The Celestial Kiss (14 page)

“To dedicate our lives in service of the humans,” He said.   “Not to just be here as a line of defense or a safeguard against attack.  We should be out there, as political leaders and teachers and well-intended strangers, shepherding humanity into leading moral lives, patrolling the streets, protecting innocence from evil—whether that is in the form of vampires or other humans.”  The way he spoke with such unveiled passion appealed to my sense of curiosity.  They were beautiful words, and he clearly meant them.

I bit my lip, but I couldn’t hold on to my thoughts any more than I could keep my words from coming out full of contempt. “Is that what you were doing the night you attacked me?  Cleaning up the streets?” 

He sighed.  “We were having such a nice moment.”  His lips faltered around a smile, before he really looked at me.  “I don’t blame you for being bitter.”  James’ eyes were honest and unashamed, not wavering under my accusation.  “I would be.”

Bitter was not the kind of person I wanted to be.  I’d been a lot of things—callous, weak, indifferent, and emotional; I didn’t want to be any of them.  Leaving my father’s home had been my chance to start fresh, to cast off all the negativity I’d held onto for so long.  The apology was on my tongue when James spoke again.

“The night I bit you, I was out of line.  Julius and I had been in a fight just before we crossed paths with you.  I knew he’d been out all night drinking, and I was on edge as it was.”  His eyes had drifted to the sky, whether because eye contact was uncomfortable or because he was confessing his indiscretion to someone greater than me.  “And then we ran into you and …I still don’t know why I did it.  I mean, I wanted to get Julius back before anyone noticed he was gone, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with you…or rather, what I thought you were.”

It wasn’t really the answer I’d expected. I remembered seeing Julius in the diner, pinning a man to the wall by the collar of his shirt.  Was James just cleaning up his brother’s mess?

While I was feeling more open to the idea of forgiving him, if James wanted my trust, he would have to earn it.  “Why?” 

His face was grim, and I noticed a very fine line around his mouth.  He was surely just a little older than me, but it seemed that the inherent stress of being the king’s heir had weighed upon him.  “Julius has a pure heart, but he is probably the most… intense person I know.  I think that everything he feels is more acute, be it passion or misery.  His highs are higher than mine…his lows are lower.  He’s been through a lot.”

I was silent, reluctant to accept this as truth, because it would only make Julius more (for lack of a better word) human.  Besides, he was royalty, born to a great destiny.  What in his life could have possibly been hard?  These people seemed to have everything: a comfortable lifestyle, a huge family, and the freedom I’d have killed for.  And they were squandering it.  I looked at the rose in my hand, twirling it by the stem.

“Julius is older than me by three years,” James confessed.  It was a funny admission, and it caught me off guard enough to look at him.  His hands were in his pockets, and he was now looking back at the house as though he were expecting Julius to emerge from it.  “The throne would have been his, under different circumstances.”

I nodded, because that made sense.  He did seem to have an awful big chip on his shoulder, and that sense of entitlement…

“I’m not sure it’s a responsibility he ever wanted.  I’m not sure any of us ever wanted it, to be honest.  But my brother is very…unbalanced.”  He looked troubled.  My mind turned immediately to thoughts of drugs and dependencies and mental illnesses.  God willing, I wouldn’t have to witness any of that.  He was bad enough sober.  “Julius acts on emotion instead of logic…he doesn’t consider consequences or all of the options.”

James made it sound like a bad thing…which, I guess for a King it would be.  But it struck me that perhaps Julius and I were more similar than I wanted to believe.  I too, reacted with emotion.

It was quiet as we both contemplated his words.  The sun had dipped under the horizon a while ago, and while the sky was still a medley of pinks, the temperature had dropped with it.  Shivering against the passing breeze, I wrapped my arms around myself and looked up at the few dimples in the sky, stars burning millions of miles away.   I’d read once that they were all probably dead by the time their light reached us, but if that was true, then there was an understated beauty in death.

