Chapter 5
Five
V.
My mind was elsewhere as I looked down at my viola, twisting the tuning pegs with precision that more than eight hundred years of repetition had carved into skin and bone.
But it wasn’t a complaint. My life had devolved into a familiar ritual that was calming to me.
A schedule. One that I never deviated from anymore.
Sometimes, when I’m bored, I’ll play a game with myself: trying to remember where in the world I was when this building was completed. Could I remember which kingdom was rising? Which plague was falling? It was easy to remember the past.
If I needed a harder challenge, I’d try to remember the face of the person I had last killed when this building was done.
That game was much, much harder to play.
Over the years, their faces have all blurred together like a fever dream, and the taste of their blood has tinged the edges of my memories a crimson red.
In a strange way, remembering the past grounds me when I feel the most lost. It almost makes me feel human again—almost—so I hold onto the crumbs of my forgotten memories, using them as a lifeline whenever the music isn’t enough.
These days, I seem to need the past more than ever. It’s an odd feeling. One I’m not used to.
The gnawing in my stomach brings me back to reality, and the hunger scratches at the empty chasm that grows inside me every day, but I ignore it.
I can't feed again until tomorrow. Once, every nineteen days. That’s the rule, and I never break it.
If I fed more often than that, people would start to notice things—dead bodies and strange coincidences they shouldn't be able to put together, but they do. They always do. Time and time again, humans defy all the odds and recognize the patterns I leave behind like a trail. If I disposed of my meals the way I should have, I could feed more often, but that was a luxury I didn’t deserve.
For hundreds of years I’ve wondered why nineteen is the magic number, but at this point, I don’t care anymore. It works, and as long as I’m left alone, it’s not worth questioning. My rituals allow me to survive in the shadows, and the rigid schedules have become something like a comfort to me.
Once I’ve tuned my viola, my focus shifts to the other musicians gathered in little clusters across the room. No matter where I go, they’re always the same, chatting about inconsequential human things I’ve come to find repulsive. Dates. Dinner reservations. Beautiful sunsets. New puppies.
If it were up to me, their dogs would be nothing more than a quick snack, and I’d rather gouge out my own eyes than watch another sunset.
I’ve seen too many already—every color, every horizon. Every attempt humans make to romanticize the dying of the light. They never realize how accurate the metaphor is, but I know what it means to watch the light fade as it dies. It’s my favorite pastime.
The thudding heartbeat of one of the oboists standing in the stage wing catches my attention, and my eyes focus on the steady beat of his heart pulsing at the soft spot beneath his ear.
My stomach knots with the familiar ache that haunts me every moment I don't feed, and the yearning to quench my thirst tugs me a single step in his direction before I stop myself.
My fangs throb, a dull ache beneath my gums, but I allow my body nothing more than a brief second of that small betrayal before I compose myself again.
Control is survival. Control is everything. Control is the only god I’ve ever bowed to.
I take in a single breath and smooth down the front of my jacket.
After more than eight hundred years, my existence has narrowed to two things: feeding to survive, and music. The rhythm of it all keeps my monstrous heart beating—just enough to stave off the rot that tries to fester within my chest.
But each night I step onto a stage, I can sense it… the growing dissonance. My unraveling. Each night I’m faced with the quiet certainty that one of these performances will eventually be my last, and that the end will finally consume me.
Soon. That much I know. I can’t feel it.
I don’t think I can do this much longer.
My gaze catches on a thin crack between the blood red stage curtain, and I’m able to see a sliver of people already waiting in their seats. It’s something I’ve seen a million times before. The sight is like an old friend, but still, a chill runs down my spine.
For the past ten minutes, I’ve felt a tremor in the air. It’s small and delicate, barely noticeable even to me, but of course I do notice it because it’s insistent and I cannot place it. Rarely now are there things that I cannot place.
I wondered for a moment if it was the feeling of stage fright, perhaps, though I’m not sure I’d ever felt it before.
