A Dark and Stormy Knight Read online

“Fewer questions and more helping up,” I say, raising a brow, and Toby rolls his eyes before offering a reluctant hand to Charaxus. She’s leaning against the wall, and she gazes at him with uncertainty; he does look pretty weird with all the mime makeup, not to mention that oversized hat. I give her a tired smile.

  “Charaxus, this is Toby. Toby, this is Charaxus,” I say, and after a moment's consideration, Charaxus accepts Toby’s hand and rises to her feet.

  “Were you stabbed?” Toby asks her excitedly, and Charaxus stares at him, her expression flat.

  “No, no, she wasn’t stabbed,” I say quickly—maybe too quickly—as I scrabble to my feet. Both Charaxus and Toby stare at me as if I’ve suddenly grown another head: Charaxus because I’m lying through my teeth, and Toby because my cheerfulness is, even to my ears, unconvincing.

  “Sorry,” I tell Toby, clearing my throat as I shrug my shoulders and shake my head. “It’s just… It’s been a long night. Charaxus nearly drowned.” I start babbling a little faster. “But she got checked out at the emergency room, and she’s in tiptop shape, as good as new,” I say, smiling inanely, and then I’m looping my arm around Charaxus’ waist and steering her down the hallway, toward the living room of the Ceres.

  “Why are you acting this way?” she asks me, her voice low as she murmurs in my ear, but I shake my head, offer her a little grimace.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  When we reach the living room, I’m surprised to see that nearly everyone has already gone upstairs, either to bed or back to work. Sammie is conked out on the sofa, and Rod, Toby’s boyfriend, is the only person left in the living room, and he’s eating the very last slice of pizza. The empty pizza boxes lie open on the counter, sad bits of cheese glued to waxed paper all that remains of my once vast pizza empire.

  “Oh, hey, Mara!” says Rod, saluting me with the half-eaten slice in his hand. “Cecile ordered more pizza, so don’t panic or anything,” he says, with a slightly worried smile.

  My love of pizza is kind of legendary.

  “Actually,” I say, and I have both of my hands at Charaxus’ back now, aiming her toward the stairs, “I’m not hungry.”

  Rod stares at me from the couch, his eyes round, as Toby comes in behind us, hands still on his hips; he gazes at me in suspicion.

  “Did the pizza queen really just say she wasn’t hungry?” Toby asks Rod in a hallowed whisper.

  “There was free pizza at the emergency room!” I call back over my shoulder, and as Toby is asking Rod if that’s even possible, insisting, “They never had free pizza on ER,” Charaxus and I mount the stairs, and then I’m opening the door to my bedroom, pushing the black-clad knight gently over the threshold.

  Charaxus and I stand in my room with the door shut behind us, the sounds of the Ceres fading away.

  We’re alone.

  I sigh with relief as I lean against the wall, gazing lazily at Charaxus in all of her armored glory. She’s watching me with a quizzical expression, as if she’s not quite certain what just happened; her arms hang loosely at her sides, and her head angles to the right as she awaits my explanation.

  “So…” I clear my throat, trail off, searching her eyes as I shrug my shoulders weakly. “I just thought that maybe we shouldn't bring up the whole ‘from another world thing’ to the guys down there. Or, you know, anyone else who lives here...”

  Charaxus crosses her arms, raising a single brow. “Why? You think they would have doubts, as you did? I could prove it—” But I step forward, wrap my fingers around her metal-plated forearm, and stare deeply into her eyes, licking my lips.

  “Charaxus,” I begin softly. “We don’t have magic on this planet. I mean, we do, but it’s not really magic. I mean, it's not real magic…” I trail off, waiting to see if she understands. And apparently she does: she nods curtly, pressing her lips into a thin line as she observes me closely. “That’s why I didn’t believe you earlier,” I tell her, raking my fingers back through my hair. “That’s why you had to prove to me that you could actually do magic. And…it still sounds really weird to me, saying it out loud.” I sigh. “I’d like to think that I took the revelation pretty well, but other people might freak out. Like, really freak out, because magic… It’s make-believe. It doesn’t exist. Period. And if they find out that it does exist… Well, they'll have to reorder the whole universe in their heads.”

