I incline my head. I don’t say anything stupid like ‘oui’ because this isn’t a hokey period drama, and I’m not French anymore, I was only French when I was alive. “I was,” I correcther. “I haven’t been for a very long time. Just like I’m not an artist anymore.”
“What kind of artist were you?”
“A painter. I worked at Versailles like we all did when I was younger. Moved on to teaching the Académie after.” I take another deep drink of my wine and immediately start refilling it. “I met Claire at a party. It was love at first sight. We were married a month later,” I say, opting to leave out the orgy aspect of my meetcute with Claire. Best not to go too much into the particulars of my first wife in front of my last.
“What happened? You said you were turned that year…is she a vampire too?” Maris asks, looking around like she thinks the ghost of Claire will appear suddenly and attack her. Claire would never do such a thing. Not even her ghost. She was gentle.
I shake my head. “No. She’s dead. Claire died two months before I turned.”
Maris puts her hand on mine. “I’m sorry, Julian.”
I lift her hand to my lips and brush a kiss across her knuckles. “It’s long in the past. Another life. No reason to be sorry. I was plenty sorry as a human. Everything I built with Claire, the home, my title and position at the Académie, all of it, I lost in those two months. I was inconsolable. Half-mad. A sad, dirty, drunk. Gutter trash.”
“Julian…”
Maris sounds sad. She shouldn’t. Not for me.
“That’s how Rosanna found me. Passed out from a night of drinking and out of my mind. She wouldn’t have come across me at all if I hadn’t passed out in the graveyard. I went there because it was quiet. I could sleep off the bottle of gut rot I’d drank and no one would bother me. No one went to the graveyard at that hour, or that's what I thought.”
“Rosanna is your maker?”
“Now where did you pick that term up?” I ask her with a smile. “A movie?”
Maris blushes and ducks her head. “Yes, but what else am I supposed to say? Your vampire mom?”
I laugh. “Never refer to anyone as a vampire mom. I beg you.” I lean in close and kiss her neck. Her skin is soft and warm and the pulse of her blood beneath my lips sends a rush of need through me that goes straight to my dick. I take a slow and steadying breath to keep myself from laying her back on the floor and fucking her. I’m supposed to be giving her my origin sob story, not my cock.
There’s time for that later.
Maris leans into me when I kiss the spot beneath her earlobe. “Then what do you want me to call her?”
I nip her flesh and lean back to look at her. “Maker was right. I’m only teasing you.”
Maris’ eyes are bright, her pupils blown wide. She’s just as aroused as I am. She takes a deep breath and clears her throat. “Okay, then Rosanna was your maker?”
The second I’m done with this tale I’m going to fuck her.
“Yes, she was. She was there to feed. She’d lured two coachmen into the graveyard with the promise of pussy and coin. They were drunk, an easy mark, but even if they weren’t they wouldn’t have been a match for Rosanna.”
“She’s strong then?”
“Very, but crazy,” I tell her. “The second she saw me passed out in front of a crypt she changed her mind and changed me instead. Those coachmen were my first meal. She and I spent the better part of two hundred years together until I got sick of her shit. Remember what I said about crazy? She’s unpredictable. I got tired of having to run from mobs to cover her sloppy decisions and struck out on my own. I began studying medicine after I left.”
“Where is she now?”
“Seattle,” I tell her.
“Seattle? But that’s so close and-,” Maris stops and because my wife is smart, I know why. She’s working out the logistics of my arrival into town, “but you came from Seattle.”
“I did.”
“So you’re still in contact with her?”
“Sadly.”
“I thought you said you went out on your own.”
I move closer to Maris and brush her hair over her shoulder before I press my nose to her neck and breathe her scent in deeply. The florals and lemon of Maris work into my system as I speak.
