27. Isolde #2
“Hmm.” Isolde only hoped Everett was loyal enough to Anselm not to stake her or Selene while they were here, but given his previous track record…
her hopes were low. Now didn’t seem like the right time to ask that particular question, though.
“I have another question about Everett. When Anselm struck him, I smelled his blood, and… it smelled like yours, even though you’re not related to Everett by blood. How is that possible?”
“It’s got something to do with the Wolf that turns us,” Bastian said. “Wolves don’t smell the finer intricacies of blood like Vampires do, but I’ve been told something in the blood changes after we’re turned. Anselm turned both me and Everett, so it would make sense for our blood to smell similar.”
Isolde stayed silent after that, watching Bastian. His eyes were red, his face still streaked with the remnants of his tears. He looked… sad. Tired. Like the events of the last two hours had drained every ounce of energy from his bones.
There was something else there, too, in the slight pinch between his brows and the twist at the corner of his mouth. Isolde couldn’t be sure, but it almost looked like… longing.
“Do you miss it here?” she asked.
Bastian’s head jerked upright, like the question surprised him. He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again, his brows pinching even closer together.
“Yes.” The word was barely a whisper, like he was afraid to say it out loud. “I do.”
It was one thing to touch Bastian when he was falling apart or when he’d asked her to, and another to do it now that he was calm, but Isolde didn’t let herself think too hard on it as she reached out and laid her hand on his knee.
“It’s okay to miss it, you know,” she told him.
“Even if some of your worst memories happened here.”
“There were good memories, too,” he said.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“It’s beautiful here, when it isn’t the dead of winter.
The sun shines through all the windows so everything is all…
warm and golden.” His expression eased, just a little, as he stared toward the curtained window.
“And outside, it’s green, for miles and miles.
The grass is the softest I’ve ever felt, and Everett and I used to just run and run and run for hours every day.
We’d swim in the lake, too, and the water was so cold and clear it made us feel weightless. ”
Isolde felt it, then—the same longing that saturated Bastian’s voice. She wished she could experience this place the way he had, with the sun on her face for hours on end, the heat of summer warming her bones.
But she never would. Not like that.
“That sounds nice,” she said softly.
Bastian reached up and covered her hand with his, trapping it beneath the warmth of his own palm. “Maybe someday I’ll be able to forgive Anselm, and Everett will forgive me, and I’ll be able to come back.”
“I hope so,” Isolde murmured. That was something she’d desperately wanted for herself since she turned. To be able to go home again.
Bastian stroked his thumb along the curve of her wrist. “What about you?” he asked, as if he’d sensed the direction of her thoughts. “What was your home like, before Bloodhaven?”
Isolde stared down at her lap. Part of her wanted to pull her hand away from Bastian’s grip, and the other—the very, very foolish part of her—couldn’t bear to give up that lifeline.
“My family has an estate west of Aaldenburg,” she told him. “Not as big as this, but it’s surrounded by grass and trees, and there’s a little stream in the back that I used to like to read beside in the summer.”
“You haven’t been back since you turned?”
“Once.” Isolde swallowed hard as the memory wedged its way into her mind, painful and unwanted. “I’d been missing for a while, after I didn’t make it home from Aaldenburg. My family was overjoyed that I was alive, until I told them that I… well, that I wasn’t.”
Her mother’s warm brown eyes, widening with horror.
The soul-rending scream she’d let out as she scrambled backward, falling over the tea table in her haste to get away.
The way her father had burst into the room, sword drawn, and shouted for her to leave.
Demon, they’d called her. Monster . Aberration .
“Anyway,” Isolde said briskly, before the prickling at the backs of her eyes could become something worse. “I miss it there, I suppose, but it’s better in Bloodhaven, where the humans see us more as protectors than as… bloodsucking demons, as Everett would no doubt say.”
“I’m sorry about him,” Bastian said. His thumb was still making gentle sweeps across her wrist, and Isolde forced herself to focus on that, rather than the lingering tightness in her throat.
“And about Seraphine and Calden. Under any other circumstances, I’d have knocked their teeth in for disrespecting you and Selene like that. ”
“It’s alright,” Isolde told him. “As a Vampire, I’d be a fool to expect anything less from Wolves.”
“Yes, well.” Bastian’s hand slipped further down Isolde’s arm, his fingertips hot against her skin as they slid beneath the cuff of her sleeve. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re a monster.”
Isolde blinked up at him. His eyes were steady and clear now, the pain gone, and the look on his face…
it was like he could see right through her.
Like he understood her in a way that no one else had since she turned.
It should have shocked her, having Bastian, of all people, tell her she wasn’t a monster, but those words on his tongue sounded like the most natural thing he could have said.
He might have been a Wolf, but Isolde didn’t think he was a monster, either. Not even close.
She saw herself in him. The hurt, the anger, the longing for a version of himself that someone else had killed, who he could never find his way back to, no matter how hard he tried.
Isolde didn’t know what she was supposed to do with that, but she did know that it felt a hell of a lot better than the pain the rest of the world had made both of them feel.
“Kiss me,” she whispered.
Bastian didn’t hesitate.