“For the moment,” William mutters. “A couple of decades later, he would have chosen another.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Buttimehad other plans.”
“Grandsire betrayed me,” says William, a growliness in his voice that he cannot suppress.
He has kept that truth to himself for too long, and it is a relief to finally say it out loud. “He knew me better than anyone. He knew how much I longed to marry for love and have children. Then he turned me when I was nineteen.Against my will.”
“I understand why you’re upset,” she says, straightening. She takes a step closer, moving as one would when approaching a wild beast. “But there was a reason he did it. Something bigger than him, or you, or me.”
William glowers at her, and she stops moving. She is no more than three feet away from him.
“How doyoufactor into this?” he asks, suspicion coloring his voice. “Your father was human.”
“As I said, the Legion showed up at our house looking for answers, only my father would not give them any. So they took him in for ‘questioning’ at the station. When he was released six months later, he was barely more than a corpse.” She swallows back her emotion, and William is surprised to see real pain on her face.
Even though vampires grow emotionally numb over time, there is something so tangible about Fabiana’s grief. She reminds him of his parents.
“They tortured him,” she says softly. “Starved him. Destroyed him. He passed away only a few weeks later. Since my mother died in childbirth, they never had more children. Father and the household staff raised me.”
She moves toward him again, and this time William lets her. When her face is right in front of his, close enough that he can see the freckles on her nose, she looks even younger. She was probably only a couple of years older than him when she was turned.
“When Father died, I had nothing left,” she whispers. “So I sought out Grandsire. I told him what my father had done, and I asked him to either turn me or kill me. I did not want to be human anymore.”
The intensity of her gaze feels so familiar that William is both comforted and challenged by it. The same way his professor made him feel.
“Where is Grandsire now?” William stares into Fabiana’s brown eyes as if he could compel her. “Where is my family?” he presses. “Where did everyone go?”
She sighs, and the gesture is strikingly human. Since she teaches mortals all day long and pretends to be one, she must have become quite accustomed to their mannerisms.
“The Legion grew more daring,” she says. “Individually, vampires were powerful, but we did not work well together, and the Legion was… well,legion. They functioned like a well-oiled machine, and they managed to activate all their cells across the world in a coordinated surprise attack. Only we weren’t the target.”
Her gaze grows so shiny, it makes William wonder if she can cry. Even his parents could not summon tears after they were turned.
“They were killing human Stokers.”
William feels his jaw slacken with stupefaction.
Humans were murdering their own kind just to keep them from becoming vampires. Despite all he has read in the history books of Huntington’s library, he cannot believe they stooped so low.
Turns out there are monsters on both sides.
“That was when Grandsire announced an equally radical plan. It’s always been whispered that when he was human, he lived among the witches that once roamed this planet, before their power grew so great that they abandoned this realm. It’s said he had a close bond with one of them, and they gifted him a special spell that they foresaw he would one day need. They told him his blood would save the species.”
William nods in assent because everyone knows this tale. It is part of Grandsire’s legend. The mythos around him is the reason millions of vampires voluntarily followed him. Yet it never occurred to William that the spell might be real.
Fabiana moves so close now that he wonders if she is going to kiss him. Like Anne, she has the self-assurance of a beautiful woman who is used to getting what she wants.
“My father described your eyes aspurple,” she says, studying William’s gaze. He watches the way sunlight plays against the shimmery brown of her irises, making him think of tigereye.
“But it’s more than that,” she says softly. “They’re like raw amethysts that seem to reflect every shade of purple possible.”
“Please,” he says, his voice as low as hers. “I need you to tell me. What did Grandsire do?”
William wants the answer badly enough that he does not move as Fabiana’s nose brushes his cheek, and she whispers in his ear, “He used the spell to hide our species where the Legion could not follow.”
She pulls back to look him in the eye as she explains: “He displaced the vampires from the current timeline and deposited them in the far future.”
It takes William a moment to process what she means. When at last he can speak, he asks, “How far?”
