Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (80 page)

“Just set him up in the garage,” I suggested.

“It’s too cold out there.” She put the paintbrush on some paper towel. “And besides, it’s the first thing he does when he wakes up and the last before he sleeps. I don’t want him to feel like an outsider—being kicked into the garage to spend most of his days.”

David shook his head, rolling his eyes, but I thought Vicki was really sweet. In his short time here so far, Jase had won over a lot of hearts. He’d made a lot of friends at school and all his teachers adored him, and Vicki was starting to get emotionally attached, too. I knew that if David and I ever had to move back to the manor to run the monarchy, Jase would be fine here with Vicki and Sam.

“Anyway,” I said, standing up. “I need to finish icing this cake.”

“I thought it looked perfect.” David’s face pulled in an odd sort of frown.

“When I put it in the fridge I knocked the edge, so I need to fix a few bits up. But I might finish the streamers and balloons first.”

“Well.” He slid his hands under Elora’s arms and picked her up. “I might put this little one down for a nap before we put on her party dress.”

“Okay. And don’t forget to change her nappy first,” I added as he walked from the room, reminding myself
again
that they called them diapers over here. “And her blankie’s in the laundry basket by the bedroom door—”

“Got it, Ara,” he said in a dull tone.

Vicki and I laughed.

“It needs folding, by the way,” I tried. “The laundry. If you’re bored.”

“I’m never that bored,” he called back.

“No one ever is around here,” Vicki noted absently.

“I kinda like it,” I said, standing on the chair again to string up the balloons. “It beats sentencing vampires to years of torture or imprisonment.”

“Hm. Yes, and when
is
your next session of Court?”

“January.” I leaned forward and tacked the string of balloons to the wall. “Why?”

“I thought we might all go out to the manor for a few days—just to get away.”

“Yeah.” I nodded, thinking about that amazing tub in my bathroom, and I knew Vicki was thinking the same. “That’d be nice.”

***

We waited as long as we could for Falcon, but after Em and Mike arrived with Max and Josh, followed soon after by Morgana and Blade, it was getting late and Elora was getting restless. We all stood around eating and drinking and watching her ignore her presents while she played with the paper, and when her late afternoon sleep time came around, I decided it was time to do the cake—end the party.

“Can’t we wait just another five minutes,” Vicki pleaded. “They might just be caught in traffic.”

“They?”

“Yes. He’s bringing Quaid, isn’t he?”

“I thought Quaid was in London.” I reached into the fridge and pulled out the cake, being careful this time not to knock it. “Seeing to his Set?”

“Oh, um…” She glanced back at David. “I must have misheard.”

“Well, I’ve waited long enough, Vicki.” I nodded at Elora, rubbing her eyes. “She needs to go to bed, and…”

“We’re here!” Falcon’s voice flowed through the house with a steely breeze and a layer of snowflakes. He struggled with the giant present in his hands and the scarf around his neck, trying to close the door on the uninvited gust of frost. “Sorry we’re late.”

“Who’s we?” I said, a bit irritated, and as I stepped around the kitchen counter and looked past Falcon, my heart stopped, freezing my feet to the spot. The light in my hands sparked and flared as it connected with the new energy in the room, and the bulging ache that’d been in my chest for the last six weeks broke apart into a budding flower, filling me up with an emotion I couldn’t place.

His blue eyes fixed on my face for a second, moving then to the little girl in David’s arms. “She’s grown.”

I nodded, trying to swallow down the lump in my throat. I could feel everyone watching, wearing that same kind of goofy smile people wear when someone walks into a surprise party, but I didn’t care.

“I thought you were dead,” I whispered, my voice not really working. “For good.”

“Resurrection takes time.” He took off his gloves and tucked them into the pocket of his big black coat, extending both arms. “Come to me, daughter. I’ve longed to hold you since I first awoke.”

I rushed forward and pressed myself into his cold clothes, closing my eyes tight, wondering why Morgana wasn’t falling into his arms, too. And then it sunk in. She already knew he was awake.

“How long have you been alive again?” I pulled back and looked up at him; he was thinner, his skin pale but freshly-shaven, and the blue in his eyes was dull and almost grey. “Why didn’t anyone call me?”

“We wanted to surprise you,” Falcon confessed.

“He woke up a week ago,” Morgana said from across the dining area, “but…”

“But?” I looked back at her.

“I didn’t want you to see me in that state.” Drake turned my face back to him. “You suffered enough in taking my head from my body. You didn’t need to see me struggling to recover.”

“Struggling?”

He moved his head in one simple nod, the gesture carrying the weight of everything he’d clearly endured.

I moved in and hugged him again, letting myself finally believe everything, absolutely everything in my life would be okay now. “Did they tell you—about Lord Eden?”

