“Oh.” I head back to where I was sitting on the bed.
“Oh?” Matthias grouches as he throws his hands in the air. “Oh! Asher, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
I don’t really know.
For the last twenty years I’ve been moving, hunting my soulmarked.
But I’ve also been dying.
Not fast enough that it would be noticeable to any but those closest to me, but I am. Something deep inside is killing me. A rot that’s festering and eating its way slowly down to my heart.
Time is ending for me, I can feel it. If I don’t take Chloe as mine, if I don’t bind our souls...
I’m dead.
Andrei has done tests. For the past ten years, he’s ran every single test he could muster up.
Cellular regeneration, or the lack thereof. Dead cells infesting live cells. Dementia. Alzheimer’s. Anything and everything he could test me for, he has.
Two years ago, he came to me one very dark and stormy night, quite literally. Drenched from the rain, exhausted beyond belief, with dark bags under his eyes from the lack of a proper diet.
“You’re dying, Asher,” Andrei said quietly.
“That’s impossible, unless you’re planning to…” I trailed off at him with a smirking frown.
“It’s like a cancer,” Andrei said, passing over my poor attempt at a joke.
“What?” I asked in confusion.
“You’re dying, and I don’t know if I can stop it,” he said, sitting heavily into the chair beside my desk.
“Again, what are you saying, Andrei?” I sat forward, looking at him. Trying to peer inside that entirely too complex mind of his.
“These bouts of blanking out, the rages, the insomnia, the listlessness, the somber moods… The aches and pains a vampire shouldn’t have… You’re feeding less and less.” He ran his hands through his soaked hair, pulling at the ends as he looked at me. “I can’t identify it. Not even under microscopes that cost more than this house.”
Silence filled the room as he stared at me. I could smell the salt leaking down his cheeks that I would have put off as water.
“I think we’ve both known something’s been wrong, especially the last couple of years. You’re shutting down. The blank moments in your life are getting longer and longer.” He spread his hands at me.
Nodding my head slowly, I said, “I suspected you knew.”
“How long have you?”
“Since she was born I’ve felt as if the hourglass of my life is draining faster and faster. I’m not entirely sure how many grains of sand I have left.”
“It’s cancer, or at least something like it.” He leaned toward me. “Cancer of the soul. If you don’t find her… if you don’t bond… Father, I don’t want to lose you.”
Leaning forward, I grabbed the back of his head and kissed his forehead. Then, for a long moment, I rested my forehead against his. “None of the others can know.”
A sharp slap across my face knocks me out of the past.
It’s funny the way my mind works now. I notice it sometimes. I feel myself fading, remembering things and people I haven’t thought of in centuries. Little moments in time that come back to me.
“Asher, fucking focus!” Andrei roars.
Nodding my head, I look up to all my closest friends. “I’m here.”
There’s stunned silence in the room. All of them staring from Andrei to me, wondering what the fuck is happening.
Andrei isn’t violent, not like that, and never to his sire.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Raphael mouth to Matthias, “What the fuck?”
Standing up from the bed, I shake the cobwebs from my foggy brain.
“We need to tell them, Asher,” Andrei says loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Tell us what?” Raphael asks quickly.
“Later,” I say, waving my hand at Andrei. “I promise, as soon as we’re done with him.”
Pointing, I motion for Matthias to put Ambrose in the chair next to the room’s little coffee table.
Tilting his head, Ambrose stares so long into my eyes I think he’s fallen asleep.
But then he sighs so quietly I almost miss it. “She tasted of the goddess’s nectar and cyanide.”
Well, that wasn’t what I fucking expected him to say.
“So delicate, so decidedly poisonous.” Ambrose looks to Andrei. “I wished to dance.”
Moving to stand in front of Ambrose, I look down into his eyes. “You tasted my soulmarked, Ambrose. I have full rights to remove your head for that.”
“Full rights, yes, but you’d be a fool to do it,” he singsongs at me.
I backhand him hard enough to send him flying from the chair. I may be fading and my strength is waning, but I have enough left to hopefully get to her.
Reaching down, I grab the lapels of his frock coat, hoisting him back up to the chair. “Why did you drink from her?”
Woozily, he sways around in the seat, his smile not fading one bit. “She smelled. Yes, smelled of mine. But she tastes of hemlock and honey. Strawberries and strychnine. She is death and beauty.”