Charlotte Cantemir
Calliope
Water and mud soak through my jeans as I kneel before her grave. With shaking fingers I brush dried leaves off her little headstone.
I feel so alone. And it’s hard to see past that aloneness. It’s hard to acknowledge that in this whole world full of billions of people that I’ve no one to talk to right now. No one who could ever dare to understand me.
My chest aches with the pain of a thousand deaths.
The men I love, and I know I love them. I do. Aren’t men at all and they just dismissed me as though I didn’t exist in the moment. Too busy killing others just because of territory. And even that I don’t have the full picture, the full scope of things.
All I have is a notebook. All I have are these feelings that I don’t know what to do with.
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte.” I talk through my tears. My fingers tracing over the last name I gave her. My name. The only thing I didn’t lose in my marriage.
When I had to fill out those forms I couldn’t give her James’s last name. He didn’t deserve that.
Besides he has a new baby on the way. One he can give his surname to.
I may never get the chance to have a baby.
Desolation swims inside of me. This black void that pulses where my heart should be.
There is this part of me. This tortured soulless part that is just ready to give up.
Ready to walk away from this life that’s done nothing but bury me into the ground though I still breathe and function.
I’m nothing more than a zombie with a beating heart.
The rain washes away my tears that just won’t stop.
It’s like a dam opened up inside of me and I can’t stop it. That void pulses as it expands.
Is there a way to come back from this? From this pain inside of me.
They all fucking lied.
And no one came for me.
Calypso didn’t answer my call.
Hadley has ignored me for months.
My parents only exist inside their scope of life. Not my world. Theirs and they expect me to enter it with them and I can’t.
Soren didn’t come. He was far too busy with Cassandra to even look my way.
Vex never said anything at all. Not a damn word.
Lazarus… Well he is the worst offender of them all.
Gods I feel so fucking alone.
In fact I could disappear right now, and no one would notice. No one would care.
The thought hangs heavy in my mind, like a stone tied to my ankle dragging me down into dark waters. I press my palm flat against the cold marble of her headstone, feeling the carved letters of her name beneath my fingertips.
“Charlotte,” I whisper, my voice breaking on each syllable. “My sweet baby girl.”
A sob escapes me, raw and ugly, and I don’t even try to stop it. The rain falls harder now, plastering my hair to my face, mixing with my tears until I can’t tell which is which. All I feel is this absolute grief with no end. No light at the end of the tunnel.
Just the same thing day in and day out.
Nothing ever changes. Nothing.
Every day is the same. The same grief that builds in my chest, the same one threatening to tie that stone to my ankles. My breath stutters as I gulp for air.
Inside I feel what’s left of me begin to shatter.
No one came for me. They didn’t come for me. They didn’t stop me. And the way Soren looked at Cassandra, he never looked at me with that kind of love.
“Girl, you know it’s raining?” A voice startles me out of the dark place I’m living in.
I barely react, all I can do is stare at the little etched angel in stone next to my baby’s name.
“She never even breathed,” I whisper to the strange woman out here in the middle of the night just like me.
That we have in common.
I catch her in my peripheral as she sits down beside the grave in front of me. Legs outstretched one over the other.
She’s small. Maybe five feet. Maybe shorter. Curvy with dark brown hair to match her skin and warm eyes that hold more compassion in them than I can look into right now.
So I don’t, I turn away.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispers.
I laugh because those words say a lot. But they aren’t true not in this moment. Not in this sense. They can’t be true.
“I had one job. That was to keep her alive and my body couldn’t do that.
” I don’t look at her. Strangers are well meaning, but they don’t get it.
They never do. They hear, you lost a baby.
And then comes the pity. The pain. The broken looks of compassion they just want to speed past the conversation.
I don’t want to speed past that conversation. Not right now. I want to sit in it and let it simmer. I want to feel everything because for three years all I allowed myself was to numb the pain. To disassociate from it.
“The ah,” I swallow not sure why I’m talking to this strange woman. But if she is here in the graveyard in the middle of the night then maybe she’s my kind of people. “Doctors told me placental insufficiency. So yeah, it was my fault.”
“Oh baby girl.” I look at her then because it’s the way she says the words. As though they hold a meaning for her that exists outside this bubble we are in right now. “It isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
I laugh. “I don’t know you.”
