What Kills Me (24 page)

“I know I sound like we’re dating and
you’re bringing me home to your mother and that’s ridiculous
because we’re just friends but I still feel nervous…”

He put his hand up. “Stop it. She is
going to like you. She is going to help us.”

I nodded.

“And if she doesn’t like you, she will
grow to like you,” he added.

“That’s comforting.”

“Hey, I didn’t like you when we
met.”

“That’s fine because I didn’t like you
either. I thought you were a jerk.”

Lucas crouched down and sprang up
thirty feet. He landed on the side of the cliff, like a fly landing
on a wall, his hands holding the edge of a deep crack in the rock
face. By this point, I knew to just follow.

“That’s fair. I can be a jerk
sometimes,” he said, once I landed near his feet.

“It’s okay. Sometimes it’s
warranted.”

He pushed off, flying horizontally,
and grabbed another ledge. I looked over my shoulder. Below us, the
clouds looked like a frothy ocean from which the mountaintops
emerged. I wished I had a camera.

“Amazing,” I said.

“You coming?”

“Yeah.”

I jumped up to meet him. I grabbed the
ledge but the rock disintegrated like soil in my hands. I gasped. I
groped the air and started to fall.

I kicked against the air. I reached
for Lucas. He was half turned, looking at me over his shoulder, his
nostrils flaring. I thought I heard him say my name but his mouth
barely moved.

I shrieked.

Lucas’s face came toward me. He
snatched my wrist and the two of us came to a jarring halt in mid
air. I stared up into his wide eyes and waited. Waited to keep
falling or for something I understood to happen.

“Are…are you flying?” I asked. I tried
to still my dangling feet so I would not swing. We seemed to be
frozen in the air, mirror images of each other, connected at the
hands.

“No. Vampires can’t fly.”

“Did you dive off the ledge to grab
me?”

“Yes.”

“How are you doing this?”

“I’m hanging by my toes,” he said.
“Can we have this conversation later?”

“Yes please.”

With one yank he pulled me up,
throwing me up to catch the ledge. I scrambled up onto the rocky
landing and saw that he was indeed hanging off the lip by his toes.
It looked as if someone had left their shoes on the edge. Reaching
down, I grabbed the waistband of his pants and pulled him up beside
me. Lucas fell back against the rock and closed his eyes for a
moment. I peered over the edge and shivered. There was no bottom.
Just thick white mist, like a bed of fluffy snow.

“That was insane,” was all I could
muster.

I tried to suck in air to flush away
the nausea but it had no effect. I forgot I didn’t
breathe.

“You have to be mindful of your
strength,” he said. “You grabbed the rock too hard.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “And thank
you.”

There was no time to recuperate. He
rose with a sigh and kept climbing. In a few minutes we had made it
to the other side of the mountain and started to
descend.

“Do you ever get tired being a hero?”
I asked.

“Do you ever get tired of being a
troublemaker?”

“What if I had fallen?” I
asked.

“By the time that I climbed down to
get you, you would have been fully healed and then we’d just start
back up again.”

“Hmm. So instead of plummeting to my
death, I would have just cost us maybe an hour of
travel.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t sound so
bad.”

“Yes, but you would have been in
excruciating pain so I wouldn’t try it.”

“Oh, that’s not something I want to
try. Trust me.”

The wind brought the scent of trees
and flowers. Soon we were wading through bushes, my fingers
brushing their soft leaves and folded, sleeping blooms. Lucas
abruptly stopped and I walked into his back.

“What?” I asked.

“There, look,” he said.

In the distance, a white pointed roof
poked out of the thick mass of green, like the edge of a card in a
bouquet. It was the top tier of a temple that seemed to sit on the
mountain’s shoulder, and in the heavy haze it would have been easy
to miss. I felt a quiver of excitement in my chest and looked at
Lucas. His eyes darted across the terrain, marking the quickest
path.

Watching him, I was aware of the
wistful smile on my face. The glimmer of anticipation I felt became
a dull pain. His impending reunion made me hope for one with my
family. I had never been separated from my parents for this
long.

Meanwhile Lucas had not seen Nuwa in
hundreds of years.

“Let’s go,” I said, swallowing the
ache.

He took off first and because he
didn’t look back, I tried to concentrate on shadowing him to avoid
a misstep. We tore across the woody landscape. Surrounded by trees
I lost sight of the temple. He stopped in front of a three-story
wall of green. Ropy trees had grown against the barrier, leaning on
the wall for support and then spreading their arms to hold hands. I
reached out and my hands slipped through the leaves and the vines
to the cool stone underneath.

“The temple is just on the other side
of this wall,” Lucas said in a whisper. “I’m going to go over
first. Just to make sure it’s safe. Wait for me to call you before
you follow.”

“Be careful.”

He leaped up into the trees. I
searched the lush forest for movement and listened for his voice—or
barking Dobermans. I was distracted by a whistling cricket dancing
on a nearby tree trunk, its wings vibrating with every
chirp.

“Shh,” I said.

“Zee,” Lucas hissed.

Coming.

I jumped up, breaking a few stems with
my head before grabbing a thicker branch and swinging over the
wall. On the other side there were more trees and I snapped several
branches before hitting the ground.

“I called you a few times,” he said,
pulling a few twigs from my hair.

“Sorry, there was a…” I didn’t
finish.

