Thanks to the lovely people who reviewedlast time - thank you Cynical Leaf, Dead Flower, Me, Starwisher, Jen, Diomede, Night Goddess, Aquilla, Kitty Katt, Persephone, Angelphire, Meg, Angelic Angel, and the fabulous Ice Princess.
As might be obvious, I really love hearing what you think, both goods and bads; criticism will not offend me, honesty is cherished. Please do take a moment to review - it helps me improve the story.
The lyrics are from Green Day's gorgeous Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) which I fell in love recently. Lovely, mellow and acoustic song.
Remember Part Nine
So make the best of this test and don't ask why:
It's not a question but a lesson learned in time.
Aspen was asleep. That was his first mistake.
He had felt so safe, even in her disgustingly girly room in its pastels and prettiness, that for the first time since he could remember, he just curled up and caught up on twelve years of missed sleep. Her pillow smelled like the rosemary shampoo she always used, and it made him miss her.
Aspen couldn't imagine missing anyone.
But he couldn't imagine needing anyone so much, either. Maybe he loved her a little too. Not in the live-in-your-eyes-die-in-your-arms sense, or he didn't think so, not yet, but purely for her kindness and her fear and her courage in the face of that fear.
He also really, really wanted to bite her.
But he had got the impression last time that it wasn't too polite.
So there he was, in his floating empty sleep, absently walking the dreamwebs, when something woke him up.
There was a girl standing over him with a massive bruise on her face and a gun. He had a very nasty feeling of déjà vu.
He shouted for Tam. That was his second mistake.
Tamtamtamtamtam...
She was in some kind of a lesson, staring at squiggly symbols and numbers. For a brief moment, Aspen understood algebra, then she tuned in. Aspen? Are you okay?
That girl's come back! he shouted at her, panicking. She's got a gun, and she's pointing it at me!
Ellie?
I don't know! I haven't stopped to ask her name! It's the one from the party...the one Blue let shoot me.
She had asked him why he wasn't angry at Blue for that. "Do you get mad at your cat when it hunts mice?" Aspen had said with a shrug. "It's like being angry at rain for being wet." It was just vintage Blue. He'd known the guy for ten years, and he was like luck. Whimsical, weird and occasionally a right w-
Stay there, she ordered. He sensed her getting up, ignoring the teacher's startled question and tearing out the classroom like a mad thing. I'll be there in twenty minutes if I run. Call Blue...call Therese...
Done it already. He couldn't reach Therese, but Blue's cool voice was speaking in his ear. Aspen didn't know if it would work...but he could try. Don't know if-
Her mind cut out suddenly, and left him alone.
X - X - X - X - X
Rob blinked slowly.
There was an astonishing cobalt radiance above him, like a thousand kingfishers had spread wide their wings. Wait. No. That was the sky.
And he was lying on his back. But surely the sky wasn't so bright, and the sun didn't sear into his eyes like a blowtorch, and he normally never felt so strange...or...
"How do you feel?"
A face appeared over him, and a hand touched his forehead, strangely cool for the warm golden tone of her skin, a hand that swept short lines down to the sweat-dried curls of his hair. He looked at the round snake-like curve of her cheekbones, and the oddly flat nose, and the burning intensity of those dark eyes.
Oh no.
She was dangerous, she was very dangerous, and she had already bitten him once. But something...something was different this time. Her face seemed sharper, and he swore he could see the butterfly-flutters of her pulse in her lips and her skin, and hear the slither of her breath.
He could smell her too. Like clean sand and sweetly fragrant heaps of sawdust.
This was weird.
"Are you going to bite me again?" he said edgily, sitting up because at least that way he didn't feel so vulnerable. Unfortunately, it meant getting closer to her, but Rob solved that problem by scrabbling back at the same time until he was half-crouched away from her.
He was on the tennis court.
How had he got there? He remembered being bitten, and taking Tam's bizarre boyfriend home because he had been...hurt somehow, the details were hazy, and there had been strange nightmarish dreams, but the entire morning - or maybe it had been days, he didn't know - evaded him, lurking at the back of his mind like a taunting imp.
He could meet her eyes now, and the colour in them moved like a bird's shadow over a lake, rippling and changing strangely. Not black, like he had thought, but filled with deep swirling blues and surprisingly feminine glitters of pale yellow and green.
He didn't even notice he had crept forward to gaze at her until he was impolitely close, and staring with unabashed fascination.
