She Dies at the End (November Snow #1) (32 page)

Zinnia picked up the thread.  “She feels trapped and alone, and she has little hope that her situation will improve.  If we don’t take better care of her, she’s either going to make a run for it or one of us will find her swinging from a chandelier.”

“If it were possible to set her free, I would,” the King replied sadly.

“Well, maybe you should tell
her
that,” Zinnia retorted.

“I don’t think seeing me will make her feel any better,” he replied.

“She’d be hard-pressed to feel much worse, Father,” Savita countered gently.  

“You two need to manage her,” he said to Pine and Willow.  "Handling a human servant should not be my problem.”

“If you weren’t worried about her-- if you really didn’t care – you wouldn’t be standing here,” Zinnia said.  “You can tell yourself all you want that this is beneath your dignity as a vampire or whatever,” she continued, rolling her eyes, “but you and I both know the truth.”  She crossed her arms stubbornly, adding, “Either go talk to her, or go away and give her some peace.  She doesn’t need to be hearing all of us talking about her behind her back.”

Ilyn made up his mind.  “Get back to work, the lot of you,” he ordered as he strode toward the bedroom door.

November squeezed her eyes shut when she heard the tumblers in the lock moving.  
Please just make me invisible.  Make them all go away.
 Ilyn walked toward her, stopping next to her bed.   She was expecting him to coldly lecture her form on high, but to her surprise, he knelt next to her bed.

“November?” he asked quietly.

She lifted her head away from her knees and opened her eyes.  Anger bubbled up past her hopelessness.  “What do you want?  Do you need me to cut Ben’s head off with a hatchet or something?”  Her voice was sharp and brittle.

“I am sorry about last night,” he said.  “If I’d had any idea that she would choose you . . . I suppose she thought it was a chance at vengeance, forcing you to do it.”

I don’t know about that
, she thought, but she said aloud only, “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to make sure you were alright,” he replied.

“I will live to be used another day,” she said flatly, “so you can go ahead and get back to more important things.”

“Little one, you have every reason to be angry, but –“

“I am not your little one!  You are so patronizing!” she yelled, suddenly sitting up in her bed to face him, eyes blazing.  Her robe slipped off her shoulders, revealing her bathing suit and the physical evidence of her very bad afternoon.  Ilyn winced when he saw the livid bruises from her underwater struggle.

“And damn straight, I’m angry,” she continued without pause. “You know, the reason I helped Savita, that I helped all of you, was that I felt badly for all the people Luka has hurt and killed, and I thought it was worthwhile to help stop him.  It was nice to think that maybe my gift finally meant something.

"And the longer this goes on, the less I can see why I should care who gets to be king of the leeches.  And I thought I had a home now, and friends.  But then you have to go and use my friends to try and control me.  Sending Pine with your blood – how could you do that?  You should have at least done it yourself. 

"And to top it all off, now I find out that when I do get turned into a vampire, I’ll be even more of a slave than I already am, under the control of a man who thinks that because I’m human I’m not worthy of being loved.  I have
nothing
to look forward to.  Before you showed up, I had made my peace with my fate, and now that peace is gone.  You have left me with nothing.  What the hell did I ever do to you to deserve this?”  

She pressed her lips together, trying in vain to stop the tears her tirade had set free.  
And I so hate that I cry when I’m angry!

“Nothing,” he responded softly.  “You’ve done nothing, and you don’t deserve any of this.  But in my experience, hardly anyone is free, and deserving has precious little to do with what people get.”  He looked at her beseechingly, but she refused to meet his eyes, drawing her knees back up to her chest.  “When I sent Pine, I thought it would be easier for you that way, given the tenor of our last conversation.”

“It wasn’t.  Are you sure you weren’t making it easier for you instead?” she replied, unusually merciless.

“Possibly,” he admitted after a moment.  “Perhaps it was a mistake.  I seem to be making a lot of those recently.”  

