The rosary was beautiful. Each bead was finally cut from ruby, throwing back droplets of sunlight so the beads looked like drops of blood.
Malachi looked down at it, appreciating the beauty. He couldn’t touch it. If he did, it would burn his skin deeply, to the bones of his fingers. So he only looked at it and remembered where it came from.
It had belonged to his mother, and it was all he had left of her. He remembered the day his father had given it to her, draping the rubies over her hands, where they fell between her fingers in a fall of crimson. Now it lay in its cotton-lined box, inside another box, the last box Malachi needed to unpack before he could truly say he’d settled into his new home.
The house was nothing like the house he’d grown up in, of course. Separated from his birthplace by three thousand miles and three hundred years, his current residence sat in the trendiest vampire-friendly section of Chicago, a penthouse in a high-rise apartment building. During the day, the windows were locked down tight, keeping even the smallest ray of sunlight from touching him. At night, he could throw open coverings on the big bay windows and see the whole of downtown Chicago spread before him, clusters and garlands of lights blinking on and off throughout the night.
When he was a child, there had been no lights after sunset except the stars, perhaps a candle, a torch if you had to check on the animals. It was a different life, a different world.
He set the box with the rosary aside, instead withdrawing other bits and pieces, different accoutrements, and setting them in their proper places. A coin collection, a Delft plate. Nested Russian dolls from the nineteenth century. A lace doily carefully tatted by his human lover in the early 1700s.
But the rosary–his eyes kept returning to it, to the splashes of red the lamplight coaxed from it. Sometimes he wondered why he kept it. It was useless to him. Dangerous, even.
But over three hundred years, he hadn’t been able to part with it. Because it helped him remember his mother.
After all this time, he still recalled the taste of her blood.