Kerstrande slept like the dead. I don’t know if him being a vampire made him that way, or if he’d always been a heavy sleeper. Sadly, I’d been awake for hours curled up in the corner of the room watching shadows move. He’d laughed when I told him the apartment was haunted. The truth was that he was haunted, not the apartment. They just lingered here cause they knew he’d be back. Why? Cause I was here, and for some reason he was drawn to me. And I could see them.
He shifted in his sleep, eyes open a slit to glare sleepiness at me, “Come to bed.”
I curled up beside him, let him wrap his arm around me and press his body to mine. It should have been exciting, but he slept on as if he’d never awoken, and I still felt the room moving around us.
Years of tuning them out made it hard to tune just one in. The look of death was enough to make me shudder. “Show me what you want to already and let me sleep,” I told it.
And it did, pouring into me the night of her death. Kerstrande’s first kill. He said it didn’t happen often. And usually only by accident. But he’d been new, young, and out of control. Her death had been unnecessary. She lingered because he still grieved for her. He’d never even known her name, but he still grieved. In fact he dreamed of her again, his way of keeping her in this world.
My fingers brushed the hair out of face, his peaceful world looked pained until I brushed the memory away. This one I could free. He had no reason to keep her and hurt himself night after night. She whispered her thanks and vanished into the darkness moving on to whatever the dead did after life was over.
One less shadow in the house. Shame that there were uncountable more. I closed my sleepy eyes, burying my face in his chest and taking my own memories as a shield for my dreams. These memories were of kisses, happy days, friends, and the love of my life, Kerstrande Petterson.
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