Reckless

Chapter 14 Part 5

Present Day

Character POV: Roxanne

Ariadne puts a hand on my shoulder, displaying no reservations about intimate gestures on her side, which instantly shuts me up. She shoots me a dashing smile like I could imagine on a swashbuckling pirate. I can already picture her with the plumed hat. She shakes her head a single time at me as she objects, "No. Every single one of us had to die and be remade by the magic in our sire's blood. If you remove the spell, we're just a bunch of corpses. We all die. And Analize knows that, she has a spell that can unbind the spell keeping us around, but she needs access to me in order to make it work. If she takes me out, then all of the vampires I have sired will also die, and there goes the entire vampire race." She smiles at me as she says, "Being a vampire isn't all that bad. I've grown to like it. I'm not sure that I could manage without my special bag of tricks."

"Why didn't you tell me any of this?" I ask her, reaching up and pulling her hand off of my shoulder, a gesture which makes her jar slightly, but I feel myself beginning to get angry at her for keeping me in the dark for all of this time. "We have been in each other's orbit for our entire lives, we were intimately together, and you never told me any of this. Why?" Because I deserved to know. It was a deal that involved me. I had a right to know.

"Yeah, that wouldn't have been fun, would it?" She snorts. When I give her a flat and unamused stare, she seems to lose her edge and replies in a more genuine tone, "You had enough things that you felt guilty about. I didn't want to be just another one added to the list. If I told you, you'd beat yourself up, and then you wouldn't see me for me. Everything you felt for me would be out of a sense of duty or obligation. I want you authentically, stripped down to your true self, with no pretenses. That's how I've always liked you, in the raw, raging like a wildfire." She smiles at me knowingly, well-aware of the memories that particular phrase churns up, of lighting the forest on fire as we hunted witch hunters. But her next words are more deflated, as if her entire soul has been crushed, as she says, "Also, you had already moved on and clearly didn't love me any longer or you wouldn't have been with David, going so far as to move in with him. We both know that you only have room in your heart for one person. That's why Analize was instant on driving us apart, so she could be the most important person to you."

I stand there for a moment, her words settling in my mind as I take in the way that Ariadne's not looking at me, the roughness to her voice. This isn't a manipulation technique. She honestly thinks that what she just said was the truth. I take a single step towards her, and her head snaps in my direction as I scoff, "Analize has told me multiple times to find and stake you, and yet you're still here, still alive. But you tossed me a stake and told me to stake David, and I did. Clearly, I do love you. Everything I have done has been to protect you, because I love you. I'm just mad as hell at the mind-job you've been doing on me these past few days."

"I needed to wake you up," Ariadne replies surprisingly evenly. She reaches out and takes my hand, and I allow her to, as she says, "Come with me. There's something I need to show you, someone you need to see in order to understand what this has all been about." When I make no move to follow her, she smiles, "It's a good surprise this time, I promise."

"Good" and "Ariadne" don't really go in the same sentence, but I came here to give her a chance to explain herself to me. I want so badly to believe her, to see things from her point of view. I nod finally, encouraging her to lead on. She smiles with wicked delight then, turning and pulling me to one of the back doors, not the one to the exit but one that opens up to a small hallway that is poorly lit. I rear back at being submerged in darkness with a vampire that, though I love, I do not trust. Nothing good lurks in the darkness, typically. Darkness is the time where men do things that they would prefer to keep from seeing the light of day.

What keeps my feet moving is the memory of how, when I was trapped in the dead of night with evil men, Ariadne was the one who stepped in and saved me from them. No matter what has lurked in the dark of night, waiting to jump out and attack, Ariadne has been there and been on my side. She has never been someone I had to be afraid of. Ariadne has had plenty of chances to hurt me in these past few days. She was less than a foot away from me, with my guard down, more than once now. Yet, I'm still alive. If she had wanted to hurt me, then she would have. Her attacking women who looked like me or had ties to me has put me on edge, but the memory of who Ariadne used to be puts me more at ease, even though my shoulders ache from the tension I'm storing in them.

Gradually, my eyes adjust to the darkness of these quarters and I make out the shape of a woman sitting at a small table in the small kitchen off to the side of the hallway. I freeze, instantly on guard as I feel ambushed. Ariadne gives my hand a gentle squeeze as if to remind me that I am not alone, that she is still here and that she promised me this would be a good surprise. Ariadne reaches around on the side of the wall and flips the light switch, and I can suddenly see the woman sitting in front of me clearly. She is all sharp angles and appears tall even when sitting down. Her blue eyes bore into me, her red hair lighter than the red hair that Analize has. She almost looks familiar. I glance over at Ariadne and ask her, "Who is this?"

Ariadne smiles at me with a sort of warmth that makes me feel uncomfortable given all that has happened. She nods in the direction of the other woman and says, "This is one of Boudicca's daughters, Locrina-- named after Boudicca's mother, your step mother. She was the elder daughter." Everything goes quiet in my head at that declaration as I whip my head back in the direction of the woman. She slowly rises to her feet, and as I look at her this time with the context given to me by my former girlfriend, I can see my sister looking back at me in her daughter. The sharper angles to her face are her father, Prasutagas, which threw me off. But the hair, the eyes-- the eyes which are identical to her mother's eyes-- all of that reminds me of my lost sister.

I feel Ariadne step up to my side, still holding onto my hand as a way to try and ground me or reassure me, I can't tell. She continues, "I couldn't save both of them. I tried. I had gone to Nitocris and been turned, and I immediately headed back to Boudicca to see if there was a way that I could help, a way to save any lives that I could. I took them away to Greece and stayed there with them for years, but once they both were grown, they begged me to turn them. They wanted to be strong enough that they wouldn't have to be afraid any longer, that no one would stand a chance at doing to them what the Roman soldiers had done ever again. I did it for them," she says, as if it isn't obvious that she turned at least the one in front of me, because she's still alive and standing in front of me, "and then they went to Egypt where Arsinoe was waiting for them, prepared to help them set up a new life there. I trusted Arsinoe because she told me that she, too, had made a promise and that promises are sacred things. She stuck her neck out and helped vampires despite knowing Drusilla would be furious."

All of these centuries, I have been angry with Zahra for not going to help, angry at all of my fellow witches for not launching into the revolt to save my sister and my people. I've isolated myself from them for most of my life, only being around the majority of them again during the battle with the vampires where Ariadne was so determined to sacrifice herself to end Analize. Ariadne releases my hand and hovers into view, standing between my niece and I. Her violet eyes search my face as she says finally, "You want to know the truth. It's not pretty, it'll crack your entire world view. But I am finally prepared to tell you the truth. I'm done determining what you can and cannot handle. So, here's the truth." She bites into her wrist, letting a dribble of blood flow, and holds it out to me. I know vampires can share memories when they share blood. With my magic, it should work the same. Still, I hesitate, but then I take her wrist and wince at the irony taste of her blood. This is the only way I can be sure she is not lying to me.