I shrugged again. “When I first got to the manor, Lilith wanted me kept away from Jason. At any cost. And then she just… changed her mind.”
“But you don’t know why?”
“No.” I pouted. “She tried to tell me but…”
“But?”
“As is the fashion for my foolishness, I said I didn’t want to hear it.”
He wasn’t shocked. “Why?”
“I was tired of it all—tired of being told by prophets and Rune Readers and scrolls what I had to do. I mean, they told me I was destined to free the people, then Morg told me I was destined to kill the evil King Drake, and then it was my child that was supposed to. Safe to say, David, I don’t really believe what anyone says they can predict about my future anymore. It feels like they all just tell me what they need me to hear to get me to do what they want me to do.”
“I understand that, Ara. I really do.”
“But?”
“No buts. I don’t blame you at all for refusing to hear another word of it. I think I’d have done the same.”
And I nearly fell over. I took a moment to compose myself, bristling with pride, and added, “She did, however, say I was changing things—said by denying Jason’s love I was altering the course of Fate.”
“Did she give you the impression this was a bad thing?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t really take the time to analyze.” I looked at my bare, dirty feet, and wriggled the tiny leaves out from between my toes. “She did say that if I loved Jason, he’d give his life to save ‘the…’,” I added. “And that’s when I cut her off. So she probably meant ‘baby’.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because she also told me originally that either myself or our child was at risk if I chose you. So maybe he’s meant to save her, or something.”
“From what?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? I don’t think it’ll come to that.”
“No, you think it’ll be you that dies,” he said dully.
“Yes. And that’s exactly what she hoped you’d discover by seeing this.” I showed him my branded hand.
“Why?”
“Because she wanted to provoke a fight between us—wanted you to hate me for choosing to risk my own life instead of ensuring my own safety by being with your brother.”
Even from this distance in the dark, I could still see his eyes focus suddenly on me. “How could I hate you for that—for choosing me over him?”
“Because it was foolish. Lilith told me I should be more mature and do what’s right over what I desire.”
David just laughed. “Then she knew exactly how to sway you to her wishes—preying on your need to be a good queen.”
“I guess so. But it didn’t work.”
“No,” he said absently. “But they did get me to hate you.”
“In their defense, I kinda helped.”
His shoulders dropped and a black-and-white flash of a memory that clearly belonged to Jason, and only to Jason, filled in his mind like a hologram in an orb. I suddenly saw my naked body through the eyes of my husband’s brother, and it was as beautiful as it was disturbing.
“You should never have taken those thoughts from him,” I said.
“I had to.”
“Why?”
“Because you were my everything, Ara. This sweet, precious girl that I’d move mountains to protect, and someone else had you in their arms. I had to know what he did to you.”
“But you didn’t see all of it, did you? He—”
“He refused to show me.” His fists tightened by his sides. “Fought me harder than he’s ever fought for anything.”
“You didn’t hurt him, did you?”
He swallowed hard. I actually heard the saliva move down his throat from here.
“Why?” I asked, barely controlling the rise of anger. “What did it matter, if you hated me for doing it anyway?”
He closed his eyes. “You know nothing of what I felt for you, Ara.”
“Yes, I do,” I said incredulously. “You didn’t even hear me out when I told you, David. You threatened to kill anyone that stopped you from seeking vengeance. You—”
“What did you expect me to do?” he yelled. “I didn’t know what to do, Ara. What to say or think or—God!” He braced his forehead in his hands and just stood there, taking deep, controlled breaths. “This spell?”
“Mm?”
“You believe it’s the cause of this desire to kill you?”
“I don’t know. If that desire started right after you found out about Jason, then probably not. I don’t think this spell was present until more recently.”
He looked up from his hands with a half-smile. “I didn’t want to kill you that day, you know.”
“What day?”
“The day…” His head bounced, his hands circling in the air in a prompting gesture. “That day.”
“Oh.” My lips stayed in an O shape. “You said you did.”
“Did I?” His eyebrow moved down with doubt.
Both my shoulders moved up to my ears and stayed there. “I… I’m not sure now. But I sure as hell thought you were going to.”
He laughed before composing himself with a small cough. “I know. I was pretty mad.”
“And you’re still mad.”
His posture slumped slightly as he exhaled. “Not as mad as you’d think.”
“As mad as you’ve been acting?” I asked.
“I hope not.”
“Then…” I gulped down the quake in my voice and it stuck in my chest. “You don’t actually want me dead?”
“Of course not, Ara,” he whispered to the ground. “And that’s what confuses me so much about these dreams. The fact that, when I wake and the dream slips away—taking the sense of failure and the fear that you’ll still be alive with it—I feel nothing but pain.”
“Pain?”
He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes glassy. “The pain. Punishment. It’s the pure physical agony I suffer when I feel anything for you.”
“What do you mean?”
His mouth twisted up and his eyes closed as if that pain ripped through him right now. And the weight of it was too much for his brittle body. His knees buckled, and he dropped slowly and weakly to them, a fist bracing the ground to hold him up.
