Bereft: Foretold

22 | A Lonely Demon

Long hours trapped in a finite space with people one enjoys can be trying, but long hours trapped in a finite space with people one loathes can be an utter nightmare.

The day wore on as all days do, the sun pinnacling and rounding the otherwise empty sky as we traversed a low terrain of uniformed blandness. Inside the border of New Mexico, the desert became flatter, redder, interrupted only by irregular rock formations, stunted brush, and the occasional fence. All I could do was stare across the beige plain and muddle through my situation.  

The huntress tried to keep up a conversation—and managed to do so quite well, considering I was ignoring her and Saule was intent on reading her foul tome. I inadvertently learned Connie was an only child, her parents had died when she was young, and she had spent much of her formative years in the care of Tiber. As far as backstories went, hers was fairly typical, though it lacked the tragic childhood cliché I would have thought mandatory for a young renegade vampire hunter. She wasn't driven by revenge or hatred, just a reckless need to follow in Tiber's footsteps and to do him proud.

I didn't tell her the Aos Sí was using her as all his kind used humans. The man was too old and too grizzled to continue his sole campaign against the vampires, so he'd enlisted the aid of an impressionable human, training her, shaping her into a better, shinier weapon. Though he may have been affable with Connie, I knew the man was a cheat and liar because if he had truly cared about the girl, he would not have sent her out into the desert to kill alone. He would not have sent her across the country with two strangers, alone.

I allowed the woman her ignorance, because it was not my place to shatter her illusions. Humans often claimed a desire to know more about the others of their world, but time and experience had shown they thrived in ignorance and stagnated in knowledge. The truth was cruel. The world of their fairytales didn't exist. In its place was a realm of terrors, pain, and struggles to survive. There were no elves, no fairies, no angels or pixie dust. There were only bereft, hungry creatures wanting to destroy and to be destroyed.

When night fell and Connie was too exhausted to drive more, I took her place behind the wheel and the huntress climbed into the back with the panting mutt, slumping over without another word shared. Saule slid into the passenger seat and sat cross-legged with her book in her lap, reading by the flickering ray of a dying flashlight as we drove across the flat plain.

For a time, I was given blessed silence interrupted only by distant voices breathing through the radio static, bleating about lost lovers and broken hearts.

The scratch of pages rotating and coming together paused, so I glanced at Saule. She was partially turned in her seat, looking down at the huntress snoozing on Bram's proffered haunch. The headlights of slow-moving truckers I passed crossed the witch's face, revealing its introspection and the diminutive lines at her lips that belied her true age.

"I feel kinda sorry for her," she whispered, setting her chin atop her folded hand. "Like she's jumped feet first into a pit of snakes thinking there's bumble-brush down below."

"I'm sure I've misunderstood that because it was yet another one of your charming witch colloquialisms—," I said as I adjusted my grip on the wheel and stretched my neck. "The woman's naïve." 

"So?" Saule shrugged, eyes half-closed as she turned in her seat again. "I am too. It's not a crime."

She read again, though without the same fervor as before. The witch traced the words with her fingers, gaze on me, or the bleak scenery, or our unconscious vehicle-owner. "You know..." she finally ventured, bored of her inner musings. "You're in this book."