The Heart's Ashes (14 page)

“
Friends don’t force themselves on each other, Ara.” He
pointed to the bench, where I’d been standing with Eric.

My world stopped, but everything around me moved, rolling
forward, as if I’d jumped on an invisible conveyer belt. “You saw
that?”
I knew it.

Mike simply
stood taller and dropped his hands to his side.

The movement
of my rocking world felt like a hot room—a sauna left on high with
the door closed—making my cheeks tingle, my lips numb, until it
dissolved with a rush of cold.

Mike’s frown
loosened and shock washed over his eyes as the sound rang out
around me...

...coming back
in like heavy breathing and a constantly beating heart. My eyes
inched open to a stream of daylight, while the firm pillow beneath
held me down.

No, wait, not held me down—
held
me.

Looking
around, I aimed my eyes to the yellow wall beside my bed—to my
photos and the rainbows shining through my crystals. But as I
focused properly, my heart sunk, and the dream of my dad’s house,
of Mike and David, slipped away to the bright white walls and
strong embrace of my best friend. “Mike?”

“
I called work for you—you passed out,” he said in a stern,
emotionless tone. “You’re not eating, are you?”

“
What? Why would you say that?” I sat up from his chest and
looked down when I felt the brush of sheets on my bare skin. “You
undressed me?”

“
You had coffee all over your clothes. I only took your shoes
and jeans off—and your shirt.” He shrugged, but the normal glint of
mischief in his eyes was gone.

“
You’re mad at me,” I stated, sitting up properly.

“
Yes.” He bit his teeth together and looked away.

“
I don’t like it when you’re mad with me.”

“
Ara, are you starving yourself because you miss
him
?” he asked, anger
gripping his usually gentle tone.

Is he mad at
me because he thinks I’m starving myself, or because of Eric? “What
makes you think I’m not eating?”

“
You passed out, and you’re very,
very
thin.” His head shook as he
exhaled the words. “I nearly fell over when I saw your bones, Ara.
You’ve done well to hide it from me, but I’ve seen it now. So tell
me the truth.”

“
I’m not starving myself, Mike. I don’t really get hungry
anymore—and, yes, it’s because I miss him. But it’s not
intentional.”

He let out a
breath. “So, if I cook for you every day, you’ll eat it?”

“
Yes.” I looked down.

“
Now—” He took my hand and waited until I looked into his
eyes. “We need to talk about this.”

I cringed at
the touch of his finger over the scar on my wrist—the one David
left. “I don’t want to talk about it.” I snatched my hand back
defensively.

“
I don’t care!” He pulled me back to the bed as I tried to
stand up. “Now. Talk.”

“
Why did you look at Eric’s arm?” I asked, spinning around to
look at his face. “When you shook his hand? Why did you do
that?”

“
I know what he is.”

I doubled
back, then folded my arms defiantly. “Oh yeah, then what is
he?”

“
Ara, stop it. You know that I know—you’ve known for a while.
I was just waiting for you to tell me—to give me one shred of
honesty—but you didn’t.” He pressed his lips into a stern
line.

Oh, crap. I
slowly unfolded my arms. “I—”

“
You what? Don’t stop talking, Ara. It’s time for the truth to
come out—the whole truth.”

“
I didn’t want you to be mad with me.”

“
But I am mad.
Furious
, to be exact. How could you
hang out with that guy—knowing what he could do to you?”

“
David never did anyt—”

“
Not David. Eric. David would never do that to you. But you
don’t know what Eric’s capable of, Ara. He could’ve bitten you. You
could’ve ended up in a coma again.”

“
Whoa, hold on, hold on. Exactly how much do you
know?”

“
I know what they are; David
and
Eric.” Mike ran his finger over
my scar again. “Does David know that guy’s hanging around
you?”

“
David’s gone, Mike. Eric says no one can find
him.”

“
How does Eric know?”

“
He was in the same Set as David. Mike—” I looked at the
narrowed squint of his eye, and sighed. “I’m sorry I never told
you, but I didn’t really know anything. David kept that part of his
world to himself.
Eric
told me most of what I know about the Set;
Eric
told me about
David, how he left and—”

“
Is that why you’re hanging out with him? He’s your link to
that world—to David?” Mike asked.

“
Yes.”

“
Oh, thank God.” He ran the hand of relief through his hair.
“I was afraid you might be in love with him or something—you know,
or maybe you had a fetish for guys that can kill you.”

“
Mike! What a horrid thing to say.” I drew back.

“
I’m sorry, baby, but what’d you expect? You don’t talk to me
about it.” He pulled me back into his firm, almost inhuman-sized
chest, and squeezed me. “All I’ve had are my own
conclusions.”

His white
shirt smelled so strongly of him—the scent of a man mixed with heat
and sweat and powdery cologne. But it smelled so good, so human.
“Well, how long have you known—about David?” I asked.

“
Since the day I met him.”

I tried not to
let my shock out verbally. “Oh. Really?”

“
Yeah, I mean, I started piecing things together beforehand. I
suspected something, but I was just really far off-the-mark.”
Mike’s eyes widened. “When you were attacked, and I saw the bite
marks—I put it all together. How could I not? Plus, I saw that guy
lift you like a feather and fly off. He moved faster than humanly
possible, Ara. Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?”

“
I guess I just forgot about the finer details.” I sat up and
swiped my hair from my cheeks, still tasting the sweet liquor of
Eric on my lips.

