How to Kiss a Vampire novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Don't Let Me Forgive You

"Why would I write that?" I said.

I was standing in the middle of his floor in his flannel shirt and nothing else, with the paper in my fist.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't let me forgive you.

I wrote that to myself, in the middle of the worst night of my life. What did you do?"

Torsten stood by the workbench with his hands hanging.

He had pulled on his jeans and nothing else, waiting grimly for a sentence.

"The House found out because of me," he said.

"How?"

"Eero had a fever in September. A hundred and four. You called me at four in the morning because you had no car."

I remembered the fever.

I did not remember the call.

"I came across the city in the dark," he said.

"I carried him to St. Luke's under my coat, with you running beside me."

"It was dawn by the time we got to the doors."

"And?"

"I took a ten-second run through the sun. One of Ragnar's thralls saw me burn."

"And that's how they knew about me."

"That's how they knew a human had seen what I was."

"I should have called an ambulance. I could not stand to wait."

I stared at him.

I should have felt a lot of things.

Mostly what I felt was fury so large that I couldn't tell who it was for.

"You carried my son to a hospital through the sun," I said.

"Yes."

"And then you let me be the one to beg."

"I did not let you. I tried to stop you three times."

"And for four years you stood on my roof," I said, "and you let me hate you."

"You didn't remember why."

"You could have come to the door!"

"I couldn't cross it."

"You could have rung the bell!"

"And what would I have said?"

His voice broke.

"That I was the man whose fault it was? That I had your memory in a drawer?"

"Yes!"

We were both shouting.

The clocks ticked around us.

I threw the paper down on the bench and put both my hands in my hair.

"I am so angry at you," I said.

"And I'm angrier at me. I wrote a rule for myself, and I broke it in about five hours."

"It wasn't a rule. It was a warning."

"It was an order."

"Then I'm not asking you to forgive me," he said quietly. "I never was."

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