Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Most didn’t pay for that stupidity for an immortal lifetime.
“She wouldn’t want this for you.” Elena knew that for a certainty. “Beth loved you as much as you loved her.” Sweet and affectionate, her heart growing apace with her age, Beth’s eyes had still lit up when Harrison walked into a room. She’d always been a young girl in love with him.
“That’s my girl,” he’d say even when Beth was eighty, their hands linked and smiles delighted.
Beth in turn would giggle and snuggle into him. “That’s my handsome guy.”
Still later, when Beth became so very frail, Harrison would carry her out to their porch swing, hold her against him as he rocked them both. Once, after Elena dropped by unannounced, she’d found him just smiling at Beth while Beth slept in his arms.
It was a memory aglow in warmth, in tenderness, in love that had endured. “She told you to find someone after she was gone. She loved you enough to not want endless loneliness for you.”
“You’re a better woman than me, Bethie,” Elena had joked at the time. “I’d come back from the dead and banshee-haunt Raphael if he moved on.”
Oh, how Beth had cackled, two sisters having a laugh together.
“I know what Beth told me.” He took a long inhale. “But I…I can’t go on, Ellie. I also can’t kill myself in one of the ways that can take out vampires—I promised Beth I wouldn’t die by suicide. She was so worried about me, so I promised—but I didn’t understand what that would mean, how long I’d have to live without her.”
His dull eyes met hers. “Will you do it? Or will you ask someone to do it? Clean and fast. So I can be with her?”
Of all the things he could’ve asked of her, this she’d never expected. “That’s not the answer.” She shifted to face him. “You—”
“It is!” He fisted one hand to the side, tendons tight at his neck. “I thought immortality would be fun, that I’d travel and see the world and taste life. But I have only ashes on my tongue.
“At first, I could bear it, because I had Maggie and Laurent, and their children. But with each generation that passed…I saw less and less of my Beth and our babies. And I lost more and more of myself. Because she was the best part of me. We both know that.”
Wracking sobs. “Please, Ellie. Please let me end, let me go home to her.”
Undone by his anguish, Elena knew he needed help of a kind she wasn’t equipped to provide. “Come to the Tower with me,” she said. “We’ll sort it out there.” As a first step, she’d take him to Nisia, and to the counseling the healer could provide.
Because Beth had asked Elena for a promise, too.
“I know you and Harrison have never been friends,” her sister had said one day in what would prove to be her last year of life, “but will you keep an eye on him? Not forever, just for the first ten or so years after I’m gone. I think he’ll have trouble for a while before he adapts.”
Elena had kept that promise—and she’d kept it for a lot longer than ten years. But given how well he’d seemed to be doing at around the two-hundred-year mark, she’d let it go—because Beth had asked that of her, too.
“Once he’s settled into his new existence, then please make sure he knows he’s free, that he doesn’t need to forever mourn me.” Her sister had leaned her head on Elena’s shoulder while Elena spread her wings around them in an embrace from a big sister to a younger one.
“I used to be so angry with him for getting Made when I couldn’t follow him into vampirism,” Beth had confessed, “but now I worry the guilt and grief will strangle him. It’ll be better for him to get away to another place—so when he’s ready for that, will you make sure he feels like he can leave without being tied down by the weight of memory?”
“Yes, Bethie,” Elena had promised. “I’ll most definitely let good old Harry know he can head off for parts unknown. I’ll even set him up with job offers he can’t turn down. Oh, but how will I bear his absence?”
Beth’s laughter echoed through time in Elena’s mind as she looked at the broken shell of the man her brother-in-law had become. “Come on,” she said, afraid to leave him alone, “we’ll walk to the nearest road and I’ll call you a transport to the Tower.”
He walked silent and withdrawn beside her.
“You were content for a while at least,” she murmured. “Stellar reports from multiple territories.”
She hadn’t actually had to use her connections to get him work. Turned out her brother-in-law was really fucking good at being an administrator when he wasn’t wasting his energy attempting to climb the social ladder.