Barcelona, Spain, 1585

The inquisitor’s chamber had walls of stone with two barred windows set close to the high ceiling. Darkened hallways branched off the main room like the legs of a spider. Killian stayed close to Layla’s side. She trembled, from fear or cold or anticipation he could not say.

He almost turned back, almost drew her from this place of pain and torment, but he stifled the inclination and drew her forward instead. He refused to carry out the task he had set himself without her full and clear consent. He had brought her here so she could see the truth of what he was, what she would become.

He had met her by happenstance, a dying woman who desperately wanted to live. She was the sister of a man with whom he carried out business. He did not love her—was one such as he even capable of love?—and she did not love him. Theirs was a friendship of mutual respect and companionship. She was intelligent and shrewd, and their conversation was amusing. After months of watching her slowly fade away, he had told her he could offer a cure, he could save her life.

The offer was made not only for her sake but for his. He was weary of his solitude. The lovers he had taken over the years had been fleeting distractions, women who were well aware that he would never be a permanent fixture in their lives. He had told none what he was, shared little of himself with any of them. But Layla was not a bedmate. She was a friend, and he thought that was a good basis for the solution he offered: a way to cheat her rapidly approaching death.

He had shared few details, had only warned that she would have to do things that were both distasteful and against her nature in order to survive.

“I do not care,” she had said, her dark eyes flashing in her pale face. “I want to live, whatever the cost, I want to live.” She had paused. “Do you do those distasteful things?”

“I do. Do not misunderstand. I do not revile what I have become.” What his mother’s murderer had made him. “It simply is. And because of it, I have had opportunities to travel, to study, to see wonders others can only imagine. Pyramids. Tigers. Monkeys in a jungle thick and green. Rome, Venice, Paris, London…”

And always he moved on after a few short years, never offering the chance for any to notice that he never aged, never grew ill. Never allowing himself the opportunity for friendships or connections of much length or depth. It was a lonely existence, one he had lived for over two centuries. In his human life, he had enjoyed interludes of quiet and equal interludes of camaraderie. But he was no longer human, and whatever interactions he shared with mortals could never be enough to breach the walls between them for he was the hunter and they were his prey.

In the beginning, there had been occasions when he had considered walking into the sun. But he had not, for his yearning to live, to learn, to feed off experiences, and yes, to help mankind and atone in some tiny way for the lives he stole had outweighed his melancholy. The plague that had killed his family—that he had brought to his family—had sparked in him a need to understand disease and death, to bring ease to the suffering of others, to find cures where he could. So he studied texts and healed those he could; those he could not heal, those who were already wrapped in death’s embrace but had yet to draw their last breath, he drained.

Layla looked up at him now in the dim light, her face pale, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders.

“For everything you gain from this choice, there will be sacrifice in equal measure,” he warned.

He had not made this offer before. He was not even certain he could succeed in her transformation for his plan of action was based solely on the hazy recollections of his own rushed and terrifying transition. She might die during the process. She would definitely die without it.

She nodded.

“Come.” He offered his arm and she took it, leaning heavily upon him as they moved from the Inquisitor’s chamber to a narrow hallway with small cells on either side. When they reached the end of the corridor, Killian stopped. He held to the shadows, his form draped all in black, invisible to the wretch who lay on the ground where he had been tossed.

Killian had come to this place because he had heard this man’s cries and pleas.

He was doomed, this man who was a husband and father, whose crime was labeled heresy because he refused to forsake his religion and replace it with another. He had been accused and detained. Tortured. Tried. Sentenced.

Killian had not been there to witness the man’s torment. But he knew what had been done because he knew the human body and could read the signs in the prisoner’s broken and bloodied form.

Beside him, Layla’s every breath was too fast, too shallow. He could hear her pulse, the racing of her heart, the pounding of the blood in her veins. Sweet blood, hot and alive. After this night, her blood, her heart, her very physiology would be permanently altered.

It was an easy matter for Killian to enter the cell, to hunker down by the prisoner’s side, to ask him, “Why do you beg to die? I heard you as I passed by, calling out for a merciful death.”

The man’s lips were dry and cracked and it took him a moment to manage a reply. “Are you an apparition?”

