Mike closed his eyes, smiling, like he was going to sleep in a very comfy bed. “Maybe you should go up and check it out—get cleaned up while you’re there.”
I touched my face and felt another big clump of sticky flour. “Good idea. I need to be a bit more presentable to close the festival tonight.”
“Well—” He checked his watch. “You have about thirty minutes until eleven.”
“Okay.” I brushed my long dress off as I stood, stepping on the skirt and stumbling for a moment until I righted myself. “Come get me at about quarter to?”
“Sure.” He closed his eyes above a smile and went back to enjoying his little spot on the grass.
***
I was acutely aware that Falcon had caught my scent as I passed the festivities and followed me up to my room, smelling, obviously, that Mike wasn’t with me. I let him follow, even though we both knew there was no threat here, because I also knew he was worried about me after what I went through last night. He didn’t engage, though—didn’t talk or make it obvious that he was following. He just walked at a distance behind me. Watching.
When I reached my room and pushed the door open, he stayed at the end of the corridor, and only as I set my door firmly back into its frame did I notice a shadow moving under the crack. There was a distinct taste in the air tonight, like concern or fear, but it only seemed to follow my guards. I could feel it pressing down on my shoulders when I was around them, even Mike, but he was better at hiding it. Something had happened. Something that made them worry enough to hang out like old mates at the festival, as if they didn’t all have better places to be. If only Jason were still here; I could make him read their minds. Then again, if I could figure out how I was reading his mind, I could just go and read their minds myself.
I sighed, leaning my forehead on the door. People keeping things from me is the worst form of disrespect.
“Falcon?” I said through door.
“Yes, my Queen.”
“Call a council meeting.”
“My Queen?” he said, meaning “Come again.”
“Call a council meeting—for after the ball. We’ve something to discuss.”
“We do?”
“Yes. Like the fact that you all need to confess what you’re hiding, or I’ll have you all locked up for the night.”
A second passed, where the tension in the air thickened, even through the door. “Of course,” he said.
I waited until his footfalls became distant patters, then turned around and leaned the back of my head on the door. But before I could close my eyes and plot out the Angry Queen speech my knights would suffer, a giant gold-framed canvas caught my eye, leaning against the wall, right between the sitting room and my bedroom. The gift from Jason.
My eyes widened to take in the majesty of David’s lake, right there in thick oil brushstrokes, like looking at it through a window. It was summer, and the trees were in full foliage, the water reflecting the blue sky and a dark-haired girl sitting atop the black rock, hugging her knees—her back to the artist, her solemn thoughts miles out past the tree line.
I wandered over and traced a fingertip along the shadowy figure of a man, standing in the tree line, watching her. Even though Jason had painted the man with his face hidden by the angle he stood at, I could see it was him—his gait, the set of his shoulders … no, wait. There was something more dominating about the way he held himself, as if the man commanded a certain response to his appearance: submission. Fear. And Jason’s words filtered out from among my thoughts then, echoing in my mind: It’s David. It always has been.
The detail and the texture, the brushstrokes, the entire masterpiece, made me miss Jase terribly all of a sudden. He had such an unappreciated talent for art, given that his heart was in science, making self-expression and creativity really just more of a hobby. Then again, I suppose with the laws of the old king that he lived under his entire vampire life, he couldn't really take up a career in artistry. There was nothing stopping him now, though, except, I guess, his new fantastic job.
I sat back on the blanket box at the end of my bed, folding my arms while I considered the painting. But I wasn’t studying it from my room. Not really. I was there, by the lake, years back into the past. It felt like the first day I saw it. Such a strong emotion attached to it that I could still feel all of the sadness and doubt surrounding me. As it always had. It seemed then that I’d spent my life so far in an empty room, missing David, waiting around for him—just praying he’d come back and stay with me. Nothing much had changed. But what did Jason mean by “It was always him”?
I got up and touched David again, as if I could tap his shoulder and make him turn around.
Why did Jason paint him lingering there in the shadows—watching me? Why didn't he paint him beside me, where I needed him to be?
“What are you trying to say?” I asked the painting. Millions of conclusions ran through my head and heart, and as I looked at the lonely figure sitting on the rock, completely unaware she wasn’t actually alone, it snapped, like a rubber band flicking all my random thoughts into one neat line.
She’s not alone. David
is
there. That’s what Jason wanted to say. David is still here. He always comes back eventually, because he loves me. And, if I think about it, he’s never really been gone when he’s been missing from my life. He’s always been there—lurking in the shadows, a warrior in the background, either watching over me or doing something to keep me safe. Sometimes, staying away to keep me safe.
That dark figure wasn’t the absence in my life; he was my knight in shining armour. He always had and always would be. I just needed to wait—to be patient until he felt safe to step out of the shadows and meet me by the water’s edge, where everything was always okay.
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and texted Jason: It’s beautiful. But where am I supposed to hang it?
The canvas was bigger than me in both height and width, not that that was hard, so I couldn't really think of a wall, except in the library, where it could hang without touching the floor. I wondered just how long he’d been working on this and what prompted him to paint it.
As I sat down on the bed and checked my phone, something hard stuck into my thigh. I rolled off it and pulled the leather bound book from under the silky folds of my dress.
David’s journal.
