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“What?” I get up, staring at her in confusion. “It couldn’t be your brother. The baby was Leif. He was the son of Wolf and Amethyst. Vampires I personally know.”
“Yeah, well, I know them too,” she says. She gives me a faint smile. “They’re my parents.”
I can’t help but look at her, absolutely dumbfounded. “They can’t be your parents. That’s impossible.”
She folds her arms across her chest, which causes a scrap of material to fall from her, and gives me a steady stare. “Tell me how that’s impossible.”
I quickly try and calculate but all the years seem to be a blur. I haven’t talked to Wolf in, well, a very long time. They went into hiding after Leif was taken from them. “Leif was a twin…”
“At the time it was Leif and Liam,” she says, and it catches something in my memory. “But they changed his name from Liam to Dylan a long time ago. Right before I was born.”
I have to shake my head, all of this seeming too impossible. “You can’t be their daughter.”
“But I am.”
I run my hand over my face. “Christ on a bike,” I mutter. My brain hurts. “How?”
“It’s a tangled web when it comes to me,” she says. “Don’t you think about how impossible it was for you to find me again after the first time I died? All the people in the world, and you run into me in the British Museum. Had you gone earlier in the day or the next day, had I not gone at all, had I just bent down to adjust my dress at the very moment you were looking my way, we would have missed each other. But we didn’t. And how impossible is it that I was sent to Venice to kill you, that I had a glamour on that prevented you from recognizing who I really was? All of this is impossible, Valtu, and yet it’s happened. The universe keeps finding a way to put us in each other’s path, no matter the circumstances.”
I had no idea we had met at the British Museum. There is so much that’s been erased because I erased her.
Because you had to. You lost her.
And yet she’s here.
“The universe also keeps finding a way to torture me,” I tell her gravely. “Because it also finds a way to make youdie.”
It even had me kill you, the last time, I think and for once I feel a touch of guilt. Guilt that had never been there before. What is happening to me?
She gives her head a shake. “Nope. I’m a vampire now. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You almost did,” I point out, gesturing to the ash.
“Perhaps I’m lucky this time around.”
“When you live long enough, you learn everyone’s luck runs out eventually.”
Rose raises her shoulder in a shrug. “Perhaps. But for now, I’m alive and I’m standing right in front of you.” She looks again at the ash on the ground. “I’m assuming you didn’t have any emotional attachment to the demon?”
“Me? Fuck no.” Then terror floods my mouth, a sour taste. “Shit. The book!”
I turn and run toward the house and after a beat I hear Rose coming after me.
I throw open the front door, then speed through the house and the halls until I’m bursting through my bedroom, my eyes flying to the book.
It’s sitting there, on my desk as usual. Destroying the demon didn’t destroy it as well.
Still, I have to be sure.
I go to it and flip open the pages. To my relief the spells that were there before are still there, though there’s that touch of disappointment in that no new ones have appeared.
“What happened?” Rose says from behind me, and I look over my shoulder to see her standing in the doorway. She steps on through and I realize for the first time ever, someone else is in my bedroom.
She comes to my side and lays her eyes on the book. “Is this it? The Book of Verimagiaa?”
I snatch the book away from her and hold it to my chest.
“Okay, Gollum,” she says with a snort. “I’m not going to take it from you.”
