Aria and Will Read online

  “Sir, she requested that I give you her name. She insisted you would meet with her if you knew who she was.”

  Wilhelm barely refrained from grumbling. “Then tell me so I can send you back to inform her that aggravating me in the middle of a meeting is not the smartest thing to do.”

  The soldier swallowed heavily, as though Wilhelm’s bad mood had been directed toward him. He was a new recruit, and they were often more nervous around Wilhelm than they had reason to be.

  “Her name is Ari…Ariadne, sir.”

  He had stumbled on the unusual name, but of course, Wilhelm recognized it. He frowned, annoyed that the child apparently thought her name would be enough to force him to drop everything he was doing to meet with her.

  “You know her,” Bergsen guessed. “We can finish this later if you want.”

  Wilhelm shook his head. “No. We have work to do.” Glancing back at the soldier, he gave a sharp nod. “You have my answer for her. If she continues to argue, have the MPs escort her out of the building.”

  The soldier saluted before walking out.

  “You should be nicer to your groupies,” Bergsen said, his voice just on the edge of teasing. “Especially wannabe recruits. Heaven knows we need more of them.”

  “She’s fifteen,” Wilhelm scoffed. “Unless you changed the minimum age without telling me, she can’t join the Guard.”

  A rare chuckle passed Bergsen’ lips. “So you do know her. And her age. If I didn’t know for a fact that you don’t have time for that, I’d point out that she’s much too young for you.”

  With a grimace, Wilhelm looked down at the report in front of him and tapped it with a finger.

  “We have work to do.”

  * * * *

  When, after hours of debating, arguing, and agreeing on the direction that they needed to take, Bergsen and Wilhelm walked out of the office, Ariadne was still there, sitting on a bench on the side of the lobby. Wilhelm’s eyes went straight to her as she stood. She looked sullen, her voice cold when she asked if she could speak with Wilhelm now.

  “Such determination should be rewarded,” Bergsen butted in, the smallest of smiles tugging at his lips. “Don’t you think, Will?”

  With a roll of his eyes, Wilhelm stepped forward and gestured for the girl to follow him. He led her to his office, which was down the hall from the Commander’s office. He rarely ever used it; he was always on the move, and if he needed to sit down, he usually did so at Bergsen’s desk. Ariadne patted the seat of the chair he indicated to her, and dust rose in the air. She sat without commenting on it and looked around her expectantly.

  “I thought there would be more old stuff in here,” she said after a few moments.

  Wilhelm cracked a smile despite himself. “I’m the only thing that qualifies as old here. Now what do you want?”

  Arms crossed, he was leaning against his desk a few steps in front of her. She looked up at him with determination and—could it be hope?

  “I need you to talk to my mother and convince her to let me join the Cadets,” she said, very seriously, in the tone of someone who had practiced her words. “I want to be ready to fight when I enroll in the Guard but Mom refuses to sign the consent form.”

  Wilhelm waited, certain that there had to be more, but Ariadne did not add anything and merely continued to look at him.

  “I don’t see why you want me to talk to her,” he started.

  Ariadne jumped in right away, as though she had practiced that part too. “You convinced her once when she was acting stupid. I know she’ll listen to you again.”

  It was doubtful, Wilhelm thought. After all, Ariadne’s mother had sold her house and moved to a different part of the city as soon as she had learned he was patrolling her street regularly. As far as he was concerned, she had spelled out rather clearly that she wanted nothing from him—be it his protection or his opinion on how to raise her daughter.

  “I am sorry, Ariadne. That’s a family matter, and I have no right to interfere.”

  “You have to talk to her,” she pressed on, her voice strained now, and leaned forward as though to give more weight to her words. “My father would have let me do it.”

  “But your father is gone,” he said, as gently as he could, “and it’s your mother’s opinion that matters.”

  “You’re a jerk!” she shouted as she jumped to her feet and glared at him, her fists closed tight and her eyes gleaming. “I thought you cared about me but you don’t! I should have known when you stopped patrolling in front of our house!”

  Standing as she was, only a couple of feet in front of him, she seemed to dare him to deny her words—seemed, also, to be demanding an explanation, or even an apology. Wilhelm gave her neither.

  “It’s time for you to go home.”

  He escorted her to the door, and led her down the corridor to the entrance of the building. He was shocked to discover, when they reached the door, that the sun was just about to set, the sky lit up in pink hues over the western horizon.

  “If I let you go alone, you’ll be breaking curfew,” he sighed, glancing back at her.

  The look she gave him made it clear that she couldn’t have cared less.

  “Come with me.”

  Protected by the long shadows cast by the buildings around them, he went to the camp garage and requisitioned a car to drive Ariadne home. She followed him the entire time without a word, but without balking either when he told her to get into the car. She remained silent for most of the drive, until they were only two blocks away from her new home.

  “So you do know where we live now,” she commented, very quietly.

  Wilhelm did not answer. It hadn’t been very difficult to find out that piece of information.

  When he parked the car in front of the small house, Ariadne did not move.

