Chapter 3
Cristian
Ihung in a void so complete it was an insult to nothingness. Time had no slope. Memories arrived in fragments, then fell away. I grasped at them the way a drowning man clutches rope, though rope itself had become an abstraction.
Betrayal. Poison. Latin chanting threading through the chaos. Pain in my chest. The cold of stone under me. Between them, there was the loop of base impressions that came and went and came again and again.
Black.
Silence.
Regret.
Hunger.
Sleep.
It was my litany. Small consolation.
I am undone. A relic. A wretched beast sealed beneath the earth, cursed to rot beneath God’s discarded stars.
Dramatics came easily to me. The theater of my ruin pleased me in a way that made me hate myself.
Then, after how much time I could not begin to guess at, light cut through the rest of it all. Not a distant star. Not a mercy. A precise, obtrusive brightness. It struck me like a blade.
Have the heavens opened? Has my torment at last come to its end? My first reaction was not prayer. It was a snarl contained in the deepest part of my mind.
A pull seized me, the persistent tug of a line threading through my ribs and knotting at my soul. It had intent, and held me with a stubbornness that felt familiar and unacceptable.
Something urged me upward. Energy hummed through my limbs, alien and vivid after so long in the void. A single thread had found me. It did not loosen. It did not falter.
I realized then that I had awakened—that someone had woken me. The realization was not one of joy. It was recognition of an injustice corrected only to begin anew.
My fingers twitched as if testing the world.
Muscles contracted with almost comical reluctance.
When I opened my eyes, I met a rawness of light I had not measured in three centuries.
Everything around me blurred into formless shapes.
Where the magic that sealed me in the coffin had been, that ever-persistent tug now coiled, searing through my bones and leaving me ragged with want.
Then a sound—ridiculous and utterly alive—cut through the void with language from a world I did not know. It should have made no difference. Yet, it did.
The voice said, “Cool, cool, love that for me. Latin in the murder cellar. Fucking classic. At least I’m going to die in a cardigan.”
The tone was light, female. Slurred enough to mark intoxication. Sharp enough to be human. Or a witch. I did not know the patterns of modern idiom, but I understood mockery. I cataloged it and returned it with all the courtesy of a man used to silence.
The witch mocks me now. Let her.
Shapes resolved into a female. Her face—pale, freckled perhaps—held astonishment and that peculiar delight people showed when surprised.
She was not what I expected.
Her brown hair tumbled in careless curls, as if it refused to obey.
She wore yellow—bright and indecent—that dared the darkness to swallow her.
Small lemons adorned her dress. The neckline square, her shoulders bare.
A white cloak hung from her arms, pinned with a badge that read something I could not yet decipher.
On her feet, heavy black boots, scuffed and practical.
Have the women of this age abandoned corsets entirely?
I cataloged details because the world required it. Her legs were bare, scandalously so, and I was both offended and fascinated by the sight. She clutched a glass bottle as though it were both courage and defense.
She was intoxicated and fierce, observing me as if I was a specimen she neither trusted nor meant harm.
Pain seared my chest. Not the phantom pains of old wounds.
A terrible, precise hunger fanned from my core.
I had not felt this for nearly four hundred years.
It was not desire. Desire was polite. This was directive.
It tightened every fiber of me. My nakedness struck me then, but there was nothing to be done about it.
Her scent came next, an intrusion on my senses. Ripe plum. Blood-orange peel. Cinnamon. Salt. It mapped itself along my memory like a language I understood without studying. Warmth. Human warmth. The pulse at her throat sang a rhythm that called to something older than time itself.
The world narrowed to the sound of her pulse. Steady. Close. I focused on it, unable to do anything else. The urge to move forward, to feed, was instant and absolute.
Instinct pulled. Instinct demanded. It was only discipline, honed from centuries, that pulled me back. I had never given in to that hunger without purpose.
A small, sharp sound escaped the woman’s mouth. The syllables of her surprise meant nothing to me, but their cadence did. She repeated it until it became a chant:
“Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.”
A phrase I did not know. But repetition, like ritual, was familiar.
Panic made the woman graceless. Her knuckles tightened around the neck of the bottle, then she threw it. The red glass struck my cheek with a dull crack, scattering droplets that smelled faintly of fruit and oak.
I did not move. To move meant to reveal what I was, to surrender the small, precise thread of control that still bound me.
She stood rigid, breathing hard. Then, quieter, more to herself than to me, she muttered, “Great. Now I’m out of wine.”
The absurdity of it almost unmoored me.
I breathed once, shallow and slow. The air trembled in my lungs. My thoughts roared against my restraint.
I am awake.
I am bound by something new.
I must not lunge.
I am going to lunge.
These assertions came not as lines of poetry but as military orders.
The final one had the bitter humor of inevitability.
I held myself in place through force, memory, and the delicate thread that had taken hold of me upon my awakening.
The binding pulled like a leash with teeth.
It kept me grounded even as every part of me leaned forward. Anchored to this mortal.
I had been turned into a vampire against my will.
The Sovereign Court had hunted me, wanting to chain me to their service.
I had been trapped inside a coffin for longer than any mind should have to withstand.
Now, I stood in a new kind of confinement, one created the moment this woman opened the lid and pulled me back into the world.
The bond that tied me to this woman was not gentle. It was exact. It held me in place with a grip I could feel in every cell of my body. It told me where she was. It told me when she moved. It told me what direction I would pull toward if I gave up even a fraction of my control.
I was tied to a mortal woman who had touched my prison and dragged me into hers without knowing it.
I stayed where I was and forced my focus to the floor between us. Control and discipline had kept me alive this long. I could not let go of it now.
She backed away, eyes wide in a manner that made her face more open than any portrait had been in my memory. More words tumbled from her mouth, so rapid and panicked that I could not parse all of them.
She was beautiful in the honest way of living things. She was alive in a way that made my old bones hurt.
There are moments when history collapses into one human interaction and you know, with the clarity of a man who has been buried and then resurrected, that life will not be the same after.
Standing there, feeling the hunger and the tether and the absurd sting on my cheek from a broken glass bottle, I understood that the world had not returned to me for punishment alone.
It had returned to let something begin.