by Sharon Lee
Years ago, I kept poets. The food was hot and wholesome when they were creating, but their passions consumed them even as I was nourished. It was a rare moon passed without a suicide.
Writers of prose are every bit as unsatisfactory as a reliable source of nourishment.
Visual artists are another matter. Perhaps because their work is concrete, perhaps because they work so intimately with the balances of shadow and light, weakness and strength... I find painters most satisfactory, though yet inclined to those deadly swings of mood. Rock-steady reliability is most often found in sculptors, but that food is never more than bland.
For a time I kept only painters. Recently, I find the stabilizing benefit of an eclectic herd--painters, potters, sculptors--outweighs my preference for the painterly passions.
Of this current herd, my favorite is Nikita. She paints in vibrant primaries: splashes of bold crimson, thick puddles of yellow, emerald arabesques... Ambitious, sensuous Nikita. Really, I am quite fond of her--almost too fond. I must be stern with myself, or I should be with her every day. It would not do to lose Nikita too soon.
Of the others, I especially enjoy Michael, who pots, and Sula, who does woodcuts. Jon is my sculptor, stolid and uninteresting; and the newer ones: Amy, Chris, Fortnay and Quill.
I find eight a good number, though I should perhaps look about me for another sculptor; Jon seems a bit fagged of late.
Contrary to Sula, to whom I go this evening.
I find it best to take myself to their studios, rather than Calling them to me. I find that the peculiar aura of the artist’s own place, adds a depth and piquancy to the nourishment that is entirely absent from a feeding taken in another part of the house.
Sula’s studio smells of wood shavings, of beeswax, sweat and yesterday’s coffee. Sula also smells of these things, and a salty, overripe femaleness. I believe she has many lovers.
Her back is to me as I enter the room. She is lighting the candelabra atop the battered chest of drawers that serves as her supply cabinet. I see her downturned face in the mirror behind the candles, dark skin waxy in the hot light. Behind her, in the mirror, the studio shows twilit and empty.
I wait until she has lit her last candle; until she has shaken out the match and pushed it, headfirst, into the sand-filled pottery cup that sits beside the candelabra. It is one of Michael’s pots, glazed with stripes of sunset orange.
She turns at last from the bureau, heavy breasts swinging under her loose shirt. I breathe across her eyes and she pauses, the momentary confusion of trance misting her face before she smiles, beatific, her nipples hardening into spears of ecstasy. She moves to her worktable, and I with her. She stands there, staring down--at nothing, save the scarred, stained surface--and in her mind, Sula dreams.
She dreams the most poignant piece of wood she has ever held. In her mind, she shapes it, with the strength of her will, into subtlety beyond mere beauty. Sula dreams with intensity, with pure savage power, and I stand over her, one hand above her heart, one hand cradling her forehead, drinking, drinking, drinking, as much a captive of her passion as she, of my trance.
Feeding of Sula can span objective hours, such is her vitality. Often, it is I who pull away, sated, and she who clings to trance and the dream-thing she is making. Tonight, I barely touched my peak, her lust coursing and lighting my veins, when I felt her-- falter.
Shiver.
Against me, as never before, she ... moaned, vitality spent, heart pounding, but with something other than passion.
Full, but not yet satisfied, I stepped aside. She slumped against her work table, braced against her flattened palms, breathing in great gulps, as if she had been running, hard and long.
Alarmed that she might be sickening--that she might, indeed, have already passed her sickness to one or more of the others--I let the glamour go, extended a gentle hand and touched her shoulder.
"Sula?"
She started, the remains of trance shattering, shook herself and with an effort straightened.
"Hey, Jimmy." Her usual greeting, but without her usual verve.
"Are you well, Sula?" I asked and she smiled a dazed smile and shook her head, pulling at the loose collar of her shirt.
"Tired," she said. "Hope I ain’t caught that flu’s going round."
I smiled and said I hoped so, too. She nodded and turned away, toward the candlelight, and it was then that I saw the cause of Sula’s illness.
