by Fiona Zedde
“What are you still doing here, Kylie?” Belle walked with her hands in the pockets of her dress, the heels of her shoes delicately kissing the sidewalk.
They moved side by side down the narrow walk. A man with a neatly trimmed beard and too much alcohol in his blood walked toward then slipped between them, disappearing from where they had come.
Kylie unconsciously mirrored her mother’s stance though she didn’t look nearly as beautiful and dramatically feminine. In her jeans and gray T-shirt, her unimpressive height of barely five feet nine, she felt less than, a dainty and almost unworthy creature. She shrugged off the feeling.
“I like it here,” she said in response to her mother’s question. “That’s why I’m still in Atlanta.”
“The human is dying. I can smell it.”
Kylie nearly stumbled on the smooth sidewalk. “I know.”
“Then what are you doing here? Either kill her or fuck her and move on. Or give her your blood and make her one of us.”
Kylie hissed on a breath of unwelcome air. “I could never do that.” The thought of making Olivia what she was actually sickened her. She shook her head. “I’d rather see her dead than turn into what I am.”
She felt her mother’s gaze. “Is this really such a terrible existence?”
“You know it is.” Kylie couldn’t look at her. “I’ve never wanted this. I feel like a monster.”
“I thought you’d get past that.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.” Her mother drew a breath. “I have. I’ve had to.”
Of course she would say that. She’d been living an ideal life with Silvija. Killing and fucking and rubbing their happiness in everyone’s faces.
“I can’t,” Kylie said. “I may do what I have to do, but I hate myself every time a human takes their last breath in my arms.”
“Maybe you’re doing it wrong then,” her mother said. “They shouldn’t die in your arms but in the dirt where you found them. That’s the surest way to get emotionally entangled.” Belle looked her over again with keen eyes. Searching.
Did she know that what Kylie said was merely what she wished and not what was? She wished she was caring and gentle, as human as she once was. Instead, all she felt for them was hunger. She thought briefly of Olivia and clenched her back teeth at the surge of lust that moved through her.
They were on the jogging path now, empty of everyone except the occasional passing drunk or homeless person. Distantly, she could make out a few inhuman scents. Other vampires in the area she had noticed before but had not bothered to find.
“You smell like your human, you know.” Belle spoke into Kylie’s deliberate silence.
“She isn’t my human,” Kylie said the words before she could stop herself.
Moonlight glinted off her mother’s teeth as she laughed softly. “If you haven’t claimed her yet then it’s only a matter of time.”
“I’m not like that!” Kylie snapped. “Not like you and—and her.” They both knew the “her” she was talking about.
Her mother looked at her again but with something more complicated in her gaze. They’d never talked about sex before, had never discussed that Belle was now living with and having regular sex with a woman. Something she would have never dreamed of doing in Jamaica.
The few times her mother had tried to talk with Kylie about anything approaching the subject, she had shut her down, saying that her grandmother had taught her everything she ever needed to know about getting naked with another human being.
“Don’t be so closed minded, daughter.”
Kylie hated it when Belle called her that. It sounded as cold as “stranger.”
“I’m not being closed minded.” But she was being something. Wasn’t she the one who had watched Olivia touch herself and taken her own private pleasure from watching Olivia’s mindless bliss? Wasn’t she the one who wanted…more?
Her mother merely smiled, a bare movement of her painted lips. “Come have dinner with me tonight.”
Pleased surprise flitted through Kylie’s body. She felt it like a rod through her spine. “Um…Okay.”
Her mother laughed again. The breeze lifted up, billowing her skirt around her knees, bringing her scent that was like home brushing against Kylie’s face. Sometimes looking at her was almost unbearable. She was so beautiful yet so distant. Farther away, it seemed, than even when she had been missing in Jamaica and Kylie only relied on her grandmother for a steady diet of love and tenderness.
