Page 15 of Overexposed

Auris seemed to give that some thought. “I suppose he does. Or as I said, did, when last we met. If you truly want to, now would be the time to take a drive to the ossuary, my sweet. If you want to postpone, I’ll find you a nice bottle of wine and light the fire for you.”

“Like Owain did for you.”

He didn’t answer right away, then, “Yes. Like Owain did for me.”

I licked my lips, wiggled my toes when his touch tickled. “Did Owain have freckles?” I asked.

To my relief, that got me a smiling vampire, not an irate one. “You don’t have to be jealous, Ethan. There is no other. There never will be. There is only you. What was doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter. It doesn’t matter when it comes to my feelings toward you.”

I looked down, looked up again. “So did he? Have freckles?”

Auris heaved a sigh, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Okay. Well. I mean, it’s okay, really.”

Auris lifted a single eyebrow. “Wine?”

I shook my head. “Nah. Look, let’s go out there. Maybe we don’t find anything, and then, we can just keep on being here. And maybe go to the museum, but at night, so you can get me access to all the places the public can’t go. Me and my camera, of course.”

“Ethan, my sweet, I am feeling used.”

I grinned. “It’s in part your fault, because that manager team you set on me is too excited and ready to get the project off the ground. I need to give them something.”

“Hmm.” He lifted my feet out of his lap and stood. “You will want to take your camera. You will want to explore the ossuary, I think. And dress in all your winter things. The cold in a bone church is nothing to trifle with.”

I nodded and went to get ready. I felt a lot like Auris must have felt all those centuries ago. I tried to imagine him, human, a boy. I could, and I couldn’t. In appearance, yes, but even in his story, Auris didn’t sound like a teenager to me. But then, he’d grown up in a different world, a different time. What I wouldn’t give to have known him then.

* * *

Saying I wasn’t afraid on the drive to the bone church would have been a lie. My mind went round and round to the last time I’d been inside a church, to my last encounter with the priestly kind.

Auris reached out to take my hand whenever he didn’t have to operate the gearshift, and when we were maybe ten minutes outside of Prague, I saw him turn his dark eyes on me in my peripheral vision.

“You don’t need to drive me home,” I said quickly. “I’m okay.”

Auris nodded. To distract both him and me, I asked, “Is Tove still around?”

I did not get an immediate response, and I wondered why that was. Maybe family issues weren’t an exclusively human thing.

“Yes. Tove is still with us. It has been a while, and when I last saw him, he said he was going to sleep for a while.”

“Does that island still exist? Where you all lived?”

Auris shook his head no. “The ocean reclaimed it. I always suspected that magic strengthened its foundations, and magic can fade over time.”

I had to chew on that for a while. I had come to terms with vampires, but that hadn’t been easy. I always made sure to look at people’s eyes now, to see if they were black or silver, and I wondered whether dead celebrity sightings were a sign of vampirism spreading among the rich and beautiful.

Auris had laughed about that theory of mine, but in a friendly way.

At any rate, vampires I was willing to accept. A life made easy by Auris’s power of entrancement I was willing to accept. The threat of churchly people I was… I was willing to live with that.

Magic was a whole different can of worms, and if that was real, the laws of nature had all of a sudden become a whole lot less like laws, more like guidelines.

“You said magic is rare, though. Right?” I asked.

“Very. It was rare when I was young and has grown rarer over the years. The existence of it upsets you?”

“Yeah?”

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