Reckless

Chapter 14 Part 7

Present Day

Character POV: Roxanne

I snap back to the present with a gasp, pressing a hand to my chest as if that will help me get air down into my lungs. Tears are streaming from my eyes, and I do nothing to stop them even as my vision gets blurry and my breath shaky. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?!?" I demand of Ariadne. Because then I would have been right beside her, helping her to take Analize out. I would have helped her, not stopped her, not saved the life of the person who ruined my family.

"Because I knew you had affection towards her for giving you a magical, immortal life," Ariadne replies, reaching up and pulling me into a hug. For a moment, I fight it, but I am too overcome to fight it. Not when Ariadne has done so much more for me than she has done against me. I bury my face in her neck, sobbing. She strokes a hand down my back as she says, "I thought I could just take her out without you ever having to know. I didn't want to see what knowing would do to you. It looked like it would be the best of both worlds."

I laugh incredulously, pulling away from her and wiping at my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt as I hiss, "Yeah, except that you would be dead, and I would have no idea why you thought killing Analize was more important than what the two of us had together. I would have lost you, and I would have lost my niece as well-- but you didn't think about that, because your vampirism blinded you to that reality. Losing you would have meant me losing everything, and never knowing the reason why." My voice breaks at the thought, the idea of being totally and utterly alone.

"But you would have been safe!" she intones, her voice desperate as her eyes widen with pleading. "You have no idea why I was there that night that you were on the pyre. It wasn't coincidence. I had heard that Drusilla had ordered all of her witches to stay out of the vicinity of where you were, to stand aside. She fed into that paranoid minister's delusions and pushed him over the edge to the point where he strapped you to that pyre. She did it because you were getting too powerful and had become a threat instead of a tool for her to use." She pulls back, tears rising in her vision as she says, "My vampires warned me of the plot, and I had to race to you or else she was going to have you killed. I saw someone I loved in the worst state imaginable, I saw you almost die. There was no way that I was going to risk letting her have a second go at you. Your niece was in on it, by the way," she adds, pointing back accusingly at my last blood relative who nods a single time in confirmation. "I wasn't some crazy woman sacrificing the lives of people dear to you to save you. I mean, I am crazy, but a different kind-- an off-brand crazy if you like."

"If she was so determined for me to die, how am I still alive?" I ask her, my entire world shattered and in fragments around me at each new damning revelation Ariadne hurls my way. My entire life, I served a woman who had done everything in her power to ruin mine. Everything I believed in was a lie, a lie I fed into an enabled. Maybe I was right, maybe I wasn't strong enough to come here and hear what Ariadne has told me. It feels that way right now when I'm fighting to just get air down into my lungs.

"Because of your self-destructive spiral," Ariadne informs me, her anger back and her eyes turning red. "You neutralized yourself with substances. You couldn't pose a threat to anyone, human or creature. She was more than happy to just watch as you slowly poisoned yourself to death. And, with you high or drunk or whatever you were, you weren't with it enough to see what else she was doing. All of your witch sisters, except for Arsinoe, gone. And it never occurred to you who could be behind that. Who started the witch trials. Who gave humans that idea? Who stood by and allowed her witches to be burned? Vampires starting it was a great spin she put on things, but we're more into living a hedonistic lifestyle than sabotaging an entire species." She winks at me, trying to use a little bit of her off-center humor to make this easier for me to digest and keep me from feeling crushed by all of these revelations.

It doesn't work. My mind is still racing a thousand miles a minute as I try and think through all of the implications of this. I shake my head, running a hand through my hair and knotting my fingers through it as I scrunch my face up with confusion and hiss, "But why is she so obsessed with me? Either she wants me on her side and is prepared to do anything it takes to ensure that I don't have conflicting loyalties, or she's actively plotting ways to undermine or kill me. She's the leader of the witches, you'd assume she'd have more important things to do than to kill other witches and terrorize the ones she's decided get to live." I release my hair and shake my head as I say, "That's not how you stay in power, by killing the people who give your title. What's the plan? Be the queen of the witches, a people with a population of one?"

"Locrina," Ariadne calls, reaching behind her beckoning towards my niece who obediently steps forward at the summons as Ariadne finishes, "please give me the scroll." I watch as my niece removes a very brown and flaking scroll from the counter behind her, holding it gingerly aloft as she makes her way towards her sire. Ariadne turns away from my briefly as she slowly lifts it from Locrina's hands, winking at her as she says, "Thank you, sweetie." She turns away from my niece and back to me as she slowly opens the scroll. She mutters to me, "I've had this scroll in a climate controlled environment since the technology to do so existed. It's still ancient, so we might only get one shot at this."

"What is it?" I ask her, standing on my tip-toes to peer into her hands and get a glimpse of the scroll. Once glance at it tells me that it is most likely Greek in origin, but it has been centuries since I have seen artifacts from the past. If it isn't from around where I grew up or any of the places I have lived, there's a slim chance that I am going to recognize it. When you have an immortal lifespan, you cannot possibly retain everything. Some things need to be filtered to the unimportant pile and deleted. It's not like I became an archaeologist and used that information for every day of my life going forward. If I didn't use it, I got rid of it.

Ariadne drags her violet eyes back to me as she smirks at my eagerness, then she pushes past her momentary amusement and directs her gaze back to the scroll, where there is indeed Ancient Greek writing on it. There's no way in hell that I would be able to read that, but luckily, we have an Ancient Greek woman right here. Ariadne tells me in a rushed whisper, "The Oracle at Delphi delivered this prophecy to my mother, who had magical talents. My mother was being recruited by Drusilla at the time, and she wanted to know if she could trust the Roman woman. After she got this propechy, my mother decided she would rather live a mortal life. My mother died in childbirth having me," Ariadne finishes, enlightening me to things she has never told me before in all of our time together. Her voice catches as she says, "My father was left to raise me. It wasn't long after I turned that Drusilla sought out my father and killed him to punish me for going around her and finding an alternative route to immortality."

"I'm sorry," I tell her, my heart breaking a little at the revelation of how she lost the only family she had while doing something to try and protect me, while keeping a promise she made to my sister that I never knew about. I think of all of the things that Ariadne has sacrificed throughout her life to try and ensure that I was shielded from anything that could possibly do me harm, and then I think of how I pushed her away and threw it all back in her face essentially, getting with David and creating a life with him, a man who embodied all of the traits we sought to purge from the world when we hunted witch hunters. Suddenly I feel very small, and the urge to take something, anything, to numb out this uncomfortable feeling surges through me, almost beyond what I can handle. I glance around, just out of habit, to see if there are any bottle of alcohol around. I notice that there are a lot of empty spaces on the shelves, and that there isn't as single drop of alcohol, something Ariadne drinks by the gallon to suppress the high emotions that come with being a vampire. Ariadne does live here, right? Or did she just get rid of all of her stock because she clearly knew that I was coming? Was that another sacrifice, albeit a smaller one, that she made for me?

Ariadne cuts me a sharp glare, her eyes flashing red for the briefest moment as she snarls, "Stop that. Babe, if you had any part to play in that, if I thought you were responsible for his death for even a second, trust me-- we'd be having a very different, much less civil conversation right now." When I just nod, Ariadne moves onto what the scroll itself says as she slowly unfurls it. She holds it gently, aware that the wrong pressure or wrong angle could cause it to suddenly disintegrate before our eyes as she says, "The scroll reads: The true queen of the witches will change the shape of the world. She will have a power beyond compare and will survive the trials ahead." Ariadne slowly, almost slower than a snail's pace, puts the scroll back in its original position and hands it back over her shoulder to my niece who takes it from her.