It wasn’t that I didn’t desire him as well. He was breathtaking to look at and the sweet fragrance of his blood ghosted over his skin like baking sugar, making my mouth water. It was just that my will to protect him was that much stronger.
At the time I thought I was protecting him from the world. From war and famine and poverty. But now I know I was also steeling myself to protect him from a much more present threat.
You.
I just wasn’t ready to admit that bit to myself yet.
You led him out the door with your arm possessively around his shoulders, Magdalena and I trailing behind with our arms wound together. The coach waited invitingly, sleek polished walnut gleaming in the winter weather like black blood on new snow.
“Are we going to do it now?” Alexi asked, looking up at you with round eyes. “You said — ”
“Discretion,” you chided, pulling him closer so no one in the street would overhear. “You promised you were capable of it.”
“I am! I just wondered — ”
“Yes, we’re going to do it now, little prince.”
The coach was dim and warm, stuffed with furs and outfitted with a bottle of cold champagne. Alexi settled himself gingerly into his seat like he had never travelled in such accommodations before. His blue eyes gleamed invitingly in the darkness as you helped Magdalena and then myself into the coach. Finally, you swung yourself inside and ordered the driver to take us all home.
Your mouth was on his the instant the door was closed, seeking his kiss like a grieving man seeks strong drink. Alexi shuddered and bloomed under your lips, sliding one arm around your neck while the other reached out for Magdalena. She settled in close beside Alexi, nuzzling at his neck, while I took my seat at your feet. You broke the kiss long enough to turn to me and take my face in your hands, leaving Alexi and Magdalena to each other.
You kissed me deeply, your usually frigid mouth warm with the taste of him, and my muscles slackened beneath your ministrations. Alexi chased Magdalena’s kisses with a grin, his white teeth flashing in the confines of the coach. Within moments her hat had been discarded and her hair was falling in ringlets past her shoulders.
“I love you,” you said into my mouth. It sounded like you were drawing up a peace treaty to protect the boundary lines of contested ground. “I promise you that.”
My throat was tight, either with fear or desire or the strange foreboding that had been nipping at my heels since the moment I set eyes on Alexi. I needed fresh air, but the coach was hot and close, and we were already trundling down the road. There was nowhere for me to go. There had never been anywhere for me to go.
“Alexi,” you said, voice rough with want. You hauled him onto your lap and took his jaw in your hand. Your grip was just tight enough to leave divots in his skin as the heavy seal coat slipped from his shoulders.
“Are you sure you really want this?” you asked. “You can leave, if you’d like.”
Alexi gazed at you, lips reddened with Magdalena’s lipstick, his eyes clouded over with an abject devotion so familiar it went through my heart like a dagger. I knew that look. I knew what it felt like to be held by you, suspended in place like a fly trapped in a web. There was no saying no to you, not now, when you had drawn Alexi into your world of lust and finery. He had passed the point of no return the moment you first smiled at him.
I tried very hard not to think of when that might have been. Of how long you had been planning to spirit this boy away.
Alexi wrapped his fingers around your wrist and slid your hand down so it was around his neck, pressing lightly against his jugular.
“This is all I want,” he said. “I’m yours.”
You looked into his eyes curiously, perhaps wondering if he knew how easy it would be for you to snap his neck. Knowing Alexi, I suspect he did.
“I promise you bread and roe,” you declared. “Pheasant and mackerel, vodka and pomegranates, from now until eternity. Chairmen and ballerinas will dine at our table and you will know nothing but bounty.”
Alexi kissed you again, hungry for his own annihilation. You wound your fingers through my own, drawing me closer, and Magdalena pressed in on your other side, her dark eyes shining with want.
Magdalena bit him first, her sharp teeth pricking his fingertip. He didn’t even cry out, just thrust his other hand out to me. How freely he offered himself up! All the enthusiasm of youth with none of the wisdom and caution of age. Hesitation burned in the back of my brain, but the heady scent of blood had started to fill the coach, and Alexi was so lovely and so willing…
I kissed his wrist in an apology before burying my teeth into his skin. His blood was crisp and sweet as a burst grape, dribbling down my chin as I drank from him greedily. I could have drained him dry and still been thirsty for more.
