Lucian Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Dawn came gray through the tall red windows. The watchers in the garden had gone, for now. Lilith stood in the cold hall, the locket at her throat. She turned to Lucian. "I wore your life around my neck," she said. "But I don't know whose life it is. Three hundred years, and I've seen nothing of them. Show me who you were." Lucian had no answer ready. His house held few things. He kept no letters, no friends, no record of the dead he had outlived. He saw the doubt gather behind her blue eyes. If he gave her nothing, she would fill the silence with fear. "Come," he said. He took her up the dark stairs to a room he never opened. Inside, sheets covered the furniture. He pulled one down. Beneath it hung a painting in a gold frame. The canvas had cracked with age. It showed a young man in a black coat and dark red vest, with a proud, cold face. Lilith stepped close. "Who is he?" "Me," Lucian said. "A painter made this the year I became what I am. I kept it to remember my own face. It no longer changes, so I forget." She studied the paint. She looked from the man in the frame to the man beside her. The two faces matched. The same jaw, the same eyes, the same part in the dark hair. No mirror would show her this. The dead don't photograph. But a brush had held him still, three centuries back. "You were real," she whispered. "You had a mother. Someone who sat you down for this." "A woman who feared me by then," Lucian said. "She paid for it so she'd have something after I left. I came back and took it from her house. I've carried it ever since." Lilith touched the cracked surface. Her finger rested on the painted chest, over the heart. "It doesn't beat either," she said. A short laugh broke from her. The fear left her face. "But you were a boy once. I can see him." "I hid him from you," Lucian said. "I hid all of it. I thought the less you knew, the safer you'd be." "No." She turned to him. "The less I knew, the more I doubted. This is worth more than the oath." She pressed her hand flat to the painting, then to his cold cheek. "Now I'm marrying a man with a past, not a ghost with a secret." The doubt was gone. Lucian saw her choose him again, with open eyes. Then her hand dropped from his face. She looked past him, to the window below the frame. The watchers had returned. Three now, not two, standing in the thin morning light where no vampire should stand. One raised a gloved hand and beckoned. They wanted to talk. And they knew he could not keep hiding her forever.