Authors: Kallysten
“Let’s put everyone on high alert tonight again. No
R&R permissions, all Guards including reserve ready to join the walls if
needed until midnight.”
On the other side of the conference table, Bergsen
didn’t react in any way to Wilhelm’s suggestion. Leaning back in his armchair,
he turned to the two soldiers sitting on his left on the long side of the table
and merely raised an eyebrow, inviting them to comment.
“The Code Red has been in effect for four nights.” As
usual, it was Carter who spoke first. She had a few years more experience than
her counterpart, although they shared the same rank. “If we declare it yet
again and no attack comes, morale will continue to decrease. I think we should
lower it to Code Yellow.”
By her side, Stevenson kept his eyes on the notes in
front of him for a few more seconds, tapping a pencil against the table the
entire time. The sound seemed louder than it really was in the large conference
room, empty save for the four of them. They had tried meeting in Bergsen’s
office at first, but it was too small for a four-way discussion that sometimes
lasted five or six hours. When it had been just the two of them, Wilhelm and
Bergsen had rarely taken more than two hours to make the same kind of decisions
that were on the table today, but then the entire point of having Carter and
Stevenson there was to train them so that when the time came, they would be
able to do their job.
“There haven’t been any demons at the walls for six
nights now,” Stevenson said at last, his voice slow and steady.
“My point exactly,” Carter jumped in. “It’s unlikely—”
“Major, please, let Major Stevenson finish.”
She pinched her lips tight and inclined her head.
Stevenson picked up where he had left off as though he hadn’t noticed the
interruption.
“The last time a situation like this happened was
seventeen years ago. When they finally attacked after eight days, they came in
such numbers that they breached the walls and went as far as Ninth Street.”
“We fought them all night long,” Bergsen continued
grimly when Stevenson stopped. “And by morning, the sky was covered enough that
they didn’t retreat as we expected them to, so we had to continue the fight
without the vampires. It was a butcher field.”
“But it hasn’t happened for seventeen years,” Carter
argued, “so we don’t know that it will now.”
“We don’t know that it won’t, either,” Wilhelm shot
back. He didn’t like the woman; she had been Bergsen’s choice, and Wilhelm had
never agreed with it. “Are you ready to take that chance?”
She held his challenging gaze—for three seconds—before
lowering her eyes.
“Major Carter does have a point about morale, though,”
Bergsen intervened. “See what the kitchen can do on such short notice to make
something special. Then announce the Code Red is extended.”
Carter and Stevenson seemed startled to be dismissed
so early, and Wilhelm was as surprised as they were. There was still a lot to
discuss. They stood without a word however, and saluted before leaving the
room.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Bergsen asked
after a few moments. His fingers were drumming lightly on the armrest of his
chair. “She was just giving an opinion, which is what we’ve asked them to do,
so what was the point in chewing her out like that?”
Wilhelm blinked, surprised. He hadn’t realized that he
had, indeed, been past the point of rudeness with Carter, but now that Bergsen
had pointed it out, he couldn’t deny it.
“I’ll apologize to her. I guess I was a little
distracted.”
“Distracted, huh? The same kind of distracted that
sent you to the emergency room five times in the past seven weeks? And it would
probably have been more if we hadn’t had these few quiet nights. You’re not
trying to get yourself killed, are you?”
Wilhelm scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then what’s going on, my friend? If you need time
off, we can give you that. God knows that a couple weeks in bed did wonders for
me.”
There was an edge of derision to his words. He had
enjoyed his stay in the hospital no more than Wilhelm would have.
“It won’t be necessary.”
Bergsen didn’t miss a beat. “Is it about the girl?”
The question was the last thing Wilhelm would have
expected. He tensed. “What girl?”
“The one who showed up here, years ago, and wouldn’t
leave until you talked to her. The one you stuck into a desk job the day she
graduated. The one every group leader we have says we should promote and you’ve
tried to convince me isn’t leadership material. The one you asked a nurse to
tell you about when she was in the hospital. That girl.”
Closing his eyes, Wilhelm leaned back into his chair.
