by Lola Gabriel
“Hello,” Rex said, pushing himself up to lean on his elbows, “you’re back in the land of the living.”
Maddie’s innards squirmed. “Was I…that bad?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember too much.” That was a good midway. She didn’t want to admit to remembering absolutely fucking nothing.
Rex grinned. His teeth were white, his lips very, very red. “I see,” he said. “Yeah, I didn’t know where you lived.” He pushed back his hair where it had flopped onto his forehead, revealing that grey streak. She still couldn’t place his accent. Eastern Europe somewhere? The Balkans? And it came and went somewhat, like maybe he had lived away from home for a long time. Intriguing.
“Thanks, I guess,” she said. She was leaning against the doorway like a little girl. Wow.
“What for?” asked Rex, cocking his head slightly.
“For being a gentleman?” Oh my god, I am doing the flirting thing again, Maddie thought. But he was doing it back.
“A gentleman?” Rex repeated, and he raised his thick eyebrows. He looked sleepy, in a sweet way. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, the grey premature. He’d looked older in his tailored clothes too. But the sleep, that was sweet, youthful.
“Ugh, you know what I mean,” Maddie said.
“Not ravaging you when you were incapacitated?”
Maddie shrugged. “Right, something like that. I mean, I feel great now, though.”
“Is that an invitation?” Rex’s shoulders were broad and he wasn’t as thickly haired as his dark stubble and hair suggested he might be, but there was a black shock of it on his chest and down his belly into his boxer shorts. His thighs were thick, but there was this delicacy to all of him, his alabaster skin. It was like he was almost see through.
Maddie took a couple of steps into the room. She felt slinky, she felt sexy. “It might be,” she said in a voice she barely recognized. A silky voice. A voice that had seen the world.
Rex was smiling at her. He beckoned her over, one long-fingered hand pulling at the air, saying come here. Maddie shook her head. She bit her bottom lip.
“Come to me,” she fixed him with her gaze. She felt so awake, so alive.
Rex sat up properly, swinging his legs off the bed. “You’ve really woken up…tough,” he said.
“I’m not tough,” Maddie smiled. “I’m just feeling decisive. And I want you to stand up, so I can climb you.”
Rex stood and walked slowly to Maddie. He stood in front of her. “Like this?” he asked, and he planted his feet firmly and leaned down, his lips brushing hers. Maddie stepped back. She was tingling with anticipation. Strange, cold anticipation. She pulled her shirt off over her head, and then she unzipped her skirt, leaned over, and stepped out of it. Rex was looking her up and down with those eyes like chips of sky. She ran the few steps to him and jumped. Her legs went around him, and he caught her, one hand under her ass and one on the small of her back.
“Hello,” he said, and he kissed her hard.
Maybe Maddie was still drunk? She wasn’t a shrinking violet, but she wasn’t this confident either. Or maybe it was that he was a proper stranger. She didn’t even have his number. It was a meeting out of a movie, really, gallant stranger taking her home for her own safety, and he happens to be apparently like…a millionaire or something.
They were kissing with so much abandon, their teeth clacked together. Maddie laughed. She moved to kiss along his stubbled jaw, down to his neck, where she stopped to take in his scent, and then to press her teeth down, test the strength of his skin, lick down to his collarbone.
Rex had undone her bra while holding her up in his arms. She shook it off and it landed somewhere in the big room.
“Bed?” Rex asked, and she pushed her hair back over her shoulder, leaned back to look at him, and nodded.
Rex half threw her onto the bed—maybe he was trying to reassert his dominance. But she was feeling dominant today. Feeling like she should be in charge. She wrestled him onto his back, pushing his shoulders down and straddling his sharp hips. Rex laughed. “Stronger than you look, aren’t you?” he said, almost in a growl. And to her surprise, he was right. She felt stronger than usual. Felt like she had somehow become a fitter person in her sleep. Maybe it was just the lust, because that was coursing through her too, a thrum of need for this virtual stranger, a level of desire that felt like a stranger too.
