Authors: Kallysten
The phone rang. Wilhelm started. He had been intently
reading through a report about the state of energy supplies in Newhaven, a
document so dry that unless he made a deliberate effort to remain focused, his
attention drifted every few lines. He glanced at the identification display. It
was the hospital. He picked up the receiver before the second ring had ended,
fumbling a little in his haste. He had been expecting this call for the past
couple of days. He was somewhat surprised Ariadne had remained in the hospital
this long, she had to be bored out of her mind by now.
“Wilhelm.”
“It’s Laurie, Will.”
Wilhelm’s anticipation dropped back at once but he
tried to put as much warmth in his voice as possible out of respect for one of
the strongest women he’d ever known. As Bergsen’s wife, she had needed that
strength daily for the past twenty-five years.
“How is he?”
“Better.” Relief echoed in that simple word, but it
didn’t completely mask the underlying tension. “He woke up this morning. He was
disorientated for a while, but I just talked to him and he’s lucid. He wanted
to talk to you, but the doctor vetoed it, said he needs more rest.”
For a brief moment, Wilhelm closed his eyes. In times
like this, he sometimes wished he had had a God to pray to, and to thank.
“I’ll come by later, if that’s okay.”
“As long as it’s not to throw him back into work.”
“Just to say hello, I promise.”
They said their goodbyes. Wilhelm was smiling when he
hung up the phone. Forty-nine hours earlier, Bergsen had suffered a heart
attack. His wife, his doctor, two nurses and Wilhelm were the only ones who
knew. If he recovered completely, there was no reason to tell the public and
start a panic in the city. If he didn’t… there would be time to think about it
then.
On the desk in front of him, the energy report still
waited, but Wilhelm ignored it a little longer. Since he was going to visit the
hospital, maybe he would stop by Ariadne’s room. He had last seen her when she
had come out of surgery, and since then whenever she came to his mind, it
wasn’t as a young woman full of life, nor as a skilled fighter. Instead, it was
a pale face he saw, closed eyes circled by pain and forced sleep, and a
too-still body on the bleached white sheets of the hospital bed.
If he went to see her, however, the reasonable part of
his mind pointed out, it might attract the attention of too many people, and
the last thing Wilhelm wanted was to cause gossip.
With a frustrated sigh, he returned his eyes to the
papers he ought to be reading. Unlike Bergsen, Wilhelm wasn’t good with these
things. He knew fighting, training, strategy. He could see trends in the
numbers of wounded or dead and could organize fighters, but taking care of
civilians was a whole different matter. And so were women.
There was a sharp knock, and before he could answer,
the door opened. Ariadne entered and closed the door again behind her. Wilhelm
sat up, blinking in surprise, and watched her. Her strides were steady when she
approached the chair in front of his desk, but he noticed a flash of pain as
she sat down. It had been three weeks since she had been hurt, and she was
wearing her Guard uniform, but there was no way she was fit to return to combat
yet.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed, still?” he asked, foregoing
civilities since she was doing the same.
She was sitting very straight, almost too much so. Her
eyes seemed calm. If he knew her at all, it wouldn’t last. She was fire and
quicksilver; anything else she might show was a mask.
“The doctor said I was fine. Didn’t you get the call
yet?”
Just as she finished talking, the phone rang again. As
before, the display identified the hospital, and Wilhelm picked it up. On the
other end of the line, a nurse informed him that Ariadne would be discharged in
the evening.
“So maybe I left a bit early,” she answered his raised
eyebrow when he hung up. The calm in her eyes was turning into smugness. “Why
did you want to know when I left the hospital?”
He didn’t bother asking how she knew he had requested
to be informed, just like he didn’t bother calling her on her attitude. He was
getting used to her barging in on him with questions and demands.
“You were badly hurt,” he pointed out. “I was
concerned.”
She snorted at that, the small sound accompanied by a
shake of her head. “Soldiers are hurt every day. Are you concerned about all of
them?”
