Read Page 11

"I'm going to let you be the judge of that," I told her. "Once you've heard my story."

I bade Soarse halt, then slid from the stallion's back, and helped Elisabeta to the ground, as well. We were in a tiny wildflower-strewn clearing, surrounded by trees on three sides, and the river on the fourth.Advertisement

A deer stood nearby, nibbling red clover blossoms, unafraid.

"I was ill as you are now, weak and growing weaker. I was thirty years old, at the time. And one night I was simply taken from my bed by a man as strong as ten men should have been. He took me to his home, a crumbling ruin of a castle, and there he...well, he made me into what he was."

She stood looking up at me, her hands still resting on my shoulders. "How?"

"I don't want to frighten you with such -"

"How?" she asked again.

Yes. She needed to know, all of it. "He sank his teeth into my neck, right here." I touched her neck. "It wasn't painful, as you know. But he didn't merely taste me in passion, as I did with you last night. He drank from me until I was all but drained. And then he made me drink from him. And I did."

A soft gasp was her only reaction.

"When it was done, I slept as if dead. I thought myself to be dead as I drifted into that slumber, for it was far deeper than any sleep I had ever known. And when I woke...I was changed."

Her face was pale in the darkness. She seemed afraid and yet eager to hear all I had to tell her.

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"Changed in what ways? Did you feel differently? Look differently?"

I nodded. "My senses were heightened to a point where it was nearly unbearable at first. Every touch was magnified a thousand times, and more so with every year I live. Be it pain...or pleasure."

"Oh." She averted her eyes.

"My hearing was acute. My eyesight, like an eagle's. My weakness - gone and replaced by a strength such as no human being has ever known. I can run too fast to be seen by mortal eyes. I can leap, to the top of this tree if I wish it. I can listen to the thoughts of humans, and other immortals, as well, and speak to them and...there's so much, 'Beta. So much. I'm immortal, ever young, ever strong."

She nodded slowly, turning to pace away from me, and then sitting in the grasses and flowers. I moved to sit beside her. "You make it all sound wonderful."

"It is...or, it could be."

"Then why had you decided to take your own life last night?"

I looked at her sharply. "You are too insightful for me," I told her. "But you're correct, there are...drawbacks to living this life. I can never see the sun again. It would burn me to cinders."

"Then...you can die?"

"Everything can die. I think in time, everything does. I can die, from the sunlight, or by fire. An open flame is a dangerous thing to a man like me. A cut, even a minor one, could cause me to bleed to death.

And pain for me is...it's excruciating."

"I see."

"But worse than all of those things is the loneliness. When you live so long, Elisabeta, everything you know dies before you. Kingdoms come and go. Ways of life, entire civilizations pass out of existence, and yet, you go on."

"Searching," she whispered. "For someone to share it with."

"Yes. Exactly that." pqdm.com