Chapter 20

Lucianus

After she was gone, I did my best not to think of her. I didn’t return to the human world to steal any more humans. I wasn’t afraid that I would run into her again, but I didn’t want to chance being drawn to her if she was nearby.

I had to admit that was a possibility, even as it irritated me. I honestly hoped that the next time I entered the human world, she would be dead from old age. How long would that take? Time passed differently here than in the human world. I wasn’t sure how much of a difference it was, but centuries in the human worlds had seemed to pass in the blink of an eye here.

It felt as though it had only been a year, maybe two, since my wife had died in this realm.

Realizing that the humans didn’t even have a memory of the war that had changed me and my life forever only irritated me more. Their short, insignificant lives didn’t deserve the longevity they got when she was no longer breathing.

As I lounged on my throne, I looked across the empty hall. I thought of balls of the past, of executions. It had been here that we had declared war on the humans. She had been there, my wife, by my side.

I could hear her voice in the wind, whispering my name still as if she was still here, but I wasn’t so lost in my grief to chase after it as I had done before. How many hours had I spent drifting through his castle, chasing her scent, her voice, the shadow of her movement?

Having that woman here had not revived those visions but had replaced them as she had often been wandering the castle.

I sat and listened as much as it irritated me, but it wasn’t her cries of pain or even the way the woman had said that nickname. It was knowing that the castle was doing this to me, pushing me.

It was only making me more irritable.

The servants avoided me in the hall. I hunted down vampires in the Forest of Darkness for sport, trying to work off my annoyance. I couldn’t say if I killed every vampire that had been near her, but I felt that I had cut the vampire population within the forest a great deal. I felled several trees that had drank her blood as well.

The Forest trembled at my displeasure, but it felt repentant for taking her in the first place and overstepping its place. The sight of her on the forest floor, trembling, bleeding, and sobbing, flashed behind my eyes. She’d clung to me the way my wife would when she woke up from a nightmare.

I rubbed my head as the door opened, and Henri brought in a scrawny human who looked almost too weak to entertain anyone. He placed the human at my feet. She was more skin and bones than flesh.

Pathetic. Disgusting. I looked down at her as a portrait of my wife surfaced out of the wall. I set my jaw, looking at the woman in a heap at my feet. She looked nothing like my wife, but her human stench made me think of the human with my wife’s face, defiling it with her humanity.

I should have killed her. That woman with my wife’s face didn’t deserve any of the kindness I had given her.

I should have made sure that she and any likeness of her were gone from this world as it should be with my dead wife.

Yet, I couldn’t. I turned over every moment in the chamber, trying to find the moment I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to do it, yet I couldn’t say that I had ever been truly convinced that I could do it.

I should have watched her die there in the snow before those humans found her. I should have instructed them to drop her from the top of the cliffs, so there was no chance of survival. I should have done so many things, yet I hadn’t.

The thought infuriated me. As the woman lifted her head, I sneered down at her. For a moment, I saw my wife’s face on that woman’s body.

“P-Please—”

I struck the woman across the face hard, throwing the slave across the room with the sharp crack of her neck. Her body tumbled and rolled into the deep canal where we placed the remains of the dead.

She was dead before she had even reached the canal.

“… should I bring you another?”

I glared at Henri, whose gaze followed the trail of blood. “If I was bored, I would have taken her first.”

He said nothing, though I could see in his eyes that he wanted to say something.

“Then, perhaps a hunt?” Henri asked.

I glared at him. “You think me incapable of finding my own entertainment?”

“Since the girl entered the forest, and despite your many hunts within it, the vampires have grown restless... They have begun disappearing.”

“The hunger has driven them to madness. I suppose the forest is ready for…”

I frowned, turning as I felt something. A strange sort of movement that I had not noticed before.

“You said… disappearing.”

“Yes, Alpha. We believe a portal has opened, and they are going through it into the human world.”

I considered it. Her fresh blood had likely stirred something in them, but the opening of a portal was something different. The Forest was reacting in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. I stood and went to the window, looking out to the forest. It was as dark as ever, but it had changed undeniably.

“While I don’t care much if they run amok in the human world…” I said, glaring at the forest.

“Interesting that they felt so… inclined to go against my rule.”

Henri said nothing for a moment.

“Well?” I asked after a moment.

“It is your territory, Alpha,” Henri said, then fell silent.

It was as if he thought that I didn’t know that this was my territory. As if I wasn’t well aware of it, but he wasn’t so dumb to say so.

He knew well enough that I had killed vampires for much less.

To be fair, I didn’t need him to say anything.

I had grown… diminished over the centuries, wallowing in my misery, in my grief, and rage. The castle had stopped listening to me as much. My connection to the Forest had faded enough that it had taken her entrance into it to reawaken it.

I had not even noticed the slowly opening path to the human world within it.

That was my fault.

“Should we plan an excursion to the human world, Alpha?” Henri asked. “The number of human deaths has… increased a great deal. We may have to put the castle on alert before the Vampires start a new war.”

The human world. How much time had passed there? The number came to mind, and I knew it wasn’t long enough for her to be dead. I looked down at my ring, looking at the familiar curves of the symbol of my house. Her mark allowed me to feel her faintly. She was so far, but I still got little pulses of her feelings, her motivations.

She was still alive. Experiencing something that brought her closer to death than she had been in a long time.

“Then do so,” I said easily. I left the room in a rush of dark clouds and drifted through the hallways until I reached my private chambers, the one no one, not even my wife, had ever known about.

I sunk onto the low couch and let the darkness of the room soothe my irritation. I felt the castle alive with the staff’s movements.

I considered never leaving again. I considered letting myself turn to dust, if that was possible, to fall into that deep, forbidden sleep like death, never to speak a word to anyone ever again.

I wanted that.

Yet, in the darkness, I could see my wife. I could smell the scent of her perfume. I could feel her leaning over me, stroking my face as if she were there.

An illusion? A hallucination? Some mad dream that was meant to beguile me.

I opened my eyes, and the sky was a burning red and gold, like burning blood and fire. She smiled down at me from within some secret in her eyes. She said nothing but looked at me with every bit of love she had ever had for me.

It was beautiful and truly the best vision I had ever had of her. It eased something in me to simply delight in her presence, however fleeting it was.

My mind was unhinging. Could I not stay here forever with her?

“Can I not stay?” I asked, hearing my voice on the wind that washed across the open plain.

She smiled, but she did not answer.