never ceased to feel shame after a kill or to continue her efforts to go as long as possible without feeding.
Seamus also liked the city, but even so, as the years passed, he was given at times to melancholy about the state of his existence: endless, unchanging, no one for company but Rose. She could hardly blame him but had no idea how to help.
She and Edward maintained a polite silence.
Remembering their home in Scotland, she took up some of her old interests, such as herb gardening, and she tried to create some semblance of a home for Seamus.
Then in 1913, a letter arrived.
Rose,
She has left me. She has gone to Oregon.
To my disgust, I am lost. I am alone. I don’t know what to do.
Help me.
To Rose’s shock, she was hit in the face by blatant pity.
How strange, how unexpected to feel pity for Edward. But she did. If there was one thing Rose understood, it was loss, especially the loss of someone she loved. She wrote back, and she offered him comfort.
She told him that he would heal in time.
But he did not. He only grew worse. Later, she counseled him to move to Portland—where Eleisha had settled.
He took her advice.
Then his letters stopped.
Over the years that followed, sometimes Rose wondered about Eleisha and William and this “contact” that Edward mentioned in France, and she wondered how many of their kind still existed. But she knew all their survival depended on living quietly away from Julian, on not gaining his attention, and in her case, on living in secret . . . or at least this was what Edward had convinced her.
She and Seamus continued to make it through the nights, with little changing besides the city exploding around them in population and development. The building they lived in grew old, but she could not bring herself to move, not again. It was both a kind of prison and a home at the same time.
In the early spring of 2008, as morning arrived, she was just falling dormant in her bed when something happened.
Her mind exploded in pain, and images of Edward burst inside her brain, along with the memories of everyone he had ever fed upon. In between his victims, she saw the same image over and over of a lovely dark-blond girl in her teens, with a serious face and hazel eyes. The pain was searing, and it went on and on. . . .
“Rose!” Seamus was beside her bed. “What’s wrong? Stop screaming. Someone will break the door down.”
The pain faded and then vanished.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think Edward may be dead,” she answered flatly. “I think I felt him die.”
Rose waited. She waited in fear, and a part of her mourned for Edward. Nothing happened for six weeks, and then although the sensation was much weaker, she was hit with the memories of another vampire, an exotic woman with dark hair who also passed images of the blond girl with hazel eyes, and of many victims, and of a bright city with its own carnival . . . and the Space Needle. Seattle.
To Rose, it felt as if the vampire was dying.
Back in Scotland, when Julian was still killing vampires in Europe after she’d been turned, she had never felt this, seen anything like this. Perhaps she had been too young in her undead state?
A few nights later, she felt another death, an old man, and she saw almost nothing in his memories but the girl with hazel eyes—and of feeding on rabbits.
Someone was killing vampires.
“Seamus, can you go to Seattle? Try to find out what’s happening?”
“Without you?” he asked. He never strayed too far from her side. He said he felt tied to her.
“It isn’t safe for me to go anywhere now. I should not leave the apartment.”
He nodded. This was true.
And so he tried. He found out that once he’d reached a general vicinity, he could sense the undead. He found Eleisha and Philip in Seattle. He was outside the Red Lion Hotel when Philip kicked Julian out the window. He learned where Eleisha was staying and read the address on the house. But the longer he was away from Rose, the weaker he grew.
He focused upon her and rematerialized in the apartment and told her what he had seen, what he learned.
Once again, she knew something in their world had shifted.
Instead of hiding, instead of living alone, somebody was fighting