Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (67 page)

I sat down on the stool and picked up the pen again, jotting down my hopes and fears and, at the end of the page, I realised there were very few fears. I flipped back through the many weeks of scribble before it, and I could actually
feel
the sadness and uncertainty. I woke that day after the attack on Elysium to a world of freedom and great change, but my heart woke in the past—compressed by fear and worry. It seemed the mind did not move on quite as easily as the past could. Safia may be dead, but many things had died with her and, sadly, that was all I could focus on for the longest time. It was nice to flip back on this leg of my journey and see myself changing, healing.

And that would be what I’d discuss with Vicki today—change.

Finally, after so long, I could actually see the light at the end of the tunnel—a light that had been there since the day Safia died. I just wished David would see it, too.

***

Given that the Lilithian Monarchy is headed by a Lilithian Queen, and the Vampire monarchy by a Vampire King, David and I were now officially equals, which made it a rather odd custom for us to sit side by side at dinner. I didn’t care that the members of the Lower House kept staring and whispering about my seat at the King’s right hand, though. In a few weeks, I would be sitting at a small wooden dining table in a modest kitchen in suburbia. No crown. No servants. So none of the formalities and traditions mattered to me now the way they used to. But David did. Which is why, when he told me he wanted us to sit together at dinner—that he couldn’t bear to look at me and not be able to touch me—I agreed. But of course, being the old-fashioned man he was, I couldn’t very well expect him to sit at
my
side. No. Of course, it was me that had to sit at
his
side. I didn’t mind, though. There was that same old-fashioned girl in me that thought it was somewhat wrong to have a King sit at the side of table, not the head. And I was strong enough now in who I was, and respected enough, that my place along the side of the table would not make me look weak.

I checked over my shoulder to see that the nanny was holding my baby properly, glad we’d no longer be required to use a nanny soon, then forced myself to turn away and focus on the conversations running up and down the length of the table.

“Seven of us have journeyed from the farthest reaches of the world to meet tonight; I do not see why Councilman White could not attend,” Lower Councilman Philips said.

“Councilman White has already met the new Set Leaders—he appointed half of them himself,” I said. “And just left here last month. I gave him permission to remain in Australia for this meeting.”

“I still don’t get it,” Sam said, putting his hand up as though he were in class. “So all these newbs here tonight are Set Leaders, right?”

“The Lower House are secondary Set Leaders, like assistant managers,” David said. “Headed by one leader.”

“And those
heads
, the ‘one leader to rule them all’, they make up the Upper House members, right?”

“Right,” I said, leaning around to look at him where he sat four chairs down from me.

“So what are the Lower House for now? Because in the old Lilithian style, they represented the people, right—”

“In the past, our role was to hear the complaints of the Lilithian people and bring them, should they need to go further, before the Court,” Lower Councilman James advised. “We were a council all of our own. We did not answer to anyone but the King and Queen.”

“And it was also our duty to oversee any minor punishments and enforce any new laws.”

“But now you do the same thing, except there’s more of you?” Sam asked.

A few Lower House members laughed.

“Pretty much, Sam,” Falcon said. “It works the way Vampire Sets used to work. There’s a person at the head—” he pointed to himself, “—that has the final say on all matters, overruled only by the Queen, or the King,” he added offhandedly. “There is no longer a Vampire Council and a Lilithian Council, we merged them all into one and divided them throughout the Sets—”

“Meaning that we now have only one Set per zone,” Vicki cut in. “Made up of both Vampires and Lilithians.”

“Right,” Falcon said. “Seven zones around the world, which means Seven Sets, with six Lower House members and one Upper House member per Set.”

“So, with the overlord,” Sam presented Falcon, “that makes seven Set Leaders in total?”

“Right,” Falcon said with a nod, and Sam nodded too.

“That was the bit I didn’t understand,” Sam said, sitting back in his chair. “I thought Mike was a council member, not a Set Leader—”

“They’re the same thing,” Falcon said. “He’s an Upper House leader, also known as a World Council member, which is probably where you’re getting confused—mixing Upper and Council together.”

“I get it now.” Sam nodded, then looked at Falcon again, confused. “So what’s a High Councilman?”

“That’s the
old
word for an Upper House member—the way it was in Vampire Sets,” David said, unfolding his napkin and laying it in his lap. “We refer to them as Upper and Lower House.”

Sam nodded, the confusion departing from his face. I didn’t blame him, though. It all was quite confusing. I still found myself hesitating before referring to Falcon and Mike as Upper House members sometimes, cringing as the memory of Walter entered my mind. I would never stop fearing him. Even though Safia swore she’d killed him, the fact that we’d never uncovered a body, or even body parts, left an uneasy feeling in my stomach. It always would. As would the fact that Lord Eden was still out there—somewhere. Maybe lying in wait until he could convince another to kill his great granddaughter for him, since the coward clearly couldn’t do it himself. All those times, I thought to myself, knowing I shouldn’t go down this path in a room full of people, but… all those times he came to the lake house, talked with us, planned out the attack, he was just trying to get the courage up to kill my child. And I was no expert on predictions, but I was pretty sure that the prediction he had on the driveway that day was not of us losing, but, perhaps, winning, and he would then lose his chance to have someone else kill my baby. And his advice about Mike leaving—getting back to Oz to protect his boys—was most likely, as Vicki had explained, because Mike would have been the one to save me. And it broke my heart to think how close we came to ending it all that week—to think that maybe my baby might have been born in a more natural way—when she was ready to be born. Mike always had been my saviour, and it made me smile to think how things might have turned out if we hadn’t trusted the one person who truly was working against us all along.

