Page 37 of Even Vampires Bleed
“What do you remember?” she asks me, and this is such a weird question that I don’t know where to start.
I’m stuck.
She waits for a minute and when I still haven’t answered her question; she starts with another one.
“Do you remember your name?”
“Léandre,” I answer automatically, but I feel the need to correct myself. “You’re the second one to call me like that, and… It feels right.”
“So, you don’t really remember that,” the girl says to herself.
“Do you know what you are?”
“A cockatoo-shifter,” I answer without missing a beat.
I don’t need to wonder because I feel it in my bones, the same way I would know how to fly if I was asked.
“Good,” the girl says. “Do you remember my name?”
I wince. I have no idea and yet, with how cautious she was with the question, I feel like I should know.
She seems to deflate, but then she steels herself as if nothing has happened. This girl is good at showing a face that doesn’t reflect what she feels about the world.
“My name is Angélique. We grew up together.”
There’s a pregnant pause.
I don’t know this girl—Angélique—but she’s expecting me to say something. Maybe that what she just said feels right, but I can’t say that.
It rings hollow.
That’s when it hits me.
I feel hollow, as if I was a blank page.
This is how I feel.
“Do you remember having any family?” Angélique asks again.
It feels like this is a one-way conversation.
This girl keeps asking me questions, and all she has to do is read my face, and she gets all her answers.
I don’t even need to say a word.
I might not be able to read her now that her face is blank, but she seems to know all my tells.
She might very well know me. She might have grown up with me, but I don’t remember it.
“No.” I remember to answer her question and for a second I think I see hesitation on her face, but it disappears so fast that I think I imagined it.
“It might be for the best,” she mutters to herself again.
She stands and puts the chair where it used to be. Tentatively, she approaches me.
“What I have to ask might sound weird,” she says as she looks at me from above, since I’m still sitting on my bed.
“Can you touch behind your left ear?”
