As Red as Blood
Part One
They tell a story of Snow White. They say that she was born with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. This is a different story, though no less true for that. She was not born with lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow and hair as black as ebony. True, her hair was dark, though it was more the color of the teak wood dining chairs that came as part of her mother's dowry. And her skin was fair, though not the pure white of snow. And as for her lips, those did not turn red until much later.
Born on a cold winter morning, her mother clutches her to her breast and calls her Snow White, in the hope that she will be as pure and white as the new-fallen snow. And with a doting mother and a loving yet oblivious father, it proves true.
The court physician worries about the child because she never cries, but looks up at her with eyes of wonder, eyes so dark a brown that they bring to mind the chocolate that has lately come from Spain. The physician shudders with something akin to revulsion as she leaves the baby's nursery and doesn't know why, for surely there is nothing revolting about this, the perfect child.
At the age of five, when her mother dies, Snow White does not cry. She knows she should, but she cannot summon the tears to her eyes. Her father wraps his arms around her and soaks the shoulders of her dress with his tears, but she only looks solemnly over his shoulder.
The physician, invited to the funeral as all the household staff is, sees this solemn look, and glances away quickly, not wanting to catch her gaze.
Soon after the death of the queen, the king falls ill. The doctor comes to treat him, and there is no physical wrong in him that she can see: indeed, he is still young, not much past thirty, and, the doctor cannot help noticing, still as handsome as he ever was.
But he will not eat. He has sunk into a despair so deep that it is all she can do to force broth down his throat. She comes every day, and as he drinks his barley broth or she feels his forehead for a fever, he looks at her as if she is the only thing holding him up, keeping him alive.
And so it is on the day he clutches at her arm as she turns to go and says "doctor," she sits on the edge of the bed and tells him to call her by her given name; for all that no one has used it in nigh on a dozen years.
He says it as if it is a flavor he is savoring, and still he holds her by her wrist as though she might float away on a passing breeze if he does not. No one has ever looked at her like that, she thinks, and so the next time she comes she does not tie her hair up in a ribbon but lets it fall free. She has been called beautiful in her youth, a youth not much past.
She does not think of what she is doing, trying to attract a king, and mere weeks after his wife's death. She is careful not to think about it. And when the day comes that he sits up in bed and kisses her, she pushes all thoughts of mourning and fidelity from her mind and leans in and kisses back, just to feel his warm arms come around her and to be safe again, for the first time since childhood to have no worries or cares. This is what she has. This is who she is.
Snow White is six years old when her father marries his physician and tells her "She is your mother now. You will call her Mother."
But this woman has blond hair, not brown, and looks at Snow White with lips that are pinched, not smiling. No, she can never be Mother.
For her part, the once doctor watches Snow White watching her and thinks "there is something wrong with that child." But she cannot think for long, because there is a line of well wishers waiting to give her gifts and congratulations, as their new queen, and she does not know what to do with her hands, or her mouth.
She settles for a half smile and clasping her hands over her stomach, then quickly lowers her hands as she thinks it too conspicuous and that surely someone will realize that there is another human being growing inside her.
But still she jumps out of her skin when the last person in line, a wrinkled old woman who barely reaches the now queen's shoulder, puts her gnarled hand upon her stomach and says "ah," before handing her a gilt-framed mirror swathed in lace. The queen wants to recoil, but her husband is smiling and reaching out to the woman to embrace her, explaining in quiet tones that this is his godmother.
She forces a smile to her lips and kisses the woman's weathered cheek, and her present is the first the queen looks at that night after they have all been moved into her antechamber.
It truly is a beautiful mirror, she realizes, once she removes the lace that binds it. She hangs it on the wall above her dressing table and thinks nothing amiss until the day it whispers as she leans in to powder her face: "You really are, you know."
She lets out a strangled screech and jumps back, upsetting her chair. Then she cautiously leans in again.
"I am what?" she asks shakily, barely above a breath.
"The fairest of them all."
