Chapter 22

Olivia’s POV

I waited until Damien grew bored and left me, and then, after making certain he was gone, I hurriedly grabbed the picture of Jacob that I had drawn off the ground. I flattened it as best I could then rolled it up tightly. Knowing that Damien would destroy it if he saw it again, I tucked it into the folds of my clothes to hide it among the few items I owned in the bedroom.

With it safely stowed, I also grabbed a few spare pages and the charcoal, hoping to take more memories down before I forgot them. Drawing Jacob again was clearly off-limits, but Damien never said I couldn’t draw at all.

If I really was going to live here for the rest of my life, then I wanted to be able record some people and places of my past, before time replaced those memories with cold castle walls and disapproving vampire scowls.

Over the next few days, when I did not have any direct orders from Damien, I sat and I sketched. The most common times for my art was right before bed.

While Damien sat at his table, reading or working on some documents, I would sit on my makeshift bed of blankets and sketch away.

After his reaction to Jacob, I stopped sketching people for a while, instead focusing on the places that I loved. I sketched the buildings of the town that I knew so well, as well as the clock tower in the center square. My own house was the most common, and I had even rendered my bedroom a few times, as I remembered it before all this had happened.

I wondered if Mom and Keri had altered it in anyway, or did they leave it preserved, a memory frozen in time, a museum to a tribute unlikely to return.

I didn’t know which choice I hoped they had made. I wanted them to make use of that space, but I also didn’t want them to forget me.

Today, I felt like sketching their faces. I missed them so much.

I had to redraw Mom’s eyes a few time. I kept making them too sad. I didn’t want to think of her that way, as she was when I had been pulled away from her. Instead, I wanted to remember the mother of my youth, when she still had hope in her eyes.

“Show me your drawings,” Damien said. “The ones you are working on today.”

Obediently, I put down the charcoal, then, carrying the drawings, stood and brought them to him. He flipped through them, stopping on the in-progress portrait of my mother.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“That’s my mom,” I said.

He hummed thoughtfully. “You look like her.”

That was the best sort of compliment I could have ever received, and one I never would have expected from Damien. Of course, his face was impassive. To him, I suspected, he was just making a statement of fact.

He flipped past that picture to one of my home town. “This is where you are from?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It seems very quaint,” he said.

By quaint, I wasn’t sure if he meant small or poor, but both were true. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but Mom always found a way to get food on the table. She must have had two or three jobs at a time. I helped, when I could. Times could be tough, but as long as we had each other, we were happy.”

As Damien continued to stare at the pictures, his gaze became distant, as if he was looking through them to a place very far away.

“I don’t remember my family before…” I started, then cut himself off, shaking his head. “I’ve been a vampire such a long time. Yet even before, I’m not sure I ever felt happiness. He looked up at me, and for such an ancient creature, for the first time, he seemed a bit lost. “What is happiness?”

“It comes from love,” I told him. “When people are around the ones they love, they feel happy.”

Damien frowned at that. “I’ve never loved anyone.”

That seemed impossible for a being as old as him, and I didn’t fully understand. How could someone that lived for thousands of years never have felt love?

“Tell me, pet. What does love feel like?”

Damien’s POV

I felt melancholy, sitting in my chair, looking at these drawn portraits of Rose’s family and her hometown. The care for these people and these places was clear with every stroke of the charcoal to paper. And even clearer as Rose talked about them.

Her affections for her family and her home sparked my interest. Long had I given up any desire to feel love or friendship for myself, yet she seemed passionate about it.

“Love is…” she started, but then seemed to struggle with her words. I supposed I could understand why. Love wasn’t some tangible thing, but merely a concept.

I grew bored with waiting for her answer, and started to put aside the drawings.

“Love changes you,” she said then. “It draws you in, sometimes against your wishes, and it makes you want to be a better person because that’s the kind of person that the one you love deserves. In the end, you would move heaven and earth for them, just to make sure they are safe and happy.”

Her words sent me to a memory, a time and placed long since come and gone. I was a different man then, still a vampire but younger.

A woman in a vibrant regal gown was sitting on the floor near the foot of my bed.

She was looking at me and she was speaking.

“But it’s not all about giving. Just being near them, gives you a kind of warmth in your chest. You can’t get enough of it. It feels like home.”

This woman made my dead heart start to beat again. I didn’t know who she was, only that I felt as if I knew her, and had known her for a long time.

I was drawn to her, as a moth was to a flame, and before I knew it, I was out of my seat and walking toward her.

“It’s not a feeling you forget,” she said. “In fact, when you love and lose it, it haunts you, maybe for the rest of your life.”

Her voice turned sad, and I wondered who she was thinking of. This woman in her regal gown should never be sad. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted to be the one to make her happy, even if I didn’t understand why.

I kneeled down beside her and then started to lean in closer to her.

My heart felt strange, too tight and too hot.

As I leaned more, my lips so close to hers, my mouth desperate to taste her, the woman’s eyes went wide.

“Master?” she asked, her voice soft.

I blinked, and the illusion vanished. The woman in her regal gown was gone. In her place, my pet sat, staring up at me with wide, frightened eyes.

What trickery was this? In my old age, was I finally losing my mind?

I would never lower myself to kissing a pet.

“Do not get so close to me,” I scolded her, anger in my voice. Though it was anger at myself for allowing this, not meant for Rose. Even so, I couldn’t allow her to think she had any kind of effect on me.

No one could affect me anymore.