The last thing I was expecting after a day like this was dreaming of Adrian.
The funeral had been small, as my mother had promised. Only my family, Abe, Mark, and Oksana had come. Only I had met Rose personally before, so there wasn't much to say. After several shots of vodka, I wasn't so self-conscious about being the under the spotlight anymore, and the words flowed more easily, but I was still every bit as antisocial as I always had been so all the while I was secretly hoping everyone would leave.
My mother said beautiful words of acceptance and love, telling everyone what happened and how she was grateful for Rose's bravery and unselfishness. She gave me the opportunity to speak then, and my mind went blank as I faced the task in front of me, experiencing a weird form of stage-fright.
I ended up telling them about the night of St. Varvara's and the scavenger hunt, and we laughed together through the whole narrative of Rose struggling to have the most points to win dark chocolate bacon truffles for Christian. She had told me about the boy's misfortunes, hoping that I would let her finish the tasks without reporting her to Alberta. However, even if he wasn't the reason she was competing, I think I would have helped anyway. It was kind of pathetic, but I knew that if she asked me to jump, I would never question how high.
It had been one of the most thrilling moments of my life – the possibility of getting caught made everything more vivid. I felt like I was a teenager, my body full of adrenaline. Actually, I had never felt like that when I was an actual teenager. Sure, I misbehaved a lot and did my share of rule-breaking, but I guess Rose had a way of intensifying every experience.
That was something I never thought I would tell anybody, but seemed suitable for the situation in hand. It was me remembering her, not as my star-crossed lover, but as the girl I fell for, the one who would turn the school upside down just to win a box of candy to cheer up her friend.
If she ever heard me saying those things, I think she would have accused me of giving sappy speeches, and told me to get to the point. Deep down, however, I think she would have been touched. I knew sometimes I could sound pretentious – Rose's annoyance with my "Zen life lessons" proved that much – but there were things that deserved big words and epic monologues, things that were hard to explain exactly because of their simplicity. I hadn't been graced with the gift for briefness.
Abe kept quiet as my sisters offered their condolences, as did Mark and Oksana. The Spirit user's expression was ashamed yet resolved: she hadn't wanted to interfere by compelling me into coming back to my family, but didn't regret her decision. I understood that now, my anger completely forgotten. I wasn't better, not really, but something inside me felt right for the first time in ages, and I owed it to her. Yeva kept to herself, her expression unreadable, and my mother walked around, refilling our glasses and making sure we ate everything she cooked.
"I guess you should speak too," Yeva pointed out after a while, looking directly at Zmey. "She was your daughter, after all."
He shrugged. "I have nothing to say."
My grandmother scowled at him. He grimaced and kept drinking his vodka, looking down.
I caught Oksana and Mark exchanging a few weird glances, as if they were arguing mentally. As soon as they saw me looking in their direction, their faces turned reserved. I wasn't interested enough on whatever it was that made them disagree to keep wondering about their strange behavior, so I just shrugged it off and kept to myself until everybody left and I was able to go to my room.
By the time I had the opportunity to sleep, I was pretty drunk and decided to take a shower to clear my thoughts. Undressing and making my way to the bathroom through the deserted hallway, I replayed the last month in my head in the hopes of finding some sense in my life during the drunken haze, but only succeeded at getting a headache.
After a long shower that didn't help at all, I laid down to sleep, and as I started drifting the world around me shifted and I was taken to a place I thought I wouldn't see so soon: St. Vladimir's school library. I could hear Boney M's Rasputin playing in the background and that should have been the first sign to what I was about to face, but my brain seemed to be on a holiday.
"My favorite cradle robber," I heard his voice from behind me, and turned around to find Adrian Ivashkov smirking at me. "Actually, since you chose to rob the cradle I was rocking, you are not eligible for the number one position in my ranking, but you get the point."
I growled. Rose had told me about Adrian's ability of walking into people's dreams, but I had never experienced it before. It was actually fairly similar to reality, but there was an intangible quality to my surroundings, as if my brain was aware that everything could crumble down at any moment from now.
"If I had wanted to be around you, I would have stayed at St. Vladimir's, Adrian," I answered, not as calmly as I would have if I was talking to any other person.
