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Arc 2: In Memoriam (Part 8)
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Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 2: In Memoriam (Part 9)
I leave the flat the same way I got in—by the kitchen window, which I reinstall on my way out. Next, I use sorcery to obscure myself and run the entire way from Slough to Egham so I can break into the humanities department at Royal Holloway. I’m cutting the time a little close, since it’s already almost two o’clock, which leaves me about four hours to track down James Cantrell’s office, top up on blood, and return to Canus’s estate in Hackney. The campus is much like any college campus, I imagine, all grey roads and red brick buildings. There’s an antique sort of feel to it, and I recognise the shapes of some of the buildings from the photos posted online over a year ago, when I was still a classics student named Aura attending university here. I desperately want to read the letters from James Cantrell, but I’m also afraid. There’s a trepidation there, a sense of tragedy that feels a little like standing on a bridge made of glass. I resolve, as I walk through the darkened corridors
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Interlude II: A Prologue
The man had an ageless air about him, one that made it difficult to tell if he was in his late twenties or his early fifties. His colouring was drab—mousy hair and dark grey eyes, but his features were fine. Too fine, maybe, to be hidden by a thin scruff and old-fashioned glasses. He dressed in a cosy way, all argyle and tweed, but he sat like a Grecian ruin, elegant and straight and seeming to have endured unblemished for aeons. Aura’s academic advisor had told her that he was a very approachable man, this Dr. Chantrell. She hadn’t believed her then, and she didn’t believe her now. There weren’t many other choices, however. James Chantrell, PhD, was relatively new to the college, and thus he was the only lecturer with an opening for a seminar leader in his intro to Latin class. Aura was still an undergrad, but she was in her final year and top of her class to boot, and she really, really needed this job. ‘Dr. Chantrell?’ she said, more meekly than she would have preferred. ‘I hope I
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‘You weren’t human,’ I accuse. Canus’s mortal face is still floating before my eyes, an uncanny contrast to the face I see blinking wearily at me from his favourite chaise. I throw the letters at him, not caring that a corner of the beautifully carved box they’re in knocks into the arm of his seat before he catches it. ‘James Chantrell,’ I add. ‘You weren’t human.’ This brings him up very short. He sits upright and stares down at the box. ‘Go on,’ I say. ‘They’re yours more than mine.’ He doesn’t open it. ‘You asked me if I remembered anything, but I didn’t. You remembered, though, didn’t you? Or you wouldn’t have asked. Or you wouldn’t have found me again and turned me.’ I’m throwing out shots in the dark at this point. I don’t know what happened, and I’m not sure I want to know. I didn’t finish reading the letters last night, nor did I even try to look at the email conversation. I don’t know why I didn’t. I just sat down in my bed and stayed like that until this morning, when I
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 2)
Canus looks back at me as the door shuts behind Scintilla and Margaret. We both wait, tense as their footsteps fade into the distance. Out of pride more than anything else, I want Canus to go first, to explain himself to me. He’s calm, however, lounging back as if we didn’t start the evening off with me barging into his rooms to demand answers from him. Eventually, I break. I start with something innocuous, but relevant enough, given how my wrist is still marred with a semicircle of drying blood stains. ‘Can you not drink from humans? Is that why you do this to us?’ I know the answer, of course, but I want to hear his excuses again. Surviving on mortals weakens me, he’d said the first time I mustered up the courage to ask him this question. The curse of our bloodline burdens me more than most. His tone had left no room for further questioning. His answer is different this time: ‘I could, for a time, but often not without killing them. As my newborn vigour left me, however, human blo
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 3)
‘The bloodline curse,’ I whisper in wonder. The blight of my otherwise perfect unlife, yet, if I’m to understand Canus correctly, an unavoidable side effect of its very perfection. Other vampiric bloodlines aren’t as strong as the royal line, but they also don’t suffer our curse. And it’s all because they’ve been using dhampirs to strengthen the bloodline. Canus is both the progeny of the Prince of London and his biological son! It’s all starting to come together. ‘Yes,’ Canus says, nodding. ‘For our line, the weakness manifests as a curse upon our ability to feed, but it’s more complicated than that.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, take my grandfather for example, who, according to my father, had only been limited to feeding from men. Then, you have my father and his siblings. My father is limited to feeding from mortal nobility. The Prince of Birmingham, meanwhile, is limited to feeding from artists, and the Prince of Manchester is limited to feeding from those born out of wedlock.’
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My blatant emotional manipulation works on Canus. He stops pacing and looks back at me with a stricken expression. ‘I don’t—I mean—no, you’re right. It’s not fair to keep it from you.’ He breathes in, then exhales in something akin to a long sigh, but it’s not the sigh that I’m used to. It’s not disappointed or exasperated, but instead tremulous. Almost like if he’s afraid. ‘Alright, it’s like this. As a newborn, my curse was centred on, ah—’ He winces. ‘Sorry, there’s just no other way to phrase it: I was more or less limited to virgins—purity in a very archaic sense of the word. I still am, sort of, but the curse worsened when I stopped being a newborn.’ I already knew this, more or less, but still I feel the un-vampire urge to blush. I swallow down my embarrassment and ask, ‘And how did it worsen?’ ‘Now, I am limited to those who are dependent upon me.’ A pause, then I start, ‘How does that even…’ relate? He grimaces. ‘I can’t be certain, of course, but I think the logic might
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 5)
Canus’s head snaps back to face mine. His eyes, bright silver and burning, peers into my avoidant gaze. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks. ‘I know we were… together, sort of.’ I bite my lip. I was about to say in love, but it seemed a bit presumptuous. I keep our gazes locked and set my shoulders back, faking assurance that I don’t feel. ‘But I also know that the letters stopped at some point. I figured, if you broke things off between us, and if I didn’t want to remember the embarrassment, then maybe, before you turned me, maybe I asked you to let me forget.’ It’s all speculation, and I grow increasingly uncertain as I try to fill in the gaps of what might have happened. And there’s also that last email conversation Aura had with James. It didn’t seem like she’d been very receptive to his calls. That must have annoyed him. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone tell Canus ‘no’. ‘Favilla,’ he says eventually. ‘Please rest assured that, even if it had been an option, I would have never wante
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 6)
Though I’ve been coasting quite well through my second run at being a newborn (and I now realise that, though I have the mental fortitude of a vampire of three decades, there are still certain physical indications that my body is still new to immortality), Scintilla can’t seem to say the same. I remember her as a mentor figure, a beloved older sister that guided me through those early, tumultuous years of my unlife. She went with me hunting well past my newborn months, regardless of the many duties Canus had tasked her with, citing her position as the eldest as justification for granting her the dubious honour. She stayed with me during the nights that I wanted nothing else but to bury myself in the back garden to get away from all the noise, all the light of London at night. It wouldn’t even be wrong to speak of her as a motherly figure, as opposed to a sisterly one. Now, however… ‘How did you do that?’ she asks me one night as she practises calling forth her witchlights and I prac
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