He ran his hands through his hair, seemingly having picked up the habit from Birch.  “And as for who is ‘king of the leeches,’ I wouldn’t much care myself if I thought Luka would be satisfied ruling his own.  But he is greedy, and he has greater designs.  He would make slaves of the entire human race.  He would exterminate the werewolves, who, my history with them notwithstanding, don’t deserve to die for old grudges.  I’ve done enough evil in my life that I don't want to see more done.  I can’t just step aside and facilitate Luka’s violence.  I ask that you continue to help us, even though we don’t deserve it, even though we’ve made your life a prison.  Of course, if you refuse, I’m not going to do anything bad to you.”  

She said nothing, his words worming their way through her anger and fear.  “As for the life you anticipate having after your death, I take it that someone told you of the bond, the tie that binds maker and child in the first few years?” the king asked.

“It came out that night when they were all trying to convince me to drink your blood,” she affirmed, swallowing the fresh rage that welled up whenever she thought of that evening.  “I would have appreciated knowing about that sooner.”

“I’ve never abused the bond with any of my children, lit— November.  I have used it only to protect them, and their prey.  Learning how to feed safely, adapting to the vampire life – these are difficult things.  Once my offspring were able to fend for themselves adequately, I set them free.  I would do the same for you, November, if and when the time comes.   I swear it.  Besides, I have many children, which weakens the maker’s control.  You have enough legitimate things to fear.  Please don’t let this be one of them, brave girl.”

November finally looked up at him with hard, studying eyes.  After an eternity, she nodded and said, “You can see why I might have difficulty trusting you at the moment.”

“Indeed.”

“Alright,” she replied.  “Thank you for coming to talk to me instead of delegating it.”  And with that, she curled back up under her covers, still not ready to face the world.

“It’s rather the least I could do,” he said, standing up to leave.  He reached out a hand to touch her, but stopped short when she stiffened in anticipation of the unwelcome contact.  He lingered at the door, looking at her, looking for something, but she had already closed her eyes and tucked her forehead against her knees, hiding her face under the covers.  He silently took his leave.

The remainder of the day was quiet.  Zinnia clucked and fussed over her for a little while before having to return to her duties as a page.  Confined to her suite, November finally managed to rouse herself enough to bathe, change clothes, and order some room service.  

The talk with Ilyn had helped her a bit.  She had to give him some credit for that.  She tried to distract herself with movies and books, but found more peace in drawing some of her recent visions.  They seemed unusual to her, a seemingly random assortment of women from disparate time periods, featuring none of the people playing parts in the current political and familial drama.  And yet, they seemed important and familiar and somehow related, but she couldn’t say how.  She started a new binder for them.  

By three in the morning, she was exhausted and sore, and she tired of waiting for Zinnia to get back.  Off to bed she went.   

A rough night’s sleep came to a rougher ending as November awoke in the late afternoon, shaken frantically by Willow.  “Em, we have to go, right now.  You’re in danger, and the king is moving you to a more secure location.”

November sat up, brought instantly awake by Willow’s intense, worried voice.  “Where’s Pine?” she asked, disentangling herself from the sheets.

“Securing the path to the car,” Willow replied.

“Where are my shoes?” November asked, unable to recall in the rush where she had left them.

“No time, come on,” Willow insisted, grabbing her by the arm and pushing her toward the door.  The fairy warrior held a dagger at the ready.

The hallway was empty.  November’s hair began to stand on end.  Something was badly wrong.  They turned a corner and saw some unfamiliar fairy faces.  Willow pressed her into a doorway.  The group passed them by without even a glance, as though November and Willow were invisible.  As soon as the group was gone, Willow continued propelling November down the corridor, leaving her no time to wonder at Willow’s little trick.

They approached the elevators, one of which had been propped open, waiting for them.  When they were nearly there, Pine appeared from a hidden corner: crawling, desperate, severely injured, an arrow running straight through him.  

November screamed in shock and horror and tried to move toward him.  Willow yanked the girl violently back to her side and threw a knife, which buried itself in Pine’s chest.  He looked up at November, his eyes full of guilt and sorrow and, without a sound, he disappeared in a blinding flash of light.

“No!” November screamed again, struggling to break free from Willow’s iron grip.  She barely felt the prick of the needle the fairy inserted into her neck.  She was unconscious before she could draw enough breath for another scream.

