Bad people will come looking for you now, my love, the moment they understand what you are
The last thing I remembered was falling. Not the ordinary kind, where your knees give and the floor comes up too fast. This was quieter than that, and much bigger. I had opened myself to him on purpose, throat bared, blood already moving before his teeth found the vein, and then there had been no Sarah left anywhere to fall from. There had only been him. Every version of him, arriving all at once, until I stopped being able to tell one feeling from the next and simply went under. Then nothing. A long, warm, formless dark. Then, fish. I woke slowly and then all at once, my body finding itself back piece by piece. The room was dark, properly dark, the kind that only comes hours after the sun’s gone, and somewhere below me I could smell something cooking, butter and garlic and fish going crisp in a pan. I didn’t know yet how long I’d been under. I only knew it had been long enough for morning to become night. I tried to sit up too fast.
The room tilted hard, dragging the ceiling sideways, and my skull throbbed like something had struck it from the inside. I went down again onto the pillow with a small, humiliated sound, and lay there blinking until the walls agreed to stay where they belonged. Downstairs, a pan hissed, and a boy’s laugh carried up through the floor, and underneath it, a low, amused voice, careful with whatever he was cooking the way he was careful with everything else in his life. Neither of them had heard me move. By the time footsteps came up the stairs, unhurried, ordinary, exactly the pace a man walks when there’s a seven-year-old downstairs who mustn’t hear anything else, I had almost convinced myself I’d imagined the whole business with the ceiling. Damian didn’t bother knocking. He crossed the room already reaching for me, and it was only once he was sitting on the edge of the bed, both hands framing my face, that I understood how much that unhurried pace had actually cost him.
“Hey. Look at me.” His eyes went over my face like he was checking for damage he couldn’t see.
“You’re all right. I’ve got you.”
“The room did something rude just now.”
“You’ve been out since yesterday afternoon.” His voice was low and very controlled, the voice of a man narrating a fact he’d spent the whole day trying not to panic about.
“I didn’t know if that was normal. I didn’t know if any of it was normal, taking that much from someone who isn’t...” He stopped, jaw working, and pressed his forehead to mine instead of finishing it.
“I’m here.”
“You scared me.” His voice cracked on it, plainly, without any five hundred years of composure left to hide behind.
“I have gone centuries without once feeling my chest do what it did every hour you didn’t wake up. Don’t do that to me again.” Then he kissed me, and there was nothing careful in it at all, nothing like the slow, deliberate way he usually took his time with my mouth. It was fierce, almost rough, his hands sliding into my hair like he needed the proof of me kissing him back, and I let him have it until my head had nearly stopped pounding and he finally drew back, breathing hard, forehead still against mine.
“Slow,” he said, quietly, like he was reminding himself as much as me.
“Whatever just happened between us, we take it slow from here. Your body isn’t finished catching up, and I’m not built to survive frightening myself like that twice.”
“What day is it?”
“Still Saturday. Just later than either of us planned.” A small, unsteady smile finally made it onto his face.
“I called Priya. She’s covering your classes through the weekend, no questions asked, though I expect she’s saving several up for you.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“There’s nowhere either of us needs to be tonight. Just here.” That was when Noah appeared in the doorway, in socks and a tea towel knotted around his waist like an apron, a smear of something floury on one cheek, entirely delighted with the state of the world.
“You’re awake!” He climbed straight up onto the end of the bed, unbothered by the idea his mother might want space, and looked around the room like he still couldn’t quite believe it was real.
“Mum, this house is insane. There’s a whole forest out the back. Damian let me play video games basically all day while you were asleep, and then he made dinner and it was actually really good, like restaurant good, not just dad-food good.” He said dad-food without seeming to notice he’d said it at all. I looked past him to Damian, who had gone very still in the way he did when something mattered more than he wanted his face to show. This was the first Noah had ever seen of this house. I hadn’t told him it existed. I’d only ever come here myself on the weeks he was away at camp, some instinct in me keeping this particular door closed until I understood what was behind it myself.
“You never showed me this place before,” Noah said, not accusing, just puzzled, the way kids get puzzled by adult logistics they haven’t thought to question until now. Then, before I could answer that, he’d already moved past it.
“Can we stay? Like, actually stay, not just tonight.” He looked between the two of us, seven years old and entirely earnest.
