Almost Everything (32 page)

“I’m mortal and dying,” he said, “but not today.”

I nodded, feeling
it to be true. I didn’t know how long he had, but it was probably months rather than moments. “You’re hungry.” I realized the sensation rumbling through my guts actually belonged to him. “You’ll feel stronger if you eat.”

He looked shocked. “But the hunt is over. …”

“Mortal food,” I explained, cutting him off. “You haven’t had anything real in that atrophied mortal stomach of yours for a zillion years, Dad. Have a bagel or something. It’ll do wonders.”

I started to stand up to fetch him something from the pantry, but Mom was already on it with an irritated, “Oh, I’ll get it.”

I sat back on my heels. Wait, was she actually upset because Dad was hurt? WTF? I thought that fire had cooled sixteen years ago. I shook my head. I could cope with my dad finally acting like a decent person, but Mom too? No, that was too much.

Dad caught my expression and said, “Fussed over by two queens. I feel pretty special.”

“Don’t get too used to it.” I laughed. Mom might be acting cool now, but I couldn’t imagine it lasting once he regained some strength. “But I don’t want your job, Dad. Or this piece of your soul. Can’t I give it back?”

He gripped my arm and shook his head vehemently.

“I wish you could,” he said. “But what’s done is done. I made a mistake, and now I have to pay for it.”

It was so
unfair. My dad had tried to do the right thing. I felt deeply sad for him, and I wanted to take care of him. I rubbed my eyes. I wanted to go home and crawl under the covers. I looked at Dad quivering piteously under a blanket. “Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was weird, but I couldn’t stand the idea of him just wandering off and dying somewhere alone. “You should come live with us,” I offered suddenly. “We’ve even got a place completely cut off from the sun because Elias needed it.”

“I suppose I don’t,” my dad said softly, his voice light with amazement. “Not anymore.”

“What? You mean you can stand the sun again? That’s great. In that case,” I said as Mom came back with a toasted bagel and cream cheese in her hand, “you can stay in the craft room! We can turn it into a guest bedroom. Can’t we, Mom?”

Mom flashed me a horrified and angry look, but said, “Yes, I suppose we can arrange something like that.”

Dad did a double-take at my mother’s agreement. “You would put me up in your own home, Amelia?”

“I said we might be able to come to a suitable arrangement,” she said stiffly. When I started to protest, she raised her hand. “But, seeing as you have no place to go at the moment, we could put you up temporarily.”

Leaning in conspiratorially, Elias said, “I can vouch for the accommodations, but be cautious of her tea.”

Mom looked affronted. “What was wrong with my tea?”

I rolled my eyes. “Only the fact that you were trying to poison him, Mom.” She looked at me blankly, so I continued. “To enslave everyone? Remember?”

“You think
that was what I was doing?”

“Well, yeah,” I said, and Elias backed me up with a curt nod. In case she tried to deny it, I added, “I heard Mr. Kirov ask if the potion had worked. He said something about binding the vampires.”

“The vampire hunger,” Mom said. “Bind the vampire’s hunger. I’m surprised you could understand him at all with his thick accent and spotty command of English. Look, I was trying to come up with a potion that would cure the effects of the hunger.”

I was ready to call bullshit when Elias said, “That was why it came back so strongly.”

Mom looked at my surprised expression. “Didn’t you notice that you hadn’t been hungry until the day after we skipped our nightly tea ritual?”

My stomach had growled at breakfast that very morning.

Oh. Now I felt stupid. A deep blush colored my cheeks. I couldn’t believe it. Mom had been trying to help? But what about that spell she’d cast? “You tried to zombify me again that morning. I felt your magic trying to hold me down.”

“Zombify?” Mom’s expression crumpled into deep hurt. “If that was what you thought, no wonder you ran away! It was protection! From the effects of the hunger. Why do you think I was so upset when I found out you’d bitten Nikolai at the picnic?”

Blurgh. Could this have been more a comedy of errors? What else could I do but apologize? “I’m sorry,” I said.

“We should
try to trust each other a little bit,” Mom suggested.

“A good first step in vampire-witch relations,” my dad muttered with a bit of a laugh.