  “I really would like you to talk to her,” she said, staring straight ahead at the road. “I know she’d listen to you.”

  After taking a deep breath to calm down so he wouldn’t snap at her, Wilhelm asked: “What makes you think I want you to join the Cadets?”

  The look of pure surprise she gave him made it clear the idea that he might side with her mother had not entered her mind.

  “You’re still a child,” he continued. “I’ve seen too many children die already to want you to fight.”

  He could see, by the hard frown she gave him, that she disagreed with his calling her a child, and that she wouldn’t stop pressuring her mother to let her enroll. Cadet training was nowhere near as dangerous as the actual Guard was, of course, but Wilhelm refused to help her step onto that path. It was a decision she could make for herself when she was old enough, but not one he would encourage in any way.

  She opened the door and stepped out without a word of goodbye. Wilhelm watched her go to her door, and glimpsed someone opening to let her in before he left. His mind blank, he drove back to the camp to return the car. He had patrolled the streets of the city by foot for years, breaking his routine only when large attacks were expected.

  Just as he was leaving the camp again, he walked to the front of the wall where the Guard posted the names of its dead. At the foot of the wall, beneath the most recent list, rested a bouquet of white roses. They were in full bloom and Wilhelm took a deliberate breath to take in their scent, wondering how many more children would die under his watch.

  * * * *

  I may have been fifteen, but I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was not a child. It took Will many years to realize that.

  To this day, I am still certain that a word from him would have been enough for my mother to sign that damn paper. Without his help, however, it took me six months to convince her to let me enroll in the Cadets training. I had to plead, beg, nag, pout, argue, and in the end, I even had to resort to a threat.

  I had spent a week writing her a letter that listed all the reasons why I wanted to take part in that training. When I gave it to her, she sighed, and without even looking at it sh
e said she wouldn’t change her mind. It hurt and I lashed out with the threat I had hoped I wouldn’t need.

  “You can prevent me from joining the Cadets, and even force me to wait until I’m of age to enroll in the Guard. But if you do, my eighteenth birthday will be the last time you ever see me.”

  She looked at me as though I had just announced I was going to the moon.

  “You don’t mean that,” she said after a few seconds, but her voice trembled with shock.

  “I’ve never meant anything more in my life, Mom. I didn’t want it to come to this but—”

  She slapped me. I can’t remember her ever raising her hand to me before that day. She hurt my pride more than anything else, and I left her there and went to my room. My eyes were stinging, but I refused to cry. Later that night, she came to me and said she had read my letter. She had brought the signed parental consent form for the training with her. Nevertheless, she never apologized for slapping me, and I never did for threatening her.

  The day I graduated from the actual Guard training, she admitted that she had hoped I would tire of the discipline and demands of the Cadets before I ever enrolled in the Guard. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  She wasn’t the only one who opposed my desire to join the Guard. The entire time she and I argued, Paul never lost an opportunity to show his own dislike for the Guard, and by extension the Cadets. It comforted our mother in her opposition, I suppose, until I made my last argument.

  I know why my brother had such a strong attitude against the Guard, even though I never understood it. He blamed the Guard for not having protected our father. But Dad was killed while traveling outside of the Guard’s protection zone, coming back from visiting our grandparents in a nearby town. How that makes his death the Guard’s responsibility is beyond me.

  Paul never showed any interest for what I learned or did in my training, or later in the Guard. I remember, when I came back from my first week at the camp, I expected Mom or him to show some curiosity in what I had done. Mom asked me only if it was hard and if I had changed my mind. Paul waited until we were alone to tell me what he thought. I can still hear the exact tone he used, half sneering anger, and half condescension.

  “Getting yourself killed won’t bring Dad back.”

  I shrugged his words off. I wasn’t a child anymore, and I had known for a long time that our father wouldn’t return.

  “And that vamp won’t ever replace him either.”

  That hurt, more than it had any right to. And it probably hurt even more because it held some truth.

  It wasn’t so much that I wanted someone to replace my father. No one could have done that. But I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I guess what I wanted—what I needed—was someone who wasn’t afraid of demons. Someone who didn’t turn pale as a bed sheet when the sirens blared to life and announced another attack. Someone I could trust with my every breath, like, when I was a child, without even knowing it, I had trusted my parents. My mom had tumbled from that pedestal when she had broken down after my father’s death; and yes, Will had replaced her, had replaced them, simply because he had been there. Simply because he had rested his hand on my shoulder and taken me home. I didn’t have that insight at fifteen, so Paul’s words brought nothing more than pain, and the guilt of feeling as if I was betraying my father rather than honoring him. When my leave ended and I returned to the camp, I was glad for a new reason. I would have a full week away from my brother.

  For a year and half, I spent every other week at the Cadets’ camp, only a block away from the Guard’s building. About two dozens other trainees were there on alternate weeks, as many girls as there were boys. The instructors instilled discipline in us along with a respect for the authority of hierarchy. We weren’t allowed to fight demons, of course not, but we learned hand-to-hand combat and how to handle swords, axes and bows. The hand-to-hand, a mix of several martial arts, was mostly to improve our endurance, focus and coordination. No human could hope to best even the weakest demon without a weapon, and even most vampires would find it difficult if not downright impossible.

