Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (3 page)

Leafy trees popped up around the banks in the last hundred years, giving the lake at Winter Falls the privacy it needed—being the skinny-dipping spot it had become. And it was an unspoken rule that if someone was here before you, you come back later.

The indecisive sky meant that we had no competition, though. The lake was all ours for the day and, luckily, we hadn’t yet met the rain.

On the rug beside David’s outstretched legs, the picnic basket lay untouched. I looked at it a few times, considering a sandwich, but from the moment I laid my head in his lap and his hands tangled softly in my warm hair, nothing in this world mattered. Not even hunger.

Although this place was nothing like David’s lake, it was still just so nice to lie in the pale sun by the water with him again. He seemed so light and so animated without that spell weighing him down, and nothing—not the future to come, not the past, nor the deaths of all those children—seemed to get in the way of the simple pleasure of a lover’s company. Everything he said was expressed with his hands, his smile and his bright eyes. I could see his teeth every time he talked because he hadn’t stopped smiling all morning. And I just watched in amazement as this man I once only thought was a dream awakened inside him and came to the surface—finally free to just ‘be’. David-in-love had to be just about the most beautiful thing in the world. I could see now why people in his vampire community said he’d changed so much just after he met me. And I could see how people had easily been confused over the years about which twin was the evil one. He could be mean and cold, but if there wasn’t anything breaking his heart, he was just a kid—only nineteen and so free of cares that one could mistake him as human.

“What?” he asked, frowning at my probably very goofy smile.

I moved one shoulder up to my ear. “You’re just so beautiful when you’re happy.”

He looked away shyly, his eyes coming back with a small guard up, and then he swept his curled fingertip over my cheek. “And you, my love, are immaculate in this light. I see what they mean when they say ‘pregnancy glow’.”

This time I looked away shyly.

Overhead, a few small dots of rain left the wispy grey clouds and sprinkled down onto the rug beside us. I put my hand over them, rubbing my fingers against my palm to dry them away.

“Do you think we should go back now?” I asked.

“Back to the manor, or back to the past?”

A hard lump formed in my throat. I swallowed it down. “Are you ready for me to show you?”

He drew a long breath in through his nose. “No.” He exhaled it. “But you have no choice, do you?”

I shook my head against his legs. If I spoke, I’d have no way of controlling my tears. He would just be so disappointed in me when I told him what I did with Arthur. That loving look in his eye right now—the one I remember from when we were kids at school—I’d missed it so much. I just wasn’t ready to let it go.

As I sat up to begin my epic tale of lust and betrayal, the raindrops broke through the final layer of cloud and smacked the rug hard, bouncing up for a second before blending with the next drop. It came down fast then, like a flood of water dropped from cupped hands, making rivers down my eyes and beside my nose and adding weight to my coat and my jeans before soaking right through them.

David grabbed the guitar and held it over our heads, and I just laughed, pushing it away.

“There’s not much point now.” I motioned to our arms and legs. “We’re completely wet.”

He squinted up at the glowing white sun, blinking off the rain. “That just came out of nowhere.”

“No it didn’t.” I stood up and nodded to the wispy grey clouds. “It’s been brewing up there for about half an hour.”

He stood up too. “A warning might’ve been nice.”

“Why?” I said, offering my hand. “A little rain never hurt anyone.”

“I guess not,” he said, taking my hand. “Would you like to go inside to talk, or stay out here in the cold?”

I looked up to the grassy hills in the distance, feeling a sudden urge to run. Maybe to run away from the inevitable or the truth, but not, on any level, to run away from David. “I think I’d like to play a game.”

“A game?” he asked, as if it was the silliest thing he’d ever heard.

“Yeah. Come on,” I said, and started running. “Let’s run back to the manor without getting wet.”

“How do we do that?”

“Dodge the raindrops.” I glanced back at the dripping David and grinned.

“You know that’s not at all possible, right? Not even running at vamp-speed.”

“
You
can manipulate the elements.” I stopped running and shrugged back at him. “Try.”

He wiped his hand firmly over his mouth as he considered that, looking up to the sky, then around the hills. “I can
slow
them. But you’ll have to run pretty fast to dodge them.”

Fast, I could do. “Easy.”

“You’ll ruin those boots,” he suggested.

I rolled my foot to its side and considered my cute calf-high boots—soaking up the mud as the rain pushed it above the grass. “They’re suede, David. They’re already dead.”

His head moved in a nod of approval. “You ready then?”

I leaned down into one knee like a track runner. “Race you?”

He leaned down too. “You’re on.”

And something changed then—the air, maybe—something stilled somehow. Everything looked exactly the same, except for the way the rain hit the ground. It was like each drop danced to a different beat. When I looked across the grassy clearing toward the forest in the distance, I could almost see a path defining itself—like shower heads on a timer.

The excitement narrowed my eyes into competitive slits and I took off running before David said “Go.”

“Hey!” he called over the distant thunder. “You little cheat.”

“Don’t like it?” I said. “Catch me and spank me.”

But as I weaved and darted around the fat lines of cold water, David caught up and merely took my hand, running beside me. There had always been a feeling of ultimate freedom that accompanied running at this speed, but something about running through falling rain and not getting wet felt
magical
and almost intimate, as if the rain hid us from the world.

David turned slightly as he got ahead of me, his hands moving in around my waist. He leaned into our stop, and steadied me against his chest as we skidded for a few feet, the rain falling thickly down on us then as if we’d just tossed an umbrella aside.

I took a really big breath as the cold water went right down my shirt. “Holy crap.”

