Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 84864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
We’d become friendly with how much time I’d been spending down here lately, and he was beyond helpful since he had a photographic memory when it came to the texts that were tucked into neat little stacks among the shelves. He’d been helping me try to find the right piece of text to convince Ajax to try and transition me, but nothing we’d turned up yet had leaned that direction.
“Can never read too much,” I said, flashing him a genuine smile. He was a welcomed distraction after an hour staring at the same text without finding any results.
He shifted a book beneath his arm, his brow furrowed. “What are we researching today? More experimental trials with vampire and human blood among the ages or your own personal family history?”
I waved to the tome before me. “The latter. Not having any more luck with this than I did the nights prior,” I said.
Julian flashed me a sympathetic look. I still had a hard time reconciling his laid-back style—always in athletic pants of some sort and more often than not, hoodies—with his intellect and thirst for knowledge. Somehow, he pulled it off in a way that made him look like a college student fresh on a study hunt, not a vampire who was a master of their history.
“What do you remember about your mother?” he asked as he took a seat at the table across from me.
I blew out a breath, my heart clenching with that old piece of grief that had never actually healed. “Her name was Lilith Ashcroft,” I said on an exhale. “She used to make the best strawberry pancakes in existence and she would sing me to sleep.” I swallowed hard. “And then, when I was eight, she received the same diagnosis I just did, and she passed away not long after.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Julian said. “What about your father?”
I shrugged. “I never knew him. I was placed in care shortly after my mother’s death because I didn’t know any extended family either. It was always just me and her.” And now, knowing what I did about my bloodline, I wondered if there was a reason for that. “Do you think she knew? About our history? Do you think she was keeping me from any part of my family that knew the truth?” I leaned my elbows on the table, needing the support to keep me up.
Damn my body, it wasn’t functioning like I needed it to.
“It’s a possibility,” Julian said. “But it could just as easily be she had no clue about your ancestry and had very realistic reasons for keeping it just the two of you.”
I sighed. “There’s a lot of that going around,” I said, then explained when he tilted his head. “The whole it could be this but also just as likely this.”
I looked down at the tome in front of me, thinking of the one thing Ajax and I couldn’t agree on. The risk verses reward of turning me.
“You said Ashcroft?” Julian asked, pushing away from the table.
“Yes.”
Julian sped out of the room faster than my eyes could follow, returning before I’d even realized what happened. He pushed aside the tome in front of me, then set a new one in its place. “This is a historical index containing anyone named Ashcroft from this area,” he explained. “Of course, I don’t know if your mother was born and raised in Edgemont, but maybe it’ll point you in the right direction.”
“I adore you,” I said by way of thanks.
“Everyone does,” he teased, then winked at me and sped out of the room again, giving me privacy to study the index alone.
An hour later, and I’d studied the Ashcroft line as far back as the index recounted—all the way back to the eighteen hundreds. But I still wasn’t sure when the vampire blood entered our line or how it was possible when humans and mortals weren’t supposed to be able conceive children. But it seemed like, just from my brief study, that sometimes the able to and actually happened were two totally different things.
A warm shiver bloomed on the back of my neck and spiraled down my spine.
“I can feel you, mate,” I said without looking up from the book. “You can’t sneak up on me.”
“I was so close,” Ajax said, coming around the stacks and leaning close to me as he planted a kiss atop my head. “Can I steal you away from your books?”
I sighed, every unsettled thing inside me snapping back into place now that he was here and safe. “Always,” I said, closing the book and leaving it on the table since I knew I’d be back tomorrow. “What do you have…” My tongue stopped working as the word I was looking for evaded me.
It’d been happening so frequently lately that I didn’t even have that rising panic anymore. It simply was.