Chapter 12
Innermost Thoughts
Cedar
Normally when I had this dream… nightmare some may call it, I was him. But tonight it seemed I was having an out-of-body experience, which was new.
“This is one way for my mind to twist it around, I guess,” I muttered to myself.
I leaned against the stone wall behind me and watched as the blurry-faced figure dumped his blood into my mouth, his face shooting up and looking around before he bolted from the scene of the crime—the crime being my death, of course.
This was somehow worse, honestly. Experiencing what I imagined over and over sucked, but standing back watching it as if it were a play of the arts was truly something else.
As if this were someone else’s life entirely and I was just an interloper—someone looking in on the scene as if I didn’t belong.
Soft footsteps sounded along the cobblestoned street and my gaze fell from my fallen body only to find the other normal occurrence of my dreams of late. I couldn’t help the eye roll.
“Why are you here?” I grumbled. “Is showing up as a specter to haunt me during my torture sessions not enough for you? Now you must haunt my nightmares as well?”
She arched a perfectly sculpted dark brow at me, her lips in a hard line before she looked over to my fallen form.
Her blue dress barely dusted the ground, the plunging neckline and sheer silky material left little to my already overactive imagination, and she was barefoot.
Something about the picture made me want to ravage her, which only served to piss me off.
“You tell me why I’m here,” she said without looking away from my broken and bleeding body. “These are your nightmares? Bleeding out in the midst of the night? This is as bad as your life has gotten?”
I scoffed. “I wish.” I cleared my throat and walked closer to my fallen form.
“This is only the beginning. Not sure why my mind decided you being here would be beneficial to me though. But since you are here, the least you could do is shut up. Your voice grates on my nerves and it’s unlikely I can kill you here within my own mind. ”
“Whatever you say, darling. What’s next?” she asked. The impatience with my attitude felt a great deal like real life, if I was being honest with myself.
“Well, Princess, next up we have the ever-enjoyable view of someone trying to save me and me killing them. It’s a great time, feel free to pull up a seat and get comfortable. We’ll be here a while yet.”
Her eyes widened for the briefest of moments before she went and leaned against the wall I’d been on before.
I reluctantly joined her, watching as a man strolled by my broken body.
He stopped before coming over to try and check on me.
Just like every other time I remember this, I watched as he pulled out a handkerchief and held it against my bloody skin.
I assumed to see where I was bleeding from.
He didn’t know the wound was gone, the unknown vampire’s blood coursing through my veins already healing whatever could’ve been wrong with me prior to now.
It didn’t take much longer before he started to try to shake me, not finding a clear wound site to apply pressure to.
“Sir? Are you well? Sir? Shall I retrieve help?” His masculine voice was quiet as if he was scared to startle me.
He should’ve been. Not a moment later I gripped his wrists, pulling him closer.
We watched as I buried my new fangs into his throat.
The scream that leapt from his mouth still haunted me a hundred and seventy-nine years later.
My eyes moved over to Cora, unsure of what I expected the female to be doing right now. Her eyes were intent on the scene in front of us. Standing up straight, I began preparing for the next part of the journey before she finally spoke. “How old were you? When you were turned, I mean.”
I stared at her, unsure why she gave a shit—real or not. “I was thirty-two.”
She nodded and then stood up off the wall, prepared to follow me, if I had to guess.
“Is this the part of the dream that gets all dark and dreary?” Her voice wasn’t condescending like I’d expected, no.
She just sounded curious about it all—about me.
Which left me partly annoyed and partly intrigued.
Where was a dagger when I needed one? Although Silv would probably be angry if I killed her sister.
However this was a dream, so maybe I could just get it out of my system and real-life Cora would be fine.
She was still staring at me and I nodded slowly. “Something like that.”
We watched, walking slowly behind a version of myself I barely recognized.
He was my height, my skin tone, my eye color.
But he lacked the scars. He’d lived a soft life until now.
Not rich by any means, but comfortable. Happy.
Easy. My hair was longer now, my tongue harsher, my mind less carefree.
I still tried to have a joke ready and a warm smile for those who mattered—but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t the same.
I watched as my past self pulled himself up to the front door of the home he’d had his entire life with the only family he’d ever known.
“I was married.” It was barely a whisper, but I knew she heard me.
I hadn’t ever told anyone about that, not even Silvana in all the years we’d spent side by side.
I didn’t even know why I uttered the words to Cora, but maybe it was because it was a dream and it was just as if I was talking to myself.
She was safe here, so I was safe to just be.
“Guess she didn’t like the new fangs, huh?” she replied with a smirk.
I felt my temper rise, but I pushed it back down. “You suck at being a shoulder to lean on, even in my imagination.”
“This isn’t your imagination, Cedar, and no one’s ever knowingly leaned on me, so I’ve not had the most amount of practice in my long life. Now, what happened to her? Really this time, no jokes.” She stared at me, but my gaze fell back to the house as my feet followed my past self into the home.
I wasn’t sure why my subconscious was committed to sharing with this female. We weren’t friends, let alone more than that.
“Ma?” my past self tried to holler into the house, though his voice sounded rough and unnatural.
“I still wasn’t sure what was happening at this point,” I told Cora.