Kylie and Belle moved into the hidden areas, away from the streetlights and toward the shadows that the unwise and the criminal had slipped off to. The fall air was crisp, perfumed with the scent of dying leaves and wood fires. Belle nodded, hands still in the pockets of her delicate looking dress. She turned her head away from Kylie. Her face shifted in the silvered darkness, becoming harder with the scent of a possible prey. Kylie smelled it too. Enticing.
The scent was beyond the homeless men huddled under the overpass. A pair of them Kylie could hear talking about women in the neighborhood they’d like to fuck. It wasn’t the group of young girls walking home together after a late-night movie, their laughing gaggle of voices riding the night. It wasn’t even the single man, a lone nighttime jogger, making his way on the path, secure that no one would trouble him, would dare compromise his masculinity. He wasn’t enough for the two of them. Or was it that feeding on one person would be much too intimate an act for them to share? Kylie shied away from that thought and focused instead on the most enticing meal available to them.
No more than half a mile away, a photographer and his subject were taking advantage of the bright moon to photograph Atlanta by night. Kylie could hear them. His instructions, the young girl’s ready compliance, the sigh of her clothes as she turned this way and that. She smelled the makeup and powder on the girl’s skin, the hint of sweat under her clothes. Kylie licked her lips.
Her mother kicked off her pretty high heels and toed them under a flowering bush. “Ready?” Her voice was a low purr.
Kylie nodded. They walked together toward their prey, silent. Kylie thought she should do well to remember that moment. Except for one disastrous night nearly seven years ago when she’d first joined the clan, she and her mother never hunted together. Never. That first time had been a trauma that neither of them wanted to relive. So it had been Rufus who taught her to hunt, Rufus and Ivy. And at times, they all hunted together, swarming in a pack on some unsuspecting group in the feast of a city that was New York, but even then, Kylie and Belle stayed away from each other.
On that long ago night in Jamaica, the moon had been high and full overhead. A salt-scented breeze rustled through the soaring trees in the front yard of the cottage where the clan—Belle, Silvija, Julia, and Ivy—stood in a loose circle, waiting.
On her first full night as a vampire, fear and excitement battled for dominance inside Kylie. After years of separation, she was with her mother again, and Belle’s love promised to make up for everything Kylie had lost along with her human life—sunlight, mangoes, her grandmother.
The night before, she had woken up from a nightmare only to realize that it was real. In a fit of hunger, she had split open her grandmother’s throat and drank her up like fresh tea. Her first blood, the sweetest she’d ever had, but also the one that brought her the most pain.
Kylie was fragile, on the edge of falling apart because of what she had done to her grandmother. She stood under the moonlight at her mother’s side, feeling like a beast, unworthy and ashamed. Perhaps sensing her turmoil, Belle touched her face with hands that smelled like the earth.
“This is what we do,” her mother said.
Kylie trembled in the grip of remorse and relief, gladness and guilt, not knowing quite what to do. Belle removed her hands but kept her eyes on Kylie’s, her velvet brown gaze filled with as much guilt as Kylie felt.
Then Belle blinked and turned away, linked hands with Silvija who had been watching them with concern. Their
hands squeezed then let go. Kylie looked away from them, uncomfortable with the sight of them touching.
Silvija turned, moonlight creating shadows and beauty on her full-lipped face. “Let’s go.”
Then the clan was off, loping over the damp grass, through the yard, and down the hill. There was human scent in the air and Kylie followed, running full speed. The wind rushed against her face, tugged at her clothes. The night was like another world. Scurrying insects and the smell of fear, animal footsteps darting away from the clan, the heady perfume of orchids.
Before too long, she smelled smoke in the air, the sign of a fire not too far away. There was singing and bare feet stomping in the dirt, conversation and laughter. The smell of ganja. Some humans were having an outdoor party.
The clan broke it up. Kylie and her new family burst into the ring of hippies and wannabe Rastafarians with their long, manicured dreads and mediocre marijuana. The humans froze in mid-dance around the fire. Seven of them. Two women. Three were dancing while the others sat around the fire, smoking and talking.
