CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN || ELI
The room fell away around us. There was only endless darkness. It should have been frightening, but instead it felt good. Warm. Safe. Safer than I had ever been, in this life or any other. Like descending into a hug—an embrace that would hold me forever.
There were hundreds of points of light around us. They looked like stars dotting the night sky—but surrounding us in all directions.
What is this? Nicolas wondered. His awe rippled through me, mixing with my own. I wasn’t sure how I knew what was his and what was mine, but I did.
Proof that we’re supposed to be together, I told him. Though we didn’t have bodies here, I still took his hand. My intention to do it was enough. That we had always been meant to be together.
Eli, what does that mean?
Before I could answer, one of the points of light came close to us. It moved quickly, becoming brighter and brighter until it filled the darkness with light.
I felt Nicolas try to put himself in front of me, as though he were willing to use his body to shield me. But it was useless—the light was coming from everywhere at once.
Images began to bloom around us.
Nicolas, younger and still human, cradling an olive-skinned man with dark hair and even darker eyes. They were pressed against a stone wall, well out of view of anyone who might happen past. In the distance, I could hear the clomping of horse hooves.
Abruptly, I could remember it: the smell of packed earth and hay, the much better scent of Nicolas’s skin, still warm from the sun we’d just been in.
The distant notes of music from the market several streets down.
The feel of his body pressed against mine—masculine and strong and vital. Alive and wanting…
That was the first man I ever loved. Nicolas sounded almost dazed with wonder. But why are the visions showing us this?
I didn’t answer him. Somehow, I knew—in a bone-deep way—that he hadn’t connected the same dots I had.
He didn’t yet understand that the olive-skinned man in the vision was me.
It was the very same life I had dreamed of since my early teenage years.
Even though it had technically happened to me when I was someone else, the memory of it still belonged to me.
I smiled a bit at the memory, savoring the innocence and exuberance of my very first love.
And I had loved Nicolas for all that he was: passionate and unfailingly kind, but also tender and mischievous when the moment moved him.
And though we both would have been expelled from the village if we’d been caught—or perhaps worse—it never stopped him from pulling me into a shadowy corner and kissing me in a way that left me breathless and gasping for more.
I wanted to drown in his touch.
In the next instant, I found myself kneeling on a cold stone floor. There was a thick cloth hood over my head, obscuring my vision.
“Let my brother and me leave,” Nicolas said, speaking in rapid-fire French. He sounded bewildered and frightened. “Please. We won’t speak a word of this to anyone!”
I wanted to cry out to him, but I couldn’t quite remember how.
Failing that, I knew I needed to escape—to wrench the hood off and run.
But though my hands weren’t bound, my body wouldn’t obey my command to move.
I remained perfectly motionless as the coldness of the floor bit through the thin fabric of my hose, my discomfort growing with each passing moment.
Even though my muscles screamed for movement, I was frozen in place like a statue.
I hadn’t understood it at the time, but the modern version of me knew why. I was under a vampire’s compulsion.
“You and your brother may both go free,” a man’s lazy, silken voice said from somewhere nearby. “Once you drink. That’s all I ask. You needn’t hurt anyone if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t understand,” Nicolas said slowly, sounding appalled. “Drink… what?”
“Oh no, I think you do understand,” the man replied, chuckling. “Come now—what does your body crave? What does it want and need?”
“No! Nicolas, don’t do it!” Thierry cried out, in the same direction as the silken voice. “Magnus, don’t do this! I am the one who should suffer your wrath, not him! I was the one who killed—”
“Silence! Or I’ll cut your wagging tongue from your head.”
Eli, I don’t—I don’t understand. Why are we seeing this?
I didn’t answer. I knew what was coming next. On some level, perhaps, I had always known.
“Do it, boy!” Magnus’s voice sharpened, growing colder. “Feed, or I’ll end your brother’s miserable life in front of you.”
Somehow, even though I hadn’t seen it back then, because Nicolas and I were connected so intimately here, I knew that his maker, Magnus, was holding a wooden stake to Thierry’s chest. Even if Nicolas couldn’t yet bring himself to use the word vampire to describe what they had become, he still knew that driving a wooden stake through Thierry’s heart would end him.
