Aria and Will Page 16

  She finally reached the solemn blocks of white marble that had been placed in the northern part of the garden. A wooden fence separated the two spaces. Aria paused briefly at the entrance. The ten stelae towered over her, lined up next to each other, all but two covered in names engraved in black. She approached the fourth one from the left, her eyes already searching the lines two feet above eye-level. Even without the light of the almost full moon, she would have been able to read the names easily. She quickly found her father’s name and placed the few roses she had brought at the foot of the stone.

  For a moment, her eyes remained on the flowers, so white they made the marble seem gray. Few flowers were still cultivated in the city, but white roses remained. They were traditionally reserved for the dead, but Aria had lost count of how many of them Will had offered her over the decades they had spent together.

  When she looked up again, she reached to brush her fingers against her father’s name. As she did, she wondered if anyone would mourn her when she finally died. Her mother and brother had died long before, and she had no idea whether Paul had ever had children. For all she knew, she was the last of her family. She also didn’t know whether her Sire was still alive. Once when she had broached the subject, Will had assured her she would know the instant Lorenzo died, but she had trouble believing him. The blood link between her and her Sire had never been very strong.

  Her troops would miss her, she thought and hoped. She had kept enough of them alive until retirement age that new recruits often requested being assigned to one of her squadrons. They were her family. Them, and Will.

  Slow steps behind her announced another late-night visitor. Aria didn’t look back but merely waited. Seconds later, a familiar hand slipped into hers.

  “Ready?” Will asked quietly.

  She eased her sword a few inches out of its scabbard and let it slide back down, feeling its familiar weight.

  “I am.”

  She gave the sword at Will’s side an absent look as they walked away, hand in hand. The weapon had endured through decades, while Aria had needed to replace her own sword a few times already.

  They left together, without a word, like they had left that cemetery so many years earlier. She could never have guessed how important meeting Will would turn out to be. That simple walk in the night had changed her life.

  She wondered if this night would change her life again. Newhaven wouldn’t merely fight back a demon attack tonight. The best fighters of the Guard would attack, and for the first time they had a pretty good chance at winning. They knew how to close the tear between worlds through which the demons had come relentlessly for decades. It wouldn’t be easy, but they could do it. They were ready.

  She looked at Will again. He returned her look and smiled.

  As long as Will was with her, she was ready for anything.

  * * * *

  And as long as she was with me, I was ready for anything, too. Ready to walk right through that rip through reality and never look back if that was what we needed to do.

  And it was.

  In the middle of the battle, when I looked at the ground between two slashes of my sword and saw more dead humans than demons, when I looked at the desperation of the soldiers we had hand-picked for this, at the mages who still weren’t done closing that damn gaping hole, it became obvious. They needed more time. They needed the demon reinforcements to stop crossing over and disrupting their magic. We could buy them more time, Aria and I. We could go through, stand guard over the rip, stop demons from passing through and allow our mages to put an end to all of this. The possibility had been raised during our planning. It was a last resort option. We would be trapped when the rip closed, but it would be worth it. Newhaven would be safe, and we would still be together—to live or die, but together.

  I continued fighting, but now my focus shifted toward the other side of the camp, where a shimmering, wavering circle hovered just a foot from the ground. Maybe eight feet in circumference, I couldn’t quite see what waited on the other side. A foggy curtain only revealed shadows of demons before they crossed through, teeth bared and snarling. When I looked away, my eyes found Aria’s. She glanced at the rip, then looked at me again, her eyebrow raised in a question she didn’t need to voice. I knew her face well enough to interpret her expression, even with splatters of blood marring her cheek—not her blood, I was sure of it.

  Are you thinking of going through? I’m game if you are.

  Right there, with a demon trying to kill me, another one trying to kill her, with so many duels going on around us and magic crackling in the air, I could only think of one thing. How much I loved her. How much I wanted her. I fought just a little harder so I could go to her and steal one of those battlefield kisses that were always so dangerous—and yet, oh, so necessary. One of those kisses that we have shared for more than a century and that always seemed to amuse the Guard to no end.

