Page 15 of Snowed in with the Vampire Prince

In the morning, we would go our separate ways once I had gotten him to safety. It was safe to speak to him in ways I could never speak with anyone else. So, I swallowed hard and continued. “When I was an infant, I was left on the steps of a church in upstate New York. I was raised in a Catholic orphanage. The sisters who ran the place—nuns—were very kind to me, so I was fortunate in that regard. But, to this day, I still don’t know why my parents left me because there was no note. I’m lucky I didn’t freeze to death because they left me in the middle of winter, and no one found me until the morning.”

They didn’t care if I lived or died.

I didn’t say that aloud, but I think that perhaps we both heard it. I did my best to keep my face perfectly neutral, but the stab of pain I felt at the memory was sudden and sharper than I expected, and some of it might have shone on my face. The question that had haunted me for my entire life rose again in my mind: what was so wrong with me that they took one look at me and decided not to keep me?

“I’m sorry,” James said quietly, watching me with an expression that was torn somewhere between sympathy and curiosity.

“It happened a long time ago.”

“But it still causes you pain?”

“Yes,” I admitted. I took a moment to squash down the sharp broken-glass feelings this line of questioning had triggered in me. “Why were you so willing to leave and put yourself in danger on my behalf?”

“It’s not past tense,” he replied. “I would leave right now if you’d let me. And it’s like I told you before, I can’t allow anything to happen to you because of me.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Because that’s not what someone who’s loyal and true would do,” he said so easily that I doubted he even had time to think about it.

I quashed down a surge of impatience as I tried to make sense of what he’d just said. I could tell I was missing a lifetime’s worth of context. Though the words were English, they made so little sense that they might as well have been spoken in another language. I had wanted to know something real about him, and I had gotten my wish. I could tell that this was real. Real and outrageously fragile.

I watched him quietly, waiting for him to explain.

He frowned at me, but he looked almost as unwilling as I had earlier. “Okay, I’m not sure I like this game.”

“We could talk about something else if you’d like?”

He shot me a dirty look. “Turnabout is fair play. Or whatever. Okay, so, when I was fifteen, I came out to my father.”

“That must have been hard.”

He shrugged, but then he gave me a small smile. “Doing it was hard, I guess. I was pretty sure it was going to wreck my whole life, but I couldn’t stand lying to him anymore. I didn’t want any part of my relationship with him to be based on a lie. I didn’t want him to think I was one person in his head, even when I was hiding something pivotal to me. I couldn’t do that to him.”

The way he said it, through his teeth, the flash of anger in his eyes… there was definitely something else there, just underneath what he was saying.

“My mother lied to him for a really long time. And then she left him. After that, I was all he had left because she apparently didn’t want me either.” He let out a deep breath, then he seemed to notice that his hands had curled into fists, because he flexed them a few times. “She left both of us, I guess.”

I felt frozen in place, watching him. Our pain was so terribly similar. I understood what it felt like to be left behind, to be unwanted. But I still had no idea what I could say to him in that moment that would have made any difference at all. A hundred years of immortality, and I had never been able to ease the sharp sting of rejection.

After a long moment, he continued. “Anyway. It was just me and him after that, and I had to tell him. I couldn’t let him love someone who wasn’t real. I couldn’t lie anymore. Not after what she had done. We weren’t far from the campsite where you found me, actually.” He paused, then continued. “He and I used to come here a lot on camping trips. And, um… I was literally shaking, the whole time I sat there and told him. I couldn’t even look at him afterward. I was just staring at our campfire, waiting for everything to fall apart around me. And he was so quiet afterward. It was awful.”

I felt an irrational surge of protectiveness for the boy he had once been. I wanted to stand between him and anything that might have tried to harm him. It was an impossible wish.

James shook his head, as though to clear it. Then he surprised me when he smiled. “But then my dad hugged me and told me he’d known since I was a little kid, but he was proud of me for being so brave and honest with him. He told me that being a man means being loyal and true to myself—and to others. It’s one of my best memories of him. And I guess, for better or worse, that lesson stuck. So, I try to be loyal and true whenever I can. It’s the one thing I can still do for him. As long as I can keep doing that, it feels like I haven’t really lost him.”

“He wasn’t wrong,” I told him. Speaking of his father seemed to make James feel both happy and incredibly sad at the same time. I was pleased by the happiness, but I wanted to say anything I could to drive away the sadness. What was wrong with me? I added, “I think I would have liked him.”

The protectiveness I felt was beginning to crystallize into a fierce sort of tenderness. The emotion was hot and sharp in my chest. It was both violent and gentle all at once, and it was altogether unexpected. I had never met anyone else in my entire life, not even when I had been a human, who had triggered such a feeling in me.

“You probably would have. He would have been curious about you, that’s for sure,” James replied, laughing. “Anyway, to answer your question, you put yourself on the line for me. You were loyal and true to me, a total stranger. So, to be loyal and true to you—to be the kind of man I want to be, the kind of man my father taught me to be—I can’t let your decision to save me be repaid with violence. I just can’t. That’s why I’m willing to go back out there. If you’ll let me.”

“I understand now,” I told him, still trying to quash the fierce tenderness, the hot and sharp protectiveness burning in my chest. It wouldn’t be quashed.

Again, his scent burned in my nose, my throat, my everything. It wasn’t the appeal a human usually had—he didn’t smell appetizing, exactly. He smelled inviting, yes. But in a way that was clean, good, and comforting. It didn’t make me want to feed from him. It made me want to gather him into my arms and breathe him in, it made me want to hold him close and never let him go.

His eyes lit up, but the expression on his face was halfway between relief and wariness. “So, you’ll let me go? You’ll release me from my promise?”

“I understand where you are coming from now, but your concern is not necessary. The wolves won’t harm me,” I told him. A note of anger entered my voice, but it wasn’t anger at him. It was anger at anything that might ever want to hurt him. “Please stop suggesting it. You want to protect me, but I want the same. I want you safe.”

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