“Oh, don’t worry, I know who you are,sweet Katherine,” she said. “I’ve been hearing about you for years.”
She looked at me like I was a celebrity she’d been expecting, but I stared back at her with nothing but confusion on my face.
“You’ve heard of me?”
She giggled, like I was stating the obvious.
“You’d sure hope so, wouldn’t you? You are the long fated mate of Hans Weyer, after all.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Ithoughtthetrapdoorhad revealed all its secrets, but I was wrong. The heavy wooden door was open wide, but the depths were still in shadow, even though I’d freed the crying child.
Sarah’s voice was upbeat as she carried on talking.
“I’ve been praying for years that I’ll be a fated mate myself one day, but I doubt it. I’m just a player holding on to a fantasy of true, vampire love.”
I was looking at her, dumbstruck. The trapdoor inside me was rumbling.
“Has Hans not told you yet?” Sarah said, reading my expression. “Shit, sorry! I might have just ruined a big revelation.”
Our conversation was another humbling experience. For a self-proclaimed vampire addict, I knew absolutely sweet fuck all.
“What are fated mates?” I asked her. “I guess it must mean an intense connection.”
“Add an intense connection to a serious slice of destiny and souls entwining, and I think you’d be pretty close. I don’t know anyone who’s been a fated mate of one of the vampires around here, not before you showed up tonight.” She checked out one of her shoulder wounds in the mirror, then met my eyes in the reflection. “You’re so lucky to be Hans’ long-term love. Like everyone else here, I’ve heard whispers about Mary, but he’s as certain as it gets that you’ll be the one to right the wrongs.”
Wrongs?
The trapdoor kept on rumbling.
Mary.She sounded familiar to me in the strangest of ways. Like a ghost of a whisper.
Like a ghost…
The idea of Hans being in love with anyone else made my stomach turn. I didn’t want to imagine him looking at anyone else the way he looked at me.
“Who is Mary?” I asked. “An ex of his?”
She looked horrified.
“You don’t know who Mary is? Fuck! I’ve got to stop putting my foot in it. It’s up to Hans to tell you this stuff, not me.”
“No, please tell me.”
She looked wary of sticking her foot further in the mud.
“There’s not all that much I can say. I think Mary is some kind of ex of his. From a serious amount of time ago from what I can gather. People don’t really share vampire secrets. All I know is that she was a woman he was very, very in love with. Someone who left him heartbroken for hundreds of years and took him off the path of everything he knew in his old life. The older vampires know all about her, and I’ve heard her name plenty of times. She must have been really special.”
Mary.
Some distant part of me felt like I should know her.
“Are you ok?” Sarah asked. “You look a bit sick. Did you lose too much blood back there? It happens when you’re a newbie. I can get you some help, if you like.”
She began to step away, but I didn’t want her to. It wasn’t blood loss that was making me sickly, it was the thought of Hans being in love with a woman called Mary. There was something deep, dark and scary about it, but also deep, dark and beautiful.
Feeling, not thinking.