NOW

JULY IS A THICK AND HOLLOW BONE and there are cracks running down the length of it, and an ache when it rains. The wind claws at the edges of his clothes, but Luka Korchak doesn't register the chill, even when the raindrops rake their cold fingers down his cheek, matting his light hair against his forehead.

When it rains, it pours, Luka supposes.

The funeral had been three days ago, but Luka hadn't attended. Just three years ago, his own funeral had been held in the same place, his coffin lowered into the same plot of land, and it still felt like a fresh wound.

At night the cemetery bleeds shadows, and although Luka knows better than to believe in ghosts, he can't stop seeing the flicker of something not-quite-there passing through the cracked tombstones. Something with a nervous heartbeat skitters over his shoes, and, in a flash, he brings a foot down on it, the crunch of a hundred breaking bones echoing in his ears. Lip curling in disdain Luka kicked the broken rodent's body away, and heard it land somewhere in the overgrown grass ravaging the space. Moss clambered over the tombstones, which were on the brink of crumbling apart with age, and weeds grew in the cracks. Even in death, there is always the reminder that things are temporary. Nothing sticks.

Luka stares are the inscription on his own tombstone. Three years ago, it'd been legible, but now all he can make out are the years he'd been alive and half the letters of his name, the other half had been eroded by time. It didn't matter much, though. If anyone dug up his coffin, they'd find it empty. But the gravestone beside his was new, a healthy tooth sticking out amidst the dead and the decaying in the gums of this plot of land, and the earth packed over the coffin smelled fresh, and the grass hadn't grown over it yet. Luka crouched down before Violet's grave, tracing a finger along the inscription of her name in the rock.

"It's just Wren left, Vi," Luka muttered, brushing off specks of invisible dirt off the top of Violet's tombstone. "Let's hope she doesn't turn out like us."

A distinct crunch of footsteps in the grass behind Luka caught his attention.

Luka straightened up. "It's been awhile."

"It has," Sam Uley said, his expression grave, but his tone light. He was older now, no longer the seventeen year old boy Luka knew like the back of his hand. Now, he was all hard planes solidified by the hardships of adulthood. That was a life Luka, immortalised in the chrysalis of youth and death, could not be a part of—Sam had outgrown him in the literal sense, and Luka knew what growing at different rates did to people. Sam jerked his chin at Violet's grave. "How're you holding up?"

Luka shrugged. In truth, everything hurt. His heart had stopped beating three years ago, but it didn't stop the tight feeling in his chest, or the way the anger gnawed at him. Victoria might be dead for good, this time, but now that there was no one left to direct his anger at, Luka didn't know how to find peace. She'd taken his life, and then she'd went on to take his younger sister's life, too. He'd thought that, by avenging himself (and, by extension, Violet's death), it'd bring some sort of peace of mind. Some semblance of absolution. But all it'd done was form a scab around the wound that kept cracking open every now and then. Luka didn't know what else there was for him to do.

"I'm managing," Luka said, simply. He still couldn't look at Sam. Not properly. Sam had a fiancé now. Sam had a life that didn't have a place for Luka in it. Sam had moved on. So why couldn't he do the same?

Sam seemed to sense the distance. Between them existed this gap that separated what had been said and what needed to be said, and there was also this even bigger rift—one that was impossible to cross—where what Luka felt stood on the other end, seeking reconciliation that wouldn't come. The continental drift caused by time's cruel nature had fractured the lithosphere of their relationship. Even if Sam offered, Luka didn't think he could stick around here. Eventually, he'd have to make his own way. Just anywhere else but here.

"You know, your sister died," Sam said, his tone gentle. "That day on the peak, Paul said you didn't even look upset. It's been four days, and you hadn't even expressed any—"

"Grief?" Luka cut in, meeting Sam's gaze with a flinty stare. He was being defensive, and Sam was only trying to help, but Luka couldn't help it. It was reflex. "Like I said, I'm managing."

"All I'm saying is that it's okay for you to feel."

"I'm fine." Luka stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dark jeans.

"Something this big happened and all you can say is that you're fine? That, you're managing?" Sam asked, incredulously. He shook his head. "I may not be the same guy you used to know, but I'm worried about you, alright? And you can still talk to me. I'm still here for you, Luke. I never stopped thinking about you."

