The Children of the Sun (28 page)

“I bought this a few weeks ago,” she said, and opened the box. Sitting inside was a six-chamber revolver with a short barrel and a molded black grip. “It’s a Smith and Wesson, and it’s loaded.”

Theroen stared at the weapon for a moment, feeling a creeping dread steal over him, knowing what it was that Naomi was about to ask without having to look into her thoughts. How long had she been waiting? How long had she known it had come to this?

“Oh, Naomi …” he said, and she gave him a hopeful smile.

“I want you to take this gun out of the box,” she said, “and I want you to put it up against my temple, and I want you to pull the trigger.”

“Naomi, please don’t ask me to do this.”

“It won’t be hard,” she said, her voice soft and far away. “We can go in the bathroom if you want, so it won’t make a mess.”

“That is the very least of my concerns,” Theroen told her.

“Are you afraid of being caught? If you use a pillow to muffle it, no one will hear. No one knows I have moved here. It will be weeks before my body is discovered. Maybe months. I’m paid through the entire year. Your fingerprints aren’t on record. No one will ever know.”

“Naomi, for God’s sake …”

“Oh, who are you to speak of God?!” she cried, turning her gaze back to him, brows knit, her whole body rigid. “Surely you of all people know that there is
nothing
out there.”

“But why?” he asked her. “Why now, of all times, and why me?”

“Who else should I ask? Who better than my oldest friend? We have spent centuries apart, but we also spent decades together when we were young and still new to this world. Forty years, Theroen. Do you remember them?”

“I remember them well,” Theroen told her. “Sometimes I remember them better than I would prefer. Lisette would never have wanted this.”

“I cannot think of a person with less right to judge me on this matter than Lisette,” Naomi said, and there was darkness in her eyes. “She gave up on us. She gave up on everything and left us to our fates.”

“You said yourself that she sacrificed herself to save us.”

“Yes, she did, but she could have fought. You would have fought, if she had let you.”

“I tried to do so anyway,” Theroen said. “Isaac threw me against the fireplace and nearly caved my skull in. What threat were we to him? If not for Abraham, I might never have had my revenge, and as it turned out, it was against Abraham that I should have been raging all along.”

Naomi sighed, shook her head, and said, “It doesn’t matter. Isaac is dead. Abraham is dead. Lisette is dead and I would join her. There is nothing left for me here, Theroen. I want it to end. I am so tired of being cold and empty and alone.”

“So you want me to put this gun to your head and shoot you. Naomi, I do not advocate this, but … could you not simply do it yourself?”

Naomi was quiet for a long time, looking at her hands. Eventually she said, “I am afraid.”

“That seems to me a strong suggestion that you are not yet ready to die.”

“No, you don’t understand. I am not afraid to die. I’m afraid that I will fail again. I … already tried once.”

Theroen was momentarily taken aback. At last he said, “You shot yourself in the head?”

Naomi shook her head. “I tried pills, first. A few weeks ago. I took, God, I don’t know how many Percocet. I lay down in bed, drank two bottles of wine, and took those pills. After that … everything is grey. I have strange wisps of memory, as if someone came and talked to me, but nothing concrete. When I woke up, four days had passed and my entire body ached, but I was alive. That was when I decided to move here and buy the gun.”

“Were you waiting for the opportunity to arise to ask me to use it?” Theroen asked.

“I didn’t plan on asking you until perhaps an hour ago. Oh, Theroen … if only you hadn’t stopped me from fighting the woman who killed William, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. She would have killed me, and it would have been you and Two on the fire escape, and you’d be fine. I’d be dead, and you both would simply look on it as a terrible thing that had happened, and it would be done. But you had to pull me away and save my life, so you get to be the one I ask to take it.”

Theroen put a hand to his face and shook his head slowly from side to side. Naomi gave a grim laugh.

“I thought about asking Two, first, but I realized she would never agree to it. She’s too young and stupid and self-righteous. It’s one of the many things I love about her even when it makes me want to grab her shoulders and shake her to death.”

Theroen nodded but said nothing. Naomi continued.

“I need someone who can be there to make sure I’m dead. That’s why I don’t want to do it myself. I don’t want to wake up and know that I’ve failed again.”

“Naomi … why? Why do you want to die?”

Naomi looked up at him now, and there were no tears in her eyes, no quivering lips or shaky voice, nothing that hinted at any sort of internal conflict. When her voice came it was steady, and calm, and laced with a deep and aching sadness.

“I am so tired,” she said. “I do not believe in God, anymore, but if I did, I would ask Him why He has turned against me. For all the efforts I have made, for all of the good I have tried to do since Lisette was stolen from us, how have I been rewarded? Time and again I have been given pain and more pain, in one form or another. If it’s not punishment from an angry God, then the only other possibility is what I told you earlier … nothing matters. Why continue to struggle against the part of me that begs for it all to end? Why continue to fight on, and on, if the only thing I am fighting for is the chance for more pain?”

“I don’t—”

“Please let me finish,” she said, and she favored him with another sad smile. “You don’t need to tell me how there is wonder and joy and beauty and love out there for me. The best I have felt in thirty-five years was during a relationship I knew was doomed within weeks of starting it. A few brief months of relative happiness, followed by torment at every turn. Agony, as I have watched those that I care about die or fade away, like you and her.”

“Two and I are not fading away,” Theroen said.

“Are you not?” Naomi asked. “Did you even realize that when we saw each other last month at the bar, it was the first time in
six months
that we had been together for anything other than official council business? We lived within blocks of each other for more than two years, and yet I saw you and Two only when it came time, every few weeks, to watch the both of you sit impatiently through a council meeting until we told you we had no further information on Tori. My reward for that news was a pair of disgusted looks and to watch you leave as soon as possible, to disappear into yourselves and into each other for another fortnight.”

