Chapter Twelve #3
I don't have many words. I haven't spoken about myself in millennia.
There was a time, long ago, when I had a mother and a father and three brothers and a small horse the color of a fox.
There was a time when I had a name that meant wolf in the language my mother spoke and when she used it she meant be brave.
There was a time when I rode east with my brothers under a sky full of stars and the snow on the plains and we were hired men, paid in silver, going to a country we hadn't seen.
I tell her this. I don't tell her in order. The fragments come up out of me as her warm cheek presses against the cold scar of my chest, and I don't know what shape they take when I give them to her, but she listens.
I tell her about the battle.
I don't remember much of it. I remember the cold of the morning. The horse going down under me. The shape of a blade in the gray light. And the smell of the field afterward — so many men opened to the air at once, the smell of blood becoming something else as the day warmed.
I tell her I rose.
I don't know how. I don't know why. There was no one there to tell me.
I sat up among the bodies of my brothers and I was changed.
The teeth in my mouth weren't the teeth I'd gone down with.
The fingers I lifted to touch my own face weren't the fingers I'd been born with. The sky was too bright for my eyes.
I rose. I walked off the field. I've been walking ever since.
She lies against me and she doesn't speak.
I keep going. I tell her the small things.
The cities that no longer exist. The languages I learned and stopped using.
The long centuries between cities when I crossed empty country and saw no one and spoke to no one.
I tell her about London. The firm. Whitfield.
The bag phone and the addresses delivered by courier.
I tell her about the farmhouse.
I tell her about the night I first saw her.
The parking lot. The smell of her hair under the grease of the food court. The brush of her shoulder against my chest. The way she said sorry and didn't look up. I tell her how I followed her home and stood across the street and watched the light go out in her window and stayed.
I tell her about the feedings.
I don't soften any of it — I don't have the words to, and I won't lie to her now that she's asked.
I tell her about the man at the dumpster the first night I saw her, the one I'd taken before I knew she existed.
I tell her about the worker at the food court I took next, to find her name. I tell her about Tammy.
She doesn't move at the mention of Tammy. Her cheek stays against my chest. Her breath doesn't change.
I tell her about Craig.
She's still against me. She doesn't ask questions. She listens. I tell her what Craig had been thinking about her. What he'd been planning. What I'd seen in his memories when I touched the inside of his mind. I don't soften that either. She needs to know what I killed and why.
"You killed him," she says.
"Yes."
A long silence. Her hand moves on my chest. The pads of her fingers trace the scar she's been pressed against.
"Good," she says quietly.
I close my eyes.
I tell her about Dr. Reeves. The cardigan. The cats embroidered on the dish towel. The Brahms she remembered Jenny playing at nineteen. The conversation about the conservatory the year before everything fell apart.
She makes a sound against my chest. The stir of a memory she didn't know was still there being touched.
I tell her about her mother.
I tell her slowly. The Tudor house in Dundee.
The kitchen at midnight, the cup of tea cooling in front of her mother, the way her mother turned at the sound of the door without screaming.
I tell her about the conversation I had with her mother before I fed on her.
Are you going to kill me. No. Are you going to kill anyone in this house. No. My husband is asleep upstairs.
I tell her about the memories.
I don't give them to her in order. I give her the pieces I think she needs to hear.
The little Jenny in the yellow dress with the wooden spoon and the metal bowl, hitting them together, laughing.
The father kneeling in front of the child with the quarter-violin, showing her how to lift the elbow.
The Meditation from Tha?s in the auditorium, the father standing up first.
The conservatory letters in the drawer in his study.
She begins to cry against my chest.
The tears are soft. She doesn't make any sound. The warm wetness of them seeps into the cold of my skin and runs along the line of the long scar she's been pressed against. I draw my arm tighter around her. I lower my face into her hair. I hold her.
I tell her the last thing. The photograph on her mother's nightstand. Her father's silence about the photograph. The conversation her parents had in the dark six months ago. I should have stopped you with the letters. I know.
She's crying harder now. She presses into me with the whole weight of a body that's been holding something for a very long time and is finally letting it go.
I don't speak.
I hold her. I let her cry into my chest. The light in the room continues to dim. The window has gone gray. The day is leaving.
Eventually she goes still against me. Her breath slows. The crying is over. Her hand is curled against my sternum and her face is pressed into the side of my neck.
"Farkas."
"Yes."
"You did all of this."
"Yes."
"For me."
I can't speak. The word for you is in my mouth and it can't come out because if I open my mouth the love is going to come with it, and it's bigger than I am. I press my face into her hair instead.
She lifts her face.
She looks at me. The marks of the crying are on her cheeks. Her eyes are dark and wet. She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
"I'm sorry for the people you killed," she says. "For Craig and the others. For Tammy and the professor and my mother."
I don't know what she means at first. Then I do.
"I didn't kill any of them but Craig," I say. "The others I fed on are alive. They won't remember me. They're safe."
She closes her eyes for a long moment.
When she opens them she lifts her hand and lays her palm flat against the side of my face.
"Thank you," she says.
I don't know what she's thanking me for. The not-killing, perhaps. Or perhaps the giving back of pieces of herself she'd been missing. Or perhaps something else. I don't ask.
We lie together for a long time after that. She drifts and I think she'll sleep but she doesn't. The light in the room continues to drain. The window has gone dark blue and then deeper. The streetlight outside comes on.
I should go.
The day is gone and the night belongs to me. The arrangements that have been waiting in my head for two weeks now have to be made real. The phone call. The papers. The thousand small things that move two lives across an ocean. I can't do any of them lying beside her.
I'll come back tomorrow night with everything ready.
"Farkas." Her voice is sleepy now.
"Yes."
"You aren't leaving forever."
"No."
"You'll come back."
"Tomorrow night. And then I'm taking you with me."
She's quiet for a moment. I don't know if she's heard. Then her hand finds my chest in the dim light and her palm presses flat against the scar.
"Yes," she says.
The word lands in me the way her arching into my touch did, the way her name in her own voice did, the way every small offering she's given me has. Yes.
She closes her eyes. The fatigue is catching up to her. The afternoon has been long. The evening has been longer.
I lift myself away from her gently. I rise from the bed. I pause for a moment, looking at her in the dim room. Her hair pooled dark beneath her head. The bare line of her shoulder above the blanket. The small form of her in the bed.
I dress.
I do it carefully. The trousers. The shirt. The coat. The boots. I'm slow about it. I don't want to leave.
I cross back to the bed.
I lower my face to hers.
I press my mouth to hers in the second kiss.
The first kiss was hers. She gave it to me in the daylight.
This one is mine. I give it to her in the dark.
My lips against the warmth of hers, careful of my teeth, lingering — I don't want to lift my mouth from hers. I don't want to do anything but stay.
I lift my mouth.
"Tomorrow night."
"Tomorrow night."
I cross to the window. I work the latch. I push the window open. The cold of the December night rushes in.
I look at her one more time. Her eyes are closed. Her face is soft in sleep. Her hand is curled where I'd been beside her.
I step out onto the ledge. I close the window behind me.