Sacred Circle

by Claire Thompson

  As he moved his hips, savoring the hot, tight clamp of her sex against him, he became aware that she was no longer struggling. Her eyes were closed and when he removed his hand from her mouth, the only sound was of her labored breathing and breathy little sighs. Julian felt her passion rising to meet his. At that moment, it was perfect, just what he needed to send him over the sweet edge of sexual release.

  He had left her there, sleeping on the bed she had come to prepare, a little smile on her lips, a gold sovereign pressed into her limp hand.

  Chapter Three

  The blood-hunger was both a psychological and physical sensation. It wasn’t satisfied by food or drink, but only by human blood. It would start as a whispered gnawing in his gut, but eventually it would overtake him. While in the throes of this need, he was at once agitated and empowered. His pulse would race, and he would feel a dizzying fever overcome him in anticipation of the act of feeding.

  Eventually, Julian finally learned to control his baser instincts. He learned to survive on less and to take the blood of humans without killing them. His passion for blood raged as much as ever, but he was able to spare the lives of his victims, for the most part.

  He was careful never to mix sex and bloodlust, as he knew he might not be able to exercise the control necessary to spare the life of his lover. And, remembering his dear Adrienne, lost forever to him, he had never attempted to “turn” a human, as she had so rashly done with him. Indeed, the Elders had told him many years after the turning that they were surprised he had survived.

  Turning was a special skill and very few vampires could accomplish it. Humans were simply too fragile as a rule, and the offering was lost when they gave up their flimsy lives, overpowered by the vampire’s rich and perfect blood. Vampires were a dying breed as less and less of them retained the art of turning, and slowly, finally, the ancient ones died away at last. Procreation was rare and required special circumstances. The birth of a new vampire was heralded across the globe. It had been years since Julian had heard of such a thing. He himself, though he’d lain with vampires, had never created life.

  Julian shook his head, trying to focus in the present. The music, some kind of techno beat, pulsed around him. He moved a little from the wall, all his senses alert. Walking slowly, he raked his eyes over the throng of people. Most of them looked as though they were at a costume party, with the theme being Count Dracula, of course. He was vaguely amused by these silly humans, but he also knew there were some serious players among them. People who honestly believed they themselves were vampires.

  At first, Julian had been interested by the rise in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of these so-called vampire clubs. He’d been fascinated by the plethora of them springing up on the Internet, and the profusion of information that flooded the web about “real vampires”. Most of it was utter nonsense but some of it was right on the money. As always, there was a kernel of truth in the mass of misinformation.

  He had penetrated a few of the vampire clubs, only to learn that the people involved were mostly players, using blood and blood-play as a way to feel special, or to enhance kinky BDSM sex games.

  Some of the humans in the groups seemed convinced of their own authenticity. They professed a sensitivity to light and a need for human blood to survive. At first, Julian used to try to explain that drinking blood didn’t make you a vampire—it made you a person with a blood-fetish. Too few of them could distinguish the difference. Eventually his earnest attempts to educate gave way to tolerant amusement. Let them play their games. What was the harm in it?

  Usually he avoided these vampire playgroups, because they depressed him, reminding him of how alone he in fact was. There were only a handful of his own circle now left, and they were presently scattered over the globe. He had given up any hope of finding Adrienne. She was little more than a passing dream to him now.

  He scanned the room. The connection he’d felt a moment before was gone. Perhaps it had only been his longing that twisted its way into his brain, creating the illusion that there was someone here like himself, one of the true kin.

  Moving forward, he revealed himself now to the crowd and as always, he was immediately noticed. Handsome as a human, he was triply so now, with his alabaster skin, his dark eyes and his hair dark as a crow’s wing. His body was hard and muscular, without a trace of fat and he dressed impeccably in fine linens, leathers and silks.

  Several people approached him now, glasses upraised. He turned to meet them, swallowing the sigh of loneliness, his face cast in a red-lipped smile, which didn’t reach his eyes.

