EVERETT’S “ROOM” WAS REALLY MORE LIKE AN ENTIRE APARTMENT OF ITS OWN, complete with bedroom, bath, living area, game room with vintage arcade games I’d only seen in movies, a card table, a pool table, a foosball table, and who knows how many other tables. I didn’t see the other bedrooms to know if they were like this, but the sheer size of all of it was starting to seem ridiculous. Even for me.
I still couldn’t sleep, but I tried for a little while. Then I talked with Ginny and Mark about what had happened. All of the Winters looked in pain as I described the taste of the blood to them, the feel of the kill. It was partly because they pitied me, and partly because it fueled their desires, which made it so clear to me what I was really struggling with: How I could love them when I knew what they were capable of. It was one thing to know in theory, like I had for months. It was another thing to have experienced it.
Everett had quickly become stir crazy in the cold Canadian air, so he and his siblings left at midday to feed. They never told me this was what they were doing, but I could always tell. I hadn’t figured out how often it had to happen because it seemed to depend on several variables. I did know, though, that Everett never went alone.
I wandered around outside, and eventually I dropped to the ground. I lay in the snow for several hours. Adelaide came to lay with me.
“Do you want to talk?” she asked softly, her eyes fixed up at the bright white sky like mine were. I think she knew what I was going through. Didn’t she have the same struggle I did?
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I feel like I’ve talked enough.”
“I understand. I used to think it would be nice to have someone to vent to, someone who could understand, or who could at least just hear me out. But as time passes, I’m grateful for the silence I must keep. I’ve realized that saying it all out loud may actually make it worse,” she said.
“It certainly makes it more real,” I said.
“Is that what you’re struggling with? That until now you could deny it in a way?” she asked.
I thought it over. “Probably,” I said. I didn’t know what I was struggling with. It was everything I had always struggled with, just amplified. “You know, when he fell for you, I remembered thinking that you may be able to overlook what he does, what he is because you don’t value life very highly,” she said. This hit me in an odd way.
“I must be an awful person if that’s how I come off,” I said.
“That’s not it. I just thought that maybe someone who regarded death and life in such a strange way would maybe be able not to think about what he does. What they all do,” she said.
“Can you keep from thinking about it?” I asked.
A long pause floated on the frigid wind as Adelaide chewed on my question. Or how to respond to it.
“No,” she said. “And yes.” She sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“Well, right now all I’ve got is ‘no’ and ‘complicated’ so tell me more about the ‘yes’ part,” I implored, pushing myself up to a sitting position. Adelaide sat up too. “I guess I think of it like this: In our supernatural world, there are powers and there are weaknesses. There are individual or specialized powers that only some of us have. Like your mind-reading. Ginny’s mirroring. Or all these other powers Anthony finds for Mark to acquire. But there are specialized weaknesses too. Vieczy and other vampires, they have a weakness you and I don’t have. Their lives are only sustained by taking life from others. Is it awful? Yes. Justified? Never. But that’s how they were born. I’m not going to love my children any less for being that than if they were born with a disability, a terrible illness, or something that made them different in some way. I’m going to love my children unconditionally. I always have. I always will. And I can understand that this family isn’t your God-given family, but I feel like God gave you to us. So I hope you can find a way to cope with what Everett is, with his weakness. He can look past your lesser qualities. Maybe you can look past his.”
“The only person I’ve ever tried to kill is myself,” I said quietly. “It’s different.”
Adelaide laughed a kind of sad, frustrated laugh. “What do you want me to say, Sadie? That you’re a better person than he is, than all my children are?”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said apologetically. I traced circles in the snow around my feet. “What about Anthony? Can he look past what they do?”
“Anthony’s view on it is a little different than mine, as you can imagine,” she said.
“He thinks he’s one of them,” I said. “Or pretends he is.”
