2. Valtu
Valtu
THEN
“V altu?” Lenore says gently.
I’ve been sitting on the floor of the kitchen, cradling Dahlia in my arms like a newborn.
But she is not a newborn. She is the opposite of that.
She is dead and I am holding onto her because I know eventually I’ll have to stop.
These last moments with her, even though her heart has stopped beating and her spirit has moved on, are all I have left.
I want to hold her forever. Never let go, even as she’s put into a grave with me and she rots in my grasp.
I woke up this morning a man in love. I felt something for Dahlia I never thought I’d feel again. I felt hope. I felt a future. I felt happy for the first time since Lucy died.
I was given a second chance at life.
But then it all came crashing down on me.
It all ended because of my own hand.
My own temper.
My own violence.
It never lets me forget the monster I have buried inside.
And now I see Dahlia for who she really is. The woman I love now, but also the women I loved then. Love stacked on love stacked on love and I smashed it all to smithereens with my own hand.
I’ve lost her again.
“Valtu,” Lenore says again, crouching down beside me.
She tries hard not to look at Dahlia, even though she wants to.
I know she feels guilty for what she did and I’m too drained to be angry at her.
I know my anger will return and she might be on the receiving end of it, but until then, I just feel an emptiness so vast I fear I’ll disintegrate into nothing.
No. That’s not quite true. I don’t fear that.
I want that.
To disappear.
To be with Dahlia in that vast nothingness.
“We have to do something,” Lenore goes on. “I know how hard this is for you, but we have to do something about her…” she trails off, unable to finish her sentence. Unable to say the word “body.”
“There will be people looking for her,” she adds, with urgency in her voice now. “Friends, family, the school will notice she’s missing. We have to cover this up.”
I give my head a shake. It feels like the most energy I can spare. “She has no family.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure that wasn’t a lie—”
“She has no family,” I repeat, my words sharper now.
I stare at her hard enough that she flinches and moves back.
“That wasn’t a lie. You heard her yourself.
Her parents were killed. By this, this Bellamy .
There was no one else in her life. I knew Dahlia, I knew everything about her except that she was a witch. She wasn’t lying. She had no one.”
But, briefly, she had me.
Lenore presses her lips together for a moment, thinking.
“Okay. I believe you. But I also know witches. Valtu, she was sent here to kill you. She wasn’t alone in this.
I know how they work. She knew someone else in this city.
She had a friend, another witch, a contact, I guarantee it.
They’re going to sound the alarm when they find out she’s missing. ”
“Maybe they won’t. Maybe they figure Dahlia disappeared like so many other people have been doing in this city.”
“Which is something else we need to look into,” Lenore says.
I know there are pressing things outside of this moment, but I honestly don’t care. Let Saara and Aleksi’s demons eat the whole city. Let everyone rot. What’s the point? What’s the point of saving people in a world that allows something like this to happen?
But you have to avenge her , a voice inside my head says, and I stare at the freckles across Dahlia’s nose. You have to make sure her death wasn’t for nothing.
And yet I’m the one who killed her. Me. I did this.
How do I get vengeance on myself?
“Maybe we should go to her apartment. I take it you know where that is?” Lenore asks.
Of course. Her apartment. I never stepped inside of it. Never saw her place. I don’t know why that didn’t struck me as odd, but now I realize she was trying to protect herself, hide her true self from me. Which means there might be things there that could be useful.
“Whatever is there, we will have to remove it,” Lenore says delicately, picking up on my thoughts. “We can make it look like she left on her own accord.”
I hate this. I hate how quickly everything has changed. I can’t even mourn her properly without having to cover our tracks and make it seem like I didn’t fucking murder her.
Because that’s what I am.
A murderer.
Not that it’s anything new. I’ve murdered countless souls in my past, and I’ll murder again. But this time it’s something unforgivable.
“Valtu,” Solon says, shutting the doors to the backyard and coming inside as he slips his phone in his pocket.
“I hate to be the one who pulls you away from this and you know I always mean respect, but we have to decide what to do with Dahlia, and we have to decide now. Each moment we delay puts us all in direct danger. You don’t want your life here to end. ”
I give him a look that says, why not?
He exhales heavily and I know he’s trying to do what’s best and what’s right. He knows what to do—vampires are skilled at hiding the dead—and he wants to be able to do it without me getting in the way.
I look back down at Dahlia, at the dried blood splattered on her face, my blood that I had tried in vain for her to take. I need to leave her. I need to say goodbye.
I don’t know how this time.
Solon comes over and puts his hands under Dahlia’s arms and lifts her up and out of my hands. The feeling of her body, dead or not, no longer pressed against mine makes me instantly bereft. Hollowed out into nothing. Without her I am just a void.
“Where are you taking her?” I ask, my voice barely audible, my throat raw, my fingers curling over nothing into fists.
“We need to hide her,” he says, staring down at me.
The sight of her lifeless in his arms bleeds my heart dry.