Luka smiled, but there was no relief or humour in it. "How does your fiancé feel about that?"

Sam sighed. "She knows about you. She knows what you mean to me. I may not feel that way about you anymore, but I'm not going to pretend that you didn't mean something to me. You know you're always welcome at the house."

Luka shook his head. "I'm not staying long. There's... nothing left for me here."

Disappointment flickered in Sam's eyes, but only for a moment, before it vanished. Sam cocked his head. "Because of Violet?"

In the rain, his dark hair gleamed, and rivulets of water dripped from his brow, and Luka felt the downpour inside his chest as he dragged his gaze up to meet Sam's, barely resisting the urge to brush the rain out of Sam's eyes. In another time, Luka might have been able to do so freely. In another time, Sam might've been able to get more out of him.

Luka dropped his gaze back to Violet's grave, and his mouth went dry. "You know, it really... puts things in perspective. She was a human, and it's a little different for me, but I can't help but think about how nothing lives forever. Someday in the future, maybe your descendants will hunt me down, or maybe I'll fall into lava and burn to death, or I'll get staked in the heart like Victoria. Point is, even though I supposedly have eternity on my side now, someday, my time will run out. Some time from now, years from now, or maybe even tomorrow, I'll wake up as I did this morning thinking I'm still some kid. Thinking I still have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me. And then, I'll find out, again, that I'm wrong. My choices have already been made and half my life is behind me. I've already wasted so much time these past three years, and even though I have nothing but time, I can't help but feel like it's running out."

☾

FOUR DAYS AGO

THERE EXISTS A CERTAIN COMFORT, an escapist's piece of serenity that accompanies the concept of death, and Violet is a firm believer that it's not as transcendental as it all seems. As everyone makes it out to be.

Nobody knows what happens to someone when they die, so it makes perfect sense to fabricate lores around the world's biggest mystery. When a person dies, there begs the pervasive question permeating the membranes of everyone's subliminal thoughts:what happens to their consciousness? Does the soul exist? What does the spirit look like? Where do they go? Then the theories about an Afterlife, a Heaven, a Hell, a purgatory, a reincarnation—all of which have yet to prove their existence—start pouring in.

Violet wasn't sure what Victoria's soul would look like, or if she even had one in that cold, cobwebbed cavity between her lungs.

But Victoria was dead, her blood glistened like rubies in the snow, and there was no soul to consider, no cartoon-esque ghostlike wisp drifting up from her body, which lay in pieces, glistering like diamonds, with the cracks to show.

And even after the battle, the snow kept falling around her, and the sun kept glaring through the trees, and the sky was bloated with thick clouds, and the wind didn't stop howling and the world didn't stop moving. Violet felt the cold creeping in. Felt its invasive presence icing her veins from the inside out, even as droplets of her blood hit the snow with a hiss.

Paul cradled Violet's dying body in his lap, his hands over the wound in her chest, slicked with blood, slicked with pain, slicked with the reminder that she was painfully mortal and she was just a girl. She could barely speak, and when she did, it was in laboured breaths and whispers so soft it was almost painful to hear. Because with every word expelled, there was the possibility of it being her last dying breath.

Luka knelt on her other side, shock written over his expression, but aside from that, his built composure wasn't compromised. Violet met his gaze with a surreptitious smile. Time's up, a voice in her head sang, but it wasn't like the iron voice's, or Victoria's, or any of the illusions her sick brain had crafted up and conjured into corporeality.

"Vi, please stay with me, please," Paul begged, and his voice was a faraway sound, like she'd been submerged underwater and he was suddenly universes away, drifting further and further. She felt his fingers glide over her cheek. Felt his tears leak onto the bridge of her nose, felt him brush away her hair, tuck it behind her ear, felt him all over, his warmth, his heart beating, every shuddering breath, the fear racking his ribs. It's the first time she heard him sound so broken and it almost broke her too. This is wrong, she thought. "You can't go," he implored, "We'll get you to a hospital, we'll get Carlisle to help you—"

"I don't think that'll help me now," Violet says, a small, quaking smile stretching her lips. She lifts a hand, trembling with immense effort with the last of her waning strength, and only manages to touch her fingers to his cheek. "It's okay."

"It's not fair."

"I deserve this." Eye for an eye. Memory by memory. Ashes to ashes. Blood for blood. "Now, let me go."