“Aria,” he murmured. “Her name is Aria.”
“So, it is about her, then.”
Wilhelm remained silent as he thought. He had known
Bergsen for longer than anyone else in the city, possibly longer than anyone
still alive on the planet. He was the closest thing Wilhelm had to a friend.
“Yes. It’s about Aria.”
Bergsen stood and walked to the cabinet on one side of
the conference room. It contained plans, maps, reports about past battles,
and—at the back of the cabinet, behind everything else—two glasses and a bottle
that was as old as Bergsen. He brought them to the table and poured a finger in
each glass.
“I thought that was off the menu for you,” Wilhelm
commented as he accepted a drink.
Bergsen raised an eyebrow. “Do you plan to tell
Laurie?”
“No.”
“What she doesn’t know can’t hurt me. And speaking of
Laurie… She has been telling me for years that you needed a woman in your
life.” He paused to take a sip of his drink and grimaced lightly. “Please tell
me you waited until that child was of age.”
Glaring, Wilhelm finished the glass in one long gulp.
“Don’t be crass. I haven’t touched her. Nor do I plan
to.”
“That explains the bad moods.”
Wilhelm continued to glare and reached for the bottle
to help himself again, this time more generously. “What are you implying?” he
grunted. “I’m not a lovesick teenager.”
After barely wetting his lips from his drink, Bergsen
laughed quietly. “When’s the last time you were in love?”
The glass made a soft clinking noise when Wilhelm set
it on the table again, his movements very slow and deliberate. “Who said
anything about love?”
“You’re over three centuries old, Will. I hope you
wouldn’t put yourself in such a state if all you needed was to get laid.”
Said so bluntly, the words were like a slap. Wilhelm
was too stunned to react.
“Why don’t you go to her?” Bergsen insisted.
The confession was almost shameful to make. “She has a
boyfriend.”
“Isn’t she worth fighting for?”
Wilhelm could have sworn Bergsen was rolling his eyes
at him and he felt slightly offended. “I’ve been fighting for her every night
for more than ten years.”
“Then get her. Or try to. At the very least, you’ll be
able to tell yourself you tried.”
The dry retort on Wilhelm’s tongue was never voiced.
Instead, he looked at Bergsen with some resentful surprise. “You know, usually
I like it when you make sense.”
Once more, Bergsen laughed. This time, Wilhelm laughed
with him.
* * * *
Sometimes, Wilhelm hated to be right.
The massive scale attack he had predicted had finally
happened, and although the walls hadn’t been breached yet, every single member
of the Guard was there and fighting. Wilhelm was only concerned about one of
them, however. On the extended battlefield, he hadn’t seen her for hours, but
every move he made was for her, to go back to her, and to finally tell her.
After his talk with Bergsen, he had decided that he
had to at least try to talk to her. He wasn’t sure what he would say, but if
she would only let him kiss her again, then he knew everything would be all
right. What they had felt when they had kissed before was bound to be there
again, and neither of them could deny its existence. He wouldn’t let her deny
it the way she had let him. He didn’t know what would happen next—he had never
felt this way for anyone—but he would figure it out. They would figure it out
together. He was aware that he was avoiding thinking about Lorenzo, but he
would cross that bridge when he got to it.
A long, strident note echoing over the battlefield
made Wilhelm’s knees want to fold beneath him in relief. This was it. The
demons were retreating. Newhaven would endure a little longer.
His relief was short lived, however. When he followed
the ebb of fighters back inside the walls, one of the soldiers who were in
charge of opening and closing the wounded doors caught his attention. At once,
he knew something had happened to Aria. That was the only reason why the
soldier would talk to him.
“How long ago?” he asked. “How bad?”
“Less than an hour. Pretty bad, I think.”
The medics gave Wilhelm dirty looks when he hopped
into an ambulance, but they let him ride with them back to the hospital. He
jumped out before the ambulance had come to a complete stop and ran, stopping
only at the nurses’ desk to ask where Aria was. He was relieved when they gave
him a room number and hurried away without listening to anything more. She
couldn’t be hurt that badly, not when he had finally decided to tell her.
