Day
I stared at the unopened bottle of whiskey, the indecipherable notebook, Rafe’s empty jar, and the photograph of a pinned butterfly, hoping one of those things could give me answers. They didn’t.
After we’d retreated to Day and hours had passed without the demons breaking through, Kensey had tried to talk with me, but my brother telling me “I told you so” was the last thing I needed. Of course I’d known they’d all one day try to take the station from me, but I hadn’t expected it to happen on my watch.
When the knocks on the library door came, the only person left who would dare risk my wrath was Jack.
He had a key. He could go anywhere he pleased. Just not Night, because the demons ruled that now, thanks to my silly love affair with a demon. Maybe. I wasn’t sure about much of anything anymore. I’d tried to keep Rafe safe by gambling with Mastema, and it had all backfired spectacularly.
Jack eventually opened the door and limped inside, avoiding where the sunlight pierced the closed blinds and stabbed at the floor.
“I try not to spend much time in Day, for obvious reasons.” He parked a hip against the side of my desk and placed a paper butterfly on my desk. “It was outside your door.”
I blinked at it. It was the same one Rafe had made for me. Its wing had bent since I’d last seen it, but it was the same butterfly.
I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t reveal a hundred things, so I said nothing and looked up at Jack instead.
He nodded at the notebook. “Some light reading?”
I huffed. “I can’t understand a word of it.” Talking about the mysterious notebook was better than how I’d fucked up everything else. I’d stopped the mad human from hurting my family while letting the demons in the metaphorical back door.
He tugged on one of the book’s corners, turning the notebook slightly to get a better look. “Where did you find this?”
“The station found it for me, but it’s written in code. I can’t read a single word.”
“Ah, well, that’s good.” He pulled up a chair and sat beside the desk. Out of his dramatic showman’s attire and back in the more simple cotton clothes of Day, he was Just Jack again. His button-up shirt gaped at the collar, and he wore it untucked from his trousers. Even his hair had ruffled loose. Day suited him. I hated it.
“Why is it good, Jack?”
“Whoever wrote it likely doesn’t want their secrets told to any random person who happens across it.”
Why was he smirking? Why was he even here? To gloat? To tell me how much of an idiot I was? I didn’t even know if any of my staff had escaped. If they hadn’t, the Dark Ones would be using them. I should have been a better host. I’d failed.
I cracked open the bottle of whiskey and gestured to offer him some. “It’s not blood, but you’ve had quite enough of that. Lilith told me about the woman you killed, by the way, and how she’d intended to poison my staff.”
“A thank you from you would be too much to ask?”
He was delusional if he thought I’d ever thank him for killing someone. “The plot to poison us was convenient. You’d have killed anyone to quench your thirst.”
“True enough.” He reached over and collected his full glass, but as he did, his sleeve pulled back, revealing the mark on his wrist but also the strange swirl of tattoos, which I knew from experience covered his entire body. My gaze skipped from his wrist down to the open pages of the book and back to his wrist.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
The swirling marks on his arm were the same as those in the book.
He smiled into his drink.
“What does it say, then?” I shoved the book at him. Of course he could read it. Damn him.
“It says…” He cleared his throat. “‘This book is not for prying human eyes.’”
I rolled my eyes. “Is it yours?”
He reclined in the chair and rested his drink on his bent knee, looking all Mister Casual.
“Is it a diary, a manual… what?” I asked.
“I doubt anyone could have escaped Raphael.”
The switch in topic tripped me up. Rafe’s whispered pleas to stab him proved he hadn’t been there to hurt me, but he’d wanted everyone else in that ballroom to think he would have, especially the angel Mastema, his father, I assumed. They looked too alike. No doubt Rafe would suffer for his apparent failure in capturing me, but I’d stabbed him in the heart, so our ruse had looked convincing. I wished I could tell him I still loved him, I still believed in him, and I didn’t believe all the things they’d said about him. Raphael was complicated, but he was family, and I wasn’t giving up on him.
I picked up the paper butterfly, unscrewed the jar lid, popped it inside, then screwed the lid on. It was safe now.
“You would have resisted him,” I told Jack, waiting to see if he asked why I’d trapped a paper butterfly in a glass jar.
He didn’t, although, from the curious way he admired the jar, he wanted to. “Let me rephrase… No human can escape him.”
The present tense told me Jack suspected Rafe still lived. I’d have to be careful around Jack. He’d always been astute. He’d figure out I didn’t hate Rafe, and then he’d know Rafe was lying to everyone but me, and Jack already had too much power here.
