“What exactlydidyou do to her,” she frowns, “you didn’t kill her, did you? Because, you know, I’m not sure that will sit well with him, and that’s a pretty big secret.”
I laugh.
“I killed her lover, in front of her, of course. But her,” I frown, “no. I couldn’t kill her, it would have been like pulling wings off a butterfly.”
“Where is she then? She’s left the modelling world.”
“Trust you to follow up on that,” I smirk. “She’s gone to an ashram in India, to seek wisdom and lift the curse of the night stalkers from her soul,” I add the last few words in a deep, melodic and frankly as terrifying as I can be, voice.
“Oh, you didn’t,” Tess tries not to laugh.
“I did,” I smirk, “and I don’t think we will ever see Little Miss Lettuce-Only, again.”
“But she’s safe, and probably happy there, helping the poor and feeding the starving,” Tess muses.
“Yeah,” I shrug, “that’s what I figured too. I’m not wholly evil, Tess.”
“I know that,” she walks up the steps, carrying the discarded laptop in one hand, a too-big-to-carry piglet in the other, and lays beside me on the porch deck. “None of us are, we try not to be anyway. I just so wish you and Tristan would get back together. Now that we know the lore, the mythology surrounding Irresistibles and their vampires, it would be utterly terrible if you threw away something so amazing. I think back to Jacques,” her voice goes quiet, “and I wonder what kind of a life we would have had together if I hadn’t eaten him.”
“I’ve tried to eat Tristan dozens of times, Tess, I’m no saint,” I nudge her with my shoulder, try to knock her out of her memories.
“But imagine,” she whispers. “Do you remember what Solomon said? How he laughed when he learned what had happened. What he said when I returned?”
“Yes,” I shudder.
“He said,” she continues as though I hadn’t spoken, her eyes on a faraway distant time, “that for every minute I had been gone, a child would die a slow and painful death screaming for its mother.”
“I know,” I whisper, my memory as sharp as hers.
“Four hundred children,” she whispers, “and Jacques. Four hundred. My hands will never be clean. If I ever, ever meet another Irresistible, I will kill myself.”
“What? Tess, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I mean it,” she whispers. “I’ll kill myself before I can harm a hair on his head, or cause anyone else to die.”
“Tess, I don’t want to hear you say things like that, it frightens me,” I scowl, leaning up on my elbow to look down into her earnest eyes.
“Well, not likely I will meet anyone here, alone on a farm with my animals, hundreds of miles away from people. And the only people I meet at the funeral home are already dead,” she smiles at me before rolling over to her stomach and studying the cracked picture of Tristan and his models.
I keep looking at her profile, her face illuminated by the screen, and wonder if, after all, she was as unaware as we consider her sometimes. Perhaps she had moved here specifically after Serena met Christopher, perhaps the whole idea of more than one Irresistible being out there for each vampire drove her to this isolation.
“They got the name wrong again though,” she muses, interrupting my thoughts, “see.”
I frown down at the caption;‘Newly divorced and back on the market, billionaire playboy Christopher Berrington caught the latest fashion show in Paris this weekend with two unknown beauties. He later, according to sources, checked into the Hilton with both.’
“Huh,” I frown, “I hadn’t noticed. Anyone who knows them would know this is Tristan.”
“And yet,” Tess muses, flicking through news item after news item, “look. Each one of these pictures you have been agonising over, the captions all say Christopher.”
“But every single one is Tristan,” I sit up, staring at an equally confused Tess.
“What are they up to?” she whispers.
“What about Serena?” I cock my head to one side. “Has anyone heard from her?”
“No,” Tess shakes her head. “Charlotte said Serena left the moment she was told about the mythology and saw what Nick had become. That is the last any of us have heard from her. Apart from the news that the divorce had gone through.”
“And yet Christopher too has disappeared, but let it be believed he is bed-hopping around the planet having a wonderful time, making it very public that he is completely estranged from Serena. I can’t believe, even for him, that he would be such a prick. Something strange is going on,” I chew my fingernail thoughtfully.
