“I know,” I said. Right now I was so pleased and content that I didn’t even care that my voice cracked.
“I’d like to tell you something,” Adriel said after a moment of quiet. “But if you’d rather not hear a vampire story after your nightmare, I understand.”
Curious now, I lifted my head. “What’s it about?”
Still holding me against his chest, he pressed his lips gently to my temple. “It’s about my turning.”
My heart flipped. It was an intimate memory for him to share with me, but I knew that realistically, it also included Margaret.
So that’s why he asked first,I thought.He’s trying to be considerate in his own way.
But my anxiety over Margaret paled in comparison to my curiosity. Adriel was a private man, I knew that already - it had taken him this long to understand and accept his feelings for me - so him offering to tell me the story of his turning must have been difficult.
I smiled and cuddled closer to his chest. “I do want to hear it. Even if Margaret’s in it.”
The room went quiet, with only the sound of my breathing and the gentle stroke of Adriel’s fingers through my hair breaking the silence.
“It was a very long time ago,” Adriel began. His voice sounded distant, like he was in the deepest recesses of his mind, digging the memory out. “Centuries ago.”
“Centuries?” I said. “Plural?”
“Yes. Almost three,” Adriel replied.
“Three hundred years,” I mumbled in awe. “That’s a big age difference.”
He shot me a quirked brow. “Do you want to hear the story or not?”
I shut my mouth and nodded.
“Before I delve into it, I must warn you in advance that it’s not a very pleasant story,” Adriel said.
“I figured that,” I replied. “I mean, just from what I’ve read in your books, turning into a vampire isn’t fun.”
“It is not,” Adriel confirmed.
“Still, I want to hear it,” I pressed. “I want to learn more about you.”
If Adriel could have blushed like a human, I’m sure he would have. He cleared his throat politely.
“I know now in hindsight that it was my own stupidity that caused this to happen,” Adriel began. “It wasn’t a safe time back then. Compared to modern times, it was chaos.”
“Really?”
“I lived in a small town with a curfew,” he went on, “because of the dangers roaming at night. Wild animals, bandits… and things beyond the knowledge of people at the time. Like vampires.”
“They didn’t know about vampires?”
“They did. But they didn’t know what to look for,” Adriel said, his mouth a tight line. “We were taught to see an ugly, abomination of a creature, with grotesquely protruding fangs and leathery bat wings.” He paused. “The creature that attacked me did not look like that.”
I withheld a gasp. An image flashed in my mind of Margaret attacking Adriel and I shuddered with a fresh wave of anxiety.
“It wasn’t her,” Adriel stated. His eyes looked distant again. “She was the one who saved me. That night, a foolish feeling came over me. At the time, I was dissatisfied with the lack of freedom in my life. I was a grown, healthy man, and felt that a curfew didn’t suit me.”
I listened with growing dread, knowing this story didn’t have a happy ending.
“I gathered my notebook and pen, and set out to the field outside the town. I was a writer back then, the same as I am now - although I was unskilled and inexperienced - so I wanted to get a taste of the night sky, alone. I wanted to feel the moonlight on my face.”
I watched him now as he closed his eyes, back in the memory of it.