I hadn’t thought about that. If I was the queen of the vampires and Mom was the queen of the witches, what was it going to be like living in the same house? I smiled at the thought of the first time she demanded I clean my room. I could shoot back that I’d do it, but she had to give vampires a free pass to something. This could be very weird, indeed.

But, to be fair, I’d just learned that Mom had turned out to be not nearly as evil as I thought. In fact, she’d been trying to help all along. Maybe things would work out.

A sickly cough racked my dad’s slender frame.

I rubbed his back. He looked up at me, his eyes watery. “I’ll be okay.”

I could sense his lie, but I let him keep it. “I know,” I said.

He looked at his hands and flexed his fingers as if he’d never noticed the lines on them before. “So fragile,” he said. “So breakable. It will be strange living as a human again.”

I looked at my own pale hands. What about me? If my soul was now part of all the vampires, did I still have some of it in me? “Am I still a vampire? I mean, I must be if I’m queen, but do I still have the powers?”

“I suppose we won’t know until you try,” Dad said. “But I imagine you’re going to be a kind of supervampire, able to tap into the power of everyone in the kingdom.”

“Supervampire queen,” Nikolai muttered from where he sat, alone, at the bar, nursing a Pepsi. I hadn’t even realized he was still there. “Great. My dad is going to freaking love that.”

Mom offered
to take me home in her car, but I explained that I had some unfinished business with Nikolai. Elias and Dad arranged to meet back at our house before sunrise. I guessed Elias was going to arrange some kind of vampire meet-up in the meantime to tell the kingdom what happened to Dad and me and everything. I almost wished I could go with them. I had no idea if the vampires would accept me as their queen. But, then again, if they didn’t, that meant I could go back to a normal life. Well, at least as normal as it could be with me linked to God knows how many vampires on some weird blood/psychic level.

Sheesh. When I screwed things up, I really did it
royally
.

I settled into the passenger side gingerly, mindful of the myriad of skin abrasions all over my body. The bumpy ride down to the main drag had me gritting my teeth in order to hold back a stream of curses.

Nikolai was quiet as we drove.

I spent the first twenty minutes not knowing how to start. I kept looking at Nikolai, trying to find the words. I knew I needed to be clear, straightforward, in a way that left no doubts. I had to tell him that I was with Thompson right now, and that it was unfair to Thompson to assume things were doomed. I didn’t want Nikolai waiting for me. But, every time I turned to tell him, I caught sight of his face. He looked so pensive and serious, and … handsome.

Then I started
thinking how unfair it was that Thompson had the unfortunate timing to have asked me out a few hours before Nikolai kissed me. If he hadn’t, I could be dating a rock star again.

I dithered so long that it was Nikolai who spoke first. “I can’t believe you’re the queen of all the vampires. Do you even know how much this sucks?”

Given the constant buzz behind my eyes and the painful way I flinched every time a headlight flashed, I had some idea. But I didn’t think he meant the physical side effects. “I suppose that makes things awkward, huh?”

“A little,” Nikolai said.

“Plus, I’m dating someone else.”

“There is that.”

“So I guess there’s no ‘us,’ right?”

He gave me a little frustrated grimace. “Not right now. I’ll never stop loving you, Ana.”

I had no answer for that, so that was all we said for the rest of the drive home. Even though he sped off the instant I closed the door, I thought that had gone pretty well, considering.

Mom put in a surprising amount of effort to make the craft room nice for my dad. She and I moved some things around to make room for the foldout couch that we’d had stored in the carriage house. It wasn’t much, but then, as much as I hated to think about it this way, if the remains of his soul continued to slip away, it wasn’t as if he’d be staying with us that long.

At any
rate, he seemed very appreciative. Elias helped Dad up the stairs. One of the stops they made must have been to some Igor’s house, as Dad came fully dressed and with a grocery bag full of clothes. I brought him up a glass of iced tea. He seemed utterly fascinated by the taste of it. Likewise, he was completely mesmerized by the TV; I was almost afraid to show him Mom’s iTouch. It was a little heartbreaking, though, seeing him so excited by everything.

I pulled Elias aside while Mom showed Dad how to work the DVD player. I’d noticed he hadn’t brought his rucksack back. “What about you? Where are you going to stay?”

“I have places,” he said.

“I know you don’t get along with Mom, but you could stay in the basement a little while longer.”

