I always knew I had been cursed with darkness. I knew it from the moment the venom spread through my body, taking every ounce of humanity I once had and I was informed that I would be deprived of light for eternity: the light from the sun that I could only feel on my skin in the privacy of very few secluded places, and the light from my own soul, that stopped irradiating it to give place to the shadows where my inner predator took shelter.

I never minded it. I had the moon and the stars, and the nightlights. The time I once used to sleep I could use to study and discover new things and places, bathed in the light of elucidation. I had the glistening glaze of blood reflecting any light in the most enticing way, mouthwatering and glossy. I was perfectly content, so much so that I never realised that I was not fulfilled .

And it was not the same. It was definitely not even close, it was so far from that. I couldn't know, being aloof and adrift as I was, but I finally noticed what I had been missing when I looked down to Marina finally bathed in blood just like I had dreamed of seeing her and when I ran my tongue along her skin to lick it off of her just like I had imagined myself doing so many times before.

This is it, this is how I want to feel for eternity.

She was scared and she was crying but I couldn't stop, it was too much. It was too good . We were so close to her transformation that I couldn't bring myself to care, I just wanted to seize that moment, that sole moment when I would have the chance to make that reverie become reality. My only chance of tasting her before she was one of us.

And when I kissed her it was all forgotten, she was once again lost. It was nothing if not supernatural tricks my body used to lure in the weaker but it didn't matter, I thanked both Nature and Hell for them. She was so easily affected, it was beautiful to watch.

The feeling of it absolutely overwhelming.

She was too warm, too soft and too frail but that barely distracted me from my enjoyment. I couldn't be too rough and her skin seemed to burn mine but nothing came close to being uncomfortable, not when she sucked on my neck and pulled my hair, nothing could feel anything but amazing when she scraped her teeth along my jawline and licked her own blood from my lips.

"You're ruining me" she would repeat in soft whispers in between her ministrations and I smiled at the confession, drunk on her.

It sounded more like an accusation, to be honest .

"You have never looked so beautiful as you do now."

How could it have taken me so long to even notice she was beautiful at all? She was evidently the most beautiful human I had ever seen as she held my face in her hands, uncaring of the blood I spilt everywhere on ourselves and around us. Her cinnamon-coloured complexion, flushed beneath the tan undertones, her plump lips slightly parted to give way to her soft sighs, her wavy hair going down to her clavicle — a brown that was so close to black...

I could really just eat her up.

And then her thin fingers, calloused from holding pens and paint brushes, and pricked by needles she used to sew book signatures, those fingers ensnaring my wrist so wrathfully as if she truly believed she could stop me with one mortal hand and a few hollow words...

I wished she could choke me with those fingers.

I had missed just that during all of the time I had existed and it had a name, a word I murmured so quietly against her moist cheek that she couldn't hear me, as if her skin absorbed it just as it did to the tears and the blood —

" Passion ."

Yes, I had been missing that and once I finally had it I was ruined too, because I could never go back to how I was before her, I could never return to the real darkness I once lived in. I had seen true, blinding light and could no longer accept anything less than that.

" You are ruining me " I threw back at her and it seemed to pain her to hear it just as much as the other times I offered her own words to her. I could see it in her eyes every time, the horror of recognition.

I could see that she hated it because it forced her to see herself reflected in me and I was an unredeemable monster in her eyes.

I loved it, I wanted to take every single thing she had ever said to me and repeat it back to her until she couldn't tell us apart, until we were one in her mind and she had to accept that she was a monster too in her own right. I wanted her to forever forget who she believed she was before she met me and drown in whatever regretful, incredible awfulness I gave her. I wanted to chew up her soul and spit it back and I wanted to soak up in her light as I buried her in darkness.

"It's too much" she said after a few minutes, "too much blood, I feel light. You're too much, I can't bear it."

I felt like no time had passed at all but she did look unwell.

I let her slide from the couch and lie down on the floor, her hair and her skirt sprawled around her like a frame in a painting. I didn't want to stop, I felt nowhere near done with her and cursed her fragility as I allowed her to inch away from me and rest with her face pressed against the carpeted floor. She closed her eyes and I took a second to admire how serene she looked after all the intensity I witnessed in her features before I stood up to fetch her a water bottle.

Mine, she is mine now. There is nothing she can do about it .

She opened her eyes when she sensed me kneeling by her side.

"Thank you" she whispered as she took the bottle from me, sitting up and drinking it almost all at once.

She then looked at me with the saddest expression I had ever seen her wearing.

"My mother's name is Gloria" she told me unpromptedly "and she met my father at Marina da Gloria. That's why they named me Marina."

"It's a beautiful name."

I thought again of how I considered myself to be adrift before finding her and smiled at yet another coincidence.

"I used to come here a lot growing up" she continued and I was not sure she was saying it all to me or to herself and I just happened to catch it because of my heightened hearing. "My parents visited this city all the time and I came here a few times with friends after I got a little older. It had been a while I hadn't come back, though. It doesn't look very different but it feels very different. I thought you were coming to kill me."

I lifted a hand to touch her shoulder and she didn't flinch away, so I rested it there. She was still giving me that depressing look and I felt myself getting annoyed at her again.

