The thing about being seven hundred years old was that you ran out of fucks to give approximately six hundred and fifty years ago.
Aldric had been extremely clear about this. He'd made it known in every possible way, through his reclusive lifestyle, his complete lack of interest in human affairs, the carefully worded notice he'd pinned to his door in seventeen languages, including two that were no longer spoken by anyone alive.
NO SOLICITORS. NO HUNTERS. NO DAMSELS. NO VILLAGERS WITH TORCHES. ESPECIALLY NO DAMSELS. I AM READING.
And yet.
And yet here he was, at two in the morning, standing in his doorway while a woman bled on his doorstep.
She was beautiful, of course. They always were. Dark hair plastered to her face with rain, enormous eyes blinking up at him with that particular combination of fear and fascination that he'd come to recognise over the centuries. Wearing something white and diaphanous that was doing exactly the kind of thing white diaphanous things did when soaked through, which was to say, clinging to every curve and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.
"I'm so sorry," she gasped. "I didn't know where else to go. There were men, they were chasing me, I thought" She swayed, and he caught her automatically, because he was seven hundred years old and had been raised by a mother who would rise from her grave to smack him if he let a lady fall.
"Of course," he heard himself say. "Please, come in."
No. No, no, no. What are you doing? Let her fall. Let her bleed on the doorstep. Close the door. Go back to your book.
But she was already in his arms, already being carried to his sitting room, already leaving a trail of rain and blood on his Persian rug. She weighed nothing, humans weighed nothing to him, and she was warm, so warm, with that delicious pulse fluttering in her throat like a trapped bird.
He set her on his velvet chaise. Stepped back. Tried to remember how to be a recluse.
"Thank you," she whispered. "You saved my life."
"I really didn't. You're still bleeding." He gestured vaguely at the gash on her arm. "I should get bandages."
"I'm Beth."
"Aldric." He was already moving toward the medical supplies he kept for exactly this reason, because despite his best efforts, wounded humans kept finding their way to his door. "Don't move."
She didn't move. She watched him with those enormous eyes while he cleaned and bandaged her arm with the efficiency of someone who'd done this approximately four hundred times too many.
"You're a vampire," she said.
"Yes."
"I thought you'd be" She gestured vaguely. "Different."
"Older? More Gothic? Gloomier?" He finished bandaging and stepped back. "I assure you, I am all of those things. I'm just also practical. Bleeding requires bandages."
"I meant—" She blushed. The colour rising in her cheeks was almost painfully lovely. "Never mind."
Aldric sighed. He could already feel it happening—the fascination, the attraction, the inevitable progression toward someone begging him to turn them or bite them or sweep them off into the night. He'd seen it a thousand times. Literally a thousand times. He'd started keeping count in the 1300s and stopped around nine hundred because it was too depressing.
"The rain will stop by morning," he said. "You can stay until then. There's a guest room upstairs. I'll show you."
"Wait." She sat up, wincing at her bandaged arm. "Those men—they'll be looking for me. They know I came this direction. If I stay, they might find me. They might find you."
Aldric looked at her. At the genuine fear in her eyes. At the way she was trying to protect him, this stranger, this vampire she'd just met.
Something shifted. Just slightly. Just enough.
"Describe them," he said.
The men arrived at dawn.
Three of them, large and armed and clearly accustomed to getting what they wanted. They pounded on his door with fists that would bruise, and Aldric opened it with the expression of profound annoyance he usually reserved for missionaries.
"Can I help you?"
"We're looking for a woman. Dark hair, young, pretty. She came this way."
"She didn't."
The leader—a brute with small eyes and a larger ego—stepped forward. "We can search the house."
"No."
"That's not a request."
Aldric looked at him. Really looked. Seven hundred years of looking at humans had taught him to recognise the difference between the merely foolish and the genuinely dangerous. These men were the latter. He could smell it on them—the casual cruelty, the entitlement, the history of violence.
"One moment," he said, and closed the door.
Beth was in the sitting room, where he'd told her to stay. She looked up when he entered, her face pale.
"They're here?"
"Yes."
"What are you going to do?"
Aldric considered the question. He could kill them—easily, quickly, without remorse. He'd done it before, many times, when the situation warranted. But Beth was watching him with those enormous eyes, and something about the way she was looking at him made him want to be... not better, exactly. But different.
"I'm going to be very, very annoying," he said. "Stay here."
He opened the door again. The men were still there, looking impatient.
