Calliope #2
“Yeah,” he says almost detached from every emotion he felt for her.
He loved her. He loved her and he’s pushing the feeling away.
“But it wasn’t because of me,” he whispers.
“Otto.” A voice calls to him through the rain, through the dark. Feminine and somehow warm with anger. “Step away from that girl.”
Otto sighs stepping back from me. Listening to this woman I sense somewhere in the dark.
Behind me I hear a car skidding to a stop. Feet on pavement.
“Callie.” Soren’s voice drifts to me.
I ignore him and stare at the woman closing the distance, coming close and closer to me until she stands before me. Red hair that looks like it’s bleeding in the rain. Blue eyes glimmer with an otherworldly light.
“Do you have any idea how much danger you are in right now?” she asks, her eyes focused on me but her posture stiff.
“No.” I well and truly do not.
“You see those men back there.” She jerks her head at where I came through the slats. “They step through that hole, all hell will break loose.”
“Vex no!” Lazarus shouts.
I don’t dare turn around because fear is slowly working its way up and through me. “I think I made a mistake.”
“You think?” she states. “You see those homes, they’re full of vampires from a different house. Do you know what that means?”
“Cassandra?” Soren calls out.
“Focus on me,” the redhead says when I go to look at Soren. “No one else. You and I are the only brides here. All these vampires will dance around us like fools. You wanted answers, let me give them to you.”
“Who—”
“Am I?” she finishes for me. “The only woman who knows what you are feeling right now. And we do not have time.”
“I don’t?”
“Vex no!”
“Fuck.” She curses and grips my elbow. “Run.”
“Why isn’t there time?” I try again but she isn’t letting me speak.
“Run.” She grabs me and takes off, not waiting on me to start running on my own but running and dragging me with her.
I look behind me. Vex has ripped the entire wall down. Soren stands at his back and Lazarus? Lazarus and Otto are fighting in a way I’ve never seen before. In a way I didn’t know was even remotely possible.
“Fucking idiots.” She nearly trips and then rights herself.
“Stop.” I tug my arm from hers. “Stop.”
“Do you want to die?” she throws her hands up.
“Who are you?”
“Cassandra,” Soren whispers from behind me.
I turn in time to see him staring at the redheaded goddess before me. His eyes full of tears and pain so deep that I’m not sure the wound there ever healed.
“I’m so sorry, Callie.” My savior whispers before turning to Soren. “Hello, Ren.”
Soren chokes on the rain. His eyes glued to her. Not me. Her.
“How?”
“I never got to learn that you made it through the night,” she whispers.
“Soren?” I ask. He doesn’t turn my way.
They only have eyes for each other. Just them. Not me.
There’s a history between them. And the feeling ripping through me right now? I know this feeling. I’ve lived this feeling.
James introduced me to this feeling.
I can see Soren slipping from me in that moment. She means something to him. And as I drift backward. They don’t notice. Maybe that hurts even more because there’s no yelling, no argument. Just silence between what could have been.
Gone.
She was right, Cassandra. All hell broke loose. Everything around me is sounds of anger, of fighting and moving pieces I just don’t understand.
“Callie.” Lazarus rushes toward me whipping me up in his arms. “Don’t run, please let us explain.”
“Lazarus. What is this?”
“Asmodeus.” He looks over his shoulder as he moves to the hole in the slat. “Listen, that man you were talking to? He killed Vex.” He sets me down his eyes glowing as he looks at me.
“Killed Vex.” I parrot looking past Lazarus to the fight behind him. Vex and Otto roll across the pavement their movements choreographed with the lightning.
“Vex is right there.” I protest. “See.”
“I know, Calliope. He’s right there. But Otto?” he says. “He killed Dot. He killed Vex.”
“No, he loved Dot.” I try to explain. To get him to see.
Movement blurs at the edge of the fight. Otto tearing free of Vex, crossing the street faster than the lightning can catch him.
Just then Otto stabs Lazarus in the shoulder and answering screams from Vex and Soren rip through the melee. Horrified I see a wooden slat sticking out of Lazarus’s shoulder. Sweat beads on his forehead. Fangs descend from his lips, and his eyes hold that otherworldly light.
He’s a vampire. A fucking vampire. It’s really real. Real.
“Oh gods,” I breathe. It’s one thing to read in a booklet about it all. Another to realize the men you’d been falling in love with, aren’t men at all.
He lifts me in his arms moving far too fast for me to think or even breathe. He sets me back at that grate the one that haunts my nightmares.
“Please go home, I’ll explain everything. I promise.” He disappears in the next moment. Leaving me to stand at the broken wall.
I feel dismissed and though I get it, it’s a freaking fight. But this never would have occurred if they had just explained things. But he didn’t. He ran away. Leaving me here to stand in the rain alone. Alone to piece this all together myself.
I back away even further.
No one notices me.
Just notice me.
Please notice me.
And with each step away no one sees me. No one looks back.
The rain continues to pour down my face as I stand frozen, watching the chaos unfold before me. Vampires fighting vampires. Cassandra and Soren lost in their own world.
No one sees me. No one needs me. I’m just the catalyst, the unwitting spark that set this fire.
I turn away from the broken wall, from the violence and the history I don’t understand. My shoes squelch in the mud as I stumble backward, away from all of them.
“Callie, wait!” someone calls after me, but I can’t tell who. It doesn’t matter anymore.
I run.
Out through the hole in the wall. Past everyone with their secrets and their lies and their inability to communicate. I rush past it all, doing the thing they asked me not to.
I run to the only place left to me.