Chapter 36 Elijah #3
‘I looked into why your Molly is resistant to compulsion,’ my sister says from behind me. ‘Couldn’t find anything conclusive, but I have a theory that some souls are just too stubborn to be swayed by magic. Like the humans that spirits can’t hide from.’
I don’t look over my shoulder at her, but I’m sure that the sad, knowing expression she saves just for me is there still.
‘Sounds like her.’ I put the book down, graceless, and hand a warmed bag of blood to Jellie.
She punctures it with the metal straw I brought, and I do the same to mine.
We sip quietly, backs against the counter-height table.
‘I’ve never felt this way,’ I admit quietly.
‘Like not having her will be the tragedy that haunts me for centuries.’
Evangeline rests her head against my shoulder and squeezes my arm. I put my hand over hers, grateful for the comfort.
‘If I stay as I am, she will forget me. She’ll get the life she wants, and I will miss her for eternity.’
‘You’re so dramatic,’ Evangeline says on a sigh, and it makes me smile, a relief in my grief.
‘Molly introduced me to all the best, brooding vampires of twenty-first-century literature, and I felt I had some work to do.’
‘Please, you put them all to shame. Need I remind you where you spent the last hundred and ten years? And what you were up to all that time in your tower?’
‘Fair,’ I say. ‘I’ve always been good at sulking and brooding.’
‘Are you really going to do this?’ Evangeline asks, like she has many times in the last few days.
She’s walked me through the proposed ritual, the ancient spell, the injection to my heart, the intense and lasting pain she expects I’ll feel before I’m either turned human or lost to this world forever.
It’s a gamble, one she can’t say with certainty will pay off.
‘I’m sure,’ I say, and squeeze her hand again. Because life is worth the risk.
Christmas finds me shirtless, laid out on a cleared patch of floor in Jellie’s lab, where Samara has drawn several runes and lit a veritable fire hazard of thick candles in a circle around me.
She and Jellie do their final preparations, neither of them pretending to be calm, but both at least as confident as they can be after our days of checking and re-checking their work.
Samara has to be the one to complete the ritual and administer the potion, but as she wipes something like mud on my wrists, ankles and the base of my throat, Jellie kneels by my side once more. I meet her nervous gaze with a steady one.
‘Brother…’ she starts, and her voice wobbles.
‘It’s going to work,’ I assure her. I don’t know that it will but I’m choosing to believe it. It’s all I can do. ‘The most brilliant people I know put it together.’
She scoffs and a blood-tinged tear slides down her cheek. There’s nothing more to say that we haven’t rehearsed again and again, so she presses a kiss against my forehead and exits the circle.
I give a final nod to Samara before she begins.
She holds a ceremonial dagger and a potion-filled syringe over my chest and chants in a language I’ve never heard, words that electrify the air, magic tangible around us. The candles flicker, the patches of mud on me seem to warm and my scalp tingles. It’s all very dramatic and surreal.
And this, of course, is how Gregory finds us.
‘What the fuck is the witch doing?’ he booms, breaking the spell woven around us, all of the candle flames going out at once.
‘Gregory, don’t—’ Jellie tries, but Gregory has none of it, pushing past her to get to me. He knocks over a candle with his boot, the wax spilling on the floor, before he hauls me up by my arm.
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ I say, though in fact it’s worse than it probably looks.
‘Mother!’ Gregory beckons, and I curse. They were both supposed to be gone another day at least, long enough for us to attempt dangerous, untested rituals in peace, but plans change.
Gregory turns back to address me, ‘It looks like that witch was going to cut your heart out in some sort of suicide ritual.’ His voice drips with disdain and Samara curls her lip at him.
‘I’m no murderer,’ Samara defends. ‘Unlike some of us.’
Her comment is pointed at Gregory, who quite literally hisses in response. I push him away from us and it only serves to rile him further. Mother finds her way to us, sweeping down the stairs, demanding to know what’s happening. Jellie groans and throws her hands in the air.
‘Elijah was going to kill himself,’ Gregory says. ‘All this over a human. Come now, brother, don’t be so dramatic.’
‘He what?’ Mother shrieks. ‘Evangeline, you would let him do this?’
‘I wasn’t!’ I exclaim, but neither Mother nor Gregory is listening to me, their attention focused on my sister.
‘You misunderstand–we don’t aim to kill him,’ Jellie says. ‘Only…’
She closes her mouth before she can reveal the truth that is even more damning than killing a vampire.
‘What?’ Gregory prompts.
‘To let him live,’ Samara finishes. With her words, it’s as if all the air is sucked from the room. My mother and brother both still, processing the words and their possible meaning. I’m sure I know what they’re thinking. That this isn’t possible. What’s been done to us cannot be undone.
And yet.
‘Your project,’ Gregory says to Jellie.
‘What did you do?’ Mother whispers at her only daughter.
She looks terrified, and her anguish brings a pang of guilt to my chest.
‘The council—’
‘We’ll never tell them,’ Evangeline says. She moves between us and looks Gregory in the eye. ‘You will never tell them.’
A vein in Gregory’s jaw twitches, and his nostrils flare as he attempts to keep his emotions in check in the face of our sister’s words. He turns to me.
‘You can’t do this, I won’t allow it.’
‘It’s not your choice to make,’ I say.
‘It will kill Mother.’
‘And yet, she will continue to live, just as we all did after Father, after every person we’ve ever loved has met their end.’
‘But you do not have to,’ Gregory says. He grabs my shoulders in his hands, hands I’ve known for centuries, so like my own, like our father’s, too.
I think he might punch me, or shove me again, but he just locks his eyes onto mine and begs me to see his side.
‘Do you not think of us at all? Of how you’ll let us watch you age and die? ’
He shakes me as he speaks, his voice cracking, and I don’t fight him or push him away.
Gregory and I have not seen eye to eye in centuries, but he is my brother above all, and I would grieve him intensely.
My eyes are soft, and I lift a palm to press flat against his chest where his own heart once beat.
‘I will never be gone,’ I tell him. ‘So long as you live to remember me, I’ll exist here. Like Father still does, lying in the sun with the peel of a stollen orange discarded beside him, listening to his sons bickering, his wife and daughter laughing nearby.’
He turns to Evangeline, pleading with our older sister, who’s always been the smartest and most sensible of us. ‘Is there no chance of convincing him?’ Jellie shakes her head and Gregory’s face falls further. ‘Mother, tell them no.’
We all turn to look at her, the matriarch who made us this way because the thought of losing us was too much for her to bear. She steps slowly towards us, all of her years suddenly showing in her sad, sad eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ I say, and I mean it.
‘My boy,’ she sighs, and comes near enough to touch my cheek. ‘This life has always fitted you wrong. You were such an explorer, always in your dreams, and immortality chafes at your soul, like it would have your father. Always has.’
‘It’s not that I’m ungrateful,’ I whisper.
She shushes me, comforting me even as I break her heart.
‘I know, of course I know.’ She turns to look at Gregory, then Evangeline.
‘We will never speak of this,’ she says, a promise as much as a command.
‘When a century has passed, we’ll tell the council he died by accident. You will be free, Elijah. To live.’
Gregory lets out a sound like a sob and squeezes my shoulder tighter.
This is one thing about being a family for so long–we’ve learned how to disagree quickly.
We know each other too well by now to know what battles are worth fighting.
Gregory is stubborn enough to pick at old fights for years, but not so stubborn that he won’t follow our mother in this.
He pulls me to him, the first true embrace from my brother in over a hundred years. Jellie joins us, her arms wrapping around the both of us, and after a moment, our mother does too, holding on most fiercely of all.