I had the strangest dream that I was a wolf. I awoke confused and startled. As a vampire, I know that can never be. It’s she, inside my mind again. I’m sure of it. I need to know whom she is before it drives me insane. I don’t dare speak a word about her to Harley. Not yet. I need to find her.
I need answers. Alice has been called a charlatan, a fraud, but I’ve seen enough to be sure that she knows things. Answers from Alice won’t come easy or cheap.
I glanced down to find Arys watching me intently, likely waiting for my expression to change as I read. I stroked a hand through his soft, ebony hair.
“Why don’t you tell me these things yourself, Arys? Then you can censor the parts I really don’t want or need to know.”
“You need to know all of it, my wolf. Just read it.”
I was skeptical. “I really need to know about all the fun you and Harley had driving women into a sexual frenzy while you killed them? I doubt that.”
Arys snickered, and it sent a shiver down my spine. “You don’t want to read it because it gets to you. You start to remember, and you like it.”
“Screw that.” My response came too fast, and my pulse quickened. I hated it when he was right.
“Keep reading. The worst of it never made it into that journal anyway.”
“That’s reassuring.”
It wasn’t. I did not want to read more about Arys’s murderous activity, but I did want to know more about Alice and what, if anything, she knew about us.
January 4, 1850
Alice is either a liar and a thief or a woman who knows too much. She read my palm, an act that seemed very contrived and only for show. Then she started talking, and I almost wished I’d never gone to see her at all. She confirmed what I already knew, that the wolf is mine, somehow. Twin flame. That is the term she used. The wolf is my twin flame. I had never heard of this before. I asked if she meant we were soul mates. The shriveled old hag laughed as if I were a fool.
Twin flames and soul mates are often confused though never the same. According to Alice, soul mates are two different people meant to be together, but twin flames are part of one another, created as one and split into two. Two separate beings, two separate souls, and yet we are one. Alice claims that twin flames rarely ever exist in the same lifetime. They aren’t meant to. Yet if they do somehow unite, it is for a reason. A spiritual purpose. Of course, I asked why. Alice was unwilling to part with more information without parting me from more money. I concluded that she had little else to share. Perhaps I will go back. Perhaps I never will.
If Alice speaks the truth then I will likely never know my wolf. I don’t even know her name. And, for some inexplicable reason, that pains me.
I read the entry a second time and then a third. Twin flames. I had never heard the term before. I flipped ahead to the next entry, but it was about an argument with Harley, something that meant nothing to me right then. My mind was stuck on the twin flame revelation. Too impatient to keep reading in the hopes of finding more information, I jumped out of bed and ran upstairs to fetch my laptop. This question required the internet.
Arys raised his head, an inquisitive expression on his face as I jostled him about while getting settled with the computer on my lap. “What’s up, love?”
“How could you not have told me this before?” I tapped my fingers impatiently on the keyboard as the laptop went through the motions of starting up. “This can’t possibly be true.”
I typed it into Google, grateful for once that the search engine corrected my spelling. My fingers were shaky on the keys. I skimmed through the search results. For something that I’d never heard of before, a surprisingly large number of websites were devoted to the topic of twin flames.
As I made my way through the sites that looked the most promising, a strange feeling began to twist my stomach into a knot. Most sources were quick to tell me that a twin flame and a soul mate were not the same thing. Twin flames were much like a coin. Each side was just half of a whole. Neither could exist without the other.
I went cold inside as I read on. The yin yang was used to explain twin flames more frequently than anything else: Light and dark. Night and day. Life and death. Each side possessed a little of the other.
I devoured everything I could find on the subject, analyzing it all with my own personal bullshit filter. What it all boiled down to was that a twin flame union was rare and usually unsuccessful. Both halves often struggled with the immense power of their bond. It usually destroyed them. Emotional turmoil and conflict would follow the twins always, as they could never hide anything from one another. The truth was always there, deep down inside.
My lungs froze when I read that last part. Our shared memories fit that description a little too perfectly. I shook my head and tore my gaze from the screen. This could not be real. It was just too much to process.