‘I never threw your vial away,’ I admitted, ‘I drank it in the wardrobe last night.’
His face contorted in horror.‘Why?’
I felt a coil of embarrassment.‘It was the only thing I could think of to protect you.’
‘You would do that for me?’
I ran a thumb over his smooth cheek.‘I’d do it again a thousand times.’
‘That’s why you’ve been sick.’Raleigh groaned.‘You were changing.I should have realised.’
‘You’ve been … preoccupied.’
He choked out a laugh, then winced in pain.‘So does this make you my sire or my spawn?’
‘Both, I think.You can feel it too, can’t you?’
‘I can,’ he said, face awash with conflicting emotions.He sounded distant, like he wasn’t sure how to feel.I couldn’t blame him.He’d spent three hundred years trying to escape the last woman he’d loved, only for me to drag him back into exactly the same prison.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘What?’The warring emotions on Raleigh’s face united into one perfectly confused truce.‘Why?’
‘All you wanted was to be human again, and now I’ve forced you back into the dark.’
‘Clara …’ He softened, intertwining his fingers with mine against his cheek.‘What I wanted was to be free and to find love.How could I possibly fault you for giving me everything?’
‘You told me you wanted to live.’
A faint smile slipped onto his lips.‘I feel more alive with you than I ever did as a human.’
I found myself speechless.My heartbeat felt conspicuously absent, but even so my cheeks started to burn.I wondered if he’d spoken like this to the Queen, back when he still loved her.How could she hear him speak like that, see the sweet earnestness of his expression, and choose to use his love to break him?
No one would ever hurt him like that again.She was gone, so there was only one person left who could.
‘I swear to you,’ I said, ‘I’ll never use you the way she did.Know that you’re free, no matter how much hold I have over you.’
He pulled me to him and kissed me hard.‘I know,’ he said when we parted.‘And I promise you the same.As long as we both walk upon this earth I’ll never use my power over you again.’
‘I know,’ I echoed, truthfully, and kissed him until his injuries forced him to pull away.We lay back down together on the hard floor, and I fitted my head in the crook of his neck.He weakly leant against me, but when he tried to reach across me he grunted in pain.I caught his hand as it dropped and held it tightly against the heart that once again lay still.
‘You once said that becoming a vampire was the worst thing you could imagine happening to you,’ Raleigh murmured.
‘I know,’ I said.‘But I discovered something worse.’
Raleigh fell silent.His thumb caressed the back of my hand.‘I’ll find you another cure.It only took three hundred years the first time.With you at my side, we’ll have another ready to go in two hundred.We just have to promise not to kill each other in the meantime.’
I laughed, not even remotely sure what the world might be like two hundred years from now.‘All right.Well, since you love deals so much, why don’t we make another one now?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Promise me you’ll never try to kill me,’ I said, taking his hands.‘I promise you the same.We’ll find another way to regain our humanity, one that doesn’t involve killing each other.’
‘That’s not a deal, that’s a vow.’
‘And in exchange—’
‘In the nature of a bargain, shouldn’t I dictate my terms?’