Wilhelm didn’t like the direction her questions were
taking or the rising volume of her voice. Accompanying her to the hospital had
been a bad idea, as had been the roses. Who knew what ideas he had put in her
head? He should have known better. At least, he hadn’t gone to visit her.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I get daily
reports about anyone from the Guard who enters or leaves the hospital.”
“Individual reports?” she challenged. “And do you
assign babysitters to all Guard members as well?”
She leaned forward. A flash of pain coursed over her
features, but she didn’t back away. Her gaze was pinning Wilhelm to his seat.
“I don’t assign babysitters to anyone.”
“What do you call Lorenzo, then? He told me
everything.”
Wilhelm clenched his teeth and kept quiet. Lorenzo was
an idiot, and the next time they met they would have a small discussion about
what part of ‘don’t tell her’ Lorenzo hadn’t understood.
“So? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“You just said you know everything, so I don’t know
what else you want to hear.”
There was no trace left of her earlier calm when she
stood. A muscle was ticking in her jaw, and the frustration and anger in her
scent were too tightly wound to distinguish.
“How about why you asked him to shadow me? Or whether
you suggested to him to get closer to me—”
“Never.”
She didn’t even seem to hear him. If anything, she
stood even closer to the desk, looming over Wilhelm.
“I just don’t get it. You go through all this trouble
to keep me safe, you bring me to the hospital, and then you don’t even visit
me.”
For a second, Wilhelm had a feeling that this last
point was what angered her most—but that couldn’t be. It wouldn’t make any
sense. She was waiting for an answer, though, and he struggled to find one.
“I can hardly visit everyone who gets hurt.”
“But you send flowers to all of them?”
Wilhelm had had enough. Nothing he could say now would
satisfy her. Standing, he walked around the desk and went to open the door to
his office.
“Night will be on us before long,” he said once she
had turned to look at him. “I have things to do. It's time for you to leave.”
She took slow steps toward him, staring at him the
entire way as though she could get the answers she wanted straight from his
mind.
“This is not over.”
The warning was clear in her tone, but Wilhelm didn’t
respond as she left his office. Returning to his desk, he picked up the phone
and dialed the number he had taped to the base of the receiver. The eager voice
that answered greeted him by name.
“Yes. The usual. Six. Pick up the note in my office.”
He pulled out a small envelope and blank note card
from a drawer and put the tip of a pen to it. When the florist knocked half an
hour later, the card was still as blank as Wilhelm’s mind.
* * * *
I still have that piece of paper, like I have every
single note Will ever wrote to me. That one just held one word. Sorry. I’m not
sure what he was sorry for. I asked him, once, and he said he was sorry for
ever thinking he could keep me safe despite my own wishes, and sorry he
couldn’t. That didn’t answer anything, but that’s Will in a nutshell for you.
I guess all his notes tell as much about us as
anything he ever said to me. I have quite a few now. I hold them in a wooden
box carved with roses I’ve had since I was a child. Even after all this time, I
can remember my father bringing the box back from one of his trips out of town,
an old, brown thing, with hinges so rusty it was difficult to open. I remember
sitting in the kitchen, hands flat on the table and my chin resting on them,
and watching him slowly, delicately, almost tenderly sand away the paint until
the wood was pale and smooth. He rubbed in wax, made the box shine. Then he
screwed in new hinges, gleaming like silver. That’s the most vivid memory I
keep of my father. I can still smell the warmth of the wax when he handed the
box to me, can still see his smile when I thanked him.
That day, the flowers were already there when I
returned to the two-room apartment I shared with Lorenzo. I had taken a slow
walk after talking to Will—if you can even call what we did ‘talk’. The flowers
were there, and so was Lorenzo, but the note wasn’t.
“Nice flowers,” I said. And it was true. They
always were beautiful.
“White roses are bad luck.”
His tone was my first clue that he was sulking.
Then I looked at him, stretched out on the small sofa that took an entire
length of wall. His eyes were on the ceiling, looking at nothing in particular,
at anything but me. After my argument with Will, the last thing I wanted was to
have an argument with Lorenzo as well, so I pretended not to notice his bad
mood. Returning my eyes to the small bouquet of flowers, I looked in vain for
the white envelope that should have been there.
