Chapter 26
Unlike the other memories, this one—Sylvia, in the attic, in the dim light of the moon dipping below the Alps—did not fade into the next. Aster wouldn’t let her brain skip forward.
She couldn’t leave Sylvia like this.
Even when she knew it was irrational, even when she knew it was like trying to kiss a photograph, or hold onto a ghost. Because she swore she felt her body there in that attic, really there, feet planted to the wood, fingers trembling.
She could see the moon through the window and every pockmarked crevice in the basalt walls. She could see Sylvia curled into herself like a child on the floor, and Aster wanted to touch her. Needed to touch her.
To wrap her hands around her small shoulders and tell her, in sequential order—
It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.
And then,
You’re not alone anymore. We’re in this loop together now.
Because this was real, it wasn’t a memory. She was there, and she could fix it.
Except the moment she stepped forward, a pain like death pried its fingers into the gummy fabric of her brain.
She fired off signal after signal to her useless body—Move.
Go to her. She needs you. She needs you.
—and yet Aster looked down at her feet and found them as heavy as sandbags, immobile even after she screamed at them like a frenzied football coach.
“Stop it, Aster. You’re making it worse—”
Aster’s heart clenched with hope when she heard the voice, and looked toward the Sylvia on the floor expectantly. But that Sylvia was still curled up like an armadillo, crying silently.
The voice had come from somewhere else.
Somewhere else? There was nowhere else. Aster’s mind pulsed as she descended further into the memory, until the word memory was no longer something that could describe what she was feeling. This was all there was anymore. She would stay here until she could fix this.
Aster tried stepping forward again, but the movement seemed to have the opposite effect, and she moved backwards instead of forwards, the image of Sylvia getting slowly farther away and more blurry, as if Aster was swimming in a pool, and someone had tied rope around her ankles, and now they were pulling her up like an anchor that’d been tossed to sea.
“No,” Aster cried out. “Let me go. Let me go to her.”
Her slowly decomposing brain compensated her confusion with a ballista of images.
She saw herself falling from a cliff, then suffocating deep underwater.
It was too much air and then not enough.
She clawed uselessly at the waves, desperate to find something to hold onto.
Nothing felt solid anymore. There was nothing to wrap her fingers around.
This is death, she realized, eyes widening.
And promptly got pissed the fuck off. Because she’d been asleep for all the most important moments of her life, and here the vindictive universe wanted to submerge her one last time, before she could finally—finally—see, before she could finally breathe the same air Sylvia had been breathing for centuries.
She wouldn’t let it close in on her just yet.
Powered by that rage, she ripped a tear in her own dream, raked across the fabric of reality with only her fingernails, and swam through it.
And suddenly she was a wet fish flopping on the beach again—on the couch, breathing heavily, eyes snapping open to see Sylvia’s head looming over her with a frank, unhidden terror in her eyes.
Sylvia’s mouth had been already open, as if she’d been trying to talk Aster back into reality for several minutes.
Seeing that Aster was awake, and her pulse still beating, two silent tears of relief slipped down Sylvia’s face.
She made no effort to wipe them away. She just stared at her with red-rimmed pupils, refusing to blink, as if Aster might disappear if she looked away.
“Aster,” she breathed finally, voice trembling. “I thought you — I thought it was all over.”
Aster smiled at her sadly, tragically, painful adoration squeezing her chest. She wanted to say I’m not going anywhere, I’m here, I’m alive. She wanted to say I see you now and I’ll never forget again, but instead what came out was “And see of never you again.”
She blinked when she heard the words leave her mouth and she realized that they made no sense—barely a sentence, barely English. She blinked twice when she saw the alarm in Sylvia’s eyes, and realized just how much she’d failed to string together a coherent thought.
“No, no, no,” Aster clarified with a growing lisp — her mouth felt puffy despite it being perfectly fine. “Speak — saying — I have trouble. Don’t mean. Sylvia. Sylvia. I see you.”
Sylvia inhaled sharply at the last phrase.
But whatever effect it had on her dissolved quickly in face of the rest of the garbled sentence.
Sylvia met her continued linguistic foibles with a deep-set frown, but at least the panic had died down slightly.
