Aria and Will (10 page)

The offer took me by surprise, and I needed a few
seconds to answer, not only because it was unexpected, but also because I
didn’t believe anywhere could be much better than Newhaven.

“I can’t leave. Everything, everyone I know is
here. Newhaven is home.”

Days after my turning, I would have done anything
for him. All he had to do was demand it, and the instinct, deep inside me, to
obey my Sire would have left me no choice. But all he did was suggest, and I
could say no to a suggestion. Will was right, in a way. If Lorenzo had been
older, if he had had any experience as a Sire, he might have used the power he
had on me. As it was, all he did was look disappointed, even a little hurt.

“It’s because of him, isn’t it?”

He didn’t say Will’s name. He didn’t need to.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re my boyfriend. My Sire,
now. I have no interest in him.”

Will is the only topic I ever lied about to
Lorenzo. If I had truly had no interest in Will, I wouldn’t have been so
worried that he hadn’t shown up for the battle.

Still, I tried to convince myself that I truly
wanted to stay in Newhaven for other reasons than him. I went to see my mother,
two evenings later, just after sunset, before I had to take my post on the
walls. I didn’t intend to talk to her, but she noticed me, lurking outside, and
she came out to talk to me. Or rather, to argue with me, as she did every time
she saw me. She had never forgiven me for becoming part of the Guard against
her wishes. This time again, she let me know what a disappointment I was to
her, and as she ranted, as she told me that Paul had left Newhaven a month
earlier and that she would join him soon, she never even stopped to realize
something had changed.

I never had news from her or Paul after she left.
She never knew what I became, and maybe it’s better that way.

When I arrived at the walls that night, Will was
there. He didn’t speak to me, and when he looked in my direction he was very
careful to keep his face blank.

He looked like hell, but he was there, and that was
all that mattered.

Part Two

A Sword for Will

Chapter 11

Aria’s short nails clicked rhythmically against the
glass table. On the printed sheet in front of her, the seven items on the
meeting’s agenda taunted her. She had only checked off the first two, and the
meeting had started more than three hours earlier. She hid a yawn behind her
hand and leaned back in her chair. Around the table, the five other Heads of
Squadron concealed their boredom and tiredness with various levels of success
while Carter and Stevenson continued to argue over how many troops would be
needed that night. The two majors had asked opinions and advice at first, but
it had soon become clear that they wouldn’t let the Heads of Squadron—their
subordinates—weigh in on the decision. They rarely ever did.

“If the intensity of the attack is the same as it was
two nights ago, we’ll need as many troops as possible on the walls.”

Stevenson had only rephrased an argument he had
offered earlier, and Carter rolled her eyes at him.

“We can call more soldiers if we need to.” Her
counter-argument wasn’t new either. “The troops need rest. Most of them were
out until sunrise for two nights in a row. Vampires won’t mind but humans—”

The distinction she was trying to make shook Aria out
of her stupor as effectively as a bucket of icy water. She sat up, her brusque
movement drawing everybody’s attention to her.

“Vamps will mind just as much as humans,” she said
coldly.

She was the only vampire sitting at that table, and
she sometimes had the feeling that the others forgot what she was.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Carter replied with a
strained smile.

“I’m sure you didn’t. Just like I’m sure you don’t
mean to bore us all to tears by arguing endlessly over what should be a simple
matter. This question was first asked decades ago. Commander Bergsen and
Wilhelm established a procedure that has worked to this day. Why change it
now?”

A quick glance around the table showed approving nods,
but across from her Carter and Stevenson seemed to agree on something for the
first time that day.

“Commander Bergsen is dead,” Carter said. “Major
Stevenson and I are in charge here, as per his will.”

“As for why the procedures need to be changed,”
Stevenson added, “you only need to look at the numbers to realize the situation
is different. There are more attacks—”

“Have
you
looked at the numbers?” Aria
interrupted him impatiently. “The number of attacks have surged every dozen
years since they started occurring. If the pattern holds, we’re at the height
of a cycle right now.”

