Enzo #2
A half-forgotten tune came to the front of my mind, and my mouth found the shape of it before I could talk myself out of it.
I hadn’t sung in three hundred and twelve years.
Not once. Not even to myself.
The first notes were so quiet I could barely hear them over the rain—an old lullaby in the language of my mother’s people, the one she’d sung over me on nights when I was too small to understand fear as anything but a thing that could be soothed by her voice.
I hadn’t thought of the song in centuries. I would have sworn, had anyone asked, that I no longer remembered a single verse.
Apparently, my memory was less obedient than I had given it credit for.
I sang under my breath against Nadia’s hair while she clung to my chest in her sleep and the rain hammered the roof and the fire burned low beside us.
The melody was slow. The words I could remember spoke of stars and small boats, of a mother promising her child that the dark was nothing to fear because she would be there when morning came.
My mother hadn’t been there when morning came.
She’d died on a winter night in her own bed, and I had been standing at the foot of it when she stopped breathing. She’d never seen another dawn, and the song had never crossed my lips again.
Until now.
I sang two verses. The third was gone, lost somewhere in the centuries between then and this cabin, so I returned to the first and sang it again, quieter this time.
My mother had always said one should finish what one started or it would haunt them, and I had no intention of being haunted by a lullaby on top of everything else in the world that already knew my name.
Halfway through the second pass, Nadia’s hand loosened.
Her breathing evened.
The nightmare let her go.
I finished the verse anyway, quietly, to no one in particular.
When the song was done, I sat in the dim cabin with the fire low and a sleeping Shadow Fae against my chest, and I felt my mother’s absence in a way I hadn’t permitted myself to feel in centuries.
I had been a man of iron control for too many years.
The eldest son of a vampire king for longer than most people in the kingdom had been alive.
I had built a province, lost a crown, and watched my brother take the throne that had been trained into me from birth.
I hadn’t allowed myself to weep over any of it, and I didn’t weep now.
But something behind my sternum shifted—the same quiet, inconvenient thing that had been moving there since the alley in the village—and this time, I didn’t force it back into place.
For a while, that was all I did. I held Nadia against my chest, listened to the storm spend itself against the roof, and let the thing in me exist without naming it.
Sometime in the small hours, when the storm had softened into ordinary rain, I moved her off my lap and onto the bedroll beside me. Slowly. Carefully. With every ounce of discipline the centuries had carved into me. She didn’t wake when I drew the blanket over her.
The bench across the room was cold against my thighs as I sat. I set my back against the wall, pulled my favorite blade from its sheath, and unfolded the small whetstone I kept wrapped in oilcloth inside my drying coat.
Then I cleaned the blade that didn’t need cleaning. My hands required occupation, and they couldn’t be allowed to do what they wanted—which was cross the room and put themselves back where they’d been minutes ago.
She slept on as the fire burned, the rain falling steady and patient on the roof as I waited for dawn.
It came eventually.
Gray, like the morning in the Divide courtyard days ago.
Quiet, like the mornings in a hundred villages I had ridden through over four centuries.
Ordinary, like every other dawn. Somehow, my life had stopped being ordinary the moment a Shadow Fae pulled me through the void and looked at me on my knees in my brother’s study with an expression I had still not entirely forgiven.
She stirred just before the light strengthened.
By the time her eyes opened, I was dressed and ready for our journey with a tin cup of tea in my hands. The kettle had been on the hearth for an hour. The tea was strong enough to peel paint, which I had decided was likely what she required.
Her gaze moved from me to the cup, then back again.
She said nothing about the night.
“Storm’s passed,” I offered, trying to gauge her.
“Mm.” Her voice was husky with sleep, and that noise sliced right through me like one of her blades.
She sat up slowly and took the cup, both hands wrapping around the tin as she stared into the fire.
My shirt slipped at her shoulder again. She caught it absently and tugged it back into place, and the small, ordinary gesture of a woman managing an article of clothing she hadn’t chosen and was wearing anyway did something to me I would have to address at some point.
Fuck.
I returned to cleaning the blade that had been perfect hours ago just to have something to do with my hands.
She drank her tea. I kept myself busy. By the time she’d finished her cup, the rain finally stopped.
After a while, she stood. Steadier than she had any right to be. I gave the blade in my hands every appearance of my attention.
It didn’t prevent me from watching her in pieces—the sweep of her hair over one shoulder, the efficient pull of dried leather over her skin, the precise tightening of buckles as her weapons settled back into place.
She checked each blade with the focused calm of someone returning to herself one dangerous piece at a time.
When she was done, she turned to me.
“Thanks for the tea,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
A beat passed between us.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“Lorenzo.”
Not Enzo this time. My full name, the one I preferred, and I found I hated it on her tongue.
“You’re still a bastard.”
My lips stretched wide into a rusty grin. “I know.”
She nodded once, a ghost of a smile dawning on her face, and then she was out the door.
I remained where I was for one more minute after the door closed behind her. The fire was low. The kettle was empty. Clean gray morning light came through the small east-facing window, and outside, I could hear Nadia murmuring something low and probably uncomplimentary to Sugar.
I put the whetstone away.
Sheathed my blade.
Stood.
At the door, I paused with my hand on the latch, and for one brief moment, I let myself acknowledge the thing I had been refusing to feel since that damn alley.
I was well and truly fucked.
Then I opened the door and followed her.