“David!” I ran to his side and knelt down in the dirt. “Are you okay? Are you in pain now?”
He shook his head softly. “I lie there… for hours after, trying to tell myself I would never want you dead. But…” His head slowly rolled up until his sad, glassy eyes met mine. “The agony when I try to admit that to myself—try to admit that no matter what you did to hurt me, somewhere inside of me, I… I miss you and I…” He dropped his head. “It’s unbearable.”
My hand hesitantly landed on his shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me you were in pain?”
“I couldn’t.” He smoothed his jaw along the backs of my fingers. “Ara, I was Marked for loving you when I had no right. I had to stay away from you—”
“Wait, what do you mean you ‘had no right’?”
He gently grabbed both my arms and looked right into my eyes, his tears slipping freely, unguarded past the confines of his lashes. “You are fated to be with my brother, and anything I do, anything that gets in the way of that, will cause us pain every time.”
“How?”
“A rift, I guess. Some kind of dark karma that’s ever-present, just waiting to teach me a lesson.”
“She told you that—that the pain you’re in is this dark karma?”
He nodded.
“No, I don’t believe that,” I said, trying to stand up.
“It doesn’t matter what it is, Ara,” he yelled, shaking me softly. “The damage has been done. I am Marked, tortured by my feelings for you. Lilith warned me but I refused to listen. I couldn’t leave you. I couldn’t stay away and I sure as hell couldn’t stand by and watch you fall for my brother. Why do you think sh
e saw to it that you found out about Emily and me? She wanted you to hate me!”
“No, that was Eve, not Lilith.” I shook my head fiercely as if to dislodge the all-too-obvious truth.
“No. She sent Eve! She sent her because I was standing there that day, Ara, with your wedding band in my hand, trying to figure out a way to tell you I was sorry—that I still loved you and just wanted to go back and undo everything.”
“No.” I shoved him off me and clambered away, wiping the snot from my lip. “That’s not true. I believed it at first, but they all said you’d never take me back, and then you—”
“They don’t know me like you do, Ara.” He held my gaze for a long moment, then folded in on himself, his forearm across his gut. “But Lilith did. She knew I couldn’t keep to my vow. She knew I would falter and come to you again, so she saw to it that you would hate me for the rest of your days.”
“I don’t hate you, David.”
He looked up from the ground. “But you need to.”
“Why?”
“Because it will be easier on us both.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“But it does,” he said simply. “For the good of all. And because…” His eyes drifted to faraway thoughts.
“Because?”
“Because I… I’m not sure I want you back now.” He clearly hardened inside a little as the realization flooded him like clean water, ending his tears. “I wanted you that day, before I left for Paris, and I’ve had moments since I returned where—” He sat down and braced his knees, holding his breath as if expecting a surge of pain. When nothing happened, he sat tall again, flexing his fist. “There have been moments where I’ve had to admit to myself that I still love you, even though I hated you more than lawbreakers. But, over time…”
“What?” I crawled hand-over-hand through the damp leaves and sat in front of him. “Finish that sentence, David. Please.”
“I’m not sure I do anymore. I think I feel a sense of… maybe freedom, or perhaps lightness without you.”
I curled my fingers against the cold hard soil to ground myself. “Do you really mean that?”
He hugged his knees, burying his face in them like a little boy. “I don’t know.”
“With…” I stopped on a croak in my voice. “Without the influence of the hex—here in the forest right now—do you still hate me?”
“No.”
“And you’re not feeling that pain?” I studied him for a moment. “I mean, clearly, because you haven’t gone pale once since we entered the forest.”
His rounded shoulders moved gently up and down with his quiet breath for a while before he looked up. “The Mark.”
“What about it?”
He let go of his legs and laid his elbows loosely on top of his knees. “The pain radiated from that Mark, Ara—intensifying in my limbs until I’d pass out. But if the hatred is gone and the pain is gone…”
I sat straight. Mike was right. He only said it as a kind of joke: spell ink. But he was right.
“It isn’t a Mark at all, David,” I said, “not of Lilith’s anyway. You’ve been tricked.”
“Then…” His brow furrowed, and his eyes slowly closed as something clearly sunk in. “Everything I’ve suffered since the day I woke with this Mark…”
“Is because of Morgana’s spell.”
His gaze shot to my neck, and he swept my hair back, suddenly on his knees in front of me. “Blood.”
“What about it?”
“The Mark, this hex, it must be the reason I’m rejecting blood.”
“You’ve been rejecting it?” I gasped. “I thought you were just denying it.”
“No.” He swallowed, licking his lips after, his eyes staying on my neck. “When I drink it—any blood, be it Lilithian or human, I….” His words petered away, and his eyes glazed.
“You what?” I said. “Tell me?”
“I throw it up. Violently,” he said softly. “It won’t stay down.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, and he flinched involuntarily when I grabbed his wrist to draw his hand away from the back of my neck. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”
“Weeks.” He rested back on his knees. “I try every few days but, over time, it’s gotten harder and harder to keep it down.”
“You can’t keep any of it down?”
