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She comes over to me, but I hold my ground, my body starting to shake with rage.
“No!” I cry out. “No. Dracula. There’s a real-life Dracula, I know there is, you’ve talked about him. Where is he?”
“Rose,” my father says gently. “You’ve just transitioned. I understand you have a lot of questions right now. But your mother and I are going to help you through this. We both went through the same thing as you.”
His words produce a sharp stabbing pain in my heart, because I know he’s lying. I know it now. There were things that have thrown me off in the past, things my mother has said about her transition into a vampire that contradicted each other. But I can’t focus on that right now.
I need answers.
I need to find Valtu.
A name that hadn’t meant anything to me for the last twenty-one years and now, now that name means everything to me.
Because he was my everything.
Time and time again.
“You’ve told me that there is a vampire that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula,” I say, trying to keep my emotions in check, even though they’re coming in from all directions. I feel like a ship being slammed by waves, water pouring in through the portholes. “You said you knew him. That he helped you once. Where does he live? Is he…is he still alive?”
Oh god. What if he’s not?
My father bristles, his hazel eyes flickering with a hit of discomfort. I’ve seen him do this before when Dracula was mentioned and there’s something about that, something about all of this that feels like if I just thought a little harder, dug a little deeper, that I’d discover something big.
Bigger than the fact that I’ve just remembered all my past lives.
“I believe so,” my mother says, sounding confused. “But we haven’t seen him…it’s been a long time.”
“I need to find him,” I tell her.
“Why?”
My father clears his throat. “Rose, what has gotten into you? Why are you so interested in Dracula? Do you think he’s the king of the vampires? You know that’s not the case.”
I stare at him for a moment. I’m so used to never seeing my parents age, that sometimes I forget how close in age we appear. My father will never look a day over thirty-five. He will always look like a tall, Nordic guy with big muscles and thick dark-blond hair.
I look at my mother. She should look the same as me. Not literally, of course—she has violet eyes and black hair, I have green eyes and red hair, inherited from my father’s side, I’ve always assumed. But she should look twenty-one, the age she would have transitioned.
But she doesn’t. For the first time I’m realizing my mother looks older than twenty-one. Not as old as my father, but closer to thirty.
“Rose,” my mother says, folding her arms. “I know you’re going through a lot right now, but please tell us what’s going on.”
How do I even explain this? They’re going to think I’m crazy.
Ithink I’m crazy.
I just know I have to find Valtu.
Suddenly more memories, more realizations flood my brain.
I remember the last people I was with as Dahlia Abernathy.
Lenore.
Solon.
The vampires from San Francisco.
They were with me when I died.
