Silent Night: Vampire Holiday Romance (The Night Songs Collection Book 4) (27 page)

My phone woke me the next evening. I didn’t know where I was, alone, or even what day it was. I stared at the phone before answering it.

“How are you? It’s Stephanie.” She sounded like her normal cheery self.

I had to think about my answer. “I feel like I got hit by a linebacker.” Grief settled in, making my muscles heavy and sore. My head weighed more than the rest of my body. Losing my mother was still real.

She chuckled. “I bet. Listen I hate to bother you, but,” she paused and I swallowed hard. This was the part where she told me not to come back to work. To clean out my locker, turn in my ID badge. That I’d fucked everything up beyond recognition. Again. “We don’t know how to get in touch with anyone in your family. Your mom was never conscious, and she didn’t get any visitors. So we’re assuming you’re her next of kin.”

“Oh.” I should have expected that, but I didn’t. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Okay.” Stephanie didn’t seem to know what to do, either. “Basically, we need to know what her wishes are, and where the body should go.”

I sat up, feeling around for Aidan, but he was gone. The room was dark. How long did I sleep? “Can I call you back? I need to get in touch with my aunt.”

“Sure. Do what you need to do.” Stephanie sighed. “I know you’re not ready to talk about anything yet, but let me know when you’re ready to come back to work. You get a few paid bereavement days, but I can work the schedule to stretch your time.”

I nodded, then realized she couldn’t see me. “Okay. Thanks.”

Thanks wasn’t enough to cover what Stephanie had done for me. We hung up, and I headed out to the living room to find Aidan settled in to work hours ago. It was ten in the evening. I kissed his head, looking over his shoulder at his computer screen briefly before I went in to the kitchen to make coffee.

I didn’t hear him follow me in. “Sit,” he instructed. “Let me make you breakfast.”

I jumped up on the counter, since there really wasn’t anywhere else to sit. Aidan had already pulled eggs, maple syrup, and milk out of the fridge and now retrieved spices and oil from the cabinet. This looked suspiciously like french toast, and my stomach purred in appreciation.

“Have you ever planned a funeral?” I asked him.

Aidan looked up at me, surprised. “Not a modern one, and not one in this country. So I guess my answer is no.”

I smiled at his candor. “Stephanie just called me. I’m the next of kin.” I looked down at my hands. Those words would never get easier to say.

I didn’t have to deal with any of this with Memere. My Aunt Jackie took care of most of it, as far as I knew. My mom did have a part, making things harder than they needed to be, and looking for attention. Now, this one was all about her.

Jackie. Shit, I had to call her.

When Memere died, I spent a couple days at Paige’s house, drifting in and out of hysteria. She’d secured a Ziploc bag full of multicolored pills, probably from Matt. She told me she’d looked them all up on the internet, and they were safe. Like I cared. I just knew that I wound up liking the yellow ones better than the blue ones. The yellow ones shut my brain off, like a top to bottom fade to black.

What I would do for some of those yellow pills right now. Should I call Paige? Would she make me feel better or worse? Would she even want to hear from me?

Something told me I was better off not knowing.

“I don’t even know how any of this works.” I looked up at Aidan, who nodded while he soaked the bread. “Don’t funerals cost a lot of money? And how do you get people to come? It’s not like a party. I mean, do I send invites out over the internet? What if no one comes?”

Aidan couldn’t mask the sadness on his face. “Who else in your family needs to know?”

“My aunt,” I sighed. “I’ll call her tomorrow. It’s too late now. But I need to act fast. She’s just at the hospital…waiting.”

Aidan shook his head, flipping the toast over in the pan. “Death sucks.”

Did it ever.

I didn’t stay up long after I ate. Aidan brought his laptop to bed, and I curled up beside him, drifting in and out of sleep. When my alarm went off the next morning, I jumped. It had been a long time since I’d seen morning. It was impossible to wake Aidan, so at least I didn’t have to worry about that.

