because that’s exactly what you’re for.”
Echoes & Silence Part 1 Page 4