  * * * * *

  Grace felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. There was a delicious smell teasing her senses, but she couldn’t quite place it. Something hinting of sage and lemon balm. The scent was something primal, something sexual. Her nipples rose and she felt a warmth in her sex that confused her. When she turned, she could see no one. No one special, that is.

  Just the crowd of vampire lifestylers, decked out in their black and crimson cloaks, sporting their store-bought fangs and blood-red lipstick, painted onto faces made pale with powder.

  She shifted in her seat, sipping at the Bloody Mary, which was heavily laced with vodka. She must be drunk, she decided. She must be horny, that was all. She would have to scope out the scene, and try to find the good-looking guys, if there were any.

  It was her first time at a Vampire Coven Ball and she wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing there. Regan had convinced her to come along, because of Grace’s longtime interest in vampires. Regan was a role-player, mostly online, and this party had been put together by some of the more serious “players”, many of whom were meeting for the first time in the flesh tonight.

  Regan had dumped Grace at the bar and gone off with a man named Cloven. Or at least that’s what he called himself. Apparently, Regan and Cloven were hot and heavy in their role-play, with Cloven a self-styled “donor”, one who gives blood willingly to a “vampire”. Of course, none of it was real. It was all an elaborate, if wonderful, game.

  Regan spent every spare moment on her computer, when she wasn’t working at the law office where both she and Grace were paralegals. She’d tried to involve Grace in the online games but Grace had found them childish, though she hadn’t admitted that to Regan, pretending instead that she had no aptitude for it.

  Looking around now, Grace found herself feeling dizzy. Was it the Bloody Mary? For the first time in years, thoughts and images she’d banished from her conscious mind came flooding back with a force that staggered her.

  That smell again! It was so sweet, so powerful, almost as if something, or someone, were calling her name. A soul mate. Someone like me. One who shares the bloodlust. These words burned into her consciousness, startling her so that she gasped aloud. Ridiculous!

  The secrets she’d held so close to her heart for these many years came unbidden, bursting into flame in her mind. From the first time when she was fourteen and had tasted her own blood, something had clicked inside of her. Some primal appetite had been awoken. And now at age twenty-four, that appetite raged secretly and unchecked, though largely ignored by its mistress.

  At fourteen, she had fallen from her bike, hitting the pavement with her chin. The resulting mouthful of blood had terrified her. Swallowing, she’d inadvertently gulped her own blood, tasting its metallic sweetness with something like shock.

  Shock because the constant gnawing that was always in her gut, had been there since the onset of puberty, was suddenly allayed. Though she’d been in pain from the fall, with her mouth cut and bleeding, the blood was like a life force exploding through her veins.

  She’d known it from that moment—known that she was “different”. She’d also known better than to confide in anyone about her newfound bloodlust. Her mouth had healed, but her passion had been awoken, and it was almost a sexual thing. She craved blood. Animal blood wouldn’t do, though usually it was all she had.

  She’d once tried purcha
sing a small bucket of cow’s blood from the local slaughterhouse, but it had nauseated her. The stench of offal had permeated the blood, and its dark coagulated offering was sour and foul in her mouth. No, it had to be human. And where did one find human blood?

  She learned a lesson in caution at age fifteen, when she and a best girlfriend made a “blood-pact” to be best friends forever. It had been Grace’s idea, though she hadn’t consciously admitted her own designs. They’d pricked their index fingers, pressing them together as a way to mingle their “life’s blood” as a symbol of eternal friendship.

  The sight of that bright, perfect offering had been too much for the young Grace and impulsively she’d grabbed her friend’s hand, sucking against the bleeding finger like a starving baby suckling its mother’s milk.

  Her friend had been upset, pulling back her hand. “Gross! You are really weird, you know that, Grace?” Grace had been startled by her own action and immediately ashamed. Beyond the girl’s words, Grace actually felt her friend’s disgust resonating within her. She could sense the girl’s recoiling as a palpable thing. She’d turned away, exerting all of her own willpower to keep from grabbing the girl’s hand again, to finish licking a single drop still swaying from its tip.

