Chapter 109

AXL I sit on the edge of the bed, holding my head in my hands. It’s been over two hundred years since I felt the adverse morning-after consequences of overindulging in alcohol—a major perk of being a vampire is the lack of hangovers—but I remember it clearly. And it’s the only comparison I have for the way I’m feeling. Is this how the deterioration starts? Does it really start this early? In the two weeks since our arrival, our first Christmas and New Year’s with our girl came and went without notice, and Ophelia has remained steadfastly dedicated to her ambition of reading every single book in Giorgios’s fortress. After we got through the first lot of piles and found nothing, she simply created a new catalog and sorted out more books and more topics and has been unwavering in her certainty that the answers are in there somewhere. And for the first week and a half, we were equally committed. But with every book we read and discarded came more failure, more hopelessness. And while it se