Timothy
Evening turned to night, and night became dense darkness. Valentina left for home. I came out to see her go. I didn't really have shoes or clothes, but one of Blizzard's links had left a jacket downstairs which I borrowed, and there were heavy garden boots as well that I wore against my bare feet. The jacket was a bit big and the boots maybe a size too small. But I managed.
Our breaths misted against a starry night.
"Thank you, for coming," I said to her as we were parting ways at the corner of the house. "I am honored to have you as a friend. Still, after everything."
She seemed about to say something witty, to take away the honest edge of my words, so I insisted, before she could:
"I mean it, Valentina. You've gotten into a lot of trouble because of me. I don't know why you are the only one who can remember me. But I am really glad it's you."
"Oh, just stop it, will you?" She snorted. "I didn't start this remembering thing because of you. I needed to face what was going on with myself. You were just a happy accident in the middle."
She patted me on a shoulder.
"See you around?"
I nodded. "I think we'll meet again."
I didn't stay to watch her find her way to a night bus. Instead, I walked back to the entrance of Blizzard's little manor.
On the door, I hesitated.
Blizzard had locked me in the vault.
I withdrew my hand and walked to a wide swing in the yard. It hung over frosted grass. The wood was cold when I sat on it. The frost on it would melt where I sat and become moist coldness. But I wanted to stay outside a little bit longer. I wouldn't last long, the freezing night air was biting into my bare calves and I felt it in my neck and ears that weren't covered by hair. I reached up to untie a ponytail, to let the hair cover more of my neck. But there was no ponytail. Just short hair that didn't reach down my neck.
The burnt hair hadn't grown back yet.
I folded my arms so that I got my hands inserted into the sleeves of the borrowed coat.
I wondered what Mo would do with me. Blizzard had said last night that he would take me to see the Queen tonight. Blizzard hadn't come home yet, and I didn't know when he would. It wasn't even midnight yet.
I felt oddly alone in the world, even when Stump's presence had come floating back. He was standing right by my shoulder. Yet he wasn't there. I didn't turn to look, and I didn't say anything. Would Blizzard, or Mo, feel him too?
A hare emerged from a nearby bush. It saw me sitting on the swing and froze. Then it decided I didn't seem that threatening after all. I watched it study the yard.
Were Blizzard's berry bushes safe from the big rodent?
I raised my eyes from the hare to the heavens. It was a clear night. I could even make out a few constellations I couldn't name.
"May I sit here?"
I yelped.
I had been so deep in my own thoughts I hadn't felt the woman approaching, and now she was standing right by me in the unlit yard.
She had dark, curly hair and trimmed eyebrows. A pale, carefully touched up face.
I knew her, from the classes at the university.
"What are you doing here?" I asked Rune, but let her sit by me on the wide swing.
She searched her bag, and then handed me a small black phone and a bit bended passport. I took them. The phone felt icy in my hand. The other half of the screen was shattered. I didn't open the passport.
"She thought it would be a nice gift. You wouldn't need to strike up a deal with Hellebore or depend on the vampires so much if you had access to your bank account and a document to identify yourself with. It expires in the autumn, mind you."
How?
I didn't mouth the word.
I looked at Rune, but she wasn't looking at me. Insead, she watched the sky as I had done moments before.
"You are free, Timothy. You can go where-ever you want. But I'd do it somewhere far from the Court."
"Who are you?"
She sighed. "You know who I am. It is not really a secret. You just don't remember. You should, though. You really should."
The first witch.
I wasn't sure from where the idea came to me.
"Now that's unfair," Rune said, looking to her side. "You are ruining the mystery."
There was no one there, except for the presence of my phantasm. Except for Stump.
"You are the first witch?" I asked. "Isabela Compostelana?"
"Mmm." She confirmed my suspicion.
"How can that be? You would need to be centuries old."
She didn't answer right away, just breathed white mist up to the sky.
"I wait," she said simply. "I wait for Alfonso. And while I wait, sometimes, I come down to Atlantis to trade favors for some time in a real human body. It's called demonic possession."
"Oh? I've never met a demon before." I didn't really know what else to say.
"Yes. Well. Demons are rare."
She rose then, to leave. I caught her hand.
"You are going? Already? But, I..." I didn't know what to say. I had met the first witch in Atlantis, and she had...
