Aven's Dream (47 page)

I fell back into bed, exhausted and annoyed by my dad’s newfound interest in micromanaging my life. When Lizzie texted a few minutes later asking if they could stop by, I said yes, hoping my dad would relax around female visitors.

“Dad! Lizzie and Amy are stopping by, so don’t go all crazy when they show up!”

But they didn’t stay long, either, mostly because my dad was right—I was exhausted. I slept again after they left and then woke up and started catching up on my homework. It felt good to concentrate on something normal. In fact, other than the pain meds and cast on my arm, my life felt suspiciously normal.

I fell asleep again sometime after eleven only to wake up in tears. I started shaking as I remembered a dream from before I had met Will. Which meant I had dreamt about him before ever seeing him … and I had dreamt that I lost him.

Rolling over, I picked up the bottle of painkillers. My arm was aching, and my palms were burning and itching like the thorns wrapped around the gate of the house on Kincaid had delivered a poison to my system. But I didn’t want to take another pill. Frustrated and annoyed, I threw the bottle across the room. I waited for the clatter of plastic against the wall, the sound of pills rattling. Nothing. Sitting up, I turned on the lamp as my eyes darted around the room. Will was sitting perfectly still at the windowsill, watching me. He stood up, and I jerked forward, which sent pain shooting through my arm.

“
Will
!” I gasped, louder than I should have.

Scrambling out of bed, I felt tears streaming down my face, the crushing sense of loss from my dream mixing with reality. Suddenly I was afraid that he was going to disappear before I could reach him—that I would lose him again. Rushing toward him, I gripped onto the front of his shirt the moment I reached him.

I tried, but I couldn’t stop crying. The tears just kept coming. Because it felt like I had already lost him. Finally, I looked up, and he smiled, his expression tender and sad as he touched my cheek with his fingers. He bent down, his lips brushing my forehead.

“I love you, Aven. Forever.”

But I heard the meaning behind his words.

Goodbye
.

S
ean got me a job at the bookstore, and my second home became the tiny, windowless stockroom. Sitting amid countless boxes, I began feeling like the miller’s daughter from the
Rumpelstiltskin
fairy tale
.
Only rather than spinning gold from hay, I was left to inventory and catalog endless shipments of books. But I preferred it to working the registers, which required false cheerfulness that I couldn’t even fake.

When I wasn’t working, I stayed close to home.
Study, listen to depressing music, run—repeat
. At school, things were awkward, so I tried to tune out the distraction. Megan had stopped eating with us, and I couldn’t say I was disappointed. James, Edmond, and Gen were always around somewhere, but they didn’t bother pretending to be normal students. Sometimes I caught James at the edge of the cafeteria during lunch—soaking up the ambient energy of a large group of hormonal teenagers. But that was about it. There, but not really there. The truth was that I missed them. All of them.

But I
craved
Will.

Christmas came and went without any real acknowledgment. My mom had always been the one to spearhead holidays, and it felt weird even to try without her. Still, I made an effort to feel thankful, to focus on the positives. I was alive. Everyone around me was safe. But I felt alone, weighted down by a strange secret I could never tell anyone.

Then I had another dream. I was walking down the street slowly. I knew it was a dream, because when I looked into a store window, I caught my reflection in the glass. My hair was white, pulled back from my face, and my eyes looked bright against my wrinkled, pale skin. I was alone as I walked, and people seemed to pass by without truly seeing me. Up ahead, I saw someone coming toward me. My heart sped up as he approached. He was perfect, so perfect that my eyes began to sting with tears just at the sight of him. He smiled as he passed by, his blue eyes glowing as he looked down at me. Frowning, I searched, trying to remember his name. It was at the tip of my tongue, but I just couldn’t reach it.

“Will!” I gasped breathlessly as my eyes opened.

A sob choked me, and I sat upright in bed, flinching at the sound of James’s voice.

“For the record, I am sorry,” he said from where he was sitting in my chair.

“No, you’re not.”

“Let me clarify. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

I sighed raggedly.

“I don’t get it. Why save me and then take it all away?”

“
Take it all away
. It does feel that way, doesn’t it?” he asked pensively. “And then you find out that what you had wasn’t love at all.”

“Speak for yourself,” I snapped, my tone acidic and biting.

“Aven, don’t you want a normal life?”

I stared into the darkness in disbelief.

“Um … sitting in my room in the middle of the night talking to a hundreds-of-years-old pranic vampire. Normal? That ship has sailed.”

He laughed quietly, and I got the feeling he was enjoying this conversation a little too much.

“It should be Will here, not you,” I said icily.

“No. It
should
be neither of us. We never should have interfered in your life.”

“But you did, and you can’t take it back or change it.”

“No, I can’t change it.”

“Then stop trying to make my decisions for me.”

My dad was being overbearing enough lately. The last thing I needed was a preachy immortal babysitter. The door to my bedroom creaked open, and I saw Darcy nudge his nose through the crack. When I looked back toward James, I was alone again.

