James looked at me, his emerald eyes sparkling. He tilted his head to the side. I placed my hand softly on the lower part of his face. This was a moment I’d imagined over and over again, a dream worthy of being wrapped in a ribbon. The idea that he was mine again made my mind full of flowers and gentle love songs. Beautiful, I thought. Moments later, I brought my lips to his. It was like powdered sugar had fallen upon my tongue.
I’d waited so long for this moment. When he was human, I’d been so afraid of hurting him. The idea of injuring his frail form had plagued me. Of course, he hadn’t been weak. James had been nicely toned with muscles that many teenage boys would have been jealous of. But compared to my immortal strength, he’d been a butterfly. James’s mortal form had been breakable, too much so for me to really show him all of my love.
Our lives had been so complicated. I had fallen for James when he was human and despised myself for it. Taking his mortality had seemed like a crime. But when Pansy, a deranged werewolf, had torn his body to the brink of death, I had been given no choice. I could have let him die, but that had seemed unthinkable. And so I had decided to change him, making him an immortal.
The choice had been difficult. Yet, in the end, I hadn’t regretted it. Our love was too strong to abandon. This was my chance. I finally had just the right moment to fall into this ocean of bliss. The contentment was beautiful. This brilliant moment was enough to fill my heart with sweetness.
Our lips crushed each others. I poured myself into him, relishing in our love. We had forever. This was our chance at happiness. His hands softly held my waist. They were strong now, even more than mine.
Every particle of his body had turned to porcelain. Like me, he was a stone statue. We were nighttime beings illuminated by the soft candlelight. I never wanted to forget this moment. In a hundred years, I could look back on this.
He pulled away, a look of confusion leaking into his eyes. “Who are you?”
For a moment, I was sure I’d heard him incorrectly. “What?”
James shook his head, pushing me from his lap. I fell onto the daybed beside him, absolutely clueless about what to do. James’s face was perplexed. He looked entirely lost.
“I don’t know who you are,” he replied.
I sat there completely silent. How was this possible? We loved each other. He was my everything. James held my heart. He was my boyfriend, my partner. We were completely and wholly infatuated with each other.
How did he not remember me? I hadn’t lost any memories after I’d been changed. My human life, and the people who filled it, were still firmly planted in my mind. Nina and Anya, my sisters, hadn’t lost their memories, either. This made no sense. He couldn’t forget this love. We’d fought so hard for this. How could it be over?
I felt as if he’d torn my heart from my marble chest and crushed it within his firm hands. Panic consumed my body. Every inch of my stone-like hands seemed to shake. It was as if I was falling into a black hole. My soul was practically screaming for him to love me, but his eyes held no compassion. I was nothing to him.
I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. It was as if my lips were glued shut. There were so many things I wanted to tell him. Yet how could I possibly communicate my love in a few simple words?
I remembered the way James had held me, the way his lips had caressed mine, and how he’d told me he loved me. He’d professed his love as if it was as natural as the sun rising in the sky. But now, he couldn’t even remember it.
“James, I love you,” I whispered.
He stood from the couch, holding his hands in front of him. “What am I?”
Would he be furious? If he couldn’t remember who I was, he certainly wouldn’t know what had happened. He had no idea what he’d become. James didn’t know he was an immortal. How would I explain what he’d transformed into?
He didn’t even understand that vampires were real. All the time we had spent wishing for this moment was nothing. It was all gone. Because if he didn’t remember anything, it was almost like it never even happened.
“The last thing I remember is...something about a beach and a girl. She was beautiful, with black hair and eyes a pretty shade of blue. It’s all so blurry, though,” James said.
I brought my hand up to cover my gasp. He remembered the night we’d had our first kiss. It wasn’t clear enough for him to know it had been me, though. His memory was fractured. James had forgotten our love.
If that was really the last thing he remembered, then I was just a stranger to him. He was still my James, but I was just a girl. To him, I was a mysterious vampire with black hair and blue eyes. There wasn’t any love in his brief memory of our time together. It was just a mess of fractured seconds.
“It’s me,” I whispered.
He looked at me with skepticism. “What happened to me? Why don’t I remember you?”
Tears were streaming down my face. I had to tell him. There was no choice. It was my responsibility to tell him that he was a—a vampire. He had become a child of the night.
My voice was small. “You’re a vampire.”
For a moment, he seemed to be in disbelief. Then his eyes grew wide as his fangs slipped from his mouth. They sliced his lip, causing a few drops of blood to fall onto his fingers as he reached up to touch them.
My stomach lurched as I witnessed it. I hadn’t really been prepared to see this. No matter how much I’d wanted to be with him, seeing him as a vampire felt strange. I handed him one of the glasses of blood I’d prepared for when he woke. My long, lavender dress flowed freely around my hips. It clung to my chest before falling down to the floor. I’d worn it to be beautiful for him, but he didn’t even seem to notice. My heart was writhing in my chest.
James took the glass from my hand with a look of disgust on his face. As he brought it to his nose, desire flooded his eyes. James lifted the glass to his mouth, gulping its contents down. His lips were ruby-red. A few drops of blood fell from his fangs. I couldn’t tell if I was disgusted or entranced.
I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to run into his arms, while the more sensible side of my mind told me to wait. After all, he had no idea who I was. I wasn’t his girlfriend anymore, only a stranger. The reality of the situation was enough to make me freeze.
“James?” I whispered in a questioning manner.
He looked down at me, hunger evident in his eyes. “I need more,” he replied.
I nodded. At least I knew how to solve that problem. Gently I took his hand in my own. Though James looked at me strangely, he didn’t pull away. I led him away from my room and out the back of the tiny house.
He looked up into the night sky, gazing at the stars. They were beautiful, but I didn’t notice. My whole world had come crashing down. The man I loved had no idea who I was. Not long ago, James had begged me to let him have my heart. Now, he was clueless as to how much I loved him. The irony was overwhelming. We had switched places. How was I the one desperate for love? He’d become cold while I’d become a melted puddle of emotion.
He dropped my hand, seemingly uncomfortable with the prolonged gesture. I felt my heart lurching in my chest. There didn’t seem to be much I could do to stop the tears from dripping down my cheeks. My heart was shattered. When I looked at him, tears drizzled down my cheeks like raindrops falling from a mournful sky.
This was a terrible nightmare. He should have remembered me. Yet somehow, his change had gone wrong. I was left alone to suffer through this. I hadn’t even considered such a possibility. It was foreign, something I’d never heard of before. No one I knew had lost their memory after the change. Most people turned out fine. Of course, it took some adjusting. But through my time as an immortal, I’d never heard of someone losing their memories.
Maybe he’d hit his head when Pansy had tried to kill him. She had tortured him and let him bleed slowly, all because she was jealous of my sister, Anya. It had been sadistic, twisted in a manner that would have made anyone feel sick. Even though Pansy was dead, I’d never hated any other werewolf as much as I despised her. It was an age-old rivalry that I had thought to be mostly extinct when my sisters had fallen in love with werewolf brothers, but I had been wrong. For some of us, it was still alive.
The horror of that experience had caused so many bad things, but I’d never suspected this. Perhaps he’d lost his memory before I changed him. That was the only explanation I could give myself. Pansy had taken James from me in more ways than I could comprehend.
No matter how it happened, it was heartbreaking. Loving someone who had previously loved you was so, so hard. I still felt every inch of the passion I’d felt when James was human, but he didn’t care. There was no longer a look of love in his eyes when they met mine. I missed his soft, human nature. Everything about him had turned to stone.
“Where are we going?” James asked.
“To hunt,” I replied.