He shook his head. “It started out as an intolerance to Lilithian blood but the more I thought about you, the more I resented my brother for being with you, the worse things got.”
“So you started rejecting all blood then? Even human blood?”
He nodded. “I’ve taken to drinking wine at dinner so no one would suspect something was wrong.”
“That’s silly, David. You should have at least told us you were rejecting blood—”
“Why, Ara? What good would it do?” he said rather loudly. “Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any idea how it feels to be sustained by a substance for over a hundred years and to then suddenly reject it—to starve, to feel as though your throat and your chest is being burned every time you breathe? I—”
“David.” I stopped him, bracing both his arms. “It’s okay. It’s really okay.”
“It’s not okay.” He buried his face in my neck. “I’m so hungry, Ara. And so tired I feel stripped bare of any will to go on. I don’t even know what’s real anymore. I haven’t been able to think straight and, to be honest, I was too ashamed to admit to anyone that I couldn’t drink. I didn’t know it was because of a spell, and I thought maybe it was because of the Mark. But if that was the case then I thought all I had to do was stop loving you! Stop wanting you. Stop getting between you and my brother. I—”
“You need to eat, that’s all. Right now. You just need to eat so you can think.”
“I can’t.” He shook his head weakly. “I can’t bear to bring any more blood up. I’ll die. I—”
“You won’t bring it up, David,” I assured him. “It’s because of the spell—that’s the only reason you’re rejecting it.”
“And what if you’re wrong?” His eyes rounded among that ultimately distressed expression. “What then? I can’t take any more of the pain.”
“Well, the only way to find out is to try it.”
“If I leave here, go find a human, the spell will take hold again, Ara. There’s no telling what I might do if I—”
“I meant drink my blood, dummy.” I slapped his arm and showed him my wrist.
“Oh.” He smiled sheepishly, and we held there for a moment or two, our eyes locked, both of us wearing childish grins.
“It’ll at least tide you over for now, then I’ll go find Mike and get him to deliver some humans here to the forest and we can just…” I looked around with a casual shrug. “Camp out until we find a way to fix you.”
The angry, stiff David I’d known since his return from Paris shifted backward inside the man before me now, revealing a relaxed posture under all that stress and a shy, sweet half-smile behind the mask of hatred. “That sounds… really nice.”
I beamed, grinning from ear to ear. “Great. Then, here…” I offered my wrist again and let my imagination tell the rest of the story. His blood warmed with the idea of feeling the thick, red liquid quench his throat again for the first time in so long, and his eyes, by the light of a thin strip of rising day, showed the blackness of desire. The kind of desire that accompanied blood drinking.
“If I drink from you, especially since it’s been so long”—he cupped my jaw with both hands and drew my face to his—“I may drain you completely, or worse… we might…”
“Have sex?” I chewed my grin, trying to conceal my imagination’s plot to just roll back and pull him down on top of me.
“Yes,” he said in that deep, David-y tone, making my skin sing.
And words wouldn’t come to my lips then; they lodged inside my throat, contained by a hope so strong the only part of my body that could move was my lashes. “What h
appens in the forest stays in the forest,” I suggested timidly.
He tossed his head back, laughing, his gleaming fangs suddenly more pointed and sharp.
“I promise,” I said, pushing one of his hands from my face so I could move my head at will. “If it happens, I won’t read into it too much, David—not if you don’t want me to.”
“Yes you will.”
“Okay, maybe I will.”
We both laughed, but as David’s smile simmered, his eyes drifted to a distant horizon, taking his thoughts elsewhere—thoughts he kept protected from me.
“David.” I brushed my thumb down his wrist to wake him. “What’s wrong?”
“I wish I could understand what I feel.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…” He sat down in the dirt, letting go of my face. “I’ve forced myself to hate you for so long, knowing it was the right thing to do—convinced into submission by my own stupid assumptions about this Mark and the greater good of the world. But… without that influence, Ara, without Marks and witchcraft—right here, right now in this forest, if it’s just you and just me…” He frowned so deeply the shadows changed his face. “I’m confused by my feelings for you.”
So many things came to mind to say to him. But I wasn’t sure which words would tip him over the wrong edge, so I just sat there and said nothing, letting him be alone with his thoughts for a while.
“Blood,” he said at last.
“What about it?”
“I need to eat. I can’t think straight on an empty stomach.”
I straightened my spine and slightly angled my neck to the left, parting my hair with the tips of my fingers and draping it gently, almost seductively behind me. “Eat then. And when the dawn comes, I’ll go to the Stone—ask for advice, and maybe we can find a way to get that Mark off you.”
He cupped the side of my neck. “I’d like that.”
“Would you?” I grinned playfully. “I mean, are you sure you don’t want to hold onto it? You know, keep on hating me?”
With an unnervingly menacing pace, he got to his knees again and his eyes locked to mine, so dark and desperate for blood that the green was gone. “No. Ara, you and I have been played—forced into conflict by the actions of others, and I will be damned if I will live by the commands of anyone other than myself and what I decide is right.”
Echoes & Silence Part 1 Page 43
