Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
I just furrow my brow and continue to stare at him. Then I place my hand on his chest, right over his heart. It thumps under my touch. “But you have a heartbeat.”
“I do.”
“And a pulse, and warm blood, and—”
“Because I am not dead, Ryet. I drink the Black blood. And you will too, if you want to be like me.”
“Be like… a vampire?”
“It’s a nice word. It’s got a lot of interesting lore attached, hasn’t it? And I am ‘the vampire.’” He does air quotes around that word as it comes out of his mouth. “I am the monster they are referring to when they tell the stories. But it’s just one of many fancy ways of saying ‘demon.’ You sold your soul that night, Ryet. You understood that.”
I sigh out my words. “I did.”
“And now the piper’s here. It’s time to pay. Unless…”
“Unless I become like you.”
“Why do you say it that way? Am I so bad? Sixty-five years. You know me better than anyone these days. Far better than Lucia, certainly. And Josep. He’s just a casualty of his own sense of righteousness at this point. Unable to get past the guilt. At least Lucia relishes her life and doesn’t waste it the way he does.”
My foggy brain has no chance of keeping up with those words. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
He places a gentle hand on my cheek, soft smile on his face, gazing into my eyes. “You do. You absolutely know what I’m talking about.”
“Hell?”
He shrugs. “It has many names.”
I push his hand off me, turn away, and walk across the room to create some distance. “OK.” I turn back to face him. “All right. I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“Hell. Just… how do we speed it along? How do I get my memories back? I don’t care where I end up, I just want to remember them.”
Paul’s stoic face breaks into a sad smile. “It’s funny, you know.”
“What is?”
“That you are willing to go to Hell to remember them when sixty-five years ago you were willing to go to Hell to forget them.”
He’s right. That’s some next-level irony right there.
“But…” Paul… well, I hesitate to use this word. Because it’s typically not a word that describes him. But he wilts. He visibly wilts. “You’re not going to Hell, Ryet.”
“You just said—”
“You’re going to drink the Black witch, Ryet. She’s the answer for you. She’s what you need to be worrying about.”
My breathing is suddenly erratic. “So it was a lie?”
“What was a lie?”
“I won’t get my memory back.”
“Is this really all you can think about?”
“Yes.” I growl the word at him. “Sixty-five years, Paul. I’ve been walking around with no memory of them for sixty-five years. They’re all I’ve ever thought about.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
“It is. You have no idea—”
“Don’t I?” He laughs. “Do you want me to give you the memories? So we can get past these stupid feelings that you don’t even have? Should I get pictures of them and come back? Should I put you in a dreamwalk and send you to your wife’s bed so you can fuck her one last—”
I hit him. Hard. Hard enough to make him take two steps to the left. When he turns back to me, eyes alight with fury, his lip is bleeding. It is pooling in the corner of his mouth and dripping down his chin.
He laughs at me because there is hunger in my eyes. I can feel it rising up in my stomach like an ache.
But this is a dreamwalk and that blood isn’t even real.
He dabs at his lip with a fingertip, then offers it to me.
I shake my head.
“If this were real life, you would not be able to say no.”
“So what?”
Paul walks over the chair and takes a seat. He props his ankle up on the opposite knee. He’s wearing jeans tonight. Dark jeans and a midnight-blue button-down shirt. Boots on his feet, the kind that lace. He is as beautiful as always.
Except he’s not always beautiful. I know this. It was his true form that I said yes to sixty-five years ago.
He takes a breath and tries to restart this conversation. “You are dying. You must drink the Black witch. If you do, you will not go to Hell. It’s a real place where the Darkness lives incarnate and I’m not the one in charge there. No one will love you. You will get those memories back for a little while, but you won’t care about them because you are looking at an eternity of slavery. And not even the sweet face of your lovely wife, Jane, or that little baby, Susan, will be enough to get you through it. You will degrade into nothing but energy. And then you will just be... evil.”