***
“Can we just preface this whole conversation with me saying that Macie gave me permission to have him over…”
“As she told me.” Lucy replied coldly.
“…and also that I am like, almost forty years old and should therefore be allowed to do what I want regardless of the consequences without you hovering over me!?”
“Oh, are you almost forty years old, Violet?” She crossed her arms over her chest, “You look rather good for being almost forty.”
“Yeah, and you look pretty good for pushing three hundred. What’s your point?”
“My point is that you are exactly who you were twenty-five years ago. You are still seventeen years old, inside and out. That is the truth of our kind: we are stuck, internally and externally. We can get colder, or we can get more foolish, depending on the level of darkness we experience, but we are fixed. So, yes, I look at you the way one looks at a petulant seventeen-year-old, because that is what you are.”
“Well, don’t hold back.”
“No, I will not hold back!” She snapped, a little louder, “Do you want to get that poor boy killed?! He is stupid, and lovesick, and though you may be stupid and lovesick as well, I expect you to have just a smidgeon more common sense than what you are currently exhibiting.”
“Oh, but we’re fixed, aren’t we, Lucy? If I never had common sense, why would I have it now?”
“Do not even start that with me. Do not start your incessant back-talking, Violet. Your little act of superiority. I have walked this realm for hundreds of years longer than you have. Do not play a game of wits with me! When that boy is caught sneaking up here, and he is hanged in the village square for sullying his pureness with the idem whores’ charge, I will not dispel your grief or guilt. Because I warned you, time and time again, that you continuing to pursue this romance will be the death of him. And by the one God, you will be lucky if they do not hang you, too!”
“And what? You’d do nothing? You would just let them hang me, so you could say ‘I told you so?!’ You so would! I know that you would! Because saying ‘I told you so’ is your most favorite thing in the world to do! Proving your superiority is what you live for!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be so stupid and immature. It is so unflattering for you!”
“Yeah, well, whatever! Macie said that…”
“Macie indulges your whims because she dotes upon and spoils her children, and to her, you are another child. So she allows you to get away with murder. She allows you to behave with the same willfulness as our three-year-old! Well, I demand better, Violet Mae. I demand you to see reason, and to see that you are playing a game in which the prize and the loss is a young boy’s life, and possibly your own life.”
“And to you, I’m what?” I asked, because I had ignored everything she had said after “To Macie, you are another child.” My throat had tightened when she had said it, and tears rushed into my eyes at the implications of it.
“What are you on about?” She asked me impatiently, but in her eyes I saw a flash of something unfamiliar to me. Perhaps it was concern, or perhaps it was outright pity. I couldn’t be sure, because it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Perhaps she realized her mistake in specifying “to Macie” instead of saying generally “to Macie and me.”
“Say it.” I told her, and I reached up to wipe at my eyes, “Say what you want to say, Lucy.”
“I have said all that I want to say.”
“You want to say that to Macie, I’m another child, but to you, I’m just some girl that you’ve taken in, for whatever reason. Like I’m a stray dog.” I told her, “That’s what you were thinking.”
“You are not your sister. Do not pretend that you can read thoughts.”
“I can’t read thoughts, but I don’t need to be able to! You basically said it!”
“Do not put words in my mouth! Do not twist this around onto me in an effort to elicit sympathy! You use your tears to manipulate me, always. You use your vulnerability and our shared tragedies to avoid taking responsibility, and I will not have it tonight, Violet. I will not, do you hear me?! Not when you purposefully disobeyed me, and not when you continue to endanger that boy’s life!”
“His name is Akio, and I love him!” I yelled at her, and was it a tad dramatic? Certainly; I had come to realize over the years that I was as dramatic as everyone said I was. But was what I had said true? Absolutely.
“Oh, you love him?” She asked me disdainfully, and with a very brief derisive laugh, she began to undo her hair from its bun. Her long maroon hair was always twisted around into a large bun and attached at the back of her head. Seeing it unraveling made my heart stumble and trip so painfully that I grasped my chest, as the images from that night in Shadow Village besieged me. My hands on the back of her head, pushing it into the dirt, her hair unraveling from its bun, my fist wrapping into it, pulling her head back, slamming it back into the dirt, and all the while I was laughing, laughing so hard that tears were pouring from my eyes, watching as the tree-beasts came, perhaps because they had sensed our dark intentions, because they knew we wanted to watch them rip her apart…
“Violet!” She had screamed, her breaths coming in and out hard and fast. Her hands had been pushing into the dirt, trying to move her backwards, away from the ash circle, but the drugs had made me so strong, or perhaps they had merely amplified my rage to such a point that I was Herculian-strong. I had not known, but I had suspected that it was simply some inherent evil I had not known existed inside of me that drove me to hurt her despite her screams of protest, despite how she had begged for her life. And she had begged…
“Please, Violet!” She had cried, more hysterical than I had ever seen her, more hysterical than I would ever see her again. “Please, my wife… my daughters… Please! Please stop! Caspar! Violet! Please!”
