Prologue Sebastian #3
The thought is irrational. I am aware it is irrational. Gwyn has been dead for centuries, her freckles and her bright eyes all of it gone, all of it dust and old memory. My feet carry me forward anyway, across the courtyard toward the gate, toward the red hair glowing in the fading dusk.
She turns.
It is not her. Her face is unfamiliar, and her eyes are the wrong color. The resemblance that seemed so certain from across the courtyard dissolves as she steps into clearer light. She passes through the gate and disappears without ever knowing I was there.
I stop walking.
“What’s wrong?” Arthur asks from somewhere behind me.
“Nothing.” My voice remains level. It has had centuries of practice. “I thought I saw someone I knew.”
He does not press. We stand in the empty courtyard while full dark settles over the ruins. Arthur breaks the silence first.
“This life is not what I would have chosen.”
I look at him.
“I didn’t choose any of it,” he says. The eager young historian who was talking about the empire a moment ago is gone.
Something quieter has come to the surface.
“I was nineteen. I was sick. Everyone else in the healing house was already dead or close. I couldn’t move.
I lay there for days listening to the others go quiet one by one. ”
Arthur is not looking at me. He is looking at the dark arch of the gate where the tourist with the red hair walked through and vanished.
“I kept thinking how unfair it was. There was so much of the world I hadn’t seen yet. I didn’t want to die in that room with the smell of sickness and the sound of flies.”
A pause. I wait patiently. Arthur draws a slow breath before continuing.
“One of the nurses came to my bed. I thought she was going to close my eyes. She leaned down over me and her eyes were red.” He touches the side of his neck. “She asked if I wanted to live. I nodded. That was all she needed.”
“She turned you,” I say.
“She turned me. When I woke she told me the rules. Stay hidden. Keep away from family in the first years. She told me about Ruth’s faction, warned me about the hunting, warned me about the sun.” He is quiet for a moment. “Then she left. I never saw her again. I don’t even know her name.”
A female vampire with red eyes who found a dying boy in a sick house and offered him a choice, then vanished without leaving a name. I turn it over in my mind, looking for something familiar in the shape of it.
Nothing comes.
“Have you tried to find her?” I ask.
“I’ve never left my village,” he says plainly. “Not once since the day she made me. I have people there.” His voice changes on the word people. It takes on something careful and warm. “My sister Beatrice. She’s eighty-six and blind. I don’t think she knows what I am but she knows I look after her.”
Eighty-six. A living human sister. I was right about his age. Less than a century, this one, still young enough that the people he was born alongside have not all finished dying yet.
“But one day,” he says, and just like that the eagerness is back. “One day I’ll go. The mountains, the oceans, the cities that don’t sleep. Everything the nurse told me was out there.”
“We have nothing but time,” I tell him.
He grins at that. A real grin, unguarded. I have not seen that particular expression in a very long time. We continue walking while Arthur asks about places beyond his village and where I have been. I answer what I can, though his questions soon return to Morsvyenn.
He has studied every surviving account of the empire, most of them inaccurate. But his enthusiasm is too sincere to interrupt.
Hours pass without either of us noticing.
The moon crosses the open ceiling of the great hall while we wander from one ruined chamber to another, trading fragments of history for questions about the world beyond these walls.
By the time we return to the courtyard, the darkness has begun to thin along the eastern horizon.
“It’s almost dawn,” Arthur says, glancing east. The sky above the hills is still dark but he is young enough to feel the approaching sun as a pressure in his bones. “We should find somewhere to lay dormant.”
I would be fine in daylight. The sun does not touch Strigons the way it touches their descendants. But explaining that would mean explaining what I am and I have no interest in that conversation tonight.
“Go on,” I tell him. “I’ll manage.”
“My house isn’t far.” He tilts his head south. “Beatrice won’t mind. She is accustomed to unexpected guests.” He pauses. “Not that you are unexpected in an unwelcome way. I only mean she will not be startled by a stranger.”
I consider refusing. It would be easy to walk away into the fading darkness and leave this young vampire to his village, his blind sister and the small life he has so carefully preserved.
But there is something about Arthur that makes the refusal difficult.
The politeness and earnestness remind me of my friendship with Arescaine.
I miss my brothers.
“All right,” I say. “If you insist.”
He grins again and draws breath to say something.
The words do not arrive.
A violent impact tears Arthur from where he stands. He slams against the stone wall and his head leaves his neck. The ash blooms outward in a slow, soft cloud. It drifts through the still air and settles on the cobblestones like gray snow.
Where Arthur stood there is nothing.
I turn.
A figure steps out from the shadow of the eastern tower. The voice that reaches me is musical and light. I have been hearing it in my worst memories for a thousand years.
“Hello, Sebastian.” She tilts her head and the fading moonlight catches her face. “Did you miss me?”