Til Death (Immortal Memories) (9 page)

I shriek like a rabid cat, hands and arms flailing, hoping my nails will find purchase somewhere on Elijah’s skin. He’s strong and he’s got me off of my feet, his hands - his man’s hands! Hands on my body! Leaving trails of grime and filth on my skin! - grip my forearms and wrap them tight against my torso. The unwanted contact has me panicked. I can’t think clearly. All I can do is struggle and scream and hope someone calls the police.

We’re barely out the door when our direction changes, seemingly forcibly so. Mia lets out a frightened little squawk and we’re back in my apartment. I’m pried out of Elijah’s hands and thrust away. I stumble into my living room. The dark haired man has Mia by the shoulders, his eyes holding hers captive. Her face is slack. It’s like looking at a wax statue of my friend.

Thomas has Elijah pressed against the wall, held by the throat. He’s snarling into the man’s face, the man who’s quite clearly not been compelled even a little. His face is ashen, his irises just little dots in his wide eyes.

“The girl’s subdued?” Thomas asks, his face just inches from Elijah’s.

“Very much so.” The dark haired vampire smiles as he speaks and Mia’s face mirrors his, the corners of her lips pulling upwards. It’s gruesome because it’s not her smile. And her eyes are so glassy. Whatever it is that makes her
her
, it’s nowhere to be seen.

Without taking his attention from Elijah, Thomas addresses the dark haired vampire. “Go check the surrounding apartments. Find anyone who might have seen or heard what just happened, anyone who’s considering calling the police, and take care of it.”

The other vampire gives a curt nod and he’s gone, just a blur of movement indicating that he’d even been there to leave. Mia stayed where he left her, his smile disfiguring her pretty face. I’m trembling, an absolute disaster of nerves and fear. The fact that I ever, even once in my life considered myself a strong woman is ridiculous. What I’m feeling now is shameful. All I can think of are hands on my body, pulling on the buttons of my jeans, sliding down against my skin…

Thomas interrupts my thoughts. “What happened here?”

Elijah swallows hard. It must be painful, with Thomas’s hand clamped to his throat. I know that feeling, too. “We saw you take her -”

“I’m not talking to you!” roars Thomas. Elijah whimpers and starts to cry. Still holding him to the wall by his throat, Thomas turns to me. “I’m talking to her.” And his voice is beautiful again. “What happened?”

“They followed me in. Saw me leave with you last night and when I didn’t come home they got worried. They were going to take me to the Citadel. To keep me safe.”

Thomas snorts. “Safe. At the Citadel.” He pauses. “Are you hurt?”

I consider for a moment, giving myself a once over. The adrenaline had momentarily sobered me, but that’s fading, and I’m decidedly slow to process. I’m exhausted. Dizzy. Still very much drunk. A headache is growing. I’m confused and unnerved, but my body seems to be in regular working order. “No,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“You are most definitely not fine.” Where else have I heard those words?

“Mmmkay. I’m not fine. But I’m not hurt either.” I’m really feeling drowsy.

Thomas’s whole demeanor softens, as if in apology. “Rachel, sweetie,” he waits for me to focus on him. “I’m going to have to alter their memories. I can alter a lot. If you want. Take away their fear, their fixation on the Citadel…”

Is that the right thing to do? Just have him go in there and remove Mia’s terror? She’d be better off, not being afraid to live in a world she shares with creatures that walk amongst her nightmares. She’d be sweet, golden Mia. Happy and hopeful. I wouldn’t have to worry about her walking herself into the Citadel and inviting whatever trouble is housed there. She could love Elijah and he could love her and she could have her happily ever after with the white picket fence, the kids and the dog.

But when I look at her face, still holding onto the dark-haired vampire’s smile, her eyes slack and empty, missing all the things that make her who she is I know my answer. “Don’t change them. Take away this memory, last night’s, too if you think you have to, but please, keep the rest of who they are the same.”

Thomas grits his teeth unhappily, but he does what I ask, telling them all about the date they had last night that turned into breakfast downtown. He tells them to go to Mia’s, to sit on the couch and forget everything that happened at my apartment. By the time they’ve crossed the courtyard, walking in some horrific parody of a marionette, legs and arms all out of sync, I’m practically swooning from fatigue. My eyes are closing and the room is spinning and all those Long Islands are dancing unhappily in my stomach.

