by Lara Hayes
Elizabeth remains on the sofa staring at the surf scene. The distance between us is so much greater than the few feet that separate our bodies. Insurmountable years. I cannot spare her the brunt of death. In her fear-stricken silence, she knows this.
I can tolerate it no longer. My darling girl sits rod-straight on the sofa, her hands folded. My journey concluded so long ago, that I doubt I have words to prepare her for what awaits. What I remember is the blackness, the emptiness of death. Not how I navigated the darkness. Not how I found my way back. What I can offer her is a distraction from her whirling emotions. If these are her last moments as a coherent human, how would she prefer to spend them?
Her heartbeat hammers in my ears. She fidgets on the sofa. I close my eyes and wipe my polluted thoughts clean. The calm swells around us, and I throw my blouse to the fire, watching the flames change from gold to green.
Fondly I recall the moment I first encountered Elizabeth, beautiful yet furious. The hunger, the need, the intrigue she stirred inside me. That complex cocktail does more to heat my chamber than any fire, and Elizabeth, noticeably affected by the change in current, turns to look over her shoulder.
When I remove my blood-soiled trousers, she stares into my eyes with unabashed fixation. I linger, caught in her sights, and permit her to rake her eyes over my naked limbs. I cross the room without a word, our eyes locked, tracking each other, intent upon having one another to ourselves for as long as we possibly can.
From above us, Fane and company have grown quiet, their anticipation as obvious to me as Elizabeth’s. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my undergarments, I call to her in a manner she has forbidden in recent months: the innately intimate whisper of her name passed from my mind to her own.
Elizabeth stands, her footsteps solid and decisive. An intriguing guile brightens her troubled eyes, it sharpens the corners of her mouth into amused points. She stalks me like prey, and I should know. Predator to many as far back as I can remember. She positions herself between my parted legs and in one continuous motion pulls my head back to expose my neck. Elizabeth flattens her tongue, licking the pronounced hollow at the base of my throat. My muscles jump and I grip her wrists painlessly.
Bent above me, Elizabeth’s face falls as it always does when I resist her. This is not an intimacy I can grant. Not while she is still so fragile, so easily shattered. We have been over this many times, but I suspect it is a point I will be forced to reiterate, yet again.
“Why won’t you let me,” she pants, breathless and pained.
I release her to explain yet again what I have tried in vain to make her understand. But Elizabeth, under the heady influence of lust, grips my bare thigh, her thumbs pressing into the warm skin. A shudder runs the length of me, and Elizabeth misreads this as she has before. She swallows my protesting growl with a starved kiss, pushing her tongue into my mouth as though the sound is a reward, instead of a warning.
I pull her back by her hair, and she curses at me. Her fear usurped by indignation. Pink cheeks, a flush all the way down to her chest. Heavy in the swoon of my own hunger, I brace myself on the bedpost, lost to the angry, almost desperate tones of her voice as she presses and questions incessantly. “Can’t you see that I want you as much as you want me?” Her confusion is earnest, and heartbreakingly genuine.
My vision clears, and the pounding of her pulse in my ears dulls to a manageable drum. She slumps down on the bed, confounded. I cannot immediately face her, not with the face of a feed, the wrinkled snarl of an eternally famished animal. I turn back as the last lines of my brow unfurl and regard her sullen face, her wounded pride.
“Elizabeth, as I have told you many times, we do not want each other the same way. This is something you will understand, presently. Everything I do, I do for you, my darling. Even my refusal to allow you to reciprocate is for your protection, and not any selfish gain.”
Still unsatisfied, she wraps her legs around my hips and in closing them, pulls her front flat against my stomach. She reaches for the buttons of her blouse. “Then why do you shiver when I touch you?” She punctuates each word with their unfastening.
Smiling at her petty torment, I curl my arm around her back and extricate her shoulders from their garb. She is pliant and willing in my hands as I hold the back of her neck, and press my mouth to the middle of her throat. A gesture that once made her recoil, now welcomed with a sigh and a tightening in her grip. I lift my eyes to hers. “To keep from tearing you apart,” whispering the answer between her parted lips.
For once, the truth.
