The idea of having friends still felt alien to me, let alone having friends back in Orcop. I’d been an outsider my whole life.
“Do you mean the other witches?” I asked him. “Are they going to be my friends?”
“The witches and the blood players, as well as all the people you’ll meet now you’re allowed to become who you truly are.”
The thoughts were exciting, but that didn’t change anything. I wanted to be a vampire with Hans. I’d known that in my soul from the very second he’d chased me along the cobblestones. My soul was just singing a lot louder with Mary’s voice along with mine.
Hans was still an awful lot better at reading thoughts than I was. He was still holding my hand as he gestured further along the wall.
“Do you want to look in the mirror of old times? Do you want to see yourself as you used to be?”
He led me further into the room until we were standing beside the window, and there, up on the wall was a painting. A portrait of a woman that made me gasp.
It was me, in times gone by. Her eyes were like mine and her smile had the same quirk as mine, with one side raised slightly higher, and she even had the same dusting of freckles on her forehead. But Mary’s hair was longer and lighter. She was wearing a simple dress in white, sitting by Garway spring. I recognised the low walls on either side.
But there was something else behind her smile and her simple white dress. A tiny tickle of want in her that most people wouldn’t have seen, just like the one in me.
She wanted to explore the pleasures of the flesh with Hans. Like I did.
“I didn’t know you’d look so much like her,” Hans told me. “I knew you were going to be her soul reborn, but I didn’t foresee that your family chain would be strong enough to give you the same beautiful eyes and smile and grace.”
There was something so eerily stunning about seeing myself like that, in ancestor form. I’d sat in her position many times as a younger girl, oblivious to the fact I’d been there in a life gone by. Mary had been lucky enough to see the spring in its gorgeous flowing glory. She looked as transfixed by the spot as I’d always been.
“It’s an artist’s interpretation,” Hans said. “But it’s very accurate.”
“Who painted it?”
His eyes spoke louder than his mouth did. I didn’t need to be a mind reader to know the answer.
“Yes,” he said. “I painted it. This must have been at least my fiftieth effort. The image was imprinted in my mind for a long time before my paintbrush could do it justice.”
“I didn’t know you were a painter.”
“I’m not. I’m just well-practised in many things. I can play five different instruments at orchestral level and speak almost every language in the world.” His eyes were mischievous. “Who knows, little one. You may well be an awful lot better than I am at any of them in a few hundred years.”
He fascinated me more and more every second, if that was even possible.
We both stood looking at the portrait of me on the wall, and it was a stunning silence. I felt so assured in myself standing there, as though I’d truly come home to life. My thoughts sounded more wistful in my head, my intuition speaking at a deeper depth, and I was confident in my own heart. No longer just a girl running away from Orcop, afraid of being myself.
“We’re heading back to Garway for Halloween, are we?” I asked Hans. “That’s what the ritual is about.”
“That is my plan, yes.”
I was coming to know him so well.
Hans was a brooder. A planner. A thinker.
He’d been planning this for years.
“You knew how things were going to go, didn’t you?” I pushed. “You had the timings mapped out from the start.”
He was so perfectly honest and simple in his answers.
“Yes. I did.”
“That night when you chased me along the cobblestones, you knew we’d be in Garway a week later.”
“Fate can never be predicted fully, but yes, I had high… expectations, but the choice has always been yours to make. It still is.”