"How did you get my phone, and the passport? I thought the house blew up."
"It did. Oh, there is nothing left of anything else. Iris just thought you could use those. She thought they would even out your position when you'd meet with Mo. You wouldn't need to ask her."
Iris.
"The goddess Iris?" I asked. "Do you mean a real god gave you these?"
Rune reached out a hand to lay against my cheek. It was a patronizing gesture rather than a gentle one.
Then my phone rang.
I let go of her hand and looked down to the shattered screen. Mimosa was calling.
I silenced the call, determined to call her later, and lifted my head to continue my chat with Isabela. But she had gone. The yard was empty.
I jumped to my feet and ran to the street.
I looked left and right. But the street was empty.
I held a passport and a phone in my hand. A chilly gust flared the hem of my silk robe.
Had that really been Isabela Comostelana, the very first witch Atlantis had seen?
She was... She had been...
She had been Alfonso Moura's wife. I wondered if Julia had seen her.
I shivered in the night.
I had been let out of a locked vault by a ghost. I had found the liver of a living human in a closet. And met a woman who had my passport and phone.
You are free, Timothy. You can go where-ever you want. But I'd do it somewhere far from the Court.
Did I really want to meet the queen of vampires tonight as well? In theory, now that I had my phone, I could buy a mobile ticket for a bus and leave. I could go anywhere.
The idea hit me in its vastness.
I wasn't a vampire.
I wasn't a human.
I had a phone and a passport.
If I walked now to the bus stop, could I simply get onto a bus and leave? Would Mo chase after me if I did, or could I simply go?
And where would I go?
Did I even want to go away from the Court? Blizzard might have forgotten all our time together, but I had not. And then there was Plume. We had been stuck with each other for weeks and I had grown fond of him. And Valentina was now part of the vampire Court as well.
Plus, I owed Mo for bringing me home from the police station. Even as that had landed me inside a locked vault.
I was just about to turn my back to the bus stop and return inside, when the headlights of a silent car swept the street in front of me. I waited for the car to glide soundlessly to a stop in front of me.
The passenger seat window slid open. A pair of glowing red eyes met my gaze. Blizzard wore a thoughtful frown.
"How did you get out? That vault doesn't have a key."
I shrugged and pocketed the phone and the passport before he could clearly see either. As long as Blizzard felt he couldn't trust me, I couldn't really trust the vampire either. Trust was an odd phenomenon, it was either reciprocated, or it didn't exist in the first place.
"You want me to come in?" I asked. "Or is there something else you need before we go to the Queen?"
Blizzard eyed me for a long while. I put my hands in the pockets of the borrowed jacket while I waited. I held his carmin gaze, wondering what was going on in his handsome head. The red eyes really suited his features, his beard was red too, his hair almost orange.
"You sound and look like a vampire," he said after what felt like an hour. "And yet your breath mists in the cold and your nose drips."
He shook his head.
"It is truly a shame I don't remember you as a vampire. You must have been magnificent. Such a loss."
The passenger door opened and I sat against the leather seat with a sigh. I put my hands close to the warm air current from the fans. The car started soundlessly and made a smooth U-turn.
"I suppose you just have to remember me now, Blizzard," I said to him, as a sort of an answer to his odd comment. "I think we can be reacquainted again. Let's start again, from today."
"Mmm..."
Silence, in which we left the empty sidestreet for a bigger and better lit road leading north.
"In that case, Timothy, I am pleased to meet you. I am called Blizzard. I am a vampire."
He took his right hand off the wheel and extended it to me. I turned awkwardly, restricted by the seatbelt. Then I clasped the hand.
"I am pleased to meet you, Blizzard the vampire. You can call me Timothy."
He rested his hand back on the wheel. He had big, powerful looking fingers with thick nails that shone like polished.
I had traveled dozens of times on this passenger seat in his car. And without thinking, I navigated the radio channels. Blizzard laid a hand on mine.
"Wouldn't you rather tell me of yourself, Timothy? I have heard much about you, but nothing from you, really. Or even..." He hesitated. "Would you share some of the good memories of me, if there are any? The Queen said we were friends, once upon a time."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
I thought about it. For some reason it didn't feel right to talk of our past. As if I were gossiping on someone's grave.
