The intimate feeling between them felt more refreshing, more wonderful than he could have ever put into words in any of the numerous languages he knew. His body felt as though it had been set free from some gravitational pull that he hadn’t been aware existed. It wasn’t only because of his expression of his heart’s secret admiration for Rachel. No, he could feel that it was much bigger than that. This feeling was similar to the one he had gotten every time he had escaped from any ancient European outfit of high society lined with whale bone. His body had ached when he had felt the weight of the coat, the tightness of the fabric that refused to bend or flex. It had been something he had slowly gotten used to, standing for night after night in this stiff fabric that men called clothing in Paris. Getting into it was a slow process and he could adjust to each layer of stiffness as it was added to his person, but once it all came back, it was like a gasp of fresh air after being help under water for a minute. It was difficult for Damien to examine why it was all coming back to him now, but all he knew was that the feeling was similar. He could breathe, so to speak, as if he had been holding a breath in for years and only just realized it.
But in a small corner of himself that clung to a different version of familiarity, something that was rotten and guilty festered. Her words, though they swept through his mind and cleaned the cobwebs off of what made him human, couldn’t overcome the vampire part of himself that was so radically different than anything this foolish human girl could ever hope to understand.
He was a monster, one who had loved and lost a monster too fitting. Who was he to try to change what he was?
“I never intended for this to happen,” he pleaded quietly, as if her words had only stuck a band-aid over his open wound. “I didn’t want this to happen,” he said needlessly as her hand remained on his. Damien looked at it as he drifted into verbal thought.
“When Lucretia had,” he swallowed hard, finding the word stuck in his throat, even after all these years, “died, I lost it. With her I had built everything that we had ever wanted: a family, an empire – the beginning of a world where we could live in unity with humans and other immortals in peace, helping each other. When she died, when they all died, everything we had went with them and I was all alone except for Pierre. She was the first person I ever loved, the only woman I had ever kissed, well, before you, that is. She claimed me before I had even had the time to consider taking a wife.
“When she was gone, I don’t know,” he continued quietly, not really sure why his lips kept moving without his permission. “I closed down I suppose. The only time I ever even went near a human, let alone a woman, was to feed. The thought of being…” he paused, trying to find a word to describe what he hadn’t experienced in a very long time to a girl who had been abused so recently, “…with anyone else was the most frightening thing I could imagine.” He didn’t add that it still was – no need to make her feel more guilty about something neither of them could fully understand.
“I had… denied everything that had made me her lover since she died and I just kept moving, hoping one day something would change. Until it did, I would remain loyal and chaste.” He drifted off into an introspective pause that he couldn’t express verbally. There was no way to admit to Rachel that that change was upon him because he couldn’t see it himself.
By the time he looked back at the human, there was frown on her face that was deep as he had ever seen it. “That’s sad,” she said, wrapping her fingers around his hand in an attempt to connect to him. The sensation was something he was too unfamiliar with. The idea she expressed and the squeeze at his hand puzzled him.
“Why is that sad?” Damien didn’t understand. Had no one else grieved? Didn’t others do things in the memory of the people they had lost? That was all that he was doing. Lucretia had been his world, despite all the horrible fights and nights of hatred they had endured together and apart. She was the one he loved beyond everyone else, his lover, his sire, his empress. Her death had signaled the death of everything in him that was capable of love and compassion. Or so he had thought. “Why does everyone say that?”