  Like I’m having to do right now.

  She’s still staring at me, and as I gaze into her bright blue eyes, I realize how strange this moment is. I’ve been dreaming about Charaxus since I was a kid. Since I was a kid, I’ve had the powerful, charged dream of being with this woman, the same flesh-and-blood woman standing in front of me. I dreamed that we were in the water, our mouths meeting, merging, our hearts touching, my soul soaring...

  It was a dream; she was a dream.

  And now...this is reality.

  I’ve recounted the dream to my therapist because it’s so weird that, throughout my whole life, no detail of the dream has ever shifted. I've asked her why I have this recurring dream, and she has always chalked it up to my being a lesbian, that it was a way for my subconscious to “sort out feelings and longings for women.” I guess I believed her when she told me that, because people don’t dream about their ideal woman and then find her in real, waking life.

  It doesn’t happen. Ever.

  But magic doesn’t exist, either, and there aren’t other worlds. And yet, just a little while ago, I discovered magic is real, that other worlds are, in fact, out there…

  It’s been an eye-opening evening, to say the least.

  Charaxus' gaze isn’t locked on mine anymore. Instead, she’s trailing her eyes over the curve of my jaw, my neck, my shoulders, my breasts...roving over every inch of me. She’s not touching me, but the weight of her gaze is enough to leave me breathless.

  My heart pounds inside of me, the roar of my pulse loud in my ears as my body leans toward her of its own accord. We stand there, electricity pulsing between us, and we watch one another, paused, uncertain.

  “This is…strange,” she says finally, her voice gruff.

  There's about a foot of space between us, and when she speaks, her last word breaks, her breath coming out in a shallow pant. I shift beneath her scrutiny, beneath her burning gaze, and I place my purse on the ground, needing to do something with my hands—but I can’t reach out and touch her. It doesn’t feel right. Not in this moment. So I cross my arms over my chest, turning my gold pendant over and over at my throat.

  “Yeah, strange,” I force myself to say. Then I’m nervously babbling: “Nobody… I mean, nobody understood when I told them about you. About the dream. About you being in the dream.” I wave my hand toward her. “They said it was no big deal, nothing significant. It didn't mean anything aside from my being attracted to women. But that made no sense to me, you know? Why would I have the same dream over and over again, a dream about a woman I never met? I knew there was something more to it, but it just…” I trail off, clear my throat. “It just made me feel crazy.”

  Charaxus sighs, stiffening a little beneath my searching gaze. “I never told anyone about you,” she finally says, her voice so low, I can hardly hear it. She growls out the words. “It was my secret. It was… The dream was the only thing that was…that was all mine.”

  I stare at her in surprise, and then, reflexively, I close my eyes. I'm overwhelmed. Still, my body leans toward her, drawn toward her; I could take that final step toward her right this minute, could close the distance between us.

  But the reality of the situation is something that I just can’t ignore.

  “We don’t really know anything about one another,” I tell her quietly, bracing myself at the pain in those words. I open my eyes, and Charaxus is watching me, her face solemn. “You’re from another world.”

  “As are you,” she murmurs.

  “We’re so...so different,” I tell her, gazing up at her smooth, pale face. I step forward, then,
and I lift my hand tentatively. She continues to gaze at me, her eyes soft, and then I press my palm to the curve of her jaw and her cheek.

  Her skin is warm against me, and the shape of her feels familiar against my hand. As if I’ve done this a hundred times before.

  I still have difficulty wrapping my head around the fact that she's from another world. Lord of the Rings happens on another world. Star Wars happens on a bunch of different worlds. They aren't real worlds, though; they’re fiction. But Charaxus is real, built of metal and muscle and bone and blood.

  I trace my thumb across the line of her jaw, the silkiness of her skin making me shiver.

  I take a step back; I’m trembling. “I mean…” I’m blushing before I realize what I’m saying. “In the dream you had about me, were we… Um...where were we?”

  “In the water,” she says, and her eyes go dark as her gaze traces down, over my chin, my neck, and to my breasts again. “And we were naked.”

