The Keeper's Vow (40 page)

Their conversation shifted to Tristan and
Katie told Allison about the last time she saw him.

“Wow,” was all Allison muttered. Katie had
hoped Allison would tell her something uplifting and reassuring.
All she did was confirm Katie’s worries.

“He’ll never forgive me. I know he won’t. I
told him everything I said because I knew it would hurt him.
Instead—I think I broke him.” Katie sniffed back a few tears.

Allison rubbed her back as they sat down on
a park bench in Findley Park. The park where Tristan and Katie
spent the night. Now that she thought about it, he probably did put
his shirt over her. It was something he’d do but never take credit
for.

“He doesn’t hate you. He’s Tristan. He’s in
love with you. I’ve never seen him light up for anyone else like he
does for you. You’re the only person who ever got him to try food.
Everyday, during lunch, he’d taste something because
you
asked him to. He’s always telling Lucinda you don’t like tomatoes
on your sandwiches. If he’s not sitting next to you then he’s
looking for you, because he acts like he needs you to breathe.”

Allison sighed. “To be honest, I hated him
for a long time. He stole you from me. We used to be that close.
About everything. Then I realized he didn’t steal you, he needed
you. He still does. If you’re his friend—if you love him—you’ll be
there for him.”

Deep down, Katie knew it was true. She
should be there for him, no matter what. But How could she when his
hate ran so deep? “You weren’t there, Allison. He hates me. To his
core.”

“He hates that you’re a selfish-ass. That
you don’t see how much you mean to him. Anybody would hate that.
You hated it when he was indifferent toward you, didn’t you? When
he started treating you like you guys were just friends.”

“But—”

“It’s the same thing, Kay.”

Allison was right. Katie always wanted him
to chase her and deliver grand romantic gestures. He’d been chasing
her all along. Chasing her, and saving her, and loving her.

She was a monster.

When Katie got home, she dropped her bags in
the kitchen and went straight to the refrigerator. Her dad wasn’t
home to hold her hair back and talk her through it. It was her
decision and so she had to do it alone.

She pulled down a glass and filled it to the
brim with blood. The smell alone almost sent her overboard. There
was no going back. If his life was tied to hers, she could at least
endure his nightmares with him.

Tristan told her once that drinking never
gets better. He failed to mention that each time feels violent and
worse. She did it though, and just as she suspected, she was back
in the darkness. The darkness where he’d lost his heart.

She spent a week avoiding Larry, but she
couldn’t run away from that too. She sucked it up, Saturday
morning, and went to his shop. When she saw the sign—
Kat’s ice
cream
—she wanted to gag. The whole time—it had been there the
whole time.

Larry looked relieved when she walked in.
Katie had rehearsed what she’d say. She’d try to make it as
nonchalant and matter-of-fact as possible, but Larry never gave her
the chance.

He locked the door, switched the sign, and
started off into another story. This time about his travels around
the world, and what it was like to see a Shakespeare play on stage
for the first time. He told her what it was like coming to America
and how it was a different kind of wild than he had ever seen
before in his life. And how he had started to question his point in
life when he was in Germany.

Katie asked him if he had ever tried to use
his gift of healing to help people, and he laughed saying she was
exactly like her mother. They sat in silence after that and he
pretended he didn’t see her incredibly embarrassing ‘
I’m about
to freakout’
face.

After a while, he told her that his
gift
was just as much of a curse.

“I call it healing, but it is really a gift
of life and death. I tried when I was young, but quickly realized
that I didn’t know whether the person I put my hands on would heal
or die. I started only using it when I knew that the person would
die whether I intervened or not.”

“Well that’s a little better,” Katie said,
thinking of the lives he could save.

“There is a catch, My Dear Katalina,” Katie
cringed. He’d never called her Katalina before. Yet, it sounded too
natural. She hoped that wasn’t what he called her mother, but there
was no use lying to herself. “The more I heal, the more I die.”

Katie looked away from the window and at
him. “What?”

