One Crossroads Later

Chapter Five

Robin's departure had left Flynn with a profound sense of loss. He didn't want to admit it and went to great lengths not to acknowledge it. He spent some time alone in the room where he'd been taught how to use the sword, but practice didn't erase the sense of melancholy.

He'll come around, he told himself as he smoked a cigarette on the front stairs of the estate. While a coven of over a dozen vampires lay behind him, he couldn't think of another soul he wanted to see more than his brother. Maybe if he hadn't alienated everyone else. Maybe if everyone else hadn't ostracized him.

They'd always found him a little odd. And vampires worked much like humans this way; when presented with the unfamiliar, their sense of self-preservation told them to avoid the unknown. Granted, that had been back in the earliest days of him being turned, but memories of that time endured.

Drawing from the end of his cigarette, Flynn considered those days again. His dream from the other night only emphasized the problem he'd carried with him into immortality. A condition he still suffered from, and probably always would, he feared. The evidence of how broken you are, he thought. As he idly flicked ash from the end, he thought about a newborn vampire, waking into immortality.

And as he did, he felt the weight of the world settle on his shoulders.

Granted, mankind had been blessed not to remember being born. Flynn imagined if they did, the experience would have disturbed them for the remainder of their lives. Waking as a vampire, though, came at a time of fully formed thoughts and the ability to hold onto visceral moments. Many other vampires talked about it as a pivotal entry into a wholly unfamiliar world. Flynn envied them, though. At least they could remember who they had been before turning.

Instinct marked his first moments as a vampire. Being reborn into a world both familiar and not gave way to an explosion of sensory input, as even the experience of breathing had changed. Sure, one could still breathe, but the first experience of holding air and knowing you could keep it indefinitely had its own sensations attached to it. Sight had become cannier. Smell, elevated and designed to sense food first.

The hunger, though. God, the hunger could have torn you inside out.

It would take answering it for him to notice the silence in his chest and once he'd fed, he marveled over the sharpness of his teeth, cutting his finger and sucking it shut as a strange experiment. As Sabrina sat next to him, though, with the body of the man he'd consumed still lying on the ground nearby, the question she asked set the tenor for those next, tenuous weeks.

"Now, my dear," she said. "What do you remember about being human?"

He sat on the grass outside the coven house, barely remembering the manic frenzy of being led outside after waking and pursuing the pulse of his would-be victim. As his attention shifted from the brilliance of the moon, and the ethereal touch even the city lights had in the darkness, he looked at Sabrina to answer her question.

"I," he had begun, but stopped as his mind came up blank. "I don't know. I don't remember anything."

It didn't seem to alarm her, and he could live through several days of ignorance without it bothering him as well. Robin had been the only person who looked unnerved by his lack of memory, and this bred a growing form of hostility he couldn't begin to understand. While the other vampires of the coven simply avoided him, Robin – then still going by Michael – made it a point to weigh him and constantly find him lacking.

At that point, he had also still gone by Peter, which fit him as oddly as an oversized shoe. He didn't feel like a Peter. And whenever the name was used, he recoiled against it, like it had the ability to harm him. "You don't remember yourself," he'd think. "That's why." But it felt like something more.