“But I know you.”
I should feel fear at that statement but all I feel is curiosity. What’s left to fear in this life anyway.
Grief is real. Vampires are real. Monsters are real.
All of them wear a human face.
“Who are you?”
She snaps her fingers causing my ears to pop and silence to descend on us. The rain stops falling. No longer do I feel the chill of the damp night. And the grass beneath me is suddenly dry and warm.
“There that’s better.” She dusts off her hands like there’s dirt on them. There isn’t. “Can’t have a conversation in those elements now can we.”
I just stare at her.
“You aren’t human,” I breathe.
“Course not,” she scoffs. “No one is gonna be able to do what I just did if they were. I don’t make claims I can’t promise on. And I promise your Charlotte dying, was on me. Not you.”
“How?” I swallow. My eyes scan this woman closer a second time. She’s in black sweats, a band tee from a band I’ve never even heard of and freckles dot across her nose and cheeks.
“When I created brides, I didn’t understand the full extent of what it meant if you chose a human partner,” she says.
I hear her words and I struggle to process them.
“Can you,” I stammer. “Repeat that. Just one more time.”
“Sure can. I’ll repeat it until you understand it.” She holds my gaze when she repeats that statement one more time. “When I created brides, I didn’t understand the full extent of what it meant if you chose a human partner.”
“Sophia.” I can feel my entire world finish shattering.
“The one and only.”
“How?”
“Well,” she says in a disappointed tone. “When my girls toe the line of life and death, you can see me. I figured I’d test it with you.”
“I’m not…” I try to breathe and find it become harder and harder. “Dead. I’m not dead.”
“No, but you were thinking about it.”
“I…” the denial sits right there on the tip of my tongue. “Life is so fucking hard.” I break. My body feels like it’s turning inward. My heart stutters and threatens to stop even though it continues to beat. “I just don’t have anything to live for. There’s just no reason.”
It’s as though the years and years of grief and life shitting on me coalesce into this moment. Into this one awful moment.
“I know, baby.” She leans forward grabbing my hands and holding them in her warm ones.
“I thought James was it. I thought he was my forever. My home, my person.” I lick my lips tasting the tears as they fall down my face dripping on my chest. “Charlotte was my one good thing in this world and I lost her.” The grief burns inside me, my body shaking.
“And you are telling me it’s your fault she’s gone. ”
“Yeah, I’m saying just that.” She holds my hands tighter as I shake, my tears rolling down my face and my jaw quivering. “Your body was designed to carry a born vampire. A human baby never would have survived that.”
“Why,” I choke. “My mom had us.”
“She isn’t one of mine.”
“Why me.” I sob. “Why choose me? Not even the guys want me. I have nothing. But I could have had her. She could have been mine.”
Sophia’s eyes soften, and something ancient shifts in them. Centuries of watching women like me suffer, and yet never quite growing numb to it.
“You have so much more than you realize,” she says quietly, her thumb tracing circles on the backs of my hands. “The men who ignore you now. They do it because they fear what you make them feel. Not because you’re unworthy.”
I pull my hands away, anger suddenly burning through my grief. “Fear? That’s what you call abandoning someone at their lowest point? That’s what you call watching someone drown and doing nothing?”
Sophia sighs, leaning back on her palms. The graveyard around us seems suspended in time, not a single raindrop falling despite the storm clouds still hovering above.
“When I created the first brides, I thought I was giving women power. Immortality. Protection.” Her voice takes on a distant quality. “I didn’t understand the price. How the magic would shift your bodies, your essence. How it would make carrying human children impossible.”
“You made them incubators to the will of your sons.”
“I deserved that.” She nods more to herself than me. “I wanted more for you. So much more. I couldn’t have daughters. Only boys. A cruel twist of fate. I did only what I could do.”
“Condemn women. Steal their autonomy?” Anger rises and falls like a wave. I can’t hold onto it, it slips through my fingers only for grief to replace it.
“Perspective.” She leans forward again. “You think you don’t have autonomy. Those men love you. I gave you the choice to choose them or not choose them.”
“But I still need a vampire to have a child.”
“You need sperm either way.” She presses the wound. “Who cares if it’s human or vampire.”
