Everlasting

Chapter 1

Wulfric

"I knew you would come." Hands spotted with age reached toward me. The frailty of those hands took my breath away as my throat constricted with sorrow. Her skin felt smooth against mine, which seemed impossible when it was so folded with wrinkles.

"I'm sorry if I made you wait," I said. My words came out hoarse and whispered. It was the best I could do when my sister was dying in front of me.

There was no trace of grief in her milky eyes. Edith had accepted her mortality a long, long time ago. She even said it was worth it, trading immortality for the love she'd found and the family she'd built. But maybe she only felt that way because she hadn't been given a choice in the matter.

Edith studied me a moment longer, and her eyes grew sad. "I'm sorry. I'm doing my best to hold on, little brother."

"I'm only younger by eleven months," I reminded, and felt like crying. It was an automatic response I'd given her countless times before; was this the last time I'd say it?

By all rights, we all should have been dust centuries ago. It was a gift, or a curse – both, maybe – that we'd even made it this long.

I looked down at our linked hands and tried to imagine mine gnarling and wrinkling like Edith's had done. I couldn't. I hadn't aged in the past four hundred years. But age was coming for me again.

Once Edith was gone... I was next.

"How's Edmund?" she asked. He was our youngest brother, born almost a decade after we were.

"He'll be here soon," I said. it wasn't an answer to her question... but then again, it was. If I wasn't reassuring her that he was doing alright, it was because he wasn't. Edmund had a soft heart. He never handled it well when another sibling died. Always, before, Edith and I had been there to comfort him. We three were always the closest.

She shut her eyes, but the tears still escaped. Grief not for herself, but for what her loss would do to the rest of us.

We used to be a big family. My mother, my father, and their eight children. Then, when I was twenty-five, we were cursed. All of us.

My father, my siblings, and myself became vampires. Immortal, easily damaged by sunlight, and blood-thirsty. My mother stayed mortal: the first part of the curse to touch our hearts. We watched her die of old age before the rest of the curse set into motion.

From eldest to youngest, each of my father's children would meet their perfect match and fall in love. Love would set them free, reverting them to their human selves and restoring their mortality. They'd live out their lives to their natural end...

And then the next eldest would find love. And it all started over again.

In those early years, we thought vampirism was the curse. We thought finding love and becoming human again was the curse lifting... but so little of my long life had been spent as a human that I didn't miss it anymore. I hardly remembered what it was like to sleep or to consume real food. From what I remembered, it was mostly plain anyway, nothing like the rich bouquet of fresh blood. I didn't miss humanity, and I knew the rest of my family felt the same.

It only took losing Henry, my eldest brother, to realize that the true curse put on us wasn't vampirism at all. It was losing our vampirism one by one, until only my father would be left. My father, who was a shell of himself after watching his wife die, and then his children one by one. My father, who had already started withdrawing from me because I was next.

I'd sworn up and down for years that I wouldn't go out into the world once Edith was human. Death could take her any time, so love could take me any time. And I was determined to thwart it. I'd hide myself away if I had to until the end of days. Then, the curse would never come for Edmund. He and my father would be safe.