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Now I only had more questions. “But why swimming? You’re immortal. You can’t drown.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Lucky for you, we are stuck on a horse together on a long, empty seaside road with no food or shelter. So, why not tell me the long story? Tell me everything. You know my history. All the dirty secrets. My mum died, and I started killing people with my touch. My fiancé left me for my former best friend, and then her dad burned my wrists and forced me to work for him. What else? Oh, you already know about that time you murdered my dad in the woods. You know all my horrible history, so maybe you owe me the story of Sion. Tell me about little Sion, the boy in Lirion. Tell me everything.”

Shadows coiled off his body, and the air seemed to grow colder. “Well, first, I wasn’t from Lirion. Not when I was a kid.”

“Where were you from?”

He was quiet for so long, I wasn’t sure that he was going to answer, until finally, he said, “Wormwood. A town called Wormwood on the west coast, not far from Lyramor. Not very different from Lyramor, either.”

“Wormwood, like the poison?”

“Well, as it happens, it grew all over the town walls, and the people there were very poisonous, so it was fitting. The Tyrenians had taken over our town. They brought their one god and their authoritarian rule. My grandfather died fighting them, and that left my mother destitute, so you can guess what happened from there.”

I frowned. “Not really.”

“Well, obviously, she started working in a whorehouse, which is where I was fathered by gods-know-who. I grew up in the whorehouse, and she continued to sell herself to the Tyrenian soldiers who’d killed her family. And she died inside, every day, little by little. I grew up loathing the Tyrenian invaders more and more with every day that passed. But no matter what she did, there was never enough money, never enough food. And then she grew addicted to poppy water. It was the only way she had to get through the day, because it numbed it all. It was a way to live in a waking dream world—blessed by death’s brother, sleep.”

I swallowed hard. “And when did you leave Wormwood?”

“Well, I was always starving. We had no money, and Mum would forget to feed me, anyway. Food was all I could think about. I hated being hungry. I hated my mother being hungry. I hated that she didn’t seem to care about food anymore because she only cared for the poppy water. All I dreamt about was food, and then I’d wake with an empty pit in my stomach. So, one day, when Mum and I were out in the market, I could smell a fresh-baked steak pie, and I couldn’t get my mind off it. I was mad with hunger. When I thought the baker wasn’t looking, I just grabbed the pie. But the baker realized right away a pie was missing, and he called for a soldier. A Tyrenian Luminarus. My mum knew I’d be caught, so she grabbed the pie from me and acted like she was the one who stole it. She told them it was her.”

As he spoke, a sick feeling started to sink into my stomach. “Oh, gods.”

“Sometimes, I wonder if that was her way of ending her pain. Instead of the dull sleep of poppy water, she could have the eternal sleep of death. They didn’t really do trials at all back then. The people of Wormwood and the Luminari kept saying people like us were filth. Back then, the Tyrenian punishment for theft was being tied up, thrown in a sack, and tossed into the river, and I think they considered throwing me in, too. I remember them saying I was rotten, filthy, and I was, because I was the one who stole it, not Mum. So, she died, drowned in that river. They threw Mum in a mass grave for criminals. And if you believed in the Archon, that meant you’d be eternally tormented after death. I used to believe that. I always wanted to fix it. I wanted to prove them all wrong, that I wasn’t rotten. I wanted to become something great and find my mother’s jumbled bones and bury them outside the Archonium.”

My stomach clenched. “I’m so sorry. That’s heartbreaking. But you weren’t rotten. You were just a starving little boy. The adults in that town letting you starve were the filth.”

“Well, it was centuries ago. And I did become something, and I never needed to move my mum’s bones because when I grew up, I learned that the Archon and his afterworld of torment are made up. That it’s all a myth to make us fall in line.”

I found my head nestling into his throat, and the intoxicating scent of him wrapped around me. “So, how did you end up in Lirion, with Maelor?”

“There was nothing for me in Wormwood, where everyone thought I was filth, trash, so I stowed away on a ship to Lirion—the one place in Merthyn the Tyrenians hadn’t conquered. And I lived there, working for food on people’s farms, taking care of their animals, until I was old enough to run the stables of a young viscount who lived in a castle.”

“And you seduced his wife?”

“I wouldn’t really call it a seduction. And in my defense, Epona was very lonely. She was also very beautiful, and she loved to laugh and be happy, but she wasn’t getting any joy from Maelor anymore.”

“Were you in love with her?”

He sighed. “It was hard not to fall in love with her back then. She was beautiful, always happy. Since when are you interested in my love life?”

“I just don’t understand how you and Maelor stayed friends after you seduced his wife.”

I felt the muscles in his arms tighten. “We are bonded. We were turned by the same sire, and we crawled from the dirt together, fighting the ravening hunger that turned our blood into flames and our stomachs into empty, bottomless pits of craving. It really does bond you to someone.”

“What happened with you and the Mormaer who turned you?”

“I never completely trusted him, to tell you the truth. He left us alone after he turned us. It’s not what a sire is supposed to do. He abandoned those he turned. Maelor and I had only each other. We were together when we first went into a place beyond language. In those early days as the living dead, it was just us and our instincts and the never-ending yearning for blood, and the first thing I saw when I started to remember words again were Maelor’s pale silver eyes, and the first thing I remembered was his name. It was the first word in my thoughts. We werethere with each other when we first looked at ourselves and saw what we’d become, what we’d done. We were with each other when we learned what it meant to live like a monster. Turning into a vampire can break a person’s mind if they’re not strong enough.”

“And since those early days, how often have you gone to a place beyond words?” I asked.

A silence stretched out between us for a long moment. “More than I care to think about…are you going to keep interrogating me? Because we are rather stuck here together on this horse, and I can’t get out of this.”

Something familiar sparked in the depths of my mind. “Why do I feel like you feel guilt over the people you’ve killed? You pretend to not care about anything, but you do.”

“I’ve killed innocent people, and some of their deaths haunt me,” he said darkly. “There’s not much I can do about that. It’s in a vampire’s nature to hunt. But there are some things I’ve done I’d much rather forget, and all the fucking and blood drinking and wine guzzling in the world won’t make those memories go away—I know, because I’ve tried. Centuries of memories haunt me…it’s a gift, really, to be able to forget things that might haunt you. Don’t you think?”