Page 29 of To Vanquish Darkness

“The outrageous story you’ve been telling yourself.” Theo pushed up off the mattress. He prowled across the wood floor and stopped in front of her. With him looming over her, her bravado sank, seeping out through her aching feet, leaving only panic.

She’d tried to be strong, but here she was alone with only the man she’d hated her entire life to talk to. Her family, her friends, everything in her life was gone. Pointless. A film of exhaustion and grief settled over her, making her body as heavy as lead.

“Why would you do this to me?” she breathed.

Something flickered in Theo’s eyes, and his jaw tightened. “Besides saving you from frostbite, feeding you supper, and providing you safety for the night, I’ve done nothing else.” He turned from her and stalked to the table at the edge of the room, pouring himself a glass of amber liquid.

Amalie’s eyes burned. “How dare you pretend?—”

“You want to know what to expect? Why you’re still living after a bite from a vampire?” Theo turned, his lips wet, the glass in his hand.

Amalie swallowed hard. Why had he used those words? Why would he talk to her about living? She wanted to know what to expect when she turned. It was no life to be proud of.

Could he be attempting to distract her? The old stories poured through her mind.Le Sombre cursed to quell his loneliness, but it was insatiable. Vampires, in their lust forcompanionship, turned others with their bite only to discover their power was split, shared with their victims. They became weak, drawn further into shadow, forced to accept their isolation or shrivel in darkness without the power they’d been given . . .

Theo took three slow steps toward her, his eyes fixed on hers. “You believe I turned you. You think I gave up the power of Le Sombre to curse you like the rest of us.”

The name of the Shadow pulled her above her racing blood.Le Sombre.His power. Was Theo asking if she believed he’d transferred that power by turning her into a vampire like him? Was he amused because she was naïve enough to believe the legends or foolish enough to believe he’d act in such a way?

Amalie swallowed the shame working its way up her throat. His venom was the reason she was standing there, wasn’t it?

Theo took another step. “If I turned you, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

“Why not?” Amalie felt like she was standing on the edge of a cliff. She held her breath, desperate for the answer about to slip through his lips.

“Because I’d be a weakened sop.”

Amalie’s hands started to shake. It was true, then. When vampires were created, they sacrificed. Which meant?—

“And you decidedly wouldn’t be,” he finished.

Amalie’s breath hissed between her teeth.She wouldn’t be?There she stood like a drowned cat, her bones frosting over, in front of a creature that only half a day prior she’d stabbed in the heart with a stake. She was sick of him dancing around her questions, batting at her like a mouse hanging on a string.

“Humans don’t survive vampire bites,” she snapped. “Your kind feed like gluttonous dogs. I should be dead on the floor of my bedroom.”

Theo shook his head, the light flickering from lamps hung on the walls warming the right side of his face. “Almost always wrong.”

He thought her stupid. So be it, but she at least needed to force a straight answer out of him. Amalie was shivering again, and just as she was about to insist he stop talking nonsense, Theo opened his mouth. “I thought you’d know something. That you’d—” He caught himself, his hands balling into fists. “You have no idea who you are, do you?”

The walls seemed to close in on her, and Amalie put a hand on the armoire next to her. She wanted to shout back at him. To fight and kick like she had when his arms were around her, but his words held her in a choke hold as his eyes traveled over her, the smirk fading from his lips.

That question should’ve felt like the others he’d asked, a half-truth, a slap, but it didn’t. His words struck her like a mallet, ringing her from the inside out.

It wasn’t only this night she couldn’t make sense of.

She’d seen with her own eyes that her mother had been killed by Vallon, but her family had tried to bury the truth. They’d never let her see her mother’s body. Her uncle had never talked about it since that day.

Then her uncle’s refusal to admit the truth followed by their conversation outside her bedroom door. What else would he have told her? Missing pieces that she’d stored carefully in her memory over the years splayed out in her head. Their hushed relocation. The change of their names. Uncle Oren’s rules.

There was something there. Something she wasn’t seeing.What did Theo know that she didn’t?

His eyes were sharp as he gave a small smile that seemed disarmingly sincere. "It's true that humans die when they are bitten, but you misunderstand the reason why. You call us 'gluttonous dogs,' and I won't refute that point, but humanswould die regardless of how much or how little we drank. Their blood reacts to our saliva. It coagulates within minutes. So, yes. We drink fast and fully. Waste not, want not."

Their blood, not hers.You have no idea who you are, do you?Amalie pressed harder against the smooth wood. He spoke about death as if he were recounting a trip to the market. "You drank my blood."

"I did not."

Amalie’s frown deepened. "I have the marks to prove it."

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