I woke up the next morning, relieved out of my mind that I wasn’t scheduled to work. It was even early enough to get a run in, the cast having come off two weeks earlier. Getting out of bed, I quickly gathered my clothes and stripped out of my tank top and flannel pajama bottoms. I put on a pair of black leggings and a fitted long-sleeve shirt, knowing I was going to freeze the minute I stepped out the door.

I whistled softly to Darcy, and he trailed behind me down the hall to the stairs. Stopping at the hall closet, I grabbed his leash and my running shoes before walking out the front door and locking it. The air outside was cold, but crisp rather than damp. Bending down to tie the key to my shoe, I rubbed the ache in my wrist, a lasting reminder of that night.

As I clipped the leash to Darcy’s collar, I looked around the quiet street. The black SUV parked across the street wasn’t a surprise. Actually, I was comforted by its presence. My thought process was simple, but probably flawed: If they were still here watching over me, then Will was close, if out of my reach.

Putting in my earbuds and scrolling to the playlist I used for runs, I took off slowly, my destinations in the back of my mind. As I jogged toward town, I felt myself traveling back in time as I stopped in front of the storefront labeled only DELICATESSEN. Hanging forward, I stretched my hamstrings before taking off again. Darcy didn’t seem to mind, and I loved that about him. He didn’t judge me for being maudlin or crazy. He just came along for the ride, his tongue hanging out and his tail wagging.

A few minutes later, I stopped in front of the Winters Hotel and looked up at it. In my dreams, it was red-tinged and dramatic. Now, in the cold light of morning, it just looked like any other building. From the hotel, I traced the same path as I had the night of the dance, up the long hill to the top, stopping at the gate, which was partially torn off its hinges—from the fire department, I suspected. Yellow police tape crisscrossed the entrance, but even from where I was I could see the destruction at the top of the hill.

If I hadn’t come here that night, would Will still be entombed, frozen in time somewhere?

When Darcy nosed my palm, I turned and started to jog back down the hill, wincing at the ache in my wrist. I had one more stop left to make as I made my way back toward the house.

Sweating and panting, I stopped at my last destination: the park. I turned off my music when I reached the bench and sat down, staring at the play structure, like I could somehow make Will materialize. I had done the same thing with my mom, imagining fervently that she would just walk into my room, wishing I could will it into being reality. Eventually, I had realized that doing that hurt more than it helped. Yet here I was, again, wishing for a different reality than the one I had.

I sat for several minutes, feeling myself growing colder and colder. Soon I would be sitting across from my dad in the bakery in town, only months shy of my eighteenth birthday, sipping overly sugary Earl Grey tea and eating a pastry that would negate any benefit from the jog I had just finished. I would watch my dad work on his syllabus for the spring term. Maybe I would finish the book I had started about a man who travels through time and meets his wife as a young girl.

I would go to college. Then, I would find a job I liked, maybe even that gave me a sense of purpose and fulfillment. A job where I could spend my time alone, away from the seething, writhing energy of everyone around me.

And maybe someday I would meet someone. Not a replacement for Will, but a distant second place finisher in a race that had already been won.

My life would go on, and it would go on without Will Kincaid.

T
wo weeks until my birthday. Three until prom. Then graduation. It was a Saturday night. Most people were probably getting ready to go out, and here I was, sitting on a bench in the same empty park, feeling like a part of me had been frozen in time.

The truth was that things were good, and I should have been happy. Barring total ruin on my Trig final, I would get by with a
B
. And all of my other classes were holding steady with
A
grades. I had been accepted to my dad’s university.

But my mom wouldn’t be there for any of it. She wouldn’t be there to tell the story of the night I was born like she had on every birthday since I could remember. She wouldn’t be there to take pictures and fuss over my hair before prom. And she wouldn’t see me walk on graduation day. I missed her every day, some days more than others. Or maybe it was just the difference between a dull ache and a sharp pang—a sense that a piece of me was missing. I knew her absence would hurt more in the next few weeks.

That was the one nice part of being an empath: I knew who loved me without question.

My head turned automatically when I heard the sound of a motorcycle, and I couldn’t help thinking of Will. Looking down, I smiled. I had done a lot of that in the past several months—searching for signs of Will where there was none. Deep down, I understood the reason he had left, and I probably would have done the same, because hurting someone you love—by accident or on purpose—was always more painful than hurting yourself.

The real problem was: I hadn’t yet reached the phase where I could truly accept that he was gone. Instead, I kept expecting him to reappear, part of me stubbornly believing that I would turn my head, and he would be there. But it had been six months, and that piece of my life had slowly eroded away. I hadn’t seen Gen, Edmond, or James in months, so if they were still somewhere watching over me, they stayed out of sight. Or maybe they thought the danger from Fidatov was over now that Will wasn’t in my life.

