Page 24 of The Midnight Order (The Thorngray Vampires Duet #1)

Silver

My heart feels like it’s trying to beat its way out of my chest. It’s almost like it no longer wants to be a visceral, quintessential part of my body, yet it’s the very thing that might hold the answers to who I am.

I’ve never been able to recall who I was; my childhood is locked away deep in my brain, and the root of the night terrors lies in wait.

When Lowell told me they could hypnotize me, I thought about it.

I did. But the idea of scratching the surface of something that I can’t ever put back once it’s unleashed scared me.

It still scares me.

“You remember nothing? Who were your parents?” Corvin asks, leading me to a chair in front of Jasper’s desk and helping me to sit.

Instead of standing, he crouches, making himself seem smaller. Making himself seem approachable.

He’s a vampire, for fuck’s sake.

The absurdity of my situation, of this entire situation, rumbles in my brain, and I shake my head with a laugh.

Corvin’s brows furrow as he flicks a glare at Jasper.

I’m sure, to them, it looks like I’m losing my fucking mind. And who knows? I might be.

“Even if I try, I can barely recall the edges of my mother’s face. I don’t remember being brought up or my first day of school. I remember my aunt helping me through night terrors, and I know my mother is the one who called them night terrors, but I can’t see her face,” I admit.

Tears roll down my face like a set in summer rain against a windowpane.

“Well, sometimes it’s normal for children to forget their childhoods. Especially if there’s repressed trauma,” Jasper offers, and I nearly give him a smile at how he’s trying to make me feel better.

“I’m sure it happens when you’re as old as you likely are,” Corvin whispers.

My blood nearly freezes in my veins. “What do you mean, how old I am?”

He looks toward Jasper for direction, but I grab his face in my hands, straightening his stare and holding him steady.

I try not to notice the tremble in him or the way there’s fear tingeing the edges of his red eyes.

“How old do you think I am?”

“ I-I’d have to run more tests, but the last Tenebris known to our histories died hundreds of years ago, Silver.”

“Let me ask you this,” Jasper cuts in.

I turn and look at him, not releasing Corvin from my hold for my sake. Having him in my hands gives me some semblance of calm in a room spinning out of control around me.

“How do you know Soliel was your aunt?”

My breathing quickens as I sift through my memories of her. They’re blurry, but they’re there.

“I just… know.” My whispered words have Corvin placing his hands over mine on his face, not to escape me but to comfort me.

“What am I?” I plead with him.

“You’re one of us.”

“But why was I hidden? Where are my memories?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but we’ll find out. We’ll do whatever you want to do.”

“Whatever you’re comfortable with,” Jasper adds.

“For your own gain.” My words cut through Corvin, and I can nearly see the slice as he winces.

“For yours,” he tosses back.

For once, a serene peace warms through me, like the sun coming out on a chilly day to warm my skin.

Corvin leans forward, pressing his forehead to mine. “You’re going to be alright.”

“Am I?” I whisper, closing my eyes and letting his tranquil energy leech into me.

“You will be,” Jasper says, “because you have us now. We will protect you. We will do everything possible to give you the answers you seek.”

Protect me?

Corvin pulls back my hair and kisses my forehead.

“Why would I need protection?” I ask them both, but all they do is share a look fraught with tension before ushering me out of the room and into the lab.

All I can think about while Corvin readies needles and whispers in hushed tones with Jasper in the corner of the room is how I got this far in life as an ancient vampire in the making?!

“What’s your first memory?” Corvin asks, pressing a cotton ball into my arm and taping over it, his touch lingering long enough to remind me of our shared moments.

Closing my eyes, I recall twirling in Central Park, leaves flowing down from the trees above, and someone calling my name as thunderclaps above us. This memory is precious to me, though, and I don’t want to share it.

It’s the one thing I’ve always had.

The one thing that drives away the dark nightmares.

I shrug.

“How old do you think you are?” he asks.

“Thirty-one.”

“Seems about right.”

I quirk a brow, and he sighs.

“Vampires that are born will naturally stop aging around the age of thirty. Your gene doesn’t need to be activated for that to happen; however, you’d typically have turned naturally at that point.

In the old country, parents would celebrate the rites once the child was of sound mind and body, and thus able to make the change.

You can probably surmise the issues a vampiric child could pose to the community, so they never awoke the gene before adulthood. ”

“When did vampires stop being born?” I ask him, curiosity calming my nerves as he sits on a rolling chair and draws close to where I’m sitting beside the counter.

Tools are spread out far and wide, and the overwhelming scents of the lab remind me of the many years Corvin must’ve spent honing his craft to become this doctor for the undead.

“It was a slow dissolution of the bloodlines. More vampires mated with humans and turned them instead of mating within the faction, and humans that are turned aren’t fertile to pureblood kind.”

“So, somewhere, I have parents?”

His face grows dim. “Possibly. None of the original families have been spotted for many centuries.”

“What does your history say as to why?”

“I’ve never looked into it too deeply, as I was turned, and it’s not my lineage, but we can speak to Lowell about it. Whenever we find him, perhaps he’ll be more level-headed.” Corvin’s eyes grow haunted by the ghosts of trauma that belong to him.

It belongs to his friend.

“I’m sorry about what I said earlier. About shoving your cock in all my holes.” I fight a grin.

He spits a laugh. “I deserved it. I kept information from you.”

“Seems like more than just you kept information from me.”

