The giant jack-o-lantern tipped over as I placed it down, rolling down the damn hill until it stopped on the road, grinning at me like a devilish imp. Moments like these, it sucked being human. The old me would’ve had no trouble carrying a pumpkin that size, but this new weaker me couldn’t do it without heaving and wheezing and dropping the damn thing.
I checked down the street to see if anyone noticed my mishap and, thankfully, no one had, so I picked up its lid on the way down the steps, cursing and muttering at it. When I reached the road, I thought about throwing the bastard under the next car, but Harry would be home from school soon and he was expecting to see his house lit up like the 31st of October, even if, by the time Halloween came around, this pumpkin will have been kidnapped by local thugs and held for ransom. Or have a penis drawn on its head. Not that this was a bad area, it’s just that kids thought they were pretty darn funny. Most Australians didn’t celebrate Halloween, and only a few houses had started handing out candy since Mike moved in a few decades ago, so people were still adjusting to the idea of Halloween and, those that couldn’t, thought it was funny to stir those that did. Larrikins, Mike called them.
But it was important for me to make this Halloween as normal as possible for Harry, since everything else in his life was so… fucked up. So I turned around with the offending pumpkin tucked under my arm and as I finished my sentence—informing it that one more escape attempt would result in a ride on the ceiling fan—a wave of dread rushed through me, making my limbs go cold. Ara stood in the doorway, her arms folded, a caged smile forcing itself out across her smug face. She’d clearly seen the whole thing.
“Talking to pumpkins now, are we?” she said, breaking into laughter.
“You can’t judge.” I pointed right at her as I squatted to position the fugitive back on the slope by the porch. “You used to talk to inanimate objects all the time.”
“No I didn’t,” she said, and I rolled my eyes.
“She did,” I said for her, shaking my head then as I walked away. I was tired of this ‘old Ara’ ‘new Ara’ bullshit. My cloud of depression had lifted recently and the absence of it left me angrier about her plan to take my son away from me. I hadn’t really been in the mood for her. At all. I just wanted her to damn well acknowledge that she was Ara—the Ara she was now and the Ara she had been—and stop all the crap; stop correcting me every time I said an innocent comment like ‘you used to…’; stop looking at me, watching me with Harry like I’m going to hurt him with my evil soul; stop talking with me until two in the morning like we’re old friends and then reaffirming, once again, that she doesn’t love me. It was making my head spin and I felt like I could just… spit on her.
I opened my mouth, almost telling her to go hang out with Cal today—since they had a pupil-free day and the last thing I needed was to have her hanging about distracting me, laughing at me—but I didn’t want her with Cal either. Not now that he knew what she was.
She shook her head, walking down the steps with calculated moves, taking me in. “You get so shitty when you’ve been caught out.”
“Caught out?”
“You hate being vulnerable,” she said. “I’ve learned that now. And you were talking to a pumpkin—telling it off for running away—so now you’re angry at me because I saw you.”
I bit my teeth together.
Ara laughed again, but it wasn’t her laugh—it was the ‘new Ara’s’ laugh. It was cute, but didn’t have the soul my Ara’s laugh did. “So now you’re not talking to me?” she said, still smiling.
“Okay, fine—so I’m mad at you for seeing that.” I pointed at her, sticking the lid on the pumpkin’s head. “But that’s not the only reason.”
“What else is there?” She painted on an innocent face, but she knew damn well what was wrong. I hadn’t yelled at her for it yet—for planning to take Harry, for leading me on and pushing me away, for correcting me all the time about the old or new her—but I was one more correction away from it. And then she’d probably blame my outburst on the evil inside me and try to take Harry from me.
“I know you, David.” She stopped on the last step, keeping her arms folded, the smug grin taking the sweetness from her face. “I know you’re still mad at me because I wanted to save Harry—”
“So you can read minds all the time now?” I said flatly.
“Maybe I can.”
I looked at her, hoping to God that wasn’t true.
“Or maybe I can just read your face.” The arms unfolded and she walked onto the grass, making me step back as she came closer. Even though she was shorter than me, her face darkened by my towering shadow, and even in those short denim shorts and the pink tank top, she was intimidating. I was afraid to touch her the wrong way, look at her the wrong way, say anything that offended her. It was safer for me to just step back and not look at her lately.
