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Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 3)
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2024-10-29 19:42:56Related chapters
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
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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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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
Reborn to Love: A Vampire's Fate Arc 3: All That Glisters (Part 11)
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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‘Please, my lady, there’s no one else!’Strangely enough, the man pleading to me from outside the reception chamber sounds completely mortal. He must have been a thrall at some point, but he can’t be any longer, not with that level of emotion to his voice.‘Simon, let him approach.’Simon gives me a look that speaks volumes of my presumed softness, which I pretend to ignore. To him, this is the first time that I've held court as Canus’s representative, but I’ve done it before, a time or two, back during my first life. It takes a moment, but Simon eventually unbars the door, letting in the human. Only two other petitioners are in the room, and though they seem annoyed, they also make no move to protest as I skip over their non-queue.As the human approaches, I realise that he’s somewhat familiar. I’ve seen him before. At court? No—he looked younger back then, barely more than a teenager, and he’d been immortal when we met, barely more than a newborn and stuck fast to his master, a dark
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Canus and I don’t bother going in the front door. Instead, we peek around to the back. Only when we see a ghastly hole in the ground in the cemetery, raw soil overturned atop the lawn where Katy’s grave must have been, do we continue on inside.The halls are unlit and tranquil, but Canus doesn’t hesitate as he takes the winding turns that lead him to a suite of rooms that I don’t remember ever noticing before. It’s in an entire different section of the estate than the wing where Scintilla and I were assigned rooms. It’s been somewhat hastily refurbished, the must of decades of neglect mixing in with the sharp smell of self-assembly furniture.The door has been left ajar, and Canus and I slip in the small reception area just as Scintilla slips out of what must be Katy’s bedroom.‘Sire,’ she whispers, head bowed.I catch her gaze when she looks up and flash her a supportive smile. She doesn’t return it, but something about her bearing softens just the slightest.Canus jerks his chin tow
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The car swerves—that’s how startled Canus is by my question. When he regains control of it again, his fingers are tight around the leather of his steering wheel.‘Come again?’ he says. ‘I could have sworn that you said—’‘That Annia is convinced that I’m to be the Starlight Queen? Yes, I did. She saw me eavesdropping on Chryseus and didn’t report it to him, as far as I can tell. Lady Chalcea seems to trust her, too.’It’s not until the last sentence that Canus seems to relax a little. I grin to myself. For all that he calls her a spoiled brat, Canus still trusts his sister’s judgement.‘She was the one who took me to the shrine and told me who the Starlight Queen was supposed to be,’ I continue. ‘That is, after I accidentally lost my temper at her.’It feels so easy to tell Canus the truth, like some great burden is being lifted from my shoulders. I once imagined myself to be a practised hand at secrecy, but that was when I still had Scintilla or Chryseus in which to confide. I hadn’t
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‘I love you, too, Favilla. Always have, always will,’ he says. It’s as gentle as I’ve come to expect of him, as steadfast and sincere as I could ever wish for. We stare into each other’s eyes for a moment, and then, as one, we say, ‘I’m sorry.’ We both pause, then open our mouths, then close them upon seeing our actions mirrored in one another. ‘You first,’ I say when I open my mouth again. ‘You have nothing to be sorry about,’ he says. ‘I do,’ I insist. ‘I’m sorry I did that to you. I didn’t mean to. You were never supposed to be the one to find me. I was—’ I pause, realising that it might not necessarily be the best path to follow. I start again: ‘I mean, I know I’m not Aura any longer, that she was the one who made the decision, that she was probably very ill and in a very bad place mentally, but I still feel responsible, somehow, for putting you through that. Please, let me apologise for that, at least.’ He seems to consider it for a moment, but then he nods, mind made up. ‘
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‘It was grandad’s, you know. An antique, though I suppose not quite so antique as you.’ It had a smooth handle worn down by three generations of use, and it kept its edge remarkably well considering it went about a dozen years without anyone bothering to check on it.‘I did keep it, yes,’ Canus confesses.‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ I remember how its silver blade flashed in the dim and flickering candlelight. Looking back, I recognise how silly it was to put a tealight in the sink to see by. My thought process had been that, even if some strange happenstance knocked it over, I’d at least be certain that it wouldn’t catch the entire block on fire. I could have used proper lights, I suppose, but I was loath to waste electricity if it was going to be ages before anyone found me. If I were to die, I could at least help spare the planet from a similar fate.At first there was nothing, and then it hurt so much that I could barely slash my other wrist as well. Shortly thereafter, the cold came
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Not much has changed since I last visited less than two months ago. The scent of my human self is worked into every corner, overlaid by a strange sense of corruption. I briefly seat myself on the back of the settee, looking around the cramped space. As Canus mentioned, the kitchen table is missing from its place. Otherwise, the cabinets are all shut, and all the flat surfaces are empty safe for the thinnest layer of dust—no humans, no dead skin cells, no new dust being generated.I grimace and stand up. Walking into the bedroom, I see empty air where previously were the scattered personal effects that Canus had originally deemed too sensitive for me to see. They, of course, are hidden away in my study back at the estate, and, as loath as I am to agree with Canus, I still have yet to page through them properly.‘A bit of a let-down,’ I comment. ‘I thought you said I’d remember something.’Canus says, practically into my ear, ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know where I need you to go.’I jump
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With my new revelation, tracking down three more victims and feeding Canus in between hunting is relatively trivial. It puts a new spin on the act, however. The pain that I derive from Canus’s feeding is no less than before, but now it comes with a sense of vindication. Now, every time he pulls away and licks my blood from his lips, I see the hidden emotions dwelling in their depths—guilt and desire. Suddenly, I feel bad for him. I even feel the barest twinge of sympathy for Chryseus. The two of them have been hit the worst by the bloodline curse, enough so that they’ve been forced to feed on their progeny. What’s more, I suddenly understand that they must hate it, that they must hate seeing the source of their guilt every day, to feed from us time and time again. ‘It’s always like this, isn’t it?’ I ask after I come back from my last victim, healed and more fully sated than I’ve ever been. ‘The guilt?’ Very carefully, Chryseus nods. ‘That’s the real curse, I think. My Father likes
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All thoughts of sustenance escape me. I stand, frozen, watching the bright glint of luminescence that is my mark slip further and further down the corridor before turning in the direction of the tearoom. The bleached white walls and linoleum flooring are dark without her presence, but I don’t even care. I’m remembering back to a conversation I had with Chryseus. It doesn’t count, I said, laughing. Your progeny are all older than me. Then I’ll ask Father for another progeny, Chryseus replied, a glint in his eyes. It’s been decades since my last. He’ll accept. It won’t be the same, I insisted. You wouldn’t get to see them as a child. We can adopt a mortal baby, then. If we ask Father for special permission, I’m sure he’ll agree, especially if we raise it as a witch. If the baby is raised as non-human, then the secrecy laws won’t apply. Okay, I said, heart in my throat. Alright. I once considered it to be the moment I fell in love with him. ‘Favilla?’ Canus asks. I blink. There’s
