"I'm sorry," Nathaniel mumbled, knowing it was woefully inadequate. "I'm so sorry, Mary. You deserved so much better than this. You deserved to see all those wonders you dreamed of."

A silver glint caught his eye as he was about to set Mary down. Around her neck was a small locket. He removed it with care, then opened it, ignoring the burn of the silver. It contained a miniature painting of a stern-looking woman he didn't recognize, along with a carefully folded piece of paper. His hands shook as he unfolded it, revealing Mary's neat handwriting:

Dearest Father,
If you're reading this, I've finally found the courage to leave. Mr. Blackwood has promised to show me the world beyond our village. I know you'll worry, but please understand—I cannot spend my entire life pouring ales and wiping tables. There's so much more out there, and I mean to see it all.
Your loving daughter,
Mary

She had written a goodbye letter, planning for their future together. A future he had destroyed in one moment of weakness, when the scent of her blood had proved too intoxicating to resist.

The locket was still warm from her skin, a ghastly indication of the life he had just taken. Inside, beyond the stern woman's portrait, the letter's edges were worn, as if Mary had folded and unfolded it many times, rehearsing her escape. Had she read it over and over, finding courage in her own words? Had she imagined her father's reaction, pictured him reading it by candlelight in their small kitchen?

The paper trembled in his bloodstained hands, Mary's careful penmanship blurring before his eyes. Each word was a dagger to his chest, each carefully planned dream another weight added to his burden of guilt. But it was his name in the letter that truly damned him: Mr. Blackwood has promised to show me the world.

He should destroy it, he knew. The letter was evidence, a direct link between him and Mary's disappearance. Yet his fingers refused to tear the delicate paper. It was the last piece of her dreams, the final trace of her hopes for a future now forever lost.

Perhaps her father deserved to know she had planned to leave, that she had sought a larger life beyond the village's borders. But no—the letter would only raise more questions. The villagers would wonder about this Mr. Blackwood, and sooner or later, someone would remember the quiet gentleman who had spoken so earnestly with Mary in the tavern's shadows.

Nathaniel quickly refolded the letter and returned it to the locket. Let her father search without answers—it was crueler, perhaps, but would it really be worse than a false hope that would never be realized?

Gently, reverently, Nathaniel lowered Mary's body into the dark waters. The stream, swollen with recent rains, accepted her like a lover, drawing her into its embrace. He watched as the current caught her, carrying her away into the gloom, her auburn hair spreading out like copper flames on the water's surface. His emotions had been difficult to reach ever since the transformation, but tonight, blood-red tears flowed freely. 

For a moment, Nathaniel was tempted to follow her into those murky waters. Would drowning hurt a vampire? Could he even drown? The thought of simply walking into the stream, letting the current take him as it had taken Mary, was almost too strong to resist. But he knew he didn't deserve such an easy escape.

The village would search, of course. They would comb the woods, call her name until their voices grew hoarse. But they would never find her. The stream fed into deeper waters, and Mary's dreams of seeing the world would be fulfilled only in death as the currents carried her far from the village that had both nurtured and confined her.

As Nathaniel turned away from the stream, his mind whirled with questions. How did other vampires manage this? Surely they must exist in London, if not in these rural areas, yet he had encountered none. Why had no one reached out to him, taught him how to control these devastating urges? 

In the nights that followed, Nathaniel found himself perched in the bell tower of the village church, scanning the moonlit countryside below for any sign of supernatural activity. But the village remained stubbornly mundane, offering no answers to his growing list of questions. Only the occasional wolf howl in the distance hinted at other creatures of the night.

Sometimes, he would hide out there during the day, keeping to the darkness. Women gathered at the well, sharing gossip about Mary's disappearance. Their theories grew wilder with each passing day—she'd run off with a traveling salesman, she'd joined a circus, she'd been spirited away by faeries. 

If only they knew the truth.

In quiet moments, his thoughts inevitably turned to Elias, and now to Mary. Two lives he had taken, two futures he had destroyed. The weight of his actions pressed down on him, threatening to crush what remained of his humanity. 

Each night, he watched Mary's father's ritual of hope and despair. The old man would stand in the tavern doorway, lantern held high, scanning the darkness for any sign of his daughter. Sometimes he would call her name, his voice growing more desperate with each passing night. The regulars had stopped trying to console him, instead turning away with awkward sympathy when he spoke of the letters he hoped to receive from her—letters that would never come, from cities she would never see.

One particularly dark night, Nathaniel watched the old man collapse to his knees in the muddy street, clutching Mary's favorite apron to his chest. The sight broke something inside him, something he thought had died along with his humanity.

Nathaniel found himself longing for the discipline of his military days. As a captain, he had prided himself on his self-control and strategic thinking. Now, he felt at the mercy of his baser instincts, prone to violent outbursts and rash decisions that left nothing but sorrow for all involved. 

As dawn approached one night, Nathaniel returned to his rented rooms above the village bookshop. Sitting at his desk, he began to formulate a plan. He couldn't face Elias's sister directly—his earlier failure had proven that. But perhaps he could approach this problem from another angle.

Elias had mentioned a brother-in-law, a businessman named Richard Whitby. If Nathaniel could arrange a meeting with him under the guise of a potential business opportunity, he might be able to gather more information about the family. From there, he could better plan how to break the news of Elias's death—and perhaps find a way to assuage his own guilt in the process.

Nathaniel spent the remainder of the night drafting a carefully worded letter to Richard Whitby, proposing a meeting to discuss a lucrative investment opportunity. As he sealed the envelope with wax, he scoffed. Writing letters? He was simply a monster playing at being human. Yet what choice did he have? The weight of his sins was becoming too much to bear, and he needed answers—about himself, about other vampires, about how to prevent more tragedies like Mary's death.

Before morning broke, Nathaniel had dispatched the message via the post. 

As he turned away from the post office, raised voices from The Stag and Vine caught his attention. Through the tavern's windows, he saw an elderly woman accosting two strangers—a woman in unusual attire and a tall man whose bearing made Nathaniel's instincts go into high alert. 

"The mirrors, child," the old woman's voice carried clearly. "They remember everything. Every face, every shadow that's crossed their surface."

Nathaniel pressed himself against the wall of a nearby building, watching intently as the pair emerged from the tavern. The man—tall, impossibly elegant, with long black hair and striking features—turned toward the church spire. Even at this distance, Nathaniel could sense the power radiating from him, ancient and controlled in a way that made his own vampiric nature feel crude by comparison.

"Miss Adelaide may have the answers I seek," he heard the stranger say.

Nathaniel's heart clenched. Adelaide. Elias's sister. The thought of another supernatural being approaching her made his fingers close into a fist. But there was something else—this creature clearly knew things about their kind, about what they were. Perhaps he held the answers Nathaniel so desperately sought. 

He could follow this being. To learn from him—or to kill him—Nathaniel wasn't sure which. Perhaps both. After all, he was already damned—what was one more sin in his ledger? 

But the rising sun made pursuit impossible, for now. The fog would not last much longer, which meant he would be exposed. Nathaniel retreated to the darkness of his room as the first rays of light began to streak across the village rooftops. Before he drifted into his death-like sleep, Mary’s final words replayed in his mind—"I see everything now." He wondered what truths she had glimpsed in those last moments, what mysteries of existence had been revealed to her as she straddled the boundary between life and death.

Perhaps, he thought as consciousness slipped away, she had seen something beautiful in those final seconds—something worth dying for. But he would never know, and that uncertainty would continue haunting him like a ghost, along with the memory of her blood on his lips and her dreams forever unfulfilled.