“I gotta get this stuff finished, okay,” I said, turning away to straighten the lantern again. She caught my elbow as I bent though and held me in place.
“We can’t keep up like this, David.”
“Like what?” I snapped, throwing down the handful of plastic spiders I had in my pocket.
“You’re cold to me,” she said.
“Why do you think?” I went to walk away and then thought better of it, spinning around to finally have this out with her. I hadn’t been given a chance to say anything more than a few quiet words since Falcon told me she was going to leave with my son, because every day except today, the house had been full of people. But Mike and Em were out shopping, Vicki was at work, and Harry was at school. I could say whatever I liked and there’d be no one to stop me. “You completely overreacted to what Elora told you, and I feel like you could just take off with Harry when my back is turned. I don’t trust you, Ara!”
She looked timidly at the neighbor’s house across the street, obviously concerned that people could hear us. “David, you’re—”
“No. I am so fucking sick and tired of treading on eggshells around you all the time. I’m tired of you judging everything I do. I’m tired of…” I threw my hands up in the air. “I’m tired of being in love with you.”
“Then don’t be,” she said coldly. “You clearly have enough reasons not to be.”
“No, Ara.” I grabbed both of her arms and squeezed firmly. “None of those are reasons not to love you. I wish to God that they were because, right now”—I laughed derisively—“I’d trade anything. Anything not to be in love with you.”
“Am I really that unlikable?”
When I looked at her, I realized maybe that was a bit harsh. Yes, she was annoying and moody and more of a problem to me now than a friend. But she didn’t deserve that.
“You broke my heart, Ara,” I explained. “I need to hate you so I don’t have to love you.”
She sniffled, looking away as she discreetly wiped her cheek. And when our eyes met again, the hard Ara was in place. “Cal wants to be a vampire—”
“What?” I laughed and pushed past her.
“He asked me to find out how.”
“No,” I said firmly. “It’s a no.”
“Why?”
“Because… no!”
“What’s the matter, are you afraid I might end up with him if he can give me everything I need?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I spun back to face her, feeling bigger now on the top step with her at the bottom.
“You know exactly what I mean.” She walked up one step at a time, pointing to her fingers on each point. “The companionship that I can’t get with you, because every conversation leaks into your misery over why I won’t love you. Affection, which he can give because he isn’t always trying to relive the glory days. Blood,” she added. “And with blood comes sex.”
She put so much spite into that last word that I nearly struck her. My hand flickered and I felt my elbow tighten in motion, but I stopped myself and puffed my chest up.
“If you want to make him a vampire you have to go through the proper channels.”
“Which are?”
My jaw tightened. I looked at a random house down the street for no real reason.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll just ask someone else—”
“He has to have approval from the king.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was a done deal. Anything she asked, my brother would give.
“Good,” she said, reaching into my pocket to take my phone. “You have his number, right? I’ll call him and ask.”
I put my hand over the phone. “Don’t, Ara. Please.”
“Why?”
“I…” I didn’t have a good reason. In truth, for her—for the life she wanted—it would work out well having Cal as a vampire. She spent most of her days with him, and it would mean she could feed when she needed it. Between school, her part time job at the café, and her life as a mother, she barely got time to go out to the maze to hunt, and her personal donor had moved on. That only left Eric, and Elora wasn’t comfortable sharing her fiancé with her mother, which had left Ara pale and a bit weaker these days without the right amount of blood to sustain her. Cal would be perfect for Ara. “Would it make you happy, or are you just doing it to hurt me?”
She put her hand over mine. “Nothing I do is ever to hurt you.”
“But you’d have sex with him—”
“Not to hurt you. Okay, I said it to hurt you, but that’s because you’re being a stupid head.”
I laughed, shaking it off after. I hated it when she’d make me laugh during an argument. The old Ara never really did that. She took our arguments so seriously—if we ever had them, which we didn’t really because we both understood each other so well. But with this Ara, our arguments were always petty and quickly resolved with a stupid joke. I guess I liked that in a lot of ways, but it sometimes made me angrier later when I realized that I hadn’t got my point across.
“Fine,” I said. “Call Jason—ask him. I know he’ll say yes.”
Her little mouth turned up into a huge grin. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Yay!” She jumped up and hugged me, running away before I mustered up enough affection to hug her back, then she disappeared inside, with my phone, to make a very long-distance call—one that would also be a reunion of sorts.