Page 22 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

Letting the little comb slip back into the chest, I approached him warily. “Did you buy these things for your mystery woman?”

Hector didn’t say anything, only looked away.

“What happened?” I persisted.

His jaw clenched. “You don’t want to know, Dorothea.”

If I could describe Hector in one phrase, I would say,soul-crushing devotion. He was like Esperida in that way. To be the object of his devotion was to be a part of a brighter, kinder reality, and to be severed from it was the cruelest punishment.

That was how I felt standing there in the unbearable silence. Punished. And it was unfair. It was unfair because I’d lost my best friend too. I’d been left behind too. Yes, I had put my future over our friendship, but he had put his pride over it, and how was that any better? He could have told me how he really felt, or if that had been too hard, he could have written to me later. He could have reached out. I’d spent four years thinking he hated me when in reality he’d just… forgotten me.

Not having the strength for this conversation right now, I floundered helplessly in the tension until my gaze fell upon something that could break it.

I swiped the crimson mask from the array atop the couch and held it up to my face. “Okay, what does this remind you of?”

Immediate realization braced Hector’s face. “Oh gods. That ridiculous masquerade ball Mother threw for my sixteenth.”

“Nowthatwas a party,” I crooned, passing my fingers over the delicate lacework of the mask.

“It was not a party,” grumbled Hector. “It was a fever dream.”

“Do you remember that Arawn got so drunk he fell into the fountain? The Castle almost kicked him out.”

Hector snorted. “He still has nightmares about that night.”

Arawn’s golden face focused in the center of my memories. His delicate features. His pale blue eyes. The messy heap of his blonde hair. “Have you kept in touch with him?”

“I saw him about a year ago in Thaloria. And we write to each other regularly.”

I pressed my lips together, resentment churning in my stomach. “You visited Thaloria.”But not me, I wanted to say, butcouldn’t find the will.You didn’t even write to me. You didn’t even bother to learn if I got married.

“I was visiting the Celestines,” Hector clarified. “Calix and Esther wished to appoint Arawn the new Lord of the North.”

“Why? Did something happen to them?”

“Well, Esther is past five hundred. So she thought it was time her son took on the responsibility.”

“But Arawn is so young.”

Hector arched a brow. “He’s a yearolderthan us.”

Most of the families’ children were around our age, for Esperida’s union with Eron had signified the first period of interspecies peace and therefore the first time in history where vampires felt secure enough to settle down and create families of their own.

Still, I had a hard time wrapping my head around it. When had we all grown up so much?

I clutched the mask to my chest, holding the memory of that masquerade ball in my mind for as long as I could until the scene, as all things lost in time, fluttered away, and I was shoved back into the bleak, uncertain now. “I wish Esperida and Eron were here. This place is not the same without them,” I whispered, fresh tears stinging in my eyes. I dropped my lashes quickly so he wouldn’t see. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”

“It comes in waves,” he said. “Grief, I mean. A scent. A melody. Words strung together in a certain way. It lurks and strikes when you least expect it. Eating at you. Draining you. Like a vampire.”

My heart twisted painfully in my chest.

Was that how Hector saw himself? As the creature equivalent to grief?

I’d always thought that he despised vampire society because of the responsibility that came with his place in it. I never wouldhave imagined that he also despised the part of himself that, in my eyes, was what made him so magical.

Before I could assemble something meaningful enough to say, Hector veered to face the dresser. He pulled something out of the first drawer and, wordlessly, came to drop it on my palm.

A simple gold wristlet.

---