"I just got you back," Paul says, his voice cracking, and her slowing heart throbs in agony. Not from the holes in her chest, but because her heart has never been hers, and yet it never should've been Pauls. It is too black, too burnt with all her sins. "Let Luka help you. Please don't go."

Violet swallows weakly, and when she tries to speak, the voice that comes out of her mouth isn't hers.

"Time's up." Livvy's voice says, and in place of Paul's tear-stained face peering down at her, begging her to stay, it's Livvy, pink hair and pink lips, eyes filled with laughter glittering with a relieved sadness. Livvy looming over her with words Violet never thought she'd speak. "We gotta go now."

"Livvy?" Violet whispers.

"Vi?" Paul's voice is distant. In another world. A lifetime away. "Vi, please."

But it's too late. No amount of begging or bargaining would get her to stay. Not with Livvy, standing there, a hand outstretched with the words, "you can rest now," like angels singing to Violet's ears.

And just like that, it's over. Violet is gone.

But not before she hears someone say, "May we meet again."

When Violet breathes her last breath, when her chest goes still and her body goes slack, and her hands uncurl from around Paul's, Paul feels his heart stop.

☾

NOW

"I ALWAYS THOUGHT vampires didn't sleep," Sam mused.

"We don't," Luka said, "but I just like to close my eyes and pretend anyway."

Sam laughs, and it makes Luka feel good for a moment before it makes him feel so much worse. The crash comes after the fall, as they always say.

"You know," Sam says, his eyes elsewhere, before flicking his gaze back to Luka, a bitter smile on his lips. "If you ever decide to come back here, or if you're ever just passing through, there's always a place for you at the table."

Raking a hand through his wet hair, Luka blew a puff of air out and dropped his gaze back to his shoes. "I don't know."

"Say you'll at least think about it?"

Mustering up a smile, Luka turned back to Sam. "Maybe." With that, he turned to go. And a single memory struck him then, surfacing between the floorboards, and Luka pivoted to face Sam again, walking backwards towards the gates where he'd parked the car with all his things and too many miles left on the tank, "or maybe I'll see you on the beach, if that's still..."

Even though the shadows lapsing over Sam's face obscured his features, Sam's smile was so bright it broke Luka's heart a little. "Ours is the beach."

"I'll see you around, Sam," Luka said, his tone soft. Walls coming down. He didn't stay to see if Sam noticed.

When he got back to the car, which he'd left idling by the gates, the headlights still beaming down the gravel road, he was soaked through to the bone and Violet was sitting in the passenger's seat. She didn't want to go into the cemetery with him, and she hadn't given him any other reason except that it made her feel weird—after all, she'd worked so hard to make her mark and all there was to show for it was the stone in the ground and another empty coffin. They hadn't kept the heater on because neither of them needed it, so when Luka finally slid into the driver's seat, he only felt the blast of the air conditioning.

"What took you so long?" Violet asked, one hand fiddling with the ring binder of a very familiar sketchbook in her lap, the other holding up her phone. In the darkness, the light of her phone screen illuminated her pale features, lighting her blood-red eyes like twin gemstones. Luka read the contact she was staring at. Kit. One of Violet's friends from the Rez.

Luka's guess was that she missed her friends already. In the past four days, they'd been hiding from everyone they knew here, just until after the funeral, during which Luka had managed to sneak back into their house to collect their things, pack some bags and pick up their skateboards, and some other miscellaneous possessions. All of it was in the trunk and in the backseat. They hadn't had a lot of time, and no one knew that they were finally leaving the place Violet had worked so hard to get back to, and was finally leaving on her own terms, or that Violet was even alive. Neither of them wanted to attend the funeral, anyway. Violet didn't think she could handle watching her parents bury another child. They hadn't even come just to see Wren, who'd flown in from London with their mother. Sentiment breaks down the will. Violet didn't want to put it to chance, and Luka respected that.

Now, Luka leant back in his seat, but couldn't keep the smile off his face. "Nothing."

Violet rolled her eyes. "Liar. You know, I can smell him. I didn't realise wolves smelled so strongly to us. It's not as bad as Alice said they were."

Luka flicked her in the cheek. "Shut up."

