An Ever Fixéd Mark

Lizzie Watson ran away from a broken heart into a new dress size. Not quite the finish line she imagined for her 15 year high school reunion. Close enough, though, to attract Ben Cottingham away from her perfectly beautiful, married with children, former best friend. Their subsequent tryst fuels her determination to run off those last twenty pounds. To run off the irritation with her fallible heart and its unexpected fixation on Ben’s green eyes. She runs right into his path and finds he isn’t just the boy who pined after her friend in high school. In fact he wasn’t a boy at all, but something entirely different. A different type of human that never ages, never gets ill, and needs the blood of another human to stay that way. But that… that is almost something she knew all along and was just waiting to hear so they could move on to the next step. It is a relatively easy shift to accept the reality, but a challenge to live the minor details. Ben will never appreciate her culinary talents. She already has gray hairs and has to keep training to make her blood healthy and desirable. Her peers settle down to start families – an option that leaves the table when committing to a vampire. Or are these just excuses to keep running? Sort of. There is always something, something at the edge of her brain she knows she must understand before she can let herself feel completely. Something in the story of a missing girl from her hometown, something in the silences about his brother, something in the dreams that distort her present with a past before she was born. A past she must understand to stop running and fleeing from the consequences of her own inhumanity.