She seemed to be having trouble forming words. "You're too close," she told him finally.
"Huh?" Rob blinked. How had he gotten this near? He moved back a little, marvelling at the way his movements seemed to melt into one another, and ignoring the little warning voice in his head. "Well...are you going to bite me?"
"No. Never again." The girl pursed her mouth, and the light rippled along it in white bars. Rob didn't even realising she was saying something until she stopped. "Did you hear a word of that?"
"Of what?" The light hit her face in strange ways too, and how had he never noticed the light collected in golden speckles on her cheeks? And how long her eyelashes were in strange contrast to the rest of that bare and smooth face, sleek and slender as otter's fur, and right now stark against the hollows of her sockets as her eyes widened.
Pretty, he thought. More than pretty, amazing, like watching a sunrise in someone's face. Seeing the world in a whole new way, only instead of being turned wonderful crimsons and pinks, she was a flushing gold.
"Robert!" The first time she had used his name, rolling the 'r's and making it rich, exotic, not pronouncing the 't'. Even her voice was different, thrumming with layers of music like a symphony. Keep talking, Rob thought dazedly, I have to hear more. "I changed you."
The words made no sense to him. Rob frowned. "I don't understand."
"I made you a vampire."
So flat, so easily said, but they thudded into him like bullets, one after the other.
I...
know that can't be true, said the little voice he had so stupidly ignored, but that now suddenly exploded at full volume, drowning out even the strange new brightness of the world. It
...made...
no sense. Common sense told him that things could be made but people were people. They just were. You couldn't make or unmake them and anyway, vampires didn't bite
...you...
or sink their teeth into your neck at a death of a party and tell you they would drown in you, and leave you so exhausted you collapsed and couldn't remember anything except strange and wonderful dreams and an odd sense of peace. But he knew that was
...a...
lie because she had. She had and he was a
...vampire.
X - X - X - X - X
"Hello," she said quietly, pointing the gun at him. Her eyes were bright and lustrous, rich as autumn leaves drenched in sunlight. "I don't suppose you remember me."
"I do," Aspen said flatly. He didn't know how pale his skin had gone, chalky and around his lips, almost blue. He didn't know that he looked suddenly very young.
She might have been considered beautiful. Her features were symmetrical, her lips lushly pouted and her eyes narrow, made sultry by the clean arcs of her bone-structure, and graced by smooth skin. Her clothes fitted perfectly, and she was even smiling.
They had been beautiful too.
She laughed, and the sound scuttled through him like a cockroach, making him clench his teeth against waves of revulsion that turned his skin into goosebumps. "Go on, then. Who am I?"
"You're a vampire hunter," he said quietly. Be calm, oh, be calm because people like this will drink your fear from the inside out and leave your empty shell to putrefy. "You're vermin, and you're called Eleanor something, and you hate Tam and you shot me."
"Wrong."
Aspen could only stare. He knew everything he had said was true, yet there was absolute confidence in her voice.
"I was all those things," she said calmly. She gave an odd little shake of her head, making the twisted loops of her earrings glitter. "But everything changes. Anastacia."
X - X - X - X - X
Runrunrun... How could it be so far to her house? It was only ten minutes by bus, but those minutes seemed to be stretching into eternity.
"Want a lift?"
The car that screeched to a halt beside her was an old sea-green Fiat, so battered it looked like it should have been crumbling on a scrapheap, or possibly in a museum. Blue gestured to the passenger door.
"What are...you do...ing here?" Tam gasped out between choking breaths.
"Aspen gave me a yell," Blue said casually. "Called in a favour I owe him. You know, did it not occur to you that leaving Aspen in your own home might be a fairly obvious place?"
"Has anyone told you you're a complete bitch?" Tam said furiously as she got in, throwing him the quelling glare that had made so many people apologise hurriedly. It was the one useful attribute she had inherited from her mother.
He flashed her an easy, charming smile that didn't reach the polar ice of his eyes. "Few have ever got to the end of the sentence."
He floored the accelerator and to Tam's extreme shock, the car took off like a rocket. Something this old should not be able to go at...ninety...three...miles an hour... "How old is this car?"
Blue looked over at her. Tam found it slightly disconcerting that he didn't seem to recognise that keeping your attention on the road was a vital part of driving. "Same age as me. Seventeen and a bit."
