Hel
I don't sleep.
For creatures like me, sleep is less a necessity and more an occasional surrender. Usually, when I close my eyes, I can choose which century to disappear into, which memory to bury beneath another, which face to forget. Tonight, none of them stay buried.
Vera's face keeps appearing in the darkness.
I lie on the old sofa with my eyes fixed on the ceiling, listening to the building settle around me. Somewhere down the hallway, a floorboard creaks, and I know Michael is awake too. He has the irritating habit of moving quietly when he thinks I am asleep.
I wonder if priests are supposed to be this suspicious. Then again, Michael is hardly a typical priest.
I turn onto my side and look toward the photograph on the table. Even from across the room, I can see the edge of Vera's smile. It is the same smile she wore the night she found me, when I was still human enough to believe that kindness could exist without a price.
I close my eyes, and that's my first mistake. The memory comes anyway. Rain; that is what I remember first.
Not Vera's face, not the blood, not the pain. Rain hammering against the windows of a house that no longer exists, running down the glass in silver streams while I sat beside a dying fire and wondered whether I would see another winter.
I had been twenty-six. Young enough to still believe I had all the time in the world but somehow, old enough to understand that time was already running out.
My mother's letters had stopped arriving months earlier. My brother was dead, my father had been dead longer, and I had no one left who knew my name well enough to miss me. Vera had appeared three nights later.
She had knocked once. I remember opening the door and thinking how beautiful she was. I also remember thinking she looked terribly sad.
What I don't remember is agreeing to become what I am now.
My eyes open. The apartment is silent again.
"Damn you, Vera," I whisper.
"Talking to yourself?"
I nearly fall off the sofa.
Michael is standing in the doorway wearing a black shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. His hair is still damp, and for one deeply inconvenient second, I forget that I am supposed to be irritated by his existence.
I sit upright.
"You walk like a ghost."
"Occupational hazard."
"You're a priest."
"I've been told the two aren't mutually exclusive."
I stare at him as he glances over at the photograph.
"You were remembering her."
"That isn't a question."
"Do you remember everything?"
"No."
He walks into the room and sits in the chair opposite me. For once, he doesn't look like a man preparing to interrogate me. He looks tired, practically human, and there is something about that which makes me answer honestly.
"Some things are easier to remember than others."
"Like what?"
"The night she found me."
He waits quietly. Perhaps because silence with Michael has stopped feeling like a threat. Perhaps because some part of me has become curious about what happens when I stop running from the things I've spent centuries refusing to say aloud.
"She told me I didn't have to die."
His expression changes.
"You were dying?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"Consumption."
He looks at me for several seconds.
"You were sick."
"I was dying."
"And Vera saved you."
I laugh quietly.
"No. Vera changed me."
"That isn't the same thing?"
"No," I say. "Not in the slightest."
The first light of morning begins to creep through the curtains. I hate mornings. They have always felt too honest, too revealing, as though daylight has some personal objection to creatures like me. Michael notices me watching the window.
"What, you don't like the sun?"
"I don't like being burned alive."
"Fair distinction, I guess."
I glance at him.
"You really don't know much about vampires, do you?"
"I'm learning."
"That sounds dangerous."
"It probably is."
There is a knock at the door, and both of us freeze. Three soft knocks; not loud or urgent. Michael rises immediately, and I stand more slowly. We're both dead quiet. The knock comes again. Three times, and by the third, my stomach twists.
"No," I whisper.
Michael looks at me.
"You know that knock."
I nod.
"She used it when I was human."
"Vera?"
"Yes."
The knock comes a third time. I move toward the door, but Michael catches my arm.
"Wait."
I look down at his hand and then at him.
"Let go."
"No."
"Michael."
"You're not opening that door alone."
Something inside me should object. Instead, trust settles. I hate how quickly I'm beginning to understand what that feels like. He moves beside me, one hand beneath his coat, while I reach for the handle. The moment my fingers touch the metal, I smell her.
Roses, rain, blood.
Vera.
I open the door, but there's no one standing outside. The corridor is empty, and we're both dead still for a few seconds. Then I look down. A small wooden box sits on the floor.
My name is written across the lid. Not Hel. Not Helena Blackwood. My real name. The name I haven't heard spoken in more than two hundred years. Michael looks over at me.
"What does it say?"
I don't answer.
"Hel."
I crouch beside the box. My hands are trembling. That hasn't happened in a very long time. I lift the lid and inside is a single envelope, yellowed with age, and beneath it, a small silver pendant.
I know the pendant. I would know it anywhere. As I pick it up, Michael's expression tightens.
"What is it?"
"The last thing my mother gave me."
He looks at me carefully.
"I thought you said your family was dead."
"They are."
"Then how did Vera get this?"
I stare at the pendant.
A tiny crack runs through the center of the silver.
"She didn't."
His eyes narrow.
"Then who did?"
I turn the envelope over, but there's no name on it, only a date.
The day I was turned.
My mouth goes dry.
"That isn't possible."
"What?"
I hand him the envelope.
He reads the date, then looks back at me.
"What happened that night?"
"I told you."
"You told me Vera changed you. You didn't tell me everything."
"There isn't anything else."
He studies my face.
"You're lying."
I look toward the open doorway.
"No," I whisper.
"Then what?"
I swallow.
"There is something else."
Again, he waits. I hate him for being so patient and I hate myself more for wanting to tell him.
"When Vera found me that night, she wasn't alone."
His expression hardens.
"Who was with her?"
I close my eyes. For the first time in centuries, I allow myself to remember the third person in that room. The man standing behind Vera. The man whose face I had forgotten until now.
"The priest."
Michael goes completely still.
"What priest?"
I look at him.
"The one who watched Vera turn me until it was his turn to have his fun."
The silence that follows is different from all the others. Not awkward or intimate, but dangerous. He looks down at the letter in his hand and turns it over. His face changes.
There is something written on the back again, something I hadn't noticed before. I take the envelope from him to see what's got him so rattled.
Four words.
Ask your priest about him.
I look at Michael and he looks at me. You can cut the silence with a knife. Then, somewhere downstairs, the church bells begin to ring.
One.
Two.
Three.
Michael's face has gone pale. I've heard those bells hundreds of times in Millbrook, and they've always sounded like home, but this morning, for the first time, they sound like a warning.