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“William,” I greeted, my voice hoarse. I suddenly realized how famished I was, and thirsty too. William’s eyes fixed on me before he vanished in one of his all too fast movements. He appeared by the bar, only to return a moment later with water and a plate of croissant and berries. I raised my eyebrows in amazement. Had he openly moved like this before?
“Eat,” he demanded flatly. I obeyed out of sheer necessity, drinking the water gratefully and letting it wash over the dryness of my throat and tongue. It was enriching, life giving. William gazed out the window.
I took a bite of croissant, so buttery and flakey. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere in North Carolina, I believe.”
“Why did we leave?”
“I got the information I needed. Now I need to get you home and settled.” Still, he did not look at me.
“Tell me what you are,” I said, emphasizing each word in demand. He scoffed, cheekbones sharpening. I could see his eyes were lighter than usual, he seemed agitated, his movements locked and too controlled.
“Enough,” he snapped.
“Tell me, what you are.” Again, I pressed, only harder. “You leave me no other choice than to assume you are some demon of the night. Horris joked about your age, Filip complained about the sun. Clementine knows, doesn’t she?”
“What Clementine and Horris have discussed is none of our business.”
“Only it is, because you do not share anything at all with me, William! I am not a fool. I know you never consume anything other than wine or brandy, you licked my blood for Christ’s sake! You have these terrible sharp teeth that you use for protection and tofeed? Feed on what, William?” Through the course of my interrogation, he had gotten up and began to pace the aisle. I came to my feet, “Your eyes always change, and you can move with incomprehensible speed, whatever you are is dangerous—that much is clear—and instead of trusting me with this information you push me away!”
“Because I want to protect you from this!” he yelled, suddenly in my face. I stumbled back in terror, watching the long and pointed canine teeth protrude from their hideaway. My heart sputtered in my chest, my breathing all too fast as I yet again felt as terrified as I had the day that he hit me. Tears sprang from my eyes, and my teeth biting into my lip so as to hold back what I could of my cries. William snagged my jaw, his fingers digging into the bone, holding my face to look at him. I yelped at the sharp pain.
“I don’t want this for you.” His hand trembled as if it were restraining itself, “You cannot handle it, you—you could not even have a conversation about a hybrid child without losing consciousness!”
“Don’t you think if I had all of the information, I would have been able to process it all?” My jaw was still locked in his hand, the words garbled. Rage replacing terror, I grabbed his wrist in indignation. William raised an eyebrow in challenge. “Don’t you think you should give me at least some credit for my disposition?”
William released my jaw roughly, turning his back on me. The silence was heavy, filled with words he didn’t want to say. I was closer than I ever had been to prying it from his clutches, the truth. It ignited within me a push for the cause, just confess to me…
“If you love me–trulylove me–you will take that chance on me. This is a world I’m entering with you, a world Iwantto enter with you and I ought to know what exactly that world is. I’m creating something within my womb withyou, I ought to know what that might mean.” I put my hand on his shoulder, his muscles releasing the tension under my touch. He turned around, his mouth parted in such a way I could see his fangs.
There was an edge to his eyes, “You are right, my love. Iama demon of the night. I feast on the life force of humans, on their blood. I died several hundred years ago only to rise again as a supernatural predator which the likes of human imaginations run wild with fanatical creation. I am but a legend, a myth, folklore come to life.” He stepped closer to me, his posture taking an offensive position. William’s words were ice and his eyes even more remote. I shuddered as he spoke, as he towered over me in pure domination. My heart clenched, breath catching as fear rose within my blood. “I am a vampyre.”
I didn’t think I heard him correctly, blinking wildly as tears continued to pool in my eyes. I lost focus on reality, on William, gripping the top of the chair behind me. He was unmoving, his face inhuman while he watched the expressions dance across my face. My breathing was ragged and I tried to swallow my reactions but still, I could not put it together.
A vampyre. What did that mean? Is that not what I had tried to piece together? It did not seem real, even after everything I had witnessed.
“A… a vampyre?” I muttered, the tears finally making their way down my cheeks. William only nodded once.
“Which I assume you had suspected, from your choice of literature after the wedding.”
“I–I don’t know what I suspected…” I stammered. William, still towering over me with his grotesque fangs protruding from his mouth, cupped my cheek with his cold hand. A hand I knew now was cold because he was dead. I shivered under his touch. My child would be a hybrid of death.
“I’m going to be sick!” I cried, tripping toward the bar to vomit the contents of my stomach into a pale. William did not move. He did not come to hold my hair or rub my back softly as the chewed bits of food and acid spewed forth. Instead, when I had turned around from lurching, he had only closed his eyes.
“I see the terror in your face, Rosemary. I see it in your frame as you quiver. I have told you in the past I would never hurt you again and I meant it.” His voice was low, filled with grief as he spoke. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat as I watched him, still as stone. “You have loved me this whole time, I have been a vampyre long before our first encounter. Nothing has changed.”
And yet, everything had.
Chapter Nine
The summer in Boston was long. After our trip to Charleston in the spring, it took me several weeks to come to terms with what William had confessed to me on the train. He never spoke of the conversation in Horris’s parlor again, even as I pressed further and further for clarification on what Filip may have found. He deemed the topic much too stressful for me to explore, what with carrying a half-human/half-vampyre.
He insisted I should relax for the remainder of the pregnancy. As a result, I had closed myself off to him, and it took many months to thaw into a state of contentment. As I neared the end of my pregnancy, many things became apparent to me.
It did not take long before I could no longer hide my condition. My belly grew rapidly, and I suffered many bruises from the strength of the child inside me. William could hear their heart, their hiccups, and any tiny sounds that were made with his supernatural hearing. It was interesting to him that it should have a heartbeat, which brought comfort to my worries of an undead infant.
It did take several weeks for me to wrap my mind around him being ‘the living dead,’ had I not seen just how alive he was? Had I not witnessed the humanity and morality he carried?