"Do you really believe I want to see you, John Wayne? You represent everything that is wrong with my life; if I had a shrink, I would tell him bad things about you, and I'm not even sorry." He was joking, but I could see something brewing underneath the surface. Adrian had an easy-going nature and was a people's person – he was pretty good at hiding his true feelings. My experience of observing things behind the stage left me no doubt, though: he was hurting, and he was uncomfortable.
"Maybe you should see a shrink," I retorted whilst leaving my voice light and playful, trying to tease him and make him feel more at ease without even realizing what I was doing, "that way you wouldn't feel the need to bother me when I'm trying to get some sleep."
He snorted. "Wouldn't I? Not many shrinks have guardian training."
I waited for him to elaborate, but his theatrical personality would have me following a script he undoubtedly had rehearsed in his mind.
"What do you need my guardian training for?" I conceded. He smiled lazily.
"This may come as a surprise to you, but the only thing I need you to do is protecting your charge."
That declaration made me stop dead in my tracks.
"What happened to Princess Vasilisa?" I immediately though of waking up after collecting the information I needed and heading back to the US to keep her from danger. It was like I couldn't turn my training off, not even in my sleep. As I mentally planned my trip, Adrian cocked his head to the side and eyed me warily.
"Nothing. At least not yet," he responded, and I relaxed a little, waiting for the rest. "She's struggling with the darkness without…" he took a deep breath, "Rose to take it away. The thing is, I don't think she wants to fight it anymore. We thought she was taking her pills again but found out that she had been throwing them away.
"The cuts have been getting deeper. Christian is freaked out. She won't let him in, won't share anything with him. There's this girl who tried to become friends with her, Avery, who is very fun to hang out with but Lissa shied away from her and completely lashed out at us one night after we suggested she should have fun. She thinks we are trying to replace Rose. The only person she's not mad at is you, not even after you left. Actually, I believe she isn't mad at you because you left. I think she finally found out that you were more than a mentor to Rose. I don't know why it took her so long."
My heart broke at the thought of such a good person in this fragile mental state, especially being able to understand her pain, to some extent. We were both bonded to Rose in different ways. I wanted her to be okay, and it frustrated me that in order to do that I would have to leave my search for her best friend behind.
I was certain of what Rose would have chosen if she had been in my place. She wouldn't have thought twice before saying yes to Adrian and going back. That, I thought, was the main difference between the two of us. There wasn't much I could do for Lissa as it was, but I was ashamed of my next words nonetheless.
"I'm sorry, Adrian, but I'm not Rose. I can't replace her, and I can't take the darkness away. Lissa needs a doctor, not me."
He seemed a little thrown off by my response, but the surprise in his eyes became anger as he realized there was a refusal behind my words.
"I know you are not Rose, she was a much better person than you," he snapped, "but I thought you had at least a bit of decency left inside you to leave your vacation and do something for the person the woman you claimed to love swore to protect."
His face was flustered, and his confused, sincere words cut open my much abused chest. I grimaced, making him noticing something for the first time during this conversation, looking just above my head with a vacant expression. He was reading my aura, I realized. When his eyes came back to mine, I could see him struggling with whatever he had seen.
"You are not in a vacation, are you?" his voice was quiet and his eyes went back to the top of my head, waiting for my answer.
"I thought you had figured that one out ever since I left."
He cursed under his breath.
"You are hunting her? God, you are even crazier than I thought. I thought… I just assumed you really needed time for yourself, I mean… I could see that you loved her and when she… God, what the fuck."
I cocked my eyebrow at his heresy but made no commentaries on the matter. After a while and plenty of swearing, he recomposed himself enough to mention the elephant in the room.
"You know that Lissa is alive, right? You can actually save her, as Rose would want you to. I mean, if anything happens to her when you are away, you'll probably lose your job, or worse. Not that I care about you, but Rose is beyond help right now. Drop it, Cowboy. Come home."
I just stared at him, thinking about all the times I had to put my needs and my well-being behind in order to deal with Moroi. They didn't come first. Not anymore.
