Page 19

I licked my lips, wiggling my toes when his touch tickled. “Did Owain have freckles?”

To my relief, that got me a smiling vampire, not an irate one. “You don’t have to be jealous, Ethan. There is no other. There never will be. There is only you. What was doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter, but not when it comes to my feelings toward you.”

I looked down, then up again. “So did he? Have freckles?”

Auris heaved a sigh, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Okay. Well. I mean, it’s okay, really.”

Auris raised a single eyebrow. “Wine?”

I shook my head. “Nah. Look, let’s get out there. Maybe we don’t find anything, and then we can just keep on being here. Maybe we can go to the museum, but at night so you can get me access to all the places the public can’t go. Me and my camera, of course.”

“Ethan, my sweet, I am feeling used.”

I chuckled. “It’s partly your fault, because that management team you set on me are too excited and ready to get the project off the ground. I need to give them something.”

“Hmm.” He lifted my feet out of his lap and stood. “You should bring your camera now. You’ll want to explore the ossuary, I think. Dress in all your winter things. The cold in a bone church is nothing to trifle with.”

I nodded and went to get ready. I felt a lot like Auris must have felt all those centuries ago. I tried to imagine him, human, a boy. I could and I couldn’t. In appearance, yes, but even in his story, Auris didn’t sound like a teenager to me. But then, he’d grown up in a different world, a different time. What I wouldn’t give to have known him then.

We took Jan’s car. Well, the car Jan used that was actually owned by Auris. Saying I wasn’t afraid on the drive to the bone church would’ve been a lie. My mind kept circling back to the last time I’d been inside a church, to my last encounter of the priestly kind.

Auris reached out to take my hand whenever he didn’t have to operate the gearshift, and when we were maybe ten minutes outside of Prague, I saw him turn his dark eyes on me in my peripheral vision.

“You don’t need to take me home,” I said quickly. “I’m okay.”

Auris nodded. To distract both him and myself, I asked, “Are you really not going to tell me if Tove is still around?”

I didn’t get an immediate response, and I wondered why that was. Maybe family issues weren’t an exclusively human thing.

“Yes, Tove is still with us. It has been a while, and when I last saw him, he said he was going to sleep for a while.”

“Does that island still exist? Where you all lived?”

Auris shook his head. “The ocean reclaimed it. I always suspected that magic strengthened its foundations, and magic can fade over time.”

I had to chew on that for a while. I had come to terms with vampires, but it hadn’t been easy. I always made sure to look at people’s eyes now, to see if they were black or silver, and I wondered whether dead celebrity sightings were a sign of vampirism spreading among the rich and beautiful.

Auris had laughed at that theory of mine, but in a friendly way.

At any rate, vampires I was willing to accept. A life made easy by Auris’s power of entrancement I was willing to accept. The threat of churchly people I was…I was willing to live with that.

Magic was a whole different can of worms, and if it was real, that meant the laws of nature that were terra firma in my worldview, no matter how much or little of them I understood, had turned to quicksand under my metaphorical feet.

I looked at Auris, bathed in the glow from the dashboard. “You said magic is rare though, right?”

“Very. It was rare when I was young and has grown rarer over the years. The existence of it upsets you?”

“Yeah, I think so?”

He nodded. “Typical, for a child of this epoch.”

I sighed. “Always so judgy.”

Auris chuckled. “Only when it comes to you. I reserve all my judgment for you, my sweet, and later on I get to savor your pouts and breathy complaints. It’s something I quite enjoy.”

“Objection.”