Page 14 of Forever Bound

Instead, I see only darkness.

* * *

I wakein the cave again, in the same bed, with the same fire, in a case of total déjà vu. Well, shit.

How am I still alive?

The fresh taste ofhisblood answers that question. He healed me again. But why attack me just to heal me?

What the hell is happening here? I'm starting to feel like I'm on a massively bad drug trip and am hallucinating this whole thing, but that's highly unlikely given I've never done drugs.

But our minds are powerful things and will do anything to help us make sense of things, including lie to us if necessary.

"I told you no leaving," a voice says from the shadows, startling me from my thoughts.

"You!" I try to sit up, but a wave of dizziness forces me back onto the pillows. "Why didn't you just finish me off?" I ask.

He comes into the light, and I realize he's injured. His face has a new gash on it that oozes blood, but it doesn't seem to be healing.

And he's limping.

"What…what happened to you? Why am I here?" He doesn't understand my words, and I pound the bed in frustration. I should have studied Russian with more gusto.

I can feel frustration coming from him in waves, and he holds out his hand, beckoning me to take it.

Oh, why the hell not? In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

I take his hand, and he helps me gingerly off the bed. My body aches, but it's nothing compared to last night. He limps forward and nearly stumbles into the wall. I catch his body, and holy shit he weighs a ton. I nearly topple over from his weight.

Still, he rights himself and keeps walking, and I follow him to a door that he opens with an ancient skeleton key.

My breath hitches when I see what is within.

Paintings everywhere. Covering the walls, stacked in piles, with a fresh one on an easel half finished.

And they're all of the same thing.

A hideous monster of darkness and shadow, fangs long and dripping with blood, body deformed and scarred. I look to him and to the paintings pointing. "Is this how you see yourself? Is this you?" I ask.

He shakes his head and rummages through his paintings, pulling one out that has two figures on it. He speaks rapidly in Russian, but like the last time, I start to inexplicably understand some of what he says, and I feel that same thrumming inside me as before.

"This me. This monster," he says, pointing to the figures.

Now I see it, and suddenly everything clicks into place.

My eyes fill with tears as the painting seems to come to life before my very eyes. The vampire in the painting is an exact likeness of the man before me, without modesty or embellishment. And he's fighting the creature of darkness, who has human entrails hanging from his mouth. The scene unfolds. The creature is eating the human, the vampire fights the creature. The creature dies, leaving the vampire badly wounded. On the painting, night turns to day turns to night, and the creature rises from the dead and kills again. The cycle repeats.

I have no idea what kind of magic this is, but I finally understand what's going on.

"You're fighting the creature?" I ask, turning to him. "The creature is killing people in the village and you're…you're protecting them?"

He nods.

"You're injured," I say, stating the obvious.

Fear grips me.

"You need to heal."

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