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My dearest friend,
It’s weird. I’ve had to say goodbye to everyone I’ve ever loved. You would think I’d be good at it by now. But practice doesn’t always make perfect, I guess. I both hope this letter is enough and know it isn’t.
Everything is yours now. There’s instructions and all the paperwork you need to sign in the binder on my desk. And there are more things for you in the basement, behind the vault door. The combination to get in is 05-07-26. (It’s not gold bars, sorry to disappoint.)
You’re smart. Smarter than you give yourself credit for sometimes. So I know you already know what I’m about to tell you. Part of me thinks you’ve always known, even before it became obvious. You’re so observant and so open-minded. It wouldn’t surprise me if you knew long before Gran started forgetting and saying things that everyone else assumed were wild ramblings of a fading mind. I could see it in your face that you knew better.
But you never asked. Never feared me. Befriended me, even. Made jokes about my “past lives” peeking through and left it there. So, for that, I give you my thanks. And the truth.
I can’t include everything here. It’s too much. All the finer details will be in journals I’ve left you downstairs. But the important things—the ones that hurt me and healed me the most—I want to share with you here. Sorry if I ramble or can’t remember clearly or slip into the “old-fashioned talk” you love to tease me for. Even after all these years, it’s hard not to sometimes.
I am a vampire. I was born in the south of Ireland, near the end of the year 1721, as Rebecca Mulhivill. My parents were Féilim and Brigid. Strong names, chosen with a lot of thought. Féilim came from an older word that meant “ever good” or “enduring” and it wasn’t until I was older that I saw that in my father. We struggled to see eye-to-eye. He wanted a proper daughter who would get just educated enough to marry someone who could afford to take care of her better than they could. And I wanted to know everything, to travel the world, work for my own money, and never get married. Very large dreams for a woman back then, of course. But Ma used to say dreams were meant to be bigger than we are so could grow into them.
She was the one thing my father and I agreed on: we loved her more than anything in the world. Brigid, named for a goddess of healing, poetry, wisdom. Fitting, because she was a mind beyond her time. She was always saying beautiful things that wouldn’t mean much to me until long after she was gone. It's sad, you know, that humans can be so blind to the truth of the people they love and sometimes never even live long enough to realize it. For a long time, I wished I hadn’t.
Our village was small. A scattering of houses around a cattle farm that was struggling to make ends meet in the best of times and a few potato fields. All on the outskirts of land owned by Lord Eógan O’Cyry. It wasn’t much. Da worked the fields from dawn to dusk. And Ma tended to the cows at the farm. I had chores and classes on the steps of Mrs. Bowen’s house with the other children. At night, we had dinner and Ma would tell stories of the gods we once believed in. Immortals who lived in a world alongside this one and only interacted with us when they felt like it.
That’s how I saw Eógan back then. People said he’d inherited the land from his father, but they also said that he looked so much like his father that it was believable they were one and the same. No one claimed to have ever seen him young. And no one had ever seen his father old. “Immortal,” they whispered in our tiny tavern late at night, like they were scared he could hear from his great castle on the horizon. As a child, I thought of him just like those gods. Immortal, living close enough to meet, but only if he wished it. And he was as real to me then as the legends. Just a name in the mist.
Until he wasn’t.