Chapter 37. William
william
William is officially on his own.
After Lenny tasted him, Osorio returned as if he had been telepathically summoned and said, “Come with me.”
William followed him back through the tunnel, expecting some kind of debriefing. Instead, once they got aboveground, he said, “Nate will be in touch.”
“Lenny did not give me any answers—”
But Osorio was already gone.
Now that it is over, William finds himself free for the first time in his existence. No expectations, no destiny, no place in the world.
He walks along the Seine in the early morning hours, ruminating about what comes next for him.
Nate has not called yet, and as William’s return flight is in January, he could bounce around Europe before settling on a permanent residence.
All the world unfurls before him, and every path is available for the taking …
Yet his thoughts stray to her.
He feels a physical urge to be back at Huntington with Lorena, investigating what happened to the vampires, reading a new Shakespeare play together, hearing if she will defend Dracula or condemn him, holding her body close as they dance—
No.
He shakes his head as if he could dispel those thoughts. That part of his life is over. He is a vampire, and she is human.
He does not need to think of her anymore. What he needs to do is find answers.
What happened to his family and the rest of the vampire population? Why was he placed in death-sleep? Who kept him off the manifest?
Something Lenny said about blood keeps nagging at William. The vampire suggested that it is possible for human blood to change its scent when one is turned.
And it gives William an idea of where to begin his search.
AS SOON as his plane lands at Boston Logan Airport, William’s phone is ringing nonstop with calls from Nate. He shuts off the device.
“Harvard,” he tells the cab driver.
When he gets to the Yard, William moves across campus toward the Science Center. Until, finally, he picks up the notes of an ancient and somewhat familiar musk.
The same scent he thought he smelled a few months ago.
Back then, he dismissed it as the ghost of a memory because it was not quite the same aroma. Now he has a new theory.
The musk leads him into a building and down the stairs to a faculty member’s sublevel office. The name FABIANA BAYONA is printed on the door.
He stares at the letters for a while before knocking.
“Who is it?” The woman speaks in a low voice that would not be audible to a mortal.
He swings open the door to find her standing behind an oak desk.
She has the same sharp eyebrows and intense stare as her ancestor, and William is thrust through time to when he used to visit Professor Bayona’s office to engage the man in academic debates.
Since he did not like to speak up in class back then, William would save his commentary for their one-on-one sessions.
“Who are you?” she asks again, her tone tense.
“I believe there used to be a different Professor Bayona who taught on this campus centuries ago,” says William.
“My father,” she says, curiosity softening the edges of her voice. “How do you know that?”
“He was my teacher.”
William hopes the revelation will forge a connection between them so that she might trust him. Yet Fabiana is taking too long to react.
“It’s you,” she whispers at last.
This was a mistake, William realizes at once, and he takes a step back.
“My father spoke of you often.”
She knows him.
William should not have come here. Why did he have to ruin things when he was so close to being free—?
“You were his favorite student.”
Fabiana cuts the distance between them by half.
William takes another step back and warns, “Come closer, and you will never see me again.”
“Okay,” she says, all apprehension melted from her voice. “I just can’t believe you’re here.”
“What happened to your father?” he asks her.
“When you disappeared, he assumed either you’d been turned by the vampires or killed by the Legion. It wasn’t until we received a visit that we knew which fate had befallen you.”
“Who came?”
“The Legion.” She leans back against the desk, resting her hands on the tabletop.
“They questioned my father about you. When had he last seen you, where did he think you might be, what sorts of things did you discuss in his office? They had been watching you for a while. It was no secret you were Grandsire’s favorite. ”
“For the moment,” William mutters. “A couple of decades later, he would have chosen another.”
“Maybe,” she says. “But time had other plans.”
“Grandsire betrayed me,” says William, a growliness in his voice that he cannot suppress.
He has kept that truth to himself for too long, and it is a relief to finally say it out loud. “He knew me better than anyone. He knew how much I longed to marry for love and have children. Then he turned me when I was nineteen. Against my will.”
“I understand why you’re upset,” she says, straightening. She takes a step closer, moving as one would when approaching a wild beast. “But there was a reason he did it. Something bigger than him, or you, or me.”
William glowers at her, and she stops moving. She is no more than three feet away from him.
“How do you factor into this?” he asks, suspicion coloring his voice. “Your father was human.”
“As I said, the Legion showed up at our house looking for answers, only my father would not give them any. So they took him in for ‘questioning’ at the station. When he was released six months later, he was barely more than a corpse.” She swallows back her emotion, and William is surprised to see real pain on her face.
Even though vampires grow emotionally numb over time, there is something so tangible about Fabiana’s grief. She reminds him of his parents.
“They tortured him,” she says softly. “Starved him. Destroyed him. He passed away only a few weeks later. Since my mother died in childbirth, they never had more children. Father and the household staff raised me.”
She moves toward him again, and this time William lets her. When her face is right in front of his, close enough that he can see the freckles on her nose, she looks even younger. She was probably only a couple of years older than him when she was turned.
“When Father died, I had nothing left,” she whispers. “So I sought out Grandsire. I told him what my father had done, and I asked him to either turn me or kill me. I did not want to be human anymore.”
The intensity of her gaze feels so familiar that William is both comforted and challenged by it. The same way his professor made him feel.
