Reckless

Chapter 13 Part 1

Present Day

Character POV: Roxanne

 When the plane lands in Cairo, Egypt-- the first thing I do isn't to immediately set out on a quest to find Arsinoe. Instead, I go for a walk, my hair tied up and covered neatly out of respect for the beliefs of the locals. It also helps me to blend in, just in case there are any spies here that are loyal to either Ariadne or Analize. I make my way to El Moez Street in Cairo, walking along the almost cobble stone road for a brief second before crossing onto the sidewalk, looking at the intricate architecture. People mill about around me, going to any number of the open shops and going about their lives, and for just a moment, no one knows who I am. No one knows where I am. To all of these people around me, I am just a tourist, a person of no consequence really. They're all exceptionally nice when I walk further through Cairo.

I go all over the city, drinking coffee and tea, spending almost four hours. By the time I am done, I can barely stand due to the aching in my leg. But I feel the lightest that I have in centuries. I take one more hour to get some food, enjoying the flavorful meal in front of me, before I finally go and rent a car and begin my over 8 hour drive out to the last location that I knew Arsinoe was at.

While I'm in the car, I try and think through what my next steps are going to be. I have no real plan going forward. My entire world has been blown apart, and I don't know who to trust anymore. I know that Analize is so desperate to kill off the vampires that she will never be objective. I know that Ariadne is in the same position, wanting Analize dead so much that she was once willing to die herself to accomplish the task. That's why I came here instead of going back to the United States. In all of the war, the only person who was carefully neutral was Arsinoe. Every other witch fought in the war against the vampires, including myself. It's because Arsinoe has remained neutral and refused to take orders from either of the leaders, Drusilla or Ariadne, that she has remained alive. There are only three witches left, and she is one of them. I'm still alive because of my attachment to Ariadne and Analize needing me. Analize is still alive because she is so clever and powerful. But Arsinoe is still here because she was the only one of us who kept a good head on her shoulders. The only thing that I can think of that would be a good place to start is talking to her.

It has been almost 3,000 years since I last saw Arsinoe or talked to her. My nerves begin to fray at the thought, my anxiety heightening and causing me to drum my fingers on the steering wheel. It only gets worse with every passing minute because I know that I am getting closer to her.

There is a distinct possibility that I came all this way for nothing, that she won't help me. I doubt that she would tell on me to Analize, but people do change over time. Three millenias is a long time, anyone would be expected to change over that span of time. And, it won't go over well that I found her address by having her tailed. Analize lost contact with her about a hundred years ago and asked me to find out if Arsinoe was even still alive. I found out her location, but something stopped me from relaying that information to Analize. I figured that, if Arsinoe wanted our leader to know where she was, she'd tell her herself. I lost some brownie points with Analize for not "having smart enough agents to trail her and get a damned address" but I could sleep that night and feel at ease with myself.

My hands begin to shake, and I grip the steering wheel even tighter, as if that will stop what's coming. I have no alcohol, no drugs, nothing on me that could possibly stop the withdrawal that is coming. When you're a witch, you don't want to draw unnecessary attention to yourself, so risking being caught smuggling shit onto an airplane is completely out of the question. I take a deep breath through my nose as I keep driving, glancing at the clock. It'll be late afternoon, maybe the early hours of the night by the time I finally arrive at the rock outcropping near the outskirts of Siwa Oasis where Ariadne has set up her home, having hidden it with a spell. By that time, my body will be sending me more and more problems because of the lack of substances for the first time since I stopped the war and Ariadne and I broke up. It has been centuries of constantly pouring things into my body to dull my mind and block out all of the memories that I didn't want to deal with, all of the emotions that I didn't want to face for fear that they would trigger something worse in me. I needed to lay low, and that meant that the killing of evil men had to stop. There were times where I broke that rule, like in World Wars, where I launched into the fray and threw my magic behind the side that actually had morality, like some of my witch sisters did before they died, but even then I was dulling myself with substances.

I don't think there has been a single day, until today, where I didn't consume substances at least ten times throughout the day since Ariadne and I broke up. The thought jars me, and suddenly I wonder what changed in the last few hours where I haven't made finding something to numb myself a priority. The image of Ariadne in the warehouse flares to life in my head, how I was completely unable to attack her, how she had plenty of opportunities to hurt me but she didn't. I think of the way that all of my attention was fixed on her and I was completely oblivious to what was going on with David. Could the thing which changed my self-destructive behavior have been seeing Ariadne again? Or was it how she made me quit playing pretend with David, though her methods were extreme and harsh?

A pit forms in my stomach as I remember what happened in the early hours of this morning. I've never had Ariadne try to get through to me by making me kill someone I didn't want to kill. She's always been kind to me, allowed me to make my own decisions as long as they weren't hurting me. But today, she snapped.

"Because he was hurting you, but you have this awful ability to excuse people up until the moment they have you strapped to a pyre," Hallucination Ariadne muses from the passenger seat, rolling her eyes and leaning her head back against the headrest.

"Why are you even here?" I ask her, keeping my eyes fixed on the road. I thought that as the substances left my system, the Hallucination Ariadne would fade away. But no, she's still here, and I feel deeply unnerved. "You always show up when it is the most inconvenient."

A high-pitched laugh greets my words before she says, "You think about me, I appear. I'm in your head, doll. So I think you should start asking yourself why you've been hallucinating your ex-girlfriend for centuries when you were oh so happy with your many little lovers and thousands of boyfriends." Her voice sounds distant at the tail end of her statement, and I pop my neck by moving my head from side to side to work the tension out.

Still, her words stick with me. She said that she took David because he disrespected me, because of those sexist comments he made. Vampires are not sane, that's a side effect of their transformation. They are impulsive and their ability to live in the grey area instead of going over the line and falling off the edge is diminished. Can Ariadne not differentiate between words and actions? Has her mental health deteriorated over the centuries like mine obviously has? Are we both just two insane killers going around in circles for the rest of our lives? Or am I just having an existential crisis because I'm sober for the first time in forever? I shake these concerns off and just focus on driving, desperate to get there before worse symptoms of withdrawal hit and sideline me.