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Unlike my destiny, our daughter has had much joy: a King who loves her, a son to call her own, a protected home, and an extended family. Everything I could have wished for her has come true, and if the cost of such a fate required my sacrifices?
One does everything for one’s children.
Yet as time has changed her, it has also changed me. The foundational role of a parent is to usher their progeny into adulthood, to make sure they are set and settled, prepared to carry the torch forward past the lives of those who created them. Of late, I am beginning to think my purpose for her has been served—and the more this feels true, the more the pain of who I miss, who I am separated from, who I long for, is growing intolerable.
With the same compulsion I previously focused on my present, I now find myself returning to the past and reliving the origin story of our daughter. But it’s not about the young.
It’s about my female. Myself.
Through the course of my recollecting, I am compelled to get each and every detail of our love story right. I want all the words we shared relived with their proper tone and inflection. I want the glances, the touches, the heartbeats, cataloged. I want even the scents right.
I have to remember everything.
It’s the only way I can decide whether it is finally time to release myself of my duty upon the earth… and try to find my love on the Other Side.
If she’ll have me, that is.
Perhaps this story of mine will at long last lead to a happily ever after.
Or maybe I was wrong about everything.
And nothing awaits me in the Fade.
CHAPTER ONE
May 1981
Caldwell, NY
Darius, begotten son of Tehrror, forsaken son of Marklon, decided to drive into town the night his destiny came to claim him. Two weeks before, he had directed his trusted, elderly doggen, Fritz Perlmutter, to go to the BMW of Caldwell dealership and accept delivery of a brand-new 735i. The car had been ordered about six months before, and although vampires did not celebrate the human Christmas holiday, as its arrival date drew nearer, Darius knew all about sugarplums dancing in the head.
The sweet anticipation had been an antidote to so much dread and duty in his life, and the wait had been interminable. There had even been a delay or two, the production in Germany hitting a snag, and then the cross-Atlantic shipping taking longer than scheduled. But then, finally, the call had come in, and when Darius had returned home after a weekend away of fighting, covered in black blood that smelled like baby powder, with a gunshot wound through the meat of his upper left arm, Fritz had whipped open the back door and proclaimed that “she is being prepared and is ready to be gathered tomorrow afternoon!”
Darius had stood there on the kitchen stoop like a big dummy, his sluggish, exhausted brain failing to process whatever news had made his butler light up like a streetlamp. And then it had sunk in. Talk about your second wind.
As a doggen, Fritz could go out into the spring sunlight, and given that he was the most faithful servant on the planet, he had been as excited as his master when he’d headed off twelve hours later to pick up the new car. The last sixty minutes or so of patience had been a slog of centuries-long duration, and Darius had churned through the time pacing in his subterranean bedroom, circling his desk, his bed, his seating area. The hearth. The bath. Rinse and repeat.
Fritz had come down to report she was safely on the premises as soon as he’d gotten home, but given that the gracious Federal mansion had a detached garage, there had been no way to go see the car until the sun was under the horizon. That it was spring in upstate New York meant there had been another forever-wait, and Darius had wished, even though the nicer weather was more enjoyable, that the calendar had been closer to December 21.
Hell, in winter, he could have gone to the dealership himself.
And then it was time.
Bursting out of the back door, he had all but skipped across the asphalt court. Fritz had deliberately closed up the garage bay, and Darius had twitched through the final thirty seconds as his butler had scooted in and hit the opener.
The panels rising and revealing the BMW, inch by inch, had been like opening a present, and there had been no disappointment. The bronze metallic paint had gleamed, and those four headlights had stared back at him as if the thing were alive. Initial shock and awe over, Darius had prowled around the sedan, trailing fingertips on the cool steel, on the smooth glass, on the hood, the roof, the boot.