“I’ll do it,” Nicolas said. Then he paused, and I felt his anxiety. “And I don’t need to hurt them? Do you promise?”
“Of course you don’t need to hurt anyone.
” I could hear the wicked amusement in Magnus’s voice.
“Just a sip. That’s all I ask. You can stop after that, if you wish.
” His voice became soothing. But through the bond I knew the awful truth: Nicolas saw the anticipation in Magnus’s eyes.
And on some level, he understood that Magnus was lying to him.
His maker added, “After all, I can hardly let you go until you understand your new condition, can I? Why, that would be… irresponsible.”
“And you’ll let us go? You promise?” Nicolas wanted to believe him—badly. Even if, deep down, he didn’t.
“Yes. I promise that you’ll walk free tonight, if you only do as I ask.”
“I—I don’t know how.”
Magnus laughed. “Don’t be silly. Feeding is as simple for a vampire as breathing is for a mortal. Your body will instruct you on exactly how to take what you need.”
Then Nicolas’s hands gripped my past self’s shoulders hard enough to leave bruises.
He hadn’t understood his own strength yet.
There was a long pause, and the past version of me sat in disbelief that any of this could be happening—but I was unable to speak a single word.
And then came a searing pain as Nicolas’s fangs sank into my throat.
And the moment my blood touched his lips, he needed all of it.
His hunger was a wild beast, demanding to be sated.
And though I tried to cry out to him to stop—that he was hurting me—I couldn’t even scream.
Soon enough, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
The pain subsided until I didn’t feel anything at all except his lips on my skin as he drank.
And the darkness caused by the hood over my eyes was replaced with an even deeper, more total darkness.
Then my heart stopped in my chest, and I was no more.
In our first life together, Nicolas had killed me.
Because Nicolas and I were so deeply connected now, the vision didn’t end there. Instead, I saw through his eyes.
When Nicolas was done with me, he let my body slump to the ground. Then his gaze fell on the next of the three young men Magnus had brought him. And Nicolas didn’t see a person—only a way to sate his clawing, burning, inhuman hunger.
“Nicolas, stop!” Thierry cried when his twin reached for the next young man. “Not him. Don’t!”
Nicolas didn’t listen.
When he had finished, three bodies lay on the ground, and Nicolas was covered in crimson, his eyes wild with grief and horror as the spell of his frenzy finally broke.
“Hmmm,” Magnus said, tapping his forefinger against his pursed lips. “That’s usually enough by itself. I think you need a push.” Then a wicked smile transformed his face, and he pointed to my body. His silver eyes gleamed with malice. “Remove his hood.”
“I—I don’t want to,” Nicolas said, his horror choking his words to a whisper. His hand flew to his mouth as he took in what he had done. “Mon Dieu, I’ve killed them all. I didn’t mean to.”
“They were merely human,” Magnus said dismissively.
“There are plenty more where that came from. And soon you won’t be able to get enough.
” He paused, his grip on Thierry and the wooden stake tightening.
The tip of it drove into Thierry’s chest, causing a line of dark blood to pour down the front of his white shirt.
“Remove the hood, Nicolas. Do it now, or I’ll kill your brother. And I won’t give him an easy death.”
With shaking hands, Nicolas crawled forward on hands and knees until he was next to my body. Then he removed the hood from my head.
When my staring, sightless gaze met his, he let out a sharp cry of agony, his eyes wide and filled with disbelief.
For a long moment, his horror and grief were total, eclipsing everything else. He couldn’t wrench his gaze away from me—from what he had done to the only man he had ever dared to love. All of his hope collapsed in on itself like a dying star just before it goes supernova.
Through the bond, I felt it as something cold, clear, and predatory threading through him—a whisper in the back of his mind.
It carried with it the seductive promise that he didn’t have to feel any of this—the enormity of what he had done.
He could make all of the pain and guilt go away.
Didn’t he want that? After all, how could he live with this?
All he had to do was let the coldness in.
For just an instant, Nicolas wanted to give in to it, even if he didn’t understand what he was doing or what it meant, that it was something he couldn’t take back.