Just above her collar, dark against the dark skin, just over the luscious vein that runs from heart to throat, nestled two tiny, neat scars of a kind I had reason to know well.
I placed the Sleep upon her, which was a risk. Should the interloper return, Sula would be helpless to ward off the Kiss. But human defenses against us are paltry in any case, and she might actually take benefit from the trance, if the thief did not return.
Having done what I might for this one of my own, I went to check on the others.
Michael was locking his door as I came by; he waved cheerily and jangled his keys. "Hot date tonight, man! Don’t wait up." He slapped me on the shoulder and would have gone on by, had I not Spoken.
"Michael." Humans are particularly vulnerable to the Speaking of their names. He paused, grin fading, eyes fogged; I pulled his collar wide.
Michael’s skin is ivory, shadowed with indigo along the sweetly defined muscles, absolutely without blemish. Whoever had drunk of Sula had not tasted Michael. I straightened his collar and stepped back.
"Hot date tonight, Michael?"
Pale blue eyes blinked, focused. The grin flicked on like a blare of demon sunshine. "Hot is not the word," he said with a laugh and strode on past, wiggling his fingers at me as he went. "Don’t wait up!"
"I won’t," I murmured, and continued down the hall.
Amy and Chris were in Amy’s studio, a tangle of sweat-gilded limbs atop the spring-shot day bed. I Spoke their names, stroked them apart to search, then released them to their exercise.
Quill was before his easel, so concentrated upon the work that I need do nothing but part his collar, search, and leave.
I met Fortnay on my way upstairs and lay the trance upon him before he had a chance to speak. No marks of the Kiss here.
It would begin to seem that Sula had met her misfortune during one of her frequent trips away. This did not mean my herd was secure, given the ability of my kind to trace any human one has tasted. However, I might not be in such immediate peril as I had at first feared.
I stepped away from Fortnay, who smiled in his vague way and pushed his glasses up his nose.
"Going for something to eat," he said, looking just beyond my shoulder, which is Fortnay’s way with his fellow humans, also. "Want to come along?"
"Another time," I said softly. "I’ve just now eaten."
"Right." He nodded at the wall behind my shoulder and continued downstairs, walking heavily in his spattered tennis shoes.
In the hallway upstairs, I found Nikita’s door locked, the studio beyond dark. I stood just inside, breathing in the smell of turpentine, oils and Nikita’s own scent, then went to the end of the hall and into Jon’s studio.
He was lying in the center of the floor, the slab of dressed granite that had been his latest project a wonderworks of stone shrapnel, scattered all about.
He had been dead a very little while; I could smell the effluvia of fresh blood over the dust in the air.
Jon himself was dry as dust, white as dust. Drunk dry and with casual violence thrown away, much as a human boy will smash a soda bottle when he’s finished his treat, and for the same joy of wanton destruction.
I looked at him, my sculptor, dead and drained among the broken bits of his passion, and I was angry. How dare some--interloper--some new-made, blood-crazed Visigoth--come into my place, take food from me, destroy what was mine?
The thief would pay for this outrage. I have not existed for more than two centuries without knowing how to answer impertinence.
I searched the room an
d found what I expected to find--no sign of an intruder. Vampires are subtle, our powers many. Jon may never have seen his doom; he doubtless died in a dream of such rapture he barely noticed his own passing.
There were mundane tasks to attend to, then. I have found that the death of one distresses the balance of the herd, even if the one who has died was not especially beloved of his fellows. It were best that all trace of Jon be gone before the morrow, which bit of housecleaning consumed most of my nighttime hours.
I then visited my remaining artists and lay briefly with each, whispering into their dream-minds until I was satisfied that Jon was shrouded in the fog of far-away memory. Likewise, I persuaded each to believe that the studio at the end of the top hallway was a storeroom. That it had never been anything else.
Each, I should say, but Nikita, who did not return to her rooms until sunrise forced me back to mine.