  “See, that’s…” I cross the room, sitting down on the edge of my bed and raking my fingers back through my hair. “It's uncanny. I don’t know what to think.”

  Her jaw clenches, and her hands curl into fists at her sides—a habit I've noticed she falls into whenever she's uncomfortable. Her words are so soft now that I barely hear them: “Are you glad that this has happened, Mara?”

  I sink back onto my hands, propping myself up on the bed as I let my feet swing against the mattress.

  A long time ago, longer than I can remember, I began to dream about the woman standing in front of me. She—or her dream self—got me through some pretty rough times, times that, well, I’d like to forget.

  But she doesn’t know that about me.

  She doesn’t know anything about me.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally whisper, and I lean forward, elbows on my knees, spreading my skirt out over my legs and tugging my shirt down a little so that I can reach up, press the pad of my thumb against my gold pendant. I take a few deep breaths, trying to calm my racing heart. “I’ve…” I stop, frown. I was about to say, “I’ve had a hard life,” but why would I tell her that? As proof that I’m having a difficult time dealing with this?

  As proof that I’m messed up?

  I stand quickly, and I smooth my sweaty palms against my skirted thighs. “Sorry,” I say again, and I give her a quick smile, a fake smile. I clear my throat, shaking my head. “This is just…hard.”

  You were there for me when no one else was.

  You were my dream. You knew the deepest parts of me.

  But you don’t, not really.

  You were real, all this time, with your own dream, your own life.

  You weren’t there with me at all...

  The thought is unfair, ludicrous, but it springs to my mind, anyway, and then there’s no going back. I dreamed about Charaxus, and I clung to that dream my whole life, through all of the darkness, all of the hardships. And somewhere in this great, big universe, Charaxus was living, breathing. She existed.

  So she wasn’t really with me, wasn't ever part of my life…

  I swallow around the lump in my throat.

  I feel so alone.

  Charaxus crosses the space between us, and she sinks down in front of me, crouching back on one heel, resting her elbow on her knee as she watches me from beneath a swoop of dark mane in front of her right eye.

  “Where did you go?” she murmurs, and her voice is so surprisingly gentle that it guts me.

  “I…I didn’t go anywhere,” I tell her, but her blue eyes stare deeply into me, burning with brightness.

  “I know that look.”

  I watch her, surprised. “How could you know it?”

  “Because I’ve had it myself,” she says, and then she changes position: it’s graceful, the way she crosses her long legs in front of her. She gestures to me. “I’ve...often had it myself.” Her hand hovers above my knee before she places her palm down gently on top of my skirt.

  I rest my hand on hers, and we sit that way for a long moment.

  “I didn’t have the best life,” I admit then, my mouth suddenly dry. “Dreaming about you… Honestly, it was the best part of my life.”

  Charaxus gazes at me, her eyes softening. “What happened to you?”

  My throat tightens; I can’t breathe. “It’s…it’s not important,” I say hastily, and then I’m smiling at her, shoving all of my feelings back into the deep, dark recesses of my heart, squishing them down. I change the subject. “Can you tell me what brought you here? You said you came through a portal.”

  Charaxus nods, but she doesn’t remove her hand from my leg. It’s a gentle, reassuring weight, and I love it. I press down on her hand as she works her jaw, as she glances at the floor with a small frown.

  “Well,” she says, and then she lifts her gaze toward me. “I am the vice queen of Arktos. And…my queen was in danger.”

  “You have queens?” I ask her, suddenly very interested. “Queens and magic.”

  She nods, and there’s the ghost of a smile on her lips. “Queen Calla. I am her vice queen, next in succession to the crown. But my…my brother wants to overtake Arktos. He is the king of Furo. It is another country,” she says, waving her hand airily, dismissively, “to the north of Arktos. And he is bloodthirsty, and he has been trying to get back at me for years for leaving Furo. So he wants to gain control of the kingdom and rule it.”

  I stare at her. “Wait. You’re vice queen of Arktos, which is a country.”

  “Yes,” she replies.

  “And your brother is…king of Furo, which is another country?”

  “Yes,” she nods.

  “Then how did you become the vice queen of Arktos? Isn’t that stuff, like, inherited through bloodlines? That’s how I thought monarchies worked...”

