His mouth snapped shut again and he looked back up at me, abruptly afraid all over again. But it wasn’t the same fear—the dread that he might drive me off. It was the more ordinary kind: the fear that comes from letting another person care for you, from opening your heart when it’s been closed for way too long.
I led him to the bed. Later, I’d probably wonder how he’d gotten it there—and assembled—so quickly. For now, in this strange and surreal moment of stolen intimacy, it didn’t matter.
Instead of doing something rational—like asking any of the million questions I had for him—I dropped his hand and sat on the mattress. Then I patted the space beside me. “Nicolas.”
He watched me a moment longer, his lower lip quivering, his eyes still filled with that same fear. It hadn’t gone away.
But then he did the bravest thing I’d seen him do yet. He joined me on the bed.
Wordlessly, I pulled him close, cradling him in my arms, his back to my chest. He let me spoon him, his lips parting slightly, his eyes sliding shut. And then, with neither of us speaking at all, I held him in silence. I knew he needed it. He needed my touch. He needed me to hold him and remind him that something good and simple and pure could still exist. And I needed it too. I didn’t know how I knew any of that, but I knew it was true.
At first, I thought he might be holding his breath, afraid to move a muscle.
But moments turned to minutes, and the minutes began to add up, and Nicolas still hadn’t breathed. There was no telltale pulse rushing blood through his veins. Yet he was still warm, solid, and trembling ever so slightly in my arms.
And after a very long time, with him so near that the years of loneliness and isolation melted away as if they’d never existed, I became deeply aware of what I had somehow known all along.
It wasn’t possible. And it certainly wasn’t rational. But it was still true. Whatever Nicolas was, I knew with absolute certainty what he wasn’t.
He wasn’t human.
CHAPTER NINE || COLE
Ifelt oddly groggy as I swam back up from the darkness of sleep. I couldn’t quite remember the details of my dreams, but I knew they had been about Eliott—a past lover, a man I had loved back when I was still human and capable of such feelings. I hadn’t thought of him in hundreds of years, even though the loss of him should have broken me. It would have, if I had still been able to care. Instead, his death had cost me the last traces of my humanity and turned me into the creature I was today.
My brother and I had attempted to flee our maker early on—within days of being turned into vampires—before we understood any of the rules governing our kind. Magnus had been a cruel creature and had selected us because he was interested in the prospect of twins. Thierry and I had both objected, but when he threatened to kill my brother in front of me, I had been foolish enough to do whatever I had to in order to protect him.
Of the two of us, Thierry had always been the stronger one—surer of his actions, filled with will and conviction I hadn’t possessed. He had been my best friend and my deepest confidant. Of course, I could never have allowed any evil to befall him. And when Thierry fought back and tried to lead me to freedom, I followed.
My brother had grabbed a sword from the wall and beheaded one of Magnus’s inner circle to secure our escape. When Magnus captured us, I thought he was going to kill us. Instead, he did something much worse.
Holding a wooden stake to my brother’s chest, he led three young men—all of them my age—into his private bedchamber. Each was hooded so I couldn’t see their faces. Then he commanded me to drink from them. He promised I wouldn’t need to kill them; he wouldn’t force me to do that. All I needed was a taste, and then he would let all of us go.
Had I truly believed him? To this day, I still didn’t know. All I knew was that if I hadn’t, he would have killed Thierry in front of me—and I couldn’t have allowed that.
I hadn’t stopped with just a taste, of course. Newborn vampires are seldom able to control their hunger in the beginning. In the grip of the frenzy that took me over, I killed all three of the young men, one after another, while Thierry watched and pleaded with me to stop. And then, when I sat on the stone floor of Magnus’s bedchamber, frozen in the anguish and horror of what I had done, Magnus commanded me to remove their hoods.
That was when I discovered I had murdered the only man I had ever loved. Eliott’s body had been so pale and fragile in my arms as I clung to him. As tears burned wicked tracks down my blood-soaked cheeks, I looked down at his lifeless body and had a single moment where my heart shattered into a million pieces. Everything human in me died in that instant, crushed under the weight of what I had done.
That was Magnus’s punishment. It wasn’t death. It was something else altogether. And it wasn’t just for me—it was for Thierry as well. Perhaps mostly for him. Magnus released me that night to do whatever I wished, apparently no longer interested in the prospect of twins now that one of us waspermanently damaged goods. But he hadn’t let Thierry go. He had lied—just as he had lied about the young men, the innocents who hadn’t deserved to die.
To this day, I still couldn’t tolerate liars.
My bedroom was dark when I sat up. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was that the bed was emptier than it should have been. The comforting weight of Eli beside me—his arms around me, enveloping me in his warmth and intoxicating scent—was gone.
I checked the time on my phone and saw that I had slept for eighteen hours.
Disbelief crashed through me as I stared at the digits on the screen, willing them to make sense. Vampires require little sleep, and I had already slept before seeing Eli yesterday… Yesterday? How could it have beenyesterday?
I felt a flicker of fear as well.
Because anything could have happened to the good doctor in the last eighteen hours while I was here, dead to the world. The whole reason I had moved next door was that there was a murderous vampire on the loose, hunting in my neighborhood.
What if that vampire knew me?
Not impossible, given that I had eight centuries of life under my belt and hadn’t always made friends everywhere I went. What if he—or she—had been watching and realized Eli was important to me?
With that thought clear in my mind, I launched out of bed, not even pausing to make sure I was presentable. I made it to Eli’s home next door before even thinking about what I was doing.