James looked too.  I couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking the same thing as me. 

We stayed like that for I don’t know how long before James let out a long, low breath.  I watched him from the corner of my eye, stretching his thick shoulders, rolling his neck.  He offered me his hand.  I stared at it in instant disdain, but when I looked up at him, it evaporated.  There was no anger or disgust, no hatred in his eyes. 

Tentative, I dropped my hand in his. A warmth spread through me then, and in its succession, a downy sense of peace.

I wouldn’t exactly say we were friends, but there was a definite shift in the energy between James and I.  It wasn’t even as though we’d had a soul-bearing heart-to-heart last night.  But something about the way we had shared the silence and the moon and the stars had changed things.  I knew now that he wasn’t as certain as he’d seemed from afar, and that even he felt like things were beyond his control despite his position of power.  The fact that he’d told me anything at all about himself, about the person he was at his core, made it hard for me to hate him.  And so throughout breakfast, I offered him pleasant and meaningless conversation and just-enough-to-be-polite smiles. 

I hoped my new-found compliance would pave a path to the answers I wanted, but I didn’t have a chance to ask for them.   James was gone immediately after he stood, and Janna shepherded me to the side as soon as we exited the room.  “I was hoping you’d help me with something.”  She smiled.  I squinted at her, wondering what she could possibly need from me. 

Twenty minutes later, we were walking through a darkness so obsolete I thought it may never end.  She’d lead me to the indoor courtyard where I’d met with her father and told me only that she needed my help in the city before disappearing into the black tunnel.  She didn’t answer when I demanded she tell me why we were going there, and after a few moments of staring hesitantly into the infinite darkness, I followed.  I caught up to her in just a minute, using her flashlight beam as a guide to her.  That beam lit up the walls, smooth stone much like the one inside; I knew by the sloping path that we were headed underground and took a deep breath, trying not to think about it.

Water dripped steadily in the distance.  It sounded like it was on the inside of my skull, a trickling echo that set me on edge.  I turned to Janna, though there was nothing to see other than the back of her head.  The tunnel was too narrow for the both of us to walk side-by-side.  “What are we doing?”

She turned to appraise me, those soft eyes running languidly over all five and a half feet of me.  “I’m giving you a reason to stay.”

“You’ve already given me a reason to stay,” I reminded her.  “Although I’m not happy to have come into your brother’s life this way, I don’t think anyone deserves to die…which is what I gather will happen if we break the bond.”

Janna shook her head.  “That’s just it, though.  You’re staying out of guilt.  You’re staying because you don’t want to be responsible for whatever the Hell comes after you leave.  I want you to stay because you believe in the cause.”

“For someone so religious, you sure throw that word around easily.”

“Hell?”  Janna laughed.  “It’s just a word, Lilith.  And I am NOT religious.”  I gave her a look somewhere between surprised and confused, and she returned it with a laugh.  “I’m spiritual.  There’s a difference.”

“Sure.”  I muttered, because this wasn’t a conversation that I was ever comfortable having; particularly not when I had to remind myself to breathe.  The chances of the walls caving in were statistically low, right? 

Janna wasn’t ready to let it go, though.  “Tell me that you don’t believe in something greater than yourself…”  She said it like a dare, but when I looked up from the ground she was watching me, incredulous.

“I don’t know what I believe in.  I never have.”

“Well,” Janna straightened, the beam of her flashlight dropping as the path before us opened wider.  The darkness began to recede; my heart raced with joy.  “Maybe I can change your mind.”

The tunnel let out at the mouth of a cave, somewhere in the woods.  I’d have said it looked familiar from my flight, but I’d be lying to myself since all the rocks and trees and dirt looked the same.  Janna knew where she was going, and she walked confidently in the direction of horns blaring and cars whooshing by at speeds excessive enough to rattle the tree tops.  Across the street was the very same diner I’d thought could serve as my refuge.  My eyes flitted to the alley where James had attacked me.  I glared at Janna, mouth open.  “What are we doing here?”