I close my eyes, narrowing my focus on the feeling until I realize it’s not a feeling at all, but a heartbeat.
Somehow the rhythm feels familiar, like a memory I had no intention of remembering, but the idea was a fantasy at best. Even though my life has been reduced to nothing more than bloodlust, recognizing a heartbeat was impossible.
Even for me.
Still, when my eyes open again, I can’t seem to tear them away from the crowd.
My mind might be playing tricks on me. It wouldn’t be the first time, but I was sure the faint resonance vibrated through the wood of the viola in my hands, traveling into the very marrow of my bones.
It felt wrong. I narrowed my eyes a second too late to see anything as the stage lights blinked their warning, and the musicians all began to shuffle into place.
Irritation flared in response—at myself, at the phantom pulse in the dark teasing me, at the way my senses stretched toward it like a starving animal sniffing out a promise.
This was ridiculous.
A flicker of annoyance made me tick my jaw.
It was absolutely ridiculous to let myself get worked up.
Especially when it was because of a human with just another heartbeat.
They were a dime a dozen, really. Nothing more than food and the occasional source of entertainment to pass the time.
Or, they would’ve been if I didn’t kill my victims as quickly as possible.
Enjoyment with them wasn’t on the menu anymore.
I hadn’t been a human in nearly a millennium, let alone played with one.
My life was reduced to nothing more than music. It was safer this way.
My footsteps were silent as I made my way across the dark stage to my seat, bathing in the red lights as if they recharged my very molecules.
I tried to pretend like I didn't hear the whisper of something forbidden as it stirred in the hollow beneath my ribs, pressing against the rotten cocoon that lingered within me that was made of dying flesh and sin. A recognition of something I shouldn’t possess.
A hunger that was buried a long time ago.
I took my seat and closed my eyes, counting the footsteps of the conductor as he made his way on stage.
Once I got to fifteen, I raised my viola and bow, but instead of being able to finish my count to thirty, my attention was drawn away from the conductor when I heard the heartbeat in the audience stutter.
Almost as if my movements alone were in control of its syncopation.
The idea that I might control someone that much just by raising my bow sent a shiver down my spine, but I did my best to ignore it.
I’ve been alone for too long to give into the desire to find someone to control.
It was just another one of my flaws that have tortured me, forcing me to bury it deep within the confines of my soul.
When the conductor stepped onto his platform, I opened my eyes again, his baton already raised to signal the beginning of our performance, but despite where my eyes were affixed, it wasn’t the conductor that controlled my mind.
No, it was the familiar scent that lingered in the room, swirling around the other unsuspecting humans as they waited with baited breaths for the music to begin.
But the scent that plagued me was impossible to ignore.
Warm skin, mixed with lavender and rain from a memory that I had sworn was only a figment of my imagination.
A sliver of fear threaded through the fabric of longing that wouldn’t release me from its clenches.
One that’s impossible to mistake, once I’ve placed it.
It was a scent from another life—one I never allowed myself to go back to after I’d moved on—and the realization was a dagger to my chest. My body screamed at me to look, to confirm what I already knew, but I didn’t give in to what my body wants. I never do.
Instead, my bow moved in time with the rest of the orchestra as I relived a memory that’s haunted my dreams for the past four years.
One that’s forced me to stroke myself in the middle of the night to the sound her ragged breaths had made when she had finally seen me all those years ago.
A girl, unremarkable in every way, with dark hair and sad eyes, standing alone at the bar.
I had regarded her as nothing more than food then, watching her for almost an hour as I tried to determine if she deserved to be my next victim. She was exactly the type I found easiest to dispose of. Alone. Without friends. Bottom of the barrel.
Those were the easiest to kill because people tended to not notice they went missing. They were my favorite people to hunt, but once I had stalked her outside, hiding in the shadows as I waited for the perfect moment to end her miserable life once and for all, something unexpected happened.
For the first time in centuries, I had changed my mind.