Chapter Twenty
Sarah sent a quick text to Penny letting her know Adam was in tow and staying for dinner. She got a text back with a GIF of a woman holding her hand across her forehead and passing out. Clearly, Penny was excited.
They pulled in the driveway, Adam stood awkwardly waiting for Sarah to get Alex out of the car. Penny and Asald were on the porch smiling stupidly at them.
Alex ran ahead, leaping through the air into Asald’s arms. “Mommy brought a friend, come meet Adam,” he leaned close to Asald’s ear and whispered, “he is so cool, he looks like a baseball.”
Sarah was mortified.
“I’ve met him, he is pretty cool.” He set Alex down, “Christian is in his room playing, go inside and find him.”
Before Sarah and Adam made it to the porch Penny held up her hand to stop them. “Dinner isn’t ready yet, Sarah why don’t you show Adam the lake out back.”
She spun around and pulled Asald inside with her.
“Well, that was subtle.” Sarah blushed at Adam, “It is pretty out there if you want to see it?”
He nodded and followed her, both quiet for the short walk to the water's edge. At first, neither spoke, they stared into the water contemplating their next words.
Adam broke first, “It didn’t take me long to realize I had been an ass at the party. Every time I think I’m over what happened to me something brings it back up.” He pulled her over to the bench facing the water and sat down. “Asald told me you don’t know about us, I want to see where this is going with you but we can’t move forward until you know the truth.”
Sarah’s face was hot, she knew deep down what he was going to tell her but the logical side of her brain was still fighting it.
“I was born in 1790 in Brussels, Belgium. In 1818 there was an accident and I was trampled by my horse. My mother should have let me stay dead but in her grief, she searched for a way to bring me back. She heard about an alchemist in Darmstadt, Germany who had been experimenting with bringing people back from the dead. Against my father’s wishes, she took my body to his castle. He tried his best to put me back together but you can see his sewing skills aren’t the greatest. It took a couple of tries but his experiment worked, I came back to life.” Adam was staring at the water, oblivious to the look of confusion Sarah was giving him, “I don’t remember the first couple of years, I had to be retrained as if born again an infant. Dr. Frankenstein had started calling me Adam in reference to Adam in the Bible, we were both the first of our kind. After my mother died I stayed with the doctor until his death a few years later. It didn’t take long for me to see the biggest fault with what my mother did. I’m not able to age or die.” His voice had turned bitter. Sarah could hear the pain and longing in his voice. “I was so lonely until I found Black Hollow, almost everyone there is immortal like me and accepted me without question.”
Finally, his attention turned back to Sarah, she searched his eyes looking for the truth, “So you are trying to tell me everyone in Black Hollow is the creature they were pretending to be? It’s not all for show?”
Adam nodded, she felt like she was going insane, did he actually expect her to believe that story? Her throat was constricting, she needed space. She stood and started backing towards the house, she could see the hurt in his eyes.
A flapping noise behind her had her spinning around. A creature with giant wings was descending from above the trees. Asald landed in front of her, he didn’t say a word, his body shook as he morphed from a man into a stone gargoyle in front of her.
She wasn’t ashamed to admit doing it, she screamed and took off running for the house. Sarah was on the porch ready to catch her in her arms.
“He’s a... he’s a…” Sarah’s eyes were bulging.
“Take a breath, yes, he’s a gargoyle just like Pascal, Toussaint, Aristide, and Sebastian.” She held Sarah’s shoulders breathing deeply with her, trying to help her calm down. “I know this seems insane but it’s the truth. Alex can tell you too, Asald is the one who saved us that day on the roof from Hank. We didn’t do anything, Asald had shifted and fought him.”
Asald walked up and stood next to them, she glanced over, relieved to see he looked like a normal human again.
“You know it’s true, stop and think about everything you saw this past weekend, there is no other explanation for how real it all was.” Sarah dropped her arms and stood next to Asald.
“I need a few minutes, can you let me think for a second?” Sarah was trying to grasp everything she had been told but she was struggling with the idea that she had been in a room with a real dragon and mortified at the idea that she had flirted with the weretigers who apparently were real and could have eaten her and not in the way a woman wants to be eaten.
She shook her head at her inappropriately timed dirty thought. Asald waved Adam up to the house, she stood still while they went inside to give her space.
The last week replayed in her head, she thought back to everything she saw and heard. She did just see Asald drop out of the sky and turn into stone so she couldn’t deny they were telling the truth but that would mean everything she had ever known about fairy tales and monsters was real and that thought was terrifying on its own.
She couldn’t deny that everyone had been nice to her, she never felt unsafe. Asald was the reason both she and Alex were alive today and every cell in her body was screaming for her to accept Adam.
It wasn’t going to be easy but she finally came to terms with what she had heard and decided to rejoin the group. As she walked inside she did the math and realized he had been alive over two hundred years, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know how many women he had slept with in all that time. Not that she was an angel but she’s had a lot less time to rack up the numbers either. She shrugged, that could explain how he was so good in bed.