“It’s not the same, you mean,” I said quietly.
“Not even close.”
My gaze moved again around the room. “That’s why you hide away here.” I remembered the day he brought me to the chapel. How it must have tested him! To have carried me, bloodied, from the heath, and then ...
“When I cut myself with the knife—the blood bothered you, but not for the reason I thought.”
“No indeed.”
“And now?” I asked uneasily, brow furrowing. “Is it uncomfortable for you that I’m here?”
His dark lips curved down. “If not for my essence, you would already be dead.”
A hard shudder ran through me. My heart knocked against my ribs.
He took a few slow steps toward me. “Are you afraid of menow?”
Entranced
“Yes,” I admitted, and I could see the relief in his eyes.
Again I felt myself on the edge of flight, and I believed that was what he wanted. But something kept me rooted where I stood. He had cracked my world open in a way I still struggled to understand—far more than even Mrs. Moyle’s books had. Like I was falling, without knowing how far the bottom was.
What of the wonders Mum had spoken of? I’d never seen gentle folk or spirits, but if vampires were real, might they, too, be more than children’s stories?
And the Wolf of Roche Rock? If the Tregarricks were killers, might they have inspiredthosestories?
Most old stories have some basis in truth.
Did I not have a strange truth of my own? The prophecies I read in tea leaves?
I took another long, shaky breath and met his gaze. “Have you always been like this?”
He ran a hand through his ashy-brown waves, which resettled around his face. His head turned, and I followed his gaze to an old painting that hung between shelves on the back wall. It was a gloomy prospect, due to both age and some damage, but its subject appeared to be a manor house.
“It’s always been in me,” said Mr. Tregarrick, “ever since I was born. But the craving didn’t begin until I came of age. It was the same for myfather. And his father. All the way back to the son born to the Tregarrick who built this chapel at the beginning of the fifteenth century.”
My eyes moved over the lines of his face. “When I first met you in The Magpie, I thought we were close in age. But since then, I haven’t been sure. The clothes you wear, and the way you talk sometimes ... Earlier you said you had been working on your vital essence for many years. Forgive me, but how oldareyou, Mr. Tregarrick?”
His gaze drifted to the narrow bed beneath the window. Mine followed, and I noticed a long line of short gouges in the stone just above it. There were scores of them.
“I was born a vampire when I was one and twenty,” he said, “and one and twenty I have remained for nearly sixty years.”
“Sixty years!” I stared. “But why haven’t you aged?”
His eyes came back to my face. “I don’t have an answer for that, other than to say the affliction seems to slow everything. My breathing. My heartbeat. My appetite. Everything but my mind and the horrible thirst. I live here in unnatural stasis.”
I added the figures.He’s at least eighty years old.“No one would ever know,” I said, aghast. “I can hardly believe it.”
He nodded. “The truth is neither can I. I can’t feel the years at all, even when I try. I feel the same as I did the day I changed, and all the years since then are like a long, unhappy dream. My father told me it was the same for him.”
“How old was your father when he died?”
Shrugging, he said, “I can only guess at that. He was nineteen when he became a vampire. Nineteen he remained for a century, maybe more. But after my change, he began to age again. Quickly. For much of my life up to then, he’d felt more like my brother than my father.”
“And your mother?”
His eyes lifted to mine, and again I glimpsed the depth of his sadness. “I never knew her. She died the day I was born.”