  She’d lost the friend, but learned a lesson in discretion.

  Instead of trying to find human blood from others, Grace had become a “cutter”, using a razor knife to satisfy her thirst. The little stolen mouthfuls of her own blood allayed the worst of the chronic ache in her gut. Her parents had been alarmed by the little cuts along her arms and inner thighs, and she had been forced to be very careful, only cutting where they wouldn’t see.

  They worried that she was maladjusted. She’d been “found” as a baby and these parents were the only ones she knew. Now she overheard them clucking with fear that some genetic trait was now manifesting itself and they were in for trouble.

  When they’d taken her to a psychiatrist, the offered therapy made her doubt, and finally deny, her true feelings. Her secret longing for blood was dismissed as misplaced fantasy. The therapist convinced her that the cutting was simply a manifestation of her own insecurities, due to the adoption and the onset of puberty. He worked with her to resolve any lingering issues of poor self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness. Because it was easier to accept these explanations, she did.

  The heady sweetness of human blood became little more than a dream, the fantasy of an overactive imagination. By age seventeen, she was heavily into denial. She regarded those early feelings of bloodlust as confused adolescent longings. She told herself that she was “cured”. And indeed, she did stop cutting herself and she stopped consciously fantasizing about the bright red droplets of life-sustaining energy that had rolled on her tongue like a kiss.

  Physically she paid the price, not receiving the nourishment she needed—unaware she was starving herself. Her mother worried her constantly to eat, making thick rich meals that raised Grace’s gorge, but obediently she tried to force them down. She learned to hide her constant gnawing pain and the extreme fatigue from her worrying parents, finally accepting it as a part of the fabric of what she was.

  Grace desperately wanted to be “normal” in the way of most seventeen-year-old girls who just want to fit in. She was mostly successful. There was still that ever-present gnawing whisper of hunger in her gut. Food didn’t satisfy it, but she learned to ignore it, for the most part.

  As she matured, Grace’s skin, always fair, became very pale. People often asked her if she were ill, which irritated her. As she learned to use makeup effectively, these questions lessened. Still the quiet pain and fatigue persisted, but Grace became a master of sublimation. She became aware of an increased sensitivity to sunlight. She burned easily in the sun and tended to avoid being outdoors, especially in the summer. No beach vacations or lolling by the pool with friends for Grace.

  More likely, she would be found holed up in a library somewhere, reading in a corner, almost hidden by stacks of old books about history and fantasy. While convinced by her therapist and her own desire to be “normal” that there was no such thing as vampires left in the world, Grace still loved to read about the ancient and medieval creatures who rose from the dead, usually during times of plague or great strife, to stalk the world in the dark of night, feeding off humans to slake their constant blood-thirst.

  She felt a curious affinity with the dark creatures, fantasizing and yet, if asked, she would laugh and say she just liked the old stories. They were fantastic, that was all. There was nothing to them, of course. They were simply legends trying to explain the unexplainable.

  It was during college that Grace discovered the vampire clubs. She’d been accepted to a small liberal arts college in New Orleans and was in the middle of her senior year when she’d met Regan, the Gothic drama queen extraordinaire. Regan dressed exclusively in black and told anyone who would listen that she had been kissed by a real vampire, and had thus been “turned”.

  Of course, it was understood that Regan was playacting, but just the same, Grace had been intrigued. In her small town in the backwaters of Louisiana, any talk of vampires would have been decried as sacrilegious and even obscene. Grace had been enthralled at the open way Regan had exhibited her taste for blood, and her own professed sensitivity to light. When Regan had offered to exchange a blood-kiss, as she called it, whereby the girls would each prick their thumbs and offer it to the other, Grace had recoiled, the recollection of that other time suddenly emerging from the depths of suppressed memories.

