Whatever had happened to Camille, it didn’t answer the question I still couldn’t put down. If anything, it had only sharpened it. Something out there had known where to find her, had known exactly when to silence her, and had done it inside a locked building three hours from anywhere Damian had ever mentioned her. I didn’t understand any of it yet. I only understood that Damian’s past had teeth I hadn’t seen the shape of, and that they were still out there somewhere, patient, watching.
“Feed on me,” I said, for the fourth time that week, on the third night after the drive home, when Noah was still four days from home and the house on the hill had started to feel less like a stranger’s museum and more like somewhere I actually wanted to keep being.
“No.” He said it the same way every time, gentle, immovable. “You don’t understand what you’re asking for.”
“Then explain it to me properly instead of just saying no.”
“It isn’t a taste, Sarah. It isn’t something you try once and set down if you don’t like it. Whatever I take from you, I take completely, and whatever bond it makes between us, it doesn’t undo. Camille is what happens when that bond gets broken from the outside. I won’t do that to you. Not for curiosity. Not even for love.”
I let it go, that night, mostly because of the look on his face when he said it, but I didn’t stop wanting to understand him, and two nights later he offered me the only other window into it he had.
“Come with me,” he said, near midnight, already moving toward the treeline behind the house. “If you want to see what I actually am, this is closer to the truth of it than anything I could put into words.”
The forest at night sounded different once he’d told me to listen properly, every small movement suddenly enormous, every silence suddenly full. He went ahead of me, barefoot, shirtless, moving through the undergrowth without a single sound, and somewhere past a stand of old pines he simply stopped, went utterly still, head tilted like he was listening to something beneath the wind.
The deer came into the clearing without seeing him at all.
What happened next took less than four seconds, and I have never, before or since, watched anything so purely, terribly beautiful. He was simply there and then simply upon it, one hand closing over its muzzle before it could cry out, the other bracing its body as it went down, gentler than I would have believed possible, like he was laying it to rest rather than killing it. His mouth found the great vein at its throat, and I watched him drink, watched the long muscles of his back working, watched blood well dark and glistening in the moonlight and disappear into him in slow, unhurried pulls, and felt no horror at all, only a strange, aching reverence, the way you might feel watching a storm from very close, dangerous and correct and entirely itself.
When he finally lifted his head, his mouth dark, his chest heaving with breath he didn’t strictly need, he looked back at me, and there was nothing ashamed in his face at all, only a raw, searching question.
“That’s the truth of it,” he said quietly. “That’s what I am, underneath everything else.”
“It’s terrifying,” I said, and meant it, and then, because it was also true, “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever watched.”
He crossed the clearing to me on legs still steadied with the deer’s last warmth, and kissed me with a mouth that tasted of copper and moonlight, and I let him, understanding, finally, all the way down, exactly what kind of thing I had fallen in love with.