Nights before the battle, before before she'd killed Victoria, she'd made a deal with Luka, one that she hadn't told anybody about because she figured it'd be easier to leave afterwards—not even Sage and Kit, who were both still tender subjects, and both of whom had been at the funeral. The night Luka had come crawling to her on his knees, though there was nothing holy about his purpose, they stayed up until the dawn to talk about everything. All the secrets spilling into the open. Luka had told her everything—what Victoria had done, and what she was meant to do, and why he'd waited so long to come to her. After all that, she had put her trust in something he couldn't prove to her.

☾

THREE DAYS AGO

LUKA READJUSTED THE SHOVEL in his hand before driving the pointed tip into the ground. When the shovel stuck, he slammed the heel of his sneaker down on the shovel head and drilled it into the dirt.

At three in the morning, the cemetery stood a mausoleum of darkness and silence permeated by keening crickets and snapping twigs and the whispering wind drawing out ancient groans from bending trees. In the distance, the howling sirens of police cars echoed warning calls. After the massacre in the field, the town was on edge. After the funerals, the air seemed stained with melancholy and mourning. An uneasy shudder snaked down Luka's spine as he straightened. So far away in the land of the dead and the sounds of his eminent demise still haunt him, salivating dogs snapping at his fox-quick heels.

It's dark. Too dark. But Luka could see just fine. Still, he had to work fast. Getting caught digging up a grave would only lead to too many questions he couldn't afford to answer. This grave especially. And so, working with the moonlight illuminating Violet Korchak's tombstone, Luka kept shovelling up grave dirt, tirelessly pushing himself even when every snap of a branch was someone coming to catch him in the act, and every howl of the wind was a wolf's call, and he could swear someone was watching him. But he couldn't. For one, he couldn't linger too long digging up his sister's grave and risk getting caught by patrol. Second, there was a promise he needed to uphold. He couldn't put this off for another day—rigor mortis had already set in, and Luka didn't have much time before the body would begin to decay.

So he kept digging and digging. Until the shovel struck against something solid.

Immediately, Luka jumped into the hole and tore the lid of the coffin off and the stench of Violet's corpse hit him like a wave. Luka wrinkled his nose, but resisted the urge to turn away. Instead, he bent down, pressed his hands to Violet's still chest, careful not to put too much force, and reached as far as he could. A cold ran up his arms—a cold not like his own frozen body, or like the lack of warmth, but a cold of the inherent wrongness of bending the laws of nature, the reversal of life's direction—and beneath his palms, a heartbeat fluttered, as Violet Korchak's eyes snapped open, her gaze was made of bullets, shrapnel shredding through skin, and smiled.

☾

NOW

"SO, WHERE ARE WE GOING?" Violet asked, lifting a brow. Outside, the rain lashed against the windows, drumming against the roof of the car and blurring the view of the road through the windshield.

Violet hit a button on the stereo system, and a burst of abrasive static cut through the space. Both of them flinched, the frequency hurting their ears. Music didn't sound the same the vampires, because they could hear every micro-detail, and sounds that used to be so normal, had a different quality to them. Violet huffed and slammed her fist against the same button to turn the vile sound off, accidentally cracking the plastic shell. She was still getting used to her newfound strength.

The deal wasn't just to bring her back, but to make her just like him so nothing could hurt her ever again. Becoming a vampire didn't make a person invincible. New being, new problems. But Violet seemed to think that it'd lessen the chances of her being prone to the same afflictions as when she'd been human.

Luka sucked in a breath—not out of necessity, but more of a performative action—and drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. "Well, Violet, we've got fifteen bucks between us both, and you still have to figure out what your special vampire abilities are." He tipped his head back and met her dubious gaze with a toothy grin. "I say we can go wherever we want."

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
the end 😌✊🏼

ok yeah so i know towards the end of the book the content started to suck,,,, majorly,,,, and it's partly bc ive lost interest in writing this plot and for twilight :( sorry. and the way things tied up kinda..... sucks also.... bc i just wanted to get this fic over and done with as quickly as possible bc i knew that if i'd just left it, i'd never pick it back up, and then i'd REALLY lose where im at with this.

sooooo anyway. thanks for sticking around! vi's a very special character to me, and i know this fic isnt perfect and has its faults and all but i genuinely did enjoy writing this. 🤍🤍🤍 i hope you guys can forgive how rushed the ending was