Author's Note: This is meant to be an adult chapter, but the love scene is not as detailed as one would usually find- I'm not going for a lot of fluff. It is purposely meant to be vague, for literary reasons, as will be found in later chapters.

Carpe Noctem-Chapter Three

For six years, I never tasted blood again. But as my health continually worsened and my daily pain increased to the point of being unbearable, I could not, for all my trying, erase the thoughts of it from my mind.

We lived in a celibate marriage, Raoul and I, something hardly unusual for 1887, when parents still arranged marriages for their children and matches were made based on the size of one's fortune, even in America. It was unusual, however, for two people who were in love. And in love we were.

That Raoul met with other women I had no doubt, but he took pains to be sure I never knew of it for a certainty, and whether or not he did, I merely gave tacit if silent consent by never asking. I loved him too much to deny him the physical release in another woman's arms that I in my ill health could not give him in mine. And for all that I wondered why he never gave up his "virgin wife" for another, it was something I could never bring myself to ask him. To this day I believe that if I had, the pain of digging up the past would have emotionally destroyed him.

But after six years for wondering, I found that I could no longer refuse him that which was due him by marriage…and love.

Even after six years of marriage, we were unfamiliar with each other's nudity, and he approached me with all the shyness of a schoolboy, holding me with my back to him as if I were porcelain or glass, running his fingers lightly down my shoulders, trailing gently over my breasts, making the nipples erect with cold and arousal. I laid my head back on his shoulder as he picked me up and carried me to the bed we shared. He shifted as he balanced himself above me and suddenly I was awash in his scent…and something unfamiliar and warm.

Oh, my God…his blood…

I smelled it mixed with his cologne and sweat, heard it as it throbbed in the veins in his neck, in his wrists, through his heart. I felt my mouth open even as my hips rose to meet his, and knew that something was horribly, horribly wrong.

But I could not stop.

I felt no pain as he entered me, nor did I hear his cry as my teeth broke the skin of his neck, as he blood flowed over my tongue. I did not feel his thrusts slow and finally stop.

There was only the blood.

I held tight to his slack shoulders with my hands, tasting the brandy in his blood, the memories of countless liaisons that flowed with it, burying myself in the slowing pulse of his neck, and finally drifting into a space occupied only by the endless red of the fount at my lips.

I woke with him beside me, reveling in the seemingly miraculous cessation of the pain that had plagued me for so long. I turned to kiss him awake, my mouth still crimson.

He was dead.