Page 60 of The Unraveling

It should have been Isla dressing me in her lacy black wedding dress before I laid down in my bed to be bitten, as she teased it was apt since I was “marrying Death.”

It should have been her holding my hand while I wept with the duality of that burning, icy bite so I could be reborn. Her, handing me glasses of human blood to fill my endless stomach when I awoke.

When Frederick knocked on the door the next night after seeing strange men rolling two covered bodies into a hearse, it should have been Dr. Todd answering the door and Isla securing me in her arms while I stood at a distance overlooking the foyer from the railing above.

Instead, it was Dr. Smith who stood guard beside Frederick as I clutched the banister with my nails and held my breath. Frederick’s worry tinged the fragrant scent wafting off him and made my throat feel like I had swallowed razors. The pain deepened with each pulse of his deafening heart while Dr. Smith explained how Isla and Victor were poisoned and died after a medical experiment went horrifically wrong.

Knowing I had terminal cancer, Frederick had been sick with worry that it had been me on one of those gurneys. He shared that he hadn’t slept all day after his night shift but suspected nobody here would be awake until evening for answers.

When I told him I was cured now, his thoughts were so impossibly loud that I could hear them above his frantic, excited heart. Hear with the clarity of a hallucination, despite how he stood with lips unmoving, that he always had suspicions. That his grandmother used to visit Victor’s grandfather—who looked eerily exact to him. She’d come here for free medical care, back before Canada had universal healthcare, and told Frederick as much when he mentioned me and Dr. Todd to her mere weeks before.

His grandmother’s stories weren’t quite enough to convince him, but seeing Isla and the condition of my wrists when I’d grab our bags from the counter was. I was careful that my sweater sleeves never slipped, but I didn’t realize he could see up them.

Frederick teased me about wearing my sunglasses inside the house, which hid the bright relentlessness of my thirst, and said, “I promise I won’t freak out if you take them off. I’m just happy you’re not going to die.”

The beat of his excitement mingling with the soft scent of his relief—I could glimpse how I stood like a miracle in his thoughts—was intoxicating. I needed Dr. Smith’s help to stop me from throwing my body against Frederick’s to lap up everything he could offer me.

Even when I leaped over the railing and Dr. Smith had to pin me to the hardwood, demanding that Frederick leave without telling anyone a word, I heard how his relief for my continued life didn’t waver despite his jolt of concern.

I tuck my chin, the familiar pressure of embarrassment in my face despite how there’s no warmth to it now. “I still can’t get over how feral I was,” I tell Isla. “And how Frederick still asked me out.”

As he yanked the front door open so he could slip out, he called above my furious snarling that he’d leave his number in our mailbox for me during the day if I was interested in seeing him.

I texted him from Victor’s phone the next night, and he began to visit in brief intervals to help me adjust. Until we could watch a movie together at the theater—though Dr. Smith had to chaperone from afar—which was emptier on a weeknight.

My boyfriend. The words still feel sparkly and bright after all these weeks.

I can practically feel the judgment from Victor despite how he’s not here to lecture me.

“I gave him my blood when we got home from the castle,” I fess up. “I’ll admit to it, but I want to be able to bring him to the castle with me, and he can’t come unless he’s my familiar. There’s no cell service there, and I missed him like crazy the entire time I was gone.” A mischievous smile curves my lips. “I argue that it’s preventative care, Dr. Todd. I know Isla would agree.”

The sound of Victor’s fledgling bidding Dr. Smith goodbye has me drawing in a damp breath that I hold to mull over the flavors of the garden before releasing. I search for the feel of Frederick’s link deep within me, still fumbling to separate his state of being from beneath my own. My lingering grief—the anger that what should have been isn’t—makes it seem nearly impossible to find him through the blood link. My sorrow drowns the feeling of his happiness that flares in my chest when we’re together. My body translates his hunger as my own. Yet I know with a strange, inexplicable certainty that he’s safe down the block while at work. It’s like another sense. One more to access while I fumble to get the trick of reading minds.

“I’m still struggling with mastering mind reading. Aside from Frederick, I don’t get a lot of encouragement in that regard. The vampires at the castle are used to mind reading, but I can’t get more than a word or idea from someone here and there. But Viorel? He’s a fortress of a man, older than he can even articulate, and the visible weight of the unfathomably terrible experiences he wears make me not even consider testing it on purpose. I’m pretty sure an active effort would be viewed as a security breach worthy of execution, anyway.” I release a strangled laugh before frowning and adding, “Besides, there aren’t many opportunities for attempts, though he seems forgiving enough that he might understand if I did it by accident. I think he ventured past the guarded steel doors only a couple of times while I was there.”

There are more vampires like Raoul in the castle—black-eyed and jarringly swift. Two protect the steel doors to the king’s subbasement chambers at all times.

Isla would find it all fascinating.

It’s my hope that I may be considered a true part of the clan in the future, but they are a different brand of isolated, slow-trusting creatures than Victor was.

My camera beeps a warning, and I sigh and roll my eyes. I should have cleared more space when we returned home.

I should have. Variations of the phrase plague me, creeping into the crevices of my days.

I should have asked Isla to write a longer bucket list in her notebook. I’ll be through most of her dreams within a hundred years.

I should have completed my treatment earlier, been reborn as a seer, and had a vision of them drinking from Bradley so I could stop them.

But I wasn’t. And I couldn’t.

With tears wetting my lashes, I tilt my head back again to stare into the endless expanse of space until they run out of my eyes. Then, I gently fall back against the grass and let myself feel small. Small beneath the twinkling stars so bright, I never could have dreamed as a human that there would be so much light and color in that darkness.

I try to shove the tiny movements beneath me in the soil out of mind and do my best not to think about what time is doing beneath those well-fed roses. I steady my climbing breaths and focus on the endlessly moving shape of space until the should-haves slowly feel like could-haves, though I know they might never fully go away. I find comfort in knowing that I am but one small star in the universe, and despite so much empty darkness surrounding them, there are endless glimmers of light.