She nodded her head as she watched my past self. I tried to see myself from her point of view, even my mother’s point of view as she walked into the kitchen and screamed—another sound that still haunted me in the midst of the daylight hours when my body couldn’t fully sink into sleep.
So many screams in such a short time.
I was in a pair of light tan trousers, matching suspenders, and a white button-up shirt that was rolled up my forearms. I’d been at work all day. Hadn’t even made it home.
“Why did you come here?” Cora asked quietly. As if the dead would somehow hear us.
“What did you do when you got hurt? Did you not go to your mother?” I shrugged while I watched the scene unfold. “I thought she’d be able to help me… she always had before. I’d fall and scrape my knee, fight with the boys around the block, it didn’t matter. She was always by my side.”
I felt Cora’s eyes on me as I met her stare. She shook her head. “No, I never went to my mother.” She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask, we both just turned back to watch my past in gruesome detail.
My mother walked closer, tears in her eyes as she asked over and over again where I was hurt, and I mumbled that I wasn’t.
It wasn’t until my father came downstairs and saw me that it started to sink in for the two of them—the blood, my gaze on the floor, my mouth I refused to open all the way.
I turned and walked out of the house, refusing to relive this if I didn’t have too.
We’d lived in a town with a rising number of vampires my entire life. They’d heard the stories from neighbors, they knew the signs.
It didn’t take long for the screaming to start, and I screamed right along with them. I screamed and screamed and screamed, and the best part of a dream? The lack of pain I could feel as my fist hit the brick wall across the street from my childhood home.
The home where I’d learned to tie my shoes.
The home where my mother had taught me to bake bread.
The home where I’d brought my wife home to meet my family before she was ever my wife.
The home where I’d told my mother I was going to marry that girl.
The home where my parents called me a monster and told me I was dead to them.
The home I stood outside of while my mother cried to my father about how my wife, my Florence, had killed herself because of me. Because I wasn’t strong enough to not become what I was today.
I sat there as the place I’d called home suddenly became nothing more than a mere house I’d once lived in.
I was left breathless, sitting on the cold and wet street, staring at the once familiar building as Cora walked down the steps, her face giving away nothing. The careful dance I’m sure she’d learned to play in the Court of Ice over the long years she’d called it home.
“Well, your family sucks. Happens to all of us.” She shrugged. “Can we go somewhere else now?”
I stared at her, confusion coursing through my already explosive feelings. I was so tired—so fucking tired.
“Where do you want to go, Princess?”
She looked up towards the sky that was thick with dark heavy clouds, and then back down at me on the ground. “Somewhere with the sun.”
I closed my eyes, envisioning one of my favorite places to go when I was still human and could fully enjoy it. Opening my eyes, I smiled sadly when it was exactly what I’d thought of.
The rolling hills, the soft grass below my bare feet. There were wildflowers off in the distance. The white puffy clouds filled the sky, the sun peeking through. My gaze slipped to Cora before I could stop it, and fuck I should’ve stopped it.
She was wearing a knee-length white dress with thin straps. Her long dark hair in soft waves around her face and her feet still bare.
Her dark blue eyes looked down at herself before returning to the view in front of us. “Where are we?” she asked, her voice quiet and wistful.
“Court of Ravens. This was a field not far out of the town I lived in. I spent a decent amount of time here throughout my human life. It was one of the few places I was always happy.” I shrugged and looked over the rolling fields again before sitting down in the grass.
“Oh. Well, this is a pretty dress. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She walked through the grass and sat down next to me, her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
“I am deeply sorry that your new life started off like that. It must’ve been hard, and lonely,” Cora whispered.
I glanced over enough to know she was looking out over the hills, so I did the same.
I wasn’t going to be caught staring at her profile, and the last thing I needed was to meet her gaze right now.
I cleared my throat. “My wife… her name was Florence.”
“Pretty name.”
I nodded, watching as the clouds glided across the skyline.
“It matched her. She was soft and delicate, not in an unappealing way, but just… She was…” My voice trailed off and I cleared my throat.
“She killed herself when my parents told her what I’d become.
I didn’t even get the chance to see her first. Try to explain what happened, bring her with me, nothing. ”
We were both quiet for a while before Cora finally spoke. “Would you have brought her with you? Turned her and lived together for all eternity?”
I looked over, finding her intense blue eyes on me, as if she were trying to solve the puzzle that was my innermost thoughts.
“If she would’ve wanted to stay with me, yes.
I would’ve even been fine with her staying human, or leaving me entirely and living another life elsewhere away from me… I just wanted her to be happy.”
Cora broke eye contact first, looking back over the hills again.
“Did you ever think that was her way of being happy?” Her question was so quiet I almost missed it, and part of me wondered if I was supposed to miss it.
As if this was an unintentional glimpse into her innermost thoughts.
“Sometimes the gentle realize the world is harder than they realized and in death they find peace.”
I didn’t respond, because no, I hadn’t looked at it that way and it hurt too much to try to go down that road. So I didn’t.
We sat in silence for a long time, and when I finally woke from the dream, I was back on my straw cot, staring at the stone wall that was covered in my dried blood, my knuckles still bruised, my throat still sore, and nothing else changed much at all.