Charlotte After Dark

Chapter 29: The Scars We Bear, Part II

I met Tarmo on the sidewalk outside of Elysia Towers, and he seemed much less apprehensive as he approached me. He even managed to show me a shy smile as he opened the passenger-side door for me. I never rode in the back anymore, and found it much more comfortable to sit in the front with Tarmoas he told me about his family, and how he became to work for Charles Greymalkin.

He drove safer this time as he wove through traffic at a much slower pace than his usual race speed. I readied myself, putting my hair up in a high ponytail as Abel would most likely be waiting for me at the door, like he always did now, and ready to go immediately. Sometimes, he ambushed me from the small, dark alleyway but after the last time when I wore a pair of heeled boots that Audra had secured for me, he seemed reluctant to do so.

"How is your mother?" I ask Tarmoas we sit at a red light.

"Oh, very well," he told me. "Your poultice recipe worked very well on her arthritis, she told me she felt twenty years younger."

I had found the recipe in one of the old Elven herb books I had found among the masses in the library. I guess some of those things really did work.

"You can thank the Leantior of Brithmun," I told him. "She wrote a very extensive guide on Elven cures for joint pain."

Tarmo was the only Mundane you could talk to about the Other World, as he called it, who wouldn't run screaming in the other direction, I knew. He became quite enchanted by what the Other World held. I was just relieved to find someone who was just as ignorant of what lay past the Mundane world as I was, and who didn't look at me like I had two heads. Cormac would only look at me with bored eyes, having heard my stories and facts probably more times than I ever heard any of my bedtime stories.

As we drove up to the curb in front of Abel and Liam's warehouse, I found Abel inconspicuously leaning up against the doorway waiting for me with a familiar sly smile on his face.

"He's up to something," I think out loud, with a sigh.

"Ambush?" Tarmo asked me. Sometimes I think he gets a thrill out of these sorts of things, like a murder mystery dinner right in front of him.

"Probably," I resign before stepping out of the car.

"Tarmo," Abel signaled with a tip of his hand from his forehead, greeting him the only pleasant way he knew without absolutely terrifying the Mundane.

"Mr. Lestrange," Tarmo replies with a nod, as cordially as he can. His skittishness is still evident in his voice as Abel's gaze is upon him.

"Come in for tea?" Abel asked him. I think Abel got some sort of amusement out of eliciting Tarmo's fearful behavior towards vampires.

Tarmo first looked at me, and then his feet. "Oh, no, Sir. Thank you, but Mr. Greymalkin has some tasks for me," he lies.

Tarmo had only just become accustomed to letting a vampire ride in the front seat beside him, and taking suggestions of Elven healings for his mother. To sit in a room full a vampires sipping on tea must have seemed a little too much to him.

"Very well," Abel responds, before he turned to face me and asked, "Are you ready?"

"I'm always ready," I replied in confidence as he opens his arm to let me through the doorway.

"Why is that boy so nervous all the time?" Abel muses.

"You would too, if you had Aud-" I began to say, before being interrupted with a strong gasp around my neck.

It was not Abel, as the clutch is much weaker than his. I grab tightly around the thick arm, digging my nails into the light flesh that has tried its best to smother me. I take a swift thrust of my elbow behind me, and it is greeted by a loud, instant intake of air and a groan from behind me. I freed myself momentarily from the strange attacker longer enough to get one of my hands around his neck, slamming him into the wall behind us.