Page 41 of Taste of Death

I nodded. “The Crown region was actually my clan’s territory. The fortress I grew up in is just beyond those mountains.”

“Do you miss any of it?” Amy asked gently. “Your home? Your family?”

I let out a long, heaving breath. “Yes. I guess I do. I mean, it’s where I spent my childhood. They were the people who raised me. We used to be at the top of the vampire hierarchy, and now it’s just… me.” I frowned, trying fruitlessly to untangle the complicated feelings I’d carried my whole life. “I had everything I ever wanted, but I wouldn’t call my childhood happy. I can’t definitively say if I ever loved my family. Especially as everyone around me got sicker and I never changed.”

“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “That must have been so scary and isolating, watching everyone change like that with no answers.” She slid her arms underneath mine and looped them around until she was gently hugging my bicep, her head leaning on my shoulder. “If your family knew you’ve been trying to find a cure all this time, I’m sure they’d be so proud of you.” Her head lifted and her voice brightened with hope. “If you discover it, you’ll be able to tell them then. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

I smiled in spite of myself. She was so pure-hearted, she had no idea. If my father was still out there, and I cured him of Rathka’s Curse, he’d flay me alive with silver knives for allowing Blood ‘til Dawn to become the ruling clan, a title he believed belonged to Rathka’s Order alone. Of course, he conveniently ignored the historical facts that we’d never managed to hold onto the ruling seat in the few, brief times we’d had it.

“Honestly, I don’t know if I’m any closer to finding a cure now than when I started,” I admitted. “Part of me wants to throw my hands in the air and give up, but… ” I trailed off, once again at a loss to describe my feelings of obligation to my family. I didn’t love them, actually hated them most days. But they were my kin, my blood. I owed them the effort, didn’t I?

“You still feel the need to be loyal to them,” Amy said. “Like a sense of duty.”

I looked at her. “Yes, that’s exactly it.” Her embrace around my arm had loosened, and my fingers found hers to entwine with gently. “Don’t tell me your family is like mine.”

“My blood family? Never knew them,” she said with a shrug. “Sapien’s population has been shrinking over the years because so many humans left to live among the vampires. The elders said that’s what my parents did. Tavia’s too. The whole community raised us. So they’re all my family, in a way.”

“That can be good and bad.” I walked toward the guardrail at the edge of the turnout and stepped over it, leading Amy along by the hand.

When I took a seat, she settled down next to me. We had an unobstructed view now, the massive moon painting the mountains and valley below in silvery light.

“Yeah, it wasn’t all good.” Amy released my hand to clasp hers together in her lap. “I was… bullied. A lot. The only one who ever stood up for me was Tavia.”

“Bullied? Why?” I stared at her, unable to comprehend it.

She was breathtakingly beautiful, clever, and so sweet. Not that cruel behavior toward a child was ever warranted, but it just didn’t make sense to me. If I were a human boy, I’d be a stammering, blushing mess every time I talked to her. As a man, I would have been trying to impress her, to court her until she told me off or agreed to be mine.

Like you’re trying to do now?

“I was born premature,” Amy explained. “So I’ve always been small for my age and I had some health conditions. A heart murmur and asthma. I never could keep up with other kids my age, so I got ridiculed for it.”

“Fuck. That’s terrible.”

I didn’t have the exact same experience but could relate to what she must have felt. My brother and I were constantly thrown into competition against each other, and it was never a fair match. He was forty years older than me, and bigger and crueler in every way.

“As an adult, I still struggled with a lot of things,” Amy went on. “Anything to do with manual labor, really. I think people started to resent me because I couldn’t push myself as hard to contribute. So I tried in other ways. Cooking, making blankets in the winter, watching children while parents worked.” She let out a sigh that seemed to deflate her whole chest. “Don’t know if it ever made an impact though.”

“I’m certain that it did,” I said. “You don’t need brute strength to be valuable to a community. It sounds like they didn’t appreciate you enough.”

She shrugged and laughed lightly. “Whether I was appreciated or not didn’t matter to me, honestly. I was always happy to help. It felt like I was doing something important, keeping our human community alive in a vampire-run world.”

That was one place she and I differed greatly. All my life, I sought approval from my father and my brother. I thirsted for a single word of praise or pride like a prized drop of blood. Sometimes I wondered if I was still chasing that approval, that acknowledgment that I’d done well by our clan, by trying to find this fucking cure.

Amy’s smile faded as her fingers rubbed absently at her throat. “Since becoming a brusang, I haven’t felt any of my symptoms from before. No shortness of breath, no crazy heartbeats or feeling faint. I feel physically stronger too. I bet I could do a lot more for them now than before.”

“It must be the healing properties of vampire blood,” I mused.

She laughed bitterly. “But would they even want me back now?”

“Are you thinking of going back?” My chest squeezed with an uncomfortable ache at the thought.

“I don’t know.” She sighed again. “Now that Tavia’s got a life beyond fighting my battles for me, I have to figure stuff out. I just never thought we’d end up in such different places, you know?”

“She’s not going anywhere,” I reminded her. “She’s still your friend. You two live in the same place.”

“I know, it’s just different now.” Amy laughed. “It sounds silly, but we really were attached at the hip all the time. People thought we were sisters. Now I have to do life without her.”

I waited a long time, weighing the pros and cons of my next thought before taking the leap and saying it. “You have me, you know.”

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