“Was there a card?”
Lorenzo sat up abruptly, startling me. “You went to
see him, didn’t you?”
I didn’t even think of asking whom he meant, nor
did I consider refusing to answer.
“I did. I tried to get an explanation, but he barely
talked to me at all. He can be so stubborn.”
He laughed at that, a harsh laugh I wasn’t used to
hearing from him, and that surprised me.
“He’s stubborn,” he repeated, “and you’re blind.
Can’t you see why he’s doing all of it? Why he didn’t want you to join the
Cadets, why he didn’t want you fighting in the Guard, why he asked me to have
your back? Come on, now, Aria. You can figure it out.”
I shook my head, because no, honestly, I wasn’t
figuring it out. Or maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe it was too scary to think
that—
“He’s in love with you.”
He stood and came to me, so fast I was a little
alarmed and took a step back despite myself. I wasn’t afraid of Lorenzo, I have
never been, but he looked angrier at that moment than I had ever seen him.
Angry, and I couldn’t understand why.
“Don’t be silly.” I tried to laugh, but my throat
refused to cooperate. “You said it yourself: vampires can’t love.”
But even as I said it, I remembered what Will had
told me on the way to the hospital. According to him, vampires could indeed
fall in love. And now that I thought back on the way he had said the words…
“Leave with me,” Lorenzo said suddenly. “Let’s get
out of this town, go to a place where demons—”
I didn’t let him finish and shook my head. He knew
me better than that. I’m not sure why he even asked. I guess he was more
jealous—more afraid—of Will than he would have admitted. He didn’t look upset,
or surprised. Just resigned.
“I’ve got to go. I can’t be late on the walls.
Don’t wait up.”
He kissed me, before he left the apartment, hard
and long and with the edge of anger still cold on his lips. The entire time, I
couldn’t help wondering if it was true. If Will truly loved me. I loved Lorenzo
more than I had ever cared about anyone, and still I couldn’t help wondering.
That night, I stared at the crumpled note I found
by the sofa for a long time, smoothing it out between my fingers. In the end, I
couldn’t help it. I had to know. I went back to Will.
The night had been long; the fight, fierce. These big
fights had been taking place more often in the past few months. It seemed that
the demons had decided that skirmishes weren’t worth the effort, and that
larger fights were more likely to deliver the city to them. There would come a
day when they brought enough troops to the walls to finish the town, and then
nothing but the sun would stop them. There were too many cities, all over the
world, that had fallen like this. Wilhelm knew that it was only a question of
when Newhaven would fall as well, not if.
He had returned along with the Guard soldiers, riding
in the same truck, walking by their sides, taking the same elevator to his
apartment. It wouldn’t have been any different if he had been alone. He had
noticed the pointed looks at his injured arm, but no one had asked if he was
all right, no one had suggested that he go to the hospital. No one had dared.
No one ever did.
Something stopped his hand just as he was about to
swipe his card key in the lock. Tired as he was, he needed a few seconds to
recognize the scent lingering on his doorstep.
“Ariadne.”
He only realized he had spoken the name aloud when it
seemed to echo down the deserted hallway. If he listened intently, he could
hear a heart beating behind the door and he knew, without the shadow of a doubt,
it was Ariadne’s.
Immobile on the threshold, he hesitated. He had no
desire to see her at that moment, not after the way their last encounter had
unfolded hours before. She was asking too many questions, questions he didn’t
know how to answer, and he was too tired to play this game now. Maybe he would
just go back down to his office and… And wait for her to hunt him down. If she
had found her way inside his locked apartment, he doubted she would give up so
easily. He might as well get it over with.
Finally swiping the card, he pushed the door open with
his good arm and walked in. He found her right away, sitting on the sofa. She
was reading one of his books, but she looked up when he entered. Her gaze and
slightly raised eyebrows seemed to challenge him to say anything about her
breaking into his apartment. He wanted to scold her, but the words vanished
before passing his lips. Shaking his head, he walked over to his bedroom and
sat down on the mattress with a slight groan. When he looked up again, she was
by the bedroom door, arms crossed and looking annoyed.