"I know you think of me and my coven as villains sprouting from the underworld to snatch you away from your perfect little human life but you have to let that wrongful notion go." I tried to be gentle but my words lacked the softness of patience I mastered when I lifted my mist from her. I unfortunately did not have a very good hold on my own emotions and tended to let them loose quite easily in spite of my efforts to control them. "You were lucky to be late to work when your bar caught on fire. You were lucky I witnessed you using your gift when we first saw each other. You are very lucky to be this powerful and have the interest of such important, ancient people as you do. You are special, Marina, and a number of things happened to throw you in our way. We are very lucky too, I am very lucky. I wish you could see that there are no real losers here, you are gaining just as much as we are. You are not losing a good life to be forced into a horrible new one, you are trading a short mundane life for an eternal wonderful one. It feels bad now because this human life you have is all you have ever known and we are taking it all from you at once, and it is frightening because it is all a mystery to you, but as you learn of all you are being given you will understand how truly lucky you are and hopefully show some appreciation."

She didn't look sad anymore, she looked baffled.

"I think that was more than I had ever heard you saying since we met."

I laughed at her observation. She was right.

"It doesn't matter how much sense your words make" she confessed, "all I can do now is feel, all I can process for now is sensation. I can't think and it all just feels so horrible. I feel horrible, I feel disgusting. I never felt so putrid in my whole life, I almost wish you would really kill me and take all my sins away. You might not want redemption but I desperately crave it."

I rolled my eyes at her, finally fed up with all of that refusal and denial.

"Don't be such a child."

She snorted.

" You don't get to tell me that" she sounded indignant and it was adorable. "You are never even growing up" then she muttered under her breath, possibly thinking I wouldn't hear her, "rugrat."

Good Lord, the fucking nerve .

"Careful" I warned her but couldn't hold back a smile.

"How old are you anyway?"

I didn't want to answer that in any of the two possible ways. She would think me too young physically and too old chronologically, there was no winning.

She wouldn't let it go, so I offered her the information I thought would shock her the least.

"I was around thirteen years old when I became a vampire."

She grimaced.

"Yikes." I tried not to be offended but something must have shown on my face because she quickly amended — "Sorry."

"You're not that much older than that."

"For you maybe, for me eight years is a lifetime."

More like a blink of an eye .

She was not satisfied with that answer and pressed me for the other possible interpretation of her question.

"You don't want to know."

"I might regret knowing but I definitely want to know."

I gave her some time to prepare herself before I answered.

"I was turned over twelve hundred years ago."

Her chin dropped comically. She furrowed her brow ever so slightly and stared at me for several seconds, almost a whole minute, just like that. It was like watching a machine malfunction and get stuck and I knew her brain was doing just that.

"You are over a thousand years old?"

"Yes."

She gawked for a little longer and put her bottle down, slowly getting to her feet. She paced around the room with a hand over her mouth, shaking her head almost imperceptibly.

"Oh, God. No way. I can't even..."

I raised one eyebrow at her.

"Finish your sentences?"

She was not entertained at all. She was indeed very much shocked and I regretted telling her in the first place.

"You're too much, I can't bear it."

"I can't live that long. Damn, that is way too much, I would go insane. No way, absolutely not. Do not make me a vampire, I will hate everyone involved in that forever."

"Your perception of time adjusts itself. It already does, I am sure the years seemed longer when you were younger."

She considered that for quite a while and I gave her as much time as she wanted to think about it. When she looked at me again she sighed, a stern expression marring her features.

"No, Alec. Please don't let me be like you."

"There is no escaping it now. Humans are not allowed to know of our existence."

She covered her face again for a brief moment and then passed her fingers through her hair.

"Which reminds me," I added "to ask you about who you told."

She would swear she didn't tell anyone, I knew it before she did it.

"No one but Luke."

I got up and approached her. She took a step back in reflex but soon stopped herself. Lifting her chin with a finger, I put my face close to hers, touching her nose with mine. She immediately stopped breathing.

Oh, you have to breathe eventually.

"Who else?"

She shook her head vehemently but didn't speak.

"Say it then. Promise me you never told anyone else."

She didn't want to speak, didn't want to breathe. She knew what would happen, she would be taken in a haze. I did not control it but I quite liked using it to my advantage. I laughed at her and she quivered.

"You are so delicious, my love."

She inhaled sharply.

"Natalia."

I almost didn't hear her.

"The one next door to you."

"She doesn't believe it. I made her promise several times that she wouldn't repeat it even so." She put her hands on my shoulders, her eyes desperately pleading. "You owe her anyway, she made us meet."

That caught me by surprise.

"I was late to work because she wanted help getting ready for a party."

"You made a journal for her too, did you not?"

She confirmed it. One with a zodiac sign on the cover.

"She's a Libra."

So fitting, another perfect little piece in this puzzle.

I smiled to myself as I thought of this girl giving us Marina, the one who would probably tip the scale back in our favour in this search for some imbalance of power.

"I did not expect you to tell anyone at all," I confessed to her. "You have always been very reserved with me."

"I confide in close friends like anyone else, we were just not very close."

"And now we are, I suppose?"

Her expression became sour.

"No, I don't think so. I barely know anything about you. It's better like this, actually. I can't really be friends with you after what you have done."

Give it time, something of which you will have an endless amount soon.

"Why did you tell me about your parents and your name if you don't want us to get to know each other better?" I tried to prevent it but some resentment was noticeable in my voice.

She looked down and let go of me.

"I don't want to forget everything. Please keep a few pieces of who I am now so you can give them back to me in the future."

Another smile escaped me.

"Gladly."

I embraced her again and when a couple of tears made their way down her cheeks I captured them with my lips as I kindly kissed her.