Belle struck first. Or maybe it only seemed that way because Kylie was watching her mother closest of all. She sliced through the small group like a blade, jumping over the high tongues of flame to seize one of the women who only had time to lurch to her feet in shock before Belle grabbed her hair, jerked her neck back, and slashed into her throat with razor fangs.
The woman fought Belle, flailing her thin arms, scratching at her mother’s face. Belle broke her arms, a sound like twigs snapping. She gave a shriek of agony. Belle lashed a hand over the woman’s mouth and continued to feed, mouth slurping at the ragged gash in her throat. Blood spilled down the woman’s neck and splashed on her rainbow-colored, crochet dress.
The woman dropped to the ground and Belle went with her, sucking at the gushing fount without stopping. She was on her knees, the woman’s head and neck cradled in her arms in a parody of caring while the human’s legs twitched in the dirt. Belle raised her head, revealing bloodstained lips and curved teeth. She stared at Kylie who had frozen in the clearing in horror.
“Come drink,” Belle said. Blood sprayed from her lips as she spoke.
“No!” Kylie backed away from the sight of her mother, the killer, who was enjoying the human’s pitiful struggles, holding her on the brink of death so the blood would remain sweet. Inviting Kylie to—her stomach heaved. She threw up its measly contents in the dirt while all around her the others killed, enjoyed, feasted.
Kylie dropped to all fours near the fire, wet strings of blood hanging from her lips, the smell of smoke and spilled blood, shit and piss assaulting her from all sides. She squeezed her eyes shut, still seeing her mother at her bloody feast, ripping out the woman’s throat. Then it was her grandmother who swam before her eyes, dead and drained from the night before. And finally, Kylie saw herself.
She didn’t hate the carnage around her. Instead, she felt the spurt of wet hunger in her mouth, felt how badly she wanted to take her mother’s place at the human’s throat. Her stomach lurched again.
But that night was in the past. This was now. And although she had her fears and contrary desires, Kylie wanted tonight to be better. She wanted to accept her mother and herself as what each was. As usual, she wanted something more.
Quietly, she crept at her mother’s side. They moved like ghosts, the pavement like a perfect spring under her feet. The moment her feet touched the ground, the concrete conspired to push her up and forward again, until she was moving as fast as a bicycle, a fact that even now continued to astonish her, how fast she could run, how strong she was, how suited to killing her body had become.
It wasn’t long before she and Belle found them. Pavement became stone then grass. An abandoned house appeared on the hill. It had been burned and was now a ruined shell with kudzu growing over its charred frame, blackened doorways, even its chipped concrete steps. Kylie stopped to watch them and her mother did the same. As always, she fought that split second of jealousy, of déjà vu, whenever she was about to take a human. Their life was so valuable, but so transient. A thing that was so strong one instant, then gone in a flash. Swallowed, burped, and quickly forgotten.
Kylie savored their humanity and the thought of taking it from them. She suspected, though, that her mother was meditating on something else entirely. Belle watched the model while a predatory and pleased smile played on her red lips. The model was pretty enough and vulnerable-looking. Thick black curls spilled down the side of her throat in a scented fall while her pale skin glowed in a tight rubber dress that would make it nearly impossible for her to run. Even if she ran, there was no place for her to go.
Kylie’s hands curled at her sides as her lips parted in anticipation, making room for the slow and almost erotically painful lengthening of her feeding teeth. The inside of her mouth was wet. She was suddenly starving.
Belle nodded toward the girl. “Take her.”
She didn’t have to say it twice. But at the sound of her voice that Belle did not bother to hide, the humans looked up in surprise.
“This is a private photo shoot,” the man said with irritation.
Kylie grinned. “We like private.”
She clenched her fists, pounded them once against her thighs, and sprang. She cut quickly through the darkness, giving up the anonymity of watching them for much, much more direct involvement. It didn’t take long for the pair to see what was going on, how unwise it was for them to be walking through the darkness as if they owned it. The night was the territory of beasts. Not men. And certainly not humans.
