Page 137 of Winterfall Destiny

Others I know have events in their pasts they’d rather forget too. Andrei’s history that’s still hazy to me involves death, and my father Lex and his failed spell that ruined lives.

But they accept their past. Themselves.

“Is this everything? Your last secret?” I whisper and he nods. “Promise me there’s nothing else.”

“I promise. I’ll sit down with you sometime and tell you more about that man if it’ll help.” He hesitantly takes my hand. “Deal with the ‘self-absorbed bullshit’.”

“I’m not taking those words back, Tobias.” He smiles wryly at my response. “There’re things locked away. Not only the part the Confederacy allegedly blocked, but suppressed memories.”

“Allegedly? No. The block is there.”

I nod, but there’s another conversation missing that I can’t get into right now. Somewhere inside Tobias’s head, information about my family’s deaths remains hidden. He either suppressed memories himself or somebody else did because Tobias’s vagueness about that night and events leading up to the murders comes from more, I swear.

Tobias locks his mind to hold back secrets he’d rather forget. But is he the only one with the key? The Confederacy blocked Tobias’s nature but did they obstruct his memories of the Winterfall deaths too?

I hold Tobias’s face. “The reason I wanted to speak to you? I don’t feel any differently about the man in front of me now and I want you to stay. Always.”

“I’m not leaving,” he whispers and strokes my hair. “The curse bound us, but that bond never broke on the day the curse did.”

“I want that to be true, Tobias, but is that enough? Am I enough?”

“Yes. How can you ask that? You’d already pulled me apart to find my heart and soul and showed me there’s light inside the darkness. I love you, Maeve, and I can’t lose the person who fills me with that light every day.”

His words press tears to my eyes, and I run my fingers across his cheek, pausing with the tips on his lips. “All those days and nights at the Winterfall House, waiting for you when nobody else believed you lived after the academy fell. They’re some of the worst I’ve ever experienced. I’ll never forget the moment I saw you again. Touched you. How you held me with the same fear that we’d lost each other. From that hug, I knew you’d always come back to me.”

He moves my fingers to kiss the tips. “I could never walk away and break us. Myself. Everything.”

“Like I said, if you do I’ll hunt you and you’ll regret leaving.” I smile, heart warming as he smiles too, the recent distance in his eyes retreating.

“Understood.”

“I love you as you are, Tobias, not as the person you’d like to be. Do you understand that too?”

He gathers me in his arms and holds me tight. “Yes,” he whispers into my hair. “Whatever changes in the future, we never will.”

Our mouths meet in a gentle kiss, Tobias’s lips soft against mine. He’s as deeply in my heart and soul as I am in his as Tobias’s love wraps around and protects that heart when once he’d only protect his own. We’re not bound by a curse but losing him would tear away a part of me.

Can we change the course of our lives planned by fate? Or will the creature who’s already altered lives of a whole race of vampires possess our future and prevent the one we want?

The concern I push away sneaks in again: if I do change the future a second time, what will happen to my mind?

49

MAEVE

24 Park Road

That’s all we have.

Once deciphered, and with Ash’s help, Jamie researched every Park Road in the London area, and any town in reasonable travelling distance to the city. Without a suburb or postcode, locating the exact address proves hard. But isn’t that the point of the code and vagueness?

Most locations that the pair find are shops and residential homes, all too small or too public to house an army of vampires or perform supernatural rituals. We check and double-check owners’ names for any links to dragons, but we’d never background check every person in the time we have.

By the morning, Jamie narrowed down to two possibilities a couple of hours drive from each other: a derelict building that Google map’s images shows covered in scaffolding and a builder’s sign, and the other a disused theatre. Although checking out both places makes sense, there isn’t any connection between the builder’s name and dragons, and the disused theatre raises the highest red flag. We’ll begin there and if there’s no trace of Dominion activity, we’ll move on to the other location.

We’re reluctant to ask Dorian for his blood rune help and the hybrid clearly stated he didn’t want to involve himself, so we’ve a long drive. But if the ritual involves hemia from the catacombs, the event must take place after sundown. We’ll arrive in London in plenty of time. As far as we know, Gabriella can’t daywalk which adds another advantage—an opportunity to search the buildings in daylight, and enough time to snoop around both locations, if necessary.

Ash questions whether the address could be a trick, or that Gabriella might change the venue once she knows we infiltrated the catacombs. Possible but unlikely if everything’s in place for tonight. By now, Gabriella must know the story about the hemia vampire who transformed into something with eyes like stars in the centre of a void-like presence. A creature that killed with his mind without pause to think and would’ve slaughtered more. Gabriella will recognise the First’s energy and Andrei from the description.

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