Oliver did not see Estella that morning in the kitchen. Every day since his family’s arrival he shared a morning tea with her to start the day.

He told himself that she was only sleeping. The stress over the last few weeks was wearing them all down, but it was most noticeable on Hannah and Estella with purple bags beneath their eyes.

He told himself she worked too hard, that she carried too much and slept too little. He caught her up working long after she left them in the Archives, flitting between that dark office, the library, and wherever her bedroom was.

She needs to sleep, he told himself.

When he couldn’t find her on his break he really began to worry. Estella was always in the house by 10 if she went out, which she rarely did to even go into the garden.

He looked in all her haunts: the kitchen, library, he even peeked inside that dark office—nowhere to be seen.

He searched the yard, the gardens and greenhouses. Early in his time here she spent hours with her hands in the soil early in the morning or late at night after the day’s heat had passed but Estella wasn’t there.

He went out to the wattle and daub house down the path he takes for hunting. The building was clearly in use and he had caught her scent near it awhile ago, so maybe she was there.

Except she wasn’t.

Heart pounding anxiously, Oliver ran back to the house, the kitchen door slamming open with the force of his urgency.

“Oliver, what on earth has you so excited?” His mother asked. The rest of his family was seated at the little table he and Estella frequented, watching him.

“Have you all seen Estella today? Anywhere?”

They all responded with variations of ‘no.’

“But that’s not unusual, is it?” His father asked. “Estella doesn’t normally join us until the afternoon.”

“Oliver is always with Estella when he’s not with us. They have tea together in the morning.”

Oliver glared at his sister. Trust Annette to spy on him.

His parents thankfully thought better of asking him about the implications of his interest in the young woman. Personally, Oliver had tried not to think about it himself. Estella had made it clear that their current situation was not…ideal for friendship.

“And you all didn’t meet this morning?”

“No and I can’t find her now. I’ve looked everywhere I know she goes.”

“Maybe she went someplace else? Perhaps to a far corner of the property to look after something?”

Oliver considered that, but Estella seemed so weary of the land beyond Saint Tourre’s walls. He often caught her watching the horizon with concern, chewing on her lower lip. “Not likely,” he shook his head.

“Have you checked her room? Maybe she’s not feeling well and stayed in bed.” Hannah suggested.

Everyone stood in awkward silence before Annette asked quietly, “Can she get sick?” None of them really understood Estella’s situation. Oliver simply watched and observed her behavior but the problem was that her family of vampires, according to Estella, even acted more human than they were used to.

Oliver ground his teeth, maybe she is laying in bed ill. Maybe not. She never offered explanations about her nature either and he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable by asking.He knew enough to see that she’s at least part vampire and Estella has described herself as a witch.

His father circled them back, “Do we know where her room is? The house is magic and we may not even be able to access the family rooms.”

He moved past his father to the small staircase tucked into the back of the kitchen. “I’m not sure but these are the stairs that she comes down from in the morning.”

“The servants’ stairs?” Eva asked behind him.

Halfway up the walls began to have decorations. First by paintings of landscapes then photographs. He slowed down at a close up picture of a younger Estella with a middle aged vampire, her expressive brown eyes arresting him momentarily.

Estella’s eyes were lighter now, more like a burnt caramel. This evidence and humanness, and of transformation, increased his anxiety. What happened to her? What is happening now?

Her scent filled the stairwell. He followed it to the top and through the doorway, emerging at the end of a wide hallway, similar in design to his family’s quarters but decorated wholly different.

Where the guest rooms were was opulence, here there were personal effects everywhere. Photos, artwork, decor on moss colored walls. Faces stared back at them from all directions, all suspended in moments of joy—many drawn from happy memories.

He followed Estella’s subtle scent to the first door on the left.

No answer at his knock. “Estella,” he called. “It’s Oliver! Are you alright?” he asked. “Could you open the door, please?”

Silence.

His chest constricted and tugged. He had to go in, he had to check to make sure she wasn’t in there.

“Estella, I’m coming in okay?”

Still no answer.

Now his mother and sister were crowding behind him, pushing him forward into and through the door as he turned the handle.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Her room was a gentle mess smothered in her woodsy scent. The curtains were pushed open on her four-poster canopy bed to reveal kicked off covers piled at the foot. At the end of the bed, on the floor, sat an open trunk, blanets hanging out of its mouth. Across was another doorway and a folding room divider. Besides that was a lingerie chest, a picture frame knocked over on top of it.

Oliver stepped deeper into the room. Just as he was about to round the corner of the trunk he saw a hand lying on the floor. Hurrying towards it, Estella quickly emerged, barely breathing and a pool of blood around her head.

“Oh dear God, Estella! Estella, can you hear me?”

His mother’s hands quickly joined his in examining the young woman, while his father ushered back Annette and Hannah.

Oliver held Estella’s face gently to let Eva examine the back of her head. “I don’t see any sort of trauma. I don’t understand.”

As Oliver held her, her mouth fell open and more coagulated blood dripped out. But that wasn’t what made him gasp. Human teeth, no matter how objectively perfect, always had signs of wear on them. Estella’s teeth, while pearly white and straight, had some chips on the front teeth.

Only now there were no imperfections.

“Dad, get some towels! And water! Let’s clean her mouth. Something happened to her teeth.”

The gums, the soft flesh of her inner mouth was like an open sore.

___

They laid Estella on her bed. Oliver sat in a chair he pulled up beside her to keep watch. His family encouraged him to take turns but he would not budge from his vigil at her side.

Instead, they shared his company with Estella. While waiting, each member of his family found something to wonder over in her room. Oliver kept hissing at them to not be so nosy but really, he wanted to know more about the young woman too. Only not this way.