Tam had something she had been wanting to ask him, and now it flashed into her mind as forgotten resolutions so often do. She brandished her arm in front of him, neatly obscuring his vision and completely coincidentally, elbowing him in the nose.
"What the hell is this mark?" she demanded.
Unbeknown to her, Tam was the first person to startle Blue since he had first met Chatoya Irkil.
The blue eyes narrowed a touch, becoming two lines of sapphire in his pale face. "It's a guarantee."
"Of what?" Tam snapped. "It had better expire pretty damn quick, or there'll be..." Her words trailed off as Blue turned his stare on her. It was like being blasted by a blowtorch.
"You amuse me, vermin girl," he said softly. "Let me indulge you. That mark tells anyone belonging to a select range of organisations that they are free to kill you. And let me indulge you further and explain my motivations. I'm curious as to what happens if one's soulmate dies."
Tam felt her body ice over at the calculated coldness. "You know about soulmates."
"I have one." Blue tilted his head on one side, still utterly ignoring the road. "I also had a headache once. It too was a constant companion that interfered with my thoughts and my life. I got rid of it."
"You're a monster," Tam said flatly.
"Well, yes, but I don't like to boast." The brakes screamed, and Tam swore as she hit the front dashboard at a painful speed. But the pain was half-forgotten as she realised they were outside her house, and she could see a tall silhouette in her window, a silhouette she knew at once as Ellie.
She hardly heard Blue's parting, "Next time, wear a seatbelt." But oddly, she didn't hear the car pull away.
X - X - X - X - X
"Mwah?" was Aspen's brief and yet telling contribution. Then he recovered himself and said hysterically, "What did you call me?"
The laugh was bewitching. It rippled like a nightingale's song through his head, swathed in pure darkness. Chilling, haunting, utterly enthralling...
He had heard it before.
No, no, no...it must have been at the party, it had to have been at the party, because-
"It's true, my dearest," Eleanor whispered softly. Her eyes were shiny and full as conkers, briefly shielded by her eyelashes before she looked straight at him. "I don't suppose you remember, do you? We were in France then, of course, and you were just a shy court girl-"
"I'm a man!" Aspen said indignantly. "I have testosterone, and a deep voice, and facial hair, and certain anatomical features which I'm almost certain women don't have-"
She levelled the gun at him, and Aspen felt a sudden compulsion to be very silent and very still.
"What you are and what you were are two very different things," she proclaimed softly, and her full mouth curled upwards. He saw the curve of an axe in her lips, and the plump sheen of light on them matched the gleam of sunlight from a blade...
And he remembered.
Oh god...the whole sordid affair. An affair with this girl, only then she had been a man with rich dark-blue eyes like a swallow's wing, who had lured him away from Tam. But Tam had been different then too, she had been a Comte with land to keep, and fathoms deep in her soul that she had never let Aspen...or Anastacia see...Tam had been a man with steely grey eyes, eyes as fierce as they were now.
He had taken her aloofness for something it was not; he had made the same mistake in this life too, when he had first seen her. Thought of her as one of the proud and popular bitches that stalked around like they owned the world.
Then, she, the Comte had been the Nighteprson, and this fruitcake of a girl, this Eleanor, she had been a Nightperson too, and he the human.
And now, the positions were reversed.
Then, three hundred years ago, he had taken his own life. He had seen the love of the Other - this Eleanor - for the gaudy sham it was. It was lust, it was a desire to take Anastacia and tame her, and toy with her, and finally, Anastacia had cracked...or rather, her spine had in a noose.
Because he could see it now, see what he had not seen that last fatal time.
The darkness ran slick in Eleanor Saxoine's eyes, ran like a bubbling, terrible river of acid. It wanted to consume all it touched, to envelop all in herself.
She had hated Tam then, and it came back to him now, the cold clear words of the Other in that final evening.
He has everything. It has been handed to him on a platter, and he cares nothing! Well, I have taken what he shall miss, and I will destroy him. And the Other had fixed the tainted depths of his eyes on Anastacia, crouched there in her pretty dress with a bruise spreading the length of her side from where the Other had hurled her in a fit of rage. You're mine, pretty, and you don't ever mention his name again!
"You took me to hurt Tam," he said slowly, hardly able to believe it.
"Oh, but you were so pretty," Eleanor cooed. "I wanted you for you, too." Her face contorted. "But you wanted to go back to him!"