The ferocity of my desire is obvious in my voice, my face. My eyes widen, ears sharp and ringing with the sound of her heartbeat. Every breath she takes rushes over my skin with blistering force.
The strangled gulp that slides down her throat rushes like water in a drain as I keep her head pulled back. My senses are mired in every physiologic response her body offers. Her heart rate climbs, and the blood vessels in her neck and face swell in rosy blooms. She does not look away or cower. She barely moves. We are both trapped in this cycle of desire, fueling each other’s responses: the surge of emotion, the endorphins that render us dumb to the consequences of this special night. The same starved blood thrumming through our veins, begging me to take it back, urging Elizabeth to let herself be devoured.
Her fingertips dig into the top of my spine, and I can nearly register the pain. She drags me on top of her, delirious, half crazed by her need to be touched. No mortal has ever seen my features darkened with blood lust, and lived.
Elizabeth will not be an exception.
I strip her open shirt from her arms and wrap my hands around her waist, pushing her further up the bed. She slides back as I stalk her on my hands and knees, making quick work of her bra. All uncertainty abandons her when she holds my face in her hands. I settle my body atop hers.
Her jean-clad legs encircle my waist, pulling my torso flat. Her skin is fiercely warm. Her short blunt nails make crescent-shaped cuts along my shoulder blades that heal instantly. Transfixed by her ragged breath filling my lungs and the scent of her hair, I wonder if anything could be more satisfying than the small sounds she tries so desperately to contain.
She breaks our desperate kiss to look me in the eye. Her palm warms mine as she slides my hand down the length of her body, and under her waistband. Her eyes drift closed when I touch her. I bury my face in her neck as her hips arch, her pants rucked down to her knees, and any modesty either of us may have regarding the captive audience in the hall is forgotten. Her voice cracks, breath rushing from her mouth in a harsh gasp as a tremor takes control of her body.
The warmth of her invades me and I do not recall ever having felt this fevered. Two hands knot themselves in my hair. Her breath hitches and every muscle in her body tightens around me. My mouth opens just under her ear, her blood singing a song meant only for me. And when my name bursts from the rigid confinement of her chest, it sounds less like a cry and more like permission.
I close my mouth over her jugular—thundering beneath the skin—before my fangs have descended, and there is a moment that precipitates the pain. A wordless exchange that will never leave me: Elizabeth flattens her hand to the back of my head, and presses.
My fangs stretch from their ruby beds, and when the skin beneath them relents, a sound escapes my mouth—so foreign and starved that I wonder if it belongs to me at all. A soft cry fills my ears as her torso tries to extricate itself from underneath my body. But Elizabeth keeps her hand where it rests on my skull, encouraging me to continue even as her baser instincts seek to free her from this fate.
The flood comes fast and coats my tongue. Everything that is Elizabeth fills the roof of my mouth. When that precious life slides down the back of my throat and crashes into the abyss I have become, I open my eyes. The truth in her blood is as devastating as she is.
The empty brownstone echoing her sock-clad steps. Her mother standing on the back porch, as still as stone. Her father’s large arms
enclosing her against his chest so completely that I fear for her small body. And his arms around her become her arms around me, wrapped in a twisted nest of sheets in her bedroom.
Every inch of her existence belongs to me, until we are one beating heart roaring in my chest. The roar becomes a hum, and her hand rests limply on my shoulder. Her back settles against the bed as a lone last sigh pushes its way between her lips—the single most terrifying sound I have ever heard.
I tear myself away from her with a gasping moan and her body, now chilled, jostles from the force. Her eyes shut peacefully as if in sleep, with the start of a smile curling the corners of pale lips. I gather her in my arms, weighted limbs dangling from my grasp, and reach beneath my pillow for my dagger. I push the tip of the blade into the side of my throat with a twist. The taste of her fills my nostrils as my mouth pools with my own blood.