"I'm looking after Rose, Adrian, because nobody ever did," I finally said, after a long, charged silence. "Lissa is surrounded by people who love her and care about her. She will come through this; she's strong enough to be alone and I've known that since the day we met."
Conjuring a pack of cigarettes from… well, wherever, Adrian lighted up one as the background music changed to Kiss from a Rose, by Seal.
"Do you think this is a joke?" I couldn't believe him. He seemed confused, so I gestured to the radio resting in one of the tables.
It was like he was noticing the soundtrack for the first time. He grimaced.
"The music wasn't supposed to change, but sometimes dreams will do that. You know, pick things from your subconscious and use them without your permission." Urge Overkill's Girl, You'll be a Woman Soon started playing then, and I rolled my eyes at his choice.
"You make it really hard to hate you with your warlord propaganda, you know. All manly, doing manly things in a manly way," he told me after some consideration, his tone somewhere between lively and bitter. "And now you are acting like fucking Buffy in a leather duster, going after your soulless lover to release her from being a demon, and it's no wonder I have issues after you chose to fall for the same girl I did."
I didn't answer. For one, I had never watched Buffy, so his reference was lost on me. Also, the declaration of his love for Rose made me feel uncomfortable.
"Oh, come on!" He said, exasperated. "You never watched the show? What kind of half-vampire are you? You should at least be aware of the plot. I won't be able to communicate with you without using an obscene amount of metaphors and pop culture slang." I shrugged. "I guess there aren't many Westerns about undead vampires that I could use to prove my point."
"Not that I'm aware of."
He thought about it for a moment.
"I take it you know Orpheus?" He asked.
"I'm not an illiterate brute, you know," I stated, annoyed.
He laughed at my expression. "Yeah, I'm aware. Rose loved to complain about your reading habits. If anything, I'm surprised at myself for thinking about it. Take a moment to appreciate the rarity of this moment: Adrian Ivashkov, referencing an Old Greek myth during an ordinary conversation. You left me no choice in the matter, though."
"Talking to someone in a dream is hardly ordinary, Adrian, no matter the subject."
"Well, I guess," he conceded. "Anyway, as Moroi are really into this kind of stuff, I took several classes concerning the Greeks and slept through most of them, but this was something that really marked me. Talk about bad luck, right? I mean, there is Oedipus, marrying his mother and ending up in psychology books, and that's a bummer, but nobody screwed up like Orpheus."
We fell silent for a moment, my mood plummeting. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was actually one of my favorite stories of all times. After his soulmate died on the day of their wedding, Orpheus – a son of Apollo with a talent for music so pure he could make grown men cry with a single note – picked his lire and played it, never stopping, until he opened a passage to the Underworld. When he got there, he demanded that Hades gave back the woman he loved, and the god conceded to let Eurydice follow her lover to the land of the living, but there was a catch. On the way back, she would be behind him but Orpheus had to look ahead all times, no matter what happened. Agreeing to Hades conditions, the man started his journey but as the hours passed he felt more and more alone, until he couldn't help himself and decided to turn around, just to see Eurydice being taken away from him for his own stupidity.
"Sometimes I think that is the only thing you should be able to do if you love somebody," Adrian muttered in a strange tone that made me shiver, wondering if this was another Spirit's episode.
"What? Singing your way to Hell to get them back from the dead?" My joke fell flat and he didn't reply for a long while.
"Being able to keep walking and never turning around," his tone and expression were wistful, almost sad. That phrase was the last thing I heard before drifting back into a dreamless sleep.
The next morning, my head was hurting like hell and I could use some more sleep, but my grandmother wasn't having it. Yeva woke me up in the crack of dawn and made me go downstairs without telling me why I was needed there. I knew better than to complain; I valued my life too much to cross her.
To my surprise, I found Mark, Oksana, and Abe, all up, drinking black coffee and waiting for me. My mother was in the kitchen, preparing something for us to eat. I sat down in silence, my hangover forgotten for the time being, and waited for someone to start talking.
To my surprise, it was Oksana who broke the silence. Her face was pleading, her tone passionate.
"Mitya, I've known you since we were kids and I consider the Belikovs an extension of my own family. You all know that. So when you came to us I panicked after seeing you in so much pain. I'm sorry for making you do something you didn't want to."