She knows she is not the fairest of them all, cannot be, shouldn't be. She must wear glasses to read fine print, her hair is not the blond of cornsilk bathed in summer sunshine but of dusty wheat, and her hands are almost as large as those of the king. But the mirror insists, and she knows that a mirror like this does not lie.
Snow White sees the new worry in her stepmother's face, a worry that swells along with her belly. Snow White is too young to know about the ways of men and women, and yet she knows. And the stepmother sees Snow White look at her growing stomach and turns away, always turns away with a strange look on her face. Her own mother loved her, Snow White knows, yet this new mother does not, and will only love the creature that comes out of her.
But the creature does not come. Eight months after the wedding, the queen goes to bed and the midwife, the new physician who has replaced her, comes to her and gives her teas steeped with mugwart, and cool lavender drenched cloths to place on her forehead. And yet for all of this, the baby is born still.
"Perhaps it was not meant to be," her husband whispers as he brushes her damp hair off her forehead and kisses her. "Perhaps it was never meant to be."
He does not console her. The only thing that does is the mirror, later, alone in her room, saying "You are still the fairest of them all."
Snow White grows up obstinate. The knowledge that her stepmother does not love her taints any obedience Snow White might have had. When she is ten years old, she stops speaking to the stepmother altogether. Soon, she will not even submit to the embraces of her father, and, as she grows older, her obstinance turns to rebellion.
A princess is not supposed to climb out of her bedroom window and down the trellis in the middle of the night to wander through the woods. But she finds solace in the darkness, solace she cannot find anywhere else. In the dark, no one can see her. She can be anyone she wishes to be; anyone but herself.
A princess is not supposed to talk to boys she meets in the woods either. Boys with eyes that glow like firelight. For the fire, as she knows from observation, consumes all it touches. And yet, perhaps she would like to be consumed by this boy with eyes that follow her, this boy that seems to know her. Maybe if she lets him consume her, she will at last begin to feel. To feel as she has not since the death of her mother, eight long years ago. To feel that which the stepmother does not give her, can never give her. To feel that she is worthy of being loved.
And so when she is fourteen she lifts her skirts to him there on the forest floor. Her heart beats hard in her throat as his kisses her cheek and then her neck. This is the moment, she thinks, the moment I finally become. But what she thinks to become she does not know. His lips against her neck turn to teeth, and she feels a sharp pain that makes her clap her hand to her throat. She can feel her pulse beneath her fingers, and when she brings them away, her blood shines milky silver in the light of the gibbous moon. And he smiles at her, blood dripping off the teeth she suddenly sees are sharp. She scrambles to her feet, ripping her dress on a protruding root and runs, never looking back for fear that she will trip and then that hot, looming presence will be on her again.
She hides under her blankets that night and makes sure her windows and her door are latched. She never sees the boy again, but that does not change anything, for she knows what he was.
In the morning, she finds the blood, dried on her neck, and when she wipes it off, finds beneath two puncture holes that gape at her sinisterly, until she thinks to hide them under silk scarf from Paris. A present from the stepmother which she has spurned. It fills its purpose now.
With her wounds hidden, Snow White can at last begin to think. In all the time that she hides away from the world, she has read many books, books of lore and of fantastical creatures. She knows of the mating habits of griffins and the properties of unicorn horns. She knows when dragons prefer to hunt and why fairies sometimes eat their young.
She knows that those who are vampire-bit will soon become vampires themselves.
She begins to have difficulty falling asleep at night. She lies awake past midnight, and awakes with a start at dawn. The times of falling asleep and waking grow closer together until she does not sleep at all.
While she lies in her bed unsleeping, she probes her incisors with her tongue, feeling them grow sharper day by day, until one night a drop of blood wells on her tongue when she touches it to her tooth. She swallows the blood, feeling it slide, saltily and tasting of metal, down her throat, and finds that she likes the taste of it. It makes her feel alive as nothing has in a long time.