I bring Elizabeth to the wound and hold her there. Her pulse is a thready suggestion under my fingers as I stroke her neck. My grip on her tightens instinctively, and I can barely reason with myself that I might hurt her. But Elizabeth’s mouth does not fix itself to the wound. My blood stains the pillows, streaking the sides of her face crimson. I hold her head in place, rubbing the front of her throat. My blood slides inside of her, yet still she rests motionless in my arms. A bone-weary fatigue knocks me off my knees and all that borrowed heat returns to its source only to cool in her chest.
“Elizabeth.” A hollow command that drifts in the air between us.
My vision darkens and my emptiness wells up around me. With my body crumpled over hers, I continue calling to her as the room cools and quietens. No arguments in the hall. No whispers from Fane. Only an image of Elizabeth—a fading silhouette—growing smaller by the second, deaf to my cries, as death pulls me from her with its impersonal hands.
With a mind all its own, my body bolts upright. I finger the jagged edges of the hole in my throat, but as I push and probe, the skin seals the wound in a gossamer layer of fragile new flesh. I pull Elizabeth up off the bed by her shoulders, shaking her violently. Her arms and neck swing back and forth without resistance. I must be screaming because I hear the echo. Who else would be screaming her name? But Elizabeth sleeps undisturbed, her eyelids ashen. I wrap my arms around her too small, too-light body, and her ribs crack.
Somewhere inside me something splinters like wood, and in the darkness of my heart her name rises, knocking wildly like a sparrow on the windowsill. In the deathly silence that follows something moves—greedy, yawning—and Elizabeth’s name is swallowed by the darkness. I close my eyes to seek her out, to find her in my mind.
My confusion is cut short by the crushing pressure of a hand around my throat, so swift and strong that I open my eyes expecting to see Fane. But only Elizabeth’s calm and vacant face awaits me. I tear at the hand around my throat, but she tightens her grip. And as I struggle to free myself, Elizabeth’s body moves with mine. Her fingers dig into the skin of my neck as I try to call her name once more. The pressure stills, but does not abate. She pulls me forward into her frighteningly placid face, never opening her eyes.
Elizabeth releases a scream so shrill I cover my ears to protect them from the onslaught, an inhuman bellow of impossible volume. With effortless ease the hand around my throat closes like a vise, and she hurls me off the bed with such tremendous force my body streaks across the wooden floor. I topple down the steps into my sitting area before I can catch myself.
Weary with blood loss, I stumble to my feet, still cupping my ears to stifle the awful, anguishing sounds. When I reach the bed, her mouth is wide and her cries continue unabated. All the while her brow remains smooth and untroubled. Helpless for the first time in centuries, I rush beneath the hatch, jump and nearly miss the steel rung on my ceiling. I can feel my body’s weight as I drag myself up through the small opening in ceiling.
Bård’s large hand hoists me up by one shoulder, dropping me just as quickly to cover his ears. “Stela, what is that?”
All my family, save Fane, is crowded in the narrow compartment above my room, their hands cupped over their ears and faces gnarled for a fight. Below us Elizabeth howls as though the hounds of hell have taken her body.
“Elizabeth. Her face sleeps like death but still she screams.”
Through the roaring I hear his approach. His purposeful, resonant steps echoing through the hall toward the corridor.
“She is lost, my dove.” Fane’s booming voice reaches me before he does. “The darkness has her.”
His massive body blocks the light emanating from the hall below as he crouches at the mouth of the corridor. I climb across the tangled mess of limbs toward him. Lydia positions herself between Fane and me, forming a shield. I think nothing of it when I wrap my hand around her neck and throw her into the wall, out of the way. Fane catches my forearm in his crushing hand, twisting my arm away from Lydia.
“If you harm what is mine, Stela, I will be forced to harm you,” he warns with a mix of understanding and rebuke.
“My Lord, please…” Words all but fail me. They flood my mouth, a pitiful, pleading, incoherent rush spilling down the corridor. Emotion rolls off me in fetid waves, repulsing and intriguing him in equal measure. I am on my knees before him, begging for a life.
Fane regards me evenly, unmoved. He shakes his head and silences me with an exasperated glare. “This will be the last favor you ask of me, Stela.”
“Anything, my Lord. I swear it.” Fane narrows his eyes in disbelief. “Please, just help her.”