“I didn’t know it until the time I’d healed
your mother. I had started coughing up blood and my heart slowed
down.”

He shifted in his chair when he’d realized
she was intentionally looking away. Why couldn’t he just say,
‘I’m your father’
and be done with it? On the other hand she
could say something too, but—

“You know, your mother and—I…”

Pandora’s box needed a padlock. “So what
happened to her?” Katie said. She was just as much a coward as he
was. Maybe that’s where she got it from?
Ugh.

“We were in New York, it was a cold winter
that year. She was attacked by werewolves. Ten of them. I did
everything to save her. She wasn’t completely happy with the
results, but I saved her life. It left me weak and near dead, but
your mother was was on deaths door step. Energy is neither created
nor destroyed. Do you know what that is?”

“Energy conservation.”
And one point goes
to Traci
.

“When I use my gift, it has to come from
somewhere. And it took me a long time to realize that it comes from
myself. I give a piece of my life to heal another. And other times,
whether I want to or not, I take life from another. That is why
mine is a curse.”

“Tristan said his dad felt the same way
about his strength. Tristan doesn’t though.” Katie said it, but
Larry raised his eyebrow to confirm it. Maybe his gift had passed
down to her? If she
was
his daughter….

Neither of them touched that.

“How is Tristan?” Larry asked.

Katie hesitated. “I don’t know. He’s stopped
talking to me.

“I see.”

“I can’t make him hear me either.” She’d
tried that. Maybe he was too drunk to hear her.

“If Tristan doesn’t want to hear you, there
is nothing you can do. Except apologize for whatever it is he’s
sore about.”

Katie sighed. What if she wasn’t brave
enough to apologize? What if she never saw him again. “What if one
of us died the other would feel it right? What does eliminated
mean? I mean—is it true?”

Lawrence frowned and nodded. His eyes
drifted out the window.

“What if we never talk or see each other
again. Does the bond go away?”

“No,” after a moment Lawrence added, “you
are a good person. Good people are always forgiven.”

“Somethings are unforgivable,” she said,
looking down at the table.

“Would you like to hear another story?”

Katie smiled. Larry was weird.

“I used to be the leader of a pure blood
brotherhood in Europe. I was charismatic, I had common sense, and
when it counted, I was kind. I was all those things to everyone
except my real brother.”

Katie never picked Larry for someone with
siblings.

“My brother was born ten years after me. He
didn’t have an easy life. My father refused him because he was
halfborn, a product of his kitchen whore. He threw Eshmael out to
die. I took him to his mother, our turkish kitchen slave, and she
named him and raised him. My father was furious. He made us take
the Keepers Vow as a punishment.”

“Why?” Why was his father crazy.

“Because—my father was a demon in a mans
body. I’m no better. When I think about my brother, Eshmael, now I
wonder if I should have left him to die—don’t look at me that way.
In a way, Eshmael and I are the same. We both hated our father, and
we both don’t want to be anything like him. The problem is, you
can’t escape the demons your parents pass on to you.”

“You
can
help who you are,” Katie
said, not believing Larry. She was trying to change herself now.
She wanted to be a better person. Not someone who was too selfish
to see when her friends needed her. “Anyone can change.”

“Perhaps, but you can’t help what you
believe to be right and wrong. When we were still boys, I used to
be ashamed of Eshmael. He called that slave woman his mother, he
was a brat, and he even had a slave name. He used to follow me and
Ivan around playing tricks and making my life hell.”

“Isn’t that what all younger siblings do?”
she said.

“Eshmael spent his life trying to kill me.
We were hardly siblings. He always failed because I was smarter and
stronger than him, and because I could heal myself. I’d always rub
it in his face that he was nothing and I knew I was wrong for it.
—I take that back, Ivan always told me I was wrong for it.
Sometimes, Eshmael would hurt himself in one of his own traps and
I’d heal him—not because I loved him, but because I wanted him to
see how much more powerful I was compared to him. I was as bad as
our father was to him. The only good thing I did for him was kill
our father.” Larry sounded regretful, but of what, Katie wasn’t
sure. Every time he said his brother’s name distain followed.