You held him by the throat, watching waves of rapture cross his face while Magdalena and I drank from him. He looked like a lithe young Christ, crucified between two beautiful women with you as his cross.
Alexi gave a little whimper, and for a moment I thought he was begging for the pain to stop. But then I realized he was asking for more.
You tilted his head back and sank your teeth into his jugular, all the way up to the gums. A shudder wracked Alexi’s frame.
We three feasted on him for a few delicious minutes before you pulled back, pupils blown with bloodlust and mouth smeared red, and said,
“Enough. Enough! He needs to stay conscious. Make room.”
Magdalena and I shook off the drunkenness of a freshly opened vein and moved aside so you could lay Alexi down on the seat. His golden skin was alarmingly pale, his breathing shallow and quiet. You gently pulled his head into your lap and I daubed the cold sweat from his forehead with my handkerchief, my fingers seeking his fading pulse. He was dying, and quickly.
Regret, cold and unyielding, settled into my stomach. What had we done?
Alexi moaned something incoherent that sounded close to your name. You shushed him and opened a wound in your wrist with your teeth, staining your white cuffs with blood.
“No need to speak. Just drink.”
He parted his lips and you dribbled your own blood, so thick and dark it almost looked black in the low lighting, into his mouth. Alexi took it onto his tongue like a communion wafer and swallowed obediently.
I had attended to Magdalena during her transformation, but that had not felt so much like sitting at someone’s deathbed. I truly believe I saw the light wink out of Alexi’s eyes before it came back again with renewed brilliance, before he pressed himself up onto his elbows and started lapping at the blood dribbling down your fingertips.
You let out a laugh, all silver and steel, and Magdalena clapped her hands for joy. We were witnessing a rebirth, after all, a dark baptism into a new and unending life. But I could not summon mirth. I had just watched a young boy sign away his life to a pack of demons he barely knew. And now, I believed deeply in my soul, he was my responsibility. I had to protect him from the cruelties of the world, the ravages of immortality. Even from you, my lord.
A lick of anger flamed up in my chest. I had told you not to do this, and here we were again, a growing family despite our incurable dysfunction. But when Alexi’s eyes fluttered open and found mine, the anger was smothered by a ferocious tenderness.
“Welcome back, little prince,” you said with a smile, smoothing a sweaty curl from his brow. “Where would you like to go?”
“Go?” Alexi asked, a little delirious. It takes a lot out of you, dying and coming back, and I knew the way your blood burned through the system like a wildfire. He was probably so disoriented he was tasting color.
“It’s a honeymoon!” Magdalena exclaimed, unable to contain her excitement. I hadn’t seen her so effervescent in what felt like years, but this still didn’t feel right. Alexi was a boy, not a wind-up doll to cheer up a sullen little girl.
But then again, maybe we would all benefit from some new blood in the family.
Yes, I th
ought of him as family right away. Even though I told you I wouldn’t welcome him into my heart like that. But you’ve always been able to see through my hopeful lies, haven’t you?
“Pick a city,” you said. “A country.”
“Anywhere?” Alexi asked, accepting my offered handkerchief so he could wipe the blood from his mouth.
“Europe is your playground.”
Alexi didn’t have to think about it. He just gave a huge, dazzling smile, and I realized with a horrible sense of finality that I was already falling in love with him.
“Paris,” he said.
Paris was happy, for a time. You rented us a three-story sliver of a townhouse right in the middle of the city, and Magdalena affectionately called it our layer cake. It really did look like one of those delicate French pastries, with a spiked iron gate out front and a wash of pale blue paint over the exterior walls. There was a floor for each of us, not counting the basement, which was set aside for your inscrutable purposes. The longer I spent living with you, the more I came to suspect that you weren’t looking for any huge breakthrough or eureka moment. You research had little other purpose than to keep your insatiable curiosity preoccupied so it didn’t devour you the moment you turned your back on it. It was a sort of narcissistic love letter to our species, to dedicate so much of your life to exploring the natures of vampires and humans, to draw distinctions between the two.