“Do you know how you came to know Soliel as your great aunt?” he asks, his brows furrowing as he leans forward on his rolling chair.

I shake my head. “No, I just knew she was my only family, and I was hers.”

“Your parents are…” he leaves space open for me to fill in the blank.

“Dead? I don’t?—”

He senses my irritation building again and moves closer, placing his hands on my knees in a gesture of comfort. “Hey. It’s going to be fine. You’re not alone anymore. We’ll figure this out.”

I nod, and the space between us grows tense.

“I need to find Lowell.”

“That won’t be hard.” He smirks. “He’ll be where he always is when things get hard.”

I narrow my gaze, waiting for him to elaborate.

“Your house.”

I stand and brush invisible dust off myself as I prepare to face the man who killed my aunt, who was never my aunt.

“I’ll see you later?” I squeak, unable to steady my tone.

He leans down and kisses my forehead. It’s soft and tentative, but it’s just what I need.

“I’ll see you later. Asher and I are only a few doors down if you need to talk. Or if you just need to be near someone.”

“Thank you.” I smile.

I find Lowell right where Corvin said he’d be, standing in the tree line beyond my house, hidden in the dusk.

“I don’t want to talk.” His gruff tone rakes across my sensitive nerves from the last couple of hours of revelations, and my hands shake.

“Well, I do. You don’t have to say a thing.”

He doesn’t look away from the front of the house, almost like he’s expecting Soliel to rise from the grave and come to him.

“I’m so sorry about what happened to you. No one deserves to be treated like that.”

“You don’t know me.”

I swallow over a thick lump in my throat. “I want to know you.”

He turns his angry eyes on me. “But you don’t want me to sing you to sleep or hold you without permission?”

His question would be endearing if his fangs weren’t bared at me presently.

“Well, I’d like to know you won’t rip my throat out while we lie next to one another, Lowell.

Like you said, I didn’t know you when you did those things.

We’re still learning about one another. Can you imagine if you were the one who woke up in a strange house, with creatures standing around you with masks on, telling you that you’re the key to their ancient curse? ”

His face falls, his eyes drawn to his feet. “We took you much like I was taken. It wasn’t right.”

“It wasn’t, but you were doing what you thought was. If I remember correctly, one of you said that the wards don’t allow someone to go through if they don’t belong. Is that right?”

He nods.

“Then maybe I’m supposed to be here, and this was supposed to happen.”

“Maybe so.”

He’s turned back toward the house and is staring at the dark porch.

The light is off, and it’s hard not to let my mind wander to the depraved things that Asher, Corvin, and I got up to just beyond the closed door, and I sneak a peek at it.

“Were you made or born?” I ask him, praying it won’t cause him any distress or send him off the deep end for my asking.

“Why do you want to know?”

Contemplating what to say, I pause and shift on my feet. “Well, I was speaking to Corvin about my lineage and my blood, and I don’t know how much he’s told you, but there are some things I’d like to share with you if you’ll share bits of you with me?”

Tit for tat. It could work.

I hope, anyway.

I know Lowell will be the most difficult to crack. Rightfully so, with all he’s gone through.

“I was born.”

Three words that have my heart in overdrive spill from his lips, and I don’t know what to say next.

So, I say the only logical thing I think will keep the conversation between us rolling. “So was I.”

“No fucking shit. That’s how humans are made.”

“But I’m not human.”

I catch his eye roll from where I’m standing, even though he hasn’t looked away from the front of my house.

“Yeah? And what are you?”

“A vampire.”

He turns back toward me, his bright red eyes growing softer by the minute as my admission slams through his brain.

“Say that again,” he whispers.

I nearly miss his words as a bird above screeches through the woods.

“I was born, and I’m a vampire.”

He steps into me, and I fight to stay steady.

I don’t want to back away from him after the day we’ve had, after all the emotions we’ve both been through.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve met someone like me?” Emotion chokes his voice, and it wavers.

It’s likely the most emotion a man like him has shown in years.

“How long?” I ask, intrigued.

I forget myself and my previous fear and step closer, my chest pressing against his as I remain captivated by his overwhelming presence. I wait with bated breath for his reply.

“It feels like eons.”

“What year were you born?” I whisper as he leans closer, as if my being like him, even if my gene is inactive, draws him nearer, and holds him captive somehow.

“The year 1047.”

“That would make you…” I gasp as I can’t even math his age out in my brain.

“Nine hundred and seventy-seven.”

I can’t help but realize his age is likely a factor in how unhinged he seems at times.

I can’t even imagine having lived that long.

“You have to be as old,” he says, and I pull from my whirling thoughts.

“How do you figure?”

“Because the last reference I’ve ever found of a recorded vampiric birth was in the year 1502.

If you’re born as you say, or I assume, like Corvin thinks you were, then your birth either wasn’t recorded and your true name was lost to time, or you were the last vampiric baby born to a vampire mother. ”

I breathe out a shaky exhale. “Do you recall the child’s last name on the record?”

“I remember everything. It’s the burden I carried when I lay on the slab in that cave daily, being bled dry and fed to overabundance. All I had were my memories. I lived a thousand lives within them, reliving them over and over.”

My breathing is erratic, and my heart is shattering. “What was the child’s last name?”

I brace for impact, but it doesn’t help when he says, “Tenebris.”

My knees buckle, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath.

Lowell captures me, brushing his lips against my ear. “Silver Tenebris, I presume?”