I was glad Lord Eden was a coward, though—otherwise, he might have had his way and ended my baby’s life long ago. And in a silly, sickening way, I knew that meant he still loved me as his family, even if he didn’t actually know I was his granddaughter. He never could bring himself to harm family, no matter what. But giving the job to someone else, well… he clearly had no troubles sleeping if the damage was done at another’s hands.

“…and we will attend Court once a month,” David finished, snapping me back to the noisy room.

A plate of food was laid in front of me and the waitstaff moved back as the smell of lamb rose up and entered my Hunger Zone.

“Until the Princess is older, Queen Amara will not attend Court, which simply means that, in that time, our people will uphold the law in a most proper manner,” David said, with a wicked grin.

“Yes, I imagine they’ll be too scared to break the law—knowing the King will stand at the head of their trial,” Vicki said pragmatically, clearly cringing at the things she’d seen in her short time here.

David’s grin grew until he reminded me slightly of the Grinch, towering over a pile of presents.

“In the meantime, between Court sessions, I leave you in the very capable hands of my most trusted advisor and Upper House member Falcon,” I offered. “He will be the compassion in the monarchy until I return to full duties.”

Falcon bowed his head at a few people down the table, looking very much the Lord he now was. But in all this moving on and in all the great changes around the manor, none of it filtered out the human problems in life. I could see it in his eyes that whatever had happened between him and Hunky Doctor was cutting him deep. And I liked that, in a strange kind of way, that our human problems really did outweigh the supernatural ones in the end. It filled me up with a new sense of hope.

My ears tuned then to a discussion about Lord Eden, and Vicki looked up too when she heard his name. Sam didn’t catch on to the conversation until he saw his mother paying close attention, but her new Lilithian ears heard the finer details that Sam’s human ear couldn’t over all the other chatter.

“…a coward, handing her over to someone else that way.”

“If he wanted the child dead, he should have been man enough to commit the murder himself. But instead, he set poor Walter up to fall…”

“Walter put himself in that position by agreeing,” said someone else.

“He was just trying to save the world from the evil that Lord Eden assured him would befall this world should the child be born.”

“Lord Eden was given plenty of opportunities to kill that child should he have wanted to. There is no proof that he handed the task over to Walter. It could all be Walter’s lies—to cover up his own twisted need to see our lovely Queen come to harm.”

“He never did respect her reign. He was always working to his own end—to see her dethroned…”

“As Christof just said, Lord Eden met with the Queen just days before. If he wanted to kill the baby, he had plenty of opportunity—”

“He is a coward,” Vicki said, entering the conversation from six chairs away. They all stopped and looked at her like stunned mullets. “He couldn’t kill the baby because he lacked the guts to do it, but that does not make him innocent.”

“Mom.” Sam tapped her arm, making her look away from the small group of Council members. “Let it go.”

“Everyone can let it go,” David said over the top of a few quips. “There will be no more talk of Lord Eden, or his intentions. Until we have spoken with him directly, these are mere allegations. Harsh ones—ones my wife and I are not completely sure are true.”

“And my father, King Drake, didn’t believe them either,” I added, even though, in my heart, I did believe it. And I always would. Drake was wrong when he told me that day, while we ate burritos, that family meant as much to Lord Eden as it did to him. Drake inherited his values from Lord Eden in the beginning, but he executed them more vigorously than Lord Eden ever would.

The fact was, Lord Eden
did
set us up. He did ask Walter to kill my child, and it
was
purely because he lacked the guts to do it himself.

Vicki looked down the table at me, clearly reading my face, and I knew she understood that, for the sake of the monarchy, people needed to leave the truth about Lord Eden alone and forget he was ever even here. If they thought him a coward, we might look weak, given that he was
the
Original Vampire. And if they thought him a child murderer, we would look weak again, because they would know that we feared him—feared his return, still looked over our shoulders and checked the windows when we put Elora to bed at night.

The truth didn’t matter here. The image did, and Vicki looked back at her plate, leaving it alone, as she realised that.

***

I couldn’t find David anywhere, so I asked Vicki to sit with Elora while I went down to have coffee with Falcon. But as I closed my bedroom door and turned to walk down the corridor, I got a very strong sense of David nearby—the emotion surrounding him thick with what I recognised now as anguish. Without my real father, my teacher, it had been hard to learn how to use my Cerulean Magic, but I felt as though I’d mastered the art of following energies and reading auras—sensing the difference between Vampires and Lilithians, and understanding what those differences were. It was a start. And it gave me enough information right now to know that I should find David and see if he needed to talk.

Sniffing the air, I followed my nose, stopping at the last door by the stairs. Arthur’s old room.

“David?” I whispered softly, pushing the door open.

He looked up quickly, wiping his face, and bent down to stack the pile of books in his hand into the cardboard packing box. “Hey,” he said casually.

“Hey.” I stepped in, my arms folded, and leaned against Arthur’s bedpost. “You want some help?”

“Oh, uh… no. I can handle it.”

Judging from the mess of stuff in piles all around the space, I wasn’t so sure he could. It looked so far as if all he’d done was read into the sentimental value of each item. “David, I told you before, this room can stay as it is—forever, if you like. You don’t have to pack it away.”

“It needs to be done,” he stated emotionlessly. “Arthur is gone. He’d want us all to move on.”

“And what about Jason?” I said. “When he remembers who he is, he might want to come in here—spend time saying goodbye.”

“
If
he remembers, Ara. There’s no saying he will.”