Zagiri is weakened from the venom of his initial bite. She tries to crawl away from him, but in his rabid state, he slashes out at her and tears into her thigh, I’m guessing doing significant damage to her femoral artery.
Avet hisses. “That’s the fatal hit.”
My upper lip curls. “Why are we watching this, Dad?” He has been silent while the video plays.
“Wait for it,” Sargis promises. “Keep your eyes on the vampire.”
I do as Sargis tells me, watching the monster twitch and give off shrieks that the camera’s sound doesn’t broadcast.
The vampire’s movements begin to slow, his limbs weighted until he goes limp.
A few feet away, Zagiri gives up her attempt at escape, her blood flowing freely over the pavement as she, too, stills.
Watching a woman die is morbid, but I keep staring at my phone until I see the reason for Sargis’ call. “Is the vampire sitting up?”
“Look at his mouth when he cries out,” Sargis replies. “His fangs are missing. Watch when he screams when he sees her dead body.”
Sure enough, when the vampire sees Zagiri in a puddle of blood, he lets out a shout, revealing no trace of the signature fangs that are usually easy to spot. He looks around like a man caught mid-crime. He kneels beside Zagiri’s body, holding her upper half in his arms while his shoulders shake.
“Is he actually crying?” Avet asks. “I’ve never seen a vampire cry before. I didn’t know they were capable.”
Sevan’s voice is clipped. “I have. They cry blood. Red, sticky droplets.” She points to the video. “He’s not crying blood. Those are tears.”
Sargis’ voice swims in my overcrowded mind. “Sevan is right. He was a vampire when he attacked her, but now he’s a man again. A man who just came to and found he’d murdered an innocent girl.”
Avet’s incredulity is clear in his remark. “He’s sitting in a puddle of her blood and he’s not drinking any of it.”
Sargis’ voice is measured. “Because he’s not a vampire anymore.”
The crying goes on for several minutes, until the former vampire begins to glance around fearfully. Then he scoops up Zagiri’s body and carries her into the woods.
The video ends, along with my comprehension of the world as I knew it.
Sevan blinks at the screen. “I don’t understand what I just saw. That’s… He didn’t just turn back into a human. That’s not possible.” She shakes her head. “We went over this. Even if Zagiri managed to come up with a potion to reverse the vampiric curse, she would need a witch to bless it. Zagiri’s not a witch. Even if the science was there, the magic wasn’t.”
Sargis’ voice fills the car. “We don’t know that she never met up with a witch. For all we know, she paid a witch to cast a blessing on her potion and lured the vampire there to test it on him.”
“He knew her,” Avet rules. “The vampire—ex-vampire—he held her. That’s not something you would do if you found a dead stranger.”
My mouth drops open. I never question Avet on the ins and outs of his intuition. He understands relationships better than I ever will.
Sargis responds, his voice grave. “Bingo. You are looking at Arshak Falusian. He lived next door to Zagiri and her family when she was young. He is the vampire who killed her parents when she was a little girl. She lured him in, not to kill him, but to reverse his vampiric curse.”
My mouth drops open at the enormity of the implications weighting this new information. “She spent all those years trying to save the monster who destroyed her family?”
My dad’s reply stirs the dead parts of my soul. “That’s exactly what she did. Then her spirit found two women who knew enough about trapping to carry on with the work she started. Cher and Taline are missing, but all signs point to them picking up where Zagiri left off.” He pauses, giving his words the space to sink in. “Our girls weren’t the victims of a vampire attack,” he says to us.
Avet covers his mouth. “They were hunting down vampires so they could turn them back into humans.”
“That’s right. Cher and Taline are the hunters, not the prey. But we have no idea if they successfully made the potion in Zagiri’s notes. This is a complicated bit of science that, I’ve gotta be honest, I don’t totally understand. But it’s looking like Cher and Taline spoke with her. They might know how Zagiri brought this potion into the world. They are the only ones who have a shot of knowing how this works.”
Avet closes his eyes. “We needed Zagiri to help us make more of the potion.”
My mind is overflowing with nothing but questions, and we just put to rest the only person who had the answers.
24
BITTERSWEET HOMECOMING