Undeath: The Fragile Shadows Series (A Paranormal Vampire Romance) by Lily Levi

Author:Lily Levi [Levi, Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2017-10-11T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Francoise sat alone at her old vanity.

Time and heat had warped the mirror. The porcelain jars were chipped and thick with dust. The room was nothing and everything like it had been when she’d shared it with Laurie’s father.

She hadn’t moved in two, perhaps three days.

Time was a difficult thing. In the warped mirror, she might’ve seen her husband lumber from the bed, but he’d been gone for a long time and their house was in shambles. This was not how she’d imagined the future of the world without her in it. It was supposed to have been something different, but it felt so much the same.

What happened?

She thought she’d left the question behind. What did it matter what happened?

She touched the shriveled mole on her chin. It felt loose and she flicked it from her skin.

It landed at her feet and she kicked it away with her toe.

Her husband had understood what the boy was capable of, though his maddened notes were scattered and difficult to read.

Frozen hearts, he’d written. Drank the blood, do we drink the blood? Shared blood. Swallowed blood? Vampires, all of us vampires. The boy was dead. Is he dead? What happens now?

Of course, Francoise could not accept the staying of time and the rising of dead things.

But then she’d died.

There could never be language to describe what happened after her body was interned in the tomb that had waited for her since the moment she took her wedding vows.

There were the rising swells of fire and light, like a horrific ocean, and far above she could hear the dark spasms of dying stars.

She’d joined a mass of dead things, a rolling black meadow across the ether. One turn of the eye brought about a new terror to eclipse the last.

But there were no words for it.

The boy’s tutor, her sweet Martel, had been there. They’d stood together for a time, but she couldn’t say how long. She’d been ripped away and the pain of leaving that place and the pain of the place itself, those were enough to deaden her dry heart to the question that had plagued her while she lived.

What happened?

Francoise had known death. It was not a person, or a god, or a figure in a dark hood. It was not an event and had no description. It was a place and not a place. It was a permanent state that could not be changed.

She had not wanted to leave the landscape of the dead behind, and now, she was the walking dead, though even this terrible thought failed to strike up the fear she knew it should.

She was not afraid, not anymore.

And so, Francoise saw herself in the midst of a horrific puzzle. If she was not alive, then she could not die. If death could not reclaim the soul she no longer had, then Martel was lost to her forever.

What other conclusion could she draw?

Her withered hands worked themselves open and closed. Yes, Martel was gone, unless they’d preserved his body just the same as they’d preserved hers, but what a nightmarish fantasy to have.

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