  She didn’t examine her own reluctance. She didn’t have to. A part of her already sensed what was becoming increasingly difficult to deny. Now as she sat at the bar, sipping her tomato juice and vodka, she turned on her stool, seeking the source of the scent that had electrified her. She resisted an impulse to touch her sex and instead crossed her legs, the slight pressure easing a bit of her unexplained arousal.

  Looking up, she saw a young man approaching her. He was about her age, perhaps a little older. His face was painted white, with a little droplet of red drawn at the corner of his mouth, which was also painted blood red. His sandy-colored hair was brushed straight back, revealing a strong widow’s peak. His look was completed by the requisite black satin cape lined with crimson.

  Despite the obvious Count Dracula getup, Grace could see that the guy was rather good-looking, with wide blue eyes and even features, though his jaw was a little weak. He was quite tall and though his shoulders were narrow and a little stooped, still he presented as an attractive man. She noticed a little trinket around his neck, some kind of glass vial.

  Perhaps taking this as his cue, the fellow said, “Ah, you are noticing my amulet. Do you like it?” She looked more closely at the little glass bottle. It had a small handle on either side, and tapered at the bottom. It was quite unusual.

  “It’s quite beautiful. What is it?”

  “I can see you are a fledgling,” he said with a superior little smile. “You are not an initiate of the covens. My coven is the Red Covenant. No doubt, you’ve heard of it. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Robert. Robert Dalton. At your service, my lady.” As he spoke, Robert bowed low, sweeping his cape around himself with a flourish.

  Grace couldn’t help but laugh a little at his dramatics. She answered, “I’m Grace. Grace Davis. And I guess I am a fledgling or whatever you called me, because I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. Is that your secret decoder ring or something along those lines?” She pointed to his amulet. “And the ‘Red Covenant’ is your boys’ club—no girls allowed?” Of course she knew what a coven was, but it amused her to play dumb at his expense.

  Robert smiled back, though the smile now seemed a little strained. Grace could feel his irritation. She seemed to have a knack, a gift her mother said, of actually sensing what others were feeling. Sometimes she almost felt she could hear their thoughts. Usually it made her uncomfortable, like watching someone through the crack in a bathroom stall. She wasn�
�t supposed to be there.

  Grace bit her lip. She knew she had insulted him but he was rather pompous, calling her a fledgling—clearly an insult in his book. He lifted his eyebrows and said, “Evidently someone has brought you here, as a guest.” He almost seemed to spit the word. “I can see you have no knowledge of even the most basic vampire terminology.”

  Sitting on the empty stool next to Grace, Robert now said, “Allow me to give you a brief lesson. A fledgling is someone who is inexperienced with the vampire lifestyle. New to the scene. Fledglings who are permitted to join a coven are assigned as an apprentice to a more experienced vampire who acts as their mentor, if you will, teaching them about our rituals, duties and sacred codes.”

  So it is a secret boys’ club, she thought, trying to keep an attentive and serious expression as Robert continued. “This talisman that you see indicates my superior status in the Red Covenant. It’s called an amphora. Among the ancients, these vessels were used for holding sacred wine or special oils. We sanguine use it for other things.” He looked meaningfully at her.

  “It’s quite unusual,” Grace said, aware he was waiting for her to ask what a sanguine was, and what special uses they had for the little vials. Perversely she kept quiet, annoyed with his supercilious manner.

  Robert turned toward the bar, gesturing to the bartender. After placing his order, he turned back to Grace. His tone was more natural now and she realized he was probably just an insecure young man eager to impress her. He said, “So what brings you here tonight? Idle curiosity? Who brought you? Did you get to see the bloodletting demonstration?”

  “Regan brought me. Regan Flambert. Well, her real name is Susan, but she prefers Regan. Do you know her?” As Robert shook his head, she continued, “Well, we both went to the same college and now we both work for the same law firm. We share an interest in vampires. I mean, she’s really into it, all the online role-play and stuff. I guess my interest is more academic. The history of it and all.”