I nodded, waiting for her to continue. She hesitated briefly before speaking.
"Mark and I discussed this and he was against it, but I know that it doesn't matter if we say this or not, you are not staying. I can see it in your aura, and everyone else gave you their blessings. So, I guess if there's a possibility of this being true, you should know about it."
I tensed, not sure why, and so did Abe. Yeva looked ahead of herself, seeming lost in thought.
"When I was learning about my powers, we crossed paths with an odd man, the only other Spirit user I have ever known. His name was Robert Doru. He, too, had a bondmate who was killed, and it broke him, taking his sanity away. Most of the things he said shouldn't be taken too seriously because of his mental state, but... well, he used to claim that he could bring Strigoi back to life; he had done it once."
Suddenly, the room temperature seemed to drop several degrees. Everyone was dead quiet, like no one was even breathing. My mind could only produce incoherent thoughts of surprise and hope, but my cautiousness was there as well and I knew I needed more details before jumping into conclusions.
"How?" Abe questioned before I could, breaking the trance; he seemed as anxious as I was for the response.
"We don't know for sure. He never told us the mechanics of the restoration. This could be a fairy tale, for all we know." Mark didn't look pleased.
"Is this man still alive?" I asked. To my surprise, Abe was the one to respond.
"Yes, he is. Robert Doru is Victor Dashkov's illegitimate half-brother." Abe knew all about my involvement with Victor's trial and how I had testified against him.
"Do you know where we can find Robert?"
"No, and he won't be too easy to track down. The last I heard he was living as a hermit somewhere. Victor will be the only one to know the exact place."
I almost punched the table in frustration. Victor was rotting away in one of the most secure prisons in the whole world, so talking to him wasn't exactly an option.
Abe seemed to be considering something as he got up and went outside, his phone in his hand. Everyone waited for him to come back, and when he did I could see I wasn't the only one surprised by the huge grin stamped across his face.
"Leave the task of finding Robert to me. I have my resources and sooner rather than later I will come across a clue. But before I get to the bottom of this, Belikov, I want you to be aware that I won't let you kill my daughter, not unless we have proof that she's hopeless."
I looked at him like he was insane.
"What, so we just let her loose?"
"Don't be ridiculous. We'll have to find her and restrain her."
Everyone joined me, staring at Abe and wondering what was his problem.
"Once we have her, she won't be killing anybody and we can perform whatever we need to in order to bring her soul back," he explained like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Despite of myself, I was starting to overlook the flaws in his logic and find the plan appealing. "I need to know if you would do the honors, Oksana."
Mark was livid. "This is too dangerous! The amount of Spirit involved in something like this will be huge."
I agreed with Mark. "This is too much to ask from someone, Abe. I've seen what Spirit darkness can do. If anyone wishes to do it, they should think about it a lot first. She doesn't even know what needs to be done."
"Well, I guess," he conceded. "But that is a matter for later. For now I need you to agree on leading a group of guardians to capture Rose," he turned to me, with a hard expression, as if he was daring me to say no. "You are the only one who can find her."
So that was it. There was a possibility that there was a possibility to bring the woman I loved back. It seemed like the wildest leap of faith in history, but it also wasn't much of choice. I couldn't ignore this information, not only because Abe wouldn't let me but because I needed to try everything. I could never give up hope. My mind went back to Adrian's words. The only thing you should be able to do if you loved somebody – not looking back, trusting that the bad times would end so you could be together in this life or the next. As the cards had signaled, one way or another, this would come to a closure, and the only thing I sure of was that I'd be by Rose's side soon.
"Yes. Yes, I will do whatever it takes."
A/N.: Two chapters in two days, a record for me! I'm anxious to get to the point, and I'm sure you are too. I hope you liked Adrian's appearance.
My username comes from a song called It's Never Over, by Arcade Fire (this chapter's soundtrack). I remember reading SB and thinking about Rose's journey, how similar it was to Orpheus', and the idea was stuck with me until now. If you enjoy comic books, Neil Gaiman revisited the myth beautifully in a Sandman'sspecial.
Anyway, do you have any songs to recommend me? Songs that make you think of VA or your favorite ones?
See ya!