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“Didn’t you?” My voice sounded choked, even to me.
“With that much power, you could have locked me away forever. Made it so that I could never get out, not even when you slept. You could have been free of me, completely free, for the first time.”
“And you could have banished me,” I pointed out. “Sent me off to wither and die alone, to dissolve on the winds. Taken this body and lived your own life. Been free yourself.”
She shook her head. “That wouldn’t have been free. I would have been haunted by what I’d done, how I’d hurt you.” She turned to look at me. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
She raised a hand, and I swear I felt a brush of phantom fingertips against my cheek.
“You do that enough to yourself.”
I blinked. “What?”
That wasn’t exactly what I’d expected to hear.
“For five hundred years, you existed on the fringes, as you told our Sire. What you didn’t tell him is that you’re still there. In here.”
Her touch dropped to my chest.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s not—I don’t know what you think—”
“Five hundred years of watching,” she to
ld me. “I saw. You weren’t any freer than me. You think you decided what we did? They decided. Where you could go, what you could do. You didn’t become a hunter merely because you’re good at it. You did it because it was all they would allow you to be. You were dhampir, hated, despised, outcast. It was a hard, meager, cold life. But it was all you knew. And, eventually, it was all you wanted to know.”
“You know—you can’t talk to me like—”
But she could, and she did.
“It became familiar, comfortable. Most people are frightened on the fringes, in the woods in the middle of the night, in the old, abandoned places. They set horror movies there, don’t they? But you weren’t frightened. You were the eyes in the darkness, the shadow on the wall, the thing that goes bump in the night. Others were afraid of you. They didn’t know those places. You did. You made them your world—”
“You don’t understand anything!”
“It wasn’t the dark or the cold that frightened you. It was the light and the warmth, the places where it wasn’t possible to hide, the places where you had to be seen. You think I wanted all those things: family, home, children, because they were what you wanted. But you couldn’t have them, either, and every time you tried, every time you came close to anyone, you were hurt. So you learned to love the shadows. . . .
“But the shadows are gone now. You stand in the light. Surrounded by all the things you always thought you wanted, and it terrifies you. Even after what you just did, claiming that vampire, there’s a part of you that wants to run. That is so afraid of losing all you have, that you are thinking of throwing it away, to leave before you’re left, to go back to the desolate wastes because there, at least, you know the rules.
“You don’t know them here.”
“And you do?” I asked harshly. “You seem so sure what I want—what about you? This doesn’t scare you? All of this?”
I flung out a hand, because I didn’t have words for all the ways my life had changed recently. And was probably going to change further. Into what, I didn’t know and couldn’t even guess.
“Yes. It scares me.” She looked up at the moon, floating overhead. “I don’t know how to live this way, either.”
I waited, but she didn’t say anything else.
“That’s it? You don’t know?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not very helpful!”
“You’re asking for an ending, the answers all spelled out. We aren’t at the end, but the beginning.”
“That’s . . . profound.” It was also pretty damned useless.
“You want answers,” she told me. “I don’t have them. I don’t even know all the questions yet.”
