Wulfric

"I knew you would come." Hands spotted with age reached toward me. The frailty of those hands took my breath away as my throat constricted with sorrow. Her skin felt smooth against mine, which seemed impossible when it was so folded with wrinkles.

"I'm sorry if I made you wait," I said. My words came out hoarse and whispered. It was the best I could do when my sister was dying in front of me.

There was no trace of grief in her milky eyes. Edith had accepted her mortality a long, long time ago. She even said it was worth it, trading immortality for the love she'd found and the family she'd built. But maybe she only felt that way because she hadn't been given a choice in the matter.

Edith studied me a moment longer, and her eyes grew sad. "I'm sorry. I'm doing my best to hold on, little brother."

"I'm only younger by eleven months," I reminded, and felt like crying. It was an automatic response I'd given her countless times before; was this the last time I'd say it?

By all rights, we all should have been dust centuries ago. It was a gift, or a curse – both, maybe – that we'd even made it this long.

I looked down at our linked hands and tried to imagine mine gnarling and wrinkling like Edith's had done. I couldn't. I hadn't aged in the past four hundred years. But age was coming for me again.

Once Edith was gone... I was next.

"How's Edmund?" she asked. He was our youngest brother, born almost a decade after we were.

"He'll be here soon," I said. it wasn't an answer to her question... but then again, it was. If I wasn't reassuring her that he was doing alright, it was because he wasn't. Edmund had a soft heart. He never handled it well when another sibling died. Always, before, Edith and I had been there to comfort him. We three were always the closest.

She shut her eyes, but the tears still escaped. Grief not for herself, but for what her loss would do to the rest of us.

We used to be a big family. My mother, my father, and their eight children. Then, when I was twenty-five, we were cursed. All of us.

My father, my siblings, and myself became vampires. Immortal, easily damaged by sunlight, and blood-thirsty. My mother stayed mortal: the first part of the curse to touch our hearts. We watched her die of old age before the rest of the curse set into motion.

From eldest to youngest, each of my father's children would meet their perfect match and fall in love. Love would set them free, reverting them to their human selves and restoring their mortality. They'd live out their lives to their natural end...

And then the next eldest would find love. And it all started over again.

In those early years, we thought vampirism was the curse. We thought finding love and becoming human again was the curse lifting... but so little of my long life had been spent as a human that I didn't miss it anymore. I hardly remembered what it was like to sleep or to consume real food. From what I remembered, it was mostly plain anyway, nothing like the rich bouquet of fresh blood. I didn't miss humanity, and I knew the rest of my family felt the same.

It only took losing Henry, my eldest brother, to realize that the true curse put on us wasn't vampirism at all. It was losing our vampirism one by one, until only my father would be left. My father, who was a shell of himself after watching his wife die, and then his children one by one. My father, who had already started withdrawing from me because I was next.

I'd sworn up and down for years that I wouldn't go out into the world once Edith was human. Death could take her any time, so love could take me any time. And I was determined to thwart it. I'd hide myself away if I had to until the end of days. Then, the curse would never come for Edmund. He and my father would be safe.

I had warned Edith so many times over the years that I would never visit her, not for any reason. I swore up and down that, come hell or high water, I wouldn't venture out into the world of man. For decades, I held to it. I only saw Edith if she came to me.

But now, at the end of her life... I couldn't do it. I had to come.

"Do you need anything?" I asked.

Her eyes didn't open. Panic shot through me and I scrambled to feel her neck for a pulse. I found one, though it was faint. She was just sleeping.

A knock sounded on the door and I hurried to open it before it woke Edith. The motion was effortless, silent, and swift. Inhuman. The speed was probably my favorite part of being a vampire.

As the door swung open, Edmund fell into my arms. "Is she...?"

"No, no," I assured him. "She's alive." I led him to the armchair by the side of Edith's bed and perched myself on the arm next to him.

We kept a silent vigil hours into the night. I had nothing to say. What could be said at a time like this that hadn't already been said? We had done this too many times before. I didn't realize it was morning until the door opened again and Edith's hospice nurse came in, followed by her two children.