My coffee didn’t taste good that morning, and it didn’t settle well in my stomach. I sat in Aidan’s chair, swaddled in a blanket, feeling sick and staring at my phone. I’d kept my aunt’s number written down when I ditched the old phone, because I knew one day I’d need it. In the back of my head, I knew it was probably going to be for something like this.

The coffee rose in my throat when I hit send. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted my aunt to answer.

“Jackie?” No answer right away. “It’s Kyndra.”

“Oh. How are you? I’ve been meaning to call you.”

Sure she had. “I need to talk to you. About my mom.”

Jackie either lit a new cigarette or took a deep drag on the one she was already working on. “What shit has she stepped in this time?”

Not exactly the reaction I expected. “She’s dead.”

She exhaled her smoke, her breath catching loudly enough that I heard it over the phone. “We knew this day would come.” Her voice quivered. “Damn it, Joanna.”

“She got hit by a car.” I offered the information even though Jackie didn’t ask for it. “She’s at Cambridge Memorial. They asked me what I want to do with the, um, body. And I have no idea what to do.”

“Well, if you’re looking for money, Kyndra—“

Was she serious? Her audacity numbed me. I tried not to break down; she’d accuse me of using it as a ploy. Of being my mother’s daughter. “No! I just need help! I don’t know what to tell them. She deserves for us to do the right thing.”

“If you think so,” Jackie scoffed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Thirty-Seven

The quickest, easiest, and of course cheapest thing to do was to have my mom cremated. Jackie insisted this is what my mom would have wanted. Like she cared what my mom wanted. I knew this was about what Jackie wanted. I just didn’t have the fight in me. As soon as I signed the paperwork, I had to resist scrambling across the table to take it back.

Nothing about this felt right. It felt dirty and cheap, just like every other encounter with my mom. So maybe it was the right thing to do.

The days passed in a blur. There was so much to do, like deciding what to do with my mom’s stuff. Aidan helped me hire a service to go through it all. They’d donate anything that might be worthwhile, and trash the rest. Like everything else, it didn’t necessarily feel like the right thing to do, but it was easy.

All she had was a bunch of cheap clothes and half broken furniture. The only thing worth saving was a photo album. I drove down to pick it up, my heart shattering in a million pieces when I saw my own face smiling back at me as I flipped through the pages, as a baby, on my first day of school, and up to about fifth grade. I kept looking for the rest, knowing there was so much more, but she just hadn’t cared to keep it up anymore after that.

“Don’t feel guilty,” Aidan insisted as he looked up from the pile of paperwork we’d amassed over the last week.

“I don’t,” I lied. I just wanted this to be done.

Aidan rolled his eyes. “I can practically taste it, and it’s not good. It’s bitter, and has an aftertaste.”

“I’m that transparent, huh?” I pulled the pile over toward me.

“To me you are.”

“Go back to your book.” I kissed his hand as he tried to get the pile back. “I feel guilty that I’m pulling you away from your work.”

“It can wait.” His hand caressed my cheek. “This is what’s important right now.”

“Thank you.” I closed my eyes and sighed, not only from the feel of his fingers against my skin, but in gratitude that someone actually wanted to help me. Aidan didn’t want to hold anything over my head, he didn’t want to make me feel bad about my situation. As always, he just wanted to make it better.

“Come here.” Aidan slid his chair away from the table so I could come to his lap. He didn’t have to ask me twice. He knew just what to do to make me feel good. That feeling had been so strange and foreign to me for so long, I needed to learn to let myself enjoy it.

I deserved this.

I’d lost absolutely everything I had in the last year, but I’d gained Aidan. Besides Memere, no one had ever cared for me like he did. Some days I felt like he was an angel that Memere had sent to watch over me, to guide me. Maybe Memere was still with me. I knew she was in the hospital when my mom passed. I saw her. I felt her. But Aidan was all the proof I needed.

We kissed forever. Eskimos had hundreds of words for snow, but I couldn’t think of any words in this language that could possibly express how I felt about him. I just had to show him.