Carter snorted and looked around the room as she
talked as though to take the other Heads of Squadron as witnesses; her
expression soured, no doubt when she found them less sympathetic to her words
than she would have wished.

“If the pattern holds! What if it doesn’t? What if
they keep coming in increasingly greater numbers until we’re defeated? Will it
be time then to worry about changing procedures?”

A voice rose on Aria’s right before she could reply.
She looked at Jonas with mild surprise. The oldest of those around the table,
she didn’t know him much save for his reputation at having been entirely
devoted to Bergsen. He was usually very quiet.

“What if’s don’t help on the battlefield,” he said
calmly. “What we need right now is a decision. You two can argue about changing
our usual responses to demon activity later. Without us.”

Carter looked stricken speechless, and Stevenson
sputtered a few seconds before he could let out a coherent response.

“This is mutiny!” he called out, his voice shaking in
outrage. “How dare you question—”

“We’d be more at fault if we kept quiet.”

This time, the interruption had come from Aria’s left,
and she struggled not to throw a quick smile at Mary. They had gone through the
Cadets training together what seemed like a lifetime ago, and while they had
never been close friends, they had remained friendly even after Aria had become
a vampire. Not everyone had been as understanding.

“Leadership is supposed to guide us,” another Head of
Squadron chimed in. “You’re hardly doing that when you spend two hours arguing.
You do realize that’s more time than any of us slept today, right?”

Silence fell on the room.

Fifteen minutes later, the decisions had been made and
the meeting adjourned. All the way back to her apartment, Aria couldn’t shake
the feeling that it would all have been much easier if Wilhelm had been there.

Things had changed a lot since Bergsen’s death, only
weeks after Aria’s turning. Somehow in her mind all of the events that had
happened around that time had become linked, and it was sometimes difficult for
her to tell if there was any relation between two separate events.

Four years earlier, she had become a vampire, turned
by her boyfriend Lorenzo when she would have otherwise died from a wound
received on the battlefield. Bergsen had died of a heart attack while giving a
speech to a new class of Cadets. Although he was still on the walls every
night, Wilhelm had taken a step back from his involvement in the Guard. There
were rumors in the Guard that he had been asked to step back by Bergsen’s two
chosen successors. These two soldiers, Carter and Stevenson, had made many
changes as the years had passed. They had created a new rank—Head of
Squadron—and Aria had been named as one of them. Half the soldiers under her
command were vampires, and she had had to fight hard for them to accept her as
their leader in combat when she was nothing more than a fledgling.

She had proved herself by defending them, both in
battle and in meetings like the one she had just left. All of them had accepted
her, by now; all of them, or almost.

The elevator door opened. She swallowed a sigh as she
stepped out. The apartment she shared with her Sire was mere feet away and she
was exhausted; they should have been easy steps to take. And still, it took her
long minutes to finally enter the apartment. When she did, it was as quietly as
she could, and to go lie down on the small sofa rather than join Lorenzo in
bed.

* * * *

Far in the distance, the moon reflected off the
demons’ armor and weapons as they approached. Aria lowered her looking glass
and tapped a finger on the mini-com hooked behind her right ear to activate it.
A single tone indicated she was on line.

“Aria here. Forty to fifty.”

“Same here,” a voice answered in her ear.

A second voice agreed. She tapped the mini-com twice,
shutting it off, and raised the looking glass again. At her side, Lorenzo
cleared his throat.

“I count only thirty,” he said when she looked at him.

She forced a smile to her lips. “Thanks. You know we
always estimate to the high.”

He did not react to the smile in any way. His body
remained tense. He was always tense when he talked to her on the walls, these
days. She was afraid it would get him hurt. No one could be that tense on the
battlefield and remain unscathed.

“Why?” he challenged. “High estimates make the
soldiers think the fight will be harder than what it’ll really be.”

“And it also prepares them to fight longer than what
they’ll need so that when the fight ends, it’s good news.”

He didn’t look convinced. Aria wasn’t in the mood for
another one of these discussions.

“That’s the way we’ve decided to do it,” she said
blankly, and directed her attention back to the approaching demons. A few more
minutes and they would be close enough for a volley of arrows.