I tried not to wonder if you had studied your other brides the way you studied us. If you had studied the way they died as well.
Alexi took to the streets of Paris like a fish to water. He would leave for twenty minutes to run an errand and come home bursting with some news of some thrilling performance or political demonstration or literary salon he had been invited to. I have no idea how he managed to make friends so fast, but I was always charmed when he swept Magdalena into his arms and kissed her and started babbling about the newest opera he wanted to sneak her into. You permitted him to accept perhaps one in five of these invitations, but the invitations just kept coming. Paris in the twenties was a living, breathing thing, bursting at the seams with artists and writers and lovers. You and Alexi went out every evening for a walk and a cigarette along the Seine, leaving Magdalena and I two hours of privacy to rest or gossip or tumble into bed.
We took our dinners together every night, with you leading us out on our hunt like a father corralling his unruly brood of children after Sunday mass. Otherwise, you left us to our own devices. You and Magdalena disappeared frequently to hunt for sport, but Alexi and I preferred to do most of our killing privately. I, for my proclivity for stalking my prey into the darkest dens of their sins, and Alexi, for his proclivity to draw his prey into the den of his bedroom first.
I was not invited into his bedroom, at least not at first. That was not the nature of our relationship. We reveled in our love of you, of Magdalena, but the affection between us was more mother and son than lovers. Passion was a boundary line I dared not cross. I wanted Alexi as he was, bright and feckless, and feared jeopardizing the tenderness between us for a few hours of pleasure.
Maybe that’s why I tried in vain to protect him, when the fights began.
Alexi got under your skin faster than I or Magdalena ever did, and the spats started shortly after the honeymoon. First it was just irritation, tight in your voice, then the arguments volleyed between the two of you over the tiniest disagreement. Alexi didn’t have my knack for making himself invisible when you were in one of your moods, or Magdalena’s fawning skill for soothing your temper. He challenged you outright, talking back from the moment he was bitten. Alexi was democratically minded, and he wanted a say in everything, from where we moved to how we spent our days. It reminded me of Magdalena’s keen appetite for planning trips in our early days together, or the way I had opened my arms wide to new places and new people when I was young and still flush with life. I didn’t realize how resigned Magdalena and I had become to our roles as dutiful wives until Alexi came onto the scene, and his argumentative spirit frightened me. For his sake, mostly.
I did my best to get him out of the house when you were at your most irritable, a reprieve you welcomed. Alexi’s energy and appetites were inexhaustible, the enthusiasm of youth captured forever in an undying body, and he demanded more of your attention than you were willing to give.
“He can be so boorish,” Alexi said as we walked arm in arm through one of Paris’ bustling alleyways. Even at night, the city buzzed with life. Cafés spilled light and laughing patrons out onto the street, and the air smelled like coffee and buttered pastries and roasting vegetables. “I don’t know how you’ve managed to put up with him for hundreds of years.”
“By trying to stay off his bad side, I suppose,” I said, allowing Alexi to lead me around a large puddle in the middle of the street. We must have seemed like an odd pair: Alexi young and handsome in his flashy silk waistcoat and cap cocked at a rakish angle, me in a black dress with a high neck and no adornment to speak of. I had always preferred plain clothes, although your wealth opened up worlds of fine fabrics and expert tailoring to me. They reminded me of the simple dresses I wore as a girl and kept any eyes from lingering on me too long. I liked the invisibility plainness afforded me, unlike Magdalena, who thrived when she was the center of attention.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Alexi asked, his laughter bright as a trumpet. He waved at a pretty couple taking wine and cigarettes al fresco in front of a cramped café, and they shouted his name across the street in an attempt to get him to come and sit with them. Another one of his radical friends, I supposed, Nin or Miller or any of their set. Alexi had so many friends their names tended to fall out of my head as soon as he introduced us. I was built for long walks with a single conversation partner, not for Alexi’s raucous roundtable discussions. I hoped he wouldn’t introduce me.
