Page 29

Ruby

I got up for breakfast and knocked on my mother’s door. We had agreed the night before that she would wake me in the morning and we would go down together to get something to eat but she had never called me. I knocked again.

“Mom?” I went inside and found her in bed, sitting up.

“You okay?”

She gave a tired smile.

“I think I may need to go to the hospital again.”

“Are you feeling sick again?” I rushed to the bed and felt her forehead but she didn’t have a fever.

“I’ve been feeling a bit weak. It started yesterday, but you know, it’s been a busy couple of days.”

“We’ll find you a hospital here,” I said. “I’ll call today and…”

She nodded and smiled. “It’s fine. Listen here, sweetheart, come here,” she said, pulling me closer to her.

“I want you to be happy and if that means being with this Luc, then I am fine with it.”

“You are?” I asked.

She smiled. “I can see you are going to be with him with or without my blessing.”

I could feel myself blushing. “Probably but I would prefer your blessing.”

“Then you have it.”

I gave her a hug and felt tears running down my face.

“Our time in Cape Falls was just the best ever,” she said, stroking my face. “I’ll never forget it.”

“Me neither.”

My mom asked me what I planned on doing next and I told her that I might go to see Luc’s estate. He’d told me so much about it and I was curious to see the hills and the flowers. “And the honey bees!”

“Honey bees?”

“Apparently the honey bees know the beekeepers on the farm. If they don’t like someone, they swarm around them and chase them away.”

“Amazing,” my mom grinned.

“Right? Such small creatures, but so powerful.”

“You used to love honey as a child,” my mother said. “You’d eat spoonfuls at a time but it was so expensive. We had to ration you!”

I remembered it vaguely, asking for honey as a present one year around my birthday.

“Luc says the honey up north is especially sweet,” I said in a dreamy voice. “There are certain flowers up there that produce a honey that is creamy and light and it’s highly sought after.

“Sounds delicious,” my mother said.

“Maybe I’ll become a beekeeper,” I said with a grin.

“I can actually see that!” she laughed.

When she fell asleep, I made some calls to find out which hospital could take her. I knew Luc would help with the finances and asked for an ambulance to come and fetch her later in the day. I didn’t want her to slip into a coma and asked the hotel doctor to look in on her.

I went down to get us something to eat and heard people talking about the missile attacks down south. People were saying the war was over, that things could go back to normal. Some people said they were glad the shifters had not won. “I’ve never been a dog person, you know?” one woman said to another as they got out of the lift.

At reception, I asked if the news was true.

The girl shrugged. “I heard the vamps pay double if you donate blood now. Supplies are low and we don’t want them coming after us!” she gave a nervous giggle.

I asked for coffee and eggs to be sent up to my mother’s room.

As I stepped out of the elevator, I saw Luc standing at my hotel door waiting for me.

I couldn’t get over how handsome he was and how incredibly lucky I felt that he had fallen for me. I couldn’t believe he could love me. I felt like a giggly teenager when I thought about it.

Luc was a catch by anyone’s definition and I’d caught him!

But as I got closer to him, I could see the slump in his shoulders, the weary lines on his face.

“You all right?” I asked, concerned.

“I am now that I am here with you,” he said, taking me into his arms and kissing me.

We went into the room and he collapsed on the bed.

He told me the latest news and I wondered how much of the south had been destroyed, if there was anything left of Buzzard Creek. Then I wondered if I cared.

“What would you like to do now?” he asked. “I mean, after this?” he pointed around the room.

I shrugged. “It feels like I’m on holiday now. I think I’d like to get my mom settled into a hospital here but then, really, anything.”

He smiled at me. “How would you feel about visiting the North?”

I sat up, excited. “Sounds wonderful! I’ve never been there!”

“It’s cold,” he warned me. “Not like here and definitely not like in the South! It rains and many mornings, there is a wet fog that clings to you until mid-afternoon.”

It sounded like another world I wanted to explore.

“Don’t you need to stay here, to help with the peace process and so on?”

He shook his head. “I need a break from all of this.” He paused. “I found out who killed Matteo.”

“Who?”