"You hit me," Aspen pointed out. Not once, not twice, but time after time because the Other could not control its - and nothing so cruel could be human - jealous rages, imagining Anastacia to be flirting with others, kissing others, whoring with others.
He could feel an indignant, strange anger rise in him. The anger of injustice, that the child he had been had once felt, that the French noblewoman he had once been too had felt every day. "I was chutney by the time you were done with me."
Her lips drew back and she snarled at him. The sound reverberated, low and ferocious. "You were mine but you thought of him!"
"If it's me you're after, why did you shoot me?" an irritated Aspen asked. This girl was loopier than a slinky, but the anger was getting to the point where he almost wanted her to shoot him.
It was why Therese and Blue had called him erratic. He didn't care if he died, just as long as he spited someone on his way out. Just as long as he didn't have to remember cowering in corners and waiting in shadows, just as long as this miserable life was gone-
Aspen! That voice, it was everything, and then he remembered why he couldn't die.
The suicidal rage was quenched, because Tam was nearby and Tam mattered to him more than anyone. If he died, he'd hurt her, and there was nothing worse than that.
They're right, Aspen thought evenly. I'm crazy. But she doesn't care about that, so neither do I.
"Why?" The gun shoved under his chin brought reality in - metaphorically - a shot. "I wasn't aiming for you. I was aiming for her! But she screamed and I was...distracted..."
The gun was drawn back. Eleanor stared down at him, and her face softened fractionally. "I never meant to hurt you," she murmured.
Aspen did a classic impression of a goldfish. "You arranged a bloody party to hunt me down and kill me!" he shouted.
Don't annoy her, Tam was saying. Oh god, where's the spare key, if Billy or Celia have taken it, I will kill them...
"No!" She shook her head vigorously. "Only to punish you. Not to kill. The other two...yes..."
"How did you know about us?" he said. They had been so careful - Blue had insisted.
Her laugh was harsh. "It was easy. I remembered the moment you arrived. Two years ago, when I had only just begun to find out about the Nightworld. I knew who you had been, and I had been a vampire myself, don't forget. It's easy to see others of your own kind...or who were my kind."
She spun wildly, smashing at the crystal windchimes in Tam's room until they shattered. Not caring about the flakes that cut her smooth skin. "Why should they be born with those powers, when I can't have them?" she cried desperately. "The first one we caught, I asked him to change me, but he wouldn't, he wouldn't...so I killed him. And I killed all of them. They didn't deserve immortality."
What are the prerequisites? Tam said sharply. Bloody minded insanity? Brutality? More problems than an agony aunt's column?
All, Aspen thought uncomfortably, qualities either he, Therese and Blue had. But they were exceptions, not the rule. And besides...he was going to change. If she wanted him to. He'd do anything for Tam.
"I tried so hard to feel guilty, you know," Eleanor said almost gently. "But in a way, I was glad when I shot you. You deserved it, for choosing her." Her hands caressed the gun in a way that was extremely disturbing. "How can I love what I hate?"
"You don't love me," Aspen said angrily.
Got it! Tam crowed. Her mind was cut off from him for a second in her victory.
"But I do," Eleanor insisted. "That's why I'm going to kill Tam."
Aspen managed a spate of inarticulate consonants.
Faint dreamy smile. "Daddy gave me a good Christian upbringing."
What, he burnt her on a pyre daily? Tam snapped. Her feet on the stairs, stealthy but swift. Along the corridor, avoiding the squeaky floorboards with childhood ease: grace and humanity mingled in a way that awed him. I know 'Daddy' and the only thing he gave her was a credit card and a superiority complex. I'm going to slap her stupid... She hadn't heard what Eleanor said and he had to warn her now-
No! Apsen shouted. Don't come up here, Tam, it's not me she wants to hurt, it's you, it's you and it was always you...
But too late, the door was opening and he saw, as if in slow motion, Eleanor turning and raising the gun in the instinct of the shocked; truimph roared in her eyes as she saw Tam.
"Well, if it isn't the Comte," Eleanor purred.
He felt the explosion like fireworks searing wildly across the sky as memories burst into Tam's mind.
We're...here again, her voice said in his head; but it was two voices, one laid over the other in perfect harmony. I remember this. I remember how it must be.
"You leave him alone!" Tam snapped, her eyes flicking to Aspen. Funny, he thought dreamily, how they could be the same colour as Eleanor's...yet so different, so warm and kind.
