by Lund, S. E.
"You’ll have to force me to stay."
He frowns. “I will.”
“I’ll hate you for it.”
“You must be safe,” he says, his jaw clenched. “I’ve given up everything for you. I can’t have you taken from me. I almost lost you," he says and covers his eyes.
“Then protect me," I say, unable to look at him. "But I'm going back to my parents. I won’t stay here. I’ll contact you if and when I want to see you.”
I go to the bedroom, dressing quickly. He follows me and stands in the doorway watching me. He's devastated but so am I. Even though we just had sex, I feel nothing but numb. He's beautiful, but he's ultimately a stranger who I don't remember. Worse, he's the vampire who killed my mother. The one who left me alone with her bloody body on the floor in her lab.
I push past him, grab my overnight bag and march to the door.
“It’s the middle of the night,” he says, holding the door closed with his hand. “You’re not going anywhere now.”
“You can drive me back,” I say, not looking at him. “I have a key and the cottage has an alarm system. I’ll be safe.”
“You’ll never be safe unless you’re with me.”
“Obviously, I wasn't safe with you. What if Soren compels you to kill me now?"
He shakes his head.
“Eve, I love you. You love me.”
I shut his words out of my brain because while they’re pretty, they mean nothing to me. They’re just words.
“If you're worried about me, send your security team back to guard the cottage.”
“They’re not available tonight.”
I throw my hands up in exasperation. “Then stay outside in your car. I’m not doing this,” I say and point to the cottage. “I’m not going to be a fuck toy for my mother's killer. I’m not going to be your little Adept. Your little blood slave.”
I reach for the doorknob and open the door, but he refuses to let me leave and grabs my arm, squeezing hard.
I glare at him. “Are you actually going to stop me from leaving?”
"I've never been able to stop you from doing anything." He slams the door shut, his brow furrowed, his lips thin. He closes his eyes for a moment as if trying to control his anger and then he shakes his head.
“Eve. This can’t be happening.” He presses his body against me, his hands cupping my face. “I love you. How many times do I have to say it?” He presses his lips against my mouth and it’s only because he's affected my brain that I don’t push him away and he knows it. After a moment, when he feels no response from me, when my body is silent, unaffected by his kiss, he pulls back, his eyes searching my face. Then his arms drop and he glances away, giving in.
He goes to the bedroom and quickly dresses then returns to me, opening the door. I go outside to the driveway where his car sits. We drive the short distance to my parent’s cottage and he joins me as I open the front door.
“Eve,” he says, before I can close the door. “You’re not even going to say goodnight?”
I look at his face. He’s so beautiful standing there, his hair a mess, hanging in his blue eyes, his face filled with pain, but I feel nothing for him. Nothing but anger. No, actually I enjoy seeing his pain.
Nothing more.
I close and lock the door, then set the alarm. I stand in the darkness of the foyer feeling like I can't catch my breath and watch as he stands there for a moment with his head down. Finally, he returns to his car and just sits there, pulling his collar up, his arms folded across his chest.
He’s actually going to sit there the rest of the night?
I turn and my father’s standing in the hallway in his pajamas and housecoat. He rubs his forehead, brushing his grey-brown hair out of his eyes.
“What’s the matter? Why are you back? I thought you’d gone to be with Michel…”
“I know everything,” I say, going to him and hugging him, the tears starting. “He killed my mother. I’m not staying with him.”
He takes in a big breath and hugs me back.
“I’m sorry. We had no idea. We agreed to his demands so we could have you back with us. After the bombing, when we almost lost you, we would have done anything to get you back.”
“I know. I don’t blame you.”
“If you need to talk…”
I shake my head.
“This is something I have to figure out myself.”
I go to my bedroom and crawl under my covers, tossing and turning for hours, unable to sleep.
Chapter 55
"A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love."
