back at me, seeing me for the first time in years. I knew I had not changed in his eyes, I had not aged even a minute since he last saw me, and I heard his heart beat wildly in his chest as he regarded me now. His blond hair had grayed a little, and his face appeared a little harder, but otherwise he had not changed much, either. I would not have cared, in truth, if he had aged into an old man, crippled and near death. The love that coursed through me burned, and I wanted to go to him, to hold him, to never let him go.
“Is this the man you have been writing to? The man who owns your heart?”
I could not help but nod, and even with a knife pressed to his throat, I saw a sparkle in my beloved’s eye that told me he felt the same about me. He loved me now, right now, more than ever before.
The dark man frowned. “But how can that be? He left you in that castle as you were tortured for years. When you finally returned to him, he plunged a knife into your heart and buried you beneath a pile of rocks, left to rot into the earth. How can you love such a man?”
“My heart belongs to him; it always has, it always will,” I said softly, holding back the tears that clouded my eyes with a red mist.
The dark man scoffed at this. “I saved you from death. I give you everything you could possibly desire, yet you feel nothing for me. You and I are of the same kind and we belong together, not you and this man—do you not realize that? He will be dead soon, just a pile of bones, while you and I will live on. Together, there is so much we can do; you only need to open your eyes and see it. Open your heart and let me in.”
He never said such things to me before; and, until that very moment, I thought of myself as nothing more than his prisoner. The idea of loving such a man filled me with dread. I could not do it.
As this thought passed through my mind, the man’s eyes narrowed, and he let out a ferocious scream, one so loud it echoed off the mountains around us. The howls of a thousand wolves answered him, so loudly I heard nothing else. In an instant, he raised my beloved to his feet. It was then that I realized just how weak my beloved truly was, how sallow his skin appeared. It was then that I saw the marks upon his neck and realized the dark man had drunk of him, had drained his blood nearly to the point of death.
The dark man raised his own wrist to his mouth and tore it open with his sharp fangs, then pressed it to the lips of my beloved. I froze in horror as he drank, for I then knew this was not the first time. They had made this exchange a number of times on the trip back from Ireland to this forsaken place; more of the dark man’s blood flowed through his veins, in fact, than his own. My beloved drank until he could drink no more. Then the dark man released him, letting his body crumple to the floor.
The loss of blood weakened the dark man, but only for a moment. He forced himself to stand erect to his full height and snapped his long, bony fingers. A dozen men appeared—Szgany, I was to learn later, gypsies from the local area. Four came up behind me and bound me with ropes laced with silver. I tried to break free, but the silver somehow held me still, and where it touched my skin it burned. I struggled, but they were able to hold me, each tugging their rope taut so I was held captive in the middle of them, unable to reach any one of them. I cursed the fact that I had drunk nothing but rat blood for so long. With human blood, I might have been able to overpower the Szgany, but now I was too weak. I was a prisoner once again.
I watched my beloved turn.
I watched