"Are you staying for the day?" John asked. He was in his fifties and looked disconcertingly like my father. He was also the father of my best friend and grand-nephew, Arlo.

I looked down at Edmund, who was sagging against my shoulder in exhaustion even though we had no real need for sleep. But Edmund wouldn't leave. And neither would I.

"Yeah," I answered. "We're staying."

--

I don't know what we would have done if Edith lasted longer. We would have had to leave to drink, and Edmund would have been a wreck the entire time, worrying about missing Edith's last moments.

What happened was worse.

Edith died the next night, and even though nothing in my physical makeup had actually changed, I felt different. I was afraid to leave in her house, because it was my turn next to find my soulmate and become human. But I was also afraid to stay. Fate would find me. If I stayed, my soulmate would find me here. If I left... same thing.

I should have just stayed in our cabin. I had bought it decades ago and it was the perfect place to hole up. I had everything I needed there except for fresh blood, and Edmund and I already had a plan in place to take care of that.

Only, if I never left my cabin again, then my soulmate would probably come traipsing through the woods.

I should have gone to Antarctica when I learned Edith was running out of time. Surely, if anywhere on the planet was safe from fate, it was a continent almost entirely made of ice.

I was halfway through planning my journey south when Edmund wiped his snotty, tear-coated face on his sleeve and stood up. "We should get you out of here," he said.

We were sitting in Edith's living room with her sons. Half of her four grandchildren were here, too. Her husband had died years ago, and I hoped there was some kind of afterlife so she could see him again. Otherwise, it seemed especially cruel to have given up immortality for a handful of decades together.

Edith's body had already been removed, something Edmund hadn't been able to bear watching. He had holed up in the bathroom, sobbing, and I had known I should go to him. It was what Edith would have wanted. His comfort was worth more than spending another few fleeting moments near the shell of her body. But instead, I watched as they gently transferred her into a body bag and lifted it onto a stretcher, and I watched as they rolled her out of her home. I wasn't able to tear my eyes away until she was safely shut away in the ambulance and it drove away quietly.

That was only an hour ago, and I didn't know where Edmund was finding the will to function. I still felt half-numb. The emotions I could feel were muted, and nothing seemed urgent except the great need I had to get away.

But this was Edith's house, and there was so much of her here I had never had the opportunity to know. I wanted to look through her stacks of photo albums, search the kitchen for recipes I might make for myself when the inevitable happened and I became human. I wanted to stay near her children, whom I knew she loved more than anything and anyone else in the world. More than her husband, more than Father, and more than me or Edmund. They were her world, and by staying close to them, I could stay close to Edith, too.

But Edmund was right; we should go.

I stood up and pulled Edmund up. He stayed close to me, closer than most people would be comfortable standing with anyone. But Edmund was like an extension of myself, we were so close. And we were grieving. And I knew he was dreading the day I became human, too, and my clock started ticking down. He'd probably never leave me alone again, I thought with sad amusement.

Though we'd already gained everyone's attention just by standing, I cleared my throat and said, "We should be going."

John and Edith's younger son, Daniel, stood too. "So soon?" John asked quietly. He was the type to hide away his feelings under a mask of stoicism, and I suspected this was the loudest volume he could manage before his voice would break.

"If you or yours ever have need of us, call and we'll come," I promised. I meant it, too. Even if it cost me everything, I wouldn't let them down. For Edith.

"And don't think you're off the hook for hosting Thanksgiving this year," Edmund added with forced cheer. He hugged each of our nephews and moved on to say farewell to Daniel's daughters, Jenny and Lucy.

I drank in John and Daniel's faces. I could see my sister in them, if I looked carefully. Without conscious decision, I hugged John tightly, and then Daniel. They were both startled by the move; I wasn't usually the hugging type. "Take care of yourselves," I said.

"You, too," John said.

"Don't be a stranger," said Daniel with a sad little smile.

I nodded at them, and smiled at Jenny and Lucy, then met my brother by the door. He clapped me on the back and I tried to smile for him, and then we left.