Stendhal
* * *
The next two weeks pass pretty much as they had before Michel returned to my life. I get up and have breakfast with my parents, walk the beach, and sit on the patio to eat my lunch while watching the ocean. Michel doesn’t intrude. He gives me the space I asked for.
Security has returned and so I have the time to think about my life and what I want now that I know the truth. I go over the journal again and again. It’s clear that I loved Michel. It’s clear that he loved me but how can I be with the vampire who killed my mother? I realize he was compelled to do it, but he was with Soren. He's complicit in what happened. And then there’s Julien – could I love him? I can’t believe I had sex with both of them. My journal says I thought Michel was gone for good and that I eventually turned to Julien out of loneliness and despair.
I don’t know what I want anymore. I know nothing about who I am inside. Despite knowing I wrote the journal, it feels like it belongs to someone else. I lost the person I’m reading about in the pages of my journal.
I need to find her again, or create a new person.
I read the newspapers, read the coverage of the bombing now with different eyes. Michel never intended to take me to meet with the Council to talk about killing Soren. He doesn’t really intend to let me take up that cause again, and is just humoring me, hoping I'll give it up eventually. But I won't give up the cause and now that I've recovered, that means the mission can still go ahead, if I can meet with the Council. I may have to do it on my own. I think about Terri and wonder if she'd help me…
I try to track down where my possessions went after the bombing but it’s impossible. Michel took everything and now, unless I go back to him, I can’t even read my mother’s research to try to figure out what she knew. I have only my journal notes to go on and most of the time, they were more focused on my feelings than on specific details.
At night I sit and watch the stars, a profound loneliness filling me. I know I can have Michel if I want him but knowing that he killed my mother saddens me for how can I want the man who destroyed my life?
I don't know if I want him on his terms. As much as my journal claims I was falling in love with Michel, I’m just so angry and shocked to learn the truth about him that I don't know how I feel about him now. All I have is this story about a woman who wanted revenge and a vampire-killing vampire she thought she loved and who she thought would help her get revenge. Another vampire she thought she could love who got between them. She had sex with them both.
Other than Michel's memories that he shared with me, I remember none of it. It’s a story. It’s fiction. I feel so detached.
Now, when I walk the beach, I notice the man trailing me about five hundred feet behind. I notice the car parked on the shaded street across from the cottage. I notice the security cameras set up around our property, which I never thought to ask about before.
I’m a prisoner of this life, I'm his prisoner, with no real memory of who I am.
* * *
It’s on Saturday as I’m on the beach for my morning walk when I see a figure approaching me in the distance. He’s barefoot, his jeans rolled up as he walks in the surf. I wonder if my security team will go to him or stop me from getting too close to him but they don’t.
He’s not looking at me, but stopping to pick up stones, throwing them out on the water. H
e bends down to pick up shells, using driftwood to move some kelp. He kneels and examines the shells, holding them up one by one in the sunlight.
Finally he rises and starts walking towards me again, not looking at me, just walking with his head down as if his mind is busy. He looks like Michel – except he has shorter hair and quite the growth of whiskers. He’s wearing a pair of faded jeans and a white t-shirt, a wooden cross on a black leather rope around his neck. Sunglasses hide his eyes, but his face is the same as Michel’s. I stop in the sand, waiting.
He glances up and when he sees me, he falters, his mouth opening.
It’s Julien – it has to be. He looks identical to Michel but has a long scar on his cheek. According to my journal, I had sex with him after an intense and unconventional courtship, vampire style.
He stumbles, and falls to his knees, removing his sunglasses as if he doesn’t believe it.
“Dieu…”
He sits back on his heels, his head bowed, his hands on his knees as if he’s unable to remain upright. Huge dark wings unfurl behind him. He shakes his head, his lips moving and I can barely hear what he’s saying. He's speaking in French – cursing in French. Curse after curse.