“I’ma need … go to bed,” I slur and before I know it, Thomas has me in his arms and has carried me upstairs to my bedroom. I’m under the covers and ever so drowsy. I hiccup and smile. “You know,” I manage as the world swims around me, sleep pulling heavily at my thoughts. “You should just make me a vampire and I’ll be safe. And it’ll be me and you for the rest of forever.”

Some part of me realizes I shouldn’t have said that out loud. That was my private thought. One for me. Because he wasn’t ready to hear it, right? Wasn’t that how it went? The other part of me watches Thomas’s face blanch, all emotion dripping right off the page as if he were a watercolor painting in the rain. And then I succumb to exhaustion and fall asleep.

I wake to the scent of bacon and eggs and coffee so strong even the smell is bitter. It must be Thomas, downstairs, cooking me breakfast just like he did before he got that text on the street and everything went sideways. Eager to run downstairs and join him in the kitchen, to tell him how much I’ve missed cooking with him, I lurch out of bed. I take just a few steps towards the door, but my stomach and the hundred or so Long Island Iced Tea’s I had last night have a very different idea as to how this morning should go. I divert myself to the bathroom and fall to my knees just in time to heave the entire contents of my stomach into the toilet in one big sloshing mess.

It’s strange that Thomas doesn’t come up to check on me, but maybe breakfast has his hands too busy. I wash my hands and face, rinse my mouth and then brush my teeth just to be on the safe side. My hair’s a disaster, so I just pull it back into a messy bun and lumber down the stairs.

“Believe me,” I say as I round the corner. “I want to run into your waiting arms, but this is the quickest pace I can -” I shut up and stop walking when I see who’s waiting for me in the kitchen. It’s definitely not Thomas.

“Oh,” I say to the dark haired vampire. “It’s you.”

He spreads his hands wide and smiles down at himself. “In the flesh.”

“I was expecting Thomas.”

“I see that.” He turns his back to me and reaches into my cabinet for a plate and begins dishing out my meal. “Thomas had to … go. And if it sounds like I’m being vague it’s because I am. He told me to tell you to eat, even if you don’t feel like it and that he had some thinking to do.” The vampire plonks a very spartan plate of bacon and eggs down on the table and pulls out a chair. “Whatever did you say to him? He was more out of sorts than usual.”

I think hard, taxing my pounding brain in an attempt to remember what happened after I got home. I remember Elijah carrying me out of my apartment. I remember asking Thomas not to alter their memories. I remember the room spinning, and then it’s just me waking up this morning. I shrug, worry straining my face. “I don’t know. Did he say anything?”

“Nothing more than what I’ve told you. Now, eat.”

My stomach, which was only going to mildly tolerate the food in the first place is now all constricted with worry over what I might have said and is very much not interested in eggs and bacon. Nevertheless, I dutifully spear a bit of the egg with my fork and put it in my mouth. I study the vampire’s dark features, his aquiline nose, his hair that’s was so black it somehow seemed to devour light, not even bothering to shine. His words twist and lilt, some accent I can’t quite place.

“What’s your name?” I ask after too much extended silence.

“The sounds and syllables of my name are more complicated than your tongue can handle. Most people call me the Babylonian.” And with that, he turns from me and watches a trail of snowflakes start to fall outside my window. What must it be to live in a world where no one remembers how to say your name? Are there others like him, others who think in a language lost to the world?

Despite my lurching stomach, I manage to finish the greasy breakfast and down a cup of coffee. I feel much better because of it. I’m cleaning up the considerable mess the Babylonian left in my kitchen when he pokes his head around the corner.

“Thomas just texted me. He says that he’ll be here later tonight to discuss your proposal from this morning.”

My proposal? What in God’s name did I say to him? “Did he mention anything at all about what it was?”

“Again, I’ve told you exactly what he’s told me. No more. No less.” He blinks slowly, looking very much like a cat. “I’m bored. I’ll be outside, keeping watch as instructed. Fear not, child. You are safe.” There’s something hard and ugly in his words, but I can’t figure out what or why. And right now, I honestly could care less. I don’t have time to decipher what’s wrong with a centuries-year-old vampire with a serious chip on his shoulder. I need to figure out just exactly what I said to Thomas that has him so out of sorts he had to leave to think about it.

The pounding in my head has lessened, so I pour myself another cup of coffee and force myself to think through the Long Island induced haze from this morning. I remember Mia and Elijah and their creepy journey across the courtyard. I remember … I focus hard, my eyebrows clenched together, chasing down the memory. And then I find it. And my heart stops and then hops around in my chest double time for a moment. I asked Thomas to turn me into a vampire last night. He can’t even bring himself to share blood with me, and I asked him to turn me completely.

