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“What does what feel like?” I ask my brother, shielding my eyes as headlights from the passing cars blind me. Each day I’m finding it easier to be in my new, supersensitive skin, including eyes that hate bright lights and especially the sun, but I’m still not used to it yet. I’m not even used to drinking blood. Part of me craves it, the other part still finds it icky.
“What is it like to die?” he asks.
I glance at him. His expression is grave for once. I haven’t really talked to him a lot these last few days. He’s been keeping to himself, hanging out in the garage now that I’m not in there. The energy in the whole house has changed, becoming as somber as the gray clouds over the Pacific that only seemed to part tonight, and I know I’m to blame. I haven’t been avoiding him, or my parents for that matter, just trying to figure out how to come to terms with everything the way that I normally do—alone.
But my parents, well, part of me thinks they might be avoiding me. There is a strange wariness when they look at me now, like they’re waiting for me to lift up a mask and unveil someone else underneath. I don’t know how to explain to them how I’m feeling or what I am, because I still don’t understand it, but I do know that I can be Rose Harper, as much as I can be Dahlia, and Lucy, and Mina. My past doesn’t erase who I am in the present. If anything, it adds to it. It gives me layers of life experience that weren’t there before.
“You want to know what it’s like to die?”
My brother nods. “Yeah. Who doesn’t?”
Humans have been obsessed with death for all of time. I think vampires might share that same obsession. Vampires can die, of course, in three different ways—stabbed in the heart with the blade ofmordernes, the slayer’s blade; decapitation; or being burned alive. But I think the obsession comes with their own lack of real mortality.
I take in a deep breath, my eyes going to the stars that are peeking out from behind moving clouds. “It’s peaceful,” I admit. “The moments leading up to it can be awful, but all that awfulness disappears once you make it over. You realize how little that mattered. How little most things mattered.”
“So what happened?”
“The first time I was Mina. And I died horrifically. At the hands of my father.”
“Fucking hell.” He whistles.
“Yeah. While my lover was feet away, held back by an army. My father…” I don’t even want to finish it. Tell him what it really felt like to know the child inside me probably died moments before I did. “Anyway, uh, once I passed over to the other side, once I knew I was dead and made peace with it, I was in another plane. I was surrounded by family and friends, some that I hadn’t even known in that lifetime.” I pause. “You were there.”
Dylan balks at that. “What? How is that possible?”
I shrug lightly. “I don’t remember how. You learn everything when you’re on the other side, but you forget it all when you come back here. I guess you have to, or you won’t learn the lessons you’re supposed to on this plane. But yes, bro, you were there. Time is a circle. All these lives are connected like a carousel around our soul. We can only see forwards and back on the circle but the soul is in the middle and it can see every life at once. It’s too much for our brains to really understand but it’s the truth. I think you were there, Dylan, because our souls know each other from this life and maybe others.”
He’s silent for a moment. “And to think I’m not even high yet.”
“Well, maybe it will make more sense when you are,” I joke.
“So what did it feel like? Being dead?”
“Like the biggest accomplishment,” I admit, smiling a little. Because the memory of that feeling still lingers inside me. “Like…getting to the showdown with the final boss, after so many tries, and winning.”
“You weren’t sad after the fact?”
I shake my head. “No. Not really. There were things and people I missed but I knew I would see them again soon.”
“And so how did you reincarnate? Does everyone?”
“I’m not sure. I think everyone can, but I also think it’s a choice. For whatever reason, I kept choosing to come back, in the same body, with my same ties to Valtu. There’s something I’m supposed to learn this time around that I never learned before.”
“Maybe you were supposed to come back as a vampire so he didn’t have to witness you dying again,” Dylan says softly. “You’re immortal now. You can be with him forever.”
He’s right. This time I don’t have to die again. We don’t have to be apart.
I just wish I had some sign in my gut that we’ll find each other again.
Guess I’ll have to find out.
“Can you do me a favor?” I ask him after we’ve sat in silence for a few minutes.
“What?”
“Take me to Eugene.”
He blinks and takes his gaze off the road. “Eugene? Why?”
