Prologue

The rain came down in silver threads and turned the road to black glass on the night that Ethan’s reality was changed forever.

He remembered that more clearly than he remembered his own face from that time. Faces changed in memory. They were smoothed by years and grief until they became something like paintings. But weather remained exact. The smell of wet earth. The sting of cold through wool. The way the world looked when it was nearly dark and every lamp in the distance seemed to float like a warning.

He had been running then from the thing that had already happened to him.

He had not yet learned that becoming a vampire did not feel like entering a new life. It felt like being torn from the old one with enough violence to leave a permanent shape in the soul. At first there had been only pain, then thirst, then a terrifying clarity that came with the hunger. He had not completely grasped what he was but that realization was soon to come.

And because he had understood that, he had run.

He stood now beneath the branches of the elm at the edge of the lane with the rain slipping through the leaves onto his face while he watched the light in his own house glow through the windows.

Home. The word struck him with unbearable force.

Inside, his wife and love of his life, Judith, would be setting down her sewing and folding the blanket over the arm of the chair. She would be waiting for him, although she might pretend not to be. She always pretended not to wait, as if waiting was too revealing a sort of love. But Ethan had always known. He had known by the way that she paused when she heard his footstep and by the way that she turned before he spoke while already smiling.

He’d spent three hours pacing the woods beyond the property line while fighting his own body as if it was a wild animal. His mouth still burned. His throat ached with a need so vast that it felt like a second heart beating where his was supposed to be. He had torn at his own cuff, bitten the inside of his mouth until it bled, and shoved his hands into the mud to keep from running back to the house.

The problem was that he could still smell her….

…“Stay where you are,” he gruffly ordered.

Her mouth slightly parted with fear. “You’re frightening me.”

He could not bear that. Not from her.

The room wavered at the edge of his vision. Hunger rose up in him with a vicious, animal certainty. And for one impossible instant he saw her as prey – not Judith, not wife, not the woman who had braided ribbons into her hair and fallen asleep reading beside the fire, but a pulse of life that he could take with one movement.

He stumbled backward.

Judith’s expression changed to alarm as she exclaimed, “Ethan!”

“No!” he bellowed. The word came out raw.

The flame shivered as she set the candle down too quickly and took a step toward him. “Tell me what happened.”

He violently shook his head. The taste of his own blood filled his mouth again, although he knew there was no wound there now. “You must not come near me.”…

…When Judith finally spoke, her voice was broken but steady. “Ethan.”

He closed his eyes. “Yes?”

Her voice trembled as she said, “Do not disappear from my life forever.”

That was the moment when he nearly broke. He put one hand on the doorframe to steady himself. When he spoke, his voice was almost gone. “I will try not to.”

Then he stepped out into the rain and left the house before the dawn could find him.

He never forgot the sound of the door closing behind him. He never forgot the way that Judith had stood in the light, frightened and loving and still reaching for him. And for the centuries that followed, through blood, hunger, survival, and loneliness so deep that it became a second skin, he carried one unbearable truth with him – the night he abandoned Judith, he had not yet understood that immortality was not the curse.

The curse was living long enough to remember the exact shape of the love that you were forced to leave behind.