“They did,” he said simply. “And my only regret is that I was not here to take off his head myself.”

I hugged him a bit tighter. “I wasn’t sure you’d forgive us for killing him.”

“There is nothing to forgive—on my part. However—” he leaned back to smile down at me. “I feel
I
must apologise for being late.” He looked at Elora again. “I drained at least six humans just today in order to be well enough to travel. And even then…” He left it hanging.

“You’re forgiven,” I said, noticing then that his neck was bandaged under his scarf, a thin line of blood seeping through. “You’re here. That’s all that matters.”

“And just in time for cake.” Falcon raised his brows, handing the gift to David.

“Yes. I was just putting the candles in.” I moved back toward the kitchen. “You can hang your coats on the rack there. And can I get you a warm drink?”

“Perhaps after this beauty has blown out her candles,” Drake said, standing in front of the high chair. He moved his hands as if to reach for her, then thought better and reeled them back in. “May I hold her?”

“Of course.”

Vicki moved past me quickly to help unstrap Elora from her chair, so I went back to the cake and started placing candles in, looking up for a moment as Drake’s arms circled his granddaughter.

Elora stiffened a little, unsure of this new face, new smell, but as he reached up and held onto her little fat hand, she pulled his thumb toward her mouth and drooled all over it.

Drake laughed, drawing it back. “No, little Princess, we mustn’t do that,” he warned softly. “You don’t want to try vampire blood yet.”

“Starting early.” David laughed proudly, folding his arms.

“Now hang on a second,” I said playfully. “For all we know, she might grow up to crave
Lilithian
blood—or human blood,” I offered, lighting the candles.

“No, she won’t,” Drake said simply, sitting down at the head of the table with her in his lap. “She’s Lilithian.”

“How can you know that?”

He touched a fingertip to her nose and a blue glow soaked into her skin, turning her aura a purple-white. No one else saw it, but my eyes widened and I nearly dropped the matches. I hadn’t learned much about auras yet, but from what I’d seen so far of my own, I knew enough to know that only a Lilithian’s aura glowed like that when touched with Cerulean light. I’d never seen David’s do it, or Em’s, but Mike’s had, and so had Vicki’s.

“What is it?” Mike asked, looking from Elora to me. “What did you see?”

“Cerulean Magic,” I said quietly. “She’s Lilithian.”

David stepped forward and curled his hand over her head, sweeping her hair down where it stood on end. “What greater gift could we have on the anniversary of her birth than the knowledge of what she is?”

I stood by the counter with the glowing cake in my hands, the flames hot against my chin, and smiled at the little Lilithian girl, surrounded by family and friends. She was a lucky girl—to have so many that love her; to be Lilithian; to be the daughter of a King and Queen—and I felt proud to know she would grow to be more human than vampire, and one day, maybe, inherit my Cerulean Magic, as I did from my father.

“Ara, put the cake down before it melts,” Mike said loudly, laughing.

I snapped out of it with a giggle, shaking off the dream state, and Vicki took a hundred photos as I put the cake in front of Elora, the burly chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” filling the room.

Elora’s little face lit up with determination and she slapped the edge of her cake, ruining all my hard work, but we all just laughed, Drake moving her hand back as she reached for the hot candles.

David leaned in as the song ended and helped her blow them out, looking up to speak to Mike after, a smile lighting up his face, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying—what any of them were saying. I took in each face of each person I loved in this room, committing it eternally to memory, knowing that one day, centuries from now, the photos would fade and the videos would no longer play, and many of these faces may no longer be with us but that, somewhere deep inside of my mind, there would always be the memory. There would always be the past, and as black and as dark as it could be, it could also be filled with light.

From where I stood outside that front window, looking up at this old house, so long ago, to where I stood now, looking out of it, so much had changed. So much had been altered both in my life and inside of me that I was no longer the same sad, lost little girl. The mask I once wore I no longer needed and the home I once longed for had grown around me, filled with everything I could ever have wanted.

A mom.

A dad.

A sister.

A brother.

A child.

And most importantly, a bright future beside the man I loved.

Epilogue

Sixteen years went by before I looked at the old pile of books on the shelf—the ones I brought with me from the manor. I pawed over the spines, noticing the black band on my ring finger for the first time in years when saw the leather-bound journal of information on Brands, going back in my mind to the day Petey handed it to me.

As I reached the bottom of the pile and found an old diary of Jason’s, I thought back to a story I was once told about another journal—Drake’s—where he mentioned a child the old Queen Lilith may have had: Evada. There were still so many buried truths and ancient secrets in my ancestors’ past, and now that Elora was grown and I had so much more time on my hands, I was finally ready to think about everything I’d ignored all this time.

