Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Iwas back in the cell.
No, I was in the windowless room in Chynon.
Or perhaps it was the one I’d stayed in as a child.
The darkness rolled like waves, curling around my cheeks and over my lids, brushing my mouth and begging for me to let it in.
Far off, the hollow chords of a song I once knew began, but the music was wrong—disjointed and out of tune.
I tried to remember how it went, the feel of the keys beneath my fingertips.
“Will you play me something?” Eamon asked, and he was not the vampire I barely knew sitting beside me in Cavera lan Aiyah but the male I’d fallen in love with despite all my fears.
“I am sure you are busy, Lord Azad. I would not want to keep you.”
Eamon smiled and it was so full of warmth and longing and love it made my chest ache. He touched my face with reverence, his thumb tracing the line of my bottom lip. “There is nowhere else I would rather be.”
Time passed and yet we sat at the piano bench, the song finding its end. However, the male before me was not the resplendent immortal of before—he was now ancient in his sadness, blood tears smeared across his cheeks.
“Is that what you want?” Eamon asked.
I frowned, unsure what it was he was asking me. “It does not matter what I want.”
“It does,” he answered. Another tear fell. “It matters greatly what you want, my heart.”
“In another life perhaps,” I said, but they were just words on a page, words I once had said.
Eamon tilted my face up to his, his grip tighter than it usually was. Citrine and magic swirled in his irises; his golden-brown skin glowed with power. But grief coated my tongue, and it was agony he exhaled with every breath.
“And in that life, what is it you would want?”
We were no longer in a memory, because the Eamon of my memory had not cried.
He had not held me with such desperation.
And I had not allowed him so close or trusted him so much.
I placed my hands over his chest and the heavy beating of his immortal heart, fingers tapping with the rhythm, finding the truth so easily now.
“You, Eamon. I would want you.”
Another blood tear fell and he blinked it away. “To have me now in this life means a transformation, my love. It means I make you into what I am.”
But I knew that, didn’t I? I’d felt the fever, the infection, known deep in my bones I was not long for this world. The moment I’d come to consciousness in that dark cell I’d accepted my fate, never once believing Eamon would find me.
“Of course I found you,” he breathed, one hand slipping to the back of my head. “You are my mate, Adrienne Valois. There is nothing I would not do for you.”
Including letting me die.
There was a part of me that wanted to die—a part of me molded by the horrors of my past and present, a part of me that whispered in my ear of the danger that would come from such a transformation.
It was more than a part. Eamon was the only immortal who had ever shown me kindness and I’d always believed that was due to the mating bond.
But that was not quite the truth, was it?
I remembered Mateo and the longing he’d felt for Jules, the respect he’d had for her wishes.
How, despite his love for her, he’d never once forced her hand.
There was Callum and the love he’d had for Lilith, how he’d stayed away from her for fear of her safety, how he’d been willing to sacrifice himself for her again and again if it meant she was well.
Then there were the not-so-earth-shattering memories, the immortals who had patronized me throughout the years who had been considerate and kind. But I’d lived in the shadow of my mother and believed her poison as it spewed from her lips.
It did not mean I trusted vampires, nor did it mean I suddenly believed all vampires were good. But perhaps I finally understood that to be one was not a death sentence to one’s humanity or kindness.
“I am afraid,” I told Eamon.
He nodded, tugging me to his chest. The music shop around us melted away and we were sitting on the stairs of the garden the first night I’d come to his estate. Around us the air was heavy with asiva flowers in bloom and not yet bitter with the chill of winter.
“I would expect nothing less than your fear, my heart,” he answered, stroking my hair. “I, too, am afraid. As I was afraid when I was made.”
Back when there were so few immortals roaming the earth. When Seth walked alone and without purpose, or so the stories often said.
“Have you ever made another?” I asked, though I vaguely remembered asking it before.
Eamon drew back slightly to look into my face and shook his head. “Never. I have been waiting for you.”
I swallowed thickly, reaching up to trace the line of his sharp jaw. “Then take me, change me, and make me yours. But promise me you will not allow me to succumb to the darkness the way others have. I do not think I could bear it.”
His smile was radiant even with the tears staining his skin. “There is no darkness your light cannot destroy, Adrienne. You do not need me for that.”
“Promise me all the same.”
Eamon nodded, leaning forward to brush his mouth against mine, the words featherlight across my lips. “I promise.”
Heat prickled across my throat, faint at first, like the sun warming my skin. But it grew hotter until it was sharp and piercing like a burn. I cried out, only for the pain to be smothered by a wave of dizzy relief. The garden vanished into nothing and I waded in inky black water.
My mother stood before me as I remembered her from my childhood, her shiny blonde hair swept up in an elegant bun, silvery bites across her throat and collarbones.
She stared at me with one arched eyebrow raised.
“This means nothing.” Her voice was a screech.
“It is yet another trick, another means of—”
But whatever she’d meant to say was cut off by the rising tide. A great, black wave crashed over us, wiping away her beauty until she was ragged in her old clothes, the snarling monster I knew her to be. More callous and cruel than any immortal I’d ever met.
“You are only as good as what you can provide,” she rasped.
Those words were etched on my soul and I was not sure if I would ever be free of them.
But I could only look at my mother with pity, finally able to clearly see the wounds this world had left and the misguided way she’d sought to protect me—in the beginning at least, before greed and addiction had sunk their claws in.
Another wave rose and I knew without question that this would be the last time I saw her. “I am sorry for all you have suffered, Maman. And though I do not forgive you for all you have done, I will work every day to free myself from the shackles you put me in.”
The dark water took us both, but I did not fight the current because it was strong arms around my frame, hands touching my face, and warmth sliding through my veins.
“Drink, my heart,” Eamon encouraged.
I was already drinking, gulping down his blood greedily.
Each draught sent a shock of lightning until my body was alive with sensation.
I groaned in the dark, my heavy arms rising.
My hands slid through the thick hair that fell over us like a shroud and I held him close, rising through the water to my knees.
“That’s it, Adrienne. Take what you need.”
Pain vanished in the next breath—all the aching sores of wounds left to fester blinking out like a candle. Heat circled my belly, dipping lower, pulling a moan that was both guttural and needy from me. But the edges of my awareness were bleeding out, the water rising.
“Tomorrow and the next,” Eamon promised.
And the darkness reached up to take me.