Page 78 of We Were Eternal Once

My meager joy evaporated, replaced with the rage that threatened to boil over.

Who else was I to ask? I’d abandoned Le Sang Bleu. I avoided them, purposefully attended areas of Paris that they would not go to. I left them to their petty dealings with humans and law and revolution.

And I walked through the night with Zora, stealing things, counting cards, laughing until the moon dipped below the horizon and the sun threatened to burn me alive.

It is not you or Zora that hunts me now.

“I did not expect you to be so astute,” Caterina says, stepping from the alleyway. The incessant clacking of her shoes, the way she moved too quickly—I knew it was no human that trailed me. Once I disappeared into the shadows of the alleys, where human eyesight failed, I was sure.

I expected Yusuf or Tomasz, someone trying to drag me back to Le Sang Bleu. For a moment I wondered if it was Theon, escaped from the temple before its collapse and ready for revenge.

Instead it is Caterina, her pinched face showing her displeasure at following me for several blocks.

“Have you come to hunt with me?” I ask, ignoring the barb.

“I’ve had my fill for the evening,” she says.

“Have you come to request my presence at the salon?”

“No, though I’m not sure you’d be welcomed back.”

I shrug. I’m sure I broke some unspoken rule by leaving and never returning. Perhaps there was a rule that said one must never leave until they take a vow of silence. Who would I tell of their club? You? You wouldn’t come near it, regardless of if I attended or not.

“Have you no sense, girl?” Caterina hisses.

“I am over a millennium older than you, do not think to call me girl,” I sneer. She is cutting into the time I spend with Zora. Whatever she wants, she must be quick about it. I am not patient enough for this nonsense.

“You are acting like a newborn,” Caterina snaps.

“What is this about? I have things that require my attendance.”

“Like what? Cavorting through the streets with that glog?”

I frown, trying to place the word in French. It does not exist, no matter how I mill it over. She sees my confusion and presses her hand to her face, shaking her head in dismay.

“This is why I call you girl, for this ignorance. That kresniks? La chasseuse?”

The last word I understand—hunter. It is a different phrasing than Tomasz used, he called them le veneur. The others spoke of them abstractly, like townsfolk spoke of lamia when I was human. Concepts, myths to keep from acting out, from going someplace at night.

Hunters did not exist, just as I was not lamia.

“You think I am mad,” she says. “You are a fool.”

“I will not waste my evening listening to this nonsense,” I say.

“Nonsense? It will not be nonsense when she’s killed you. It will not be nonsense when she chains you up and leaves you in the sun. It will not be nonsense when she finds you as you sleep and kills you!” Her voice rises with each accusation, until she snaps her mouth shut and scowls.

“So I am to believe that these hunters exist, despite never seeing one for eighteen hundred years? And I am to believe that Zora is one?”

“Eighteen hundred years?” Caterina breathes. It is the first concrete admission I’ve given of my age, though I am sure they’ve calculated it themselves. This confirmation sets her back, she sways on her feet and regards me anew. “Our lives are that long?”

“Longer,” I say, just to watch her sway again. My amusement ends when she regains her composure, pressing a hand to her throat.

“Hunters have existed for hundreds of years. They appear like humans, but they are more. Their bloodline gifts them with enhanced strength and speed. It does not match ours, but it aids them against us.”

I wave my hand dismissively. “You have no proof of their existence.”

“What proof would you like? The ashes of my maker? I did not have time to gather them as I fled the square where they burned him by the sun.” Her voice is quiet but harsh.