David laughed, brushing both hands up my face to push my wet hair away. “Did you like that?”

“It was so much fun, right?” I said, a little puffed out.

“Yes, but anything is fun if I’m with you.” He leaned down and kissed my wet forehead. The water between us made a funny slurping noise. We both laughed. “This reminds me of the first time we shared blood.”

All the rain and the cold and the uncertainty of that day came flooding back, slipping away pleasurably with the memory of how he tasted. “Hm.” I let out the excitement and adrenaline with a hard breath. “I just wish this rain would stop so we could stay out here all day.”

Almost immediately, as if my words were a spell, the rain reduced to a fine drizzle before ceasing completely.

David looked up, rolling a flat palm out to the sky. “Your wish is my command.”

“Ha! Nice try. But even you’re not talented enough to
completely
stop the rain.”

“No.” He took both my hands and wrapped them behind him. “But if I were, I would stop the rain for you. And there would be only sunshine.”

“Do you mean that metaphorically?”

The light, carefree David went back into hiding, and a more guarded David stepped forward. “No matter what happens, Ara, I will forever do my best to be the light in your life. But… it’s hard.”

“What’s hard?”

“The residual effects of this spell—they…” He looked as though he was choking for a moment. “Sometimes they get in the way—change my instant reactions until…”

“Until?”

He seemed to shake off whatever he was thinking. “Once I’ve had time to think, everything will be fine. But… I’m just a little afraid what I might do
initially
when you show me this memory of you and my brother.”

His black shirt was completely wet and sticking to all the contours of his chest. I placed both hands over his arms and gripped tightly, rising up onto my toes to kiss his stubbly cheek. “I understand. Okay? And I’ll wait—as long as it takes for you to come ’round.”

He nodded, sliding his hands along my cheeks and holding my face in front of his, while I struggled to stay on my toes. “It’s time then, Ara. I need to know what happened between you two. And I need to know why you’ve put so many walls up around this memory of my uncle.”

“Okay then. Let’s not stand here.” I settled back down on my heels, feeling the rainwater in my socks squish awkwardly around. “We should go sit under the oak tree.”

He took my hand and walked past me, leading me along behind him.

***

Even though it had rained several times in the weeks that passed since the ball and the battle that followed, and despite the grass having grown to my knees in that time, the roots were still stained with red, as if the memory of war would never wash away. Arthur told me that the stains would remain for some time—that vampire blood had a tendency to ‘stick’ around—and in the right light, looking down from a window in the manor, the colour of the field matched the remaining autumn leaves, swallowing them whole as they floated gently down to the ground.

But as we sat down under the oak tree at the centre of the field, my thoughts wouldn’t follow the path of horror and gore that tried to steal them; Jason came to mind instead, bringing summer foliage and the scent of sweet frangipanis. Then, as I stretched my legs out beside David’s, our backs to the furrowed trunk, all the joy of summer with Jason melted away under the magic of true love.

David reached across and lifted my hand off Bump, taking it over to his lap, keeping his eyes steadily on the white horizon, while I stared down at my feet.

The oak offered no shelter out here from the whipping breeze, and the tiny bare twigs clung for dear life to the broader branches above us. I shivered as the wind ripped through my wet coat and jeans, clawing at my hair and wrapping it around my nose and eyes.

“Cold?”

I waited for a moment before answering. “Yes. But I don’t want to talk inside.”

“It would be better if—”

“Yes, but I like the noise out here. It always made me feel… like I’m not alone, or maybe that things aren’t so empty.”

“What do you mean by empty?” He placed his other hand over the one he was holding.

“The fear—of what you’ll say or do—it makes my chest feel like there’s nothing in it. And… out here—” I motioned around the field. “It’s not so empty.”

David exhaled and rested his head against the trunk, closing his eyes. “Is that because this is your ‘special’ tree—you and Jason?”

“Ha!” I laughed, without meaning to; David lifted his head to look at me. “No,” I added quickly. “It’s the wind—the rush, the movement.”

He put his head back again.

“Jason doesn’t mean to me what you think he means to me,” I said. “Just so we’re clear—before I show you what happened in the bedroom.”

“I know that, Ara.” He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it. “I wasn’t asking to accuse you of loving him. I just want to know everything about you—what matters to you. And, after all this time apart, we have a lot of catching up to do.”

When I looked at him, expecting his eyes to still be closed, the bright emerald green shocked me. For the first time in so long, I actually let myself look right into them; they’d changed since we were younger—a side effect of Mother Nature’s power, I guess, after being sworn in as King. Or maybe it was all that he’d suffered, perhaps even the remainder of Morgana’s spell. But the thin coloured ring around the green was slightly blue now, like my eyes, making the emerald ten times greener. And if I got close enough in this light I could see hundreds of tiny branches reaching out from his jet-black pupil to that electric blue ring, like it was a source of power, giving energy to his mind.

His thick dark brown lashes closed over them then, waking me to the reality of the situation. I sat back and shook off the intensity of those eyes, and it was only as I fixed my coat as a distraction that I realised I was no longer cold.

“Where did the wind go?” I asked, leaning forward to look around. The branches above us were still rocking and the grass still waving, but my hair was motionless and my hands warming.

“We’re in a… bubble,” he said. “But it won’t hold if I get… it’ll probably pop once you show me these memories.”

My throat filled with saliva. I twisted the hem of my jacket, plucking a few loose threads off the end. “Then I think it’d be better if I started from the end—went backward… left the Arthur thing until last.”

“Why?”