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I relieve my heavy bladder and wash my hands before pulling out my phone to call her. It takes me about twenty minutes to fill her in on everything that has gone on, my bill is going to be enormous, and I don’t even have a job anymore to pay for it. I push that thought away and try to focus on the issues at hand. Rita laughs when I tell her about the look of confusion on Gabriel’s face when Finn had contested to her being legitimate. She isn’t too happy about me volunteering her to save the day, but she agrees in the end. I knew she’d never pass up an opportunity to show off.
Finn and Gabriel have gone already by the time I leave the bathroom. Only Ethan and Lucas are here now, both sitting at the bar knocking back glasses of Jack Daniels.
“Not opening up for business tonight?” I ask as I hop up onto one of the stools beside them.
Ethan turns to face me, a small grin on his face. “Not tonight. I think we have all had enough drama to deal with.”
“True,” I reply, before rising up to lean over the bar and grab a clean glass for myself. I know I’m being presumptuous when I take the bottle of whisky and fill my glass almost halfway up. But I’m past caring about manners at this stage.
“So, how have things been going with Amanda?” I ask, turning my attention to Lucas.
His golden eyes shift to me, and his smile shows off just the barest tip of a fang. “Very well, I have grown somewhat fond of her oddly coloured hair and the metal she wears through her nose.”
I knock back a gulp of whiskey before replying, “You do know that I’ll hunt you down and torture you if anything even remotely negative happens to her when she’s with you, right?”
Lucas swallows down the last of his drink and gets up. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he answers smugly, before leaving the room.
I shake my head and continue to sip on the alcohol, which is helping me to numb the after effects of the fear and pain and anxiety I’ve been through tonight. All of a sudden I’m hyper aware of the fact that I’m alone with Ethan. Memories of last night flood my head and I have to actively drown them out. I twirl my now empty glass around and around on the surface of the bar out of nervousness.
“I’m still unhappy about what happened with Drusilla,” says Ethan in a low voice, not looking at me.
“There’s no reason for you to be unhappy,” I tell him. “It wasn’t a rational decision that I made, I’ll admit that. I just couldn’t think straight and needed somebody to take the pain away. That’s all there was to it. I know you suspect it was more than that, but you’re wrong.” I let out a long breath and then go to refill my glass. Ethan grabs my wrist before I get to the bottle.
“You know,” he says, voice still low. “I have had nothing but trouble since you walked into my life.”
“I’d walk straight back out of it if only you’d let me.” I reply, pulling my wrist free and taking the bottle, tipping the last bit into my glass.
Ethan leans back in his stool, regarding me somewhat fondly. “Nah,” he says after a long minute of silence. “As Lucas said, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Then he brushes my hair back from my face, plants a lingering kiss on my lips and leaves me alone at the bar. I swallow back the rest of the Jack Daniels and call Nicky, asking her if she’d be interested in giving me a lift home.
After the night I’ve had, it actually surprises me when I don’t sleep through most of the next day. I wake up early and go about tidying my apartment and putting some clothes in the washing machine. I really am insane. It takes the threat of a supernatural war for me to finally do some basic housework. Although I do feel a certain sense of dread at the very back of my brain at the fact that I’m getting so used to thinking about vampires and magic without laughing at myself for being so ridiculous.
No longer am I the sceptical disbeliever I once was. When I’m finished with my chores I decide to treat myself and read another of Matthew’s poems. I pull the box out from the bottom of my wardrobe and place it carefully on the bed. I don’t linger over the other items this time, I only do that when I’m very, very sad and miss him very, very much. It’s not that I no longer miss him, I’m just getting better at handling my grief. If there’s one good thing about what’s been going on in my life it’s that it provides me with a distraction from the melancholy I wish to avoid.
I go straight to his poem book and flick to the page where I left off last. The next poem is entitled “The White Queen” and again it’s written in neat, perfect handwriting. No messy squiggles like I remember. His frame of mind must have changed drastically when he began writing this new set of poems. The first verse reads:
The white queen comes
And finds me sometimes
She takes away a piece of me
Bit by bit
Drop by drop
I stop for a minute before venturing to read on. I wonder what he means by this. Perhaps the white queen is a metaphor for the depression that slowly took away his sanity piece by piece. I move on to the second verse:
The white queen comes
And makes me forget sometimes
That she had ever come at all
A black cloud fogs my mind
But pictures I recall
Of bleeding and of biting