“You love him, Mum. I know you do. And I love him too. So we could just, all be a family. Properly. Why not.” He said it so simply, so entirely without drama, that neither of us had an answer ready, and he’d already gone back to inspecting the ceiling beams before either of us managed to find one. We didn’t discuss moving in properly, not with words, not for a while yet. It simply started happening around us, the way weather does. Noah’s school bag ended up by the front door of the house on the hill more mornings than not. A drawer in the room next to Damian’s filled itself with pyjamas and the stuffed fox that had survived an entire continent and back. I kept telling myself we were easing into something, testing the shape of it before committing to a name, and Damian, for his part, never once pushed, just quietly made room, the way you’d widen a doorway for something you’d already decided was going to live there.
Glenfrost had gone properly cold by the time ten days had passed, the kind of June cold that settles into your knees before you’ve even noticed your breath fogging, frost thick on the car windscreen every morning and the daylight gone thin and stingy by half past four. I went back to the gym. Noah went back to school, full of stories that had nothing to do with caves or camps, ordinary seven-year-old grievances about maths and a boy called Ollie who apparently would not stop talking about the flying fox. Life resumed its shape around us with an ease that felt, some days, almost obscene, given what the shape had so recently contained. I still had questions. They didn’t go away just because the days had started filling in around them. It was a Tuesday, ten days out, the two of us on the couch after Noah had gone down, rain going sideways against the dark windows, when I finally asked the one I’d been circling for over a week.
“Tell me about them. The ones who found you. Silas’s people.” Damian went still in the particular way he did when a question cost him something to answer honestly.
“There weren’t many of them,” he said finally.
“Four, maybe five others besides Silas, when I first knew them. Men, mostly. And one woman. Octavia.” Her name came out of him carefully, like something with an edge he didn’t want to catch himself on.
“She was Silas’s companion. Has been, as far as I know, for longer than most countries have kept their borders the same shape.”
“What was she like?”
“Cruel in a very patient way. The kind of cruelty that enjoys itself slowly.” He was quiet a moment, turning something over.
“They found me not long after I was turned. Days, maybe. I don’t have a clean memory of it.
I’ve never had a clean memory of it, not once, in five hundred years of trying.”
“What do you remember?”
“Cold stone. Somewhere underground, deep enough that no sound reached it from outside. Being carried, I think, though I don’t know by whom, or how far. Voices I couldn’t place to faces.” His jaw tightened.
“I remember being afraid in a way I hadn’t been afraid since the war, and I remember not understanding why, because by then nothing should have been able to hurt me anymore. And then there’s simply a gap. Weeks, I think, though I’ve never been able to account for how many. When the fog finally lifted I was somewhere else entirely, and Silas’s people were treating me like something they already owned.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have?”
“That’s all I’ve ever had.” Something raw moved behind his eyes.
“I’ve spent five centuries trying to fill in that gap and it has never once given me anything back.” I reached for his hand before I’d finished thinking it through.
“What if feeding helped? On me. What if it’s not about blood at all, what if it’s about, I don’t know, connection, the same way it pulled all your other memories out for me in the cave. Maybe it could pull that one loose too.” He was off the couch before I’d finished the sentence, and the look on his face stopped whatever I’d been about to add next.
“No.” The word came out low and hard, nothing gentle left in it at all.
“Absolutely not.”
“Damian...”
“I have not fed on you since that night, and I am not going to start again because you think it might jog loose a memory I’ve spent five hundred years failing to reach on my own.” He was pacing now, a tight, contained line back and forth in front of the dark window, and I understood, watching him, that the anger wasn’t really aimed at me at all.
“I don’t need to feed on you, Sarah. I haven’t needed to since the day I met you. Do you understand what it would mean if I started treating you like a key to unlock something in myself, the exact same way I once treated Camille? I watched what that did to her. I am not doing that to you for the sake of a memory that was never going to save either of us anyway.” The room was very quiet after that, rain still going against the glass, and I understood, slowly, that I’d asked the one question that could make five hundred years of composure come apart in under a minute.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I wasn’t thinking it through.”
“I know.” He came back to the couch, dropped down beside me, some of the fight going out of him all at once.
“I know you weren’t. I just.” He exhaled, unnecessary, old habit.
“I would rather live with the gap forever than risk becoming, even a little, the thing that gap is made of.” He didn’t say anything else for a while. Then he kissed my forehead, my temple, and when I turned my face up to find his mouth properly, kissed me the way he hadn’t all evening, slow at first and then not, his hands already working at the buttons of my shirt as he drew me up off the couch and walked me backward toward the stairs. It matters, later, what happened next. He was gentle. More than gentle. He undressed me like something that might come apart under too much handling, careful of the argument still sitting raw in the room downstairs, and everything about the way he touched me said I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over, without once needing the words.