A woman burns at the stake, the flames licking her feet while the smoke chokes the life out of her.  A terrified fairy child hides as her kin are butchered by wolves.  Ilyn shovels dirt onto Savita’s corpse.  Marisha drains Luka’s blood, his mismatched eyes open wide, a smile on his face.  Sunset over the desert.  Flies on Julia’s face.  Willow on the phone.  Zinnia throws a flower into November’s grave. A fairy child lies in shock surrounded by destruction.  Ilyn and Luka make their way toward her.  Luka picks her up and cradles her to his chest, strokes her hair, murmurs words of comfort.  A little girl with a pockmarked face gazes at Luka as he drains her blood.  She asks if he is an angel.  He laughs.  A fairy carries an unconscious girl over her shoulder, turning to fire a crossbow one-handed at those chasing her through a parking deck.  She is herself hit, more than once, but she does not so much as stagger.  She reaches her getaway car, tossing the girl into an open trunk as she turns to finish off her enemies before speeding out into the daylight.

November woke into a terrifying, bone-shaking darkness.  It took a long while before she was lucid enough to realize that she was in the trunk of a car.  She tried to move her limbs but found that she was tightly bound at both ankles and wrists, her arms pinned painfully behind her back.  Her mouth was taped shut.  An icy ball of fear filled her stomach.  Her mind was running a frantic loop, whispering again and again,
Willow is a traitor.  She killed Pine, and she is going to give me to a monster.

She wondered how long she’d been out, where in the world they could be, how much of a head start Willow had.  She wondered how much the pending fire at the hotel would slow down a rescue attempt, if in fact Ilyn’s people were unable to prevent it.  She wondered if anyone would come for her at all.

She cried for a while, but that made it difficult to breathe through her nose, so she stopped, wishing fervently for the tape over her mouth to disappear. She tried to use her gift to look outside the car, but Willow was driving impossibly fast through a rural landscape entirely foreign to her.  Rolling around in the trunk, the speed was terrifying.  She experienced a moment of sympathy for the unfortunate Dogwood.

Her heart raced when the car slowed to a stop.  She simultaneously hoped and dreaded that the trunk door would open.  When it did, she blinked her eyes, blinded by the bright sunlight.  Willow looked down at her, her face in shadow.  “No screaming-- do you understand?”  November nodded.

Willow pulled her from the trunk, more gently than November had expected.  The fairy removed the gag and wiped her captive's face with a damp cloth.  Thankfully, her kidnapper had had the courtesy to slather her lips with petroleum jelly before taping her mouth.  The fairy held up a bottle of water, which November gratefully sipped.  Willow removed it too soon and bent to cut the plastic tie around her ankles with a pair of hedge clippers.  

She led November a few paces from the car, holding tightly to her elbow.  “You try to run, I will catch you, and I will make you wish you hadn’t.  Now do your business.”  November squatted and relieved herself in the dirt, face burning with anger and shame.  She took a look around the deserted turnoff, unable to keep herself from hoping for someone to come to her aid.  There was no one.

She could guess why the fairy had done this, so she felt no need to ask.  She berated herself for not seeing the danger months earlier, when she’d learned what had happened to Willow’s family at the hands of werewolves.  Willow swiftly bound and gagged her again and put her back in the trunk, dosing her with more drugs while ignoring November’s whimpering attempts to plead with her from behind the tape.

Just as the hood was closing, November caught a glimpse of two glowing orbs floating several yards behind her kidnapper.  With a flash, they transformed into two heavily armed fairy soldiers.  Hope filled her, and she fought the drugs in an effort to stay awake.  She could hear arrows glancing off the hood, then gunshots as Willow pulled her own weapon.  Her hope was short-lived.  Their pursuers quickly fell at the hands of Willow’s experience and determination.  The drugs dragged November back under, and Willow made another narrow escape.

Under the influence of the sedative, her nightmares were even more disjointed and relentless than usual.  They were a crazy quilt of clashing time periods and encounters that had never happened and never could.

Julia pours tea for Marisha in what looked like a Roman courtyard.  Ilyn buys cotton candy at the carnival and gives it to her, standing in bright sunlight.  Willow’s childhood self screams inside the house of mirrors.