In the leather-bound journal about Brands, I would find a way to remove the black Mark from my ring finger, and until now I hadn’t wanted to. But if David and I were to tear off our masks and return to school as youthful teens next fall, I would have to erase the marks of the past. It was time. As much as it broke my heart, I knew it was time.

“You ready?” David asked, popping his head around the corner.

For a moment, still sinking in the quicksand of nostalgia, I stared at him, taking in his aged skin—the way his eyes crinkled on the edges and how he was just starting to spring greys around his ears. He looked good as an older man, and I wanted to believe for a moment, just one moment, that a few decades from now I would sit beside a much older and more wrinkled version of him and whisper a fond farewell, knowing I’d meet him in Heaven. I would never really want that kind of mortal life, but I wanted to know, just for one breath, how that would feel.

“Ara?” He stepped fully into the room, his green eyes filling with concern. “What’s wrong, my love?”

I offered a forced smile. “I’m just feeling nostalgic.”

“Is this because Elora’s staying in Australia for their summer?” he asked with a laugh, moving across the room to take my slightly aged hand.

“She’s too young to be away from home for so long—”

“She’s not away from home,” he said, brushing it off like it didn’t break his heart too, when I knew it did. “She’s with Mike and Em. She’s having fun—as kids are supposed to.”

I knew that. But I also knew that, without me there to steer her, she may very well meet a certain boy soon, and once that happened, she would no longer be our little baby girl. She’d be
his
. As she was destined to be.

“Stop worrying.” He smoothed his thumb over my wrinkled knuckles. “It’s New Year’s Eve. Let’s go out and drink—enjoy being over twenty-one. It’ll be our last chance before we begin school again.”

I smiled. He was right. We’d given so much to raising our daughter—never really went out, never acted like the teens we were when we had her—and now that she was away for a while, living her own life, it was kind of okay if we went out and enjoyed a bit of adult fun. I knew I should take advantage of my age before it was gone and I was a teen again, but for some reason I felt guilty.

“I promise I won’t tell Elora if you don’t.” David grinned at me, tugging my hand.

“She’d laugh if we told her we went out and got tanked at a New Year’s Eve party.”

When
he
laughed loudly, he sounded just like her. “Yes, and imagine what she’ll say when we tell her we’re going to school with her next year.”

“I’m more worried about what she’ll say when we tell her we’re vampires—and that she is.”

“She’ll take that better than the news that her parents are coming to school to spy on her.”

“We’re not spying,” I corrected, but it was a lie and I knew it.

David smiled warmly. “Knowing our daughter, she’ll take it in her stride, and the youthful Ara-Rose from Australia will become her new best friend.”

I thought back to my first day of school—to when I met Emily. “Things will be so different this time.”

“It’ll be a blast,” he said, pulling my hand again. “Just as a night out will be. Now let’s go.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling away. “Let me get my bag first.”

“I’ll wait in the car.”

“I’ll just be a sec.”

He disappeared, and I walked into the bathroom to fix my hair and makeup. Over the years, layering my face with special creams and toxic lotions to age my skin, I’d lost that horrid red smudge across my nose and cheeks that always gave away when I’d been crying. David didn’t notice that my lashes were still wet when he came in, and since he couldn’t see the red smudge anymore, he would never know, and so he couldn’t ask what was wrong. Which I was glad of, because I needed to be sure before I breathed a word of it.

I looked in the mirror at the dark circles under my eyes, running my hands under some cold water and splashing it on my face. I didn’t feel like drinking tonight. I still felt dizzy and a little bit unwell from this flu I’d somehow managed to catch—despite my immortality. But I’d been reminded many times over in my life that Lilithians can still get sick, and worrying about Elora, I guess, had lowered my immune system.

Or maybe it hadn’t.

I placed one hand against my stomach as I picked up the stick on the sink, and my heart did a flip as the impossible stared back at me. I ran it over in my mind—the days since my last period, the nausea, the moodiness—it wasn’t possible. But a small blue ‘plus’ glared up at me from the tiny window of the pregnancy test, and as it wobbled under a thick layer of tears, my hands shaking, I dropped it to the floor and sunk down on my knees.

I wanted another baby so badly, all my life, that I would have given
anything
, but not for another soulless child. How would I tell David we were back to square one—choosing which one of us would give up our life for our new baby girl?

It couldn’t be true. The test had to be wrong I decided, with a violent shake of my head. Every test I did when I was pregnant with Elora showed up negative. Why would that change now?

