S I X
A F T E R

The ancients warn us to be careful what we wish for. It might come true.

Damn right! I got my wish but that's okay because I've got no complaints. Well ... not many. To rephrase a popular 80's saying: My life was a bitch. Then I died. And things began to look up.

But not all at once and not right away.

Nothing's perfect.

I didn't think I'd like writing this and, for the most part, that's true. At first I thought, since it happened so long ago, I'd be more removed and remembering wouldn't hurt so much. I was wrong.

Thorn doesn't care. She's not a legitimate Blood but she vamps for the juice all the same. Some nights back I learned the words on the front of the diary translate to The Book of Thorns. Peachy. All along I've felt I was talking to someone and now I know who. Snake's child.

Maybe I'm lucky Snake's only naming books. If she had ever given birth to a human child, I wonder what she would have named him/her? Charlie-M (for Manson)? Lizzie Borden? Lucretia McEvil?

"Don't be an ass," Snake says, reading over my shoulder.

"Don't be a butt-in," I say. "That way you won't see what you don't want to know."

"We'll all be glad when you finish this," she growled. "You've been a real prince lately."

She says this in a way to let me know she does not think I am a prince, real or otherwise.

"I'm supposed to be your King," I tell her.

She raised her fist and saluted me with the international third-finger gesture of disdain. "See this, your highness? Sit and spin."

"You watched Heathers again."

"This afternoon. The horror viddies aren't as much fun without you around to kibbutz."

She was trying to establish a truce which I appreciated because I didn't want to fight so I said, "I'm sorry I've been a jerk."

"You never stop writing." She frowned. "I didn't think you'd keep at it like this."

"Me neither."

"If it's going to upset you —"

"Writing doesn't upset me," I said. "It's just — I'm surprised how it all comes back. All the details, stuff people said. Stuff people did. When I write about things that happened when I was a kid, I feel it just like I did back then. All of a sudden, I'm ten years old again. I don't like it."

"But you're okay later, aren't you?"

I shrugged but not to be evasive. I just wished she would ask me a question I could answer. I wished she would put her arms around me and hold me for a while but that's not her function. Snake guards. She never sleeps, she's a real samurai.

It kills me to think she won't be here forever, not like we planned. Hence the journal, I guess. She doesn't want me to forget her.

That wouldn't be possible. This is as much her story as it is mine and the others. Like Tasia.

Tasia ... Natasha Gemelo. Dragon-rider. Blood Love. Night Queen. That I continue with you gone is the most terrible thing of all.

I want you back! I want you here. Why, how could I have left you?

It's true. The worst Hell of all is regret.

Some time passed between us and, after, Snake said in a quiet voice, "Maybe you should stop."

"I can't."

"I thought the journal would help lay the demons to rest, not catch you up it again."

I thought about that.

I was still thinking about it when she got up to patrol again. Yesterday we crashed an empty estate on the fringe of a southeast city. Charlottesville? Arlington? Richmond? I don't know where we are now. We're still riding the lines, we're still among the mounds. The Earth calls us here — or somewhere close by and we go with the flow.

It's not even midnight. There are hours to go till dawn. The Hunger is a line of tiny paper cuts along my spine but that's not what bothers me now. Everything I wrote about pain and hunger ... it doesn't matter if you're fae or human, everyone carries wounds. It's the price of going on. Of living.

There are things I have to write down. I can't put it off any longer.

I reach for Thorn. Like her mother, she's never too far away.

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