“I am not.” Killian rested his hand on the man’s injured shoulder and held his gaze, willing him to feel no pain, no fear. He supposed this ability to lull mortals into a state of calm repose was a handy thing when his survival required him to kill them. A calm victim was far easier to drain than one who struggled. And for the victim, it was far easier to die without fear. “Tell me why you wish to die.”

“They will burn me at the stake on the morrow,” the prisoner said, his words even and soft now. “They have denied me death by garrote before burning. They will burn me alive.” He closed his eyes. “Kill me quickly. Kill me now. Deny them their pyre. Show me mercy.”

Layla made a low moan, and Killian looked up to find that she had moved to the door of the small cell. “Hurry,” she said. “Bring him and let us be away.”

“You think I brought you here to save this man from his fate?” Killian asked. “After my warnings and admonitions, you believe I brought you here for that?”

Layla wrapped her arms around herself, resting her shoulder heavily on the bars. Her eyes were liquid, the shadows and dim light making them larger and darker, like the hollowed sockets of a skeletal skull.

Killian shook his head. “I brought you here to watch me feed, to understand what fate you beg for. I told you that your life would be purchased with compromises, with the need to do things. Disturbing things.”

“Feed?” she whispered with a glance at the broken man who lay on the floor.

“I am here to kill him,” Killian said. “A kindness, in truth. Mercy.” He said the last though he was not certain there was such a thing as a merciful monster.

“A kindness?” Layla took a step back, horror etching her features.

“Death at my hand will be swift and painless.”

“We can take him from this place. We can save him,” Layla said, but the words wavered and dipped, as though she already accepted that she argued against the inevitable.

Killian made a gesture to encompass the cell and the hallway beyond. “I cannot save them all.” He had learned that long ago. He had learned that humans would die and he would not. He had learned not to let his hunger grow to the point that he fed indiscriminately, a feral creature driven by need. He had learned to kill those who were evil or those on the brink of death. His conscience sat better on his shoulders that way. This kill was a mercy.

“Watch now,” he said. “Learn. You will need these skills.”

She sank to her knees on the cold stone, as though his words stole the last of her strength. “What are you?” she whispered.

He had not expected it, her horror and revulsion. But he saw now that he should have. He thought back to the human boy-man he had been before the stranger came to his family’s home. He had not been offered a choice between death and monster. The monster had bred a monster and then walked out to burn in the sun.

Would Kjell have chosen life if the creature had let him choose?

Killian did not know. He was Kjell no longer, and he had not been human in a very long while. He was Killian now, and Killian needed to feed.

A warning of the coming dawn crawled across his skin; it was less than an hour away. If he tarried here any longer, the dawn would flay his skin and burn hotter than the pyre this wretch feared. He needed to finish here and seek the darkness.

He lifted the man’s head to his lap. He pulled his knife free. He no longer gnawed open a vein to feed. He was a civilized monster, one that made use of a utensil. With a deft slash, he severed the carotid artery in the man’s throat and sealed his lips to the wound as the blood spurted free. And he fed.

When he was done, he wiped the blood from his lips and went to kneel by Layla’s side. She flinched away.

She cried out in protest as he lifted her in his arms, she was light but his heart was heavy. He had miscalculated and he suspected that this foray would not end as he had planned. He carried her to her home, to her bed, and when he set her down he asked, “Do you want to live?”

“Not like that. Not like you.” She scrabbled back, as far from him as she could. But he expected that. She had held herself stiff in his arms, trembling and sobbing the entire way home.

“Where is the woman who said, ‘I want to live, whatever the cost, I want to live’?”

She came up on her knees, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, her skin white, traced with blue veins, her eyes burning and wild. “She would rather die than be like you. You are a monster.”

“I am.” A foolish monster who had dared hope he could create a monstrous companion.

She looked at him now with only terror and revulsion. Gone was the clever wit and laughter.

Gone was his hope.

“Get out. Go!”

He went without looking back.

She died not long after. He was not there for her passing or her burial. But he had paid a man to report back and so he knew that she had not been alone, for she had a brother who loved her as Kjell had loved his sisters so very long ago.

Killian was glad she had not been alone.