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I pulled up the photograph the second I got to my car, hands shaking so much I fumbled my phone twice before the image loaded. There he was—Tristan, mid-stride, chin dipped toward the floor. To the side of him, in the mirror, his reflection stared back at me with eyes raised. His expression in the reflection was more intense than I remembered—eyebrows lifted a little at the center-ends, lips slack, and eyes locked on me.

“What the fuck is this? What the fuck is he?”

I ran through the possibilities—vampire, werewolf, fairy, and all the creatures my grandmother had told me about. Oh, and let's not forget Sabrina's contribution—ghost. None of them seemed right. So, I forced myself to think logically. When you're a woman prone to fancy, you have to learn to check yourself. Perhaps it was just a trick of the light. I typed reflections not matching into Google. Two articles later, I had my answer.

Angles. Distance from the mirror. Distortions. There were lots of explanations for seeing a different image in a mirror than what was really there. Reflections are strange things. It's why people used to think mirrors were magical.

Except it didn't explain the vision. It didn't explain Tristan's strange golden tattoo, if it even was a tattoo. And it certainly didn't explain why his tattoo matched a piece of silver hidden in an ancient reliquary. It all came back to Stylos. The reliquary, the symbol, and Tristan were all connected to the monastery. Why? How? What had happened there?

I drove home with the radio off, the better to hear my racing thoughts. The ride went quickly, and soon, I was parking in the building's garage. I rode the elevator in a daze, glad that no one got in with me. I kept muttering to myself about the vision. If anyone had seen me, they would have thought I was nuts.

Once inside my apartment with the door locked, I let out a breath. My boho living room, with its cozy couch, wild plants, and macrame curtains, was a visual hug. The smell of jasmine blended with the nutty scent of linseed oil and a tinge of turpentine. My sketchbook laid open on the copper coffee table, showing my sketches from the night before, all character studies of Tristan.

The corner by the window held my easel and a table of painting supplies—mugs and jars bristling with brushes, an old silverware cabinet I'd found at Goodwill full of tubes of oil paint, and bottles of varnish, linseed oil, and paint thinner. White canvases leaned against the wall, waiting to be painted. I loved having my art supplies out, ready for me to use at a moment's notice. It was worth giving up so much space.

I put a pot of water on for pasta and let my mind wander while I chopped garlic, the knife thudding steady against the cutting board. A golden tattoo. A piece of silver hidden in an ancient reliquary with the same design. A vision of Tristan at a burning monastery. None of it added up to anything sane. But sanity had left the building the moment Tristan had entered my lab.

After I finished dinner, I got on my laptop. The name Tristan Bane turned up little, even when combined with the date of birth I'd gotten from his drivers license. I remembered his birthday because it was Valentine's Day, and it felt a little too on-the-nose for a man who looked like a grown-up Cupid. He had no social media, there were no mentions of him at events or about his work, and no public records beyond a business registration filed eight years ago for Bane Importers.

I looked up the business next, and found a single mention in Architectural Digest about a rare Baroque specimen cabinet. It had been purchased from Bane Importers. So, Tristan was an antiques dealer. But my bosses wouldn't have given a random antiques dealer access to the reliquary. The request form had listed him as a researcher, but a researcher would have an online presence—papers or articles they'd written, maybe even archaeological digs they attended.

I tried property records in DC and found a single residence home in Georgetown registered under Tristan Bane. He had purchased it in 2006. Which was insane because he was born in 1990. I looked through the record again and saw that it was an Executor's Deed. Which meant Tristan had inherited the property. Interesting. Then I did an image search on the photo I'd taken of him.

The first hit was a grainy black-and-white photograph from a digitized newspaper archive, dated 1924. The image showed a ballroom full of women in beaded gowns and men in tuxedos. At the edge of the frame, a man stood beside a woman draped in pearls, his face turned just enough to be unmistakable. The same jawline, nose, and brow. It was Tristan. But that was impossible.

I decided it had to be a relative or simply someone who looked remarkably like him. I'd seen shows where they'd found celebrity lookalikes in old photos. The resemblances were sometimes uncanny.

But then I found a second photograph taken in 1943. In it, a group of soldiers posed with their arms slung over each other's shoulders. Behind them, reading a newspaper on a bench, was another Tristan lookalike.

The third image was from 1971, a crowd shot outside a concert venue. The photo quality was far superior to the others and in color. Plus, Tristan was closer to the camera this time. It was impossible to dismiss him as a lookalike. Lookalikes always had something that didn't quite match the original. That wasn't the case here. It wasn't an uncanny resemblance; it was Tristan. I was positive. I've studied faces and painted them for long enough to know a copy from an original. He stood near the edge of a group, hands in his pockets, gaze fixed somewhere past the lens. The same face, untouched by time. Tristan.

I sat back in my chair and pressed both palms flat against the table, as if the wood could hold me steady. If the last image was Tristan, then I had to assume the others were him as well. I told myself it could be an ancestor, a genetic fluke. But even the way Tristan held himself was the same as the men in those images. They all wore his guarded expression. And none of them had posed for the pictures. They'd been caught unaware.

I thought about the montages they put in movies when a character discovered an immortal through old pictures. That was me. I was the one who had researched the vampire and found evidence of him throughout history.

“But he's not a vampire. He came to the museum during the day. Maybe he's the Highlander.” I snorted a laugh.

It was all so ridiculous. And yet, I couldn't discount the evidence. These old pictures, combined with everything else, proved Tristan was long-lived, possibly immortal. He stared at me with longing that could be described as hunger. With a touch of his hand, he'd given me a of vision of what I was now certain was him in the past. He had a gold tattoo that matched a carving in an ancient monastery wall and an ancient silver piece. The writing on the back of the Stylos photo denounced someone, very possibly him, as a killer.

“Shit, maybe he is a vampire.”

If vampires existed, it didn't make all the stories true. They could simply be a race that evolved alongside humans. Maybe they could come out in the sun. Maybe, instead of burning or sparkling, they had gold symbols in their skin like birthmarks.

“Okay, get a grip!” I closed the laptop and got up. “I can't believe I'm trying to figure out what type of supernatural he is. This is preposterous!”

But as I did the dishes, I thought about the vision again and it didn't seem so silly. I kept turning the photographs over and over in my mind like coins. Not just the images of Tristan in the past, but also the one from the present, and that symbol carved into the monastery wall. When I finished the dishes, my hands ached to hold a brush instead of a sponge, and I gave up trying to resist. I put a fresh canvas on the easel and mixed paint until my palette looked like a bruise; blues, golds, and warm skin tones bleeding into each other under my knife.

Hours slid past with me in a daze. I often painted that way, dreaming my way through the process until I “woke up” and saw what I'd painted. It happened most often when I was trying to work through something in my head.

When I finally stepped back, my shoulders stiff and my fingers stained, Tristan stared back at me from the canvas, the sigil golden on his bare, beautiful chest. In his eyes was the same intense longing I'd caught in the reflection.

The doorbell rang.

I flinched and nearly knocked over my oil jar. Cursing, I set my brush in the tub of turpentine and cleaned my hands with a cloth as I headed for the door. Raised on my toes, I checked the peephole and froze. Tristan stood outside, hands in his pockets and jaw tight, as if he'd been arguing with someone. Maybe himself.

I should have been afraid. A man I barely knew, who may or may not be a vampire, stood outside my apartment. He shouldn't know where I lived. That alone,should have sent me straight for my phone to call 911. Instead, my pulse picked up for an entirely different reason, and I opened the door before I could talk myself out of it.

“Hi,” I said.