I had only laughed harder, and when Caspar had gently pulled me off of her, she had collapsed into the dirt, only to be flipped over roughly by Caspar’s foot. He knelt down beside her and grasped her face.
“One day very soon, you are going to bow to me. You are going to drop to your knees at my command.” He had said, “You will be mine. This fate I have decided for you, and you alone, Luciana Miletus.”
I had stopped laughing, because I had been growing sleepier as the drug began to wear off. But I had heard her ask, in a trembling, barely audible voice, “Why?”
He had smiled, looked down at her, and said, “Because you do not know your place.”
I remembered that moment after I had woken up, and it should have warned me of Caspar’s imminent betrayal. Still, I defended him, saying that he had been high, too.
I was as foolish and dramatic and young and immature as Lucy said I was.
“Violet.” Her voice was saying, and when I resurfaced, my hands were over my ears, and I was on the floor, my legs pulled into my chest, my whole body trembling.
“What does she need? Tell me what she needs.” I heard Macie asking frantically.
“Just water.” Lucy replied, “It was only a flashback.” She sat me up very gently, pulled me onto my feet, and then delicately sat me onto the couch. She knelt in front of me, her fingers pressed to the pulsing vein in my wrist, and when I started to cry, she did not look up at me. She knew, as she always knew, where I had gone. Somehow, she always knew.
“That’s what I am.” I told her, my voice a weak whisper.
“What, darling?” She asked, and when I did not immediately reply, her gaze, still so unnerving even after twenty-four years of knowing her, rose to meet mine.
“You know that despite all that has happened, Caspar still feels something for me. As long as I’m with you, it increases the chance of him letting you live. That’s why you have wanted me here for all these years.”
“That is not true.” She said.
“Then what? Why else would you allow me to stay after what I did to you?! Why else would you want me here?! Because I’m always g
oing to be the girl who let Caspar Elohimson talk her into terrorizing you! That’s who I am to you, aren’t I?!”
“Violet.” She said firmly, and I cried harder, not wanting to hear her say what I had suspected for so many years. Her hand grasped mine. “You want me to say something to you that I never told even my own daughter. I am sorry, but I cannot. I am not one who can speak softly. If I could not say such things to Illa, and if I cannot say such things to Millie…”
“Why would you say them to me?” I filled in for her bitterly, “Why would you say them to me, when I’m not yours? When I’m nothing to you?”
Though I was trying to stop crying, I could not. My body was shaking with sobs as I pulled my hand out from under hers and stormed off into my room.
When Macie angrily demanded to know what Lucy had said to me, they began to have a fight. Or rather, Macie rose her voice and spoke furiously, and Lucy continued to speak softly, calculatedly, coldly. When Macie’s voice rose to a new high, I heard my door creak open.
“Vi?” Millie’s voice asked.
“Hey, sweetie. Come on.” I held up the covers of my bed, and she ran forward, her bare feet pattering against the cold hardwood floor, before she leapt up into bed with me.
“Why are Mama and Mummy so mad? Is it because Akio was here?”
“Yeah, baby.” She replied, “It was nothing you did, though.”
“By the one God, you are absolutely unbelievable!” I heard Macie shout, “You would allow her to believe that you are still angry over something that happened twenty-four bloody years ago?! You would allow that guilt to continue to torment her! You can be such a cold-hearted bitch, Luciana Miletus!”
“Macie…”
“No! I will not speak to you until you apologize to her! After she collapsed because she saw that terrible night again, you pull your cold act on her. Oh, dear me, I am sorry. It is not so much an act, is it?!”
“Vi?” Millie asked.
“What, sweetie?”
“Mummy loves you. She told me.”
I replied that I knew, but inside, all I could think was that she hadn’t told me, and why should she? I was not her daughter, and apparently, she had never told Illa, who was her blood child. And why did I want that from her, anyway? What difference did it make? I had had a mother, and though we had not had a fantastic relationship, she had been kind to me. She had let me know that I was loved. Maybe I wanted Lucy to fill the place that my mother should have filled. But was that fair to her?
No, of course not. The whole situation was unfair and unreasonable. What difference did any of it make?
But the next morning, she came into my room just as the sun was coming up. Millie was sleeping all the way at the end of the bed, so she was able to sit beside me and gently rest her hand on my shoulder. I was totally asleep, but I could feel her there. Warmth began where her hand was rested and spread through me.
She did not say anything. She just sat beside me, her hand on my arm, her thumb moving back and forth. She was dressed for work, and the sunlight was a little brighter, so she stood, looked towards the door and then looked back to me. I could sense a will to say something in her heart, but I could also sense a steely resolve to say nothing. The resolve won out, and though she leaned down and planted a quick kiss on my head, she left without saying a word.
She could not “speak softly” even when I was not awake to hear her.