His hands were on her thighs, and he was lying back, looking at her with a kind of wonder. Like she was some fantastic creature. Well, she was, wasn’t she? He was lucky to be underneath her, to be able to feel her pushing her wet, wanting, warm self against him.
She shimmied down until she could feel him pushing needily against her. She let herself sit there, making eye contact, keeping her face nearly expressionless, making him want her more, moving herself roughly and then softly and then roughly again, the fabric of both their pairs of underwear keeping them from one another until Rex groaned, pushed her down toward him, his eyes closing a little with pure want. She let him want for a moment more, and then she slipped her fingers into the band of his boxers and pulled them down, let her face follow them, kissing his thighs, nibbling, until his underwear was off and then hers was too, and then finally she climbed up the mattress and put herself on him and slipped him into her and bore down, watching his face all the time. He looked just how she wanted him to look. His mouth opened, and his eyes remained closed. All of his facade of worldliness, all his knowing humor, none of it mattered now. But just as she felt her strength turning into a kind of victory, the pleasure got her too. He felt perfect inside her. She felt finished, full, complete. And just a moment after she thought that, after she had begun to realize her own joy, it threatened to peak, it came and came and came at her. And then, in the ultimate moment of it, she opened her mouth wide to gasp, to shriek, and when she closed it, her own tooth caught at her lip and made her…
Maddie draped herself across Rex, breathing heavily. Weirdly, the breathing felt performative. She should be puffed out, though. She put a hand to her mouth, and looked at her fingers. Dark sludge. She’d thought she had cut herself, a weird accident with her teeth.
“That was…” Rex said from beneath her, “that was great. I didn’t know, last night, I mean, this wasn’t my intention.”
“I know,” Maddie said, “well actually, I don’t, if I’m honest, I have no idea, I can’t remember a thing from last night.” She rolled off him, still thinking about her cut. “My teeth just did something weird,” she said. “Do you have, like, I don’t know, a mirror? I want to see what happened.”
Rex laughed. “No mirrors in this flat,” he said. “I hate the things.”
“That’s a very weird take,” Maddie said, “original at least. My lip isn’t bleeding, but I need something.”
She leaned over the side of the bed. Surely this man would have a rag, a clean sock, a
pillowcase? There had to be something.
There was.
“What the fuck!”
Behind Maddie, Rex’s weight shifted as he sat up and looked over her shoulder. “Shit,” he said, as Maddie reached down and with thumb and forefinger lifted the half-drained bag of deeply red, thick liquid. It clung to the insides of the clear bag, dripping down in rivulets. She could smell it through the two small holes in the bag’s surface. Two holes like…
“Would you believe me if I told you I was sick, and it’s my cure?” Rex tried.
“Abso-fucking-lutely not!” Maddie replied. “Especially when you say it like that!” She flung the bag at Rex. “Is it blood? Is it really blood?” she asked.
Rex, naked and still reclined, clearly thought for a moment before he answered.
“Yes,” he said, calmly and quietly, “yes, it is, and it was your fangs that cut your lip. And you aren’t bleeding properly because your heart no longer pumps blood.”
Maddie moved away from him, suddenly feeling incredibly exposed in her nakedness. She tried to pull the b
lanket with her, but Rex’s weight was on it. The bag if blood—because that was definitely what it was, thick, oily, iron-stinking blood—lay between them, slowly staining the bed clothes.
“Did you drug me?” Maddie asked, as calmly as she could manage. “I was out with my work mates, and then I left, and then I was here. Did I come back to the pub? Did you slip something into a drink?”
Rex shook his head. He followed her off the bed, and in a move that would be comical if it wasn’t such a terrifying moment, he felt on the floor for his underwear and pulled the boxers back on.
“I swear, Maddie,” he said, “I made you, and now I have to look after you.” Rex looked around the room a little desperately as Maddie backed away, as if he was searching for something. “Christ, this used to be easier when everyone believed in the occult. Maddie, think back to after you left your work friends, okay, what did you do? You didn’t come back to the King’s Arms.”
