Page 91 of Mortdale

“I don’t think you have limits, Willow. I think it fascinates you, but you’re too aware of yourself to say so. Constantly cautious of what is accepted and what is not. You’ve spent a long time studying what is normal—you know the rules of that game better than anyone. I think you’d love to pull me apart right now just to figure out how I function. I see how you look at people you find interesting, smart, strange, new. Anything that doesn’t fit the ordinary is a curiosity to you.”

Her heart started chasing the metronome set at presto again. “Do you think I’m weird?”

I got up. “I’ve wanted to pull you apart, too. In my own way. Does that make me weird, too?”

“Maybe.” Her chest rose fast as she looked up at me. “A little.”

“Then we’re both weird.”

Her head tipped all the way back to look at me when I reached out a hand for her. “Let’s go and see if you’ll burn in those Hells of damnation, shall we?”

Her cold hand slid into mine. She didn’t pull away even as we went inside. Even when I brought her to sit on my lap.

The urge to bury my face in her hair was severe, but I focused on the matter at hand. She scooted back on my lap when I pulled the Chronicle out of my shelf and I set it on the table. This close, I could feel her heart beating as if it was pressed against mine; lined up perfectly against each other. It was the closest they could ever get, but it wasn’t even nearly close enough.

“What’s this gibberish?”

I brought her closer to me as I leaned forward, over the book. “The Old Vampiric Languages. I’ll translate. What part did you want to know?”

“The story about Sankta Katerina.”

“The Old Creation,” I said, searching for the section.

She was doing it again—watching me. And the urge to perform for her grew severe, to please her enough that she wouldn’t look away. “You’ve read it before?”

“You can’t hate religion if you’ve never read their gospel. It was between these pages full of saintly prejudice I found it—my hate for it.”

I tapped a finger on the illustrated page. Painted in gold was a veiled woman on her knees, holding the dead, bleeding body of her lover.

“Sankta Katerina and Lamuel, the first vampire,” she said, running her fingers down the painting.

“Sankta Katerina fell for a human man called Lamuel of the Grey, a traveller from the Far Isles. He was killed by an enemy of his family in a dispute over trade. They were pirates,” I told her. “When she returned home from giving her blessings to the realm, she found him dead. In grief, she fed him from the Ewer of Life. A goblet said to have been made of pewter from the arm of Nestor the Immortal, He Who Brings Life, whose body was said to have been all earth and mineral. And filled with his blood which was the fountain where all life had begun. But those who drink from the ewer of the immortal must always feed on the fountain of life. Forever. With no cure but to exist hungry and deranged from hunger.” I paused, looking at her. “Hence why Lamuel needed to drink blood to continue living. And so on and so forth.”

Her finger ghosted over the silver-painted ewer. “Why would Katerina curse a dead man like this?”

“They were in love. She refused to let him go. And in return, she watched him turn into a monster, something no better than an animal.”

She looked back at me. “What happened to them?”

“He went on to become a king. And she went on to sacrifice everything she had to kill him, to stop him from becoming an even worse monster.”

Yet she was to this day hailed as a saint. The revolutionary who’d triggered the start of another race.

Her chest rose quickly, and I could hear it through her spine, beating against my chest. “And did she?”

“She did. But not before he made more monsters like him. His…curse, let’s call it, lived on even if he didn’t.”

“This is so strange,” she murmured, her eyes narrowing on the pages.

“What is?”

“Something about this just sounds…familiar to me.”

“Vampiric tales and folklore are twisted into many cultures and fictional stories. The kind you like reading, too,” I said, reaching for her book in my drawer.

She itched the tip of her nose as she tried her best not to smile. “Enjoyed it?”

“Thoroughly.”