Annette was the first one to do it. She righted the fallen photo, expecting to see the faces of the close Saint Tourre family but in the frame was no one she had seen decorating the walls of the family’s quarters. The house, they noticed, was decorated much more intimately in the rooms Estella frequented: the kitchen, the library, and the downstairs drawing room were the only places they had ever seen her if she wasn’t in the archives. They all had personal touches.

“Oliver,” she called, “look at this. These are humans in this photograph.” Sure enough, there was an older couple, their faces lined and hair grayed. They were smiling, standing in front of wisteria and holding a much younger Estella between them.

Something about the woman in the photo was familiar, like he had seen her somewhere before. Perhaps it was just Estella’s features mirrors in her own, he told himself.

Apparently his silent observance wasn’t enough for Annette. “Who do you think they are?” she asked.

“Her grandparents.”

“But I thought Monsieur and Madame Saint Tourre were vampires.”

He shook his head, “No. The grandparents who raised her before she came to France.”

His sister sat down at the edge of the bed to face him. He flicked his eyes to Estella to see if she reacted at all to Annette’s weight on the bed but she didn’t move.

“Came to France? Estella isn’t French?”

“No, she’s American.”

“Really?” Annette studied the unconscious girl. “I never would have guessed.” Oliver had nothing more to say and just raised one shoulder in acknowledgement. If she had more questions, which he suspected she did, his sister didn’t ask them. She held her tongue until the very end of her time with him until just one more escaped her, “Do you really like her Oliver?”

Oliver knew what Annette was asking: is she it for you? Is she your Hannah? He had asked her the same question after he spotted her and Hannah in the corner of the university library.

He wasn’t obtuse. He liked Estella, very much so. He was attached her, even. Wanting to follow her around the Saint Tourre and make sure she was alright, that she didn’t need anything. The problem, of course, is that she needed a lot but wouldn’t share any burden with him. It didn’t help that he didn’t know how much of his attachment was because of the circumstances they were in. He wanted time and space to answer that question, wanted to not misstep where pitfalls may be plenty.

And Estella. he had no idea how she felt. He was certain, however, that she was on her own path and she may not want to see him on it. He would be though, if she would let him.

Annette cleared her throat to draw his attention back to her, away from where it drifted: Estella. He was gazing at her again.

He took a deep breath as if bracing himself from a blow, “We’re friends.”

Annette said nothing but squeezed his shoulder on the way to the door.

It was the same response she gave when he asked about Hannah.

No one else asked him about his relationship with Estella. Perhaps they didn't want to know right now. Perhaps Annette told them to let it lie.

When Hannah came, she found her stack of books, precariously piled on the floor on the other side of her bed. There were eight of them, all with bookmarks stuffed into their pages. It was a mixture too. Two were history books, one on cultural history of absinth another on the British Empire. The fiction was a hodgepodge of genre and literary fiction from Italy to Russia to Japan with some classics thrown in between.

His mother tidied her room: righted toppled objects, folded piled clothes, stacked papers and notes. After she finished with the bedroom she turned to Estella’s drawing room, commenting that it was “more like a study than a place for visitors. There are books and writings everywhere.” After he asked, his mother read the titles to him. More history books, this time on magic, witches, and the supernatural world and beliefs. “It’s almost like she was writing a dissertation, there are notes everywhere, truly. I mean just—Oh! Oh! Our defense, Oliver. It’s all marked up. But it’s only half read. I wonder if she was working on it when she….” His mother’s voice dropped off. How do you describe what happened? When she collapsed? Had a health episode?

Oliver rubbed a hand over his face. Trust Estella to be helping other people up to a life threatening event.

His mother appeared in the bedroom, “She was writing her thoughts down as she was reading. Maybe I should….?”

“Go. I’m staying with her.”

His dad noticed her music collection tucked underneath her window seat. “Look at these records, son. A lot of Italian, and French of course but not really as much. Some German, English, and…ah, Americans too. And Italian-American artists too.” The strong presence of Italian music wasn’t entirely surprising, to the left of the window on the wall was a concert poster for the Teatro alla Scala.

Oliver filed these observations away for later, for when he could ask Estella about them directly. The questions were lining up: Are these your grandparents you told me about? Why these novels and those history books? Do you write everything down? Why so much Italian music?

After twenty-four hours, Estella began to stir. At this point, she was mostly moaning in pain, flakes of blood still coming loose.

Once she opened her eyes when Oliver put his hand over hers to offer comfort—to himself or to her he wasn’t sure. She grabbed back weakly but didn’t let go for the rest of the night and well into the next day.

Thirty-six hours into her transformation, Estella painstakingly lifted her hand and rested it on her throat. He called for water, which she refused. She tried to speak, but only garbled monosyllables came out before she was reduced to a series of bloody coughs and labored breathing.

Eva, holding the rejected water, asked, “does she want blood?”

Oliver didn’t know. He’d seen Estella drink blood, but only in an altered form, reheated over the stove. He had asked her how it was preserved one slow morning and she smiled at him and replied simply, “magique.” She didn’t answer his question about hunting. Would she drink it straight? Somewhere, deep in his gut, he knew she would if he gave it to her.

Turning to his sister who stood in the doorway, he gave her instructions. When Annette returned with the warmed blood he gently lifted Estella up and propper her against his chest. Tipping the cup to her mouth, she drank eagerly. Annette came back with a second and then a third. Estella slowed with each cup. The fourth she didn’t finish and push away, back into Oliver’s hands.

“You need,” she rasped. He tried to coax her into finishing the cup but she kept refusing. “You were here. You need.” She had turned her face towards him, their noses brushing. Her eyes had recovered their gleam, bright and intent upon him.

“Estella,” he spoke softly. “Can you speak? What can we do?”

Shutting her eyes, she laid her head beneath his chin. “Rest.”