My thoughts flashed back for one single moment to when Arthur stopped me on the stairs that day—so long ago, before I knew I was pregnant with Elora. I saw myself hand the pregnancy test I’d been carrying to him—ask him to hold onto it for me. And a realisation hit me like white light: he didn’t want me to know I was pregnant then. He was protecting that secret fiercely. He could have easily tampered with the test.

Everything I’d been told so far about Lilithians and pregnancy had been wrong. Why
wouldn’t
my pregnancy show up on a test, if every other Lilithian pregnancy among our people since then has?

Trying hard to breathe and just focus, I looked down at my flat belly. It was a young foetus—no more than six weeks gestation—I knew that much. I’d felt a tiny flicker of energy once, a few weeks ago, but I ignored it, not sure what it was. And as time went by, I grew surer and surer that there was life there. Which is why I took that test. But this felt different. Everything about this pregnancy felt different. It was as if, now that it was confirmed, I could connect with its life force—its
soul
. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

I closed my eyes and tried to feel for the same energy I felt with Elora, but no, again, it was completely different.

“Ara!” David knocked on the bathroom door.

I gasped, quickly wiping my eyes. “Uh… um. Just a minute.”

“Ara?” he said again, his voice liquid with concern. He shook the handle. “Ara, what’s wrong?”

“Um. Nothing,” I said, but it was such a big fat lie that I burst into tears, giving up on trying to stand, and just knelt there on the floor and cried.

The door flew open and David landed on his knees beside me, his strong, familiar arms wrapping me up. “What is it, my love? What’s wrong? Is it Elora, do you—”

“No.” I shook my head, burying my face in his shoulder.

“Then…” He leaned back and looked at my tear-streaked face. “What is it?”

“We can’t go to school with Elora.”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” He laughed. “Because we don’t have to. If you’re worried she’ll hate us—”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.” I pushed out of his arms and knelt forward to pick up the test. “It’s this.”

I placed it in his hand, watching as he turned it over and saw the little plus sign, his eyes lighting up as it sunk in.

“You’re pregnant?”

“Mm-hm.” I nodded, my face crumpling in an ugly way, then I burst into sobs again.

“So… are you crying because you’re hormonal, or because you don’t want the baby?”

“Because she’ll be soulless, David!”

He leaned back a bit as the volume in my voice nearly shattered his ears. Then, he laughed.

“
What
?” I said, wiping my cheeks.

He just laughed louder, curling his hand round the test.

“Stop it!” I slapped his arm. “Why are you laughing?”

He jumped up, placed the test on the sink, and picked me up under the arms, sweeping me into a huge hug as he spun us around.

“Stop it,” I said, whacking his back, but he kept spinning, making me want to throw up. When he finally put me down, I punched his arm and ran for the toilet, lifting the seat. But my stomach settled as he squatted beside me, his elbow over his knee, and grinned at me as if he was waiting for me to catch on to some joke.

“Ara?” he said, still waiting.

“What?”

“Safia’s magic died when she did.”

“And?”

“And she was the one that placed that curse on your womb, remember?” His whole face was altered by that know-it-all smirk, and if the sudden realisation of the truth hadn’t just changed the rest of my entire life, I would have punched him again for being so arrogant.

“She won’t be soulless,” I breathed, touching my belly, finally allowing myself to feel the life within me—to really listen to it and picture a healthy baby growing there.

“No, my love.” He drew my other hand away from the toilet bowl and kissed it. “She,
or he
, won’t be soulless.”

My eyes widened as he said that. I looked up at him, a huge smile spreading my mouth.

“What?” he asked. “You have your ‘I get it’ face on.”

“Because I do.” I pressed up on one foot and stood; David stood too, looking at me with a very contorted grin.

“Get what?” he asked, brushing my cheek. “What does my pretty little wife finally understand?”

“Why it feels so different to Elora. David!” I grabbed his hand and placed it on my belly. “It has a soul. I can feel it.
He
… has a soul.”

“He?” He looked up from my belly. “For real?”

I could hardly breathe, but I nodded and managed a quiet whimper, which was supposed to be a yes.

“And you’re sure?” he asked, holding back his excitement.

“It’s a boy, David.” I nodded vigorously. “I’m certain of it.”

He laughed, running his hand through his hair as he stepped back. “Then I guess we’d better not go out drinking tonight.”

I laughed too, laying both hands over my belly to feel the pulse of life beat back against them. “No, I think we’d better stay home and talk baby names.”

“Harry,” he said, moving back in to touch my belly again. “We’ll name him Harry.”

“Really?”

The dimple I always loved pressed into his cheek, even under the aged skin, and as I saw the certainty in his eyes, I let myself imagine our little boy with a dimple just like his dad’s.

“I like that,” I said, seeing this whole new future I could never have
possibly
imagined. “A little Harry all of our own.”