* * *
IT WAS TO her door I went first, when twilight released me: It was locked, the room dim, the enormous window Nikita prized so highly muffled in yards of sable fleece. I fingered the soft stuff, then stepped ’round to the easel.
A painting was in progress--a sweep of orange bisecting a dagger of sea-glass green against the stark white canvas ground. The oils were dry, the swirls upon the palette board blots of crusty color. Nikita had not painted today. It seemed that she had not painted yesterday. And Nikita painted every day. It was not unusual for her to paint through the night and into the next day, when the passion was upon her.
I searched the rest of the studio, but found nothing further to alarm me: Her clothes, her completed works, her meager cash were all in place. The tiny refrigerator held a quart of milk, four eggs, half a loaf of bread, a depleted bottle of red wine. All precisely as it should be, lacking only Nikita herself.
On the point of quitting her apartment, I paused, frowning at a blank space on the cluttered wall.
Nikita had done a self-portrait at the beginning of the summer--a radical departure from her modernistic style. It had hung in this spot, now vacant, among the other paintings she considered worthy of being framed.
A short search discovered it, stashed behind six much-despised abstracts, near the edge of the shrouded window. Framed in stark stainless, the canvas showed a wire-thin woman in paint-spangled jeans, wearing a man’s white shirt, untucked, like a smock, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her face was a study in the simple power of line and shadow, her eyes great and dark beneath thick eyebrows. She stood at an easel, of course, paintbrush in hand, poised on the balls of her feet. The impression of the whole was of power, of intensely focused, living passion.
Carefully, I lifted the painting, carried it across the room and hung it in its place.
Then I went to tend the others.
Michael’s door was ajar, but Michael was not within. Chris and Amy were with Quill, coaxing him to call it a day and lend his enthusiasm to a threesome destined for Amy’s day bed. As I left, he allowed himself to be convinced, and began hurriedly to put his brushes by.
As last evening, I met Fortnay on his way to dine. As last evening, I refused an invitation to join him and turned the corner, on my way to Sula’s studio.
Michael knelt in the center of the hallway, blond head thrown back, a rigor of ecstasy upon his features. The ivory column of his throat glowed in the silver dimness; his naked chest ran sweat.
The figure standing behind his right shoulder, jeweled and painted fingers stroking his sweat-slick skin while pressing its lips to that place where the sweet blood ran swiftest, raised its head and snarled.
It was an admirable face for snarling--pinched and paper-white, a bare stain of claret across the stark cheekbones, the lips glistening dark.
"That human is mine," I said, and stood forward. The other licked her lips, slowly and with satisfaction.
"He showed no mark. He came willing." She ran her skinny fingers along the sweet curve of his ribcage. "Didn’t you, Michael?"
"Yes," he gasped, hoarse and trance-locked. "Oh, God, yes!"
She smiled and bent her head to tongue the place, tantalizing herself.
"Have you no more for me, Michael? Shall I stop?" Her voice was velvet, warm and suffocating, resonant with power. A human could no more stand against it than a dog against his master’s command.
"No!" Michael gasped. "Take me. I’m yours ...all yours..." He was groaning, back arched in passion, his manhood straining against the prison of his jeans.
She smiled. "All mine," she murmured and fastened again upon the heart vein. Michael cried out, sobbing in his frenzy, the passion roiling off of him in sweet, delicious waves...
In my desire to ensure the safety of my household, I had not yet taken nourishment. Here before me lay a feast. I went forward and wrapped him in my embrace, drinking his rapture as the other drank his heart’s blood, riding the rising tide of his passion until, at the pinnacle, while I clung, drunk with him and able to do nothing else, save drink more--at the peak of this ecstatic experience, Michael--was gone.
Besotted, bewildered, I staggered upright and stood staring at the other, the drained, white body between us, quiet, as dead to passion as we are.
"You did not have to drink him dry," I said then, the words thick on my tongue.
She shrugged, rosy-faced now, and plump with blood. "There are more," she replied, and waved a ringed hand casually toward the wall. "So many more that all of us together couldn’t drink them dry, if we drank three times each evening." She smiled, slyly.
