This was a mistake.

Ludovic shouldn't have tried to turn her.

He didn't know what he was doing.

Forty-eight hours had passed since he'd drunk down his wife's blood and fed her his own. When Ludovic himself had been turned, he'd awoken almost immediately, but Elise had spent all that time in a state of half-wild semi-consciousness, moaning and thrashing in their bed. Even when she lost consciousness entirely, she clawed frantically at the air, and when he tried to restrain her, to stop her hurting herself, her nails raked bloody furrows into his arms.

Was this normal?

Had he done it wrong?

Ludovic tried to feed her, bringing small animals into their bedroom and cutting their necks, holding them over her open mouth, and that seemed to quiet her for a while, but it never lasted. Always the wildness took over.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, pulling her head into his lap and stroking her hair. "I should never have done this to you."

Elise moaned and twisted, the whites of her eyes showing beneath her fluttering lids.

Ludovic had never felt so helpless.

He'd never been so bleakly aware of how little he actually knew about vampires. There was no one to ask, no one to help.

All he could do was continue to feed Elise, and talk to her and soothe her, and hope with everything he had that she would get better.

He had no idea what to do if she didn't.

Another twenty-four hours passed, and Elise seemed to get worse. She scratched Ludovic's arms to ribbons, but that was nothing compared to what he felt he deserved for doing this to her. He loved her so much, and she was suffering because of him, because of what he'd talked her into. Could he really pretend he'd done it for anything other than selfish reasons? Any reason other than that he was scared to be alone again, scared to lose the only good thing in his life? Now that good thing was paying the price for his cowardice.

"I love you," he whispered, hugging her to him.

A hand trailed along his jaw and his eyes flew open.

Elise was looking up at him, and though her eyes were vampire-red, the madness had faded. The desperate, barely conscious vampire was gone, and he held his wife in his arms again.

"Elise?" he whispered, touching her face with a trembling hand.

She offered a weak smile.

Ludovic helped her sit up, and leaned her against his chest, handling her as carefully as if she was made of glass. "How are you feeling?"

She took the time to consider the question. "Strong," she said. "I feel strong."

"Really?" He tilted her head back so he could get a good look at her.

Her skin was paler than he'd ever seen it, making her freckles look like specks of gold, and her eyes gleamed red.

"How long have I been in bed like this?" she asked.

"Three days."

Her eyes widened. She looked down at her hands, splattered red, drying blood under her nails. "Whose blood is this?"

"It's mine."

She jerked away from him, for the first time seeing the clawed scratches on his arms. "I did that?"

"It doesn't matter. All that matters is that you're alright."

Elise shuffled off the bed and flexed her hands. "I'm better than alright. I feel like I could punch through a wall or run with the wind. Is it like this all the time?"

"I don't know," he admitted. He'd spent too much of his vampire life in fear.

Elise bounded forward and grabbed his hands. "So what happens now? You'll teach me how to be a vampire?"

"I'm not sure how much I even know about that," he confessed.

She beamed up at him. "We'll have to learn together then."

Elise learned first.

As years passed, Ludovic forgot his anger and disgust at how he'd led her to this point. She was happy. They both were. They hunted together at night, slept together during the day, and sometimes, when it was dark and windy, Elise would go out into the countryside and run, pushing her vampire body to see how fast and how far she could go. She embraced it in a way that Ludovic never had, and it helped him embrace it too.

He'd almost forgotten about the dark days when he hated himself.

But one bone of contention arose between them.

Elise didn't like the taste of animal blood.

Ludovic agreed that it didn't taste as good as human blood, but sometimes feeding on animals was necessary. They couldn't afford to draw too much attention to themselves.

Elise disagreed.

"We're vampires," she'd said to him once. "It's natural for us to prey on humans."

"I'm not sure the humans would agree," he'd pointed out, but Elise just scoffed and turned away from him.

Ludovic began to realise the things that Elise truly embraced about being a vampire were the very things that had once made him so afraid. She loved her strength, her power. She found a thrill in the hunt. She wanted to feed every day, whereas Ludovic felt it wasn't safe for them to do so, and she wasn't happy with only taking a small amount at a time. Ludovic had taught her to only ever take as much as they needed to survive, which wasn't much at all, but Elise began to chafe against those restrictions.

One night, after they had silently stalked a couple through the town streets so they could feed from them, Ludovic realised that things were deteriorating. He'd taken a few mouthfuls from his female victim, and then sealed the wounds, but Elise was still drinking.

"That's enough," Ludovic said.

Her eyes met his, bright red over the throat of her victim, but she didn't stop. The man sagged in her arms, pale and still.

"Elise, that's enough." Ludovic tried to pull her away, and she snarled at him, like a wild animal, baring bloodied fangs. In that moment, Ludovic saw absolutely nothing of the woman he loved. He saw the darkness that he had always feared.

"Let me go," she said.

"You're killing him," Ludovic snapped.

"So?"

Ludovic stared at her, and she stared back, chin lifted, red eyes defiant.

"Let. Him. Go," he said.

Something frayed between them in that moment, the bonds of love and respect they'd built up fracturing under the weight of something that Ludovic had never expected and didn't understand.

What would he do if Elise refused to release her victim?

Physically, he could force her – he was a lot stronger than she was – but she was still his wife. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her.

"Please," he said, and the anger in Elise's eyes softened.

She let the man go, and he dropped to the ground, and the dismissive way she treated him, as if he wasn't a person, felt like a kick to the heart.