Any warmth imparted by being with Edith's family faded away in seconds once we were outside. In my centuries on Earth, I had seen much of the world, and with every new place I saw, the world felt bigger. Even with my elongated life, I'd never see everything, and even if I did somehow make it to every last corner of the planet, I'd have to start all over again. Things changed so quickly.

Now, with the curse hanging over me, the world had never felt smaller. Where could I hide from fate? Could I really subject Edmund to living in some remote place, away from civilization? Even if it worked, even if I somehow avoided ever meeting my soulmate, what quality of life would I be offering him? Because if I knew anything with certainty, it was that Edmund wouldn't leave me. Not even if I chose to dwell in the most miserable of places.

We climbed into Edmund's car and he started backing out of the driveway, only to stop and stare at me. "Where to?"

The plan had always been to go back to our home, our remote cabin deep in the woods. It was a mark of how well Edmund knew me that he expected me to have changed my mind. I took a couple of minutes to seriously think through my Antarctica idea, before finally accepting that if that was what it took to hide from the curse, it wasn't worth it.

"Let's go home."

We didn't talk much on the drive home. Edmund called our father to update him, but he didn't answer. After that, we put on a radio station that was playing old-timey swing music even though static came through more than the melody did. It didn't matter. I wasn't paying much attention to my surroundings. I was too busy worrying.

Worrying for myself, sure. But mostly worrying about Edmund. We only had each other, now. Father still talked to him some, but he'd been growing more and more distant over the centuries. The curse had worn him down to the point where he was barely the person who had raised us anymore. That man had been warm, loving, and entirely devoted to his family. His children and his wife had been the most important things in the world to him. Now, he could hardly bear to look at us. He'd been withdrawing for a long time, mourning us before we were gone.

The next of us to die would be me. Who would comfort Edmund then? Who would be there for him? He'd be facing down mortality all by himself. I couldn't bear to think of it.

"You doing okay?" Edmund asked after a while.

"Not really." There had been a time, long ago, when we all banded together to shelter Edmund from the horrors of the world. But after everything we had endured side by side, there was no need for artifice.

"Me neither."

We still had another hour of driving before we reached home. Though I yearned for the safety of our cabin in the words, I felt an unexpected dread at the prospect of arriving. Once I was there, I didn't intend to leave again. Was it my haven or my prison?

"Are you hungry?" I asked.

"I'll be fine," Edmund answered, which meant that he was.

"We could-"

I couldn't even make the offer to stop to feed before Edmund cut me off. "No. We're getting you home. Then I'll go out to eat."

My throat ached and my stomach felt hollow. I needed to feed, too, but I couldn't risk getting that close to a human. I wasn't entirely sure how I would recognize my perfect match, the one who would strip away the curse, but I knew that I would. All of my siblings who had gone through this before claimed they knew the instant their eyes met.

"Imagine you're seeing in black and white, and that person is color. Or imagine you're in the dark, and a lamp turns on," Edith had tried explaining to me. "I don't know how else to describe it. You just... see them, and you know. There can be no doubt."

Her explanation hadn't made any sense to me and I'd gotten caught up in making sure those had been purely metaphorical examples. No way did I need the curse to mess with my vision. I was already poised to lose too much of myself without that being added on.

Now, I was back to wondering what it would be like to meet my soulmate, and I had no one left to ask.

Edmund turned onto the little private road that led to our home. "Why don't you drop me off here and go into town? I'll walk back."

"Are you sure?" Edmund asked, which told me how hungry he really must be. Usually, he'd insist on dropping me off by the house.

"Positive." He slowed to a stop and I climbed out. "See you soon."

"I'll be fast," Edmund promised. I nodded and shut the door, then started walking. The nearest town was half an hour away, so he wouldn't be back for a while yet.

My stomach twisted in hunger, driving me to distraction. My throat burned like someone had poured acid down it. It was easier to ignore than ever before, because it was nothing compared to the ache of grief in my chest. As I walked, I thought about my time with Edith, and tried to remember my other siblings, too. So many of my memories of them had faded with time, but I remembered enough.

The shades of the past followed me the rest of the way home.