The night was young, and Alice had already finished her evening round. She was on a break, only a few hours and she would be able to return to Leo. This was the final straw that made her marriage fall apart. She wasn’t getting a divorce, but she would no longer be welcome in her husband’s family home. Her night shifts, work in a dangerous environment and daily contact with mostly male patients had left her husband envious.
“No more night shifts, Alis! You could catch a contagious disease and die! Our son could die too!” he said one morning, waiting for her at the door.
“As if that was your main concern, considering you pester the recovering veterans to leave, trying to send them far away from your wife, when they are here because of my specialty and skillfulness”, thought Alice, remembering one of their last arguments. Having two stubborn adults under one roof is unbearable.
~But what if he was right?~ whispered a little voice.
“No reason for his suspicions. When I’m at work, I work; when I’m at home, I love my family.”
~I have my own suspicions about his behaviour… Maybe they weren’t groundless?~
“What am I even thinking? My life is a grim story by an English author, not a courtesy romance.”
The sound of an engine swelled in the narrow street. At that hour Melnikoff rarely appeared alone – he would bring some creepy acquaintance and linger beside Alice with his straight possessive flirtation he mistook for charm. Alice listened closely - it was a heavy, workaday hum of the larger car, not the familiar crisp note of yellow-black cabriolet. That meant Melnikoff had company. The low rumble of a car engine drew nearer. Alice pulled the curtain aside. Melnikoff was with his companion, who had the look of a scholar from Central Europe – but you don’t even know from which time – he had glasses, a disheveled collar, but the face of a man, who had long since left boyish eagerness behind. Despite the narrow old streets of Treguier, he always managed to park conveniently near the hospital, as if applying the skill of navigating the world with his huge body—Melnikoff was the same height as her colleague Tomaz, but twice as wide. The car engine coughed and fell silent. A low voice rolled like a bronze bell, commanding a squealing one to stay in the car. The door swung open and the heavy tread of military boots struck the wet cobblestones. Alice waited, her pulse tight in her throat.
~I knew there was something wrong about what I did then. I could have hidden and gone home, but I went out to meet him…~
“Perhaps it was his Dominate? Or the Blood Bond? He never shied away from using his innate disciplines.”
Alice lifted her coat and hat from a bone hook—the ancient nuns had a peculiar sense of humour, immuring tibia into the wall to use as coat hooks—and stepped out the door.
The night was young, but it would be the last for the outstanding plastic surgeon.
The fog of Brittany wrapped around her bare shoulders like a second skin. She had shed her nurse’s gown, and her everyday sage-coloured dress left her arms and neck exposed to the damp night air. The hospital’s ancient walls, still marked with the thumbprints of long-dead masons and architects, glistened faintly in the gaslight. Above them, somewhere in the brume, the spire of Saint-Tugdual cathedral stabbed blindly at the hidden moon.
Melnikoff stood beneath the arched granite porch, motionless, - he was not smoking tonight – like a sentry on duty. His usual sanguinity had been shuttered, replaced by seriousness so deadpan that the fog seemed to already start to pool around his officer’s boots. Usually, the moment he spotted Alice he would break into a grin broad enough to crack his weathered face, then sweep her up in those enormous bearlike arms as though she were a child. Tonight he simply watched her, his expression unreadable.
“Something has happened,” Alice thought.
~But you weren’t afraid, though, were you? Only wary,~ whispered the other voice, the one that did not quite belong to her, for now.
“Not afraid, no. But Melnikoff with a neutral face is far more frightening than Melnikoff in a rage or a flirtation.” The military man’s moods shifted before her inner eye like a kaleidoscope - hotblooded, almost indecently human for a man of his bulk and experience. He brimmed with feelings so much it unsettled her. She, who prided herself on the cold precision of the scalpel, had little taste for so much unguarded emotion.
- Madame, good evening. Would you care for a walk?
- Good night, Melnikoff. I was rather hoping to go home and sleep through the day, until Leo wakes me.
- Leo is with Tomaz. You are entirely free tonight, - He paused, as though the next words cost him something. - And we might rest somewhere quiet. There is a place I know.
“I don’t remember this part. I thought Leo was with my husband?”
~You see? Details are surfacing already, the details your erased memory was not meant to keep.~
- Are you making decisions for me now? Would you mind explaining? - Alice crossed her bare arms. She still had not put on a coat, hanging from her elbow.
Melnikoff hesitated, then with the clumsy gentleness of a bear handling a songbird, he gathered the coat from her arm. His manners, at least, had been well trained in some vanished Rostov drawing-room that may have become a gathering place for readers of the works of Marx and Engels.
- Alice, does anyone do anything simply to please you these days? Don’t you deserve a night drive to the shore? The bathhouse is already reserved, - his voice roughened.
She allowed him to arrange the coat on her, the same way she allowed a nurse to slip a surgical gown over her shoulders. Impersonal and professional.
- The seashore, you say… Very well. I will come. But I will be back before the dawn.
He did not smile at her words. As though he wasn’t secretly pleased that she had agreed. He hesitated, as though he wanted to object, then swallowed the words unspoken. He opened the passenger door of the waiting Ford and Alice ducked into the cabin, swallowed instantly by the dark.
“Tomaz told me later that he searched for me everywhere but could not find me because of some concealment discipline. But Melnikoff did not know Obfuscate, did he?”
~There are rituals and talismans for that. I understand that now. But they have a price.~
“Did he even truly search? Was he really with my son? Or did he conspire with Melnikoff?”
~Stop. You don’t have the facts. Ask him, he is not dead, Alice.~
But the rest of the memory was a rain-streaked letter—every line bled into a blur. She tried to put fragments like beads on the string but they scattered: the tingling of the rearview mirror charm. The aroma of coniferous wood planks in the bathhouse. The weight of a broad hand pressing her neck to the wall. The heavy door smeared with round sigils the colour of old wine. The grain of the wooden table, cold against her shoulder blades. A flash of her own bare foot striking his shoulder, a futile effort to shake his fortified stance. Autumn-sky eyes holding her gaze through a haze of inseparable bliss and terror. The pit yawning open in her stomach as breath left her body for the last time.
~Count to 5. You can put it into words. You have been through this. You are still here.~
She surfaced from the trance. She was no longer in Brittany, no longer in 1935. She sat on the floor of a haven in New Orleans in her coterie’s presence.
- Tomaz, - she said, her voice raw, - what was true, and what was a lie?
The ruby set in her teacher’s forehead half-hidden behind straw-coloured hair turned to golden color. He looked afraid - the particular dread of a healer forced to apply the knife. He had never been a coward, but the bitter truth stuck even in his elder throat.
- You made that choice yourself, - he said, - and I knew of the Embrace. I could never have been permitted to Embrace you myself - I learned only later that I, too, was stolen from my sire. But in order to keep you safe, I had to alter what you remembered. For your mental stability.
A thin crimson spring welled from the corner of Alice’s eye.
- I trusted you and you just buried a part of me like a rotting carcass. You lied to me about my sire. I want the rest, all of it, without sugar-coating, - a stream of blood slid past the place where her birthmark had been, before she removed it, as she had all the others.
- I know that you bit him back.
It would be a long night, uncovering her past from the unfamiliar edges of who she truly was when she met her sire. But thankfully she's not alone now.
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