Walter de Ville's Advocate

Chapter Twenty-Three

With Lucy's exit from our imprisonment – my own dungeon – I resumed the anomalous effort to calm my body down. Day by day, I felt like I was losing more control; not just of my home, but also that of my very self.

Although I didn't need breath, I seemed desperate for it. What I had been really desperate for these last few weeks was blood, and yet I'm not sure I could stomach it any longer . . . And with that nagging thought in the back of my head, and the increasing stakes against my sweet Evie – no pun intended – I felt that same dread from right before the ceremony, but now it was all-consuming.

My chest ached, and those same, unnecessary feelings came back to me in an infinite loop:

Heavy.

Tingles.

Lurch.

Pins.

Except with my current predicament keeping me physically restrained, I felt unable to shed these sensations. I also felt trapped in what was becoming increasingly obvious . . . that some part of me was feeling true emotions again; human ones, and that I had been wrong to think that everything was heightened as a vampire – nay a master vampire – because everything I was feeling?

It was absolute torture, and yet it was all in my head, or my heart.

Although such a thing no longer existed.

Then again, I could easily avoid any negative feelings within my usual position and power. Pleasure? I didn't have to wait for . . . Devotion? Quite the same . . . And that dark power and control I received when I satiated my bloodlust . . .?

I coughed loudly as I felt the burden of my actions from the weekend we were to be wed; how Evelyn Alexander had been caught up in this whole scheme, and that I'd been given so many opportunities to free her.

I could've sent her away at any point since her arrival. When she was injured at the cliffs, I could have found some way to quickly set her ankle so that I could get her out of there. Maybe sent her to the hospital under a pseudonym, and arranged a flight home?

Of course, the Alexanders would've searched high and low for their precious grail, so that pseudonym might've followed her for the rest of her human life, but she'd be alive. She wouldn't be trapped in this house – or the dungeon – nor as a bloodsucking monster like me.

I felt disgusted with myself, and grateful for my lack of a reflection for I surely couldn't stand to see Lord de Ville looking back at me.

"What have I become?" I whispered as I recalled what I'd known as truth during the tour we took at the cocktail party . . . when Evie had calmed me with her gentle touch and her sweet kiss:

I did not deserve Evelyn Alexander.

It was the truth then, and I didn't bother to act on it. I didn't protect her, just like I didn't protect my people, nor my dear Emmaline. That thought evoked the memory of her horrific death, and the pain I felt then, but . . .

I furrowed my brow as those emotions welled up within me. I—I had felt this immense distraught when I witness Emmaline take her own life, like a hole had been ripped inside. Viktoria said I was never the same after that, and it was one of her reasons for overthrowing me at the wedding ceremony.

Time did help, but as my lovely Evie once said, the pain of losing someone never quite leaves you.

Ever since that first meeting with Evelyn Jackson Alexander, I knew something was different about her, but I never stopped to wonder if something was also different about me.

"Walt," Evie asked for me, though it didn't seem like the first time.

"Yes, my love," I answered through my guilt.