“They’re my friends!” Alexi shouted, going red in the face. He looked every inch the petulant prince in his loose white shirt, but his rage was that of a grown man. “Why don’t you let any of us have friends?”
In any other scenario you would have walked out and left Alexi with his tempestuous emotions, but he was blocking your way to the door. I knew from experience that if Alexi kept pushing you, you would explode. I tensed involuntarily.
“They aren’t friends. They’re humans. Prey animals, ghosts of a past life. You forget yourself, Alexi.”
“I’m not forgetting anything! Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one around here who remembers anything. The taste of food, the feel of warm skin, the sound of laughter.”
“Alexi,” I said quietly, holding my arms out to him.
“Don’t defend him!” Alexi shouted. “All you ever do is defend him.”
His words pricked my heart like a hornet sting, but I knew he was right. All those years living under your thumb and I still justified your behavior to the others, hoping to make sense of the madness.
“Alexi,” you hissed.
He turned the full force of his wrath back onto you. “I didn’t sign up to waste away in some tower room while the world went on turning outside. You told me I would live. I want to live .”
“The world has no place for us,” you snapped, eyes flashing dark fire. “We are wanderers by nature, lions among lambs. We have no recourse with our food.”
“Just shut up and listen to me,” Alexi shouted, tears springing to his eyes. I had seen Alexi cry only a handful of times in our years together, and the sight frightened me. I wanted terribly to fold him up in my arms and hide him away from you, but this was his fight. He had been itching for it for months, and I wasn’t going to rob him of it. “I need friends. Don’t you understand? The way I need blood, or rest. I’ll lose my mind without them.”
“You have your sisters.”
“We cannot exist only for each other!” Alexi screamed, right in your face.
You slapped him.
It was sharp, deliberate, and the force nearly knocked Alexi to the ground.
That slap snapped me out a reverie I had been living in for hundreds of years. It obliterated any grace I had left to give you, any lies I was still telling myself about your good intentions and your savior’s heart.
I had always comforted myself in the dark hours after any of our arguments with the thought that at least, you had never hurt any of us. You would never hurt any of us. You only wanted what was best for us, and you were harsh with us because you loved us.
But now, all my carefully crafted excuses for you dissolved like sugar under absinthe, revealing a truth I had spent centuries avoiding.
“You hit him,” I blurted. It was the only thought screaming through my mind. “Oh my God. You hit him.”
“We’re leaving,” you announced, looking a little unsteady, as though you were surprised by your own violence. You always prided yourself on your restraint, after all. “Pack your things. Both of you.”
I rushed over to Alexi and pulled him into my arms, letting him bury his face in my bosom.
“You can’t just make us leave,” Alexi spat, cradling his wounded cheek in his hand. The fight hadn’t gone out of him entirely, but the fire of his rage had been dampened. “We have a life here.”
“Any life you had here died with her,” you said, jutting your chin towards the corpse quickly going cold on the rug. “There were witnesses, Alexi. A half dozen of them. They know what you are now, and they’ll run you through with a hot iron or make you eat silver bullets if they see you again. The police will be coming soon, looking for death and someone to blame. Do you really want to be here when they arrive?”
“Do not do this,” I heard myself say. I felt so small, so pathetic and useless. You had laid hands on my beloved Alexi right in front of me and here I was, pleading like a schoolgirl. I should have torn your throat out in that very instant, and every day I regret that I was too frightened to try. “Don’t drag us out onto the road again.”
You gave me an almost pitying look. It made me sick to my stomach.
“None of you have left me any choice,” you said.
The chateau you found for us was miles away from the nearest city, a crumbling pastoral house that had seen better days. The money had begun to run out by then, I suspect. No amount of sound investments and jewels handed down through generations could outlive the slow grind of time, and our lifestyles had become less and less extravagant in recent years. Our finances were in as much a state of decay as that house was, wasting away with stubborn slowness.