I wasn’t there for it. Not properly. Some part of me kept trying to arrive and kept sliding straight back out again, snagging on the shape of what he’d just told me, a cold underground room, a memory five centuries wide with a hole punched clean through the middle of it. Damian must have felt it before I even understood it myself, some hitch in my breathing that had nothing to do with him, because he went still above me, propped on one forearm, watching my face with a stillness that had gone from tender to something more careful.
“Sarah.”
“I’m sorry.” I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
“I don’t know where I keep going.” He didn’t look angry. That was almost worse, somehow, watching him absorb it with nothing but a tired, patient sadness, the particular exhaustion of a man who has just discovered there’s a room in himself he still can’t fully share, no matter how much of the rest of the house he’s opened.
“Don’t apologise.” He rolled off me, gentle about that too, and lay on his back beside me instead, close but not touching, giving me air.
“You don’t owe me anywhere your head has to be tonight.”
“Damian...”
“I mean it.” He said it kindly, which somehow made it land harder.
“Get some rest. I’ll be downstairs.” He was already up and reaching for the drawer where he kept a pair of pyjama bottoms he never actually needed, some old habit of normalcy he still performed for reasons I understood better now than I once had, and I watched him dress in the dark with a strange, hollow feeling opening up in my chest.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?”
“I don’t need sleep, Sarah.” He said it without any weight behind it at all, just fact, pulling a shirt over his head.
“You do. Properly, this time, without me lying here making you feel like you have to perform being fine for my benefit.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead once more before he went, unhurried, ordinary.
“Shout if you need me. I’ll hear you.” I didn’t think, lying there in the dark after he’d gone, that I would need to test that. The dream came fast and total, the way the worst ones do, no gentle drift into it, just suddenly there. Vanessa Cole was standing at the end of a hallway I didn’t recognise, and her eyes were wrong, red-lit from somewhere behind them that had no business being lit at all, and when she smiled her mouth was full of teeth that didn’t belong to anything human.
Blood ran from the corner of her lips in a slow, unhurried line, dripping off her chin, and she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past me, at something on the floor I didn’t want to turn and see, and some old, useless instinct in me turned anyway. Noah was lying there. Small and white and entirely still, his colour draining out of him in real time the way water drains from a tipped glass, and I opened my mouth to scream his name and nothing came out at all, not one sound, my throat working uselessly around a silence that had teeth of its own.
I tried to move toward him and my body wouldn’t answer either, pinned to whatever floor I was standing on, and Vanessa’s red eyes finally slid to mine, patient, delighted, in no hurry at all, and I understood, with the particular clarity dreams reserve for their worst moments, that I was going to have to watch this happen and be unable to do one single thing about it. I came up out of it already trying to scream, and found the sound as trapped in my real throat as it had been in the dream, my whole body locked rigid, eyes open onto the dark of our room and unable to make a single limb obey me. Damian was there before I’d even managed a full breath. He must have heard the change in it from two floors down, some fractional catch that no ordinary man could have caught, because there was no space between the dream and his hands on my face at all, no sound of him crossing the house, just suddenly present, kneeling over me, holding my jaw, his voice pitched low and urgent.
“Sarah. Sarah, look at me, you’re safe, you’re home, nothing’s in this room but us...” I still couldn’t speak. My mouth worked and nothing came, my eyes wide and fixed on him, and I watched something close to panic move across his face, fast and total, the particular helplessness of a man who has spent five centuries able to fix almost anything physical in front of him and has just run headfirst into something he can’t.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said, more to himself than to me, already turning my head to bare my throat, some old, desperate instinct taking over where reason had run out.
“I don’t know how to help you, I don’t, feeding might, it might ease whatever this is, I don’t have another...” His mouth had barely grazed my skin before the room went white. Not white like light. White like erasure, the whole bedroom simply ceasing to exist around us in a single instant, replaced by cold and stone and torchlight and the smell of something old and bitter burning, and I understood, distantly, that I was no longer lying in a bed at all, that neither of us were, and that whatever had just happened between his mouth and my throat had thrown us both somewhere neither of us had ever meant to go. We were standing in a place I had never seen before, and somehow, with total and terrible certainty, I already knew exactly when it was.