Aidan

He remembered the smell of her blood a hundred years before she was born.

Then, in dank 19th-century St. Petersburg, he saved her great-great-grandmother from starvation by ripping out the throat of her tormentor. As a reward, he took only one drop—and in it, he thought he tasted the summer sun. Since then, he has sought that taste in each new generation of their family, watching as fragile women with identically arched eyebrows are born, live, and die.

He became their shadow. An invisible guardian who paid for their education, warded off misfortune, and erased the memories of unwanted witnesses. He considered it a hunt for the ghost of a lost feeling.

She—Alice—grew up with the feeling of being watched. She thought she could hear whispers in the rustling of leaves, and the chill in her back meant someone was staring. She chalked it up to the artist's fertile imagination, until, on her twenty-sixth birthday, she stumbled upon an old daguerreotype in the family archive.

There he stood, among the faces of long-dead relatives. Exactly the same as the stranger who had bought all her paintings at the vernissage yesterday. The same eyes the color of old silver, the same predatory grace.

She found him in the park, trembling with fear and curiosity.

"Who are you to me?" she asked, looking into the eyes that remembered her great-grandmother.

He hesitated. He knew that if he told the truth—admitted that all these years he'd been drinking not just blood, but its warmth through generations of others—he would scare her off. But if he lied, he'd lose the only chance to touch the present, not memories.

"I am the one," he said, extending his hand, "who has waited for you longer than you have been alive. And I am tired of waiting."

At that moment, something stirred in his chest, where a heart hadn't beaten for centuries. He realized that for the first time in two hundred years, he didn't want to drain her dry, but rather for her to drain his loneliness.