Asher Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Asher Nightshade had killed to protect his solitude for two hundred years. Now a mortal woman walked toward his door, and he wanted to keep her. She stood at the edge of the barren waste, past the dead trees that ringed his manor. Every other human ran from the vampire with grey hair and red eyes. She did not. She had heard the stories about the monster in the black cloak, and she came anyway, a lantern swinging in her hand. Asher watched from the broken window and felt his cold chest ache. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to speak, to learn her name, to ask why she was not afraid. So he moved toward the door. A hand caught his shoulder and stopped him. "You'll get her killed," Rowan said. Asher turned. Rowan leaned against the wall, arms crossed, wolf ears flat against his black hair. The wolfman had been Asher's only friend for a century, the one creature who stayed when everyone else fled. His blue eyes were hard now. His tail did not wag. "You feel it already," Rowan said. "The hunger. I can smell it on you. You look at her and you want two things at once." Asher said nothing. Rowan was right. When he watched the woman, part of him wanted her company. The other part wanted her blood. The two hungers lived in the same breath, and he could not tell them apart. "Let her walk away," Rowan said. "You've spent two centuries alone for a reason. Go out there and one night you'll wake up standing over her body. You know it." Outside, the woman knocked. The sound rang through the empty hall. Asher looked at his own hands. They had done terrible things. He remembered the faces. He wanted, more than blood, more than silence, to sit across from someone who chose to stay. This woman had chosen. No one had chosen him in two hundred years. "I'm going to try," Asher said. Rowan's jaw tightened. "Then you'll do it without me at your back. I won't help you bury her." "I know." Asher pulled the door open. The woman looked up. She did not flinch at his red eyes. She smiled, small and steady, and asked if she could come in from the cold. "Yes," Asher said. His voice shook. "But you should know what I am first." "I already know," she said. "That's why I came." Asher stepped aside and let her cross his threshold. Behind him, he heard Rowan leave through the back, the door slamming shut. He had chosen her over the one friend who had ever stayed. Now the woman stood inside his home, warm and breathing, and the hunger stirred beneath his ribs. He had wanted to keep her near. He had done it. Now he had to learn how to sit beside her without becoming the monster she'd been warned about.