feet apart, in neat rows, are gray gravestones marking the lives of each person buried here.
“What is this place?” I ask, apprehension cutting into my brief dance with joy.
He glances around sheepishly, shrugging as he releases my hand. “It’s a cemetery. An old one. Sorry about that. It’s the only place we can take patients to get some fresh air. I hope it’s not too creepy. I’ve always found them fascinating, myself. So much history, so much lived stories buried here.”
With a melancholic drop to his head, he lets his long fingers slide over the tops of the gravestones, studying each one as he passes.
The waves crashing against the rocky coastline creates a somber soundtrack to this outing of ours, and I make the very difficult and conscious choice to slough off my anger for just a moment and don curiosity instead.
“How did you die?” I ask, stepping closer to him, our shoulders nearly touching as we both look towards the horizon, where the ocean and stars meet. “I saw the aftermath, apparently, but what led to it?”
I glance up at him, watching as his jawline clenches, then releases. He stares out at the water as he speaks. “It was 1641 in Islandmagee—a rural community on a peninsula in what is now Northern Ireland, where I was born and raised.”
My eyes widen in surprise. With his British accent and darker complexion, I wasn’t expecting an Irish origin.
As if he’s reading my mind, he explains. “My mother was Irish. My father was Persian. They met during his travels and fell in love. He stayed with her in Islandmagee but was never accepted as one of them. His looks, his culture, they were too different. And humans have a tendency to fear those who are different. Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to violence.”
His words remind me a lot of the story Dean told me. About his pack turning against him.
The doctor pauses and I wait, knowing by the distant look on his face he’s processing his own demons. I try to wrap my mind around the idea that he existed in the 1600s, but it’s so hard to imagine. How does one hold the weight of so many centuries, full of so many memories, in just one mind without breaking?
“But that isn’t what killed him, or me. My family, along with more than 3,000 Irish Catholics in that region were murdered by English and Scottish forces. It was a massacre of innocent people,” he says, his voice laced with fear, anger and grief even still.
I can’t blame him. My own pain and grief over losing my parents is still fresh, even after all these years.
“I remember the blood, and the pain, as a sword sliced into me. And then nothing until I woke up in a dirt grave and had to claw my way out. A woman sat under the moonlight waiting for me. She explained that she saved me. Turned me into a vampire to be a companion to her.”
I suck in my breath as jealousy inexplicably worms its way into me at the thought of this woman and the life he had with her, which is a ridiculous emotional response towards the doctor who is keeping me prisoner, I remind my traitorous self.
“We left Ireland for England,” he says. “And we used the war to feed ourselves without detection.” He glances down at me. “That’s why I sound British now. I lived there for most of my undead life. Eventually, I figured out how to go to school and get my degrees. After so many years of taking lives, I wanted to help save them.”
“What happened to the woman?” I ask, wondering if she’s still out there, waiting for him.
“She was killed during the witch trials,” he says. “Ironic really. They branded her the wrong kind of monster.”
“Do you really think we’re all monsters?” I ask.
He shrugs. “What else can we possibly be? We do not belong here, with humans. We do not belong to this world. We are a sickness that must be healed. That’s what they’re trying to do here. Heal us so we can be normal. So we can live amongst the humans as one of them again.”
There it is again. He continues to relegate us to the same group. Almost as if he’s a patient here too.
“It seems to me humans are just as monstrous, if not more so,” I say, imagining all those people slaughtered because their religious beliefs were slightly different. Catholic versus