I dropped.
Stump had come to the car with us. Blizzard hadn't commented on the presence of someone he had known for years. So I concluded that he didn't sense Stump. The past, Stump included, belonged to me alone. To me and the goddess.
I pushed down the radio's button. A night concerto filled the car.
"I think," I said after a long silence, "that maybe it would be best, for now, to take this fresh start for the two of us. Leave the past alone."
Blizzard nodded. He even smiled a bit at the near empty road ahead of us.
"Good. So be it. Let's forget the past and concentrate on what we mean for each other from tonight on."
After the Queen has spoken.
I wasn't sure if the thought was mine, or did it somehow emanate from the being traveling on the backseat.
Julia
I had broken into Aconite's office at the university. I still didn't know where he lived, and the university's central campus had been practically on my way.
I turned in my hands a silver lettered calling card to the Fair Marquise. I tapped Aconite's desk with a nail. Now, Aconite was quite the powerful mage apparently. And the City sometimes tried to offer passages and other boons to powerful witches. That was how the Witch Towns had formed in the first place. But I very much doubted Aconite would be pleased by such an offering. Passages were difficult to navigate and many a witch had lost their life in them.
So, chances were I would just have to locate the house where he lived. Probably somewhere deep in the Witch Town of Breasinghae.
I sighed. I was getting tired, and the time was getting late. And I didn't fancy driving a taxi home, because Lavender's accounts weren't bursting with extra cash. I needed to catch the last metro to the east of the city. It would leave just before midnight.
I closed Aconite's office door behind myself. Then I ascended a flight of stairs to the entrance hall of the University's great main building. The place was dark and echoed emptiness. I had broken into the building as well.
I left the main entrance open as I embraced the night. The university campus formed a seamless part of the city center and there were people outside at all hours. The hussle of the day had died out, leaving behind an unhurried, leisurely atmosphere, not unlike the overall mood in witch towns.
I would have maybe lingered in town, but the last metro spurred my steps.
A shadow parted behind me. I saw it in the corner of my eye.
I didn't care, but pressed on. No one would dare attack me in the city's center. And I wasn't afraid of attacks. I was afraid of missing the metro.
I caught the metro, and not even the last one. I was still holding Hellebore's calling card when I sat down on the plastic seat. I rested my head against the dark window and flipped the card through my fingers.
I wondered what was behind all this.
Until this night my suspicions of a murder had been nothing but speculations. Now however...
Why, it was all but obvious that Hellebore was behind the murder of the male incarnation. I could chase Aconite all I wanted, but the case still rested with the Alchemist.
I had thought it could have maybe been a witch. The elders had always felt worried about some of my plans and they disliked my abilities to affect the fae. So I had thought that maybe the old Fern would have meddled. As it seemed that Aconite, the witch town's assassin, had killed me, it could have been the circle of Elders that was behind it.
I considered my own reflection in the dark glass of the window.
I had thought Hellebore was a friend. One of the few true friends I could have. Even with the vampires the situation was complicated, as part of my magic affected them, whether I wanted so or not. All fae felt inclined to please me. It was part of how we were. It had been part of my Futile Desire, to be loved by all fae.
And so I knew that Timothy was made of magic these days as well. He was fae, without a body of flesh. Otherwise he probably wouldn't have told me all that he had. He would have thought first of how it would affect his friends. But he liked me, despite the fact that in essence I had eaten up his human friend Lavender.
That was kind of troubling. It had been nearly 500 years since a new type of fae had been born in Atlantis...
I frowned. Or had it been exactly 500 years?
I wasn't sure. I hadn't really committed to memory the day when Hellebore had come to me, dragged me to his little laboratory and shown me the place where Mo had been changed. Her shackles had been torn open, and there hadn't been a sign of the curious Chinese girl. She had become immortal that night. We hadn't seen her for some decades.
But then Blizzard had come to us. Blizzard, with his red eyes and and tall frame. And it had been Blizzard who had explained to us what Mo had become. And it had been Blizzard's appearance that had made it finally clear: Mo was fae. She could create beings like herself.
All fae were made of magic essentially. And all fae reproduced. There were many elves, many seafolk and many vampires. These non-human entities that didn't eat like humans, didn't breathe like humans and weren't dependent on light and warmth like humans. And yet could look like humans.