“He lied with his every breath… for years. He showed up a few days ago with a sword in his chest, and I believed it.” I suspected the sword had been Mastema’s and the result of Rafe taking too long to seduce the station out of me. But until I spoke with him, I wouldn’t know for certain. “I’m such a fucking idiot.”
The irony of my lies to cover up Rafe’s honesty was not lost on me. Rafe was a warrior, built to survive, but he had a soft heart. He’d shown me that. I’d see him again soon, when it was safe.
“Yes, you are.” He lifted a hand. “But you’re a self-aware idiot, which is progress.”
“From you, that almost sounds like a compliment.”
Look at us, talking like two people who didn’t try to kill each other every five minutes. Although there was time for that. Jack and me… I did not know where we stood or how we fit together, but I could no longer deny his importance.
“Father Angelo,” I began, “mentioned some things… about Gerome.” And about my origins.
Jack stiffened and lifted his chin, waiting for the question to begin. He’d tell me the truth, I realized. He’d tell me everything, and gods, I was afraid of what he knew. Afraid that Gerome wasn’t the man I’d thought him to be, and if he wasn’t good, what did that make me? I’d ask soon, but I wasn’t ready to hear it now, not yet. Some of it I feared I already knew.
“Why are you here, talking with me?” I asked instead, and his shoulders loosened, relieved that I’d saved those questions for another time. “Why do you care about me or the station? Why did you fight for us when you could have joined the Dark Ones?”
“Well, for one, demons and I don’t get along. I no more want them here than you do. And two, you’re in denial about how you need my help.”
“This station was yours. Gerome somehow stole your key. I’m just… a caretaker. Why didn’t you leave me in the bloodfarm? Or kill me a hundred times since then? You don’t need me.” He pondered his answer. “And don’t lie. I can’t take any more lies.”
He considered his answer carefully. “This station adores you. It watched you grow, and it kept you safe, as much as it could. You and your brother have kept it strong all these years during my absence. You’re more than a caretaker. You’re a host.”
That was not what I’d expected him to say. I’d expected him to use Kensey and I, like most Dark Ones would. But he really did care? “How can you know that?”
“The same way you know it.” He touched his shirt, over his heart. “The station and I… It’s a part of me like it’s a part of you. Something my queen never understood…”
He looked at the faded mark on his wrist, thoughts drifting. Was his the first mark? He’d told me once that the queen didn’t know the station had marked him. What else did the queen not know about her Chosen?
“I can’t trust you,” I said. “I can’t trust anyone. I don’t even trust Kensey anymore. I trust a fae changeling more than my own brother, and that’s saying something, considering Etienne shut me in a carriage with you.”
I was beginning to come around to the idea that Just Jack didn’t want me dead, and that maybe he had saved me from Caine and multiple times these past few weeks. Maybe he didn’t lie with his every breath. Maybe he was the only one who had been entirely honest this whole time?
I sighed, and he sat there and waited and listened in a way that shouldn’t have felt comfortable but did.
“I can help you…” he said. “Stop fighting me. Imagine what you and I could accomplish if we worked together.”
“Jack… the queen brought you from her world and put you in charge of this station and all the Dark Ones who travel through it. You said her will was yours. I saw her… In your eyes, I saw what she could do to you from a distance. The jinn said you’re her first vampire. How can I ever trust you?”
He picked up the notebook, opened it to a random page, and blew onto the paper. Then he set it down on the desktop and stood. “The queen will learn of what happened with the demons, and soon, she’ll learn of my survival. It’s just a matter of time. The demons believe they have a foothold in this station, which is indeed the queen’s doorway between worlds. I will do what I must, with or without your help, but I’d prefer to have your daggers beside me than buried in my back. You, Miss Aris, need to pick a side, and you do not have long.” He tapped the book’s cover. “This will help convince you.” He limped to the door and paused to add, “Don’t take too long. I hear there’s a train due at midday.”
Only after he’d left and the door had locked behind him did I pick up the book and open its front cover. The strange swirls had vanished, and in their place rich, swirling words revealed their secrets.
Day 9 of the New World…
This world is strange, filled with color, even in darkness. She says it’s ours to take.
She lies.
I’ve seen her work. I am her work. There is nothing but darkness before the memory of her. I fear I have forgotten my purpose, if I ever had one. Her madness has become my own. I feed but am never sated; I am home but always lost. And I know she is the same. Her insatiable hunger will destroy this world and all those within it, including me.
I am her Chosen, but I did not choose to be.
~ Her faithful servant, Lassiter.
Jack’s diary.
All his secrets lay open and exposed in my hands. How he’d come to this world and his relationship with the queen and the Night Station.
Jack’s life was an open book.
I hastily refilled my glass and settled down to devour every single page.
To be continued in Dawn Breaker. Coming soon!