When Wilhelm entered the room, Lorenzo was there. Of
course he was. Wilhelm would talk to him later about letting her get hurt yet
again. Dismissing the man from his thoughts, he turned his attention to the bed
and the pale woman lying in it.
He had to grab the door to hold himself upright, and
only after a few seconds did he manage to step back and leave. There was no
heartbeat in that room.
* * * *
The door just a few feet to Wilhelm’s right kept
opening and closing with the flow of visitors, an incessant ballet to which he
was all but oblivious.
At first, most were going in. Wounded humans who had
realized that the small cut they had wanted to put a bandage on might need a
few stitches after all. Friends, humans and vampires alike, who were coming to
check on those soldiers who had been taken from the battlefield before the end
of the battle. Parents called in to say goodbye to their loved ones, or to hold
their hands and wish for the best.
Regular visiting hours wouldn’t start until ten in the
morning, but nurses and hospital personnel had stopped trying long ago to keep
visitors out of their ward after visiting hours on battle nights. All they
asked them was to be quiet, and to keep their visits as short as possible.
Eventually, the stream reversed, and patients and
visitors started leaving. Most were silent as they went, but the salt of tears
was heavy in the air.
An overhang a few feet long protected the entrance of
the hospital, but from where he sat, Wilhelm could still see the sky. The inky
darkness lightened as he watched without really seeing, the blue coming from
behind the hospital and spreading toward the horizon. It slowly turned from the
color of a stormy sea to that of the purest mountain lake. Occasional clouds
drifted through as light as foam, and just as ephemeral. At noon, the sky was
so blindingly white that Wilhelm had to close his eyes. But behind his closed
eyelids, the white persisted, shifting from one moment to the next until it
took the form of a sheet drawn over a still body. Wilhelm jerked, his first
movement since he had sat down on the concrete with his back to the hospital
wall. When he opened his eyes again, the sun was drawing a thin line just
beyond the edge of the overhang.
The line thickened as the sun started moving lower
toward the horizon. Then it lengthened. Wilhelm kept his eyes on it, and to him
the line barely seemed to move at all. Only when he blinked did the sunlight
appear to jump forward. Jump toward him. It did so until there were only a
couple yards left, and minutes were all that separated it from Wilhelm.
“Hello, Will. You missed our afternoon meeting.”
Blinking slowly, Wilhelm looked up, following the
pressed uniform pants and shirt until he found Bergsen’s face. The man was
looking at him through a blank mask, the same mask he wore at Guard funerals.
Wilhelm didn’t know what to reply, so he kept quiet and lowered his eyes again.
Just behind Bergsen, the line had leapt again.
“Will…” Bergsen sighed as he squatted down; his eyes
were now almost level with Wilhelm’s. “What do you think you’re doing here?”
Wilhelm shrugged. After hours of remaining still, his
muscles protested at the movement, but he silenced the pain and kept it out of
his voice. “Nothing. Just enjoying some fresh air.”
Shaking his head lightly, Bergsen snorted.
“Fresh air? It smells like burned meat to me.”
It took a few seconds before the words slid far enough
into Wilhelm’s mind to begin to make sense. He sniffed, and the scent clinging
to the air—burning flesh—made him frown.
“Come on, now, my friend, you’re scaring the nurses.”
Bergsen’s hand closed over Wilhelm’s right shoulder and he squeezed, pulling up
lightly. “Let’s go in, and they’ll put some bandages on these burns.”
When Bergsen looked down, Wilhelm followed the movement
with his eyes, and was surprised to discover that his left hand was red and
blistered. His face felt tight and sore, too.
“I didn’t go in the sun,” he protested, taking Bergsen
as witness. “Why…”
He couldn’t finish. It didn’t make sense that he would
be burnt. He hadn’t moved all day, remaining by the wall beneath the overhang.
“Of course you didn’t go in the sun,” Bergsen said,
gently pulling up on Wilhelm’s shoulder again. This time, Wilhelm stood at the
prompt. “If you had, I wouldn’t be talking to you now. But you were close
enough to sunlight to do the trick. What the hell were you thinking?”