Part 4 — When I Delivered a Warning to the Vampire King in a Dark Restaurant, His Fiancée Suddenly Stopped Smiling

At the sound of the first bell, every window shattered at the same time.

Wind burst into the basement and extinguished the candles. The red symbols flickered on the walls.

Adrian shouted:

“Seize her!”

The members of the Pact moved toward me.

Ricardo stepped in front of them.

“Sofia, put the spoon on the stone table and touch nothing.”

“It says that you must die.”

“I know.”

His calm frightened me more than all the threats.

Brenda stood by the wall and for the first time was no longer smiling.

“If Ricardo dies, the city’s protective barrier will collapse,” she said. “Hunters, vampires, and humans will turn against one another.”

“Isn’t that exactly what you wanted?” I asked.

“I wanted war, not the deaths of children.”

Adrian struck her.

“It is too late for regret now.”

His words were repeated by a device hidden in the walls. The voice returned several times through the basement:

“I wanted war, not the deaths of children.”

Brenda froze.

“What is this?”

Matiane took a small glass device hidden in the wall.

“A recording of your meetings. I have been recording everything for three weeks.”

Adrian looked at him.

“Matiane, you?”

“I swore loyalty to the king. Not to your fear.”

Brenda’s old voice came from the device:

“Sofia’s blood will open the gate. If she resists, let us kill her mother.”

Then Adrian’s voice was heard:

“The city’s children will be the first fuel.”

Silence fell over the room.

Adrian stepped backward.

“This is edited.”

“It is your own voice,” I said.

“No!”

He tried to smash the device, but Ricardo caught his wrist.

“All your life you forced others to forget their own words,” he told him. “Now listen to yourself for the first time.”

Adrian struggled, but Ricardo’s hand did not move.

I went to the stone table and placed the copper spoon on it. Its crescent scratch caught the red light.

A circle opened on the stone surface.

Ricardo came to me.

“If you destroy this seal, my life will follow it.”

“There must be another way.”

My mother shook her head.

“There is not. But no one has read the old text to the end.”

She took out a sheet hidden behind the folder. The paper was so thin that light passed through it.

“It says here that the king’s death is necessary only if the gate is closed by his own power.”

“And if it is closed by my power?” I asked Ricardo.

Ricardo looked at the sheet.

“The blood debt gives you a choice. My power will protect you if I willingly transfer it to you.”

“What does that mean?”

“The power of my centuries will pass into you. I will die as king, but I may awaken as a human. Or I may not awaken at all.”

“You knew this?”

“No. I just learned it.”

Adrian laughed.

“Do not believe him. A vampire’s word is dark as blood.”

Ricardo looked toward him.

“That is why the choice belongs to her.”

He knelt before me.

The three-hundred-seventeen-year-old king.

Matiane lowered his head. Brenda closed her eyes. My mother was crying, but she made no sound.

“Sofia,” Ricardo said, “if you leave me, the children may survive. If you stay with me, perhaps I will survive too. But I cannot promise that I will remain the same.”

My fingers touched his cheek. His skin was still cold.

“Even if you had not recognized me that night, I would still have saved you.”

Something broke in his eyes.

“Why?”

“Because your life needs a choice. Not a debt.”

I took the spoon in both hands and pressed its crescent scratch against Ricardo’s palm.

He caught my wrist.

Red light entered our bodies.

There was no pain. Only heat, as if an entire summer had poured into my veins. The darkness disappeared from Ricardo’s eyes. His teeth grew smaller. The severity of centuries fell away from his face.

Adrian screamed as the symbols engraved on the walls disappeared one after another.

“No! This is my kingdom!”

“No,” Brenda told him. “It was never yours.”

The members of the Pact dropped their weapons.

Matiane called upstairs and handed the recordings to the hunters. A few minutes later Adrian’s and Brenda’s conversation was being broadcast on every screen in the city.

Adrian tried to escape.

Ricardo did not stop him.

“Go,” he told him. “Now everyone will know where to find you.”

Adrian opened the door, but a group of hunters was already standing outside.

Their commander stepped forward.

“Adrian Aguirre, you are under arrest for conspiracy against the city’s residents and endangering the lives of children.”

For the first time Adrian could say nothing.

Brenda came to me.

“You were not my enemy,” she told me. “You simply reminded me that I had a choice.”

“You still risked many lives.”

“I know.”

She held out her hands, and the hunters arrested her.

Ricardo fell to the floor.

I knelt beside him.

“Ricardo.”

His heart beat weakly, but like a human’s.

“You are still here?” I asked.

He opened his eyes.

“Unfortunately, you still cannot get rid of me.”

I laughed, although I was crying.

In the hospitals, the children were saved that same night. The Pact’s laboratories were closed. The recorded confessions were handed over to the court. Brenda was put in prison, and Adrian was sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of his life.

Ricardo left the throne.

The great hall of his castle was no longer a throne room. A shelter was created there for vampires who chose to live peacefully with humans. Matiane became head of security. My mother moved in with me, although during the first months she did not dare sleep in the same room.

Ricardo remained in the hospital for two weeks.

When he came out for the first time, the sunlight made him squint. He could no longer disappear into shadows, walk on walls, or control people’s desires.

“Now you are ordinary,” I told him.

“No,” he answered. “Now I am alive for the first time.”

Three months later I rented a small apartment by the river. I no longer worked as a waitress. I was employed at the city archive, where I sorted old documents and helped people who were searching for lost relatives.

Every morning Ricardo made coffee and complained that human food was too salty.

My mother arranged old photographs in my room.

On the day of the first snow, Ricardo placed his hand on the window.

“For three hundred seventeen years I waited to see snow like this,” he said.

“How did you see it before?”

“As something that weakened humans.”

“And now?”

He smiled.

“Now I know that some things are not weakness, but the reason it is worth staying.”

Six months later I received a letter from Brenda. The envelope had been sent from the court. She wrote that she was asking for a reduction of her sentence and wanted me to become her witness.

Ricardo read the letter.

“You do not have to answer.”

“I know.”

“You can even forgive her.”

“I know that too.”

I folded the letter and put it back into the envelope.

“But saving her is no longer my business.”

Ricardo nodded.

“Now you are truly free.”

I wrote only one sentence to Brenda: “I hope that someday you will look at your decisions the way I looked at mine.”

Then I tore up the letter and put it in the trash.

That night I was preparing dinner in the little kitchen. I opened the drawer and saw the copper spoon there. Its crescent scratch no longer shone. It looked like an ordinary, useless object.

But I knew how many lives it had saved.

I placed the spoon on the windowsill.

Outside, the first snow was falling.

Ricardo stood beside me and took my hand.

This time there was neither a blood debt, nor a crown, nor old power in his hand.

Only a choice.

And for the first time, that was enough.