“Naomi, we were not trying to hurt you,” Theroen said. “Truthfully, we were trying to give you space. If we had known …”

“I am not blaming you, or her.”

“But we—”

“It doesn’t matter. Every night I wake up and wonder why I am waking up. What is it, exactly, that I am hoping to accomplish? I want it to end. I am asking for your help. If you won’t do this thing for me, then just say so. I will find someone else.”

“I do not want you to find someone else,” Theroen told her. “This is your blood talking, the curse of the Ashayt, this sadness and emptiness.”

“Did my blood kill Stephen?” Naomi asked him. “Did it murder Lisette, and Mother Ashayt, and William? Did it steal Andrew from me or cause Arenne to hang herself in that shitty, rat-infested inn? Did it cause the fire that burned Patricia alive before her thirtieth birthday?”

“Time is a blade, Naomi, and it can cut deep. Those of us who live long, we all bear such wounds. You are not the only one with scars.”

“Am I to envy your strength for enduring them?” Naomi asked, her tone almost casual, staring out the window into the darkness of the park. “Theroen, do you remember the first night we were together? We shared our first time on November the twelfth, sixteen-hundred and nineteen. I still remember it to the very day. You held me close when it was done, and you promised that if I ever needed you, you would be there.

“Do you remember that promise? You thought me dead for centuries, but I knew you were alive. For three hundred and fifty years I knew it, and I never collected on that debt. I have never asked you for a single thing until this moment. If you would renege, just say so. Tell me that you will not do this for me and let me search elsewhere, but do not seek to change my mind.”

Theroen thought back to that night. The three of them had sat together, talking and laughing, Lisette and Naomi drunk on wine, Theroen sober, his young Eresh body incapable of tolerating the liquid. He remembered the rush of excitement that had run through him when Naomi had glanced sidelong at Lisette, her cheeks pink, a tiny smile on her face, and said, “I think that I am ready.”

He had never known why it was that Lisette had insisted he wait for Naomi. He had known only that the elder vampire refused to take his virginity from him, though he had asked it of her. Always she had told him that it was to be Naomi’s task. So he had waited, and at last he had learned this final thing.

He had tried not to rush, when first she had circled her legs around him, and shifted her hips, and helped him into her. Naomi had cupped his head, twined her fingers into his hair, and pulled him down so her lips were at his ear. “I am giving myself to you,” she had told him. “You should take me.”

Whether a command or a request, Theroen had been unable to deny it, and he found himself thrusting again and again into that warm and wet place within her. It was like nothing he had experienced before, and with Lisette and Naomi he had experienced a great many pleasurable things. Within moments, he had gone from gentle caution to something approaching frenzy.

He remembered struggling to stay aware, to not lose himself in the moment. As if in response, refusing to let him stay distant, Naomi had cupped his buttocks, pulling him against her again and again, making little gasping, growling noises. The air had been filled with the scent of her hair and skin, her sweat, her sex, the blood in her veins; this combination, this essence of
her
, had been maddening. Lisette had shown him what an orgasm was, and he could feel that need overwhelming him, but also something more, an almost violent desire to possess the writhing, panting creature below him.

With a last thrust, he had buried himself deep within her and, snarling, driven his teeth into her neck like an animal. It had seemed his entire body was climaxing, rejoicing as her blood washed through him. Naomi had given a cry that was half pain, half ecstasy, and dug bloody crescents into his back with her nails.

Lying with her after, exhausted and drenched in sweat, he had made his promise. He remembered it just as Naomi did now, and wondered how he had ever forgotten those words. He nodded, staring at the far wall but not really seeing; most of him was back still in that cramped and smoky, candlelit room.

Naomi, I am here with you. I am here for you, and if ever you need me, I will always be here for you. I promise you.

He looked over at the girl who had shared this thing with him, all those years ago, and it seemed for a moment that he could hear Lisette’s words, the first she had spoken since he and Naomi had begun, whispered on the breeze.

“Now you understand,” Lisette had said, and only centuries later did Theroen feel at last that he did. She had made them wait because neither had ever known the thing, and there was something for both of them in the learning of it. Something that would tie them together forever, even long after they had moved on from their time as lovers.

“Yes, I remember,” Theroen said finally, and Naomi smiled.

“I have always wondered why Lisette chose to give us that bond,” she said. “I never understood why she didn’t take you for herself, right from the start. Perhaps it was one of her flashes, a glimpse of the future like she claimed sometimes to have. Perhaps she knew that someday I would ask you to do something for me, and you would not want to do it, and that this thing between us would leave you no choice.

“That is where we’ve come to now, Theroen, is it not? If I press, you will do what I ask because you promised it to me almost four hundred years ago.”

“She can’t have meant this!” Theroen said. “She would never have wanted this.”

“And yet she locked you into your promise without knowing, because this has nothing to do with what she might have wanted. It’s what
I
want.”

Theroen closed his eyes for a time, considering this. When he looked at Naomi again, she met his gaze and even managed half of a smile.

“Will you not wait, at the least?” he asked. “We need you.”

“What, you and Two? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Yes, Two and me, but as well the rest of the vampires in this city and this country. We need you if we are to survive this plague that’s fallen upon us. With William gone, you are now the most senior member of the American council. They will turn to you for leadership. They will—”

“I cannot help them.”

“That is
not
what William believed!” Theroen snapped, losing his temper for a rare moment. “He thought you were the best of the Ashayt in this country, and that is why he chose you. How can you ignore that? Could you not sense his relief that soon you would take the council from him?”