"It's okay," I say, peeling myself out of Declan's embrace, and reluctantly pulling my feet from Dean's lap. "I'll be okay."
I shrug into a sweater and slide on slippers, then follow Sir down the hall. I don't ask which doctor I'm seeing, but I say a silent prayer it's Livingstone and not Cutter.
"Where are we going?"
Sir doesn't answer or slow down, so I pick up my pace.
After a few more minutes, I realize where we're headed, and I can't help the excitement bubbling in me.
When the door is pushed open, I suck in a breath of fresh ocean air and smile.
In the distance, sitting on a bench under the sliver of moonlight in the cemetery, staring into the horizon, is Dr. Livingstone.
I half expect Sir to follow me out, but he gives me one sharp glance, then retreats behind the door, closing it after him.
Dr. Livingstone is lost in thought when I join him, our thighs grazing each other's in the narrowness of the bench.
“I didn’t expect another visit outside so soon,” I tell him.
"It seems you've negotiated with Dr. Cutter," he says with a guarded voice, his gaze still locked on the rolling waves before us.
"What do you know of this place?" I ask, using his own trick against him, diverting the conversation rather than responding directly.
Finally he looks down at me, his silver blue eyes glowing softly in the darkness. I feel a mesmerizing pull towards him and wonder if that's his vampire powers or just him. Either way, the doctor has an intoxicating effect on me that's disorienting, and I feel my pulse pick up speed at the way he looks at me.
"Le Rêve is an asylum for the supernatural, a place to heal and to cure the ailments of those cursed," he says in his clipped British accent, repeating what he’s told me before.
"That's the party line, yes. But is that really what you still believe?"
He sighs and glances down at my hand. With a tenderness that nearly breaks me, he takes my hand in his and turns my wrist over, the pad of his thumb gliding over the scar that remains of my suicide attempt.
For the first time, I notice his pallor. There are dark circles under his eyes and his complexion looks sunken in. Sickly.
"Perhaps it does not feel as monstrous to you," he says, still staring at my wrist. "Your magic. Your power."
When he looks up, his canines have elongated into sharp points, and for the first time I see the vampire beneath the man.
"I have never been able to lie to myself about my own monstrosity. I was born in blood, and survive on blood. For the first hundred years of my undead life, I lived to kill." He pauses, closing his eyes until his teeth shrink back to normal. "Blood lust drove me. Then I lost my maker, the woman who turned me, and had been my lover and companion all that time. My thirst remained, but my lust for the kill dimmed. From that moment forward, I killed to live, but still the remnants of my Irish Catholic upbringing condemned me."
His expression is haunted when he opens his eyes once more. "I eventually learned to control my cravings. To feed only a little at a time. Not enough to kill. But not enough to fully live either. It was a half existence for me, but it assuaged my conscience, as much as anything could."
Words trip on my tongue, but I keep my mouth clamped shut. I have questions, thoughts. I want to offer comfort. But I know he needs more time to speak. To share. So I don't interrupt. Instead. I twist my hand to hold his, our fingers intertwining in an intimate gesture of support. It’s far beyond anything he’s allowed until now, but with his personal admissions between us, everything seems different.
He looks down at our joined hands and hesitates a moment, then his fingers curl around mine, the coolness of his skin matching my own.
In this we are the same.
Made of ice, but filled with fire.
"When Dr. Cutter found me, I was a shell of myself. Haunted by my own demons. I had lost the will to live, but had not the will to end it all. He offered me hope." He glances down at me, his eyes full of hundreds of years of pain. "He gave me a chance to not only help others, but to also cure myself of this curse. It was an answer to everything that plagued my broken soul."
He pauses and the silence stretches before us. I realize he's not going to take the next step. He can't acknowledge the truth just yet.
And I hate what I have to do, but I do it anyways, because I must.
Because everyone's survival depends on it.
In a reversal of roles that were never really our roles to begin with, I guide him to the truth as gently as I can.
"Dr. Cutter isn't who you think he is," I say softly, knowing my words will be the dynamite that blows apart his carefully constructed lie. "He's not trying to cure us. Or help us. He's trying to own us. To break us or maybe even harness our power for himself."
Dr. Livingstone sucks in a sharp breath, his fingers tightening around mine as I once again recount my strange and life-altering time with the madman who runs this place.
When I'm finished, I use my free hand to roll up my sleeve and show him where my blood was drawn. "I have no choice but to help him, at least until I can find another way."
“Your blood.” He looks up at me. “What will he do with it?”
“I don’t know, but it won’t involve helping Estelle, that I know for sure.”
“Estelle?”
“My sister.”
“Your sister is dead.” His confusion is too convincing to be fake.
Slowly, I tell him about Estelle. Finding her alive. Cutter’s deal with me. And of my true treatment thus far.
"If what you're saying is true," he says slowly, forcing the words out as if they cause him physical pain, "then it's all been a lie. I will never be cured."
I don't respond, because what can I say except yes.
"Whatever he truly has planned," I say, "it won't end well for anyone but himself."
He breaks eye contact with me to resume looking towards the sea, and I wonder at the thoughts a man who has seen and done what he has would have. What darkness of the soul does he carry?
"Do you believe me?" I finally ask. "Because quite frankly you haven't believed me about anything else since I got here."
He flinches as if I struck him with my words, and he turns to face me again. "Believing you means giving up on my own hope," he says simply, and it strikes me then that we all nurture our own lies, our own shortsightedness, when the truth is too shattering to our necessary realities. It's how we survive an inhospitable world.
It’s how we live with our pain.
I spent my life convincing myself the women in my family were all insane, because if I'd even once seriously considered we were of magical descent, born witches with power, I would have had to face the truth: that my mother died in vain. That every woman in my family lineage died for nothing.
Sometimes the truth is too painful to face.
But we've run out of time, and lies, and now we all must break the illusions we've been flirting with and commit to the reality we've been dealt. Before that reality destroys everything.
I am a witch. Descended from others like me. That’s my new truth.
I give the man beside me time to adjust his understanding of his own truth, before asking again. "Do you believe me?"