“We can have a service for her. But I think the only course of action is to put her in the boat, tie her down with bricks, and put her in the water. We’ll wait till night, take her out past Lido. ”
The words are so callous.
“What are you doing with her now?”
“He’s helping you,” Lenore says, taking me by the elbow and pulling me to my feet. “You need to clean up. We all do. Then we need to go to her apartment. Okay?”
I nod and in a daze I let Lenore lead me up the stairs to the bathroom.
I let her clean me up, dabbing a washcloth to get off my own blood.
Then she leaves and I get changed into new clothes.
I’m moving so slowly it feels like I’ve come apart from time as a whole.
Like I’m operating just outside of it. Being a vampire means you’re very in tune with your body and the world around you, but I’ve never felt more removed.
Like the world is ticking on but I’ve stepped outside of time’s path.
It’s only when the three of us leave my house—Solon put Dahlia to rest somewhere until we get back—that I feel a little more life seep back into me.
Purpose. Because if I can’t have my love back, I can at least get started on making those that wronged her pay.
She wouldn’t have been sent to kill me, she wouldn’t have been corrupted, had Bellamy and the guild of witches not killed her parents and forced her to be a slayer.
Still, the walk to her apartment feels like a dream. Not even a nightmare, because a nightmare would make things feel more real. But that terrible disassociation is back. I’m walking through my beloved city of Venice feeling like a ghost.
When we get to her apartment, just the sight of it makes me freeze.
Suddenly the last thing I want to do is go inside there.
But Lenore puts a cloaking spell over us to make sure we aren’t seen, and somehow I find myself in the building.
Though I’d never been in her apartment, I know which unit is hers and we head up the rickety staircase to the one at the end, facing the lagoon.
I had told Dahlia that where she was staying was one of the most haunted areas in all of Venice, and now I’m feeling like hundreds of restless spirits are crowding around me, knowing what I did.
Judging me.
“What is this dark energy?” Lenore says, scrunching up her nose as she looks around the hallway, the floor tiles cracked in some places. “You’d think the guild with all their money would have put her up some place a little nicer.”
“How much money does the guild have?” Solon asks.
“A lot,” she says emphatically.
I stop in front of Dahlia’s door, about to put my hand on the knob, despite knowing it will be locked, when I hear a faint noise from inside. And if I can barely hear it, that means whoever is there is really trying to be quiet.
I give the others a furtive look and put my finger to my lips. We all breathe in deeply in unison, expecting to smell a witch. But there’s nothing.
There’s a moment’s pause before I pull back and then slam my shoulder into the door. It pops open with ease and I manage to see a woman going for the window, as if to climb out.
In seconds I’m at her, hand around her mouth, arm around her stomach, holding her in place.
“Who are you?” I seethe. I’m practically seeing red.
The woman squirms beneath me. She’s strong but not strong enough to fight me off.
I know that she might be a building manager, or maybe a classmate of Dahlia’s, and that I’m dangerously close to hurting a civilian, but I can’t think straight either.
I just want answers. I just want the pain to go away.
“She’s a witch!” Lenore cries out as Solon tries to close the door behind her. I know we’re being loud, so I pray the cloaking spell holds. “She has a glamour on!”
The woman struggles even more and that’s when I know it’s true. Now that I know what to look for with glamour, it’s something you can figure out. It’s like staring at one of those paintings that look like something and morph into something else when the light hits it from a different angle.
“Search the apartment,” I growl.
“What are we looking for?” Solon asks.
“The blade,” Lenore says as they both start looking in drawers and under the bed. “That’s probably why she’s here too. She wants the blade of mordernes .”
“So you’re from the guild,” I say to the girl, my words coming out like venom. “Tell me, did you set her up to fail? Was she sent here knowing she would fail in killing me? Was it a way for the guild to get rid of her, just as they got rid of her parents?”
“I found it,” Solon says.
He’s pulling a box out of the cupboard, hidden behind a fake wall. None of us vampires have to look at it to know what’s in the box. We can sense the blade is there, its energy insidious.
The girl starts to struggle again. The stench of adrenaline and fear is high but that doesn’t stop me from holding on so tight that I could break every bone with one twist of my hands.
“Where is she?” the girl manages to say. “What did you do to Dahlia?”
“You pretend to care?” I sneer. “You threw Dahlia to the wolves.”
“And you are the wolves,” the girl says through a gasp. “The wolves that tore her apart. I should have known she’d fallen in love with you. I should have known you were using her this whole time. I don’t know how you vampires can live with yourselves.”
I don’t know how either.
The rage inside of me breaks and bubbles over and I’m not only seeing red, I’m feeling it too. Towards the witches, towards this girl, towards myself.
I take her head in my hands, palms pressed against her skin, fingers digging into her scalp, and before Solon has the chance to yell “No!” I twist my wrists quickly.
I break the girl’s neck with a sickly crack that seems to bounce off the walls of Dahlia’s apartment.
I step back and the girl crumbles to the floor, dead.