The next time they stopped, Willow left her in the trunk while she hijacked someone’s car.  Only after she had the new car running did she transfer her victim, so quickly that November barely got a look at the unfortunate soul whose life Willow had entirely drained.  He was reduced to a blackened husk.  November screamed behind her gag as the trunk door slammed shut and the pharmaceuticals sent her back into a spiral of confusing visions.

As the winter sun beat down on the hood, the air in the trunk grew uncomfortably warm and close.  Sweat matted November's short hair to her skull, and her thirst grew intolerable.  Once the sun set, however, she quickly became chilled and longed for the warmth of the day to return.  She so hated being cold.

She heard the ring of a cell phone a few times, and conversation too muffled for her to understand.  She supposed that Willow was checking in with her master and receiving instructions.  The car slowed once more, and her heart hammered as she feared they had come to their destination.  Instead, she heard a door quickly open and shut.  Willow immediately took off again with a squeal.  To her surprise, she made out a familiar voice in the cabin of the car:  their new passenger was Ben.

November tried to marshal her gifts and focus her mind on them, struggling to push away the fog of drugs and hunger and make out what the two traitors were saying to each other.

“I thought you would run,” Willow commented.  “I thought for sure someone would have to hunt you down.”

“What would be the point?” he replied matter-of-factly.  “I must say, I’m surprised, too.  You.  You were another agent.  Reliable Willow.  I cannot believe it,” Ben said, incredulous.  He gave a bark of bitter laughter.  “You couldn’t help me out after I got caught?”

“Stuff it.  I would put you in the trunk if it weren’t currently occupied,” Willow replied flatly.  “Your incompetence had no bearing on my mission.  I have been under cover for over a century, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize that for an idiot newborn vampire who couldn’t manage to do anything without giving himself away.”

“Fair enough,” he allowed, not seeming to care enough about his fate to actually be angry about it.   “Why don’t you just kill me and deliver this letter yourself?  Save him the trouble,” he asked almost hopefully.  Evidently he wasn’t looking forward to an encounter with Luka.

“Because those aren’t my orders,” she replied impatiently.  “Are you seriously going to talk the whole way?  Do I have to pull your tongue out?”

“Sorry.  I’ve just been talking to walls for months, that’s all,” he responded quietly.  “Do you mind if I ask one question?”  He construed her lack of a reply as acquiescence.  “Why?  I mean, haven’t you worked for them for, like, hundreds of years?”

Willow heaved a sigh.  “They betrayed me first, when they made peace with the animals that killed my kin.  They are not worthy of anyone’s loyalty.”  November had a strange feeling that she was leaving something out.

“Fair enough,” he said again.  “I assume November is in the trunk?  You smell like her.”  Willow just nodded.  “Is she okay?” he asked, trying and failing to keep the concern out of his voice.

“She’ll live,” Willow replied, adding, “Look, if you know what’s good for you, you will forget any feelings you have for her.  She’s Luka’s now.  If he lets you live, and that’s highly unlikely, you had better keep your little crush to yourself.”  Ben said nothing.  He just looked out the window.  Willow turned on some music.

They switched cars one more time, to an SUV that had apparently been left for Willow in a planned location, as there was no murder involved in this swap.  Since the vehicle had no trunk, the prisoner was instead tossed unceremoniously onto the floor in the back.  The windows were heavily tinted, and the sun had long since set.  There was no way anyone would see her.

“Oh, jeez, Willow?  Is all that really necessary?” Ben asked, breaking his silence of several hours when he saw the sorry state November was in.  “Those ties are cutting into her, and it looks like you beat the crap out of her.  How much of a fight did she put up?”

“Most of those bruises are from yesterday when some deranged fairy tried to drown her, and I’m not taking any chances after how many times this has been botched in the last six months,” the fairy answered in a hard voice.

Ben looked at November with sad eyes.  She met them with her own eyes full of fear.  He looked awful, even more gaunt and worn than she remembered.  She wondered if he was grateful that she’d asked for his life to be spared or if he wished that he’d gotten his execution over with.  Of course, November hadn’t know that Ilyn would so warp her request by sending the prisoner to an almost certain death.