"Sacristy…" he says. "Crisse. Batard.…"
He rises and staggers towards me. I step back, afraid of him, those wings making him look like some wild fallen angel. I’m shocked at the intensity of his emotional response. He grabs me, crushing me against his body, squeezing hard, harder, breathing fast.
“Oh, God, oh, God…” he whispers, taking my face in his hands, his blue eyes on mine and his eyes are brimming.
Then, he kisses me, one long intense kiss and when a connection forms between us, his emotions explode into me, leaving me breathless. He ends the kiss, his forehead against mine.
“I thought you were dead,” he says, his voice breaking. “I saw your body. I saw your hair…” He runs his fingers through it then over my throat where Michel bit me. He looks down at the gold crucifix around my neck and touches it, shaking his head.
"I thought…" he says, touching the crucifix around his own neck that looks identical to the one I'm wearing. "That bastard…"
He struggles to speak for a moment and when he does, he’s so emotional, he can only whisper. “They identified you through DNA because your body was so badly disfigured...”
“That wasn’t me,” I say, trying to pull back but he won’t let me, his arms going around me, his face in my neck, his tears wet on my cheek.
“Oh, God,” he says, squeezing me so tightly I can barely breathe. “Oh, God you’re alive…”
Then, he must finally realize I don’t remember him and he pulls back. He grimaces as if in pain, brushing the hair from my face.
“You don’t remember me?”
I shake my head. “I know you must be Julien,” I say quietly. “I can tell because of your scar. I read about you in the journal I kept before the bomb.”
He shakes his head as if he can’t comprehend what I’m saying.
“But we were lovers…”
“We had sex, twice,” I say, emotion filling me, making my throat choke. “We weren’t lovers.”
“I loved you. You said,” he says, his voice breaking. “You said you could love me.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I try to step away. “I don’t remember anything because of the head injury.” I turn away because the pain on his is just too blatant and brings tears to my eyes.
“What?”
“Retrograde amnesia and some agnosia caused by a Council drug your brother gave me. The damage was to my frontal lobe. I lost everything so far back, I can barely remember my mother’s face. No recent faces. No events since I was ten, according to my neurologist. Just body memories, sounds, smells, but I have no idea how I got them.”
He’s breathing fast. Faster.
“That bastard…” he says, his voice barely audible. “I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him,” he says, and his fists are clenched, his lips pressed thin.
My emotions rise. He’s just so upset, this beautiful stranger who I don’t remember but who acts as if I’m his, and I don’t know how to take it.
“He didn't want me to try to kill Soren,” I say, unsure why I'm defending Michel.
“No,” he says. "He just wanted you all to himself." Then he glances past my shoulder and I hear someone coming up behind me. I turn as a man dressed in a black suit and white shirt, sunglasses, a wireless headset in his ear, comes along the beach towards us, struggling to run in the sand. He goes to Julien and tries to shove him away.
“Julien, leave now,” the guard says, his chest out, but Julien just takes the much larger man by the throat and lifts him up, squeezing. He's a fearsome sight, his face a mask of rage, the vampire coming out, his eyes red, his fangs extended, his wings spread out wide. The guard chokes, his limbs flailing, his face becoming purple.
“Stop!” I cry out to Julien, but it's as if he doesn't hear me. “Don’t, Julien please! He’s only doing his job.”
He turns to me, his face changing, eyes returning to normal as if I’ve called him back from some very dark place. He drops the guard, who falls onto the sand, choking, his hands at his throat as if he can’t breathe.
“You’ve hurt him,” I say, kneeling down to the man, who still can’t breathe. I glance up at Julien. “Help him!”
Julien shakes his head. “I’m not a medic, Eve. I'm a vampire. I kill. I don’t heal.”
“But you can,” I say, tears in my eyes. “Do something…”
Finally, Julien's wings fold up until they disappear and he kneels beside me, taking the guard’s head in his hands. He runs his fingers over the man’s throat as if he's molding the man's windpipe, and after a moment, the guard starts to breathe again, inhaling loudly then coughing. Julien takes the man’s face in his hands once he’s breathing more normally.
