“Why?”
He took her hand and rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. That was a tough question to answer without revealing facts she was not prepared to learn. “It’s… a long story.”
“Marcus!” She jerked out of his grasp. “If I’m going to be trapped here with you, at least tell me why.”
This wasn’t how he’d wanted her to learn, but if it would appease her and salve his guilt for treating her so poorly, then he would tell her. “As you wish.” He dragged two unvarnished spindle-backed chairs out of his pile of half-completed woodworking projects and set them in the middle of the room. “Please, sit. You’ve had an exhausting day.”
She grasped the arched back of her seat and rattled it as if expecting it to fall apart before gathering her skirts and sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her back perfectly straight.
He matched her pose, took a deep breath, then began. “It started ten years ago. I’d prepared an invention to present at a symposium, a flask intended to keep liquids at a constant temperature through the application of vacuum force.”
That was the closest he could get to the truth, that the event had been organized by vampires with the goal of finding new ways to operate in a human-dominated world without detection. He’d attended, intending to convince his peers that the biggest threat to their existence was their dependence on humans. He was proof that it was possible to sever that connection by consuming frequent small doses of animal blood, a task made easier using his flask.
“I was terrified, to be honest,” he said.
Winifred scoffed. “You?”
He rubbed his damp palms along his trousers. “I’ve never been adept at speaking. Especially to people I don’t know. Lucina—my youngest sister—was the one who encouraged me to attend. She escorted me down the line of chairs to the podium even as I was certain I’d fall over faint the moment I turned around and looked outat all those expectant faces.”
He’d known his peers might reject his ideas. For many vampires, drinking from animals was disgraceful. It was akin to a wolf scavenging from what other predators left behind, a sign of weakness. He’d hoped that presenting the idea through a scientific lens would help his peers understand why they needed to adapt to the changing world to survive.
He’d been wrong.
“A member of the audience stood and called me a… a fraud.”
Every time he closed his eyes, he returned to that moment, trembling before the man, with his long, black beard; dusty bowler hat; slicker coat; and gold-tipped cane. What the man had actually done was insinuate that Marcus could not hunt his own prey, a grave insult.
“No one rose to your defense?” Winifred asked.
“No.”
He clenched his teeth as the most shameful part of that day returned in a flash.
“You would defile your body,” the man said. “Did you get this idea from your maker?”
Marcus felt as if he’d swallowed a stone. His carefully constructed arguments vanished beneath the heckler’s sneer. “M-Marguerite has n-nothing to do w-with this,” he said as he shuffled through his notes. “W-Wh-When—” Something wet dripped out of Marcus’s nose. He slapped his hand to his face as a murmur swept through the crowd.
“Wuh, wuh, wuh, what?” the man asked, in what was an obvious mockery of Marcus’s stutter.
A sharp prickling started in Marcus’s toes and swept up his body. He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. He was an embarrassment to his kind, a vampire rendered speechless by nothing more than cruel words. It would be better for his siblings if he walked into the sun and allowed them to be absorbed by other nests.
“The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground.”
He’d never learned the name of the man who’d stood up during his presentation, nor did he care. The awful thoughts that had assaulted him that day had made several reappearances over the following week, buzzing around his mind like irritating gnats. Unable to stand the noise in his own head, he’d fled to his family’s ancestral castle.
The room fell silent, except for the howl of the wind outside and the crackle of the fire. He tilted his head back and stared at the patchwork of stones that made up the ceiling, not wanting to see the disgust or pity on her face. He was supposed to be the head of his family, the eldest of his nest, but was trapped in his own home. Were it not for Cordon and Jonathan visiting him every few months, he wouldn’t have seen his siblings in years.
Marguerite would have been so ashamed.
The weight of his sorrow seemed to crush him into his seat, but he choked out a laugh. “I would give anything to walk freely in society again, but I fear it has been so long that I would not know what to do. It’s become so bad that…” His throat tightened, but he forced himself to continue. “I have to follow a strict, regimented schedule because any amount of stress can trigger an attack.”
It was like a barbed net had been dropped over his life that was slowly drawing tighter, forcing him to contort into increasingly uncomfortable shapes to keep from being sliced to pieces.
“So that is the aim of your experiments,” Winifred said. “You’re not treating your livestock. You’re looking for a cure to your attacks.”
He flushed. “Yes.”
Her warm fingers touched the back of his hands. “What have you tried?”