“Go home, Ariadne. I have nothing to say to you.”
“Do you ever?” She snorted. “It doesn’t matter. You
can listen.”
Once again, her eyes held that challenging look that
she seemed so fond of. Wilhelm wondered, as she started rambling about Lorenzo,
and Guard assignments, and unwanted interferences in her life, if she looked at
demons the same way on the battlefield. When he had fought by her side,
guarding her back before he had asked someone else to do so for him, he had
always been too intent on keeping her safe to pay much attention to the way she
looked at their enemies.
From there, as she kept talking, more animated now but
still just past the threshold, his thoughts drifted toward Bergsen. Wilhelm had
gone to see him before heading to the walls, and he had not liked what he had
found in that hospital room. People were beginning to wonder where Bergsen was.
The excuse that he was taking a few well-earned vacation days was shaky at
best, and it would never hold once he reappeared, looking weaker, paler,
thinner. Questions would be asked, and asked again until they received
satisfying answers. Wilhelm doubted that anything but the truth would do.
That was what he had been thinking about, during the
battle. That was what had been distracting him from the demons in front of him.
That, and Ariadne, her words and anger still ringing in his ears. That
distraction had cost him. He should have avoided that axe blow; he hadn’t. He
couldn’t let himself be caught off guard like this. With Bergsen already
weakened, Newhaven needed Wilhelm more than ever—as much as he hated that fact.
They needed to train better replacements, build failsafe people into the system
so that if either of them was incapacitated—or both—the Guard and Newhaven
would keep running and remain safe. The chain of command, as it stood, would
never hold. Wilhelm didn’t know why he had never realized as much before.
He didn’t know either why he had never realized that
Ariadne was too much of a distraction.
He focused his attention on her again, blinking to
adjust his vision. She had fallen silent and her lips were pinched into a thin
line.
“Did you even listen to a word of what I said?”
There was no reason to lie. “No.”
She shook her head, but strangely enough her features
softened, almost to the point of a smile. “Of course you didn’t listen. That’s
just like you.”
Annoyance flashed through Wilhelm. It was the first
time in all the years he had known her that he had blocked out her words rather
than listened to her, because he was tired and because he didn’t know what she
wanted to hear.
“You know nothing of me. And I know nothing of you.
We’ll both be better off if we keep it that way.”
He stood from the bed, ready to show her out, but
couldn’t help groaning as the movement jostled his arm. Immediately, her eyes
widened and she looked him over, her gaze stopping at his arm where blood made
his jacket and shirt adhere to his wound. On the black leather, the blood
barely showed.
“You’re hurt.” Her hand rose toward his arm,
hesitating before she reached it. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing. You need to go now.”
He blinked, taken aback, when she turned away and left
the room. He wouldn’t have thought it would be that easy. And indeed, it
wasn’t. When he followed her out, he found her in the small bathroom, rummaging
beneath the sink for the standard-issue first aid kit.
“Ariadne,” he started, but she interrupted him before
he could say anything more.
“Take off your shirt and jacket.”
His protests that he was fine didn’t help in the
slightest. When he didn’t do as she asked, she simply stepped forward and took
matters into her own hands, pushing at the collar of his jacket. He tried to
evade her, but the wall behind him stopped him. He caught her wrist.
“Stop that. I don’t need your help.”
“Maybe not, but you want me out of here. Let me look
at that wound and I’ll leave.”
Too tired to argue anymore, Wilhelm gave up. The
sooner she left, the easier it would be. He shrugged out of his jacket, then
pulled off his shirt, wincing when the fabric pulled at the edges of his wound
where the blood had started to dry. When he looked at her, Ariadne’s gaze was
not directed at his wound, but at his chest instead. He watched, a little
bemused, as she bit down on her bottom lip. When she noticed he was watching
her, she blushed, her cheeks suddenly bright red, and cleared her throat before
turning away to grab a wet washcloth.