"I've considered your request," Aldric said, "and I've decided to decline. You may leave now."
"We're not leaving without—"
"You are, though." Aldric leaned against the doorframe, projecting boredom with every inch of his ancient body. "You're going to walk back down the mountain, and you're going to forget you ever came here. You're going to forget the woman entirely. And if I ever see any of you again, I will be significantly less polite about it."
The leader laughed. "You think you can threaten us? There's three of us, old man."
"I'm aware." Aldric smiled—a real smile, the kind he hadn't used in centuries. It showed his teeth. All of them.
The men looked at each other. Looked at him. Looked at the door he was blocking, the ancient house behind him, the impossibility of their situation slowly dawning.
"I don't know what you are," the leader said, "but we'll be back. With more men."
"I'm sure you will." Aldric stepped back inside and closed the door.
He waited until he heard their footsteps retreating down the mountain. Then he turned to find Beth in the hallway, her eyes wide.
"You didn't kill them."
"No."
"Why not?"
He thought about it. "Because you were watching."
Something flickered in her expression—surprise, then warmth, then something else he couldn't quite name. She crossed the distance between them and, before he could react, rose on her toes and kissed him.
It was brief. Soft. Over before he could process it.
"Thank you," she whispered. "For everything."
"That was—" He touched his mouth, bewildered. "That was unnecessary."
"You're blushing."
"I am not. Vampires don't—" He touched his face. His cheeks were definitely warm. "This is highly irregular."
Beth laughed—a real laugh, bright and surprised, and Aldric felt something crack open in his chest. Something that had been sealed shut for a very long time.
She stayed.
Not because he asked—he never asked. Because every time she tried to leave, something happened. A storm. A rockslide. Another group of dangerous men who'd apparently decided she was worth pursuing. By the third week, Aldric had stopped pretending he wanted her to go.
"I don't understand," he said one evening, watching her cook dinner in his kitchen—his kitchen, which hadn't been used for actual cooking in approximately two hundred years. "Why do you keep coming back?"
"Because you keep letting me."
"That's not an answer."
She turned from the stove, spatula in hand, and looked at him with those eyes. "You're lonely."
"I'm a vampire. Vampires are lonely. It's part of the aesthetic."
"You're lonely," she repeated, "and you're too polite to say so. You've been alone for centuries, and you've forgotten how to let anyone in. But you want to. I can see it."
Aldric opened his mouth to deny it. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I don't know how," he admitted.
She crossed to him, took his face in her hands—warm hands, alive hands—and kissed him again. Longer this time. Slower. When she pulled back, his eyes were almost human.
"Then let me teach you."
What followed was unlike anything he'd experienced in seven centuries.
Not because Beth was extraordinary, though she was, in ways he was only beginning to understand. But because he'd forgotten. Forgotten what it felt like to be touched with tenderness rather than fear. Forgotten the weight of a warm body against his cold one. Forgotten that desire could be gentle instead of desperate.
She taught him slowly, patiently, the way one might teach a child to read. She showed him that his cold skin could be a comfort rather than a shock, that his strength could be protective instead of threatening, that the hunger he'd spent centuries managing could be something other than a curse.
The first time they made love, he trembled.
Not from desire, though that was certainly present. From fear. From the vulnerability of being seen, truly seen, by someone who might leave.
"Hey," she whispered, her hands framing his face. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"You don't know that."
"No. I don't. But I know I want to be here. Today, tomorrow, as long as you'll let me." She kissed him softly. "Isn't that enough?"
He looked at her, this impossible woman who'd stumbled into his life and refused to leave,and felt something loosen in his chest.
"It's everything," he said.
She pulled him down to her, and he went willingly, gratefully, letting himself be loved for the first time in longer than he could remember.
The men came back eventually.
More of them this time, better armed, more determined. They surrounded his house at dusk, torches lit, weapons ready. Aldric watched them from the window and felt something he hadn't felt in centuries.
Annoyance, yes. But also protectiveness. Fierce, absolute, undeniable.
"Stay here," he told Beth.
"Like hell."
"This isn't—"
"I'm not a damsel, Aldric. I'm not going to hide while you fight my battles." She picked up a fireplace poker, tested its weight. "I can help."
He looked at her, this woman who'd refused to be afraid of him, who'd taught him to feel again, who was now standing beside him with a fireplace poker and absolutely no fear in her eyes, and fell in love.
Completely. Irrevocably. Seven hundred years of careful emotional detachment, shattered in a single moment.
"Stay close to me," he said.
