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“No,” she says in an odd voice, looking away as she curls her fingers into her palm. “Or my claws.”

“I’m sure you’ll still live a very long time.”

She looks up at me sharply. “A long time in your care,” she says, the bitterness clear in her tone.

I nod, giving her a placating smile. “Yes.”

One day, she’ll get used to it. She might even like it.

“Kind of funny, isn’t it?” she says slowly. “To be a priest when there’s no chance of you being called to the afterlife to meet your maker.”

“That might still happen. I could be terribly unlucky. There are only three ways to kill a blood-drinker.”

“What are they?” she asks with glinting eyes.

I chuckle. “I wouldn’t dare give you that information, not when you want me dead.”

“I don’t want you dead…” She trails off. “But I would kill you if I had to.”

I shrug, taking no offense. How can I, when I claimed I would slaughter her one day?

She studies me, her gaze sliding over my features, pausing at my mouth, my nose, my brow, as if she’ll find some answers there. “You had said you were a father once.”

I visibly bristle, shoulders stiffening.

“Did you have a family?” she goes on, her voice gentle now. “Children? A wife?”

A dull pain forms beneath my chest, the kind I usually run from. But her eyes are looking at me more closely now, and I feel trapped, with nowhere to go.

“I had a wife, a son, and a daughter,” I manage to say. I shouldn’t have even said that, but it’s as if I was compelled to, as if I want to tell this little fish everything.

Distance, I remind myself. Put distance between you in every way.

“What happened to them? Were they turned too?”

I glance down at my hands. These same hands that pray to God are the same hands that belong to a beast.

I can only shake my head. “No.” My voice comes out in a hush. “It was only me.” I close my eyes, and I can see it now: the moments I try so hard to bury alongside my demons. It comes slowly, like a dream descending through the fog, one I know will quickly turn into a nightmare.

I take in a deep, shaking breath.

And, against my better judgment, I tell Larimar my beginning.

And my end.

“I was in the village, at my shop as a blacksmith, about to finish my work for the day,” I say to her. “My shop was at the end of a cobblestone street, and it was quiet that early evening. The sun was still in the sky, summer twilight a few hours away. There were early crickets and the smell of sunbaked wheat from the surrounding fields, and suddenly, the crickets stopped.

“Darkness descended, and I remember looking at the sun shining beyond the oak, but the air had a shadowiness to it that I couldn’t explain, and suddenly, I was chilled down to the bone. The magic I could always feel in my veins was starting to buzz like hornets.

“They came out of the forest, a band of them on foot, and I remember wondering why I hadn’t heard them. How could this group of men have come so fast through that thicket without making a sound?

“But as they came closer, I understood. The magic in my veins had been warning me. They were not men.

“The one at the front, dark hair, wide jaw, was smiling like a fool. I saw the fangs. Then, I saw the sword. It plunged straight into my heart, killing me on the spot.

“My last memories of a man, of a pure human being, were of me on the ground. The one who stabbed me took the sword from my chest and told me his name was Kaleid, that he was the Son of Skarde, and I was going to join his army of monsters. Then he took his sword and sliced open his wrist. I was dying as he put his wrist to my mouth. I remember tasting his blood, and that was it.”

I glance over to see her leaning toward me, worrying her lip between her teeth. “That was it?” she whispers.