She could tell he was considering doing something unwise as he shifted his focus from her to the driver, and she could see the moment when he admitted to himself that he didn’t have a prayer of taking the much older fairy in a fight, certainly not without getting November killed in the ensuing high-speed crash.  She tried to smile her understanding through the duck tape before turning her gaze out the window to the moon high in the sky.  At least it was something prettier to look at than the inside of a trunk.  She wondered if she would ever see the sun again.

November had no idea how many hours this journey was taking, though she thought it had been early afternoon when they left the hotel and it was now well past sunset.  She couldn’t be certain she hadn’t missed a whole day somewhere.  As disoriented as she was from the drugs, the visions, the thirst, and the imprisonment, she knew very little for certain.  She knew that the road had gotten rougher; the additional bruises forming all over her body told her that much.  She assumed they must be in the middle of nowhere, for she heard no other cars going by.  Her numb limbs and the screaming pain in her shoulders told her that she’d been bound for a long time.  She knew she was frightened and hungry and alone.

She thought of Pine, there one moment and then gone in a flash of light.  She tried not to cry.  She thought of Ilyn, who showed his attachment to her yet denied it to them both.  The thought that she might never see him again, or worse yet, that she would see him as an enemy, made her want to break things in grief and anger.  She prayed that he was safe, that all her friends were safe.  Her well-justified anger had melted away in the heat of danger, and all she felt was longing and forgiveness and sympathy.  She imagined that he was with her, singing one of the songs he’d used to comfort her at the new year.  She could almost smell the pipe-smoke in his clothes.

They stopped for gas.  It was a two-pump, cash-only, pay-inside kind of place.  A couple of other cars were parked there.  Kids were hanging out, sitting on their trunks, drinking soda and smoking.  Willow turned to her and said, “If you try anything, I will kill everyone here.”  She then turned to Ben.  “If you try anything, I will hurt her and make you watch.”

After she slammed her door and entered the tiny store, Ben turned once again to November.  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, over and over.  “I’m so sorry.  I’ll find a way to stop him.  I’ll find a way to help you.  I will.  I’m so sorry.” He looked so desperate and sad.  The cocky frat boy had turned old and haunted.  Even if she hadn’t been gagged, November had no idea what she would say.  It was hard for her to believe that there was anything Ben could possibly do to save her, given his track record.  And yet, it was a comfort to hear a sympathetic word in such a desperate moment.  Later, she would feel a pang of guilt for having doubted him.  Ben was the kind of person it was easy to underestimate.

Willow returned and started pumping the gas, ending Ben’s monologue.  They got on the road again.  Bad asphalt turned to gravel and then to rutted dirt.  November was bouncing around something awful, finally prompting Ben to insist that Willow move her to a seat and belt her in.  “Willow, she’s going to get a concussion if this goes on much longer, and if she vomits with that gag on, she could choke.”  

After a moment of thought, the fairy pulled over, unbound her captive’s wrists, tore off the gag, strapped her into a seat, and rebound one arm to an armrest, all without saying a word.

“Thanks,” November murmured as the vehicle resumed its race down what had to be the worst road in the continental U.S.  She leaned her forehead against the cool window glass and tried not to throw up.  Ben looked around for something to use as a make-shift sick bag, coming up with only his hat, which he placed in her lap with a shrug.  She gave him a shadow of a smile before she commenced dry heaving.  She was momentarily grateful for the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything all day.  Thankfully, after a while the road smoothed out a bit and her nausea passed.  Exhausted and numb, November gazed out the window into pitch blackness.  They hadn’t passed another car in hours.

Suddenly, they were driving on smooth asphalt instead of dirt.  It seemed so quiet, and November wondered why the road had suddenly resumed before realizing that it probably meant that they were getting close to their destination.  With a screech of its breaks, the S.U.V came to a stop.  Willow emerged, clipped November’s wrist free, and pulled her out of the car, dragging her still-bound feet in the dirt.  “Look,” the fairy said.  “We’re almost home.”