The Blood That Bonds

Epilogue


Lima, Ohio. The dead of night.



The girl with the blonde hair wakes from a dream she can’t remember, and looks out the window at the moon rising full in the sky. Stars like she’s never seen, no lights of a great city to obscure them, glitter back at her like diamonds cast against a mat of soft black velvet. They reflect in her eyes, large and green.

She hears the soft breathing of the young lady in the twin bed on the other side of the room, and sighs. She thinks of breathing in the dark with her lover. She thinks of the time they shared together.

Sleep does not come easily for the girl, even now, in safety and warmth, and she crawls from the bed and pulls on jeans below her nightgown. A winter coat, a pair of socks, her shoes. She wants a cigarette. She wants to think.

If the young woman in the other bed hears her leave, then she lets the girl go. There are times when it is best not to disturb. There are times when it is best to feign sleep and hope, hope that a friend will find the answers that she’s looking for. Hope that all will be well.

The girl sits on the front porch and smokes, and smiles through her tears, calls herself silly. The moon makes everything blue-black, and she remembers the woods, and how they seemed lit as if by daylight, to vampire eyes.

Two sits and smokes, and smiles through her tears, and thinks about Theroen. She thinks about the future, and about the past. She knows there are other vampires. Surely Theroen could not be the last of his kind. She knows there are others, and she knows from his stories that some of them, at least, are like him. Decent. Honest. Good. They are untainted by the evil that infested Abraham. They are out there; awake like her, under the same moon, under the same stars.

Two could learn to love the light, perhaps. She could learn to be human, to pursue again those human dreams, human ambitions. A husband, maybe. A child. A life like any other.

She doesn’t want it.

The decision is made between the flare of the match, and the cigarette’s last dying ember. Under the moon and the stars, it’s so much harder to lie to herself than it is under the sun. She wants what once was offered. What once she had. There are others, and they are out there, living the life she wants, knowing the power of the blood, moving their way through the cities and towns and woods of the world.