Janna glanced around, and then her eyes fell on the diner sign.  Her mouth formed an ‘O’ when she made the connection.  “This is where…?”  She shook her head.  “Of course it is.  Julius has a thing for the blonde waitress.”  She rolled her eyes.  “Hey, that truck stop has nothing to do with this, ok?  Come on.”

We didn’t cross the street; rather we stayed on our side of the road and walked for what felt like miles, until we came to an innocuous metal shelter, the size of a chicken coop.  It smelled the way I imagined a chicken coop would.  Fortunately I didn’t suffer long, because a few minutes later a great big bus came to a noisy stop in front of us.  I followed Janna on and she slipped enough coins into the machine for the both of us.

The bus didn’t agree with me, which was fine since I didn’t agree with it.  We sat, knees pressed together, avoiding the disinterested eyes that glazed over us.  The air seemed to have thickened once the doors closed, and with that it became hotter.  The stench of so many people pressed so tightly together set my heart to pounding, which in turn set my head to throbbing.  “Would you just answer my questions already?”  I snapped.

Janna fixed me with a sideways glance, smiled at an elderly woman with her hair pulled under a plastic cap, and then stared straight ahead.  I clenched my fists and released them.  Janna was the closest thing I had to a friend; punching her would certainly jeopardize that.  And on a moving vehicle with a few dozen spectators, it would also draw unwanted attention.  I felt like a moving target as it was.

We stayed like that, squished onto a blue vinyl seat, as the woods gave way.  Almost immediately after, buildings began to appear like out of a pop-up book, tall and glossy.  Janna stood and I followed her off the bus, tripping over the last step as the thing lurched, preparing to leave before I’d even made it off. 

The noise was the first thing I noticed; it was immediate and all-encompassing, vibrating in the air.  Horns and music and static and voices and the rushing wind all twined into one loud mess.  The next was the smell…I didn’t even know how to describe that, though it was not entirely unpleasant.  “Welcome to the city.”  Janna smiled. 

I tried not to look as disappointed as I felt.  When I’d run from Xian, from my father, I’d thought the city would be my safe place.  Though I’d never been, I expected it would magically solve all my problems.  I’d disappear in the mesh of other people, find Samuel, and then go from there.  And now, I was standing there in the heart of it all, knowing that my time had passed.             

Janna took me all over the city, as if I were a tourist who cared to see the statues and be told what each building housed.  I gave up on asking questions after we stopped for cupcakes not even twenty minutes after she bought us muffins from a little girl set up on her apartment steps.  We ate a ridiculous amount of food, drank coffee, went to the mall, visited the theater, perused a tiny bookstore, and walked all over the damn place.  And all the while, Janna dropped folded paper bills into musician’s hats’ and paid for other people’s ice cream and bought scarves for a group of school girls admiring them from a street vendor.  Despite what Janna had hoped for, I was not impressed by the city or her little acts of kindness. 

Sure, the little boy to whom she gave the ice cream cone had acted like she’d given him a puppy and the woman she’d bought coffee for outside the bank had almost cried, but I didn’t see how this stuff justified what she’d tried to pass off as God’s work.  Feeding people and buying them things they didn’t really need was hardly what I would consider protecting humanity.  And my feet hurt.  I lamented all of this to Janna while we walked on an overcrowded sidewalk and she made eye contact with every stranger we passed.

“I’m not trying to impress you.”  She said.  “I brought you because I need your help.  All of this…the shopping and the bus and the cupcakes from Sweeties, all of that was for your benefit.  You said you wanted a normal life…now it’s too boring for you?”

I gave her a withering look, but she seemed undeterred.  “Of all the people in the world, you needed me to hold your shopping bags?”

“No.  I need your help with a woman.”

My stomach plummeted and I stared at her, wide eyed.  “We’re not going to kill somebody?”