"Always."
They went out together.
The fight was brief.
Aldric had forgotten, over the centuries of reading and brooding and being left alone, just how powerful he was. The men who'd come to take Beth were nothing to him, less than nothing. He moved through them like a shadow, like death, like the creature he'd always been but rarely allowed himself to be.
And through it all, he was aware of her behind him. Not hiding. Not cowering. Fighting, inexpertly, but with real courage, using that fireplace poker to defend herself, to defend him, to prove that she was exactly who she'd claimed to be.
When it was over, they stood among the fallen, breathing hard, and looked at each other.
"That was—" she started.
"Terrifying?"
"Hot, actually." She grinned, blood on her face that wasn't hers. "Is that wrong?"
He laughed, a real laugh, centuries old, rusty with disuse. "Probably. I don't care."
She crossed to him through the carnage, dropped the poker, and kissed him with a ferocity that matched his own. When they broke apart, both breathing hard, she looked up at him with those eyes.
"I love you," she said. "I know it's fast. I know we barely know each other. I know you're a vampire and I'm human and this is probably a terrible idea. But I love you."
Aldric looked at her, at the blood and the courage and the impossible, wonderful fact of her—and felt his cold heart crack open.
"I have waited seven hundred years for you," he said. "I didn't know it. But I have."
She kissed him again, and this time there was nothing gentle about it. This was claiming, taking, promising. When they finally made it back inside, shedding clothes and inhibitions with equal speed, they came together with a desperation that spoke of centuries of loneliness meeting its match.
Later, tangled in his ancient bed, Beth traced patterns on his cold chest and smiled.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"Now?" He considered the question. "Now we figure it out. Together."
"And if I get old? If I die?"
"Then I'll have loved you for your whole life, which is more than I've ever had before." He kissed her forehead. "And then I'll be lonely again. But it will have been worth it."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Turn me."
"No."
"Aldric—"
"No." He pulled her closer. "Not because I don't want you. Because I do. Too much to ask you to give up your life, your humanity, your chance at a normal existence."
"What if I don't want normal? What if I want you?"
"Then you can have me. For as long as you live. And when that ends" He stopped, swallowed. "When that ends, I'll have the memory of this. Of you. Of being loved by someone who wasn't afraid."
She cried then, quiet tears that he kissed away. And when they made love again, it was slower, sweeter, full of the knowledge that time was precious.
They had forty years.
Forty years of mornings and evenings, of arguments and reconciliations, of learning each other so completely that they became extensions of each other's souls. Forty years of her growing older while he stayed the same, of explaining to curious neighbours why her husband never aged, of living a life so full that the ending, when it came, felt almost bearable.
She died in his arms, old and beautiful and completely unafraid.
"Thank you," she whispered, her voice barely a breath. "For everything."
"Thank you." He held her tighter, felt her heartbeat slow. "For teaching me to feel."
She smiled, that same smile she'd given him that first night, and then she was gone.
Aldric buried her on the mountain, overlooking the valley she'd loved. He planted flowers, the ones she'd tended in their garden, and visited every day for the first year, then every week, then every month, as the grief slowly transformed into something almost bearable.
He didn't take another lover. Couldn't. She'd spoiled him for anyone else.
But he did something he'd never done before: he started leaving his door unlocked.
Not for everyone. Not for the endless parade of damsels and hunters and people with torches. But for the ones like her. The ones who might need shelter, or kindness, or simply someone to talk to.
He never found another Beth. He didn't expect to. But he found something else: purpose. The quiet satisfaction of being useful, of protecting, of offering the same chance she'd offered him.
And sometimes, late at night, he'd feel her presence, a warmth, a breath, a whisper of that same impossible courage. He'd close his eyes and remember, and it would be almost like she was there.
You're lonely, she'd said, that first night.
Yes. He was. He always would be.
But he was also grateful. Also changed. Also, impossibly, almost happy.
For forty years, he'd been loved by someone who wasn't afraid. That was more than most humans got. More than any vampire deserved.
He'd take it. He'd treasure it. He'd carry it with him through whatever centuries remained.
And he'd leave his door unlocked. Just in case.
Outside his window, the valley stretched green and golden in the setting sun. Inside, an ancient vampire sat in his favourite chair, a book open in his lap, a faint smile on his face.
He was reading, finally, in peace.
And if the smile was for a woman long gone, a memory of laughter and courage and love—well. That was his business. No one else needed to know.
The door stayed unlocked.
Just in case.
