Darius had been wandering now for a few days, not coming into contact with anyone or seeing another house.He knew he was getting close to the site of his human family’s hut.He recognized the hills, but they were overgrown with trees now where they were once bare, only fields of hay or wheat or corn.He assumed that Hugo’s house would be gone, too, by judging how far the forest extended to the horizon.When Darius came to a small stream in the woods, he found a rock and sat on it.Suddenly, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to do this after all.Yet, he had come so far.And this whole thing with Annabelle was really getting to him.
He let her, a lowly human slave, lay in bed with him and they had a conversation to boot!What the hell was becoming of him?And Mitzi, how sorry he felt for how he had beaten her.He was so sorry, but he just couldn’t find the courage to tell her.And, it worried him.Worried him!!! He was worried about a simple human girl!
Darius picked up a rock and tried to skip it across the stream.It wasn’t flat enough, so he looked for another one.This time he got it to go about five times.He remembered then how he liked to fish when he was human.He had faint memories of fishing with his father.When he was a teen, he usually fished alone or sometimes with Hugo, his vampire master at the time.And then it hit him…..
He was there.
He noticed the curve of the river and the way it wound around a swell in the land and then down a valley where it then disappeared into the trees.The river was much narrower and the turns in it were not nearly as sharp as they were then, but he knew this place.
Darius got up and ran through the trees along the river.The leaves from last fall crunched under his feet.The only tree that was here when he was human was a big oak tree, the one he had fallen out of, supposedly, when his fellow slaves had tried to murder him.Suddenly he forgot that he was a vampire.He ran with the franticness of a human.He was excited, afraid, and not sure what to expect.But he yearned to find out the answers he had been craving for a thousand years, the answers to unlock his cold heart and hopefully he could once again let the warmth back into it if that were even possible now.
After running and skipping over roots and rocks that he hadn’t remembered being there before, he came to it. It was dead, just a stump that stuck up maybe about three feet, but it was the same tree, he knew it!The river bank was deep, much much deeper than it was before, from all of those years it had been cutting through the land.Darius sat next to the old stump.It was well rotted in the center and what was left of it was nearly rotted away as well.How it held up this long was amazing.He wondered how long it had been dead and figured that as the river cut deeper into the earth, the roots lost their water supply as it fell below them.
Darius thought back to that time when his friends had tried to kill him.Not once, but twice!Even after he had lied to spare them their master’s wrath!In a way Darius wished that they were still alive somewhere, he would put them through hell.But, he figured that they were already in it by now.Being here for the first time since that fateful time so long ago, it all really did seem like yesterday in a surreal way.Thinking that those that had betrayed him had been dead for many centuries did not make the memory of the pain any less.A vampire’s memories are forever sharp.Even of their human lives.It was just that Darius had the uncanny ability to teach himself to forget the good things.He didn’t want any more pain than he already had.He didn’t want a conscience. He wanted to keep that wall of hate up around him.
With his head in his hands, Darius realized that he couldn’t keep up that wall forever.It would mean that he would be lonely and tormented for eternity.It took a human woman to release Zane from his eternal curse.But how could Darius tell Zane that he was cursed by his own memories?He’d never take him seriously.Zane just had to get a human woman to love and marry him and bear his child.But Darius had to fight his curse all by himself.There was nobody that could help him in any way.