He continued. “When Eshmael was still
fifteen, he saw our father rape and kill his mother. She was the
only person he ever loved. I heard her screaming and when I went,
Eshmael was unconscious on the floor and my father had just killed
her.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

Larry looked deep in her eyes. “Because he
could. Maybe he saw Eshmael laughing with her, maybe he saw how she
loved him. It didn’t take much for him to end a life, he spent most
of his life in the shadow.

I killed him then, with my bare hands. I
didn’t understand why he had to pick her. The only thing Eshmael
had in the world, there were plenty of women throwing themselves at
him everyday, yet he had to take the one who didn’t belong to him.
When he was dead I told myself I did it because of a prophecy—but I
really killed him because I thought it would rid us of his evil,”
he said more to himself than to her.

“I was wrong. Eshmael became more of a
devil, and I—who should have shown him the right path—let him make
his own of death and destruction. I never reached out to him like a
brother should have. Though we came from the same father, I had a
friend to keep me from a life of abhorrence. Ivan forced me to live
an honest life. I should have done the same for Eshmael—we were
flesh and blood brothers, yet I casted him aside like he were a
peasant—I was a fool. I was envious.”

Larry didn’t look at Katie and she felt his
shame. “Envious of what?” It seemed to her that there was nothing
to envy Eshmael for.

“Because a brother always wants what the
other has. I had power and I never wanted him to be able to take
that from me. He had a mother who loved him….”

“What happened to him?”

“He lives to destroy me.”

“He’s trying to kill you? That’s a
bit…much.”

“No. He doesn’t want to kill me. Just
everything I love. Everything that brings me happiness. It’s my job
to forgive him and show him that it’s possible. That even now he
can also forgive me.”

“If he keeps trying to kill everything you
love, I think you guys are past forgiveness.” Eshmael was
dangerous. People like that were labeled as sociopathic today.
Didn’t Larry know that?

“That is my retribution, Katalina. At least
my father cast him out to die, I saved him and showed him a life
full of hate and inhospitality. In a way, that makes me more of a
demon than my father. If I can hope for forgiveness from my
brother, you can hope for forgiveness from Tristan.”

The sun blinded Katie as it settled just
above the window. A few rays slipped directly into the shop. “Do
you like to paint?”

Caught off guard Katie shrugged her
shoulders. “I’ve never really tried.”

“How about tomorrow we go to a studio. It’s
next door.”

Katie agreed, but she felt a little guilty.
Like she was cheating on her dad with her maybe real dad—who wasn’t
exactly her dad, but someone who knocked up her mom. Maybe.

Painting was fun. They did it often. It
helped to talk to Larry. Slowly she’d tell him about how hard it
was sometimes to see things Tristan saw, but she never went into
detail and he never asked her to. He’d tell her to try painting the
good things she saw. And sometimes she did. She had never realized
it before, but sometimes Tristan did flood her with good memories.
They just seemed like nightmares because they’d always sent him
drinking. Especially the ones of her.

“What is that?” Larry asked once.

Pointing at a yellow-gold blob, Katie had
replied, “a honeypot.”

She was becoming numb though. As numb as he
was.

The only thing that brought a little ease to
her numbness was painting with Larry. She let out all her anxieties
into bad sunsets, and lopsided oceans. She wasn’t good at it, but
there was something about blending colors that made her less numb
on the inside.

“You’ve forgotten to drink haven’t you?”
Larry asked signing the bottom of his painting of a landscape with
a castle.

“Are you painting that from memory too?”
Katie answered. Before he had painted a picture of a boy that
looked just like him, with gray eyes, mud colored hair, a look of
contempt sitting on his face. He told her it was Eshmael when he
was fifteen.

“Yes. It was where I stayed in Germany.
Where I met your mother. Why aren’t you drinking?”

“You always drop ‘mom bombs’ and never stay
for the fallout,” she half-chuckled.