"Oh, I won't leave him alone," Eleanor said coyly. He saw Tam's face change as the gun was levelled at her. "After all, he'll have me. This time, there is no choice."
"Are you mad?" hissed Tam, his soulmate, his saviour, more than he had dreamed.
Get out! Aspen shouted at her. Tam, she has a gun! Those things hurt. I know!
She turned her stare on him briefly, and for the first time, he saw the Comte's cold determination still in her, rising from where it had been buried. No. I remember what happened last time I left you. I will not do it again.
I'll be fine! he said desperately. It's you she wants to hurt, not me.
Mon ange, she said gently, and the words were an arrow in his soul, do you even know what she is? She's not a person, she's evil. Old evil. Did she tell she loves you, mon ange, and smile her pretty smile, and promise not to hurt you if only you'd choose her?
How did you...?
Because there's more to the story than you know, mon ange. The eyes that were focused on him appeared almost grey for an instant, and hauntingly sad. After you killed yourself, she came to see me. She brought an army with her, mon ange, and massacred my people. And me, finally. When I knew what she was. Pain flowing through to him, and underneath...
He could feel Tam fighting against this knowledge, feel her fear. She was scared of losing herself in these memories; of forgetting who Tamara Slone was.
"What is she?" he asked gently.
A dry laugh resounded about him, but it did not belong to Tam. Eleanor Saxoine was chuckling quietly, though her eyes were nothing human. Nothing recognisable.
"She'd call it evil," Eleanor said softly. "But all I am is death, pretty."
He shook his head dumbly, frozen by the inhuman artfulness that glimmered in her face. Something old, and something sly that tilted her smile into a crooked twist and moved with jerky speed.
"I like your fear," she whispered. "It tastes like honey."
She feeds off fear, he thought. There was something...something...
"You're a wraith," he said flatly. Yes. Blue had told him once, when they were discussing extinct Night creatures. Wraiths, the trapped spirits of the cruel who refused to leave the world and instead, infested body after body until that person died. Malign, mad beings who lived for the suffering of others, who fed on it.
He had sometimes thought Blue was a wraith. But Blue wasn't mad. Only wrong.
"Well done, pretty!" she said brightly. "Now which of you goes first? Her, I think...she's only afraid for you...but you're afraid for both of you."
She raised the gun.
Aspen had never even imagined anything could move so fast.
But Blue leapt through the window like a burning bullet, dragonfire haloed around him, knocking the gun.
A picture on Tam's wall shattered with the erratic shot as Aspen threw himself across the room and pulled her down behind the door. "Stay down," he whispered, leaving Blue to do what he was so, so good at.
Black fire crawled across Eleanor Saxoine as Blue wrapped his hands around her throat quite calmly, and the sounds that came from her mouth were unearthly and dreadful. Rising higher, and higher, and higher-
A pale green light seemed to leap from her body, and Aspen thought he glimpsed a screaming, raging face in it for a second before it was scattered into ethereal dust.
"Talk about regular exorcise," was Blue only dry remark. "Interesting. And we thought they'd died out."
The human girl was limp in Blue's grasp, unconscious.
"Oh my god," Tam was repeating into his shoulder, over and over again. Aspen tried not to wince at the pain, but let her clutch him with feverish hands, begging him to tell her that she hadn't seen that, that it was a nightmare, a dream, anything... "Stop me remembering," she was saying, "please, I don't want to see. Aspen, Aspen...it hurts so much..."
He held her head in the curve of his neck as he saw Blue drop the human to the ground. Take out a knife. Spread Eleanor Saxoine's hand on the floor. Cut off the trigger finger.
"No more hunts," Blue said softly. His smile gleamed like dawn on glass. "We're even now, Martin."
"We're even," Aspen agreed, as he felt Tam begin to cry into his shoulder. No one could be strong forever. "Take that vermin with you, Malefici. She doesn't belong here."
Not in Tam's home, this place of security and comfort, of family and friends. This home that he would make his, because it was quite clear to him now that Tam needed him too, even if she didn't always know it. She didn't understand the Nightworld. She didn't know what she was dealing with.
And even though she cried for a long time in his arms, amidst the wreckage of her room, Aspen thought that he had never been so content.
It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right
I hope you had the time of your life.
X - X - X - X - X
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