Before Loki could say anything, the wind snaked around him. Like a sponge erasing the writing off a chalkboard, it erased the trees and the sky over the graveyard, and started drawing a new life and space in front of them.
They were transported to a beautiful summer day, and were standing in a vast garden with a fountain in the middle.
“Where are we now?” Loki asked.
“In Styria, under the reign of Francis II, the Emperor of Austria,” Snow White replied. “It’s late in the 18th century.”
Loki saw a beautiful young girl running in the colorful garden under a blistering sun with her pink dress fluttering over the lilies, which contained purple, yellow, and lime green colors. Loki had thought Styria was always cold and snowy but he couldn’t argue with dreams.
“Who is she?” Loki said. He liked how Snow White looked, but this girl was as beautiful and lovely as she was, if not a notch lovelier. She had curly blond hair, sea blue eyes, and a smile that sucked in the air and made the lilies she ran through giggle.
Snow White didn’t comment for a while, watching the girl in the lilies with caring eyes. Her eyes followed her every move, every laugh, and every breath.
“That’s my mother, you’re looking at,” Snow White finally talked. “Her name is Carmilla Karnstein.”
Angel rose like a sneaky cat from between the lilies, hugging Carmilla and kissing her from behind. He kissed her on the neck once before she slid playfully away from him, and he had to chase her all over again.
“My father was sent to Styria on a school trip,” she continued. “Night Sorrow had sent him to spy on Carmilla’s father in the House of Karnstein, a wealthy family known for hunting vampires. It wasn’t known to the public yet that the Sorrows and the Karnsteins had one of the biggest family feuds in history. One family was vampires, the other, vampire hunters.”
“So Night Sorrow and Carmilla’s father were as different as night and day?” Loki said. “And your father just fell in love with the Karnstein’s daughter? Nice move, Angel,” Loki waved ‘hi’ out of curiosity at Angel. Neither Carmilla nor Angel could see them, although Snow White and Loki were standing in the middle of the field of lilies.
“She was worth it,” Snow White said, her eyes a bit watery, staring at her parents.
Loki was still watching. Carmilla lay in Angel’s arms on the bed of lilies while he stroked her hair gently. She looked ecstatically happy while a butterfly rested on her palm. Angel, although son of one of the darkest vampires in the world, didn’t look like a vampire at all, except for his almost inhuman beauty and strength. He waited until Carmilla slept and gathered a bed of purple and yellow lilies and laid her upon it, then sat watching as if she were a sleeping beauty. In many ways, Loki thought they both made a perfect beauty and the beast; Carmilla was as pure and innocent as a princess would be in fairy tales; Angel was as tortured and beautiful as vampires depicted in novels, a perfect portrait of a beauty and a beast.
“So when was he going to tell her he was a vampire?” Loki asked.
“He already had,” Snow White said. “She admired his courage, and that he wanted to be a good person in spite of the evil nature his father wanted to pass on to him.”
Loki watched Carmilla waking up to Angel’s kiss. She whispered something in his ear, and his face lit up as if he were an angel.
“What did she say to him?” Loki said.
“Why are you so curious?” Snow White wondered. “I thought you didn’t believe in a true love’s kiss.”
“Seriously,” Loki’s face knotted like an impatient child. “What did she tell him that made him so happy? I want to know.”
“Angel always saw himself as a beast,” Snow White explained. “My mother told him he was a beauty to her, but that wasn’t what lit up his eyes like you just saw. It was when she told him that she loved him and that she would stay with him until death do them part.”
“Wasn’t Angel immortal like other vampires?” Loki said, unable to take his eyes off the couple. He didn’t know what it was that attracted him to them, but he thought he would have loved it if he could have seen his own parents like that within a Dreamory of his.
“Angel wasn’t immortal yet because his transformation as a vampire wasn’t completed,” Snow White said. “He practically chose mortality as long as he was in my mother’s arms.”
“And what happened next?” Loki asked as if she were telling him an amazing bedtime story.
“Carmilla told her father about Angel. Surprisingly, he welcomed him to be with his daughter, believing Angel would be of great help to the Karnsteins in defeating the vampires—which also meant Angel had to go against his own tribe.”