He started to float up, and with every foot he ascended, he started to fade even more. “I will,” I heard him say, his voice growing fainter. “And I’ll tell her that one day, she’ll meet her other sister, too . . .”

That’s all I heard before he disappeared. I waited for several minutes, staring so hard that my eyes burned. Then, at last, I felt Vlad’s hand on my shoulder.

“He’s gone, Leila.”

“I know,” I said, my tears breaking free because saying it made it real.

He turned me around and pulled me into his arms, dropping his shields so that the warmth of his feelings matched the comforting cocoon of his arms.

“I’m here,” he murmured. “And I always will be.”

I gripped him back, glad when his arms tightened even more. “I’m going to hold you to that for the rest of our lives.”

Epilogue

“The house is beautiful,” I said, looking at the countless strands of garland that hung along the walls and the mistletoe sprigs that dangled from every crystal chandelier, not to mention the gigantic tree in the great hall. I had never seen Vlad’s castle decorated for the holidays before, but he did it the way he did everything else: impressively.

“It still seems hard to believe that this is our first Christmas together,” I went on, a pang hitting me as I realized it would also be the first Christmas in many years that I would spend without Marty. At least Leotie had called, promising to drop Gretchen off at our house tomorrow morning. Either she was over her hunger, or Leotie knew the danger of my transferring the legacy to her before Gretchen was ready had passed. Not that I intended to transfer it to her now. I hadn’t wanted this power, but somewhere along the way, it had become a part of me.

Just like Marty would always be a part of me, no matter that he was gone. At my request, Vlad had cremated his bones into a fine powder, and I’d split up the remains into little urns that I sent to some of Marty’s old friends on the carnival circuit. They’d promised to take him with them when they traveled next season. It was the closest I could get him back to the job he had loved so much.

Vlad’s brows drew together. “That seems impossible.”

I let out a dry chuckle. “Well, time flies when someone’s constantly trying to kill us, right?”

“That’s not what I meant,” he replied, drawing me in his arms. Then a warm, rich swath of emotions brushed mine, growing in intensity, until it felt like I was sinking into a pool of heated silk. “I can’t have only loved you for less than a year. Every day, I am more and more convinced that you have always been a part of my soul.”

I slid my arms around him, staring into his deep, coppery-colored eyes. “No,” I whispered. “You’ve always been a part of mine, even before we met.”

He kissed me, his mouth, lips, and tongue causing a lot more heat to build in me, then he drew back with a slow smile.

“Since it’s Christmas Eve, I’m going to give you one of your presents. You should like this one. It’s a secret I haven’t told you before.”

“Let me guess; you’re the inspiration behind the Frankenstein novel, too,” I teased.

He arched a brow with familiar arrogance. “The drivel I inspired is at least much more successful than that.” After my laugh, he got serious. “You know that I resisted telling you that I loved you to the point of letting you walk out on me, but deep down, I think I knew it from almost the first.”

I couldn’t stifle my slight snort, remembering what he’d told me before the first time we’d slept together. I can give you honesty, monogamy, and more passion than you can stand, but not love . . . “Then you sure had a strange way of showing it.”

“You remember my summoning Mencheres almost immediately after I brought you to my castle?”

I frowned. “Yeah, to help you find some artifacts for me to pull essence imprints from so I could track down who’d kidnapped me and tried to make me find you for them.”

“And to ask Mencheres a question,” Vlad replied, his tone deepening. “You don’t remember that part?”

I thought back, once again amazed that eleven or so months felt like years ago. “I vaguely remember something about a question you didn’t want Bones overhearing . . .”

He snorted. “Indeed I did not.” Then his expression changed, and the feelings that brushed mine were tinged with the painful sting of loss. “After my wife and my son died, I was consumed with rage and the need for vengeance. Yet after I killed everyone I believed to be responsible, I felt no better. Instead, the worst kind of emptiness filled me. It kept growing, invading the deepest parts of me, until eventually, anything seemed better than the bottomless nothingness that had taken residence in my soul. Anything.”

I knew what he meant. Oh, how I knew. I didn’t have the physical scars on my wrists anymore, but the memory of the pain that had led me to such an act was a scar that would never fade. “I understand,” I said, tears pricking my eyes.

He gave me a jaded look even while his fingers brushed my wrists in a gentle caress. “I know you do. Mencheres sensed it in me, and he told me something that I immediately dismissed as a meaningless, compassionate lie.”

“What did he tell you?” I asked softly.

His hands slid from my wrists, one rising to grip my newly grown hair, the other splaying possessively on my back and pressing me closer to him.