“A roofie can destroy memories from before it’s in your system,” Maddie said, but somehow, she was less sure now. Because she did remember stumbling out of the bar. She remembered Allan being sweet but irritating and she remembered slipping away.
“I wanted to see the river,” she said. She was still moving back toward the door, but slower now. “I was walking to the river. It was pretty dark.”
Rex was still looking at her gently. He wanted her to continue, but he wasn’t pushing. He was giving her space to finish.
“I…” she really couldn’t remember; she had run from something. She remembered being scared and heading for the light. The street was wet, wet paving stones that hadn’t wanted her to get away, but she nearly had and then…
Maddie remembered. She put her hand over her mouth, felt herself back into the wall. “Oh, no!” she let this out as a moan. She remembered.
“There was… a thing,” she said. “It had teeth and white eyes and then…”
Rex nodded. He walked a few steps forwards. “Can I hold you?” he asked.
“It wasn’t you?” Maddie asked. She shook her head. Rex’s blue eyes were soft. He was holding his hands up in front of him in a show of innocence. “Do you remember it being me?”
Its face had been wide and white, blue-veined, pale-eyed, and dressed in something old fashioned, ragged, even. And its smell...
“It smelled,” she said. “It smelled…dead.”
“Right,” Rex said, taking another step forward. “That means it…they…have gone feral, or are on the way. And that isn’t me, Maddie, I saved you. I mean, I turned you. You’re one of us now.”
Maddie’s hand went to her mouth. It felt normal. But of course it did, vampires weren’t real, were they? This was fucking stupid.
“Is this a joke?” she managed to ask, though she felt a little frozen.
Rex shook his head. “Do you want to see?” he asked. “I mean, look at my dinner.” He gestured back at the bed, where the blood or whatever it was that looked—and smelled—like blood was still seeping into the sheets.
“You’re messing with me,” she said. “I don’t even know if that’s…”
“Fine,” Rex said, clearly irritated. And then he moved toward her quickly, incredibly quickly, and his face changed. His eyes went an even brighter blue, the skin on his face stretched, and his teeth…his mouth…it became something more like an animal’s mouth, with animal’s teeth, with bright, sharp fangs.
She pushed herself further into the wall. She wanted to whimper, wanted to cry, but instead she felt her own teeth do something strange. It was the same thing that had happened at the height of their lovemaking, the thing that had split her lip.
Trembling, Maddie put up a hand. Her teeth were sharp as knives. Her teeth were like his teeth.
In front of her, Rex’s face reformed into its normal, handsome features. One arm leaned against the wall behind her. He looked calm, he wasn’t sweating, he wasn’t breathing hard. He was looking at her quite gently, in fact. “You see?” he said. “You see? It wasn’t me, and I saved you. You were dying, they nearly killed you.”
Maddie couldn’t breathe. Then she realized she wasn’t breathing. When had she last breathed? She took a huge gasp in, and then she felt her face again. Felt her teeth retreating back into their normal position. She should be crying right now, she felt like she should be crying, but she wasn’t. “What the hell?” she managed. “If this is true, you should have let me die. And if it isn’t true, you’re insane. I mean, clearly you are insane. Where am I? Where have you trapped me? Why is it so dark in here?”
She pushed herself off the wall behind her, ran for the other wall, the wall that had to have windows in it. She felt for them. It was all dark. And eventually, yes, a different surface. Fabric? Thick, but it was fabric. It was blinds. She tore at them, yanking as hard as she could. And like before, like when she had pushed the broad-shouldered Rex down below her on the bed, Maddie found that she was a lot stronger than she should be, than she usually was. The blinds snapped, ripped, and she tugged them right down.
The light, even just in strips, flooded into the room. It wasn’t warm, more a cold kind of burn. It was like putting a hand in dry ice. She couldn’t see where it fell. It was a whole golden roar. Maddie couldn’t help it, she stumbled backwards and fell to the floor, crawling toward the living room as best she could. And then there were hands under her and she was lifted and carried, and the soothing dark closed around her again, and the pain thrummed lower and lower until it was gone and she began to open her eyes, at first to afterburn stars and then her vision cleared.