My stomach’s heaving again and I want to throw up. What have I done? How could I have said it out loud? What’s he gonna say? What’s he gonna do?

I stand, unable to sit still, ready to run upstairs just for the sake of moving but two precise knocks on the door stop me in my tracks.

When I open the door, Thomas brushes past me only to turn around halfway to the couch and close the distance between us as I close the door. I want him to touch me, but he doesn’t.

“Did you mean it?” He’s moving again, leaving my side and striding over to the window near the table.

What can I tell him? Of course I meant it. The idea of being a vampire is thrilling. The idea of spending an eternity at his side? Well, that totally makes forever worth it. If being with Thomas is like this, then this is all I ever want. But how do I tell him that without setting off whatever emotional landmine I seem to have triggered? Do I avoid the topic completely?

“I was very drunk …”

He spins, not in the market for stalling and excuses. “But did you mean it?” The intensity in his voice has an odd effect on me. It doesn’t stress me out. It doesn’t make my decision regarding what to tell him any more confusing. I hear his need to know the truth and in that moment the most logical answer is to satisfy that need.

“Yes.” I don’t move even though I want to cross the room and fly into his arms. “I meant it.”

The look that clouds his face borders on desperation. “Why? How can you want this?”

I’m not sure if he wants to know how I could want him or how I could want his life. “When you say ‘this’ what exactly do you mean? There are two ways to answer that question. Which one do you want?”

“I want both.”

Of course he does. I answer the easy question first. I talk about how I feel so antsy all the time, how the prospect of real life doesn’t fill me with hope or relief, but dread. The prospect of working for some nameless corporation for all the days of my life, struggling to make ends meet, using up my youth and beauty on forty to fifty hour work weeks just fills me with defeat. And then what? Once I’m accomplished enough to afford all the time off I’d need to experience all that I want to experience in this world, I’ll be old and used up and too tired to actually care.

Being a vampire would extend the time I have on this planet to see all that I want to see and be all that I want to be. My expiration date is removed. I’ll have my youth and my beauty and I can learn an infinite number of new skills. I don’t have to choose between the things that interest me. I’ll time enough for them all.

“But as amazing as that sounds, that’s not the thing that sold me on wanting to become a vampire,” I say. Thomas isn’t looking at me. I’ve had to direct all of my words at the back of his head.

“Well if not that, then what?”

I’m eager to reach him. Eager to have him back. I don’t like all this distance between us. “You,” I say. “You sold me.” He turns ever so slightly and I catch his profile, illuminated against the window. “The time I’ve spent with you has changed me. I’ve never trusted anyone. Never let anyone into my heart. I’ve spent a lifetime of keeping myself at arm’s reach from everyone I’ve ever met. Somehow, for whatever reason, not with you. I love you, Thomas. I can’t imagine ever being without you. I can’t imagine saying goodbye to you and having to mean it.”

He sighs. His eyes drop to the floor and his lids slide closed. “Forever is a long time…”

“I’ve seen all the movies. Read all the books. This is the part where you try to tell me about how time changes a person and how I might not feel the same in a few decades.”

“You may have seen the movies, but I’ve lived through those decades you just casually dismissed. Time …”

“It stretches on. I get it. I’m staring at the next sixty years leading up to my death with dread. But with you-”

“And what will you do when I’m not around? What if I get bored? What if I leave you? I’ve lost someone I loved, someone I trusted, someone I thought would help me face eternity. How will
you
handle that?”

I blanch at the thought of him loving someone before me, someone he was truly ready to spend forever with. For me, there was no one of consequence before him. But the thought that I might share his heart with the memory of some failed relationship…? I don’t like the way it feels. “I didn’t know you’d lost someone.”

“Yes, you did. My sister. I told you about her.” And in that moment I’m flooded with relief that makes me feel ashamed. Here I am feeling better about myself because he’s lost someone he cares about but it’s ok because it’s a sister and not a lover. “She was my
stability.
She was my
world.
Everything I knew and loved has crumbled and disappeared. In the span of my lifetime there’s not been one thing that remained constant outside of my sister. And now that she’s gone? I have nothing to anchor myself to who I was. And, even after all this time, I’m not ready to forget the person I used to be in order to embrace the monster I am.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen pain like this before. I can’t handle not touching him. I cross the room and lay my hand on his shoulder. He flinches away at first, stabbing a deep wound of rejection into my heart, but I persist. After just a moment, he softens and turns towards me. I bury myself into his arms and press my forehead to his shoulder.