To my relief, Alexi kept walking, leading me down the street to an antique oddities store that fascinated him. Alexi loved you in part because of your connection with the past. He was always asking for old war stories or tales of your tenure in the palaces of duchesses and kings. He was of the opinion that the past was far more romantic than the present, no matter how voraciously he ate up every bit of sweetness the modern world had to offer. Maybe it was because he had also tasted the cruelties of modernity and lived through so much of its upheaval.
The antique store was dusty and dim, but Alexi’s face brightened as soon as we stepped inside as though he had found a doorway to Camelot. He ran his fingers over the pendants and parasols, the cigar boxes and hat boxes, losing himself in the reverie of days gone by. Soon, your morning spat had been entirely forgotten, and he was prattling on about all the historical events he wished he could have lived to see.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was sure to live through plenty of history. I doubted he would find it as rarefied an experience as his imagination hoped.
The shopkeeper appeared at the back of the store, a thin man with a nose like a hawk.
“Can I help you find something, young man?”
“We’re just taking it all in,” Alexi said pleasantly.
“Good. If you or your mother need any help, just ring the bell and I’ll be right with you.”
He disappeared into the back room, leaving Alexi snickering. I scowled, crossing my arms tight across my chest. Coming out with Alexi suddenly seemed foolish. That was all anyone ever saw when they looked at us together, a mother and son, or a governess and her overgrown ward. I had a face built for a chaperone, not for making beautiful young men fall in love with me.
“Come now Constance,” Alexi purred soothingly as he sidled up to me. It was his special nickname for me, and it always warmed my heart to hear him say it. “Don’t be mad. It’s an honest mistake.”
“Honest in that I look like a spinster?” I muttered.
Alexi snatched up a nearby silk scarf, fluttering it through the air before looping it around my shoulders. His touch was heavy and warm on my ski
n, and desire pooled in my stomach. Paris and a steady diet had banished the gaunt look from his features, and I hadn’t noticed until that moment how healthy and handsome he had become.
“Honest in that you’re motherly,” he conceded. “Why, you’re a regular Wendy Darling to us lost children.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the comparison. Alexi had taken me to see the play, and even though I hadn’t been a child for a long time, I had a fondness for its charming tale of eternal childhood. Sometimes rousing Magdalena and Alexi from bed so we could face the night as a family felt like dealing with children.
“Does that make him Peter?” I asked drolly.
“He’s certainly moody enough to play the part.”
“You haven’t seen anything. After that whole debacle with the Harkers he was sullen for months.”
“Who are the Harkers?”
“Before your time dear, just some dreadful Victorians.”
Alexi slid the scarf from my shoulders with a theatrical flourish.
“Come on. I’m buying you this, and then we’re going for coffee. You can still drink coffee, can you?”
“Yes,” I lied. I could manage a few sips, for Alexi.
“Good,” he said. “There are people I must introduce you to.”
Alexi had an appetite for danger. He liked to wear a gun, and to walk along the thin edge of the Seine by night, and to slice shallow cuts into himself to entice Magdalena and I into a frenzied bedroom game. Once, you found us three together: we girls lapping up the blood pooling in Alexi’s collarbones like kittens while he made soft, pleasured noises, the bloody pocket knife still in his hands.
You dragged your little finger through the blood on his chest, tracing out the first letter of your name before bringing your finger up to your mouth. To this day, I cannot fathom your restraint. Even the littlest pinprick of blood set me on the hunt, and I was suckling at the cut Alexi had made with an almost painful desire. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to pin him down and tear out his throat, and I’m sure Magdalena felt very much the same. But that, of course, was the sweetness of his game.
A Dowry of Blood Page 11