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Chapter 10
Torr had witnessed and taken part in plenty of disclosures over the years. Some worse than this one. Typically, the way the individual took the news depended on his or her willingness to accept the inexplicable. As he stood there, helpless, watching Alessandra comfort Charlotte, he found himself transported back to his own struggle to accept the truth—no less vivid for the passing of time.
The ruin they’d wrought in those first weeks still haunted him. They knew they’d become monsters—why else would they hunger for blood? Why else would they be compelled to attack innocents?—but not why.
Not at first.
Of his family, he’d had the hardest time adjusting to the change. Isobel’s countercurse, the Balance, had made it easier for them to control the bloodthirst. They could feed from humans without giving away their secret, for the victim would instantly forget. And they could also subsist off animal blood.
Only it was hard. Hardest for Torr, for some reason.
He was the first vampire to change a human into one of them. He’d never forget the feel of her limp, lifeless body under him. The shock of it had nearly paralyzed him, for he hadn’t remembered attacking her.
The sound of Lady Isobel’s scream reverberated in his mind still. Running up to the girl whose mother had served Clan Karyn for more than forty years, she felt her pulse. Alive, but barely.
After admonishing him not to touch the girl, his sister-in-law ran to her chamber. Feeling every bit the monster he’d become, Torr knelt beside his third human victim since becoming a vampire and simply stared. When Isobel returned, she slathered a poultice on the wound and cradled the girl’s head in her arms.
There was no censure on Isobel’s face, he remembered that much. It was her curse, after all, that had turned him into a beast. The relief that flooded him when the girl’s eyes opened would soon fade when she too thirsted for blood.
And so they learned inadvertently that this Nine Herbs Charm, if applied to the wound of a vampire’s bite when the victim was only a heartbeat away from death, could turn a human into an immortal. A monstrosity, or so he’d believed himself to be at the time.
The feeling of self-rebuke had only strengthened when she was slain by one of the Cheld after she had killed more humans than him and his siblings combined.
Only later had his attitude toward immortality changed. Only later had he begun to see it as a gift.
It was easy enough to forget what it had been like at the beginning. To focus on the strength and power, the knowledge and wealth that came from being alive for so long.
But at times like this, the memories came flooding back, assaulting him with their vileness. With the bitter knowledge of what he was and what he’d done.
Torr was a vampire. And if Charlotte looked at him now with more than a healthy dose of horror in her expression . . . well, he’d earned it.
When she finally pulled away from Charlotte, Alessandra reached up and brushed her sleeve across her friend’s eye.
“Mascara.” She lowered her hand and smiled. “Are you okay?”
Charlotte darted a glance at him before returning her attention to Alessandra.
“I think so. I . . . still have questions. It’s just hard to—”
Alessandra’s phone rang. “I’m sorry. Someone keeps texting and—”
“Go ahead.”
Pulling her phone from her pocket, she answered. And then looked at him with enough alarm in her eyes to pique his curiosity. Alessandra Fiore was not his friend, yet she’d looked at him as if they were on the same side.
“Kenton wants to know if you are okay. And Toni and Lawrence are still over there—they want to know if they should all come over?”
“Go back, tell them I’m fine. That I’m with Torr.”
She wanted to be with him rather than her friends?
Torr’s eyes narrowed as Alessandra gave him one last backward glance, clearly reluctant to leave. But she did.
Silence stretched between him and Charlotte as they watched her go. Then she shifted her gaze to him, and he knew in that moment that she finally believed them.
“Why don’t you sit?” he said gently, moving to the cushioned wicker chair.
She did.
