Life Starts After Dark

Eric’s POV

Pain…gut wrenching, intolerable…pain.

Pam stood beside me in total silence as I held Skylar’s cold, limp body in my hands. She was gone.

I looked at her face, looking for the young woman I loved, but her resemblance seemed to have disappeared from her features in this slumber than was so much more than sleep.

She looked like a snow white queen, with her sable hair and her snowy face. Her eyelids and lips had gone blue from the cold night, without a pulse to keep her warm.

“The sun is about to rise, Eric,” Pam whispered quietly, reminding me of my many weaknesses. Part of me wished I could stay here with her, where I would become her very own funeral pyre as the golden sun rose over the horizon.

How I longed to see the sun again. I had never thought I would miss it so painfully. Skylar had been my sun, my link to the world of the daylight. She had filled me with the very warmth that I thought only the sun could give me. I longed to feel that again, even if it meant it would grow so searing hot that my flesh would burn away. There was something so peaceful about thinking of my own possible demise.

But I had responsibilities. And knowing that Skylar would have wanted me to go on existing even without her, kept me from sitting by the grave I had dug her, holding her in my arms there for the rest of my existence.

So, gently, I laid her in her grave, six feet below the surface. And Pam helped me cover the only one I had ever truly loved with the earth piled up beside me until the ground was level again.

There had been no sense of pride in killing Joseph. My revenge was empty, a cold feeling that left me feeling even more numb than I had before. Nothing could bring her back to me.

“Eric, it is time to go now.”

I rose slowly to my feet, and we ran together, back to Fangtasia. I had buried her next to her house, so it was a long run back to Shreveport. We barely made it in time, for when we closed the basement door, the sun had risen, and Pam suffered small burns closing the door, which healed quickly after a day’s sleep in her coffin.

The next night, I went back to her grave, where I waited. I had a small glimmer of hope that when Joseph had given her blood that it may possibly have been enough. My hopes were small, due to the amount of blood she lost even after death. All of his blood may have been spilled along with her own.

As I waited, I remembered.

“I know what I want. And what I want is you. I love you, Eric.”

It had been possible after all. As monstrous as I was, she had truly loved me, and I had proven that vampires were, in fact, capable of love.

Of course, none of that mattered now.

I put my hand on the cool earth, and I could not feel her, so deep down below me. This was not how it should have been. She belonged up here, with me. I may not have been able to change her myself, but I was certainly unable to see her die in my arms. And yet I had managed to survive through it, even when I wanted nothing more than to be lying next to her.

And yet I existed with the pain of her death, and I longed to be released from it.