The sun that greets her in the mornings hurts her eyes and seems more like a curse, though the farmers call it a blessing. She keeps her curtains shut all day and deigns not to go outside. From her reading, she knows what would happen to her is she does, and though she does not value life, she is not eager to see what death would have in store for one such as she.
Surprisingly, she is not disgusted or afraid of what she has become. She likes the taste of the word on her tongue almost as much as she liked the taste of her own blood. Vampire. Vampire. At last she can put a name to who she is. Not Princess. Not Snow White. Not daughter whose mother left her. Vampire. She smiles, alone in the darkness of her room.
Her skin grows parchment pale and her lips plump, hungering for the blood their color mocks.
Food has no appeal for her anymore. She pushes away the sharp cheese and sweet pears she used to love. She tells the cooks to make her meat rare and tries to ignore the worried looks her father gives her as she tears into the pink and bloody steak.
But she cannot ignore the looks the stepmother sends her, looks not of worry but of fear, and a strange determination.
There is something wrong with that child, the queen thinks across the dining table, as she has times too numerous to count over the years. Something very wrong. And as time passes and the child grows yet stranger, refusing to come out of her room for days at a time, her lips growing red as though stained by blood, the once doctor comes to the realization that something must be done about her, and that she is the only one to do it.
Her determination strikes fever pitch on the evening ten years exactly from the day she became queen and received the gift of gifts, when the mirror, in response to her query practiced for years in the secret of her room when the king is not near, denies her her only lifeline.
"Who is the fairest of them all?" asks the queen.
And the mirror, instead of replying "You, my queen," as is its wont, says "You are most fair, my queen, but the other lady of your house is fairer still. Snow White is fairest of them all."
It cannot be. It cannot be. Snow White is barely fifteen, pale and withdrawn, with hair and lips too stark to offset her pallor nicely. The child is wrong, all wrong. The queen has known this for years, and now she takes away the only solace of a life of unreal dreams and unfulfilled expectations, of a husband who was near until the baby died, then went away forever, the baby dead, no hand to hold hers and no one to love and be loved by, save this cold piece of glass and gold which now betrays her. Everyone, everything betrays, falls short. There is but one solution, realizes the once-doctor queen, alone in her room, sprawled on the floor, her skirts all about her, her hair in disarray and face streaked with tears. If Snow White does not live, she cannot be fairest. Snow White must die, to bring the world back to where it belongs.
Snow White can make do at first on nearly raw meat that still holds some memory of blood flowing through its veins, but soon that, even with the occasional sampling of her own blood, does not satisfy.
She takes to once again sneaking out of her bedroom window and down the trellis when the world is dark and silent, this time not to escape but to hunt. She finds that she is fast, faster than the rabbits and badgers that inhabit the wood. As she sucks from the open wounds, blood that is not her own gushing down her chin and over her hands, at last, at last, her hunger is satisfied, but only for a time. Soon she begins to crave not the sweetly diluted blood of the innocent forest creature, but a drink more noxious, and all the more intoxicating.
She begins to assess the risk of taking this human or that, this stable boy or that ladies' maid. Who would miss them, who has family, friends, a sweetheart? Finally, she settles on the huntsman, he who brings in the meat for their table. She knows he lives alone and rarely talks to anyone. No one will look too closely into his death. But it is these same attributes, unbeknownst to Snow White, which make him so attractive to someone else.
The queen thinks of how to kill the girl. She thinks the forest the best place for it. The girl used to go there often enough in earlier days, before she took to shutting herself up in her room. No one will think it unnaturally odd that she became lost there, and died of starvation or exposure.
The queen knows she cannot kill the girl herself, much as she would like to, to satisfy this perverse desire she has to see the girl's heart, to discover at last whether she is truly human. She begins to look around, to find out who she will enlist to do her bidding. She sees the huntsman one day, drawing water from the well in the courtyard, a brace of rabbits hung on his belt. The blood streaked across his tunic belongs to him, and he to it. There is nothing out of the ordinary in the huntsman going into the forest and coming back smeared with blood.
