Chapter 29, Part 1: Life After Death

Vlad

He curled his hands around hers, listening to the steady sound of her breath. He didn’t sleep, didn’t need to, and so he simply closed his eyes and listened. 

“What did you mean you have feelings now?” she whispered.

“What?” His eyes flashed open. He hadn’t realized she was awake. 

“At Von Haunt,” she clarified, still staring at the ceiling. “You said you had feelings now and you liked them.” Her voice was hollow, like she was making an observation from far away. 

“Like is a strong word,” Vlad replied. But that evasiveness was a knee jerk reaction. He swallowed and forced himself to actually answer. “I do prefer them, I think. It’s hard to know. I didn’t choose to feel, I was cursed by a witch seven months ago.”

“Why?”

“My depravity became too much even for witches,” he quipped. 

Another dodge. He tried again, aiming for truth over flippancy. He told her about the cease and desist, the hunting of witches, the boy who went over the cliff. The more truth he poured out, the more he began to understand why the witches had risked everything to curse him. He had become a menace long before the incident on the cliffs.

“I think I was desperate for war, starved for terror and carnage,” he said, realization dawning on him. “The modern era was so quiet…I felt myself without purpose, wasting away.”

And then because one truth begets another, he told her what it was like to feel. “Painful at first. A jumble of physical signals I could neither parse nor predict. My conscience was a voice and at first, even the smallest amount of guilt was overwhelming. Before you, I longed to use The Owl to return myself to my previous state, to undo everything I found…disappointing.” 

“But you changed your mind.” It was half a question and he didn’t understand why she was asking it. Of course he changed his mind, she needed it.

“I experienced feelings I had long forgotten. The good ones: joy, desire, contentment. I suppose I’ve become addicted to them.”

To you, he thought quietly in his mind, knowing that it was a wildly inappropriate answer. It wasn’t just that he felt those things with her, she reminded him that they were possible and he wanted to do was feel them with her. But he didn’t know how to say that without sounding crazy. Obsessed.

She sat up. “If Phobos took your feelings, do you think I—”

“No,” Vlad said quickly, finally understanding her line of questioning. “Alice, it won’t be permanent. However he did it, Ben’s sacrifice gave you power, and maybe other things we don’t yet know. But you will be mad or sad or happy again. I was…I was empty long before Phobos came along.”

The bitterness of the thought almost swept him away. He had never bothered to learn what was bound inside of him. There was only hunger and nothingness and power. It made sense now, why carnage provided such sustenance, why Alice didn’t fear him, why any hint of her fear turned his stomach.

“He’s not sacrificed, he’s missing,” she fumed as she climbed out of bed. 

A little fury was good. He followed her into the main room, smiling when her stomach rumbled. “Hungry?”

She didn’t answer, only looked shell-shocked again, the fury gone almost as soon as it appeared.

The rain made a fire outside impossible, so he set about chopping vegetables from the overgrown garden and adding some fish he caught earlier into a pot for stew. Keeping his voice light, he chatted with her as he cooked. “I don’t imagine your delivery system comes this far out.” 

If she was surprised by his ability to cook, she didn’t let it show. He was gratified to see that she took a seat on the bench near the table. Ever since Alice, worry was a new old emotion that had been cropping up, he added it to the list of ones he did not prefer.

“My father used to own all these woods. This was one of his hunting cabins. I built onto it…”—he paused to survey a crooked column—“Poorly. My father did not approve of Kaylnn, or my desire to flout his rules. We lived here in secret until Atorn was nearly 8 years old.”

She didn’t say anything so he continued, occasionally stoking the fire to bring the stew to a boil. “There’s a pond not too far from here. Always full of fish, even in winter.”

Alice stared, and he kept talking, not sure if it was for him or for her. “Kaylnn did not like to cook,” he recalled with a crooked smile, the memory warm when he shared it, instead of painful. “She said she’d rather be strung up on the gallows than put a meal in a pan. But for me, it was a new skill to throw myself into learning. As you can imagine, in that day, princes did not cook.” 

He tamped the fire down and scooped out a portion of stew, pouring it into a chipped bowl before handing it to her. She swallowed a spoonful and moaned, a little expression of joy that gave Vlad hope.

As the quiet dragged on though, he found himself in the role that was usually reserved for William or Caleb. He could now appreciate what labor it must be to coax out how he felt. Should he try a joke like William? Feign disinterest like Caleb?

“Tell me about Ben,” he said, unable to find any sort of smooth transition.