Nightwolf

“And your mother? What happened to her?”

He licks his lips for a moment, frowning. “We stayed at the house in the Black Sunshine. It was as close to normalcy as we could get. We thought we’d move on, somewhere further north, go back into the real world and start again. But my mother was slowly losing her mind. She became consumed with revenge. On the humans that killed my father. That’s really why we didn’t move on. She had it in her head that she was going to kill everyone in that town.”

“And?”

“And she did. She tried to, anyway. She would sneak out into the real world at night, travel into the villages, and start killing. At first it was because she needed to feed, and we did too. She’d come back full and bring us back food from whomever she had killed. Eventually she’d just bring us back the bodies.”

My eyes go wide in shock. “Your mother brought you bodies? Dead bodies? You weren’t even a vampire yet.”

His face goes completely grim. “My siblings and I adapted at an earlier age than most. By the time I was ten, I was subsisting on blood alone, far before I became a vampire. You see, Solon isn’t the only one in the house who has to deal with the monster that he was. I was one too.” His jaw goes tense as he swallows. “I was such a monster.”

I don’t even know what to say. I can only shake my head, my heart breaking for him. The thought of young Wolf, having to see his father’s head get chopped off(!), then having to live in the Black Sunshine, living off human blood when you’re not even turned yet. I can’t think of going through much worse and still turning out to be a fairly level-headed being.

“You think of me differently now,” he says, his voice a low murmur, a tinge of caution in it.

“No,” I say quickly. I reach out and I put my hand on his thigh, his muscles taut beneath my fingers. My god, he has big thighs. “I don’t. I’m glad you told me this, I had no idea.”

“It’s not exactly something you want to go around telling people,” he says, glancing down at my hand for a moment, but I don’t remove it. I wish I could see his eyes underneath his sunglasses. “Ezra doesn’t even know. Of course, Solon does.”

“Lenore?”

He shakes his head, and for some reason that makes me feel relieved. I love Lenore to pieces but I’m not too proud to admit that I get hella jealous of her from time to time. She’s got other vampires and witches afraid of her, all this power, and she only came into our lives a short time ago. She’s basically queen of the vampires now and she’s nine years younger than me. Obviously, this all my own insecurities, feeling like I’ve been bumped from the position of the sole young female of the house.

“Then I’m honored you told me,” I say softly. I give his thigh an affectionate squeeze then take my hand away. If I was braver, perhaps I would have slid it up between his thighs. Even though we haven’t been driving all that long, I already feel the constraints and worries of the house sliding away, like the further north we travel, the freer we both become. To do what we want, what we please, to ignore all the consequences.

Or that could just be what I’m feeling.

We’ll be in trouble if he’s feeling it too.

“So then, what happened after that? How did your mom die?” I should probably drop this whole conversation, but since he’s opening up so much, it’s making me thirsty for more. I want to know everything about him, all the deep, personal stuff that we’ve skirted over all these years together.

“She got careless,” he says darkly. “She should have stopped a long time before, but she couldn’t. As I said, she was consumed by her revenge. And now we, her children, were addicted to blood. She kept killing until she had murdered most of the village. By then, everyone that was left, plus the surrounding villages, they knew it was her, the bloodsucker as they called her. They planned to have her killed. Hired a slayer from the closest city, someone with experience. One night she targeted the wrong people and they were waiting. They stabbed her in the heart with the slayer’s blade and that was it.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. It keeps getting worse.

“It wasn’t until decades later that we actually learned what happened to her, though. All we knew is that she went out one evening and never came back. My brother, Asmund, he was much older, took control of us as a family. We finally traveled north through the Black Sunshine, until we reached a deserted settlement on the coast. An old fishing village, north of Trondheim. We moved into the real world again, moved into the abandoned houses. And we started living again, anew. As a family of fishermen. Eventually, others found us, more people moved into the village, but they never suspected a thing. They thought we were humans like they were.”