“What?”  Janna laughed.  “No.  There’s something seriously wrong with you if that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say I need your help.  I need you to talk to this girl.  She has more in common with you than me and…I think you’ll know what to say.”

Despite my suspicions, I followed her through the city for what felt like hours, getting run over by strangers in a hurry to get where they were going and running smack dab into people who stopped to consult maps.  Finally we seemed to break away from the shops and the food carts and the musicians and artists, standing in the shadow of a massive grey building.  Despite my hesitance, I followed Janna into the hospital and signed in to visit our ‘friend’ Katie in the ICU.  

I was ready to leave the moment we got there…it was something in the air…bad vibes or the smell. A middle aged blonde lady with her hair in a severe bun demanded we follow her through a mess of turns, up three stories in the elevator, and through two pairs of doors that locked on the inside.  She deposited us at the last door at the left end of the hallway and shuffled away wordlessly.  I turned to Janna, ready to run, but she ducked through the door to a room before I could open my mouth.

The girl that lay in the hospital bed didn’t look like a girl.  She didn’t even look like a person with her face purple and swollen.  I stood, paralyzed, while Janna moved closer to her and grabbed her hand.  Her eyes fluttered open…they were a really pretty light green like celery, but they were blood shot.  She jumped a little.  “Who are you?”

“I’m here to help you.”  Janna had a soothing voice.  I’d never really noticed it before, but when she wasn’t being ridiculously perky, she was instilling calm in others.  Even people who woke up in a hospital bed with little memory of how they got there and found themselves looking at a stranger.

“I don’t know you?”  But it was a question, and the girl didn’t seem sure of herself.  I bit my lip, looking anywhere but at her unnaturally purple face, and noticed that the room was absolutely sterile.  Nothing gave the slightest indication that a person was even in that room, no flowers, no balloons, no cards.  Just that girl in the bed, looking at Janna like she recognized her from some distant memory.

“We met once.  I helped you before.”  Janna took her hand.  “I brought my friend, Lilith.”

I came closer at the mention of my name, and saw that the girl’s arm was in a sling.  She appeared to have played chicken with a truck… or an angry bull.  Even her hair, cropped short and unkempt, had blood in it.  The sight made me feel weak.  “Hi.”  I waved.

“Who… are you?”  Katie’s voice was raspy and wavered, as though it took a fair bit of effort to speak.

“Lilith is here because she wanted to tell you something.”

“I don’t know her.”  Katie seemed like she may cry, her eyes brimming with confusion in the form of tears. 

“It’s okay.”  Janna soothed.  She squeezed Katie’s hand and looked at me.  “Tell her about Xian.”

My heart faltered, and I couldn’t be sure I trusted my own ears.  The bedframe leant me support as I tried to catch my breath.  And all the while, Janna just looked at me calmly, like we’d rehearsed this several times over and now this was opening night.  I shook my head.

“Last time I saw you, you looked different…better.  But you were crying.  You wouldn’t remember me, since you’d had quite a lot to drink, but that’s okay.  I remember what you told me…about your friend Cam.”

“Cam…?”  She shook her head, then winced at the motion.  “What about him?”

“You told me what he did to you.”

Katie bristled, her face tightening into what I imagine was supposed to be a neutral expression.  It must have hurt, because she winced.  “No.”

“Lilith,” Janna looked at me, pleading.  “Please tell her about Xian.”

I didn’t know what Janna knew about Xian, or how she even knew his name.  This was a topic I’d never broach, not with anyone, let alone a complete stranger.  I shook my head, but the act felt like rattling my brain against my skull. 

“Cam loves me.”  Katie said.  “We’ve been together forever.”

“And he wasn’t always so mean.  But the man that you fell in love with is gone.  Katie, I’m here because you’ve driven away all of your friends.  It’s not easy to watch someone you care about tear themselves apart inside, and that’s what you’ve been doing for months.”