Kylie’s feet sprang across the grass. Puzzlement then fear flashed in the girl’s eyes that tried to track Kylie’s quick progress toward her. Kylie almost remembered what it was like to watch the eerie vampiric speed from human eyes—blurs of movement, slashing teeth, a savage death. Or sometimes a quick one.
Kylie grabbed the girl from her shrinking crouch in the charred doorway, shoved her head aside, and pulled the pulsing artery swiftly to her mouth. Her skin popped like a cherry, releasing its hot nectar into Kylie’s mouth. The blood gushed over her tongue, a warm flood of nourishment, coppery and intoxicating. Yes, the girl had taken something, had been drugged. Kylie tasted the trace bitterness in the blood, a fleeting thought before she staggered on her feet.
“Oh!”
Kylie dropped the girl against the wall and spun where she stood, eyes blinking.
She was distantly aware of her mother and the photographer. Belle dragging the camera from his hands and smashing it against the stone steps. A hand clenched tightly over his mouth to stop his screams as she ravaged his throat. Even in her savagery, she was elegant, sensuous.
Her mother moved as if she were made of light, her body like a thousand fireflies in the dark evening. The sound of her gulping down the human’s blood was like a song, its rhythmic bass thumping loudly in Kylie’s head. Belle didn’t waste a single drop. She pinned the man’s bucking body to the ground with the easy weight of her own, dropping on him like a spider, her dress floating around them, partially hiding his body from view as she fed from him. She muffled the sounds of his terror beneath her hand.
“Stop it.”
The girl’s voice was feeble, but it was there. She sagged against the wall, her neck sluggishly bleeding, her eyes glassy and wide. Improbably, her nipples were hard against the rubber dress, and Kylie could smell the thick rise of her pussy’s scent in the night. But Kylie shook her head. She did not want that. But the girl wanted her. Even dying, she reached for Kylie, one hand held out in supplication, the other tugging at the tight neckline of her dress.
“Kiss me!” the girl gasped.
Her mother looked up from her feast. “Give the girl what she wants, Kylie.”
“No.” Kylie shook her head and fought against the effect of the drugs rampaging through her blood. “I told you, I don’t do that.”
Her mother looked over her shoulder at Kylie again, blood staining her lips an even richer red. “Don
’t judge what you don’t know.” Then she bent her head to finish her meal.
Kylie stood under the bright moon watching her mother kill. Perversely, seeing Belle drinking up the man’s life essence made her not want to kill the drugged young woman. Under Violet’s counsel, she had left some of the humans she’d fed from alive, taking only just enough blood to sustain herself, drinking from whores who were prey in the night as they waited for their next john, the homeless who offered her sex but whose blood she took in exchange for a few dollars in a dimly lit alley, licking their musky necks until they forgot about the pain of their lives for a few precious minutes. It wouldn’t do to alert the police about a predator on the loose, Violet told her. They might actually try to do something about it.
If she stayed in Atlanta long enough, Violet would turn her back into a human yet. Against the wall, the human woman was faint from blood loss, but she still reached out for Kylie. The temptation to finish her was strong, but with Belle there beside her she simply could not do it. She didn’t want her mother to see how much of a beast she’d become, how much like Belle from that long ago night in the Jamaican hills.
Her mother rose from her feast, licking her scarlet lips. “Finish her,” Belle said. “Or take her someplace where she would be found and tended to. You took a lot from her and she is already skinny.” She waved a dismissive hand at the girl’s rubber-clad body.
Kylie righted herself as the effects of the drugs lessened and she was able to see without every movement being light-streaked and too beautiful to look away from. She took the girl in her arms and carried her toward civilization.
She left her on the front steps of an apartment on a well-lit doorstep. She would be found. She would be cared for. Kylie and Belle walked away from the woman and found the bright sidewalk leading down a narrow residential street and toward a small nightclub where Kylie could hear music pounding through thick walls. Traffic zoomed steadily past on the main street ahead of them.