I was in awe. The temple stood at the
base of a slope, surrounded by a lake and gardens. We descended a
path marked by flat, oval stones. The shrubs were shaped into
perfect globes, and short trees held clumps of foliage like they
were balancing green plates on taut, outstretched fingers. The edge
of the lake was lined with boulders, statues of mini temples, and
sprigs of white and fuchsia flowers.

“This is the most beautiful place I’ve
ever seen,” I mumbled.

I lingered on a footbridge to watch
huge white and orange koi wriggling in the shallow, clear pond
beneath us. One stuck his whiskered face out of the water above a
cluster of lily pads, and his silver forehead glimmered in the
moonlight. I wished my father could see the size of
them.

Lucas passed between two marble lion
statues and started up a flight of stone stairs to the entrance of
the temple. A light wind disturbed the red cylindrical lanterns
hanging along the edge of the roof. I leaned on one of the temple’s
stone columns, my fingers touching a carving of a dragon’s head.
Lucas paused at the red doors and nodded once at me.

I wondered what Nuwa would be like
after so many years of isolation. Could vampires go insane? Paolo
was psychotic, so perhaps yes.

I thought he would knock but Lucas
pulled on the iron handles, opening the doors. I sidled up to him
as we walked into a darkened room and were faced with another set
of open doors. Through that entranceway we saw a rock garden.
Swirly patterns had been raked into the sand, and the stones were
smooth and charcoal colored.

We stepped outside onto the veranda,
and on the far side of the garden, beside a tree blooming with
white petals, stood a figure. A small woman with a cape of shiny
black hair. She had her back to us, her knees bent, her arms
extended. A tiny hand emerged from the gaping sleeve of her white,
silky shirt as she scooped the air and folded it over. She leaned
forward and pressed an imaginary wall with her palms and then, as
she leaned back, she turned her head to us.

A gentle, knowing smile spread across
her beautiful face. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. I felt
my shoulders sag and I wasn’t sure why but I wanted to
cry.

At last.

I had pictured Nuwa differently. In my
mind, I saw her as Lucas’s mother and imagined her to be older. She
had the softest facial features, smooth and rounded like the stones
in her garden. She had small black eyes and a heart-shaped,
peach-colored mouth. She looked anywhere from sixteen to
twenty-nine.

We walked along the edge of the garden
to meet her, careful not to disturb the designs on the ground. I
glanced at Lucas’s face. It was rigid. He was impossible to read.
We stopped in front of her and he surprised me by dropping down
onto one knee, his hand on his chest, his head lowered. I took a
step back, unsure if I should kneel.

Nuwa placed a hand over her heart.
Then she knelt, put her hands on either side of his shoulders, and
guided him to his feet. I couldn’t see his face. For a moment no
one spoke.

“My child,” she said. Her feminine
voice was full of warmth.

“Obaia,” he said.

“You’ve returned to me,” she said,
still holding his arms. “I’m so pleased to see you.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right, my child.”

“Noel’s dead.”

“I know.”

“And I wanted to see you.”

“I always knew that we would be
together again.”

She peered around his shoulder at me.
“And you’ve brought home company. Who is this?”

I bowed my head.

“Obaia, this is Axelia.”

When I looked up, she was smiling. Her
long hair undulated in the wind around her oval face. “It’s a
pleasure. I am Nuwa.”

“It’s so nice to meet you,” I
said.

“Come sit.”

She said something in Mandarin and led
us onto a terrace with a round stone table and four cylindrical
seats. The garden was bordered on three sides by the temple, but at
the edge of the terrace the ground dropped away. Beyond, there was
nothing but fuzzy green peaks and misty sky.

We sat down and a vampire in a
burgundy tunic shuffled out of a nearby door with a tray. She set
the tray down on the table and set out three small teacups and a
pot; a jade bangle on her wrist clinked against the porcelain.
Without looking at us she poured a stream of blood out into the
cups.

“Thank you, Yung,” Nuwa
said.

The vampire hastened away. As she
turned to close the door, our eyes met. She examined my face, her
hands frozen on the door. When I smiled, she slid it
shut.

“I’m glad that you’re not alone,”
Lucas said.

“The Monarchy was kind enough to allow
me servants.”

“You look well.”

“I exist,” she said. “I’m sorry about
your father. That must have been awful.”

“The Aramatta came to our home. They
were after Zee—I mean Axelia. They killed Jerome and then they
killed Noel.”

“How terrible,” she
whispered.

“It was the general.”

A look crossed her face, perhaps
desolation or loathing, but it was gone in a second.

“They have everyone chasing us,” he
said. “We didn’t know where else to go.”

“You did the right thing,” she said.
“I was worried when you did not arrive last night. Your messenger
said to expect you.”

“We ran into trouble on the
highway.”

“Why do they want Axelia?”

He paused. “She fell into the
Crucivium and became a vampire without a sire.”

He didn’t elaborate. I waited for her
reaction. She considered the information and reached across the
table, offering her palm to me. I took her hand. It was soft, like
a flower petal.

“You must have been so frightened,”
she said.

I nodded. She squeezed my
hand.

“You’re safe now.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Became a vampire without a sire,” she
said. “I’ve never heard such a thing.”

“I don’t think it’s happened before,”
he said.

“Incredible,” she said. “The Monarchy
must have been frantic. It reacts so poorly to anything outside of
tradition.”

“We don’t want to bring you any
trouble,” I said.

“She’s right. We don’t
want—”

Nuwa raised her hand to silence us.
“You are family. And we take care of our own.”

“What will we do?” asked
Lucas.