“I’m supposed to go back to work tomorrow,” I said when we stopped kissing. I was breathless, my lips sore. I rested my forehead against his, still needing to touch him.

“I know.” Aidan’s voice was soft. “Are you looking forward to that? Are you ready?”

“No.” The pressure that I was under, refusing to admit what was really bothering me, dissolved when I said it. “I don’t know if I can go back there. I’m worried I’ll be reliving my mom dying every day.”

Aidan sat up straight, his eyes full of concern. “What do you want to do? Are you going to look for another job?”

I shook my head, my eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know. Part of me wanted to do this because I didn’t know how to help Memere. Now with my mother dying, literally on my watch, I wonder if this is really what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t know if I can watch any more people die.”

“It never gets easier.” Aidan massaged along my hairline. “It doesn’t matter if you think you’re prepared, nothing can replace the emptiness of losing someone or something important to you.”

“I don’t want to do it anymore.” I shook my head, looking at the floor.

Aidan chuckled softly. “Said everyone in the world.”

I swatted at him halfheartedly, taking him by surprise. “I want to be like you.” I belonged with Aidan. There was no need to fight it any longer.

His eyes widened. “How?”

My mouth dried out as I tried to form the words. “I want to live forever.”

“That doesn’t making losing things go away.” His face fell slack, and his eyes darkened. “It makes it a lot worse, when everything you’ve ever known is gone, and no one understands you anymore. When you’re constantly two steps behind the rest of the world, and you have to pretend to be something you’re not.”

I’d never thought of it that way. So much for my romantic view of everything, again. “Is that how you feel?”

“A lot of the time.” He tried to smile, but his mouth fought him and quivered. “Until I found you, then things started to make sense again.”

“Then why can’t we be together forever?” I pleaded. “The world can change, and things will not make sense and suck, but we’d always have each other.”

Aidan pulled me in so my head rested on his shoulder. His body shook. He’d never done that before, so close to me. I wasn’t afraid, but it worried me. Was he all right? Had my sadness done this to him? “That sounds like every dream I’ve had for two hundred and sixty years.” he murmured.

“It doesn’t have to be a dream.” I kissed along the line of his neck, nipping slightly. His spine straightened under my hand. I was making him nervous.

If he refused to do this, he’d be admitting he was a liar. That he wasn’t what he said he was. Maybe this was just the ultimate fantasy, and one of these days, I’d learn to stop believing in those. You’d think after this last bitch slap from reality, I’d smarten up.

“Kyndra, you don’t know what you’re saying.” His words were little more than a hiss.

“Sure I do.” I pulled his shirt up over his head, letting my fingers and my tongue explore his bare chest, the dips and rises in his taut muscles. I watched the rise and fall of his chest, and rested my hand over where his heart should have been pounding. Nothing.

He put his hand over mine, squeezing it, then bringing it to his mouth to kiss it. Feeling playful and desperate not to be rejected, I moved my fingers back and forth along his lip, then put my hand on his pants, he hardened as soon as I touched him. His eyes closed as he moaned in pleasure, but I didn’t let up on him.

“Stop,” he pleaded, grabbing both of my hands to still them. “You’re going to make me crazy.”

“Think about it.” I leaned in against him. “We could be like this forever. You say your books aren’t fiction, and all you’ve wanted is someone that makes you feel like you say I do. You want me.” I drank in his shock. “I want that too, Aidan. So much. Don’t let me go. Being human isn’t working out so hot for me, if you haven’t noticed.”

“My feelings weren’t fiction, that’s true.” He shook his head. “But no one wants to read about the dark times. I lived a long time before I was comfortable, before I didn’t have to worry. I left out a lot of the struggles I had. With life, with other vampires, with my own heart.”

“So you want to be alone, forever?” I was losing patience with him. “I don’t understand you sometimes. You insist you’re this immortal creature, but you insist on making yourself miserable your entire existence. You could have settled with any of those women in any of those books.”