She gently lifted Aster’s head from her lap, helping her into a wobbly sitting position, wordlessly propping her up against the cushion.
Aster pretended not to notice when Sylvia kept her hand placed on the tense muscle of Aster’s shoulder, even once she was more than capable enough to balance on her own. She wondered if maybe Sylvia was using Aster to stabilize herself, and not the other way around.
“Sylvi—” Aster opened her mouth to try to produce language again—hopefully more successfully—but Sylvia clapped a hand over her lips, and shook her head adamantly. The feeling of her hot hands over Aster’s mouth silenced every jumbled thought in her brain.
“Don’t,” Sylvia said, her eyes flitting down to Aster’s lips, as if she could feel the way Aster’s body was responding to her. But if she could, she didn’t say so. “Your brain needs time to recover. You’re still scrambled. I wasn’t able to finish the ritual all the way.”
Aster’s eyebrows furrowed.
“No terminado?” she muttered into Sylvia’s palm.
Sylvia rolled her eyes, but Aster could feel the relief in that small expression—that Sylvia was once again capable of being exasperated with her meant that she had moved firmly past panic.
Making sure Aster was okay was the baseline of Sylvia’s Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, with Belittling Aster one tier higher toward self-actualization.
At the same time, Aster also knew that Sylvia slipping back in their usual dynamic was a facade in itself.
A wall that was much harder to spot, but no less firm and well-built.
She had just shown Aster something so vulnerable it was probably equally lethal to Sylvia as it was to Aster.
She’d revealed a version of herself that her Suggestion had let her hide for centuries.
Unwittingly or not—Sylvia had been protecting herself from this outcome. And here it was. Soul laid bare.
At least part of it.
The ritual was still unfinished. Aster imagined it was her fault—she’d overstayed her welcome in Riegersburg. But that meant that there were still memories buried inside of her. How many, she didn’t know. What kinds, she didn’t know.
Aster wished she could open her mouth and ask flatly, but as if Sylvia could sense Aster about to try her patience, firm arms slid around Aster’s middle, and she was being hoisted upwards, into Sylvia’s arms with a strength that honestly almost astonished her—she often forgot just how strong Sylvia was.
She didn’t have Aster’s deadly grip, but she was still a vampire.
“You need to sleep it off, or I’m going to be stuck talking to a static-noise version of you forever,” was all Sylvia said as she carried Aster toward the bedroom.
Instantly acquiescing to her touch, Aster buried her still-pounding head into the cotton of Sylvia’s sweater and felt all the exhaustion she’d been ignoring creep back to the foreground.
She realized reluctantly that Sylvia was right—her brain was as cluttered as a hoarder’s attic, and her muscles were sore like she’d just run a marathon.
Fistfighting death was not a sport for the faint of heart.
Luckily Aster had more heart than most, and it was pounding noticeably as Sylvia lowered her into the soft sheets.
She could smell Sylvia’s sakura detergent fresh on them.
Sylvia stalled at the edge of the bed and bit her lip as if weighing a choice. Ultimately she sighed, and said, “Hold still. I’m going to change you out of your funeral suit.”
Aster nodded softly, and was grateful for the first time since she’d woken up that she’d lost her ability for language.
Because when Sylvia started peeling off her shirt, then unbuttoning her slacks, stalling for a brief moment when the final button popped, Aster almost whimpered with want.
Because as it turned out, knowing she’d fallen for Sylvia a hundred times did not ruin the novelty.
She didn’t desire her less, but achingly more, with an immortal sort of necessity.
But if Sylvia did notice the way Aster’s cheeks heated—she was uncharacteristically merciful in ignoring it. Or perhaps she was even more distressed.
“I think I released enough of the memories to keep you stable,” Sylvia said as she helped her into a clean set of pajamas, purposefully avoiding Aster’s eye-contact as she tucked the woman’s shirt into her sweatpants, just how she liked it.
“I know you probably want to talk about all of it, and we will. But we should wait until we can finish the process before we do.”
Aster wasn’t sure if she believed that. There was no promise less-fulfilled than one that came from Sylvia Maroven about something soft and painful.
But Aster was too tired and too useless to question it, so she just nodded again, and let it be enough that Sylvia was touching her like she was something small and important.