  We were taught, also, how to fortify a street, and how to guide civilians during evacuations. In the last few months before I was sworn into the Guard, there were so many large demon attacks that we helped evacuate the streets closest to the walls on a weekly basis. It became routine for us, but the civilians were always reluctant to leave—reluctant enough, actually, that when it was suggested that the streets closest to the walls be permanently evacuated, we came very close to having riots on our hands. With the town full of refugees, all homes were needed. The solution would have been to refuse new arrivals, but Bergsen and Will never issued that order. We were the city with the best fortifications and defenses in the country, and they had decided that as long as the town could live with the delivery of food from beyond the walls along with what our gardens produced, the doors would remain open to refugees. It took decades before that changed.

  Between intensive training and evacuations, these months flew by, slowing down only when I returned to a more ‘normal’ life every other week. With the regular education system as shaken as it was, I learned far more at camp than I did in school, and those weeks spent into a cramped classroom, with my peers looking at me and the other Cadets with both trepidation and envy, seemed like a loss of time when I could have learned so much more elsewhere.

  For the entire time, I never saw more than glimpses of Will, and never was able to talk to him. Bergsen spoke to us on a regular basis, reinforcing the importance of what we had chosen to do, but Will never was one for public speeches. Even today, he leaves speaking to others, and is happy to lead from behind the curtain—or from the front row of the defense lines.

  When I formally joined the Guard, though, I started seeing more of him than I sometimes wished I had.

  Chapter 4

  The apartment’s window opened on the nicest view the ten-story building offered. Down below, the gray of the city was brightened by a splash of green. The city’s largest park, these days, doubled as one of the gardens that helped provide fresh food to humans. On the horizon, far beyond the walls, the mountains seemed purple or blue, depending on the time of day or the weather.

  However, it wasn’t because of the view that this apartment had been assigned to Wilhelm, or that all vampires’ quarters were located on this same side of the building—the north side. As much as the human members of the Guard sometimes complained about it, they understood the sheer necessity of these quarters’ assignments. Good fabric and good wood were sparse, too much so to waste on completely blocking direct sunlight.

  “What good is that view to me?” Wilhelm had once heard a vampire protest to some human friends. “Give me a windowless room instead, and maybe I’ll sleep better.”

  Wilhelm had long ago ceased to need much sleep. As a fledgling, he had heard from Masters that, in time, he would learn to forego sleep altogether. He had thought then that they were simply trying to impress him, but with passing centuries, he had started to need less and less rest to feel refreshed. He had rarely closed his eyes for more than four hours at a time since the demons had appeared. It often seemed like a much longer time than that.

  After going to bed an hour or so after sunrise, just long enough to hear the preliminary reports for the night, he usually woke by midmorning—if he managed to sleep at all. Some mornings, the news was simply too dire for him to even fall asleep; on these mornings, it was difficult to refrain from calling Bergsen and telling him that it was over, Wilhelm was quitting. He had never wanted to take such a great part in the fight, had been quite content with helping where he could, but little by little over the years, Bergsen had pushed more and more responsibilities on him.

  He had protested, of course, more than once. The last time he had let his exasperation pierce through had been a few weeks earlier.

  “If I had known when I helped you organize the Guard that you’d trap me with all these duties, I’d have lef
t town instead.”

  Bergsen hadn’t even shown the hint of a smile. “If you had, this city and its people would have died within months.”

  The worst thing was that he meant it.

  Day after day, the same routine unfolded. Wilhelm got out of bed, used his allotted four and a half minutes of hot water in the shower and fed, all of it so automatic that he didn’t need to think. The blood in the fridge was always human. Some weeks, the turn out of volunteers at the blood bank was too low, or the number of human casualties needing transfusions too high. Animal blood was distributed to the vampires in the Guard when that was the case, but not to Wilhelm. He hadn’t requested this privilege, but he also hadn’t requested to be treated like the other vamp recruits. Sooner or later, Bergsen would need to cave in and make the blood donations a mandatory part of the war effort.

  Only after finishing his first glass of warmed blood did Wilhelm go and pick up the sheets of paper someone had pushed beneath his door. Returning to the small kitchenette, he warmed a second glass of blood in the instant-oven and sat down to look at the numbers. On good days, the first line, the line for human deaths attributed to vampire activity in the last twenty-four hours, would be zero. This was not a good day.

  “Damn it. I knew I should have looked for that lair last night.”

  His mutter seemed louder than it truly was in the silent apartment. When he put down his glass, some blood sloshed over the side and stained the table red.

  The second line showed how many new vampires had arrived in town in the same twenty-four hours. Today’s report showed none, but the reports from the previous two nights had showed four and seven respectively. Wilhelm was ready to bet that there was a new clan in town, one that either did not care about the rules or had unruly fledglings amongst its members. The city could use more vampire recruits in the Guard, but it had no room for vampires that killed to feed.