63

Trinity

I wailed as I watched the light and awareness fade from his eyes. He went slack in my arms.

“No!” I cried. “Lucian, you can’t leave me! Wake up! Wake up!”

Something shuffled nearby. I turned to look and saw Mark. He was covered in wounds. He looked terrible, but he lifted his gun and aimed at me. His hand shook. His eyes narrowed at me even as they filled with tears.

“Mark…” I whispered.

His jaw trembled. The gun went still as he glared at me. Tears slid down his cheeks as he dropped his gaze to Lucian in my arms. I didn’t know why. He said nothing. Then, he lowered his arm to his side, staring at Lucian for a few more moments.

Without a word, he turned around and left, trudging through the forest alone. Relief filled me the farther away he got, but as I turned to look down at Lucian, I couldn’t even enjoy it. He wasn’t moving. His eyes stared out into nothing.

I was alone more than I ever had been before.

My dad was dead, and the man I loved was dead.

I felt a pulsing in me and gasped as I felt something inside me. The realization that it was the baby only made more tears sting my eyes.

“Lucian,” I whispered. “You can’t leave me. You can’t leave us.”

I wept, holding him to me as if I could bring him back. I searched my mind for something to do, but I didn’t know what to do.

“You must be Trinity.”

I shuddered and turned as I looked at the man who had spoken. He glided through the air, his feet barely grazing the ground as he grew closer. He was barefoot and covered in a tattered robe, yet he had a regal look to him.

Behind him were other people, vampires by the looks of them.

He kneeled in front of me and glanced down at Lucian’s body.

“He’s gone,” I whispered. “H-He’s gone….”

“Nonsense.”

I looked at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Lucian. There was something warm in his eyes that I couldn’t name. I drew back as he reached for Lucian’s body, but he cupped Lucian’s face and made a soft humming sound. Lights flickered between his hand and Lucian’s face. His lips twitched into a small smile.

“He is simply sleeping,” he said softly.

“Sleeping?”

He nodded. “He will sleep for a near eternity like this….”

Something in me lurched. I couldn’t say it was my heart, but I was terrified. An eternity? I couldn’t be without him that long.

“There has to be something you can do. H-He can’t… What about our son? What about me?”

“So, you are Trinity.” His lips twitched. “Interesting.”

“Please, whoever you are… If there’s something that can be done… Please, just tell me.”

He tilted his head. “Perhaps, I could be convinced to make a deal with you.”

My jaw trembled. “Anything. I’ll give you anything.”

He smiled. “Ten years is the minimum. It is not an easy feat putting a mind back together…”

“Ten years?” I asked. “There’s no way to make it faster?”

“You’re a vampire now. It will pass in the blink of an eye.” His gaze darted down to my lap. “And honestly, you’ll be a bit too busy to worry about it for the next ten years, won’t you?”

I swallowed. “But… ten years without him…”

He shrugged. “It could be forever.”

I shuddered. “Okay.”

“In exchange, you will come back to the vampire world and live with me.”

My jaw trembled. “For ten years?”

“Forever,” he said. “You’ll have no need to cross the portals I will make between our worlds. Food will be brought to you. In ten years, you will have your Lucian back as if he had never left.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

He stood, and Lucian’s body drifted out of my arms. The man offered me his arm.

“Shall we, Lady Trinity?”

I nodded and walked with him through the portal he had opened. All at once, I felt the heat of the castle. It felt so different from my memories. The red light had been replaced with blue light. There was a moon in the sky alongside the sun that glowed with a soft silver light.

“What happened to the sky?” I asked, looking up at it.

“Ah,” he chuckled. “That’s a pretty complicated thing to explain, but we’ll have plenty of time over the next ten years, won’t we?”

We walked through the castle slowly. I wanted to know where we were going, but I didn’t have the strength to ask. We walked outside and to the back of the castle. I remembered it being cold despite it looking like a desert outside.

Finally, we came to a courtyard. It looked like a garden. Strange flowers bloomed up from the ground. In the middle of the courtyard was a large stone slab. He came to a stop and gestured. The stone slab slid aside, revealing what looked like a crypt. Lucian drifted into the crypt, and the man drifted down with him. I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but I heard that humming again. It seemed to shake all the stones of the castle. I saw sparks of light inside the crypt. The man floated out, and I saw Lucian lying still. His chest was glowing like a small star.

“Ten years,” he said again, gesturing. The stone slab slid closed. Fear gripped me as Lucian disappeared into the darkness of the crypt.

The man chuckled. “A bit dramatic.”

He turned to me and smiled. “Come. I hear that young pregnant vampires tend to be hungry.”

He offered me his arm again. I looked back at the crypt and followed him back into the castle.

Time passed faster than I expected but also so slowly that it felt like the day would never come. Soon after he put Lucian in the crypt, he left me in the care of a bunch of familiar people, people that had served Lucian before.

When he returned, he had a whole castle hovering in the air behind him, and we had a large banquet. The castle was repaired within a few hours using the castle he’d brought with him. The stones grew darker like the whole castle was made from shadows, but I liked it.

Somehow, I wasn’t so nervous. The castle tended to make me get lost more often than not, but the man was always around to find me with a smile.

“She’s just finicky,” he said. “She didn’t like my wife either. Hungry?”

I nodded and followed him through the halls to the banquet hall. Being pregnant as a vampire was different from being pregnant as a human. The man, who never gave me his name, doted on me like I imagined my father would. He brought me blood before I realized I was hungry. If I wanted human food, he brought that too, like he just went to the store. The portal between the vampire world and the human world seemed to still be open. I wondered nearly every day if hunters from the church would come storming through the gate.

He only laughed with his eyes sparkling. “If they managed to scrape themselves together so soon, I really would be impressed.”

It was months later that I found out that nearly every religious building in the world had been destroyed. He held a large celebration that day too. I thought maybe I should feel guilty, but when he told me about his wife and son, I couldn’t feel anything. If the church managed to take my child from me and do horrible things to him, I’d want to destroy anyone and everyone I could.

After that, he seemed to be much more at peace and busy with things in the vampire world.

Every day, there seemed to be another group of people from somewhere in the realm coming to be heard about their problems. I didn’t know that vampires even had crops until I sat in on court one day. After I left, I went to the courtyard to sit beside the grave.

I counted down the days until I would see him again by the number of times I visited.

When I gave birth months later, I wished more than anything that Lucian had been there. Yet, the baby looked up at me with his red and gold eyes. The moment I held him, I knew that it didn’t matter how much more time I had to wait. So long as I had our child and eventually we would be with Lucian, nothing else mattered.

“He’s so beautiful,” I said. “He… takes after his father.”

“What will you name him?” The man asked as I cradled my son against my chest.

I sipped from a large goblet of blood and smiled.

“Luke.”

He chuckled. “That’s a good name.”