The Vampire's Reluctant Bride

Chapter 7 — What Vampires Dream Of

I had been in the castle for nine days when I had the dream.

It wasn't mine. That was the first strange thing — I knew, the way you sometimes know things in dreams, that I was seeing through someone else's eyes. The memory was soaked in a light that felt older than the castle, golden and slanted, the kind of afternoon light that exists only in the past.

There was a girl.

She was perhaps my height, with dark hair pinned loosely and a laugh that seemed too large for the small garden she was standing in. She was holding a flower — something white, something that trailed silver at the edges — and she was laughing at something someone out of frame had said.

Then she looked up. Directly at me. Or not at me — at whoever's eyes these were.

And she said, very softly: "Don't be sad. I knew what I was choosing."

I woke up with my heart in my throat.

The room was dark. The fire had burned down. But there was a light under my door — the particular amber that meant the corridor torches had been left on — and I could hear, very faintly, footsteps.

Slow ones. Uneven. The walk of someone who was not going anywhere in particular.

I pulled on my robe and opened the door.

Damien was in the corridor, twenty feet away, stopped in the middle of the hall with his back to me. His head was slightly bowed. He was still dressed as if it were the middle of the day, jacket and all, which told me he hadn't slept.

"Damien."

He turned. In the torchlight, his face was unguarded in a way I hadn't seen before — the careful blankness completely gone, leaving something much older and more tired in its place.

"I woke you," he said.

"You didn't. I had a strange dream." I hesitated. "There was a girl. Dark hair. She was in a garden. She was laughing."

Something happened in his face that I don't have a precise word for. Not pain exactly. Something beyond pain — the thing that lives on the other side of it, after you've felt it so many times it becomes part of your landscape.

"Lyra," he said.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." He leaned against the stone wall, slow, like something going out of tension. "It was a long time ago."

"Two hundred years isn't long to you, is it."

"No," he admitted. "It's — no."

I sat down on the floor of the corridor. Just folded myself down and sat there, back against the wall across from him, because I didn't know what else to do and standing felt wrong.

After a moment, he slid down the opposite wall and sat too. Two people on a cold stone floor in the middle of the night, which was not how I had imagined my life going.

"She was in the garden in my dream," I said. "The herb garden. The one I've been working on."

"It was her garden. Originally." He said it without flinching. "I had it planted for her. She liked — she said the castle needed something alive. Something that grew toward light rather than away from it."

"It still does. It just needed attention."

He looked at me with an expression that made my chest ache.

"Yes," he said. "It did."

We sat in the corridor until the castle's unnatural sky outside the high window began to shift from black to the deep purple that passed for predawn here. We didn't talk much. We didn't need to. There is a particular kind of company that works exactly because it asks nothing, and I had learned early — from long closing-time hours in the bakery, flour on my hands and the city going quiet outside — how to simply be present without filling the silence.

When he finally stood, he offered me his hand to pull me up.

I took it.

He held it a beat longer than necessary.

"The dream," he said quietly. "Did she seem — was she —"

"She was laughing," I said. "She seemed happy."

He closed his eyes for just a moment. Then he let go of my hand, and stepped back, and was composed again.

"Thank you," he said. "For — thank you."

"Anytime," I said. "I mean it. Anytime."

He nodded once. Turned down the corridor. Stopped.

"Elara."

"Yes?"

"The moonspice tart." He didn't look back. "It was the best thing I've eaten in two hundred years."

Then he was gone, and I was standing alone in the corridor with my heart beating entirely too fast for a person who was supposedly fine.