“Where is Grandsire now?” William stares into Fabiana’s brown eyes as if he could compel her. “Where is my family?” he presses. “Where did everyone go?”
She sighs, and the gesture is strikingly human. Since she teaches mortals all day long and pretends to be one, she must have become quite accustomed to their mannerisms.
“The Legion grew more daring,” she says.
“Individually, vampires were powerful, but we did not work well together, and the Legion was … well, legion. They functioned like a well-oiled machine, and they managed to activate all their cells across the world in a coordinated surprise attack. Only we weren’t the target. ”
Her gaze grows so shiny, it makes William wonder if she can cry. Even his parents could not summon tears after they were turned.
“They were killing human Stokers.”
William feels his jaw slacken with stupefaction.
Humans were murdering their own kind just to keep them from becoming vampires. Despite all he has read in the history books of Huntington’s library, he cannot believe they stooped so low.
Turns out there are monsters on both sides.
“That was when Grandsire announced an equally radical plan. It’s always been whispered that when he was human, he lived among the witches that once roamed this planet, before their power grew so great that they abandoned this realm.
It’s said he had a close bond with one of them, and they gifted him a special spell that they foresaw he would one day need.
They told him his blood would save the species. ”
William nods in assent because everyone knows this tale. It is part of Grandsire’s legend. The mythos around him is the reason millions of vampires voluntarily followed him. Yet it never occurred to William that the spell might be real.
Fabiana moves so close now that he wonders if she is going to kiss him. Like Anne, she has the self-assurance of a beautiful woman who is used to getting what she wants.
“My father described your eyes as purple,” she says, studying William’s gaze. He watches the way sunlight plays against the shimmery brown of her irises, making him think of tigereye.
“But it’s more than that,” she says softly. “They’re like raw amethysts that seem to reflect every shade of purple possible.”
“Please,” he says, his voice as low as hers. “I need you to tell me. What did Grandsire do?”
William wants the answer badly enough that he does not move as Fabiana’s nose brushes his cheek, and she whispers in his ear, “He used the spell to hide our species where the Legion could not follow.”
She pulls back to look him in the eye as she explains: “He displaced the vampires from the current timeline and deposited them in the far future.”
It takes William a moment to process what she means. When at last he can speak, he asks, “How far?”
“A millennium? Five hundred years? He couldn’t be sure of an exact amount.
Just long enough for the humans to forget.
Those were Grandsire’s exact words: ‘Let the humans forget us.’” Fabiana adopts a deeper voice when speaking like him.
“‘Let us fall away into the shadowed realms of myths and legends. Their fear of us shall wane, for in time, they will cease to believe in us. And thus, they will be ill-prepared when we once more rise to claim dominion over them.’”
William can picture Grandsire delivering that speech, with his perfectly coiffed black hair and silver eyes. No one knew his exact age, but by the pale silver shade of his irises, it was clear he had seen more than anyone else on the planet.
Even more than Leonardo the Bloody.
Fabiana places a hand on William’s chest, and he flashes to Anne’s immaculate red nails marking an X over his heart.
“He was a great leader. He was going to move millions of beings through time, and he sounded so confident that the spell would work—but I knew he had doubts. That was why he took out an insurance policy.”
“Us,” says William.
Fabiana nods in assent. “Grandsire summoned me. He told me he had already placed you in death-sleep for your own safety, because he knew the Legion was after you. They knew his fondness for you was his greatest weakness.”
Her hand drops from William’s chest.
“If the spell was successful, he and the rest of our kind would awaken you in the future. If not, he hoped you would make your own way. Only he did not want to leave you alone and without protection, so he asked me to stay behind and find volunteers to remain with us. We are to be your guard and answer your command.”
“Then my parents—they are with Grandsire in the future?”
Fabiana takes his hand, and from the way her eyebrows arch with pity, William senses he is not going to like her answer.
“The spell … it required Grandsire’s blood. All of it. And … his heart.”
William stares at her like he has not heard her right.
“Not just his, but others’. One hundred vampires sacrificed themselves … including your parents. They felt that as you had done your part, they needed to do theirs.”
It is like a bomb has been set off in his chest.
His parents are gone. He took for granted that time would never take them. Yet time has robbed William of everything.
He can barely think, much less speak. His whole family sacrificed themselves for the species. For him.
“I need … to process this,” William manages to say to Fabiana. “Please. Do not tell the others about me yet.”
She frowns like she does not understand. “But you are—”
“I am not who you think, Fabiana. I need some time in this world to adjust. Will you give me that?”
Fabiana stares so deeply into his eyes that William worries she has read all his secrets. “I am loyal to you,” she says at last. “I will not say anything. But…”
Her face fills with light, as if an inner sun were dawning. “You are here. That’s what matters.”
Yet William can only think of her.
Whatever chance he might have had of returning to Huntington is now truly gone. As much as he told himself that going back to the school was not realistic, some quixotic part of him still believed he might get the chance.
Even coming to Boston was only partly to find answers, and mostly to be closer to her.
He must be the universe’s ultimate fool.
A sudden warmth begins to spread from William’s heart, as if his regret were strong enough to reactivate its pumping. The heat jolts through him like a lightning bolt.
He has felt this sensation before—
Lorena is in mortal danger.
Only this time, he will not make it in time to save her.