“What is it?” he asks.
I look at the clock. It says 3:30 AM. I have only been asleep about twenty minutes.
“Are you okay?” I ask him.
“Fine, are you?”
I shake my head as again, a jolt goes through me. “Devon,” I say suddenly as I grab CK’s hand and Astral us to him.
He is standing in the bedroom of the suite and I can smell the blood before my eyes find the source.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
He turns to me. “Lizzie? What do I do? Help me. Tell me what to do.” His voice gets louder as he starts to panic and shoves a piece of paper at me.
He is staring at me in terror and I am staring at the scene in front of me in absolute horror.
Jess is lying unconscious on the bed, soaked in blood, her wrists slashed and bleeding out. I glance absently down to the paper he gave me, and it says simply: “If you want to help me, save me. If you don’t, my life isn’t worth living.”
“Holy fuck. Holy fuck. Constantine!” I turn to him.
He steps forward to Devon and places his hand on his shoulder. “You have a choice to make, my boy. Sire and save her or let her die.”
EPILOGUE
London, England, April 1746 - ?
I was still in shock. My husband was dead. The man that I loved more than anything in the world, was no longer in this world. I was furious with him. How dare he leave me? How dare he leave me all alone? If he had let me turn him, he would have been there with me then, like he was supposed to be. With me, forever. I started crying again as I stared out of the window of the inn room. Constantine had brought me here by way of an ability that he had acquired that allowed him to be one place one second and another in the next, to wait for something. I didn’t know what; he just said it was something I needed. He was taking me back to Tuscany. I had to get off this island. Whatever it was, wasn’t due for a few more days, so in the meantime I just sat there staring out of the window.
“Aefre, please, my sweet. Don’t cry,” Constantine said as he sat down next to me.
“Don’t call me that. It isn’t my name. Not anymore. I am Emily. Emily Campbell,” I said forcefully.
He stared at me silently. I knew what he was thinking.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I don’t know who I am. I am nothing, nobody without him.”
“Don’t say that,” he said sadly. “Be Emily. Mourn your loss as his wife,” he added softly.
I shook my head. “I can’t. I won’t ever be her again. She is his and no one else will ever see her again.” I brushed the tears away as I remembered Shifting back to my natural form as soon as Constantine found me crouched a little way from the battlefield, bloody and dirty and in shock, having been pulled away by Fraser’s fellow soldiers. I didn’t want anyone else to see me as her. But who was I? I was not Aefre, I certainly was not Elizabeth, nor Mary, and I couldn’t be Emily.
“Just don’t call me anything. I don’t want a name. Please, Constantine, can we just leave here?”
“Soon, I promise.”
I sighed and continued to just sit and stare and cry.
T he mysterious thing arrived a couple of days later and when Constantine told me we could finally leave, I was relieved. I wanted to be as far away as possible from that dreaded place. Even London was still too close, still too connected. Mind you, Italy wasn’t exactly high on my list of places I wanted to go either with all of its connotations, but I didn’t want to be alone, so I would allow Constantine to take me there. He stood me up and pulled on my cloak.
I just stood there and let him do it. The door to the room opened and in walked the only other person I wanted to see then, and my heart thumped. “Devon,” I said as he strode forward to me and picked me up. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I would have been here sooner, but I had business that I couldn’t just vanish from. Nice trick by the way,” he said to Constantine, who just grimaced at him. Still no love lost there then.
“You should have come back with me right away. Your sire needs you.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “He is here now. Are you alone?” I peered over his shoulder expecting a charge in tow.
He looked over his shoulder in confusion. “Yes, I am alone.”
I smiled a weak half-smile, relieved he was alone, “You are back then?”