Page 20 of Blood Ties (City of Blood #1)

Bash,

Talia sounds wonderful *queue eye roll*. I can’t imagine why you didn't marry her. What did you call it, Legame di Sangue. What is that? Can you explain?

Did you know that Sarah’s boyfriend is a vamp?

He wasn’t but he is now. They met in high school—he was her first love.

Her first everything. He was her everything.

Then he became enthrall to the governor guy of Treme.

He was ordered to guard the wall, and eventually, he was turned.

He left her. Picked up one day to serve his vampire overlord without a moment of hesitation.

He was gone for a year and half. She never saw or heard from him.

He was just...gone. She was attacked the week before you came into the bar for the first time.

She used to take the bus home and she was waiting for the bus right before sunrise when she was ambushed from behind.

He fed on her but stopped before it went too far.

He left her to bleed in the street, for the other predators to find her, but the bus came before anyone else.

I guess somehow Ethan heard about it, though I’m not sure how.

Maybe he was keeping tabs on her. He came back and begged for her forgiveness, and I guess now, they are giving it a go.

I don’t know what it means for their future but I suspect she will eventually turn for him so they can live out their days in darkness.

I don’t see a similar path for myself. What happens when I am no longer young?

What do you think will happen here? I can’t fathom falling in love if it’s not going anywhere.

You asked me to tell you about my first love.

What about yours, since it's obviously not Talia? My first love was Thierry. He lived across the street from me and we went through school together, though he was 2 years older. After high school, we dated for a few more years and eventually decided to call it quits when we were 22 and 24. I had obligations to Grand-mere and didn’t have any plans to do anything other than what I was doing.

I didn’t want to go to college—why would it matter if I was stuck behind this wall forever anyway?

He did not like what he called my ‘defeatist attitude’.

Ville de Sang is not a large city though, so I have seen him a few times over the last couple of years.

He works at the hospital now. He has a wife and kids.

I haven’t really dated anyone since. I guess I didn’t want to go through that again.

Crawfish etouffee is my favorite because it is the first thing I learned to cook on my own.

Grand-mere sat me down at the kitchen counter at 12 years old and taught me to chop the vegetables and make the roux.

It was something I was good at, and eating it reminds me of summer afternoons in Grand-mere’s kitchen learning about creole food.

Food is such an important part of creole and cajun culture.

It’s in the lifeblood of Ville de Sang itself, all the way back to when it was a Haitian French colony.

No matter what people call it over the years, food continues to unite the people of Louisiana across time and title.

Where have you traveled? Where have you been?

Elina