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Epilogue
~Victor~
Five Years Later…
“Claire!” I called, already ripping into the box that had just been delivered. “The new shipment of texts have arrived from Dublin.”
“You’re such a nerd,” she teased as she thundered down the stairs from our loft into the main area of the research facility.
“Says the woman who kept the tracking information on the homepage of her phone,” I reminded her.
“I just wanted to ensure they weren’t lost.” She grinned at me as she joined me at the table. “Hugh was quite reluctant to ship these over to us, and it would have been catastrophic if something had happened to them.”
She wasn’t wrong. The tomes in the box had been discovered at a dig site in Egypt and the carbon dating that had been performed indicated that they were over five millennia old, which meant they’d been hidden away by monsters even before the tombs of Saqqara had been built by the norms.
It was an incredible find, and while my wife was ecstatic to have the opportunity to study them, I knew that she was saddened to have not been the one the discover them in the first place.
She’d mostly adjusted to our new life together, the strain of her memories colliding between past and present had faded, and she was able to more easily move between them and identify which was which. But once she’d finally convinced me to turn her, her inability to walk in the sun meant that she was no longer able to work in the field as she had loved to do.
She claimed it was a small price to pay to ensure that we would be together forever, but I knew she missed the physical work of her old job.
We’d established a research facility about two hundred miles north of Fayshore, which provided us the privacy and isolation that I craved but kept us close enough to our friends that Claire was not without people who cared for her…other than me, of course.
It wasn’t the same as getting her hands dirty and discovering new secrets, but it kept her involved in the work that she loved, while allowing us to remain together and safe.
I hadn’t intended to join in her career, but after she began to pull me in with questions and teased me with mysteries, I couldn’t help but get excited about it myself. So now we were a team, and archaeologists all over the world, human and monster, would contact us for assistance.
It was the kind of life I’d never expected to find. Even before I lost Claire that horrible night in Canada, all those years ago, I don’t know that I’d ever been as happy as I was now. Working with ancient manuscripts and artifacts gave me a connection to the past, while living my new life in the present.
“Oh my,” Claire said softly, drawing my attention back to her.
She’d pulled a tablet from the box and was running her fingers over the stone carvings, her eyes wide.
“Hey, you’re skipping ahead,” I complained, standing up to look over her shoulder. I wasn’t nearly as good with translations yet, but I was getting better. “Oh my. Is that…”
“Yeah,” she whispered, her finger paused on a symbol we’d only seen once before but was impossible to forget. “Hugh is going to be quite peeved when he realizes what he’s let out of his possession.”
“He’ll get it back,” I reminded her. “But what does it say?”
“He came with feathery wings, horns like stone upon his head,” she read, moving her finger up to start at the beginning again. “Heat like the sun in his touch. And when I asked his name, his voice roared like the Nile at flood…Lucifer.”
We stared at the tablet in her hand, I think both of us not quite able to believe what we had. Legends of such a thing had been prevalent even the first time I’d walked the Earth, but it had seemed no more than stories invented by monsters.
Yet here it was, in the hands of my beloved…an actual Angel Tablet.
“How pissed are you right now?” I asked her, my tone thick with humor.
“I’m too excited to be angry that I didn’t discover it,” she admitted. “But yes, I’m a little pissed.”
“I love you.” I pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Let’s get to work and perhaps we can figure out how to wander the desert at night so you can see inside the tomb.”
“Every time I think I can’t love you more,” she said, her voice thick with tears as she set the tablet on the table and turned to step into my arms. “You say something so incredibly romantic that I just melt.”
“No more tears,” I whispered, reaching up to wipe moisture from her cheek. “Not for us. Not anymore.”
I moved my hand to tilt her chin and gently kissed her lips.
For almost two hundred years I’d locked myself away, waiting for her return. And being with Claire now was more magical than anything I’d ever imagined. Even more incredible than the discoveries we’d poured through together, our love was a story made in Heaven.