Even when Elise took his hand, smiling at him as warmly as she ever did, Ludovic was painfully aware that something had changed between them, and he had no idea what to do about it.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise when Elise finally killed someone.

Yet to Ludovic it somehow still was.

When they were alone together, she was still his Elise, still that beautiful, curious girl he'd met when she was washing in the river years ago. But when they hunted, she became something else, something that chilled him to the core.

For the first time in a long time, his old nightmares resurfaced – that poor monk dying in his arms, Maurice's head splattered across the kitchen floor, Jehanne's savage snarl and the pain as she ripped into his throat. He found himself watching Elise closely whenever they drank from humans, and sometimes he even intentionally ruined their hunts, to keep her away from people. Deep down, he knew she was dangerous, but he still loved her, and he let that blind him to what she was capable of.

Ultimately that cost someone their life.

They'd already fed once that night, and when Elise told him she was going into the countryside to run, Ludovic thought nothing of it. It wasn't until she'd walked away, that something started niggling at him. He couldn't put his finger on what it was at first. Some instinct was calling him, making his skin prickle, an innate sense that something was wrong.

He looked back at the street that Elise had taken, and that sense of unease grew deeper.

"You're imagining things," he told himself, but the unease didn't go away.

Something was wrong.

He went after his wife.

By the time he caught up with her, it was too late. The young woman she had caught – not even a woman, a girl – hung limply in Elise's arms, her heart silent and still.

Elise froze when she saw Ludovic, but she didn't pull her fangs out of the girl's neck. Her eyes blazed, like something from Ludovic's nightmares.

"Elise," he whispered, and then didn't know what else to say.

They stared at each other over the body of the girl, and Ludovic couldn't move because he couldn't understand how things had got to this point; he couldn't even believe this was happening.

Then Elise moved her mouth from the girl's neck, and the sight of the blood dripping from her fangs and sliding down her chin spurred Ludovic into action.

He charged forward, and Elise dropped the girl. Ludovic caught her before she hit the ground, but it made no difference now. Elise had killed her, and for what?

"I don't understand," he said, looking up at her.

Elise wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I was thirsty," she said.

"You killed her."

He waited to see even a flicker of remorse on his wife's face, but there was nothing.

"How could you do this?" he said, gently lowering the girl's body to the ground.

"I'll take her out in the countryside and bury her. No one will suspect us."

"I don't care about that. I care about the fact that you've just murdered someone for nothing," Ludovic shouted.

"For someone who's always been concerned about us avoiding attention, you're doing a lot to draw it towards us now," Elise said.

"I'm not the one with someone's else's blood on me," Ludovic snapped.

Elise looked at the back of her hand, where a smear of red still remained, and licked it clean.

"Go home," Ludovic said. "I'll deal with this."

Elise walked past him, paused, and kissed his cheek. He could smell blood on her lips.

"I love you," she said.

For the first time, Ludovic didn't say it back.

He buried the girl outside the city, hating himself for it.

If she had a family, they would never know what had happened to her, but his sense of self-preservation overrode that guilt. Maybe that was selfish, but he couldn't risk anyone suspecting that vampires were behind her death.

Then he went back to town, to the house where Elise was waiting for him.

She had changed into a muslin shift, like the one she'd worn when they first met, and cleaned the blood from her skin, and now she sat on their bed, smiling at him as if nothing was wrong.

But Ludovic couldn't forget the weight of the dead girl as he'd carried her out into the night, or the gritty feel of the earth under his fingernails as he dug her grave. And he could never forget the indifference on Elise's face, the blood dripping from her fangs.

He leaned against the door, watching her.

Elise's smile faded. "Stop looking at me like that. I'm sorry, alright? I didn't mean to kill her."

"But you didn't care that you did."

Elise shut her mouth.

"What happened to you?" Ludovic said. Their bedroom wasn't big, so only a little space separated him from her, yet he'd never felt further away from her. "How did you become this?"

Her expression darkened. "I became powerful."

"You became a killer." Tears of frustration and exhaustion stung Ludovic's eyes. "I don't understand. The Elise I married would never think that killing people was alright."

"Maybe I'm not that Elise anymore."

"No." Ludovic realised it with sudden, awful certainty. "You're not."

They regarded each other for a long moment.

"I still love you," said Elise quietly. "I just think you don't understand what being a vampire is. We are predators, Ludovic, superior to humans."

"No, we're not, and even if we were, that doesn't give us the right to kill them."

Elise sighed as if they were discussing something as trivial as the weather. "I'll try to be more careful, if that will make you happy."

Who are you? Ludovic wanted to scream. What have you done with my wife?

But this hadn't happened overnight, and he couldn't pretend he hadn't seen the signs. Elise had changed, and he had looked the other way rather than acknowledging it because he hadn't wanted to admit that anything was wrong. He couldn't look away now.

Elise waited for him to say something, and he tried to find the words to describe what he was feeling.

This wasn't about making him happy. It was about Elise understanding that what she was doing was wrong.

"I love you," she said again, this time with a hint of uncertainty. She had to be aware that he hadn't said it back that night.

"I love you too," Ludovic said, but he didn't feel the words like he used to, as if speaking them was like lighting a small fire in his chest.

He had a choice to make here, he realised. He could walk away from his wife, his marriage, or he could stay and keep an eye on her, even if he was no longer sure he loved her.

He chose to stay.

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