CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN || ELI #2
And then everything human in him went quiet, buried under the icy, sharp-edged predatory instincts of a vampire.
His horror and pain receded into nothingness.
In the next moment, as he looked down at me, I was just a means to an end—a bit of pleasure he was done with now.
He could hardly remember why any of it had mattered at all.
The idea that he had ever been able to love anything was a trivial human notion. Silly and beneath him.
“Brother?” Thierry asked hesitantly. His voice wavered. He still didn’t understand what had just happened or why.
But when Nicolas turned to his twin, there was a wide smile on his face and a vast emptiness in his heart.
Thierry recoiled.
And then Magnus laughed, his eyes lighting up with sick pleasure at what he had done.
Revulsion filled me, and I pulled Nicolas close. I felt his pain keenly as his heart broke all over again.
I chose this, Nicolas whispered, sounding stunned. There was a moment when I could have denied it, but I didn’t.
You didn’t know what you were choosing. This wasn’t your fault, I told him fiercely. It was never your fault. Magnus did this.
The pain Nicolas felt in that moment—the loss of everything that could have been—tore through both of us. I held him through it, wrapping my arms around him while he wept. And though something within him was breaking, I knew, deep in my bones, that something else was breaking free.
The person he had always been, buried underneath everything else. The man—hardly more than a boy—that I had fallen in love with at first sight, lifetimes ago.
Faces surged through our shared memory, and I somehow knew they were the faces of his victims. The first few, after Magnus had released him, were all innocent people.
His guilt was a crushing thing, and he tried to shield me from that too. Don’t look, Eli. Please.
Loving you means accepting the good and the bad. I held him tighter, putting every ounce of conviction I could into my words. This is who you were, Nicolas. It’s what you were made into. You didn’t choose this. It isn’t who you are now.
Then I saw Nicolas, early in his transformation, as he stalked the shadows of alleyways in the middle of the night, searching for prey to slake his thirst. Then a woman’s voice split the night as she cried out for help.
It was cut off suddenly.
Nicolas moved forward silently, drawn to the sound, scarcely aware of what he was doing or why.
He turned a corner and watched as a drunken man pressed himself against a frightened young woman in the filthy alleyway. He had one hand over her mouth, and his other was trying to pull up her skirts.
In that instant, the predator in Nicolas saw an opportunity to dominate another beast. He moved in a blur of speed, wrenching the man off the young woman and flinging him to the ground.
The woman fled at once, running through the alleyway. Nicolas considered going after her but decided against it. Her blood would have satisfied his appetite, but not the deeper desire that had suddenly taken root in him—of turning another predator into his prey.
The man climbed to his hands and knees, blood oozing from his lip. Nicolas’s gaze zeroed in on it, his fangs dropping.
The man, not understanding the danger he was in, drew a dagger and darted forward.
Nicolas sidestepped him easily. A cold smile twisted across his lips. There was something immensely satisfying about prey that fought back, wasn’t there?
The man turned and lunged at him again with a grunt of fury.
Nicolas caught him by the shoulders, his grip hard enough to crush bone, and backed him into the wall—exactly where he had held the young woman. The man let out a sharp cry of pain, abruptly helpless in the adamantine clutches of a hungry vampire.
The dagger clattered to the ground.
His wide, disbelieving eyes met Nicolas’s in the darkness. His lips parted—perhaps to scream—but Nicolas clamped his palm over the man’s mouth.
And then he drank.
That was the first time I realized I preferred to feed from dangerous humans. Nicolas’s mental voice was tight with guilt and grief. Eventually, my criteria became far more… discerning.
I caught the bitter tone of his thoughts. You probably saved that young woman’s life, I assured him. Or at least spared her from experiencing something vile.
Does that make it right? Nicolas wondered. I took his life, Eli. I killed him in that filthy alleyway. And I didn’t do it out of a sense of justice. I did it because I enjoyed it.
If you hadn’t stopped him, he would have hurt her—and probably would have done it again and again, until someone else eventually stopped him.
I’ve never been a hero, Eli. I’ve always been a monster. My intentions have never been pure or good.
I understood his horror, his desire to push it all away—his revulsion at what he had done. But he needed to know that while I didn’t condone his actions, I understood that he had protected innocent people. That still counted, regardless of his intentions.
Look, none of this is great. But your actions are what actually matter—and their consequences. Whether you planned to be a hero or not, you can’t deny that you’ve saved innocent people over the years, even while doing terrible things.
Before he could reply, the vision changed, and we were in the howling tunnel I had seen after Eric attacked me.
Dozens of voices—all of them mine—spoke at once, overlapping words and languages. Each one was a lifetime, a snapshot of who I was. They were all versions of myself that had lived before, each unaware of the continuity of experience we shared.
