“Tell me,” I said.
“It was a long time ago, back when people still had horses and carriages instead of cars. I was in London, and I thought I saw…” She trailed off, almost as if she were afraid to say it out loud. Afraid she’d seen a ghost.
In many ways, I believed she had.
“What did you see, love?” I asked gently, though I already suspected her answer. There was only one reason she’d be dreaming of my home city, my home century.
“Your… your family,” she said, each word laden with pain. Hers, mine, that of my children… What did it matter now? I was so tangled up in her, so deeply connected to her that her pain felt like mine, mine like hers.
I’d been thinking of them when I’d healed her. How could I not? The threat of actually losing Gray stirred a deep sense of fear and loss inside me, reminding me of so many other losses in my life. My human life.
Somehow, I’d transferred those memories to her.
“There was a woman,” she continued. “With gorgeous curly black hair and olive-green eyes.”
I pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder, pulling her closer to my chest. “My wife, Emmaline,” I said. It’d been a long time since I’d said her name out loud, but it still hurt just the same. “We had two children—Devin and Katarina.”
“I saw them, too. Your daughter had hair like her mom, right?”
“Oh, yes.” I laughed, the memory bittersweet. “Emmaline loved her curls, but Katarina hated them. She begged us to cut her hair short like her brother’s. Said her curls always got tangled in tree branches, preventing her from climbing as quickly as the boys. Emmaline spent more time pulling leaves and sticks out of Kat’s hair than she spent bandaging Devin’s skinned knees.”
Gray let out a soft laugh, the sound of it as bittersweet as mine had been. “Your family was beautiful, Darius.”
“Yes,” I said, because it was true. Theywerebeautiful. Loving. Happy. They’d been the joys of my life. I had been blessed.
“Do you still think of them?” she asked.
“It was a long time ago, Gray.”
“Darius,” she breathed, and I could tell from the deep note of sadness in her voice that she’d finally decided to ask me the inevitable question. Rolling onto her back and gazing up into my eyes, she said, “How were you turned?”
I traced my thumb across her lips. If we were to share memories, I would’ve much rather she’d seen my family, the precious time that I’d been given with them. I would’ve wanted her to hear my children’s laughter, smell the apple cakes my wife baked for our birthdays. But when it came to the story of my past, I couldn’t cherry-pick the highlights. This, too, was part of that story. Part of my very creation. It was ugly and terrible, but it had happened. I could no more change it than I could snap my fingers and take us out of this realm.
“It is not a pretty story, Gray.”
“I know.” Her cheeks darkened, and she lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me. I… I didn’t mean to pry. I just—”
“It’s not that. It’s…” I traced my thumb across her lips again, and she looked up at me once more, catching me as always in her soothing, blue-eyed gaze.
Something in my chest tightened—a warning that had been lingering in my heart from the moment Gray and I had connected at Black Ruby. From the moment I’d sealed our blood bond.
Learning someone’s deepest, darkest secrets carried inevitable consequences. Gray would never look at me the same after this. Where now there was passion and friendship and desire and trust and maybe even love, as soon as I said the words of this tale, there would be pity. It would recolor everything she knew about me, everything she saw in me.
I supposed I could’ve made it easy on myself—on both of us—and fabricated a more comfortable explanation. That I would’ve died without turning, perhaps. Or that becoming a vampire had been my choice.
But the feelings I had for Gray were real, growing deeper every moment I spent with her. And a love built on deception, no matter how pure the intention, was no better than a paper boat set upon a stormy sea. It might float for a time, but in the end, it would only disintegrate.
“A year prior to my turning,” I began, “my younger brother Marcus disappeared. He’d always had a touch of wanderlust in his blood, like our father before us, so initially we’d thought he’d stowed away on a merchant ship to America, or taken a train to Eastern Europe. He’d done that sort of thing before, and had always turned up back in London after a time, with a happy glint in his eyes and plenty of stories to tell. But this time, weeks stretched into months, and after four months without word, we began to worry. We sent messages to his associates far and wide, contacted the police, did everything we could to try to track him down.”
“Did you hear back from anyone?” she asked.
“No one had any information. We began to worry that he’d gotten into trouble with the law in a foreign country and was imprisoned, or that he’d been injured or incapacitated with no way of reaching us. Eventually, we mourned him as dead.”
The fire hissed, shooting sparks into the chimney. I watched its orange light dance on the wall beside the bed. Gray remained silent.
“Exactly one year and a day since his disappearance,” I continued, “I returned home from my office in the city to find Marcus sitting in my gardens, dressed in fine silks and looking for all the world like an aristocrat. He was still Marcus, of course, but it seemed as though someone had erased all the flaws and imperfections that had made him human. He had no wrinkles, none of the cares that he used to wear like a heavy coat over his shoulders. And his eyes, once a deep brown, had lightened to a warm gold that caught and held the light in a way I knew couldn’t be natural.”
“Like yours,” she said, her hand warm against my cheek.