“
Well, I remember everything. It’s all
very
clear to me.” The stern,
protective tone hovered long after he spoke, his eyes staying
focused on the wall above my dresser. “I thought David had done
that to you,” he continued, “so I called him to tell him you were
in surgery, that you’d been attacked. He arrived within the minute,
like he was already in the vicinity—except he told me he was across
town. I waited ‘til we got word that you were gonna survive before
I approached him about it; all the while, I wanted to strangle
him.

“
But when he saw you—when they brought you back to intensive
care—he fell apart. I started to doubt if it was him. So, I
followed him to the car park; found him leaning against a wall,
hardly able breathe.” Mike’s fists clenched. “I grabbed him by the
collar and spun him into the wall.”

“
Mike, how could you?” I couldn’t help but picture it. “He
didn’t do that—he’d never do something like to me.”

“
I didn’t know that then, Ar. All I’d seen so far was a cut on
your wrist and bruises on your neck. What was I supposed to
think?”

“
Did—did he hurt you—when you tried to attack him?”

Mike’s gaze
dropped onto mine, his face alight with humour. “Course not.
But—”

“
But?”

“
But, I never meant to hurt him like that.”

“
You hurt
him
?”

Mike sighed through his nose, looking away. “He just—he
said
Kill me. Just kill me, I did this to
her
, and I snapped. I threw him to the
floor—smashed my fists into his face so many times that he
should’ve died then and there.” Mike looked at his knuckles, at the
tiny white dots littering the tops of his hands, then flexed his
fists.

“
These
were from David—you hurt
David?” I ran my fingers over the scars as if maybe some small
piece of David might still be in there. “You tried to kill him? You
can’t hurt a vampire, Mike—they don’t die.”

“
He was already dead,” Mike stated factually. “He died inside
the minute he saw you. I only broke his body, and believe me, Ara,
you can hurt a vampire. They feel pain and they bleed. Granted—” he
squeezed his fists tighter, looking off into the corner of my room,
“—it takes a hell of a lot more to break their skin, but
they
do
break.”

“
How could you hurt him like that, Mike?” I couldn’t even
imagine him hurting David. “Don’t you know—he could’ve killed
you?”

“
I know. But he let me do it. Do you really think I could’ve
done that if he didn’t want me to? He nearly broke my arm when he
stopped me for a second to tell me—” Mike stopped as if he’d
swallowed a golf ball.

I looked at
his autumn eyes, waiting. “Tell you what?”

“
That I was wrong,” he said to his lap. “I said he didn’t love
you because he let you into his life, and he said it was
because
he loved you
that he left you—so you could live.”

“
So he says.”

Mike turned to
face me then. “You don’t believe that?”

I shrugged.
“Not sure what to believe. Mostly, these days, I just wish I’d
never met him.”

Mike looked
forward again, making a tight fist. “Then I’m glad I hurt him. I
wish I’d killed him.”

“
Are you enjoying that memory?” I huffed, folding my arms as a
wave of nausea flooded through me.

“
Yes. He put you in that place, Ara—he did that to you.
Whether it was by his hand, or not.”

A flash of
Jason’s face and his cold, unwanted hands, intruded my thoughts.
“It hurts, you know,” I said. “It hurts as much as if it were
actually him.”

“
Why? What do you mean, Ara?”

“
He never came for me.” I started crying then, for things I
thought I’d moved on from. “He always said he’d catch me whenever I
fell. I thought he’d come. I thought he’d save me, but he
didn’t.”

“
Oh, baby.” Mike pulled me against his chest. “I shouldn’t
tell you this—I’d rather you hated him—but he couldn’t save you. He
didn’t know you were being hurt, and it
killed
him.”

I looked up
into Mike’s eyes. “But he was supposed to know. He was supposed to
be like the knight in a book—he was supposed to be my hero, and he
wasn’t.”

“
Aw, Ar—don’t place clichés on the poor guy. Do you want to
know what he was doing while you were being hurt?”

I nodded,
wiping away a line of tears and snot.

“
He got
very
sudden approval for a meeting with the World Council—to
request an eighty year leave of absence, to be with you, baby.” He
tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and stroked his thumb down
the bridge of my nose. “Okay, he didn’t know you were being hurt.
Do you really think he’d have just sat back and let that happen to
you?”

“
No. Not the David I know, but—” I stared into nothing,
weighted down by this new information—information Mike had had all
along. I tried not to cry again. I needed to know everything Mike
knew, so crying just wouldn’t be productive. “So you talked to him
for a while then? To talk that way about the World
Council.”

“
Had three months.”

Why would David tell him more than he told me?
“How much did he tell you?”

“
Everything, baby—he told me everything.”

“
He told you about their society?”

“
Yes.”

“
And about...about
us
as well?”

“
Yes.”

“
Did he tell you about the Sets and the Council?”

“
All of it. I waited for you to tell me. I hoped you
would.”

I didn’t know
all that.

“
But, then you started getting better, and I thought you were
moving on, so I didn’t wanna bring it up.” He placed each hand
carefully over my arms. “Just tell me one thing though, Ara. Did
you
want
to drink
Eric’s blood?”

“
Yes.” My eyelids fluttered. “I wanted it. But I didn’t
want
his
.”

Mike nodded.
“So what is that? Is it like a drug? Or did you get some freaky
blood-thirst when you were bitten?”

“
No.” I laughed the word out. “I’ve had this craving for it
ever since I tried it; it’s addictive, like a drug. It makes you
feel really good, kind of—energetic.”

“
And David knew that would happen? The addiction?”

“
Yes.” My breath became deeper as the memory of David and I by
the lake flushed cold through my veins.

“
Are you really in love with him? Or is
he
a drug, too?”

“
Who?”

“
David. Is he just an addiction?”

“
N—Mike. I’m in love with him.”