It was smooth to my touch, the leather warm, as if it were still a living thing, with the date of this year carved out in its front—the same markings on the spine, too. The pages looked old and worn, but as I brushed my fingertip along the edges, I realised they were just recycled and made to look old. Probably so this journal would match the pile he kept from his first days as a vampire. I’d only ever seen a small pile—maybe thirteen or so journals, and I’d always always wanted to read them. So it truly was an honour and a privilege to be given this one. I just wished it were dated a hundred years ago. I’d be fascinated to know what made him tick before he met me.
The big hand on the clock across my room pointed to the seven—a warning to hurry up. So, without much more consideration, I cut the pages and opened them toward the last quarter. After reading down a few lines, it was clear he wrote this right after the argument we had outside his room—the night before he left for Paris. He had a very formal writing style usually, but this was all scribbles and thoughts written in his ‘voice’. Half of it was nonsensical gibberish and the other half had been smudged into a smoky cloud by what looked like droplets of water or something.
I didn’t want her to know,
was the first line I could clearly make out.
How can I ever let her look at me again now she knows?
My greatest shame has come to her knowledge and worse, she forgives me. Forgives me.
How can she? What right does she have? What could it possibly help for her to forgive me?
And yet, for some reason, I feel released.
I have lived in fear all this time that she would see the monster inside me and turn away. But she didn’t. And there is something oddly satisfying in that.
I drew my thoughts back from the pages and smiled. Was this what he so badly wanted me to know earlier—that he felt released by my forgiveness?
Right back to the middle of the journal, the pages were messy and chaotic, with sentences scratched out and some even blackened out so no one would ever read them, while the first thirty to forty pages were all thoughts centring around me in a mostly positive way. It made me feel kinda special. David could be so cold and cruel that, to be loved by him kind of meant belonging to a secret club. And I was the only member.
Well, I used to be.
I quickly flipped through, reading random bits: he thought I looked like an angel on the day he swore his oath as king. He laid and watched me sleeping many nights when he was supposed to be dead, gently tracing my cheek or running his fingertip across my lashes, just waiting for my lip to crease in the smile he adored, like I knew he was there. He couldn’t believe how amazing I was with a sword, and he was very impressed with the one his uncle had commissioned as a gift for me—the one still sitting under my bed in its wooden box. He loved the way I was changing, shaping to become this queen; this powerful girl that surprised him but, at the same time, didn’t. He felt like he always knew it was in me but just never expected it, or needed for it, to come out. He was happy with me as I was, but happy also to see me grow and take control of my life and change the monarchy he’d grown up in.
When I reached a paragraph under the date of the argument he and I had the day I threatened to sleep with Arthur if he left to use the dagger on Drake, I stopped and read it carefully rather than skimming it.
A wife is not meant to fight for her husband.
I
need to fight for
her—
to keep
her
safe
.
Doesn't she see that’s all I’m trying to do? Why can’t she respect that and let me die gracefully, peacefully, knowing she’ll go on? This is hard enough for me as it is—knowing I have to leave her, knowing she’ll fall, heartbroken and once again hurt by the world, into someone else's arms. And I don’t want that. I don’t want her to be with another, but I don’t want her to be alone forever either. She’s too young, and so lovely. Someone will steal her heart eventually. I’ve made peace with that. Deep inside. I truly have. Hell, I’ll even survive if that man turns out to be my brother. At least I know he’ll love her and respect her. But I need her to understand and to accept why I’m doing this. I need her to lay with me, talk with me, hold me until the end. I don’t want to fight with her—waste this time arguing with her. She is all I ever wanted, all I ever searched for, yet here she is, and I can’t even enjoy her because she's too darn inquisitive and had to figure all this out. Can't she see this is why I tried to keep it secret? Can't she see how much it means to me to just enjoy my last few months with her in peace—not thinking about death or the future?
Ah, naïve David, I thought, breaking away from the pages with a sly grin. To think I would ever just sit back and cosily enjoy a short period of time that would, tick-by-tick, lead to our last moment. Then again, if I’d never tried to fight for him, I would never have slept with Jason and the whole truth about Drake and the dagger might have come out eventually anyway.
But the past is not for looking upon and wishing for change. It’s for learning and moving away from.
I read on a few more pages, slowing when I came to the day he rushed home from freeing prisoners at the Castle of Death to have his world pulled out from under him. His heart, as he put it so elegantly in calligraphic scroll,
‘propelled through the nine fiery circles of Hell in one breath’.
If I could have recorded my feelings in that exact moment or any of the minutes that followed, they’d have burned a hole in these pages. Instead, I sit here days later, a pen in my hand, and nothing to say due to a numbness that set in hour by hour after I left that room.
A lion awoke in me when those words came from her lips, and he reached out a singular claw to tear her into pieces, but something else, something deeper, reached out only to hold her and tell her it was okay. It was okay. Why was it okay? Why was my first instinct to wrap her up and protect her from the beast that wanted her death? Why, when she told me she loved my brother, did I just want to step back and give her a life with him? What madness has she driven me to that I could feel that way?
I reacted with anger to these thoughts. I said things, did things these past days that I cannot undo. Not ever. She loves Jason, and I know she wants to be with him—I know now that she always has. But I don’t want to see her go lovingly into his arms hating me. Or thinking I hate her, because I don’t hate her. I hate what she did. I hate that she____
The ink faltered here into a flat line across the page before the entry ended. I flipped over to the next, but this one was dated weeks later.
If I do not write this down, if I do not expel the rage in some way far away from her, I may do something I never imagined myself capable of. Revenge, delivered with great brutality.