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Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 3)
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Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 4)
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
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 7)
Canus ignores my question. ‘Are you still willing to meet her and befriend her?’ he asks, addressing both Scintilla and me. Scintilla was watching me intently, but she returns to looking at the back of Canus’s head at his question. Her answer is slow, carefully considered: ‘If she’ll be a potential sister, then I think I’d rather have a new sister I don’t know all that well than not have a new sister at all.’ ‘Favilla?’ ‘How does surviving the transformation vary?’ I ask again. Canus sighs and turns his key, reviving the car’s idling engine. We drive past the next several city blocks in leaden silence before, finally, he responds, ‘Sometimes the Sire isn’t as careful as he ought to be. Sometimes the newborn isn’t as strong as she needs to be.’ He’s talking around the issue, and I’m more annoyed at him for it than I probably should be, considering how often I do the same to him. Such is the taste of my own medicine, I suppose. We get to the next red light before he finally says, ‘
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 8)
These past three weeks since Canus’s startling revelations about the bloodline curse, I’ve been turning them over and over in my mind, wondering if what he said was true, if he was lying, why he would lie. The answer is that of course it’s true; there’s simply no point to lying about something like this. But it raises another question. Chiefly, if it’s true, then why hadn’t he told me this last time? It can’t be that he didn’t know, since the theory originated with the Prince’s generation, or even that he wasn’t sure, considering he said that Chryseus had corroborated. It is only here, in the warm light of the café, studying an emotion in his eyes that can only be described as thirst, tinged with a sadness that can only be named regret, all because he’s looking at Scintilla watch the human beside her with growing interest, that I finally understand. You see, in my first life, Canus had preferences when it came to drinking from his progeny. He always preferred the newborns above all,
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 9)
For the subsequent week-and-a-half, Scintilla seems to go through a metamorphosis. She catches up to me a little in sorcery and surpasses me in most of the more physical aspects of immortality. She’s always been better than me at seeing in pitch dark, but she’s stronger than me now (though I have more experience so I still spar better than she does), and she seems to hear better as well. It’s pretty obvious that she’s finally figured out the trick to her bloodline curse and is gradually beginning to embrace it. And I, too, deliberate on trying to reach a similar epiphany. Before I can corner her for a conversation about it, however, she gets to me about a very different topic. It happens at Katy’s flat. It’s Friday night (or as good as, since it’s barely after midnight). Both her flatmates are out, and Katy herself is, as usual, still at work. She lives modestly, her only luxury being a large collection of first edition encyclopaedias. I’m flipping through one of her rare personal bo
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 10)
‘The letters weren’t explicitly intimate,’ I say, but I concede Scintilla’s point: ‘They were close enough to it, though.’ I pause, considering my words. ‘Of course, I asked him about that, asked him why he never told me. And he—he implied that I never agreed to be transformed.’ ‘Oh,’ Scintilla says. There’s a pause in which I think she must be pitying me. ‘So it’s not that I don’t like him,’ I conclude when the silence becomes too much. ‘I just haven’t been able to figure out how I feel about him, and he’s been decent enough to keep his distance.’ I hoped Scintilla might be satisfied with the conversation, but instead she presses on, ‘But what about this week? What changed?’ It’s a much more awkward question, considering the change was Scintilla. ‘This week…’ I begin, hesitating on my phrasing. Just then, Scintilla returns the brightness settings to what they were before we came, then shuts the laptop and readjusts the position of the wireless mouse. ‘Are we done?’ I check my mo
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Canus’s head of staff is Simon, who I suspect might even be older than Canus. He has the ageless white hair and flawless skin common in legacy thralls, maybe even by multiple generations—he slips into a tongue that I suspect might be Middle English sometimes. Before he sends us home, he tells us that he and Margaret will take shifts watching over Katy during the day, while Scintilla and I will alternate between watching over Katy at night. If this had happened before I’d gotten mysteriously sent back to the past, I wouldn’t have blinked. Right now, however, Canus only has five thralls and two progeny, which means that sending out a member of each group will render us even more short staffed than we already are. ‘We need more thralls,’ I mutter to Scintilla in the back seat of the cab on our way back to Canus’s estate. ‘We should probably send the thralls out in pairs to cover daytime protection, and, whichever one of us takes the night shift, we should also be accompanied by another
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