Life Starts After Dark

Eric’s POV

What was I doing, crying on Skylar’s porch like an idiot? I had truly lost all sense of who I had been before I had met her. The old Eric would have been ashamed of me. The old Eric would have laughed coldly and told me that this was what happened to humans who brought themselves to closely to vampire society. He would tell me that her death was to be expected, and while it was a loss of someone valuable, it was nothing worth crying over. Unfortunately, the old Eric no longer existed to make me cold and numb again.

I did not get the chance to ponder this any further, because at that exact moment, someone was attacking me from behind.

Whoever it was, I flung from my back to the front wall of the house, where I pinned him with both of my capable hands wrapped around his thin throat.

And then I froze as the realization washed over me.

The face was contorted into a defensive, fearful fanged snarl, and was covered in dirt, but beyond that, exactly the same.

Her face relaxed, her eyes softening as I heard her fangs retract with a faint pop, but her lips were left parted as she tried to speak with my hands still wrapped tightly around her throat, cutting off the air she only needed to pass air through her vocal chords and speak.

I dropped my hands from her neck, and she said my name.

“E-Eric?” she said as if she had gone days without speaking. I knew this was true. She was fresh from the ground, a newborn child of the night.

I realized she had been drawn from her hiding place by the smell of my bloody tears. She was hungry.

I registered all these things with a kind of numb fascination, unable to respond to her in any way. Surely this was not real. Maybe my mind was still playing cruel tricks on me with dreams where she was always the star, driving me more and more mad with every night of her.

But then she was kissing me, and this was more real than anything I had ever known. I broke out of my passive state, and pulled her against me with the same force that I had used on the night she had died. Both times were for the same purpose. On that night, I had wanted to keep her with me, knowing I would not be able to bear her absence. This was just the same, only now that she was in my arms again, undead or alive (it mattered not the slightest to me) I never wanted her to leave again.

“Skylar,” I cried against her lips, my arms still clutched around her. “You’re here,” I whispered, feeling weak as if a weight had suddenly been lifted from my chest, and I was just realizing how tired it had made me.

She just continued to kiss me as I ran my fingers through her hair, taking in the earthy scent of her that mingled with the scent of who she once was.

We kissed for what could have been only a second, or several minutes, but finally I was able to stop long enough for her to speak to me.

“Eric, I’m hungry,” she said, and I recognized the very tone that I had heard in my own voice the night I had awakened from death and emerged into the new world of darkness, blood, and power.

That was when I took her to my car that I had parked just down the road. I drove her to the nearest gas station, where I bought her a case of every blood type of Trueblood they had.

Then I drove us back to her house, where I let myself in, then proceeded to invite her inside.