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“I’m sorry,” I said eventually. “For everything that’s been said between us recently, and…” I hesitated. “For being dead. Or you having to go through that. Thinking that.”

Tom chuckled, his warm brown eyes crinkling. “Onlyyouwould apologise for dying, Erin.”

I laughed with him, shaking my head again, but I was glad he was there. That things were starting to resemble normal again.

I stared at the patch of sunlight on the floor, trying to piece it together. “It’s weird, though, right?” I asked. “They had me there – unconscious, helpless. Why put me back in the stream? They could have finished it then and there.”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing.” Tom’s voice was quiet. He touched the wound on his neck again. “Honestly? I think they’re playing with us. Showing us they can take you whenever they want, however they want. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The chill that had been building spread through my chest. I remembered Isabel’s words about revenge. “Fuck. You’re right.” I looked up at Tom. “This isn’t about killing me at all.Kidnappingme wasn’t even about me.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s about Nicholas. About showing him he can’t protect me – that I can’t protect myself, or anyone else.” I swallowed. “They’re making him watch while they pick apart my life. Making him feel helpless.”

Tom’s jaw tightened at Nicholas’s name, but he didn’t argue. The silence stretched between us, heavy with implications neither of us wanted to voice.

“We need to put an end to this,” he said, finally. “It’s about time we mounted an attack instead of half-arsing a defence while they chip away at our lives.”

“If we understood their motives better, maybe we could find a way,” I said, getting up to search for my jeans. The familiar routine felt strange after everything that had happened. “Pissing off Nicholas seems to be at the top of that list.”

Tom pushed himself up from the chair. “Top of a lot of lists,” he muttered, glancing away. He watched me rummage through my drawers for a moment. “Let me think about it. I’ll email Adam or whatever – get them to meet us after dark.” He sized me up with something close to his old smirk. “You get a shower first, yeah? You could do with it.”

The attempt at normal banter felt fragile, but I was grateful for it. Maybe we could find our way back to how things used to be. If we survived all this.

???

It was early afternoon by the time I made it downstairs and managed some breakfast. I enjoyed the normality of making scrambled eggs; whisking the mixture and turning it over and over on itself in the pan as it cooked. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, after days without eating, I was ravenous.

As I went through the motions, I had a lot to think about. By the time I piled my plate high with eggs, bacon and mushrooms, something that should have been completely obvious clicked into place in my mind – and it was something I could use.

I’d learned a long time ago that the best way to let an idea come to fruition was to look away and ignore it for a while. This one was… risky, and I didn’t much like it. So instead of dwelling on it, I let it stew while I sat at the kitchen table with a steaming mug of fresh coffee, breakfast and Nicholas’s first diary.

Maybe it wasn’t the best time to get to know him better – but it was the distraction I needed, and I had to start sometime. I pulled his jacket onto my lap while I read, pushing my arms through the sleeves and breathing in that uniquely appealing scent of his that lingered in the lining.

The soft, worn leather of the diary flopped away from the pages as I opened it, but it didn’t contain anything close to what I’d expected. I’d been prepared for the out of control violence and slaughter I’d seen so many times from newborn vamps over the years – but here, Nicholas was young, only fifteen, and still very much human. It was a part of his life I’d never expected to learn about.

My fingers traced the faded ink where his immature scrawlfilled the earliest pages – complaints about his father’s demands on his time, when all he dreamed of was glory on the battlefield. The musty scent of centuries-old paper filled my nose as I turned each delicate page, discovering how it had been decided he should learn to read and write to continue the family’s tailoring business.

When he finally ran away from home, the pages began to overflow – his guilt and confusion clear in the words and the smudged ink where he hurried them, desperate to explain himself. His desertion took a harder toll on him than he’d confessed to me before, and it wasn’t long before he was back in battle, throwing himself into war in search of redemption.

The sun was getting low in the kitchen window as I reached for another diary, unable to stop myself from pushing through to 1657, the year he’d become a vampire. The spine cracked as I opened it, the crumbling pages revealing how his siring had brought him an unexpected clarity, though his words were no less conflicted. There was no relief from his guilt. Instead, he wrote of how he believed he was being punished: for deserting the military, and for being weak enough to run, after he’d abandoned his family to be there.

His strangely lilting voice seemed to rise from the yellowed pages as I read his entry:

31st October 1657

near Dunn’s River Falls

I cannot understand what has happened to change me so. The world is the same as it was before, and yet Isee more with these eyes than I had ever dreamed was present on Earth. Everything is so much clearer than it was.

As I write, I’m surrounded by the stench of the unwashed soldiers in our tent, and though the stink of their sweat and filth repulses me, I’m drawn to their flesh despite it.

Yesterday, we lost men. Those who remain are grieving for their fallen comrades despite our win. The Governor does not believe we’ll have more trouble, but it is all I can do to focus on anything but the bloodshed.

A new hunger claws like a demon within me when I pass the lines of the dead, as yet unburied. Their blood seeps into the earth below, feeding it, and I cannot turn away.

I fear I won’t be able to control myself much longer.