Page 39 of Evidence of a Folktale

“Got it wrong. He was never the Impaler… I was.”

“What?” Bel hadn’t heard him correctly. Her ears were lying.

“I was my father’s enforcer. His right hand. His general. He was the devil, and he made me in his image. Historians link Vlad to the Impaler, but that honor belongs to me. I was the Impaler in his name. I’m the one history remembers for his brutality.”

“Eamon…” Bel trailed off. This man. This beautiful man she loved. He was the one responsible for mounting thousands of still-living men onto spikes. The famous Impaler was a paragraph in the history books, a monster who didn’t seem real to the modern mortal, but he was real, and he was sitting across from her.

“How many?” she whispered. “How many did you kill?”

“I don’t know… I lost track,” he answered. “Enough to send me to hell.”

“Thousands?” she asked.

“More,” he said. “I liked to kill. I was good at it, and I did it for sport.”

Bel started to cry again. She couldn’t help it. All she could see was her beautiful beast shoving living bodies onto spikes, and she pressed her palm against her mouth to keep from getting sick on the kitchen island.

“Is your father still alive?” she asked through her fingers.

“No,” Eamon answered. “He realized his mistake in creating me. I was his downfall. A child born to serve became his god, and I led the vampires to the slaughter, saving my father for last. I wanted him to feel fear, and he did in the end. The vampire breed died with him, and I seized power, often killing my brethren to stay in control. I murdered so many that I don’t think there are any left. I’m the only Dhampir to walk this earth that I’m aware of… which is why Alcina Magus tried to bind me to her with your death. My power is unmatched. I’ve been alive so long that I’m nearly invincible. Honestly, I’m not even sure I can die.”

“A stake to the heart?” Bel asked. She didn’t know why she asked, but with all the horrors laid out before her, her brain needed something trivial to latch onto.

“A stake to the heart would kill anything, supernaturals included,” Eamon said. “The hard part would be penetrating my chest. Not even an IED could do that.”

“The armor-piercing rounds,” Bel said, referring to the weapon guarding John Darling’s death trap during his kidnapping case. Eamon had implied those would harm him, but was he just being cautious?

“If shot point blank, probably. You would have to aim for my brain or heart, though, and you’d have to be close,” he confirmed, and Bel had the sneaking suspicion he was instructing her how to kill him.

“And you need human blood to survive?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you still hunt like you used to?”

“No.”

“How do you drink, then?”

“Blood drives,” Eamon said. “I work with a lot of collection and storage facilities. It’s easy to launder the donations.”

“So you don’t slaughter people anymore to drink?”

“No… you were the last person I’ve tasted from the vein,” he said. “After I met you, I stopped hunting completely. I haven’t had fresh blood since.”

“That’s less than a year,” Bel said.

“I know.”

“And before me? When was the last time you killed someone? Not to protect me. Not to save your friends in World War II. Just to drink.”

“Isobel…”

“When?” she demanded.

“Sometimes the devil in me is hard to suppress,” Eamon said, avoiding her question. “I’m unnatural, and my father spent so long breeding violence into me that my nature occasionally rears its head. I struggled to fight it… until I met you. Seems the devil is afraid of something, after all, and it’s losing you.”

“Until it isn’t. Until you can’t suppress it anymore, and you let the Impaler free.”

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