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“He never would have killed me if I had dropped the glamour in time,” I go on.
“Drink up, Rose,” Lenore says, nodding to my drink.
I don’t want to drink up. I don’t want to be distracted or placated, not now. But the scent of blood is too irresistible. I take one sip and I feel all the cells in my body growing with life, as if being reborn, and that was just from a few splashes of blood.
I finish the drink in one gulp, my veins feeling warm and tingling, and my mind sharpens. No distraction here.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t find him?” I say to them. “Give me a good reason. Is he…” I trail off, afraid to speak the next words, in case they’re true. “Is he…married?”
Did he fall in love with someone else?
Oh god, I don’t know how I’d be able to stand it.
“I doubt that,” Solon says, scratching his chiseled jaw. “It’s been a decade since we last heard from him, however.”
“Then what’s the problem?” I’m losing my patience.
“Valtu was living in Mittenwald, in the Bavarian Alps,” Lenore says, her expression soft. “He’s probably still there. He’s got the Book of Verimagiaa with him. The book has an immense hold on him. We wanted him to help us in tracking the witches, but he never ended up doing so and…”
“Valtu just sort of…gave up,” Solon adds. “He settled in Mittenwald. He has wards and spells all over the town to protect him, in case Bellamy or other vampires are hunting the book.”
“Mittenwald,” I repeat. “Then that’s where I need to go.”
“Listen,” Solon says sharply. “It’s not going to be that easy. Valtu doesn’t want to be found.”
“He’ll want to be found by me.”
“No. He won’t.” He closes his eyes and breathes in deeply through his nose. “Valtu was a broken man after you died. After Dahlia died. He was consumed by his sorrow and grief and that started to turn into anger. He always turned into a monster of sorts every time he lost you but this last time…” He opens his eyes and they pierce through me. I can almost feel Valtu’s rage. “This last time was different. Because he killed you. And he couldn’t live with that.”
He swallows thickly. “He managed to find a spell in the book. A spell of erasure. A spell for forgetting. I was with him when he did it. I warned him not to do it. That doing so would erase his humanity, but he was in too much pain, he couldn’t listen.”
“A spell of erasure?” I whisper, my heart starting to sink. “What does that mean?”
“It means he erased you from his life. From his memory. There is no Mina or Lucy or Dahlia anymore. You’re gone.”
I stare at him, mouth agape, trying to understand the words he just said.
“He used a fuckingspellto erase me from his memory?” I manage to say, my heart pounding in my throat.
“I’m sorry,” Lenore says, eyes welling with sympathy. “I don’t think he thought you’d ever come back. He thought because he killed you…that never seeing you again would be his punishment. That you would, well, stay dead.”
“Now it’s my punishment,” I say to myself, feeling sick and dizzy and trapped, like my skin is growing too hot and too tight for me. “Now it’s my punishment because he won’t remember me, but I’ll remember him.”
“Dude,” Dylan says quietly, letting out a low whistle. “That’s fucking harsh.”
“I know it isn’t fair,” Solon says. “But Valtu chose the only way to make the pain stop. He’s not been the same since you’ve been gone.”
“He’s not been the same since he got that book,” Lenore says under her breath.
I refuse to believe it. I believe they’re telling the truth, or what they believe is the truth, but there’s no spell that will make him forget me, not for good.
“Then all the more reason I have to find him,” I say, getting out of my seat. “The moment he sees me, he’ll remember. I know he will.”
“Your glamour prevented him from seeing you last time and that was magic,” Lenore says, folding her arms across her chest. “What makes you think that this will be any different?”
Because I love him.
Because he loves me.
