He hadn’t been chased into the pit of hell by an angry mob of villagers carrying pitchforks. No, he had a job looking after the castle, making repairs, and keeping everything in working order for the tourists that wandered the halls.
Adam enjoyed his work. It was simple, but fulfilling. These days, if someone caught sight of him, they didn’t scream or run. People smiled at him and told him he’d done a good job. If they saw the scars on his wrists or around his neck, or any of the other things that made people fear him in the past, they said nothing.
What Adam especially enjoyed about Miramare was the long evenings on his boat. Fishing for his dinner, preparing it. Eating it while the gentle waves rocked the boat and drinking one of the many bottles of wine people had given him in exchange for his masonry or other skills.
He didn’t have much use for money. Even this boat, he’d taken it in trade. He wasn’t a man, not anymore, and therefore had no use for most things in the world of man.
This new age made him wonder if perhaps he’d been mistaken. Until hunters for various groups found him, wanted to study him. If only they’d ask, and not try to take his freedom, he’d share the knowledge of his flesh.
Only they didn’t ask. They wanted to take. Just like his maker.
No, he’d stay in the dark until the world forgot about him again.
He both feared and yearned for the day the bloodline was extinct.
Adam knew they were the reason for his existence. Perhaps when they expired, so would he, but he didn’t fear death. He feared slavery, imprisonment. The theft of his free will.
He’d done horrible things in service to the Wollstonecraft bloodline, murder perhaps not even being the worst.
For the last month, the tingling at the back of his neck that always precipitated the loss of his freedom, the call to arms to defend, protect, and serve the Wollstonecrafts had become an ever more intensifying itch.
Adam hadn’t thought little Elizabeth would be a problem.
He’d been there the day her mother died. He’d sensed her distress, her need of him. He’d gone, only to find the small girl child sitting alone in the hospital waiting room, sobbing into her doll’s hair.
She’d been so small then, her blue eyes large and luminous. Corn silk hair in two ponytails. She could’ve been a doll herself. “My mama is gone,” she’d said.
He’d sat down beside her, unsure of what to say. For someone such as he, immortal, the ages passed. People changed. People died. He stayed the same.
She didn’t need him to speak. She’d clambered up his massive lap, and planted herself there, tugging on his arm—wanting him to embrace her. So he had. It was what she needed and what he was bound to provide.
He kept thinking someone was going to see him with this child and think all the wrong things. Someone was going to come and rip her away from him, but they didn’t. No one came.
Little Elizabeth Wollstonecraft was all alone in the world. The last of her line. He’d known a kind of relief then. He’d been heartsore for her, the little lost girl, but a kind of peace inside of himself that this was almost over.
He’d checked up on her a few times—whenever that tell-tale tingle on the back of his neck made itself known—and he’d always arrived just in time. When she was a student at Carnegie Mellon attending a mixer, he’d arrived just in time to see a young man add something to her drink.
Adam hadn’t seen Elizabeth as the grown woman she was, because in his eyes, she was still very much the small, helpless, big-eyed child with no one in the world but him.
That was a murder that he carried no guilt for and when he thought about it even now, it gave him a sense of satisfaction. A job well done.
His fingers curled into fists. No one would hurt Elizabeth. She was the last and he wouldn’t fail.
He thought about her again. She’d seemed so different than all of the others.
Flashes hit him hard and fast. If he’d been human, they’d have been called “migraines.” But he was just a monster who inflicted pain, he wasn’t supposed to feel it.
She was in a lab with John Fucking Polidori.
Adam snarled past the discomfort, the electricity crackling around his head like lightning. He forced himself to be calm. She was safe with Polidori, at least from his fucking leech teeth. The burns on his arms would make sure of that. Even with all the distance between them, the lightning would find him and turn him to ash if he tried to drain Elizabeth.
But that wasn’t the only danger.
He could see the paths unfolding before them, and perhaps that was his purview as a monster and not a man, but if she chose to continue what she was doing, Elizabeth Wollstonecraft could unleash an armageddon unlike anything this world had ever seen.
She and Polidori were meddling where mortals ought not to trespass.
Adam himself was evidence of such things.