Chapter 14
Walking through the city at night felt like a dream; the kind that wasn’t sure whether it was a nightmare or not. The kind that presented you with everyday horrors, noises and things lost in the darkness, things that didn’t add up to a cohesive reality.
Raven wanted to wake up, but he didn’t know how. He also knew he wasn’t dreaming, not really. There had been no dreams since he’d gone to the Forum for a lecture and for his own curiosity. It had been nightmare after nightmare since then.
Walking and letting Maxim lead the way was easier than being alone. It didn’t stop the thoughts and memories from coming, but there were interruptions. When the wind picked up, Raven smelled earth and water, greenery, and when he lifted his head, he saw the treetops of Seneca Park.
“Did we walk here?”
“Yes. It’s not really that far from the house.”
Raven glanced at Maxim, who was wearing that pajama set with the cute doughnut-stealing bats as if it were a tailored suit. I don’t get him. What kind of hunter wears that?
“Raven?”
Maxim was looking over his shoulder, disturbing the smooth coil of his braid with the tilt of his head.
“Huh?”
“I asked whether you’d like to go into the park? There are a few calm spots at this time in the month.”
“This time?”
“Not the full moon. It’s crowded during the full moon, with all the werewolves and their families and friends there.”
Raven nodded. He remembered that. Remembered being taken to the park.
“They…brought me here. D-Daniel had shifted. He—Laurenzio said to look at that vampire who was consorting with a wolf and… I could’ve run.
He said so. He said I was allowed to run, only they’d kill him if I did.
That vampire they showed me… Laurenzio said Daniel would go and tear his head off, but I was free to run if I wanted that. ”
Maxim had stopped. He was staring, Raven could tell, even if he couldn’t see well now that he was crying again.
“They took you to the park?” Level voice. Raven had been so sure it would be angry now, finally.
“T-to…my professor’s house too. They…said…I had…to watch, and then they…they—”
Strong arms around him. Raven felt himself shivering in Maxim’s hold. He breathed in the smell of him, faint but there, unfamiliar but not scary. Maxim didn’t move, didn’t tighten his hold.
“I apologize. This is out of line.”
Raven whined when Maxim started to release him, when the hunter’s arms slipped away, and he had no fucking idea why he made that noise. He couldn’t speak. Whenever he opened his mouth, he made things worse these days.
“Raven, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. No one should’ve been forced to go through what they made you do, do you understand? They played with you.”
“I…” Raven looked at the trees again. “I could’ve run. Could’ve told you. I could’ve…saved my professor. We… They said… We went there. After the park.”
Maxim’s nostrils flared. “How would you have saved them? There was never any choice. They knew you’d not run. They knew you’d not do that, terrified as you were, but they enjoyed torturing you with the potential choice. They fucked with your mind, Raven.”
Raven could see that, in a way. Makes sense. I guess it makes sense?
“I… They didn’t—he didn’t always compel me. Not for everything. Not all the time. If I’d just… If I’d just…”
Maxim waited. Perhaps this is what the cops do, him waiting for me to confess it all. To tell him. Maybe the walk… Maybe all of it…
Raven didn’t know what to think anymore, didn’t know if they were really here for a confession, for the weighing of his guilt.
In the movies, the dead would appear sometimes as a warning, as a haunting to make bad people face the truth, and stupidly, he looked into the darkness that grew denser closer to the park, wanting to see Prof. LeRoux there.
She wasn’t there, was nowhere anymore. I wonder if she realized what happened to me. Maybe she blamed me, in the end, because I was na?ve enough to fall for a handsome vampire and go with him.
“We don’t have to go into the park. I apologize for bringing you here, making you relive that,” Maxim said.
So soft-spoken. So calm.
A sudden urge seized Raven. He wanted to scream at Maxim, at each and every nice thing he’d said and done. He faced him, opened his mouth, but he couldn’t say the words, couldn’t bring himself to.
Or maybe I’m scared that he’ll be angry. What is he going to do to me when he gets angry?
No. Raven tried to make his lungs work smoothly. Laurenzio had been angry with him a lot. Raven had been scared because he could never tell why or when, and there’d been no way of knowing what he’d do. Except it always ended the same. He always raped me in the end and drank my blood.
Raven didn’t scream at Maxim. He did the next best thing and crossed the road, not so much as thinking about whether there was any traffic he was running into.
He walked through an iron gate and into Seneca Park, almost running, never once turning to see if Maxim was there, hoping he was. Hoping he wasn’t.
The park was too big to really know every corner of it, at least that was Raven’s impression. New Amsterdam natives might’ve seen it differently.
In this moment, the unfamiliar nature of the shadows he was walking into was soothing while also being exhilarating. What if there are people here? A fae assassin—someone who knew Prof. LeRoux and hates that she died because of me?
Raven picked up his pace, running along the path before veering off into the trees and underbrush. Something inside of him said “they” were waiting for him there: assassins, the vampire Laurenzio had made him watch. The accusing dead, finally. They’d come and take him away, and then it’d be over.
With his eyes stinging, he forgot what his feet were doing, and with a jolt of air hitting his face, the park passed him by in a strange, forward-jumping leap.
Shocked, he stopped. His feet caught on something, and before he was exactly sure where he was, he was falling forward, seeing the gravel of one of the footpaths coming for his face.
“Easy.”
Maxim caught him with an arm across his chest and a hand at his neck.
“I—”
“You ran, but with vampire speed. Nicely done.”
The praise didn’t sit right, didn’t feel right. Raven didn’t know how to brush it off, wasn’t even quite sure what it was for or how genuinely it was meant.
“Th-that was…running?”
Maxim pulled him upright. Raven’s muscles felt tense, unusually so.
“Yes. You’re lucky you didn’t run into anything. I tripped and fell and broke my face when I first did it. Do you want to sit? The first time tends to be oddly exhausting.”
He pointed at a bench that offered a view of one of the lakes that ran through the park and were home to waterfowl, the odd werewolf during a full moon if the stories were to be believed, and, of course, students out on drunken dares.
Raven huffed. No one ever dared me to go skinny dipping in the park.
“Okay. Let’s sit.”
He walked with Maxim, his legs wobbly. He sat and relaxed against the wooden bench, watching out of the corner of his eye as Maxim sat next to him, that silly pajama set doing a bad job of hiding how smoothly he moved, how elegant he was.
Rich, too. What was I even thinking, throwing myself at him? I’m nothing to him. I’m used up, wasted, and he knows that better than anyone.
In the darkness, Raven told himself that he’d rest for a moment and then he’d run, leave, tell Maxim he was going to go to the police or that he was going home. Back to university, even. He didn’t want any of these things. He just wanted…quiet.
In the end, Raven lacked the courage to do anything at all. Maxim said nothing, and they sat there, nothing but silence between them until the sun came up and cast their outlines in copper and rose.