“It was the queen. Taheera. She’d been having an affair with him but she was using him and then he became a liability.”

“You did say she was a bitch,” I said.

He laughed. “She is a bitch, but Matteo liked strong women and she is probably the strongest woman I’ve ever met, or had ever met.”

“What do you mean?” He told me how Vlas had summoned up the last of his energy to kill her. I was shocked to hear that both the king and queen were dead.

“I thought you loved the king.”

“Well, love is a strong word but I was fond of him, I thought he was a good king.”

“Who will be king now?” I asked and he pulled up his shoulders.

“I don’t really care.”

“What?!” I had to laugh. He had been so single-mindedly purposeful ever since I met him. It was hard to believe he could walk away from it now.

“I only care about you. About us.”

His voice was so serious, his eyes a luminous blue.

“Me too,” I said and I meant it.

“We can finally be together,” I said and crawled over to him, snuggling in next to him.

“Nothing would make me happier,” he said, kissing my forehead. “Except for maybe one thing…”

I laughed as I felt his hand slide down my neck and over my breast.

“And what would that one thing be, I wonder?”

We made love and afterwards, we lay in bed, talking.

I asked him what it was like to be a vampire, what the life was like and he was thoughtful, slow in answering.

“It has been the only life I’ve ever known. My memories of being human are so vague,” he conceded. “It feels like another time.”

“I see.”

“But I will say this, it has been lonely. That changed when I met you, though. That is why I don’t want to waste any time. I want us to get married and move to Mount Essay.”

“Then let’s do it,” I said, the words out of my mouth before I even realized what I was saying.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“Me too,” I countered.

“We can have a little boy and maybe a girl, and then I’ll join you, become one of you.”

“I don’t know if I want that life for you,” he said with a frown.

“It will make travel to see my mother a lot easier if I can just pop over there and back in a few minutes’ time,” I joked.

“She won’t like it either,” he said, still resisting.

“She’ll get used to the idea,” I said, knowing that I was right.

I wanted children first though, I had a picture in my mind of the two little ones, with Luc’s blonde hair and my mother’s sense of justice. I liked it.

“Here,” Luc said, placing a ribbon around my ring finger. “This will be your engagement ring until we find you a proper ring.”

“I love it!” I said.

Later, we went to see my mother in the hospital. Her doctor said she was looking much better. She had been given medication and her blood sugar levels were improving. The doctor told us that she was a good candidate for a new kind of experiential treatment and he wanted her to sign up for it.

I was about to go to her when Luc told me to go on alone, that he would see me later.

I was disappointed because I wanted to tell her about the engagement but he convinced me to wait a day.

“Let’s not upset her on her first day in hospital,” he said which put a bit of a dampener on my mood.

I went inside and sat by my mother’s side, discussing the new treatment the doctor was suggesting. My mother was open to it.

“He says it may heal me completely. I can’t even imagine not being sick anymore.”

“That would be fantastic,” I said.

“I know!”

I had dinner with her and sat with her a little while longer.

She fell asleep and I lay on the bed next to her and must have fallen asleep too.

When I opened my eyes, there were two men standing in the hospital room. One of them was Luc and the other was my father.

“Dad?”

My mother woke up too and both of us struggled to believe our eyes. “Cat?”

He had a grey beard and his clothes hung loosely on him, but it was him.

“This guy came to bust me out,” he said, nudging Luc.

“You broke him out of prison?” I gasped.

Luc scoffed. “Please! He’d served his sentence, they were just keeping him there. The warden admitted as much to me.”

I found this hard to believe. I wondered if he had used his special powers of convincing on the warden. Not that it mattered. I agreed with him. My father had served his time.

“While I was there, I asked him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.”

“What? We still do that?” I asked surprised.

“We do where I come from,” Luc said.

“And what did he say?” I asked.

My dad grinned. “I asked him what sort of prospects he had. I was rather satisfied with his answer.”

“So you gave your blessing?”

He nodded with a grin. “I did indeed.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “To a vampire?”

He shrugged. “Seems like you can teach an old dog new tricks,” he said.

All of us had to laugh at that.