I can tell my sister by the flowers in her eyes…
Tossing my hair back as I sang, I missed the moment she and Steve stopped, eyes wide.
“Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah-” I sang until Aura’s grip on my wrist stopped me. “Hey! I was finding my groove here!”
“Honey, what- what is that on your back?”
At first, I thought she meant the poem from James, my eternal tattoo, but she was staring at where my neck met my shoulder. Craning my head to get a better look, my mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
It was a silver ribbon of script, flowing like a river over my collarbone, spilling down my arm and spiraling along my wrist. Aura lifted my hand to look closer. The words gleamed in the moonlight in a precise, bold style I recognized instantly.
“I miss you more than I could have imagined was possible,”Aura recited,“every night when I open my eyes I turn to the right, imagining I’ll see you there next to me.”
I reflexively tried to pull my arm away, but she held on, yanking me back a little.
“I deserve nothing. But with every waking moment I search for you, and hoping against hope that you are safe. But I know that you are likely doing something reckless and foolishly heroic.”
Shaking my head, confused, and of course focusing on the meaningless part of it all. “I was not reckless! Or … or heroic or-”
“I curse myself for my arrogance, my stupidity. I took from you over and over, everything that was not mine to take, everything that you did not want to give to me.”
Aura’s voice was a little shaky, but for a newborn vamp, the woman had a steel grip on my arm, pulling me to the left to follow the flow of the silver handwriting down the curve of my waist.
“I felt you tonight. You were sitting, perfectly still in a crowd of people in Hyde Park. Your loneliness tore through me.”
I turned to James, awkwardly given Aura’s grasp but forcing myself to look him in the eye. He was ashen. I didn’t know a vampire could actually get any paler but he’d managed it, eyes wide and shocked.
Aura had always been like one of those Australian sheepdogs when she was on to something, relentlessly circling until she’d herded all the facts together in a little circle like the dogs and their flock. She reached down and yanked my borrowed skirt up.
“Hey, hey!” I slapped futilely at her hand like she was a drunken college frat boy. “What the hell are you-”
“I almost lost you tonight. I could see you there in that alley, your blood spilling from you and that bastard left you there. The sun was rising and you were so weak. You would meet the sun in your foolish heroism, for staking one of the ferals.”
The words were more like his “old tongue,” the measured, formal way he’d spoken while remembering his past, about his family. I couldn’t take my eyes off his shocked expression. James, who never deviated from his urbane half-smile was cycling through shock, realization, embarrassment, and vulnerability. Everything Aura read from my skin reflected back to his huge, still form, casting a long shadow from the moon.
“I wept when you found that fox to eat. I have never been so grateful for a creature’s life, given for yours. I knew you would never forgive yourself if you killed those people. Imagining you turned feral yourself. Of someone stupidly heroic - just like you - putting you down before I could reach you.”
Steve stood awkwardly on my other side, staring at James, too.
Aura was really into this now, reading the thoughts that kept surfacing on my body, down the line of my shin, and circling my calf and thigh.“I feel your hate, every time you scream and push me away. I’ll keep coming back, like a hound to heel as long as I can hold our bond. I can feel you when you drink of me, my blood and I try to imagine your lips on my skin, taking from me as cruelly as I drank from you, wishing that you were. That you were giving that pain back to me. I deserve it all.”
I was shaking like a leaf, not able to tear my gaze from James but feeling the ache of his vulnerability, of this formidable man laid bare in front of the only three people who mattered to him.
“St- hey, Aura, stop. STOP!”
Startled, she finally let go of me. Raising my wrists higher, I stared in wonder as each glittering word raised and faded like the ripples on a pond. “I’ve never seen this … these words are new. I don’t understand?”
Shoving one hand through his hair, James finally looked at me. “I only spoke through the bond to keep you safe. Try to warn you away from dangerous situations.” He gave a bitter chuckle, “Not that you paid attention. I couldn’t … I wouldn’t burden you with my regrets, all my pathetic thoughts. You didn’t deserve that. You never deserved what I did to you.”
Even Steve was leaning closer, looking from the silvery script on my skin and then to his friend.
“Then how did these words end up on her?”
James shrugged helplessly. “I don’t understand it. I wrote you letters every morning at dawn and then burned them at the next sunset.” Even he stepped closer, cautiously angling his head to look at his sorrows and loneliness, his declarations of love flowing over the plains of my stomach. “These are my letters.”
Before I could think about what I was doing, I turned and lifted my hair, showing his poetry, written in black ink and embedded forever on me.
“This is what you wrote on me, the night before you left the mountain. When I turned, the ink sank into my skin. It’s been there since. It’s a part of me.”