He gave me a patient smile. “It’s a generous offer, but I don’t think a married man should live in someone’s mother’s basement, do you?”

“Did I miss something? You didn’t already do the ceremony, did you?”

“No, but it will be done soon enough.”

“That guy is a creep. … Hey, I’m queen of Prince Luis too, right? I could just order him to forget about the whole thing.” I was surprised by how much the thought of really losing Elias affected me. “I want you to stay with me. I’m going to need you now more than ever.”

“You’ll have your father at your side. He would make an excellent adviser to the queen.”

“But you don’t even like that captain guy, do you?”

“You know I don’t. I know you don’t like it, but your father and I discussed this. I will return,” he said ominously. “And this alliance will serve as an advantage to you down the line. I will always be from the Northern Kingdom. You will always be my liege.”

A tear
rolled down my nose. I wanted to tell him how much I cared for him, but my feelings for Elias had always been complicated. If only I could just clearly say, “I love you,” but I couldn’t form the words.

Maybe he could feel my thoughts. I certainly felt the warmth of his affection as he kissed my cheek. “The captain is a minor distraction. I won’t be in the South for long,” he whispered in my ear. “The blood bond we share lasts forever.”

It turns out vampire confarreatio ceremonies are even more boring than regular weddings, with all the ancient, flowery language and various political declarations. I don’t know what Mom was talking about with the cake either. It was awful, made out of a crunchy, grainy muck someone told me was “spelt.”

However, the venue was oddly lovely: an abandoned warehouse on the riverfront. Everyone had brought candles, as if for Midnight Mass, and the points of light were like hundreds of stars. I could feel the contentment and joy in the air, which helped me not be so distracted by everyone’s nakedness. It was especially weird to see Elias without his clothes on. I’d gotten used to how he looked dressed. My dad, meanwhile, sat beside me in a heavy wool sweater and jeans. It was warm enough that I wore a dress I’d bought just for the occasion; it was silver and sleeveless with a scoop down the back. Even Mom admitted I looked glamorous and queenly in it.

I swore
Elias kept catching my eye as he intoned his oath to his new partner, and I felt our bond humming stronger with each word. If Captain Creepy sensed it, he would have had a strong case for an annulment—if you could get one of those for a confarreatio. Instead, I really tried to avoid seeing him sans clothes, and my stomach did a little sour twinge when I accidentally caught sight of the two of them together.

I spent a lot of my time focusing closely on Elias’s face or looking around at the décor. I could see he wasn’t all that into this, but he held himself with his usual grim resolve.

I hoped he’d be okay.

As stuffy and dull as the ceremony had been, the dance afterward was the opposite. Vampires always threw a kind of wild, hypnotic party and, despite my breaking heart, I lost myself in the swirl and chaos of it.

A day later, Elias was packed and gone. I wondered, despite his promise, if I’d ever see him again.

With everything I had going on and finally finishing driver’s ed, I didn’t really get to have a proper talk with Thompson until a rainy day out at Festival. After cast call, a lot of people went back to hide in their tents. Mom wouldn’t let me stay out on the grounds, so I found my way to the Irish cottage. It was exactly what it sounded like. Out in the middle of a grassy patch some distance between the food stalls and the jousting track, sat a whitewashed, single-room cottage. A fire was blazing warmly inside, and the hostess offered me a spot next to a roaring fire. Through the glassless window, I could see only gray. Rain came down in heavy sheets, and thunder boomed overhead. What few patrons had showed up to the front gate had fled once the deluge started. I pulled off my soaking wet, mud-spattered, soft leather boots to let them dry. I almost envied the people dressed as peasants—they went barefoot, whereas I was in cold and soggy stockings.

Bea didn’t get
into Festival; she seemed preoccupied with everything going on at home. The snippets I heard involved her mom having a complete meltdown when she figured out the reason she’d been drugged. There was talk of divorce, and her mom was threatening to join an evangelical church. I hoped none of that was true. Of course, Bea still found a way to come out here sometimes. She’d dumped Malcolm for the pun guy, Aaron. So I sometimes saw her at after-hours parties on-site.

The door creaked open, making me jump. Thompson loomed like a huge shadow in the doorway. He must have seen me making my way to the cottage door, because he came in only a few minutes after I’d settled down and accepted the tea the hostess offered in her overly broad Irish accent.