Fane says nothing, moving to the hatch. He drops to the floor, and one by one my siblings slip through the opening, landing silently on their feet. Strong hands take hold of my shoulders, pulling me back, away from the door. Bård cradles me to his wide chest. “I hope she is worth the misery this will cost you, Stela.”
I try to pull myself upright but I slump right back into Bård’s ready hands. The last threads of my strength were exhausted battling Lydia. “So do I, Brother.”
Bård pats the side of my bare thigh, and the smack of skin startles me. I take in my state of undress and Bård chuckles. He offers his pale wrist. “You need your strength.”
He has always been the best of us, my unspoken favorite. He welcomed me as a sister the day we met, years before I was made. He has been by my side through countless battles, undeterred by my quiet reserve, my propensity for violence. When I have crossed Fane for the final time, Bård will be there, with the same forlorn look in his eye.
“Thank you.” I tear the skin with my teeth and Bård pats my back like a child. Bård’s blood reveals little, an impression rather than a picture. His quiet concern for me, the pain he carries. The rest he has learned to block and protect. He grants me several mouthfuls of his aged blood, more than I deserve, before withdrawing his wrist. The skin covering the wound on my neck hardens, my energy rebounding in a rush.
“Shall we?” Bård slinks to the hatch and drops to the ground.
In my chamber, my family stands shoulder to shoulder beside the bed. Fane has seated himself next to Elizabeth. I push into the crush, knocking Lydia and Darius unceremoniously to the side. Darius balances a vellum bound volume—The Record of Births—in his right hand, scribbling ceaselessly with his left. He glances up from the page to peer through the swath of dirty black hair perpetually falling into his eyes, absorbing every moment, capturing our history in ink.
Lydia drifts nearer, craning her head in front of mine to better her view. She catches herself when our shoulders brush, recoiling as though burned, and casts a familiar look of disgust in my direction. The birth unfolding on the bed is the first she has witnessed, which I suspect reminds her of her own.
The room falls completely silent, Elizabeth quiet as the grave though her mouth remains open, the tendons in her neck still strained. Fane places his palm over her heart and closes his eyes. He tilts an ear toward her and beneath his iridescent eyelids, his eyes move rapidly. The quiet is so tense that I wish in vain for Elizabeth
to cry out again, anything to shake me from this nightmare.
Crogher shifts restlessly at the foot of the bed. A hulking, gloomy mass, deathly serious with his flawless dreadlocked hair swept behind his shoulders. He plucks a long wiry black hair, courtesy of Erebus, from the sleeve of his dark coat. Security and infrastructure are his domain, and a new member means added exposure—a larger footprint. He remains attentive in his cool, calculating fashion.
Bård places a hand to the small of my back, and I do not need to see his face to know that he has turned away. I turn to Darius, still enthralled by Fane’s efforts.
“Brother, what do you know of this?”
Darius jolts as though stirred from a dream, a dazed expression slowly registering my question. Never one for words—at least with me—he clears his throat and resumes his task. “She is not the first to lose her way,” he whispers between brisk passes of his pen. “There have been others.”
The room swells with Fane’s presence. He pushes his palm down on Elizabeth’s heart, compressing her chest. Another bone splinters in the sickening quiet. Lydia gasps. Great waves of humming energy roll from Fane, buffeting his enraptured audience. He is the sun we can withstand without pain, the light that bathes our shaded lives.
I return to Darius, who valiantly attempts to divide his focus between my questions and his duty. His fingers deftly flip to a fresh page, trading his pen for a stick of charcoal from his pocket. Furiously, he sketches a rendering of our Lord bent over my darling girl.
“Where did you read this?”
Darius licks his coal-smudged fingers, slicking his black bangs behind his ears. He does not have the face for deception. Narrow cheeks, a weak chin, all long awkward limbs and sharp bones, with no muscle or fat. “In the archives,” he says. “Records from our cousins abroad.” He leans in as if to confide a secret. “Tomas witnessed a similar misfortune with her Ladyship’s eldest daughter.” His voice drops, hoping that Fane will not catch any mention of his bitter rival. Darius’s eyes flick apologetically to mine, as if to say we can speak no more of this.