And I was all of them now—the sum total of everything that had come before. But none of them were me.
“This is astonishing,” Nicolas breathed. He was beside me, though neither of us had any form to speak of. “These are your past selves, aren’t they?”
As if they had heard him, the voices stopped at once—all except for one.
“Nicolas?”
Beside me, my vampire went very still. He recognized the voice all too well.
An image formed before us: the man Nicolas had loved while human—the version of me he had killed at Magnus’s urging. The young man with olive skin, dark eyes, and a thick French accent. The son of a bootmaker who had dared to fall in love with a noble.
“Eliott?” he said, somehow managing to speak aloud. “How?”
The young man reached out to him, then vanished into a puff of smoke. The tunnel went eerily silent, but I could feel dozens of sets of eyes on us—my past selves, all of them watching.
Then Nicolas froze as it clicked into place for him. The dreams you wrote about in your journal. How you knew my true name. How you knew about Thierry—
Nicolas, it’s okay.
But it isn’t! His grief and shame rolled through us both, causing the connection to shatter. Nicolas’s bedroom rushed back into focus. It isn’t okay at all!
Though only the bedside lamp was on, casting the room in a dim glow, I still blinked against the sudden brightness. It seemed too harsh after the warm, comfortable darkness—the immense feeling of safety at having been inside each other’s shared mental space.
Pressing my fingers to my neck, I found I was no longer bleeding. I didn’t feel as light-headed or woozy as I might have expected. He hadn’t taken much blood—probably less than a pint. He had been exceptionally gentle with me, because that was who he was now.
Nicolas’s mind was still pressed against mine, almost a physical presence. Happiness surged through me, bringing a smile to my lips. Strange that I had ever doubted telepathy could be possible.
Well, the world was certainly a far stranger place than I had ever given it credit for, wasn’t it?
But my smile faltered when I met Nicolas’s gaze, which was filled with a mix of horror and accusation.
“How long have you known?” he demanded. His words sounded odd when spoken aloud—duller than his mental voice, which had been rich with emotion and context. Speaking aloud was a pale imitation of real communication.
“Since you saved my life,” I said, feeling my brows draw together as confusion rippled through me at his reaction.
“That’s when I knew for sure. But on some level, I think I’ve known ever since the night we met.
And, I guess, even before that. I’ve always dreamed of you. I just thought you weren’t real.”
“You should have told me that you were… him.”
But his expression was all wrong—closed down and remote. His thoughts churned with grief and anger, a gathering storm that threatened to destroy everything.
“Nicolas—”
“You kept this from me.”
I grimaced. It wasn’t as though I had been sitting on it for ages—I had only halfway believed it until just now. But he wasn’t entirely wrong. Deep down, I knew that I hadn’t shared the truth because I wasn’t sure how he would react.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I was—I was afraid.”
“Of me.” His expression collapsed, becoming oddly neutral. Only his trembling lips gave him away. “At last, you’re frightened of me. And with good reason.”
He rose to his feet, as if to leave, and I reached forward, grabbing his wrist.
“Never.”
Nicolas hesitated. He could easily have pulled free—I didn’t have the strength to stop him. But I knew he didn’t really want to.
“But I killed you.”
“You were a newborn vampire, commanded to feed by your maker. You didn’t understand what you were yet. You didn’t know you wouldn’t be able to stop. He lied to you.”
“Eli—”
“You didn’t know it was me, either. You wouldn’t have if you had known. That’s why Magnus hooded us—because you would have fought him with everything you had if you’d known.”
“Eli, stop.”
“No!” I snapped, glaring him down. “Nicolas, you told me that no one knows why old souls keep coming back. But I do know why! I’ve been coming back for you. Because I love you. I’ve always loved you—for lifetimes.”
He stared at me, outraged. “How can you even stand to be in the same room with me, knowing what I did to you?” His voice rose, but I heard the despair in it. “To countless victims?”
“Nicolas, I forgive you.”
The coldness crumbled from his expression all at once, and he let out a sharp sound that was half gasp, half sob. And I knew through the bond that both of us realized, in that moment, he had been waiting eight centuries for exactly this—for an absolution that shouldn’t have been possible.
“What?” he managed, his words choked. “But how can you—”
I rose from the bed to join him. Then I gathered him into my arms, holding him close. “I came back for you, Nicolas,” I breathed. “And I always will. I forgive you. I forgive you for everything.”
“Eli,” he whispered into my shoulder, his voice breaking around my name. “Eli.”
“I’m here,” I replied, speaking around the sudden, searing lump in my throat. “We’re here, and we’re together again. Everything will be okay now. I promise.”
Because no matter what else happened, Nicolas and I had found each other after so many lifetimes apart.
And I was never going to lose him again.