  “Not in Arktos. If you work hard enough and are loyal enough, you can become anything. Even queen,” she says simply, with a little shrug.

  “And your brother…hates you,” I murmur to her. She glances up at me—and in this moment, her eyes are full of so much pain, I’m stricken speechless.

  “Yes,” she answers simply.

  I squeeze her hand, swallowing. “So, what happened to bring you here?”

  “My brother and I were battling. There were other knights, the queen… We were all battling,” she says, and her voice is soft, her throat tight. “I was stabbed by my brother. And I opened a portal, trying to trap him…but I was taken into it, too. Along with my brother and his own knights. They are somewhere nearby,” she says, her voice urgent. “And I must find the shard before they find it. If they find the shard that can open a portal anywhere…they would be invincible. Unstoppable.”

  “That’s a problem.” I sigh and watch her thoughtfully. “Okay. So…how bloodthirsty is your brother, exactly?”

  “He has killed so many,” she whispers to me, “and he enjoys it.”

  Reeling, I shake my head. “And you think he’s here? In Buffalo?”

  “Is that where I am?”

  I nod.

  Charaxus pauses, looking thoughtful. “I do not think that the shard’s portal would have deposited us far apart. I do think he is here, yes. And he will be looking for the shard right now. I shouldn’t rest…” She rises, and she begins to pace in front of me, walking back and forth, back and forth across the tight confines of my room.

  I get up, setting my laptop on my desk to play some light classical music that will muffle our conversation. The first soft strains of a Brahms melody filter out of the speakers, and her shoulders relax a little.

  “You’re no good to anyone if you’re exhausted,” I remind her. “I don’t know how hard it's going to be to find that shard,” I say with a little shrug, “but I don’t think you can do anything in pitch blackness, and when it’s threatening to storm again.” I wave to the only window in my room, cut into the side of the metal walls of the grain elevator. Outside, it’s starting to sprinkle lightly against the window. Lightning flickers along the d
ark clouds of the horizon.

  “I don’t know if my queen is safe,” she says quietly. “Everything happened so quickly.” Her jaw tightens. “I am loyal to her. I am her vice queen. If anything happened to her…” She grimaces, trailing off.

  When she spoke the words “my queen,” her voice was soft, in the reverent tone one might use to recite a prayer. Emotion passes over her face quickly, but it’s there for a heartbeat, and I see it.

  My lips part in surprise, and my heart sinks.

  Oh.

  Charaxus is in love with her queen.

  It feels as if the ground is opening up beneath me, and I’m falling, falling...

  Sure, I’ve slept with a lot of women over the years, and I’ve dated quite a few. But I’ve never been in love with anyone.

  Well...

  That’s not entirely true.

  I’ve been in love with her. My dream woman.

  Charaxus.

  “I’m… I’m sure that your queen is fine. You said that your brother came through the portal with you,” I say, and the words don’t sound right coming out of my mouth. They sound too stiff, forced. I clear my throat, and I’m suddenly feeling lightheaded. “Um, if you’ll excuse me,” I say, and I move past Charaxus, heading toward my bathroom.

  Cecile, in her infinite wisdom, decided that every bedroom of the Ceres needed a bathroom to go along with it, if only to avoid the morning rush. What’s funny is that artists operate on different schedules, and we probably would have rarely been getting prepared for the day at the same time—but the thoughtfulness was still deeply appreciated by everyone. I step into my own little bathroom, and I’m shutting the door quietly behind me, leaning against it as I try to calm my breathing.

  A single tear squeezes out of my eye and leaks down my cheek.

  “Mara?” asks Charaxus, her voice low on the other side of the door. A soft knock makes the old wood reverberate a little. “Mara, are you all right?”

  She’s in love with her queen.

  And I kissed her.

  I slide down the door a little, and I thread my fingers through my hair. God, I feel so stupid right now. I clear my throat, lift my chin a little. “Yeah. I’ll be out in a minute,” I manage, and the words sound strained but normal enough. I wait until I hear her boots cross the room, and then I’m standing, staring at myself in the mirror above my salvaged sink.