Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

Goodbye Again

France, 1802

"I will never go back to France," Ysanne said.

Edmond Dantès shifted on the sand, looking at her. It was a quiet night, the two of them sitting in a small sandy cove, rugged cliffs behind them, a moon-silvered sea spread out before them.

"It's been years –" he started.

"I don't care."

They sat in silence for a while.

It had been eight years since Edmond had escaped the guillotine.

Eight years since he'd tried to warn Ysanne and her lover, Giovanni, that an angry mob was coming for them.

Eight years since Giovanni had sacrificed himself to give Ysanne and Edmond time to escape.

They'd fled from France and had spent all that time travelling around Europe, trying to avoid the Napoleanic Wars, but now Edmond felt that it was time to return to his home country. He'd hoped that Ysanne would go with him.

"Why do you even want to go back? There's nothing there for you," Ysanne said.

Edmond glanced away, focusing on the sea as it crawled up the shore, then retreated again.

But after all this time, Ysanne didn't need to see his expression to guess what was going through his head.

"This is about them, isn't it? The two you killed," she said, her voice softening.

Images flashed through Edmond's head – Nicole's dead weight slumping over his chest, the savage bite marks on Baptiste's neck after Edmond had finished with him.

"Will you ever forgive yourself?" Ysanne asked.

"How can I?"

"The girl was an accident."

"That doesn't make it better."

"The boy was self-defence," Ysanne insisted.

Edmond shook his head.

"He stabbed you, Edmond."

Edmond touched his stomach, remembering the awful punch of pain when the blade had slid in.

"I deliberately baited him. I could have forced him to leave before he drew his sword. I could have taken the sword away from him without anyone getting hurt. I chose not to, and the cost was Baptiste's life. I can't let that go as if it was nothing."

"What does that have to do with you going back to France?" Ysanne asked.

Edmond watched the sea again, as it came and went, came and went. "I have to find a way to atone."

If he was human, then a prison sentence would be his atonement, but things didn't work that way for vampires. Unless his prison cell was proofed against the sun, it would be a death sentence, and he hadn't fought to escape the guillotine only to die in chains now.

But the two deaths that he was responsible for weighed heavily on him. He couldn't just forget about them.

"What do you have in mind?" Ysanne asked.

Edmond stared out to sea, the wind rippling his hair off his face. "You and I are both wealthy," he said.

He'd lost his fancy home when he fled Paris, but his investments were still solid, and Ysanne had long since learned to squirrel her wealth away across France, so she always had something to fall back on. But these last eight years they had been living simply. Edmond's extravagance and self-indulgence had helped contribute to the atmosphere that had cost two people their lives – he couldn't bear to live like that now, and Ysanne had forgone her comforts to support him.