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We were in Tenerife when she got the news and I knew we had to settle down for good, find a place to raise a family for at least the next ten years.
We decided on Italy.
We decided on Venice.
It was an easy choice to make. There was no other place we’d rather put down roots again. It had been long enough that keeping a low profile in the city would be easy. I couldn’t get my job back at the conservatory without raising suspicion, so I changed my name from Valtu Aminoff to Vlad Harper. Seemed fitting enough. Cut my hair a little, grew a beard, then I started offering private music lessons. Most of my students are vampires, but there’s a few unknowing humans in there as well.
I also took over the Red Room again, with Rose by my side as a business partner. Bitrus was more than happy to hand over the responsibility and he immediately absconded to the Rocky Mountains of all places, to go live on a ranch, about as far away from a vampire sex dungeon in Venice as you can get. Luckily Rose has really taken to running the room, and most of the vampires call her Madame, which I find amusing.
Van Helsing still lives the scientist life in Oxford, working his life away, though he visits often and has opened another lab in Barcelona, so at least the Doctor gets a little bit of fun in his life. At the moment he’s upstairs with Rose and Maria, ensuring a healthy delivery.
Lenore and Solon are back in San Francisco and Wolf and Amethyst have a place around the corner from them, though of course they’re here in Venice now for Rose’s delivery. Dylan lives in Portland, and probably would have come, but the kid is stoned out of his gourd most days so his parents will probably do a video call with him later.
And then there’s Leif. Leif the wild card. Leif the tortured soul.
Leif has a lot of shit to work through, even still. It’s going to take some time before the trauma of his childhood gets resolved, if it ever will. With Bellamy, Atlas, and Celina gone, there’s no one left to tie him to that world, but even so, he behaves more like a human than a vampire. Sometimes more like a witch too.
He was living with Wolf and Amethyst until recently, until he decided he’d had enough and needed time away, then he took off back to Europe. Van Helsing said that he wanted to help Leif further, so the last that everyone heard, Leif was living in Barcelona and having sessions with Van Helsing whenever he’s in town. I think everyone is relieved that Leif isn’t completely on his own, that the Doctor is keeping a good eye on him. We just don’t know what his future holds. I know it weighs on Rose a lot to not have the kind of relationship with Leif that she has with Dylan, but I tell her it will come in time.
Everything always does.
“Just breathe,” Wolf says, putting his hand on my back, trying to reassure me. “Rose is a toughie. She’s going to be okay.”
I inhale sharply through my nose and attempt to loosen the vice in my chest. “At the moment, I don’t know if I’m going to be okay.”
He laughs. “Maybe we should smoke the cigars I bought now. Or do we have to wait? I think it would calm you.”
“He just needs a drink,” Amethyst says. “And so do I.”
She goes over to the bar beside my piano and unscrews a bottle of Scotch, drinking it directly from the bottle.
I groan. “That’s like two hundred years old,” I protest. “I was saving that.”
She shrugs. “And is there a better special occasion than the birth of your child? Which, by the way, I think it’s insane that we don’t know the sex yet.”
Now it’s my time to shrug but I hold out my hand for the bottle. “What’s the point? It’s a baby. Boy, girl, neither—doesn’t really matter to us.”
“You’re still a little too human sometimes,” Wolf tells her. “Always liking to put everything in a neat compartment.”
She has another swallow and then hands me the bottle. “Neat? You know me. I’m not neat. Boy, girl, I don’t care, I just want to know what name the baby will have.”
“We’ve already told you as much,” I remind her. “Constantine.”
Amethyst groans. “You can’t name my grandchild Constantine.”
I take a swig of the Scotch. “Oh yes I can. Constantine Aminoff. What’s wrong with that? I think it’s beautiful for any child.”
“It’s ConstantineHarper,” Wolf says, taking the bottle from me now. At this rate we’ll be finished with the Scotch in no time.
“It’s Harper only when we’re in Venice,” I remind him. “My passport says otherwise.”
“Your passport also says you were born thirty-five years ago,” Wolf points out.
“Signor Aminoff!” Maria’s sing-song voice comes out from upstairs.
I give Wolf a look that says,see, it’s Aminoff.
“Vuole vederti,” Maria says. “Sta succedendo!”