It was silly, but I regretted not even having a picture of Will on my phone to look at. Although, in the back of my mind, I still kind of wondered if his image would have shown up in a photograph. Or, like a
real
vampire, would he have been invisible? Patting Darcy on the head, I stood up and put my earbuds in, smiling at the next track that came on. It was an ancient favorite.

Bittersweet Symphony
. How absurdly appropriate.

I started walking back toward the house. Then I stopped and turned to look back at where I had just been, wondering if I would come here after college started in the fall. I blinked. There was a red rose sitting on the bench. It hadn’t been there a second ago—I was sure. My eyes moved to the small black jewelry box sitting beside it, and I shook my head, dropping Darcy’s leash. It wasn’t possible.

“It can’t be,” I whispered, remembering the sound of the ring hitting the floor in the house on Kincaid.

I pulled the earbuds from my ears.

“I’ve had some spare time to search for it.”

My head jerked toward the sound of Will’s voice, and my breathing hitched when I saw him perched at the top of the play structure. Lit only by moonlight, he was so beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him. Shaking my head, I closed my eyes.

“If you’re going to disappear again, do it now. Please,” I whispered.

I counted to ten, hoping he would be gone—because seeing a figment of my imagination was better than losing him again. But when I opened my eyes, he was standing in front of me, and his eyes were a clear, bright blue as he held out the box in the palm of his hand.

“I told you I was a selfish creature, and never more so than in this moment,” he said quietly.

When he reached up slowly and brushed my cheek his fingers, I flinched at the memories that flooded through me—sensations I had worked to bury deep down.

“Aven, I want to be in your life … in any capacity you will allow me to be.”

I looked down.

“It’s been almost six months,” I whispered. “How do you know I don’t have a boyfriend? A date later tonight?”

When I looked up, Will blinked, and I had a moment to savor the rare look of shock on his face.

“
Do
you?”

It was my turn to give him an incredulous look.

“Yeah, that’s why I’ve been sitting in the park alone on a Saturday night.”

Will appeared sheepish for a brief second, and I had to clench my hands tightly into fists to keep from reaching out to touch him. I still wasn’t entirely sure he was really here, standing right in front of me. I shook my head again.

“I don’t think I can take waiting for the next time you doubt yourself and disappear for my own good,” I whispered. “That’s not a relationship. That’s PTSD.”

“There is so much I can never forgive myself for,” he said, reaching down to touch my wrist.

I shivered.

“What happened that night?” I asked quietly. “I need to know.”

We had never spoken of it, and I had to hear it from his lips.

“I can’t say for certain,” Will began slowly. “In the worst of circumstances, we’ve always relied on one another to serve as a proxy conscience—and to restrain us physically if we’ve lost control for any reason. Before you came for me that night, Fidatov had kept me under UV lights, draining me until the only thing that drove me was the need to take energy. I didn’t even recognize you. I recognized
what
you were, but any memory of you had been wiped clean by the craving.”

He paused, and I looked up at him.

“Then you pressed the ring into my chest, and a moment later I felt an immense burst of energy … Suddenly I saw myself, not as a monster, but as
you
saw me. The stupor of the craving lifted—and there I was, at the edge of …” He stopped, closing his eyes. “There is nothing worse I could do, and Fidatov knew if I had killed you, it would have destroyed me. James would not have had to seal me into a tomb; I gladly would have done it myself had I been faced with an eternity without you. And after I regained my senses, I knew that I deserved to lose you for what I had done.”

“
That’s
the problem, though,” I said sadly. “Eventually you’ll get tired of feeling guilty, and then you would regret being with me. Besides, I can’t be with someone who thinks he’s a monster.”

He smiled, which only made me frown in confusion. Then, before I could back away, his arm dropped to my waist, and he lifted me easily, staring into my eyes for several seconds. I tried to breathe slowly and hold onto the moment—terrified that I was about to wake up. Then his lips touched mine, and fire spread through my veins. When I gripped onto the front of his shirt, a growl rose in his chest and his lips gently parted mine. He kissed me until I was dizzy. A kiss that was even better than I remembered, which was nearly impossible. When he pulled back and set me down, I tried catching my breath.

“Existing for one more day, one more hour, even one more minute without you would have been my biggest regret. And you’ve given me an unbreakable desire to be better than what I am. My entire existence is brighter because of you—and you, Aven Casey, are all I will ever want.”

When Will reached up and touched my cheek, I realized I was crying. I swiped at my eyes.

“Then you just have to promise me one thing.”

“What is that?”

“Equality. Trust me to know what’s best for
me
. And if you’re going to make a decision that will affect us, tell me. Because I love you, and I don’t want to lose you. For any reason.”

He smiled again.

“I swear it.”

I paused, looking around the darkness.

“Now what?” I half laughed, half sobbed.

He reached over and took my phone. A song started playing, and I laughed when I recognized it from my dad’s collection. The Beatles.
And I Love Her
. Will held out his hand.

“I believe I owe you a dance, Ms. Casey,” he whispered.