"Why blame me, when you fed, too?"
But my feeding had not slain him. Michael had been very good: satisfying, resilient, strong. I had hopes of a breeding pair, between himself and Nikita, but had put the project off--too late, now. I frowned at the other and raised my hand.
"This is my place," I said, and the words were not thick now, but laden with full power. "These are my humans. If I find you here again, I shall break you into bits and bury the bits at four separate crossroads."
A potent enough threat, though she met it with a stare. But I am old and she, I considered, had not yet seen her first hundred years. Her eyes dropped first.
"All right," she agreed sulkily and moved her foot to touch that which had been Michael before she looked to me again. "He was sweet."
"So he was," I said. "Did you find the other sweet, as well?"
She frowned, puzzlement plain. "Other?"
"Were you not here last night to feed?"
"Oh." She smiled, showing malice. "That wasn’t me. That was the new one."
"Which new -- " I began, but she was done with questions and simply turned and walked away.
After a moment, I entered Sula’s room.
It was no real surprise to find she was dead.
* * *
IT WAS NEARLY dawn when I returned to her room, having used the hours between to set a different order of frenzy upon those remaining, so that they packed their belongings in panic and fled into the fading night, scattered and thereby, safe.
I did not know where they ran to--I had no need. When the present crisis was retired, I would Call. And they would come.
Nikita, now.
Nikita.
She stood before her easel, jeans spattered with the jewels of past passions, wearing a man’s white shirt untucked, like a smock, sleeves rolled to her elbows. She held a paintbrush in one hand, but she was not painting.
She was weeping.
Weeping is a human thing. I have not wept in two hundred years.
She looked up as I entered, eyes brilliant, cheeks rosy red. Suffused with blood.
"He said I would live forever," she said, with the air of answering a question. "He said I would always be just as I was at the moment of--change."
Superficially true--one looks precisely as one looked at the moment of one’s making--for as long as one remains undead. But change is--change. We sacrifice to embrace evolution.
"I thought," Nikita said, rather breathlessly. "I thought that
if I lived forever--kept painting, learning, growing--that one day I would be the--the world’s greatest painter." She groped on the table beside her, located a rag and carefully wiped her brush.
"I’ve always wanted to be the world’s greatest painter," she whispered, and slipped the brush into the cleaning jar. She turned from the easel and came toward me--extended a thin hand and lay it against my chest.
"You’re one of them," she said. "One of us."
"Yes."
Her eyes widened, spilling more tears.
"I can’t paint." Her voice was cold. "It’s--gone."
"Humans are of passion," I said. "We are--the next level. Reason. Power."
"Power." Her gaze wandered over my shoulder, to the self-portrait I had re-hung. "Right." She looked back.
"What do you live on? Not... blood..."
"A little blood. I live on--human passion. But I am--old. At first, the blood is--necessary."
"It’s horrible," she whispered. "Like getting drunk and high at the same time. Jon. Poor Jon--he was gone so quickly..."
Her eyes were back on my face. "I’m so stupid, I don’t even know--I guess I’m ...invincible, right? I mean, nothing kills the undead."
"Some things do," I told her. "The old ways: a stake through the heart; molten silver poured into the head. Sunlight."
She blinked. "Sunlight?"
"You must be very wary, especially at first. Sunlight will annihilate you, young as you are. When you are as old as I, you may risk a few moments in full sun. We are not of the light."
"Humans are of the light," Nikita said and her eyes moved again, seeking the painting beyond my shoulder. "Painting is of light and shadow... No wonder you never caught on, as hard as we tried to teach you..."
"Nikita, who made you?"
She frowned. "Made--Oh. A guy I met at one of the clubs. He said he was eighty years old. He looked seventeen--like you, no lines in his face. Said he was on a ... mission ... All I had to do was trust him." She shook her head. "I don’t remember too much about it--he kissed me, I think. I went back the next night. And the next. The fourth night he told me he was going to make me immortal, so I’d always be just like I am now..." Her voice broke.