Letters to Elise by Amanda Hocking Read Free Book Online Page B

very will give him my own. I hadn’t gone by the name “Monroe” since I’d been human, and it felt strange hearing him say it aloud. My own name had become the name of a stranger.
    I took his hand, shaking it firmly. His skin felt rough and calloused, the hands of a man in midlife who’d worked hard. My skin was soft and smooth as ever, the firm hands of a young man. He was my younger brother, and he was so much older than I will ever be.
    I left after that, wandering back to my flat in a daze. The streets felt winding, and I got lost several times. I couldn’t seem focus on anything.
    I hadn’t thought to ask of Daniel, and I regretted that. But Caroline and Joseph were fine. They were thriving actually. They’d done well without me, as they should.
    But seeing Joseph, knowing he’d grown old, that he would die in time, and I would not. I would not even change or age. These are things I’d known for so many years, but it was almost unfathomable to see.
    Time moves so strangely. I think it moves just as quickly for mortals as it does for us, but we have the luxury of being timeless, of being untouched by it. Or at least that’s what I’ve always believed.
    But now I’m beginning to think that it touches us even more than it touches them. It erodes, causing decay as harmful as the humans, but ours isn’t visible. It’s hidden away, tucked inside our hearts, where all our memories eaten away.
    I can never be sure if this life, this thing that Ezra bestowed to me, is a curse or a blessing. At times, I think it would be completely unbearable without you. I don’t think I could handle this on my own.
    Even as I write this, I’m still shaken. Not just from the visit with my brother, but from the illness I had last month. It won’t go away – this strange feeling of doom. I wake up in a cold sweat most days.
    Please, Elise, I need to hear from you soon. Ezra has tried to assure me that everything is fine, and I wish I could believe him, but I can’t. I won’t, not until I hear it from you. Tell me that you still love me, that we’ll be together soon, always and forever.
    Do you remember when we were on our honeymoon, and we arrived in Prague? We stood on the bridge, looking out over the Vltava flowing below us. The sky glowed blue as twilight came upon us, and the first star glowed brightly above us.
    “Should we go back to the room?” I asked you, my arms wrapped around your waist. I nuzzled your neck, my words muffled in the soft of your hair. “We could sleep…” I said sleep , but we’d slept on the train, and we hardly ever slept when we were in bed, at least on that trip.
    “Sleep?”   You laughed a little at that and turned to face me. Your hands went to my cheeks, stroking them lovingly, and you stared up in my eyes. “To sleep, perchance to dream. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”
    In that moment, I loved you, and you loved me. I heard you say those words, and I thought you meant death as in our lives, since we are truly the undead. You smiled as you said it, and I thought surely you must mean that we had been sleeping in this death until we met each other. Every moment we spent together had been a dream come true.
    I thought you had misquoted Shakespeare as a declaration of love. But now I wonder… were you ever truly happy, my love? Did you mean the soliloquy by its true intention? Even on our honeymoon, had the melancholy taken hold, so that you were thinking of suicide even as I held you in my arms?
    Or am I thinking on this too much? Elise, my true, return to me quickly, and tell me what dreams may come for us.
     
    Yours, forever and always, in this life and the next –
    Peter
     

June 15, 1863
     
     
    Peter-
    By now you must know that something has happened, and that’s why I’m writing to you instead of Elise. I’ve gotten all your letters, and I’ve read them all, even though most of them were addressed to Elise and not Catherine.  
    I pray you haven’t