Natalie lifted her head from his chest and stared into his eyes. Already her cheeks looked sunken and her skin had taken on a pale caste unusual for mortals. A faint sheen covered her forehead. She smiled with a reassurance that didn't reach her eyes. "Everything will be okay," she whispered, her eyes focusing on a point somewhere over his shoulder. "You'll see."

He knew she was lying for his benefit. Already he felt the beat of her heart slowing, each breath requiring more effort than the last. A gust of wind swirled the gray ash leaves around their feet. "Yes," he whispered in return, his voice almost covered by the rustle of the leaves.

The sun beat on the couple with an intensity out of season. Natalie's grip on the back of his vest tightened a fraction, though he could not guess where she found the energy.

"I love you," she said. Her voice quivered now. She laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"Thank you," he replied into the silence. Thank you for the last five years; for giving my eight hundred years meaning; for being my reason to seek mortality, even if the efforts failed . Thank you for not being afraid of me.

Nicholas de Brabant cradled the body of his love as the sun climbed high into the sky. The Litovuterine-C in his veins, the drug she had invented in a failed attempt for him to escape the vampire, began to wear off. He looked down at Natalie's face, her lips still soft and full, her lashes brushing her cheeks as though in sleep. He looked up again at the sun, its light now painfully bright. Eyes yellow, and stepped out from under the tree.

****

I wanted so much for us to have a life together. It didn't seem fair. We'd spent five years working on a way to cure him. Each time we thought we'd succeeded his face would glow with the happiness of a little boy given his first taste of cotton-candy. Each failure would find him drowning his sorrows in a bottle of human blood whilst painting glorified pictures of the sun he hadn't seen in centuries. This morning brought yet another possible cure, another chance for us. The Litovuterine-C seemed to promising.

He even proposed to me right there in the morgue with my day's work laying on the table behind me.

Of course I accepted. Later a bottle of wine arrived with a dozen white roses. How could I have known they weren't from him? By the time he found me, I'd already had a celebratory cup, the poison already in me. I could feel myself growing weaker by the minute. "One day in the sun," I said.

For once my dream was a distinct possibility with the drug still suppressing the vampire in him. We drove to the lake, to a spot my brother used to bring me before he died. As we stood looking over the water, he drew me to him in a crushing hug.

I couldn't look at him. I had been so sure that this time the cure would work. I couldn't be dying, not now. I refused to let myself die. Nick needed me. "Everything will be okay," I promised. "You'll see." Everything had to be okay. His Master had tried to separate us before. I wouldn't let him have the honor of succeeding. Nick and I belonged together.

"I love you," I whispered. The words had never been said before. This wasn't the way I wanted to first say them, but increasingly I knew there would be no other chance. He needed to hear them. For all his age, Nick really was just a little boy. He would go on without me for another forty or fifty years, unless he decided to be brought back across. Nick needed to know that for right now he had succeeded.

"Thank you," he replied. Could he read my mind? Had the Litovuterine-C made him somehow telepathic? How had he found such an appropriate answer?

I rested my head on his shoulder and tried to give him a hug that would last the next several years. The sun shone so brilliantly, I had to close my eyes for just a minute. I felt so weak but his strength prevented my knees from buckling. He would need that strength.

END