“You don’t know me.”  Katie accused.  Her eyes were sunken, and I realized just how small she looked.  Her eyes, though black and blue and swollen, seemed very wide and childlike…was she younger than I?  “And you don’t know Cam.  He’s my best friend.”

“No,” Janna shook her head.  “He’s killing you.”

“Katie,” I ventured.  My voice trembled in time with my hands.  What was I supposed to say?  “You don’t have to defend him.”

“But…”  Her lip wavered, a last line of defense before she let the sob loose.  “I love him.”

“Did Cam put you here?”  My stomach twisted.  “Did he do this to you?”

Katie looked away, like she was trying to recall a memory.  Or maybe she just couldn’t stand looking at me, a complete stranger asking intensely personal questions.  When she finally spoke, it was a whisper so low I almost didn’t hear it.  “He didn’t mean to.”

Her words shouldn’t have phased me.  She shouldn’t have phased me.  But I felt my throat constricting, and thought I may be in danger of crying too.  “You don’t love him.   If he is treating you like this, if he is allowing you to end up here like this, you don’t love him.  And he doesn’t love you.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I wished them back.  They had been cruel, not the best way of dealing with a girl who was broken in every sense of the word.  I turned to Janna.  What were we even doing here?  We needed to leave.

The tears finally began to fall, leaving smudges of makeup down her ruddy cheeks.  Janna squeezed her hand, and then looked up at me and said in a whisper, “Keep going.”

“What?”  I hissed.  “You want me to torture her some more?”

“You’re getting through to her.  Keep going.”

What else was there to be said?  She was trying to delude herself into sticking around, making excuses to stay with this man that she had thought she loved.  I couldn’t honestly say whether she had loved him, and I doubt she could either.  But I knew well enough that she thought she loved him, and that was just as strong.  “Katie…you were right when you said I didn’t know you.  But I know your story, and it doesn’t end well.”

Katie looked from me to Janna, wide-eyed and breathless.  “Can you…see the future?”

Janna shook her head gently.  “No.  But Lilith has a lot in common with you.  She used to have a boyfriend that she thought she loved very much.  But he hurt her.  You don’t hurt people you love, no matter what.”

Hearing her talk about me like I wasn’t there, like I’d given her that information to pass around freely, made something inside me snap.  I looked at Katie, and suddenly, though I felt bad that she was in pain and confused and alone, I didn’t feel any sympathy for her.  “You will die if you stay with him, young and alone and probably too beat up for anybody to recognize you.  He will kill you slowly and all at once if you stay with him, because people who abuse their friends don’t change.  He will thrive on the power you give him by letting him control you, and he will find new ways to hurt you.  The only chance you have to save yourself is to walk away.”

“I can’t.”  Her voice was a mousy little squeak.  “He’ll kill me if I leave.”

“He’ll kill you if you stay.”  I snapped.  “If you want to be someone’s doormat, go ahead.  But if you want to live your own life, if you want to know how much more there is, then you should walk away while you still can.”

Katie stared at me with her mouth open, as though she’d been planning words, but couldn’t make her tongue say them.  She absolved into tears, shaking like a leaf in the breeze.  I glared at Janna and strode from the room, throwing the door open so that the force of my anger could be transferred into it. 

Janna caught up to me while I was waiting to be buzzed out of the Intensive Care Unit.  “I don’t know that I’ve ever been more proud.”  She grinned at me, flashing those insanely white teeth like I should be proud too.  I didn’t know what I felt, but pride didn’t even come close.  “It was unorthodox,” She shrugged.  “But I think you finally got through to her.”

“That’s what you needed my help with?  You wanted me to yell at a complete stranger for something that was beyond her control?  You wanted me to tear her apart…for what?  So that she can hate herself for letting herself be controlled by someone else, which is just going to make it easier for her to be controlled?”  I shouldn’t have lost my temper, but Janna had edged me towards it, almost like she anticipated it.