5
Rex
“The sun will hurt for a while,” Rex said. “Just for a while, and then you’ll be able to stand a few hours in it. Your strength will be sapped slowly, but it won’t hurt, you know?”
“No,” Maddie said weakly from her position, prone, on the sofa, “I don’t fucking know. What have you done to me?” The girl groaned and turned over, hiding her heart-shaped face deeper in the sofa cushions. “You did slip me something, didn’t you? I feel terrible now. Terrible. I felt so good for a while. What happened to your face? Is it a hallucinogen?”
Rex closed his eyes, took a moment for an unnecessary but still balancing breath. “Maddie,” he said, “I told you. You had been attacked, and I turned you. You’re a vampire.” This had been easier, Rex considered, when the majority of the population not only feared but fully believed in the undead. In fact, they used to misdiagnose themselves and one another as vampires and missed Rex and his pack in their midst as they did so. Now everyone was so bloody “rational”. He tried a new tactic, sitting down on the very end of the sofa by Maddie’s bare feet and asking, “What sort of a drug do you know that makes light physically hurt?”
“I’m not a chemist,” Maddie squeaked from beneath the blanket she had wrapped herself up in. “Or a drug dealer, or a slipper of substances to drunk women. Apparently you are at least one of those things. So, you tell me.”
Rex placed his hand lightly on Maddie’s calf, the blanket between his skin and hers. “No, I’m not,” he said, “but I probably shouldn’t have slept with you while you were on that high from coming back from the netherworld. I just… I’m very drawn to you, Maddie.”
“That’s the kind of thing a date-rapist would say,” Maddie replied, her face still hidden, her voice stronger than before. “I wasn’t drunk enough to black out, I know I wasn’t.”
But under Rex’s hand, Maddie’s leg was a little more relaxed than it had been before. He let a few seconds of silence sit between them, and she pulled the blanket down just enough that her eyes were peeking out, and a mess of golden-brown, wavy hair lay on the pillow. She blinked. Her eyes were as blue as a mid-May sky, with silver flecking the edges of her irises. Perhaps that would convince her. Make her remember…
“Where’s your phone?” Rex asked.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why would you want that? Are you going to keep me here?”
“No,” Rex said. He was
starting to get annoyed now. Annoyed at himself, and at Maddie. He should have left her to die, it would have been easier.
But then Maddie sat up. She held the blanket around herself like a dress, and got to her feet. Even in the blanket she was beautiful, her collarbone, pale shoulders, slim and slightly muscular arms. And even now that she was changed, she was still clumsy, half tripping on her way to her bag by the door.
Rex tensed up as she got closer to the exit, wondering if she was going to make a run for it. But no, she just bent over and fished in the large tote, the blanket slipping down her back almost as far as her buttocks as she did so, so that Rex could see every link in her spine and the wing-like tips of her shoulder blades.
“It’s out of battery,” Maddie said, holding up the block of glass and metal.
“Can you see your reflection in it?” Rex asked. “They’re like mirrors when they’re dark, aren’t they?” Maddie rolled her eyes. Her new, blue eyes. But then she held it up.
“No,” Maddie said, “I can’t bloody see my reflection, but that’s just the lighting.”
“Okay,” Rex held up a charging cable. “I don’t know whether to warn you or not. Look, all vampires have blue eyes, okay? So, what color were yours before?”
They were a lovely chestnut. He knew that. Of course he did. Couldn’t get the image of Maddie standing on stage, alive, heart beating, brown eyes shining, singing that song last night, out of his head.
“Brown,” she said, “they’re just brown.”
Rex couldn’t help himself. He said, “They were beautiful then, chestnut, like the coat of my first horse, and now they are like the sky on a perfect day.”
“What?” Maddie raised her eyebrows. “Your…horse? Are you posh? Is this inherited wealth?” she indicated…this…everything round her, the concrete penthouse.