Page 77 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

Instead, I just jerk my hand back, like I accidentally touched something so cold it burns. Then I step away, and away, and away, until my back is against the door. And as I do, his facade starts to fall. Whatever trick he was going to play, he puts it aside. He can’t pretend—he is himself again.

“You know I had to try, right?” he says.

I can’t answer, however. Tears have stopped up my throat.

And I don’t even care if he knows said tears are there. Nothing seems to matter anymore—not even him seeing how weak I’ve become. Just a shell of myself, weeping over a man who wasn’t even real. That Viking he once was, that innocent, good man—he died centuries ago, in some village, when a vampire took his life. This vampire stood before me, I think.

The one that Phone made Cassie and Nancy restore.

They gave him back his memories, and here he is.

This beast.

“If you don’t leave now, I will kill you,” I say, sure when I do that he will refuse. He will fight me. If he does, some part of me thinks, I will most likely actually just lay down and die. So I suppose it’s a good thing that his expression shifts, from faintly amused to something I can’t read at all. Something I probably could if he were still the man who remembered how to show emotion on his face.

Instead of someone who has no idea at all.

There’s nothing inside him, I think, as he steps back, back, into the shadows.

Sinks into them, really, slow enough that I see them swallow him right down to the dying spark in his eyes. Then he simply turns to mist, and melts away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Of course I don’t blame Cassie or Nancy. They thought I was the one asking them to restore his memories. They thought I was the one begging them. They show me on their phones—lumps of nothing that have no more sentience than a stone—and I see my Phone, my dearest friend, persuading them by pretending to be me.

Though I don’t really blame her, either, if I’m being honest.

It’s my own fault for not paying attention. I just thought she was being extra quiet. I just thought she was grumpy that I was doing things she disapproved of. I even understood why she did it, all things considered.

And I should have done something about it.

But instead I let myself get swept away.

So now here we are.

Me lying on my stomach on the couch that still smells like him, watching reruns of Friends and Mork & Mindy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While Phone tries to tell me she is sorry. “I really did think that he was secretly dangerous,” she says, for the seventieth time. But I can’t say anything in return.

Robin Williams just said something too soft and gentle.

And it makes me think about how much the world isn’t like that anymore. We don’t value kindness, we don’t think earnestness is anything good. All the sincerity and love and wonder have been drained right out of us, and somehow in that moment this seems to me like the most excruciating horror I can imagine. Worse than that time I accidentally turned my own arm inside out while trying to make my skin impenetrable. Worse than the feeling I get when he shows up for the first time in one of my lives.

Though of course I accept I may just be sad about other things.

Like how impossibly lonely I have been for so many centuries.

I think it’s why I get up and walk right out the door. She calls after me, but I don’t listen—not even when she tells me, “You’re just in your pajamas.” Because I am, but I don’t really see why that matters. I’m a witch, I can wear whatever I want. I can do whatever I want, too. I can get right on my good umbrella, and kick off in the middle of Main Street, and fly myself to the fucking moon if I feel like it.

It’s not as if anyone can see me doing magic.

Nobody has seen me my whole life—except for him. He saw all my power, and all my lives, and a million other things that I didn’t even know myself. Like the idea that I am kind. Am I honestly, I think, as I soar into the night sky. Because really, I never imagined I was until I saw it through his eyes.

And he was just a dream, anyway.

What could have been, if everything had been different. All the way back to the beginning—or, at least, the beginning I can remember. Sometimes I think there must have been more lives, more than just two hundred years ago. But this is what I have for certain. Whitby, the cliffs—the ones I somehow find myself at a few hours later. Freezing cold and too numb to use magic to warm myself up, the salt-sharp wind blowing my hair just as it did back then, the ocean like a dark shroud, spread out below. This was where we first met, I know.

He said:

“A beautiful night for a stroll.”