Vampire in Atlantis

hear about the past,” she said, biting her lip.
    Daniel felt like the rock he’d been sitting on had just slammed into the side of his head. She loved him? Had she been about to admit to that?
    No. Of course not. He was a damned fool to think it.
    “Not my past,” he said flatly. “Nobody would love to hear about my past.”
    “Then don’t tell me all of it. Just tell me the part that happened right after you became a nightwalker. What happened? Did it hurt? Was the mage training hard?” She slipped her hand in his so naturally that he almost didn’t notice it until they’d taken a few steps, and then a wave of warmth and peace swept through him and he tightened his fingers, never wanting to let her go.
    They walked in silence for nearly ten minutes, Serai apparently content to wait for his response, while he considered what to say. Finally he shrugged. Let her hear it, then. Let her know firsthand what a monster he was. It would be easier for her to let him go when the time came.
    Easier for him to leave her to a better fate, as well.
    “I became a monster. There was nothing left of the Daniel you knew; he lost himself to the bloodlust and the pain of losing you.”
    She flinched a little, but tightened her grip on his hand. “I’d heard it was bad at the beginning, for the newly made.”
    “It’s bad enough, as far as I saw from others, but never as bad as I became, or at least that’s what they told me. I had lost you forever. I thought you were dead. I had nothing else to live for, so I didn’t bother to live. I wanted to die, but the monster’s sense of self-preservation was too strong.”
    He heard her indrawn breath, but ruthlessly continued. She’d wanted to hear it. She could hear it all.
    “By the time I was sane enough to think that maybe the story I’d heard was wrong, that maybe you lived, Atlantis was gone. Vanished beneath the sea. After that, I became a monster the like of which the world had never seen. For several years, I raged and rampaged, killing humans and treating them as nothing more than prey for slaughter. I went after the criminals and the rogue soldiers, those who looted and pillaged and raped. I killed them all and drank their blood and I gloried in it.”
    She stopped walking, but he refused to look at her.
    “You were trying to achieve some sort of justice,” she said, but he ruthlessly cut her off, before she could get carried away with some false idea of his nobility.
    “I was a murderer, after vengeance. Nothing more. Don’t try to make me out to be anything heroic. It would be the worst kind of lie,” he said roughly.
    “So what changed?”
    He started walking again, all but dragging her along. “What do you mean?”
    “What changed? That’s not who you are now, so what changed?’
    He flashed back to that moment, that one crystal-clear moment in time. The moment he’d never forget.
    “I met a girl who reminded me of you,” he confessed, the words almost dragged out of him.
    The memory that he could never, ever forget. As if on command, it played again in his head in brilliant, heartbreaking color:
    He’d attacked a small village where a gang of marauders lived, killing and maiming every man in it without regard for anything but the ever-present, voracious bloodlust, when a girl threw herself on his back and started punching him in the head. He threw her off without a thought, but when he turned, he realized that she was only a child. He never, ever killed children. Even in his madness, he’d retained that much of himself.
    But in a flash of light from the fire, he realized something else: she looked like his Serai. Not exactly, not like a sister or daughter or even a cousin. But there was something in the curve of her cheek and the fall of her hair that arrested him and froze him in place.
    “How can you do this? Are you a monster?” the girl cried out, but he didn’t hear her . He heard her words in Serai’s voice, and he was destroyed.
    He threw all the gold in his pockets at the girl and ran. Ran, and then flew, and never stopped until he found himself deep in the middle of a forest so old and dark and deep that the humans believed it to be cursed. He opened a hole in the ground underneath an ancient tree and threw himself into it, covering himself up and losing himself to the pain.
    The mage who’d turned him found him and coaxed him back to the surface. Cleaned him up and taught him a few hard truths. Told him he had a choice: study