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It was no secret that he was a better person than I’d ever tried to be, and so naturally, too. That fact continued to confuse me. Most beings were selfish. Not good to the core. They chose their own needs over the needs of anyone else. Humans were especially selfish creatures, much like vampires were. Wolves were a little different. They weren’t selfish so much as they were primal. Like their evolution had stopped with the hunter-gatherers. Not unintelligent, but they had a different way of living with different rules.
The pack came before all else. They survived as one.
Dominic put the pack above all else. He cared more about their survival than his own happiness. His own well-being. I wished I understood. Maybe this would hurt less.
I got up to make myself another drink, leaving the glass where it fell from my shirt. It could join the glass Dominic had broken. The cleaning staff would collect it tomorrow when I was at work. I selected another crystal tumbler and filled it with more Galliano. I returned to the balcony, half hoping Dominic was still there moping and watching. Waiting for me to invite him in again.
No such luck.
He’d probably stay away for another year. Maybe more, the way I’d kicked him out. He didn’t have the same need for intimacy I had. I craved it, my flesh starved for connection. I couldn’t rid myself of it, no matter how hard I tried.
I had to ask myself if I could live the rest of this lifetime without him and wait for the next.Souls returned. Greater minds than mine theorized why, but I wasn’t sure anyone really knew why. I understood it as a base level of physics. Energy could neither be created or destroyed. Souls were energy and they had to go somewhere. Some passed into another plain but most came back.
Especially ones that were tied. So I wasn’t worried about finding him again. There was an invisible string tying me to him. I merely had to pull, and it would lead me to him. But how many years would a rebirth take? And would he be a wolf in the next life? I didn’t plan on dying, so would we wait to be at the same impasse?
I didn’t have answers to any of these questions. I wasn’t sure I believed in it the way he did. Even if the theory made sense, who knew what it would look like in practice? I hated that he was so fixated on this idea he’d come back for me with less baggage. What if this was all we got?
It depressed me.
I exhaled, the sadness threatening to leak from my eyes. Moisture back into the atmosphere.Everything was a circle. Life and death and all the existence in-between. I should be more accepting of it, but I hated the pain his absence caused.
Knowing Dominic the way I did, he’d get himself killed in such a way it would trap his soul so it couldn’t make its way to a new corporeal form. The bastard was stupid and stubborn enough to make such a mistake, screwing up our entire eternity.
Then what?
I’ll have wasted all of this life.
I jumped over the balcony, unable to handle the silence anymore.
FIVE
VINKETTIN
“Iwas starting to think you’d left us for good,” Walter said when I walked into my favorite vampire bar.
The vampires in the New World tolerated daywalkers. Some even accepted us and made allegiances with daywalkers, unlike their European counterparts.
“I’ve been keeping to my kind.”
“There aren’t enough of your kind to keep to.” He filled a glass of absinthe as I sat at the bar.
“I mean those with a pulse.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised you consider yourself closer to them because you have a pulse but humans, really, Vinkettin? They are so temporary. What could they possibly know about life?”
“It’s fleeting. There is something whimsical about them.” I picked up the glass, swirling the sugar mixture with the water.
“You mean they don’t hold you accountable for anything?”
“Yes, old friend, they don’t ask me what I’m doing with my life.”
“They don’t ask you why you’re in a town pining after someone who will never want you?” he asked.
“A shot to the heart.” I put my hand over mine.
“You smell like dog. Such an unpleasant odor.” He moved faster than humans could comprehend to catch a glass a customer threw at him. “I’m coming.” He turned to refill a pint of blood for the cup wielder.
It was a surprise at all that this place carried drinks other than blood, as they didn’t encourage tourists, but this bar was friendly enough to daywalkers and kept a few things. Walter always had absinthe for me.We drank blood but we didn’t only drink blood, and I found it rather unappetizing not from the source. Sitting around to coagulate, it lost the appeal.