“It feels like I was made to fit right here,” I murmur, more to myself than to him.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

And in that moment I realize that when Thomas was asking how I’d handle it if
he
suddenly lost interest in me, what he really meant was that
he
was afraid that I’d lose interest in
him.
How can I prove to him that I was irrevocably in love with him? How can I prove that I want to be at his side for the rest of eternity?

I don’t know what else to say. It feels like we’ve come to the end of anything that could be said. If he’s not ready to turn me, then I’ll just have to be patient. Content in having him in the way I have him for as long as I get to. Thomas is quiet for a while, just holding me while he looks out my window. The snow’s tapered off, leaving just a dusting across the grass. White outlines on black branches. It’s beautiful.

“So,” Thomas says, breaking the silence with his voice like snow in the mountains, snow in the trees, “did you mean it?”

I don’t need to ask him what he meant. It’s clear that he’s asking me if I meant I could be with him forever. I don’t move. I don’t try to catch his eye and hope he sees the truth in my words. I don’t come up with another verbose explanation for why or how I know it to be true. I simply nod against his chest and say: “Ya. I meant it.”

He tenses slightly and I stay still, afraid that I’ve ruined the moment with my honesty. He moves away, just enough to raise my face to meet his with one touch of his cold finger to my chin. I let him study me, content in the connection.

“I love you.”

His words ring out like a bell even though he uttered the so quietly someone else in the same room might have missed them. But their reaction on me was monumental. My chest filled with warmth and my eyes misted with tears and everything was happiness and joy and I smiled. My entire body smiles.

“I love you, too.” I love having those words outside my head, hanging between us.

A languid smile traces his lips, almost chasing the pain and worry from his gorgeous gray eyes. “And you’re ready to face forever with me?”

I freeze. Is he really considering it? I can’t speak so I simply nod.

“You’re sure?”

I find my voice. “Very.”

He leads me to the couch and he explains how to make a vampire, the process we’d have to go through. I’m somewhat numbed by disbelief, but I try to focus on what he’s saying rather than the roar of excitement that’s happening in my head and heart. This is one thing the movies actually kind of got right. Three blood exchanges need to happen between the vampire and the mortal. Each time, the vampire’s blood needs to enter the human’s body just as her heart stops beating. The timing can be tricky. Apparently, we’d already fulfilled one of those exchanges the first night we’d met.

“So you killed me that night.”

“I did.”

“Why did you bring me back?”

“I couldn’t bear to destroy something so beautiful.”

“Did you intend to see me again?”

“No. I didn’t think I could trust myself around you. I didn’t … I don’t want to destroy you. I can’t fathom the thought of doing you harm.”

“It’ll harm me if you leave me to rot on this earth without you.”

My words seem to finally bring him to a decision. He nods and takes a long breath, letting it out with a heavy sigh. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

And then, just like the first night, Thomas moves towards me. He doesn’t ask permission. He doesn’t speak, he just takes me in his arms and tilts my head back so he has access to my throat. His teeth pierce my skin and tiny pin-points of pain flare up and subside as he sucks on my neck, pulling the blood from my veins. I grow light and dizzy and the world grows fuzzy and inconsequential. My heart slows, each beat like thunder echoing through my chest. My eyes slide closed and I’m content to be wrapped in Thomas’s arms for the last seconds of my life. I feel it in the heaviness in my chest and the lightness in my arms. I’m dying.

There’s some shuffling and scuffling, movement that jostles me and makes me frown. I just want to float away. And then there’s something pressing against my mouth and running through my parted lips and I swallow and life shoots through me. My eyes fly open and Thomas pins me with his gaze as I drink in long droughts from his wrist, his blood is cold in my mouth but warms my body. He sings to me. That song I didn’t recognize. That song that made me feel wistful and sad and that will forever on make me smile. While Thomas might have been its last keeper, he’s shared it with me and I will keep it with him. Together, we’ll make sure it’s not forgotten.

A jingling sound distracts me and I purse my brows in question. And then I recognize a key in my lock and the sweet lilting greeting Mia calls out as she enters my apartment. I pull my bloody face away from Thomas’s wrist and when she sees me she drops the keys to the floor and screams.