She calls him to her private chambers, not the audience chamber, for she knows she looks far more imposing against the black velvet hangings that border her mirror. He looks frightened when she makes her proposition, and stutters "The-the princess?" But at her imperious nod, he straightens and salutes, though he is shaking visibly.
She hands him a silver box, intricately wrought with designs of leaves and flowers, which she has picked from the treasury. "Bring me back her heart in this box," she orders, and smiles at the shudder that wracks the huntsman's body.
After he has gone, she wonders when the change happened, when it was that she ceased feeling joy at anything but the pain of another.
Snow White waits for the huntsman in the courtyard at twilight, where she has seen him come before after a day's hunting. He comes out of the castle and goes straight to the well, raising a bucket of water and rinsing his face with it. Snow White watches him, half concealed in the rose walk. He is a large man, and his blood will flow thick. Her stomach twists in bitter delight at the thought.
She had thought of how to approach him. She thinks he is an honorable man, and it is better to play the innocent girl then the seductive young woman this time.
She taps him on the shoulder. "Good sir," she says in her most girlish voice, "I think I saw a young deer enter the woods not long ago, and it looked injured. Will you accompany me to go find it?"
For a moment, she watches the play of emotions on his face. Relief wages battle with horror, until he sighs, and takes her hand, as if she is but a child, and leads her into the forest.
She cannot remember the last time someone touched her. The stepmother never has, and her father not in years. The servants do not come near her, and she has no friends. She has forgotten the comfort to be received from the touch of another human. Well, she smiles wryly, from a human, anyway. She does not suppose that she can be considered human anymore.
They reach the clearing in the forest where everything changed forever, and Snow White takes her hand from the huntsman's gently. She did not know that she remembered how to be gentle. And this time, when she looks at him, she sees not the blood coursing through him, but the depth of sadness in his eyes, and she turns away, knowing that she cannot kill him. Not him. Not this man.
"Princess," he calls her, and she says "No," for that is not what she is, not anymore, not ever. She looks into his eyes, and sees something inside him break, and then he tells her of the stepmother, and how he must kill her and bring her heart back to the castle.
She knows she should be angry, should be furious, but she only feels tired, as she has not felt since the change occurred. She feels as though she could fall asleep.
"Maybe we can help each other," she says to the huntsman, placing her hand on his arm, and tells him to sit still. He may be a huntsman, but she is fast, and when a wild boar comes snuffling through the clearing a quarter hour later, she pounces, biting down on its neck with that swoop in her belly that she has come to equate with happiness, although she knows it is not.
The huntsman watches in amazement and not just a little fear as Snow White takes his knife from his belt and slits the boar open, but he does not move. She reaches into the gaping, steaming center and pulls out the heart, clutched in her fist, and hands it to the huntsman.
"Give this to my stepmother, and it shall please her," Snow White says, and he never doubts her, this huntsman, but turns away, then looks at her one last time.
"I won't be back," she assures him, and turns also, to finish her meal.
The huntsman delivers the heart to the queen, and when he has left the room she removes it from its silver prison and holds it in her hands. She has missed the feel of organs beneath her fingers. She brings it closer, examining it. Something does not look right about this heart. But as it nears her face, she breathes in deeply, and the scent of fresh-spilled blood reaches her nostrils. Suddenly, an insatiable need comes over her. She has heard that when one eats the heart of a thing, one gains some of its power. She would like to gain control over the girl at last. She calls for salt for curing and prepares the heart herself, then sits in the dining hall where she has sat through so many fine banquets as queen, and there devours the heart of her stepdaughter. The blood is red on her napkin and the corners of her mouth and she feels sure that, at long last, balance has been restored.
To be continued...
A/N: This is a story I wrote a little more than I year ago. At first I thought I was so creative and that it was a really original idea, but then I realized that Neil Gaiman did vampire Snow White, and Tanith Lee did vampire Snow White, and they did it better. Mostly now when I look at this story I think, wow, that's a lot of page breaks. But I hope you liked it anyway. Please review and tell me what you think.