Page 80 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

Holy shit, it’s not coming. “And you don’t think that’s strange?” I gasp.

Yet he stays so blasé.

“Memory is a funny thing.”

“Not that fucking funny.”

“They were whole other lives, Freya.”

He says the words wearily until he gets to that last one. It just comes out of him, and when it does it seems to bite him in two. He stops dead, his breath hitching like he can’t hold on to it, his face suddenly turned away.

But it’s okay.

I see it clearly all the same. I see Freya.

I understand clearly, for the first time, that there were other lives than the three I recall. Older lives, much older. And her at the beginning, her most forgotten of all. Not forgotten, erased somehow, I think. But that’s too unbearable to consider. I can’t really consider it, because everything about Freya is suddenly flooding in.

My home in the wilds, made of reeds and wood and moss. The fire that smelled like honey always burning in the center, with the hole I made in reality for the smoke to pour through. My bed of leaves, my salted fish, my familiar. My familiar was a scrying stone that spoke to me.

My familiar has always been this way, I realize in a rush. Like whatever has made me forget all of this made me forget her, too. In the twenties she was my mirror. In the eighties she was my Walkman.

Phone, I think, half panicked. Phone.

And then her real name comes:

Agnatha.

She was Agnatha, she is Agnatha. I can hear her voice then, different but the same, saying to me, There is a man come. He is powerful, and as tall as a great tree, and he stands just beyond the edges of the swamp. He intends to walk across it and run you through, at the behest of his father, who cannot stand to see a witch live.

And then I see him—as he was.

He bursts into my home, a sword in his hand already, legs thick with mud up to his thighs, hair to his waist and utterly wild, chest inexplicably bare and heaving. The look on his face saying, I am to do my duty. But the second he sees the magic in my hands, my dark eyes, my amusement at his daring …

“You tossed your sword aside and fell to your knees. Then said you could not strike me down because—” I start to say, eyes half blind with some other world I’m abruptly seeing, voice hushed and full of wonder. Then he finishes for me.

“Because you are the most beautiful sorceress I have ever beheld.”

And after he has it all just falls into place.

It was never a spell that made his memory-less self be awed by me.

That was just who he is inside. Who he would always be. He relived that moment of first meeting the woman I am, and his heart said all the same things. Then my heart apparently said the same things back, I think, and my face crumples all of its own accord. “And then I loved you, and you loved me, and we were one,” I say.

Though it’s the look of hope on his face that really hits hard.

He goes to step forward, and barely restrains himself.

“We were,” he says, so breathlessly I can hardly stand it.

“Until I died.”

“You did, you did. They came in the night and you were gone on my return.”

“Your father’s men. They made me think they were you and slit my throat.”

“Yes, yes—they used a vampire who took on other forms.”

“And then he took your life, too,” I say, so sure that this must be the final piece of the puzzle that I laugh over the way it fits. A kind of strange joy fills me, and I look up into his face expecting confirmation. But instead he just looks at me, lost.