Page 90 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It takes him about four days to grow his arm back.

With a little bit of help from the juicy vein in my thigh. “Not the throat,” he tells me when I turn my head as if it’s nothing at all. “I have nightmares about accidentally tearing it out.” But I have no idea why he does. The reason he has to grow back a whole limb is because he wrenched it off to save me.

Among the million other things he’s done over the years to stop me from dying. From being devastated. From losing all hope. “Did you once carry me across a desert while crying your heart out?” I whisper to him when the memory wakes me in the middle of the night.

Or the day, as it is now.

I’m going to be nocturnal from now on—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Especially when he whispers back, over his shoulder: “You crashed your car into a cliff face. I had to, I had to. You survived but would have died out there.” And then I think of the film The English Patient. I think of some famous person once saying about Ralph Fiennes carrying Kristin Scott Thomas: Oh, to be loved like that.

Then I close my eyes and press my face into his back. Arms around his waist, him curled into the smallest ball he can make of himself. He likes to be the little spoon to my big spoon for some reason. For every reason I can understand.

Though it’s not that easy, considering he’s the size of a house and I’m the size of a thimble. I’m seriously considering adding an inch or two to my five-foot-three height. It would make kissing him unexpectedly in the kitchen and the living room and at parties so much easier.

As it is, I have to use a magic step stool.

It’s a whole thing. Nancy laughed at me about it the other day. Sometimes I do a little jump to get at his face, she said, then demonstrated with Jack. I really have no idea what any of us were thinking, finding soulmates that are just so gargantuan. Even Seth is big, and he’s the smallest of the three men.

You see him in crowds and he’s usually hovering over everybody.

Whereas we can all hardly see over the average mailbox.

It’s the one way we’re the same. In many others, we’re so different. We sit around Cassie’s kitchen table in the aftermath of dissolving the bane of my existence and happily, coincidentally, freeing the town from a terrible man, and Nancy says to me, “I don’t know how you’re coping. A thousand years of being cursed, I would be in floods of tears all the time. I would be stuck to him like superglue.”

Then she butters me another scone.

She’s already given me three of them. And twelve cups of tea. They’re arranged around me like a milky, ceramic, crumbly, cake-like hug. Plus she hasn’t stopped chattering at me since I explained everything. I’ve had twenty-seven variations of Are you okay?

And Cassie is the same, but in a different way.

She has spell solutions for everything. Practical plans. It was her idea to make the poison that melted the wicked witch of the west once we had him trapped in the secret library. Door blocked from the outside just in case he had some way out, with a sealed hole above. Instead of my idea, which was to crush the library into a cube and send it into space.

What can I say? I don’t always think straight.

I think of the most revenge possible.

The cynic’s approach to sorting things out. Madison’s influence, I suppose, though I feel like lately the other women’s memories are starting to get a little louder. Maybe my own are even starting to grow a bit now that the past doesn’t have such a hold on me. It isn’t quite as necessary now.

I have Nancy. I have Cassie.

I have Jack and Seth and Pod and Popcorn and Agnatha.

I will have my family again soon, once I’m up to undoing the spell.

And of course there is my love, my dearest love, my one and only. He comes down the stairs in the Sanctuary for Supernatural Creatures, in pajamas Cassie made for him, hair all ruffled, expression all big and real and most of all: content. He looks so content to see me there, sitting at the kitchen table, talking with my friends. Getting to be a real person again, a safe person, a person who can have people.

When he takes my hand, I take his.

We go out into the garden and sit on the edge of the porch.

Hollow Brook safe, all around us. The night sky glittering up above.

And I ask him if he is happy.

And he says, “Of course I am. The birthday of my life has come, my love has come to me.”