Nightwolf

Stick my head under the water.

Open my mouth.

And scream.

Chapter 17

Wolf

I’ve always had a strange relationship with death, even for a vampire. There’s this duality that was created inside me when I was a boy, from the moment my father was killed. I had to reconcile what happened to him, which was something I had been told since birth would never happen to us, with what I had to do later on.

Even before his death, I was aware that my parents killed people, humans, in order to survive. They drank their blood. I understood this as easily as I understood that my father would hunt deer to feed us, his still human children, or that the people in the villages raised cows in order to feed their own mouths. As a young child, still full of naivety and innocence, I took this all at face value and never questioned it.

But then my father died. And then my mother died. And then I went from being faced with feeding off of people whom my mother had killed, who were already dead (and twenty-five years too early, before my young mind could handle it), to going out and killing people myself.

It came naturally to me. That’s something I had to reckon with too. I killed people and I drank their blood and I stole their life so that I could live. And I had to juggle that alongside the child inside of me who watched his father die, who later lost his mother. How could I kill and create death and grief for so many souls out there when I knew exactly what it was like to lose someone?

I think that’s why vampires always have this guarded way about us. It isn’t because we’re purposely trying to be all mysterious. That part comes naturally, because we aren’t able to share what we really are with most of the world. But there’s that other part, the one that tells us that we must stay within our own group. Because to befriend a human is to befriend death. Death that you might cause yourself if you’re not careful, or death because it’s a constant part of their lives. If vampires had to hang out and fall in love with and make families with mortals all the time, they would probably think twice about how they live. And how they survive.

Of course, Dark Eyes solves that problem. Absolon Stavig, despite his monstrous past (or perhaps in spite of his monstrous past), created a place where we didn’t have to kill anymore. Some say it’s because we don’t want any more suspicion drawn to us with murders across the city, that it’s a way for us to actually stay put and create a home. But I know Solon. I know it’s because this is his reckoning, a chance to change the way things are done. If we don’t have to cause death, then why should we?

But now, sitting in my usual velvet chair in Dark Eyes, I’m feeling that duality slice me in two. Upstairs in her room is Amethyst, having had a meeting with the funeral director about what to do about her mother.

Her mother who is dead.

Died four days ago.

Her mother whom I literally felt the life leave her, even though I was outside of the ICU. I felt her go. I felt that loss like a cold snake in my gut, leaving just emptiness in its wake.

And I realize I made a grave mistake, one that my life should have prepared me for.

I got too close.

I got too close to Yvonne.

And I got too close to her daughter.

Her gorgeous, brilliant, funny, loving daughter.

I loved Yvonne. I fell in love with Amethyst.

Now I’m grappling with a loss I could have easily avoided had I kept my distance to begin with. All I wanted growing up was to never have to go through what I went through again. Even my relationships with vampires were fairly shallow over the centuries, in case I would somehow lose them. I had some lovers, some I even loved, but they always ran their course or I got out of those relationships when I realized I either couldn’t be with them for life or I realized I didn’t want to be with them for life.

And then Amethyst walked into Dark Eyes one night and I was a goner.

I think I fell in love with her on sight.

Eventually, she came to work for us full time, and Solon offered the house to her and her mother. Yvonne started working for us too and, for the first time, it felt like there was life in the house. We can be so brooding and dark and preoccupied with the darkness and with death that having humans live amongst us wasn’t a detriment, it only added to our lives.