Page 91 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky
Apollo, who was famed to be the most charming and handsome man in the entire Faraway North but seemed like an insufferable, pompous wanker to me, narrowed his grey eyes and crossed his unreasonably massive arms before his chest as if to underline his suspicion. “When is soon, exactly?”
“Soonmeaning a furthest point in time, or alternatively, none of your damned business,” I bristled.
Apollo’s smirk verged on demonic. “Careful, Aventine. I know sixty-three ways to kill you.”
I reciprocated the smile, ensuring my fangs were in full display. “You need sixty-three ways to kill me, Zayra? I need only one.”
“Aw, look at you grinning at each other,” Thea crooned as she and Nepheli strolled over to us, arm in arm.
When they reached us, Nepheli tucked the silver strands of her hair behind her ears, revealing a pair of teardrop-shaped earrings. “Pink or blue?” she asked Apollo, and as he cast that infernal grin upon her, the girl’s cheeks burned the brightest shade of red.
“Pink,” decided Apollo, although he wasn’t looking at her earrings at all.
Nepheli chewed at the corner of her lip, her brows knitting. “Are you sure? Pink is not really my color.”
“Every color is your color,” argued Apollo.
“I think the colors would disagree,” clipped Nepheli.
Apollo stood to take her chin between his fingers. “Darling, if a color gives you trouble, you tell me, and I’ll beat it to death.” That last remark came with a very pointed glance in my direction. It took more self-restraint than I knew I had in me not to bare my fangs again.
“You’re impossible,” sighed Nepheli, disentangling herself from him.
Apollo, insouciant as a satyr on a banquet, sauntered after her with his hands in his pockets. “You mean impossibly charming, right?”
Finally.
Blessed silence.
“You’re bored,” Thea accused, taking a seat on my lap.
I wound an arm around her midriff and brought her further back so she’d be more comfortable. “No, this is… fun.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not. I’m having fun watching you have fun.”
That she accepted, leaning in to press a chaste kiss on my cheek. “Sorry if it’s taking forever.”
But now that I had her here, time was moving fast again, and forever seemed like a single moment.
“Forever is fine with me,” I murmured against her skin, running my fingers through her soft, unbound curls.
Then she was back with Nepheli, laughing over a cup of peach-colored wine. As she stood there, bathed in the bright morning light, so ethereal she was more apparition than flesh and bones, I couldn’t help but think of the divine, the stray chance that some mystic force between the stars had willed Dorothea into my life.
I never believed in destiny. What a ridiculous, self-deprecating notion it was. Random disasters and random blessings, miracles and misfortunes, uncertainties and unseen patterns, all converging on the same indefinable point without the hope that a different choice might have changed everything.
I’d always thought we were nothing but a collection of choices, whether arbitrary or intentional, and that the first serious one I’d ever made was to love her. I didn’tfallin love with her. Ichoseit, my eyes wide open, deciding every wrong and right step along the way. And I could almost see it now—our whole lives: a complex of choices ricocheting into the present.
No, I did not believe in destiny. But, gods knew, I believed in her.
The Castle
Somewhere in the vast and magic-dazed forest of the Faraway North, I let down my stairs: a Castle of the sky, of the land, and of the gods that managed to cheat Death, if only for a single soul.
She was a very special soul, you see, marvelous and resilient and incomparably like my own.
“It’s hard to let go,” I told Esperida, who was no longer a girl, just as I was no longer her Castle, both of us standing on the edge of the same vast brightness.
“I know,” she whispered.
“Go,” I said. “The stars are singing.”
“What are they saying?”
“He’s waiting for you.”
At last, Esperida went into the light.
And I was made new again.