So. I knew of Timothy something he didn't know himself. Timothy wouldn't be the last one of his kind. Whatever he was.
It was a short walk from the metro station to my home. It was a crisp spring night. I could see the stars, even through all the illumination from the streetlamps that lined the street I walked. A thin layer of fragile ice had formed over branches and the yellow lamplight made them glitter in the dark night.
Very beautiful in its own right.
I walked alone the empty street. Most windows I saw were dark. And the night was so cold an absolute silence reigned in the absence of bird songs.
Well. As absolute a silence as you got in a city like Breasinghae. I could still hear the nearest bigger road. It was impossible to escape the sound of a motorway inside the city, even when I lived far from the heart of the capital.
I turned the key to our front door as silently and calmly as I could. But as I opened the door and light spilled to the hallway, it became obvious that Lavender's boyfriend, Dew, wasn't asleep yet.
I closed the door behind me and took off my jacket. I laid Hellbore's calling card on a small table.
And had almost gotten both of the sneakers off as well when Dew appeared, framed by the livingroom doorway. He regarded me silently as I crouched to untie my left shoe that wouldn't come free of my foot by kicking. He let me straighten up again before he spoke:
"This cannot continue."
I eyed him in silence. He meant off course that it couldn't continue that his girlfriend came home near the witching hour on most days of the week.
Yet, he didn't say it worriedly. He said it with anger marking his tone. Dew had crossed his arms over his chest. He was looking down on me and demanding, as his right, an explanation. He hadn't asked where I had been, or if his girlfriend was in trouble.
This cannot continue, was a very different kind of conversation starter. It held power in it. It meant I was doing something he disliked. And he demanded that we talk, and then I stop.
It started with the assumption that he had the right to know where I was and what I was doing. It started with the assumption that he was only reasonable, and I was being frivolous.
A coldness settled in my stomach.
For a moment I cast my gaze aside. The Lavender in me cared for this human deeply. I wanted to please him. I wanted to hug him and stay here.
And he got no idea what it was I was doing, where I was going, or why. And he would never find out, without his memory. And Dew was one of the millions living in Atlantis who wouldn't naturally ever gain the magical memory.
I sighed a breath out.
Yes. I wanted Dew to remember. I wanted to force him to remember.
Like he wanted to make me stop being who I was. He wanted back his little, sweet, and very ordinary Lavender with no obvious secrets.
Aconite had come far in creating a medicine that would force people to remember magic. But it didn't seem it would be completed in many decades yet.
If Aconite would continue developing it.
There was my murder to consider. Aconite had decided to kill me already once.
I lifted a hand to a temple. And tried to concentrate on Dew before me. Here in the narrow corridor between the front door and the living room.
"And don't you dare excuse yourself with the dizziness. We are going to talk. This cannot continue. It isn't fair to me that you just start spending time out in the middle of the night with these new friends of yours."
What did I want to do with this human in the current time? Did I want to keep him, as my boyfriend and human shield, while I investigated my own murder.
Or would it be easier for the both of us if I now responded to anger with anger, hurt him here, and went to sleep in the Castle?
Was it possible Mo was part of Hellebore's plot? Did she know he had ordered my execution twenty one years ago? Surely the Castle was out of limits. But maybe...
"Talk to me Lavender!"
Dew had come close. I looked into his eyes and felt overwhelmed. I had to stay. Had to be Lavender. At least until I knew more of who threatened me and why.
And I didn't want to hurt Dew unnecessarily. I remembered still far too vividly how in love with him Lavender had been. I would remember him. As I remembered all my husbands and wifes, lovers and mistresses over all the decades.
I said the very only thing I could:
"I love you."
I meant it.
But it wasn't enough.
I withstood the storm. I got emotional during it. We hurt, both of us. Neither one finding the truths the other would have wanted to hear. My secret wasn't one I could share with him, and his self-righteous anger could not be pacified.
But we still slept in the same bed that night.
Dew started snoring almost at the same instant his head hit the pillow. But I stayed long looking at the plastered white ceiling. Thinking of my lives, of the fae of Atlantis, of Hellebore... Of Aconite and the witches and my great plans of forcing the whole of Atlantis to remember magic.
And I thought of Timothy, the one who had erased many memories.