Tomorrow is our anniversary.

It’ll also be five days since I lost you. Five long days and five even longer nights. It’s all blending together like one unending nightmare.

At times, I think that surely it is a nightmare. Surely I’ll wake up soon and you’ll be right there by my side, curled against me, your hair spilled on the pillow. We’ll make love. I’ll tell you about my nightmare and you’ll call me silly. We’ll go about our day, and go hunt at nightfall. Tonight, we might even manage to finally execute Ann together. And then…

But I’m not waking up. And I’m not going to, am I? It’s not a dream. It’s really happening. You’re gone.

I killed Ann three days ago. Two days too late. She was laughing ‘til the very end, asking me if I would kill you too. If I’d go hunting for you, or just wait for you to come home to me.

To come home to kill me.

Ah yes, she was very vocal in letting me know you’re a killer now. I called her a liar. Then I staked her. I wanted to ask her where you were, but if she had told me I’d have needed to go look for you, and I don’t think I’m ready for that. Not yet.

As much as I want to believe, to hope she was lying, a little voice inside me can’t help but ask – what if she wasn’t? What if you really are a killer? The very thing we were taught to hunt…

I hope you’ll leave town now that your Sire is dead. You have to know she is. We were told at the Academy that Childer can feel their Sire’s death, so surely you felt Ann’s. I’m sorry you had to feel that pain, but I’m not sorry I avenged you. Because in the end, that’s what it was. Revenge. I didn’t care anymore that she was a known killer, that she’d been on the S.E. list for years. All I cared about was this one thing: there’s a jewelry box at the bottom of my sock drawers and it’s going to stay there because she took you from me. And that’s why she died.

Tomorrow is our anniversary and I miss you so much I can hardly breathe. I don’t know how I’ll get through the day – or the night.

Will you think at all about what day it is – about me?

Waking up with fangs was like being born again.

At the Academy, I had been taught that vampires’ senses are more developed, that their bodies are faster, stronger, more resistant to injuries. And I had confirmed each and every one of these facts from direct experience during my time as a Special Enforcer.

But what no professor ever told me, what no book could convey, what I could never have guessed without living it for myself was what it felt like to have these keener senses, to move faster than you even think you can or to crush something in your hand without meaning to.

Learning - re-learning – to use my body was quite a process.

Some parts were beautiful. I’ll always remember my first glimpse of the starry sky with my improved vision, or the smell of wilting roses after nightfall, like a last cry of defiance against death. A whole new world was at my fingertips, similar but subtly different from the world I had known.

Other parts were… less pretty. Cities stink, and that’s an understatement.

That’s not all there was to it, though. The physical aspect is one thing, one very important thing, but becoming a vampire also changes your mind and the very way you think. I realized that much at the very instant I laid eyes on Ann after waking up. She was the woman who had killed me, who had taken everything and everyone I’d ever loved from me and made me the very same thing I used to hunt. But when I looked at her, the only thought in my mind was ‘Sire;’ the only emotion, a deep need to listen to her and do as she said. Exactly as she said. And when she made me kill to feed… I expected to feel guilt, or even to be unable to finish the act. But I did, without remorse, and only a sense of waste. Vampires are hunters, a voice whispered at the back of my mind. Killing could be avoided, but it was nothing to be ashamed of.

Only one thing didn’t change. One small, insignificant thing – and yet more important than anything else. My Sire tried to tell me it wasn’t possible, and yet, there it was.

I still loved Logan.