Adelaide narrowed her eyes a bit. “What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “That night at the bonfire in Romania, when you all told me what was going to happen — his vision of Mark, the war, the beach and all — when he finally started answering my questions, he said things like ‘our eyes’ and ‘our venom’ and ‘we need’ and such. I didn’t think of it until weeks later, and I don’t even know why I thought of it then. But he acts like he is one of them even though he’s not. He’s a shape-shifter. He doesn’t have to feed. He doesn’t have to kill people. He’s not venomous. He’s not one of them.”
“But he feels responsible for them,” she said. “He has spent his entire time as a father, all century and a half of it, feeling guilty for fathering children he could never fully understand. It kills him, I think. Sometimes a little more each day. And so somewhere along the line, he just started acting as if he were just like them. Pretending, I guess, like you say. Maybe it helps him.”
“He’s said this to you?” I asked incredulously. I didn’t imagine Anthony to be the type to talk about his feelings or deeply seeded fears.
“Never out loud, but I know,” she said.
“If that’s what kills him, why did he have children with you anyway? If he knew what they’d become when your kind mated with his?” I asked.
Adelaide nodded her head sadly, staring at the ground. “You’ve never done the math, have you?” she asked. I must have looked perplexed because she said, “Ginny was born the year Patrick stopped aging. The year he had to start killing. I had three children before I knew what I’d created from my womb. You think I would have gotten past one if I had known, if we had known?”
She was right. I hadn’t done the math. “Oh, Adelaide...” she was crying now. Tears streaming down her pink cheeks, eyes reddening, so unlike her vieczy children. “You didn’t know the legends?”
She shook her head. By the time she spoke again, the tears were freezing to her face. “The vieczy legend was so rare. We didn’t hear of it until just before Mark was born. We didn’t even know that’s what they were. And at that time, in the late 18th century? The concept of any kind of creature close to what our children were was just so foreign. Dracula-like creatures who were bitten at the neck and turned into wild, terrible things. My children were just children. They displayed natural powers, but that was expected because they were magical. I didn’t know they’d been born with the dormant vieczy disease,” she cried, her words bitter, “until it was too late.”
Except for Mark, I thought. She knew what Mark was going to be. But Anthony had had a vision that he would come, and so, like all the Winters, she didn’t doubt that it would happen and that it was beyond her control.
“Besides,” she said, “Anthony isn’t exactly a regular shape-shifter. Even when we first heard of the vieczy legend, I didn’t even think that’s what our children were because Anthony wasn’t actually shifting anymore.” I wanted to bang my head against a wall. How hadn’t I noticed that? Four months with the man, and I’d never once seen him shift forms in the slightest bit. And the shape-shifters we encountered — the nosferatu in Romania — they’d been mortal. Anthony was over a thousand years old. Then what kind of shape-shifter was he? It was stupid of me to assume he’d be a nosferatu. Just because Narcisa and Valentin were, because some Survivors theoretically were, I had been remiss in not thinking further about what Anthony was.
The look on my face must have conveyed too much of this doubt because she added, “I’m only telling you this because I’m assuming you’ve noticed.”
“Of course I have,” I lied.
Adelaide rose to her feet, dusting the snow off of her clothing. It seemed clear that talking about this had become too much. After all, how do you comfort someone when the thing eating away at her eats away at you too? “And Sadie? Just remember that Everett...he loves you despite ...” She couldn’t say the rest. Despite how genuinely crazy you are.
“And so I should love him despite,” I nodded.
She leaned over and kissed my forehead. “I think you’re going to save him, Sadie. And for that, I’m eternally grateful.” Save him from what? I wondered.
She walked away without another word.
LATER IN THE DAY, I SAT BY THE FIRE, PLAYING WITH MY PHONE. I PULLED UP Corrina’s number and almost called her, but I stopped myself. Then I typed out a long text message, but I deleted it too. She didn’t want to hear from me, and I knew it. I didn’t need an unanswered phone call or text to confirm that.
If only I had other humans, I thought. If only I had someone else to talk to, someone who knew nothing of this situation in the slightest. Someone who would listen to anything I had to say.
I pulled up Cole’s number on my phone and stared at it for twenty solid minutes before convincing myself that the best thing I could do for him was leave him alone.