Trying to ignore the way her heart was beating faster
suddenly, Wilhelm let her do as she pleased. She cleaned the bloody slash,
muttering the whole while that stitches would have been a good idea, then
disinfected it before starting to wrap a bandage around his arm. Wilhelm was
aware that soldiers of the Guard were trained into giving first aid; he had never
known until that moment that gentleness was part of the curriculum.
Her touch was careful, almost delicate. It had been a
long time since anyone had touched him like this. It had been a long time since
anyone had touched him at all. With each of her movements, the urge to touch
back rose in him, to brush his fingers to her hand or cheek.
He remembered a child whose hand he had held, and
suddenly wondered when he had stopped seeing that lost child when he looked at
Ariadne, and when he had started seeing this strong woman instead. Years
earlier, her teenager’s antics had amused him, but even then they had announced
her future strength. A strength that would have complimented his own so well if
he hadn’t pushed her into someone else’s arms.
He looked from her hands to her face. She was looking
straight at him. Something passed between them, something Wilhelm couldn’t have
described or explained, but something that he knew she felt too when her hands
stilled on his arm. All of a sudden, years of making sure Ariadne would be safe
had a new meaning as the world shifted just enough to make everything clear.
Ariadne blinked and the moment ended, but it wasn’t
over. She leaned in and pressed her lips to his in a kiss that was warmth and
sugar. A kiss that was sunlight and life itself. A kiss that was everything
Wilhelm could not afford to want.
As gently as he could, he broke away and steeled
himself when her eyelids fluttered in confusion.
“You should go, Aria,” he said very low, not trusting
his voice to remain steady if he tried to speak any louder.
To his surprise, she left, without a word, without a
look back.
* * * *
You know who was surprised? I was.
I never intended to kiss him. I never imagined I’d
feel something if I did.
But I did feel something. Something I couldn’t
describe either back then, something I still can’t explain today. Something I
had never felt until that day, and that I never felt since, except with Will.
I was also pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who
had been shaken by that kiss. Will could deny it all he wanted; I knew now what
was going on. I knew the reason for years of protection. I knew whom he had
been talking about when saying that vampires could love. I knew the reason for
the roses.
There was just one problem. Lorenzo.
I had told Lorenzo I loved him, and I meant that.
My feelings for him hadn’t changed. Nonetheless, they paled in comparison to
one simple kiss.
I couldn’t go back to my apartment—to Lorenzo—with
my heart still beating too fast and too wildly. I couldn’t go back to him until
I understood what was going on.
The sun was just rising when I walked outside. At
this hour, there wasn’t anyone in sight. The air was fresh, cool; exactly what
I needed to clear my head. Except that when I started walking around, I could
smell their scent, carried by the soft wind: the roses from the Remembrance
Wall. I followed the scent of fading roses to the lists of my fallen comrades,
and stared at the names without really seeing them for a while. Too much was
going on in my head for me to know what to think or feel. And as time passed,
as I walked through Newhaven, painful step after painful step, the stitches on
my abdomen pulling more and more, it didn’t get any better. Nothing made sense
anymore.
It was midmorning when I returned home. I was
exhausted. All I wanted was to slide into bed next to Lorenzo and pretend that
nothing had happened. But I couldn’t do that, because Lorenzo wasn’t in bed.
When I unlocked the door as quietly as I could, he was there in an instant,
pulling me in and drawing me into his arms, holding me so close that I gasped
at a twinge of pain. He didn’t let go.
“Don’t leave me. Please, Aria, say you won’t
leave.”
His words were a broken whisper against my neck.
Before I knew it, almost before I understood what I was saying, I was promising
that I wouldn’t leave him. Not ever.
I held on to that promise. He’s the one who left.
Four years passed before he did, though. Four years of being near Will almost
every night, of feeling his eyes on me, of trying not to look at him in return.
Four years of pretending, from both of us, that nothing had passed between us,
that nothing had changed when everything had.