I gulped down the mixed blood of my sire and my enemy, and braced myself for the darkness that would consume me.

Twenty-Four

(Dis)Closure

The visions flew at me, two lifetimes of memories piling into my head at once. I feared I’d burst apart, unable to contain it all. Maybe that was Cyrus’s plan. It was either that, or he wanted to make me mad with the emotions. There was fear, brief happiness, love, but above all, there was pain. I think I might have screamed, but I didn’t feel my body anymore. I slid into the memories like a ghost, disembodied from the participants, a voyeur of pure consciousness.

One night in particular unfolded like a movie before my eyes. The night of the Vampire New Year. The night Nathan had been changed.

Cyrus sat at the table beside a woman I knew was named Elsbeth. She was his fledgling, I realized. They’d been together for just over two hundred years, but it was clear that he loved her far more than she cared for him. A brief glance at their posture, the adoring way he leaned toward her while she didn’t bother to spare him a glance, told all.

It was the same room I’d seen through Cyrus’s eyes when I’d drunk his blood before, but I never saw Elsbeth’s apathy, because he hadn’t. He’d never been aware that she didn’t love him. I almost pitied him.

In an instant, I shifted into his head. There had been an argument. He’d asked her for something, to do something she didn’t want to do.

To give him her heart.

He’d meant it literally. He’d wanted her to willingly give him what he’d stolen from me. I would have been sick if I had a body left to feel.

Wrenching myself from his mind, I watched the doors to the room open. Nathan and his wife entered. I couldn’t access her mind, but Nathan’s was, for once, wide-open.

He recognized Jacob Seymour, the faith healer they’d traveled across the world to meet, but was surprised by the strange robe the man wore. And he wondered who all the people seated around the table were. Jacob’s son, he knew. The handsome young man was Simon, and the woman seated beside him was his wife, Elsbeth. But what were they all doing here? Had they arrived too early and interrupted a dinner party?

When the doors slammed shut behind them, I felt his alarm. He knew something was wrong, in the way he’d known Jacob Seymour’s promises were too good to be true.

He’d tricked Marianne, his beautiful Marianne, into hoping for a cure for her illness, because he’d wanted to believe.

I wish I’d never brought her here.

As the dispassionate faces seated at the table began to twist into their true forms, Nathan began to pray. But the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, and the Blessed Virgin all turned their backs, the way he’d turned away from them when his prayers did nothing to stop the cancer that ravaged his wife’s young body.