  For the past dozen decades, she was by my side every night. I kept fighting for her even when it seemed like a doomed fight, even when I craved to leave Newhaven and the responsibilities I had never wanted.

  I fought for the little girl I had found in a dark graveyard, a little girl whose bright eyes and broken heart had made me ache and feel human for the first time in centuries. I fought for the angry teenager who had been ready to take on the world to get her wish to fight. So stubborn, so convinced she knew better than the adults around her, so human and fragile and strong. I fought for the young woman who died and the vampire who was reborn. For the leader who broke out of her fighter shell to become more than I ever imagined she could be. For the woman who has gone to sleep in my arms, who has wrapped hers around me, every day for more than a century.

  It’s for her I stayed in Newhaven, for her I took over the Guard, for her I watched so many people die under my command. All of it. It’s for her, with her, with her sword and her love, that I marched with our best troops to close that rip and end the demon attacks on our town, like they had been stopped successfully elsewhere in the world.

  Did we go through the rip?

  I nodded at her after the kiss, asked her if she was ready, and she merely answered with a smile. Side by side, we started toward the rip. There was no reason to say anything more than that.

  We hadn’t taken more than a few steps when we were stopped. On my left side, it was Corina who put a hand on my arm. For Aria, it was Pat. They were two of the best fighters in the Guard. He wasn’t even twenty; she was barely any older. Children, like my Aria had been.

  “Not this time, sir,” she said with a grim smile.

  “What—” I started, but Pat didn’t let me finish.

  “You’ve taken care of Newhaven long enough,” he said, his gaze going from Aria to me. “Our turn. You keep the mages safe, we’ll take care of the rest.”

  We didn’t have time to protest, or say anything, really. Corina raised her sword, let out a battle cry, and all around us the soldiers responded with matching shouts. All at once, they abandoned their fights and ran to the rip, jumping through without showing any hesitation. Most of the demons they had been fighting followed, chasing after what they had to see as weak prey fleeing from them. Only a few demons remained.

  I’ll admit I was stunned. I’d never have imagined anything like this. I was the Commander. I took care of Newhaven. Aria and I did. We took care of our soldiers as though they had been our children, not the other way around. Except… they had done just that, hadn’t they? They had offered us a chance, if we just lived long enough to take it.

  “The mages!” Aria shouted, jolting me back to the present and to the demons closing in on the best chance we had ever had of winning this war.

  We ran. We fought.

  Did we win?

  Well, I’m here and telling you about it, am I not?

  No, let me correct that. We are.

  The End

  Excerpt from

  Souls Night

  The vampire stood still in front of
the last tomb for a few more moments, then turned back toward Mierna, a hand pressed to his bloody side. She hurried to her feet so he wouldn’t loom over her, but even so he stood a full head taller than she was.

  “Why are you here, child?” he asked, his voice gravelly. “Who are you?”

  “My…my name is Mierna. I am from Riverside.”

  A short, impatient nod told her he knew of her village.

  “The last time, your people sent three armed men during daytime,” he said, sounding more tired than angry. “Do they fear me so little now that they will send one lone child to steal from me?”

  “I’m not a child,” she replied, annoyed. She crossed her arms and raised her chin a little higher, forgetting that she had wounded the vampire in the light of his accusations. “And I did not come here to steal.”

  His expression remained blank. “Then why are you here?”

  “It’s a challenge,” she explained, trying to reach for a patience she didn’t possess. “I had to come here tonight, alone, and return—” She realized the implications of what she was saying as the words passed her lips, but it was too late to stop now. “—with proof that I had come.”

  “What proof?”

  She could feel her cheeks flushing at his accusatory tone and dropped her eyes. They fell on the bloody hand he was pressing to his side, and her feelings of guilt only heightened.

  “I have to bring back a weapon,” she said, talking very fast. Then, gesturing at his wound, she added: “Shouldn’t you…lie down, maybe? I could clean this for you. Bandage it.”

  He ignored her suggestion, focusing instead on what she would rather not have talked about now that she understood the entirety of the challenge. The Fighters had indeed sent her to steal, even though they hadn’t phrased it that way.

  “Who do you think owns that weapon you had to bring back?”

