“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at the portrait.

“My fiance,” she replied, scooting back to lean against the pillows.

I turned to her quickly. “Your fiance? You were engaged?”

“Yeah, I was,” Rosaline said wistfully, staring at the painting.

I felt sadness tug at my heart. “How long were you engaged?”

“Seven years,” she replied, sighing and closing her eyes. She snuggled farther into her pillows and blankets.

I got the hint.

“I’ll leave you alone,” I said, quickly slipping out before she could say anything.

Closing the door softly behind me, I paused in the hallway. What was I going to do while she slept?

My sense of politeness warred with my curiosity.

My curiosity won.

I went down the hallway to the east side of the building, glancing in doors as I went. Most of what I saw was bedrooms.

They all looked in really good shape. No dust, no mold, no vermin. Which was really surprising, considering Rosaline was the only one who lived here.

I came to the end of the hall with only three doors left to open.

The first opened into a room with beautiful tapestries hung on the walls. They were tightly woven, and the detail was so intricate that it could’ve been a painting.

One large tapestry hung on the north wall, depicting a large family enjoying a feast.

As I studied the tapestry, I realized that there weren’t just humans in the tapestry. There were people who looked halfway between a wolf and a human. There were people with strangely colored hair and sparks flying off of them. And there were vampires, pale white, proudly playing instruments or presenting sculptures.

Everyone looked so happy in the picture.

I gently touched the tapestry, and for a moment, I swore I could hear their laughter.

Exiting the room, I peeked in the next door, which was filled with sculptures. Not as interested, I closed the door.

The last door opened into a room full of paintings, most of them family portraits or landscapes. They were just as beautiful and detailed as the ones in Rosaline’s bedroom.

I studied the family portraits. There were easily more than fifty people in each one. Mostly vampires, but I spotted others among them. I spotted Rosaline in several of them, and in the newer ones, she stood beside her fiance. She was always grinning, and her fiance looked like she was trying to hold in laughter, as if Rosaline had told some joke.

As the paintings got newer, the number of people in the portraits became less and less. The first one where Rosaline’s fiance wasn’t in the picture, Rosaline looked like she was trying extremely hard to hold back tears. But the painter had captured a single tear that had rolled down her face, as if noting her grief.

At the end of the room was a prominently displayed painting, extremely large. Taking up most of the wall, in fact.

I studied it. A woman, hair loose, lying on her side in a lounge chair. She was wearing a white silk gown and a red pendant of some kind. She had brown skin and dark brown, almost black hair.

A sense of unease hit me. Why did this woman in the painting look so familiar?

I shook my head to clear my thoughts, and my gaze fell on a piece of hair that had fallen over my shoulder.

Dark hair. My gaze traveled back and forth between the two, and as realization crept up on me, I cautiously looked at my own necklace.

A red pendant. The exact same one in the painting.

Someone had painted me.

I sat down on the nearest bench. Did they know who I was? Where I came from? Who the people were that killed my mother?

Searching, I found a golden plaque beneath the painting. It read:

THE ONLY ARTWORK OF ROSALINE VERMILION, PAINTED BEFORE THE MASSACRE OF WITCHES.

I looked at the year of the painting, and was shocked to see that it was dated a year before my birth.

Not only that, but Rosaline had painted this? Why didn’t she say anything?

As I worked through it all in my head, I realized that she had probably made the right choice not to say anything. I would have been scared out of my wits. Not that I wasn’t now, but at least right now I didn’t feel tempted to run away.

I stared at the painting. Although I wasn’t any kind of painting expert, I could tell that it was created through a lot of hard work, and was clearly painted with love and care. I looked like a goddess in the painting, compared to right now, when I probably looked like a tired, dirty, crazy witch.

Rising from the bench, I went back out into the hallway and down the stairs to the hot springs. I needed a bath.