“I do. I care,” I snap. “I was right this whole time all these years all the gaslighting. I fucking care.”
“I do too. Why do you think I’m sitting in wet grass with a grieving woman instead of watching from my cloud? Charlotte mattered. Don’t you ever hear me say she didn’t. I’m not dismissing your girl, Calliope. I’m telling you the door you think is welded shut was never even locked.”
“Then why leave me in the dark.”
“Because if you don’t love who they are in their soul the bond would never hold.” She pauses. “Ask your sister how that worked out for her.”
“Calypso.” I hiss. All her warnings now hold a different meaning.
“Love, Calliope, is the strongest bond in all of the universe.” She stares at me and I swear she doesn’t just see my soul she sees all the shadows inside of it.
All the dark nights I stared at nothing for hours because I couldn’t pull myself up off the floor.
All the nights I cried so hard I passed out.
All the days I just went through the motions forgetting that emotions exist for a reason.
Everything.
And that’s the problem with gods. With goddesses.
They see it all. But they didn’t live it.
“They didn’t come for me.”
“Girl, you walked away from a territory dispute with barely a passing understanding in your back pocket,” she snorts. “You think anyone would have given you a curator position out of college?” she snarks. “No I didn’t think so. You are a baby in this world. Understand it before you condemn it.”
I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I even have that in me.
“How can I understand it when you made it impossible to,” I say to her quietly. But she hears me.
“If those boys told you they were vampires at the start, what would you have done?” she asks.
I can’t even answer her honestly because I don’t know. I don’t know what I would have done. Run screaming for the hills? Maybe. Most likely.
“Mmm. Exactly,” she says. “You want a man you barely know to say I’m a vampire let me suck your blood? Hell no, my boys would be dead. But now? Now you know them. Not what they are. Them. And that, Calliope, is the gods damn point.”
I look away because she’s right. I would have condemned them much the same as Sophia condemned me from having Charlotte.
“Now what?” I ask breathing a little freer. I don’t feel better. Not really. Just in need of the next step. The next moment. The next breath.
“Now?” She looks off in the distance. “Now, Callie, this isn’t going to feel good, but I need you to relax. And trust me, I got you, girl.”
“What does that even mean?” I ask but her eyes are still behind me.
“It means. That my boys still don’t get along,” she sighs as though that pains her deeply.
“Listen.” She looks back to me. “I need you to remember every touch. Every kiss. Every flutter and ache in your body you have for Lazarus, Soren and Vex. And know and trust I put them in your path for a reason. Can you trust that, Calliope?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her truthfully because I don’t know. I haven’t a fucking clue where to go from here. But I can see it in her eyes she knows.
“I need you to fight.” She looks behind me again.
I don’t want to look away. But I do because I feel a crawling sensation creep up my back. Starting between my shoulder blades creeping higher and higher.
But I don’t see anything.
When I look back, she’s gone and my knees are soaked again.
I can’t tell if I dreamt her. Or if I’m hallucinating.
The feeling doesn’t leave, it remains pressing against my back. I look behind me again. This time I see someone walking toward me. Tall, and familiar.
“I know you,” I whisper. “The guy at the bar. Calypso’s friend.”
What was his name?
He crouches before me. His eyes that same gray blue as Lazarus. Otherworldly.
Vampire.
“Jude.” He smiles, his dimples poking out. “Drax Jude Asmodeus.”
I swallow. Sophia’s warning still in my head.
“Oh,” I whisper. Oddly I don’t feel fear. Just an odd acceptance of my fate. Of this moment. And every little moment that led me here.
“You won’t remember this,” he whispers. “Grief lets me in easier than anything else.”
“What does that mean.”
“Sleep, little one,” he breathes, his eyes glowing for a moment before he says the words one more time. “Sleep.”
As my eyes flutter closed and my breath whooshes out in a gasp, the last thought I have isn’t of them, it isn’t of my daughter or the job or even my ex.
No, it’s far darker and more fucked up than that. Because I know I’m not safe. I know this man Drax Jude isn’t here because he’s a good person. He’s here for me. Here to take me. Steal me for whatever bullshit reason he owns.
I know Sophia wants me to fight, but I just don’t have it in me anymore.
Finally, I think and let go.