Finally, I walked over to the stone slab upon which I had rested for four centuries. I straightened out the cloth that covered it and looked over at Ben.

No words were necessary. Ben walked over to me and sat on the stone. He lay on his back and stretched out. Sofia positioned herself at his feet. Her hands trembled slightly as she gripped the edges of the slab.

“Be careful, Derek,” she whispered.

I locked eyes with Ben. He nodded. “Let’s just get this over with.”

I bent over him, intending to make this quick like I had with Jason. But as my fangs were inches away from his neck, I stopped short. A flash of memory seared through me. The reality of the situation crashed down upon me.

Father turning son… a Novak tradition. I’m doing to my own son exactly as my father did to me.

Memories of that fateful night my father had turned me into a vampire against my will flooded my mind. The sound of his heavy breathing against my throat. His fangs ripping through my flesh, forcing me against the floor into submission. The gargling sound as he drank my blood. The burning deep in the veins of my neck as he shot venom into my bloodstream. His blue eyes staring triumphantly into mine as my transformation took hold.

This situation is nothing like that. I’m doing this for my son’s own good.

But isn’t that how my father justified his actions when he turned me?

I jerked away from my son and staggered backward. Ben’s eyes shot toward me. “Dad?”

“Darling, what’s wrong?” Sofia too was staring at me in alarm.

I gripped the edges of the slab and leaned against it, trying to steady my shaking hands.

I don’t know if I can do this to my own son. My own son, whom I’d fought so hard to preserve from the darkness.

I’d always felt uneasy about turning others into vampires. I’d felt uncomfortable about turning Jason. But now, bending over my own son in this chamber where it all began, I felt like a monster. I’d thought turning Ben would be just like turning any other. But every fiber of my being screamed out against it. Everything about this felt wrong. Even though I knew we had no other choice if we wanted to keep Ben safe.

What if he turns into the beast I was when the darkness first took hold of me?

The Elders were no longer here to influence us directly, but still, I’d be infecting him with a disease. The poisonous nature of the Elders. I was willingly dragging my own son into the struggle Sofia and I had to endure every day.

“Dad, what’s wrong?”

I kept my eyes fixed firmly on the floor, my chest heaving.

He sat up and placed a hand on my shoulder.

I need to pull myself together.

Ben can take the cure and become a human again once we’ve figured a way out of this danger.

There is no other way. There is no other way…

I was terrified by the uncertainty. Not knowing what my son could wake up as. Whether he’d be a shadow of his former self. It was a fact that some people changed irreversibly after becoming vampires. Some got seduced into the dark and never crawled out. Vampirism equipped one with the tools and mentality to explore the depths of darkness, the limits of depravity, everything that was opposite to what Sofia had tried to instill in him since birth. Neither Sofia nor I had any way of telling whether Ben would retain any of that training, or whether he might allow the darkness to take hold of him, just as I had for centuries.

Every scenario I could think of replayed over and over in my mind like a broken record. All the pros we’d seen in this decision before suddenly seemed trivial compared to the cons. It was as if I’d become blind to them completely.

Sofia twisted me around to face her, holding my head in her hands. I thought she was going to ask me again what the matter was. But I could see from her eyes that she’d realized now.

She turned to our son. “Just wait here, okay? I need to have a word with your father.”

She tugged on my arm and pulled me toward the exit, closing the door to the chamber behind us. I leaned my forearm against the wall and rested my head against it, still trying to regulate my breathing.

I thought Sofia was going to start trying to persuade me why we were making the right decision. Why we had to go through with this. She didn’t. She just wrapped her arms around me and held me close, our cold heartbeats thudding against each other as we stood in silence. I buried my face in her hair, breathing her in and clutching her tight, hoping she could ground me. Perhaps she too was waging her own war with the decision we were about to make.

We stood in silence for the next half hour before she finally looked up at me. “For all I know,” she whispered, “this could be a mistake. Any number of things could go wrong…” She wet her lower lip before looking me in the eye. “We may take away Ben’s warmth by turning him. But there’s one thing we will never be able to take from him. Choice. He can choose whether to become a monster, or whether to follow the path we’ve taken. Whatever the case, it’s his decision. We just have to hope our boy will make the right choice. Just as you did. You changed. You climbed out of the pit you thought you were stuck in because you realized you didn’t have to be that way. You stopped making excuses for yourself. You made a choice.”

I didn’t think that I could love my wife more than I did at that moment. Her words had lifted the suffocating weight from my chest. Because she was right.

I took a deep breath as I walked with Sofia back into the chamber. And as I dug my fangs into my son’s neck, as he squirmed beneath me and groaned, I kept remembering Sofia’s words. I chanted them over and over in my head like a prayer.