“We?” Lorenzo snorted. “You mean your band of—”

“If you disagree, Lieutenant, I suggest you take it up
with your Head of Squadron. You asked to change units as I recall. And your
unit is not on duty tonight.”

Almost a year after the fact, she still felt the pain
of that request, as sharp as the slash of the sword on the night she had died.
He hadn’t even told her he didn’t want to serve under her anymore, going
straight instead to Major Stevenson. She could only remember how betrayed she
had felt. Things had started to turn sour between them long before that, but up
to that night she had believed it would get better. She didn’t know anymore
what to do or say; whatever she tried, it never seemed to be the right answer.

She watched Lorenzo walk away. Unconsciously, she
clenched her hand on the hilt of the sword hanging from a scabbard at her belt,
eased it out and let it slide back in. In the distance, behind where Lorenzo
had disappeared, she could see a lone silhouette leaning against the edge of
the fortifications. She didn’t need to get any closer to know it was Wilhelm;
to know, also, that he had heard every word.

Turning back toward the plain, she raised her looking
glass again. She couldn’t wait for those demons to finally reach Newhaven.

* * * *

Aria changed a lot in those four years, and yet she
remained the same child—young woman—fighter I had always known. It was only a
natural progression for her to move up the hierarchy of the Guard, a
progression that I had impeded while she was human but that I refused to
challenge any more. As difficult as it was for me, I was determined to let her
be. I couldn’t help keeping an eye on her, of course, but I didn’t meddle any
longer. It wasn’t my place to do so. She had a Sire. Unfortunately, it would
have been easier for me to stay on the sidelines if he had been doing a better
job.

It had been a long time since I had last had a
Childe, but I had not forgotten what it had been like. There were so many
things a newly turned vampire needed to learn that their first few years were
as rich in learning as a human child’s first years. Or at least, they’re
supposed to be. As much as I looked, I didn’t see much of that happening
between Aria and Lorenzo.

In all fairness, it wasn’t entirely his fault. From
the little I had learned about him, I knew that his own Sire had been killed
mere weeks after his turning, and he had needed to rely on the rest of his clan
to teach him about being a vampire. No doubt there were many things he had
never learned—obedience to his Sire the first of them—and what he didn’t know,
he couldn’t teach Aria. It made it even more difficult for me to watch from
afar. The Sire in me wanted to teach Aria—to teach both of them—what all
Childer, all vampires ought to know, from age-old customs and traditions to the
proper way to bite an offered throat or wrist. However, it wasn’t my place to
do so. I wasn’t anything to them.

And so all I did was watch as years passed and
Lorenzo became more frustrated and angry. His scent reeked of it at all times;
I’m not sure how Aria tolerated it. I don’t think he was angry with her, just
with the situation itself.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would assume that
something deep inside him, where the vampire part of him was rooted in his
mind, knew that things were supposed to be different. His own Childe wasn’t
supposed to give him orders. She wasn’t supposed to spend so much time dealing
with other vamps. She wasn’t supposed to be able to say no to him. And yet, she
did all these things. If he had understood what he was, what they both were
better, he could have understood why it was all upsetting him so much, but as I
said he had never learned all of this as a Childe himself. There was no way he
could have stopped things from going the way they did. No way he could have
avoided leaving her in the end.

What?

Oh. I suppose. I could have given him advice, from
one Sire to another. There’s nothing in our customs against it. But would he
have wanted such advice, coming from me? Every time he looked at me, I could
see the suspicion and fear that I would somehow try to take Aria from him. He
didn’t want to have anything to do with me—and he certainly didn’t want to
discuss her with the man he considered his rival.

Yes, I guess the reverse is true as well. I wasn’t
too inclined to helping him keep her. Would you have been?

I waited four years for her. For a vampire, four
years are nothing. But when you fight every few nights and know you can die at
any time, four years can feel like an eternity. And when you go to bed every
morning knowing that the woman you will dream of is going to sleep in another
man’s arms, these same four years are endless.

But they did end. Lorenzo left. And when he did, at
last, Aria turned toward me.