  “I didn’t know anyone would be here,” she muttered.

  “And yet you came armed.”

  She wanted to roll her eyes at that, but she doubted he would take it well. Her initial burst of fear at being in front of a vampire had faded, but she couldn’t forget what he was, couldn’t forget old stories of how, once, humans had shown so much respect to vampires.

  “Of course I came armed. It’s Souls Night. I wasn’t going to walk around defenseless. And I truly am sorry. I thought you were…”

  She couldn’t finish, her fear suddenly too ridiculous to voice.

  “You thought I was what?”

  Once more, her cheeks felt too hot, and Mierna was grateful that it was so dark. “I thought you were a demon.”

  He laughed. The sound took her by surprise, deep and truly amused, but somehow awkward, as though he hadn’t laughed in a long time.

  “And you thought a spear would help against a demon?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a Fighter yet. But I will be. And a spear has to be better than nothing.”

  His laughter died as abruptly as it had started. Mierna could feel his eyes on her, heavy, piercing, measuring her from her braided hair to the toe of her boots. When he shook his head, a wave of cold ran over her; she was sure she had failed whatever test he had run her through, and she had to fight her need to move back, away from the judgment about to fall from his lips. He didn’t say anything however. All he did was grimace, look down at his middle and at his blood stained hand, and then he turned away toward the stone building fifty yards behind him. Mierna had been so focused on him, she hadn’t noticed it until now.

  “Go home, Mierna,” he said without looking back. “Children have no business fighting demons.”

  ... continued in Souls Night

  About the Author:

  Kallysten’s most exciting accomplishment to date was to cross a few thousand miles and an ocean to pursue (and catch!) the love of her life. She has been writing for fifteen years, and always enjoyed sharing her stories and listening to the readers' reactions. After playing with science fiction, short stories and poetry, she is now trying her hand, heart and words at paranormal romance novels.

  To see her other stories, including free short stories and sample chapters, visit

  http://original.kallysten.net

  Other stories available:

  CheckMate

  Lilia is a vampire; Vincent hunts vampires. They’ve each sworn to kill the other, and have battled many times without either of them winning. But when a spell gone wrong links them through bonds of shared blood and sex, the game stops abruptly and with no clear winner.

  Trying to stay alive, they learn to guard each other's back against old and new enemies alike. The game takes a new turn as the memories of what they shared under the spell become too hard to ignore and they succumb to lust - or could it be more than that?

  On The Edge

  Brett Andrews thought he had it all.

  His new club, On The Edge, catering to vampires and humans, is a smashing success, and the beautiful vampire Lisa is everything he could have dreamed of.

  When an old lover of hers, Leo, shows up at the club, Brett's immediate fear is that he will lose Lisa. But if he just stops thinking long enough to follow Lisa's lead, he might gain a lover instead of losing one.

  Forget Ever After

  Seven months ago, Lena’s fiancé disappeared without a trace. She spent those months burying herself into textbooks and lecture notes, but never quite lost the hope that, somewhere, Liam was all right, and that he would come back to her.

  When fate allows them to meet again, Lena is overjoyed and ready to welcome him back into her life. Even the shocking discovery of how much he has changed does not deter her because, he admits it with some difficulty, he still loves her.

  But what future can Lena and Liam have together, when she wants nothing more than to save lives and he is a newly turned vampire?

  Her Last Words

  Two centuries have passed since the Master Vampire Gabrielle made the biggest mistake of her life. Two centuries since her plan backfired, resulting not in the destruction of demons as she had hoped, but instead in the slaughtering of countless humans and vampires that had been fighting against them. Two centuries also, since she pushed away her favorite Childe, without ever telling him why. Two centuries of fighting alone to protect the humans she has sworn to defend from demons. Two centuries of missing Erik.

  When he finally reappears in her life, she thinks she has been offered a second chance. But she soon realizes that she will need to face her mistakes to reach him, and understand that silence can be more painful than words.

  A note from the author

  If you enjoyed this story, would you consider taking a few moments to leave a review or rating on the site where you bought it or on a site such as Goodreads? I would be ever so grateful!

  Thank you,

  Kallysten