“You’re going back to wherever you came from and you’re going to forget you saw me here. As far as you know, Eve’s fine. She’s safe. There’s nothing to worry about. Do you understand?”
The guard blinks. “She’s safe. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Now go. Tell any other guards that Eve’s safe. Tell them she went with Michel and she’ll be gone for a while.”
The guard struggles but manages to stand, straightening his jacket and adjusting the headset. He turns around and goes back in the other direction towards my parent’s cottage.
“Thank you,” I say to Julien when he turns back to me.
He just stares at me, his gaze moving over my face.
“What am I going to do with you now?” he says quietly. “I’m not letting you out of my sight ever again.”
I shake my head.
“No,” I say, moving away from him. “Don’t you be like Michel. I don’t need two of you trying to treat me like I’m some kind of possession.”
“You are,” he says, his voice choked. “You were meant for me. I claimed you first.”
I frown and turn away, remembering another entry from my journal that it was Julien who bit me first.
“Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? You sound like a spoiled child.”
“I was spoiled. I had you and then Michel took you away from me. Then, he led me to believe you were dead,” and even now, his voice breaks. “Eve, I didn’t know if I could go on when I thought you were dead...”
“But you did go on.”
“No I didn’t,” he says and his voice is almost a whisper. “I went back to the monastery. I quit fighting. I couldn’t imagine what I’d be fighting for anymore.”
“Stop it,” I say. “That's ridiculous. You’re a knight. You’re a soldier. You told me it’s what you do, fight. Kill enemies. Besides, we were barely even together.”
He’s silent for a moment.
“You don’t believe in love at first sight?”
Yes, I do. Or at least I thought I did. But my love at first sight wasn't for Julien. It was for Michel.
That much I do know from my journal.
"You had a strange way of showing it."
"I didn't want to love you,” he says. “I couldn’t help it."
I dig my nails into my palms and don’t respond.
“Eve, I thought my enemies won,” he says. “And I stopped caring anymore. But now…” We just stand there in an awkward silence. Finally, he speaks and his voice is barely above a whisper. “Are you,” he says. “Are you with him again?”
“Not anymore,” I say. “I found my journal and read everything. Until then, I had no memories of anything after my mother died. I didn’t even know vampires existed. Michel and I met again. Then I learned the truth – that it was Michel who killed my mother. I left him.”
"You left him? He let you go?” He shakes his head, disbelief on his face. "Soren compelled him to kill your mother, Eve," he says. "He wouldn't have done it himself."
"It doesn't matter. He killed my mother, Julien! He lied to me,” I say, tears in my eyes. “All this time. He lied to me all along and so did you. You never told me the truth either.”
“What good would it do to tell you?” he says, an edge in his voice. “You’d only obsess about it, plan some way to get revenge, and get yourself killed in the process. That’s exactly what you did, once you found out that Soren was responsible," he says and waves to the beach, "All this is because of your vendetta against him. We were both right not to tell you the truth.”
“The truth is always preferable to lies.”
“You think so?” he says, his voice suddenly hard. “You’ve barely been alive. You know nothing about existence. Believe me, sometimes a lie makes existence bearable. Like I lied to myself about you. That if we'd met first, you would have loved me instead of Michel. Believe me, that lie kept me alive during very dark times.”
I deliberately shut those words out of my mind.
“I’ve lived too many lies, Julien,” I say, glancing away from his too-blue eyes. “I only want the truth from now on. All of it. Only the truth.”
He just stands there, staring at me.
“OK, I’ll tell you the truth,” he says, his voice hard. “It’s either me or Michel for you. There’s no one else you can be with, so choose. If you choose neither of us, by default, you choose Soren. He’ll deploy you like a weapon with no regard for you as a human. He’ll pass you around his lieutenants like a cheap bottle of wine.”
