The blood was thick and sweet on her tongue, coating her throat and warming her insides. She could feel it blushing her cheeks, quickening in her veins, her lips and fingertips tingling as they reddened, eyes wettening, the nipples of her bare breasts flushing and becoming stiff, now sensitive to the chill in the night air. Her body was coming to life just as the man underneath her cooled, his naked form stiffening as corpses did, no longer holding the softness and malleability of a living person. She had stolen that light from him, taken it into herself like she had his sex. Not that she was truly alive- even now, with her body as warm as it could ever be, her flesh as supple as was possible, she was still dead. Cool and pale and strange. Her skin too silky and too white, more like marble than human stock. Her hair too thick and shiny. Her features too beautiful. Her teeth too sharp. Inhuman.
She could still feel this man's last acts of passion on her body- he had gripped her breasts and buttocks with strong, hot hands, kissed her mouth with wet lips that had tasted of beer, filled her insides with his burning manhood and later with his own thick ichor of life; how very, truly alive he had been, entirely human in every way, virile and powerful and drunk on his own existence. The kind of man she always sought out, for better or for worse. The kind of man she needed- only by pressing her cold self as close as possible to a sun could she feel any kind of warmth, only by taking those who were strong and young and full of life could she feel something like life herself. She always did it this way- a fruitless parody of the act of making life. That was how she killed.
The man seemed so much smaller now. Death had shrunken him, drained him of all that wonderful passion, shrivelled him up like a dead leaf under autumn's cold gaze. The masculine beauty he had held before seemed entirely absent, even though his features were the same- without the vigour and light of living blood and a beating heart, he was nothing. She reduced men to nothing, and part of her hated that. Part of her, the secret part of her that she couldn't express freely, wished that it didn't have to be this way- wished that she could have been like him, this man, like him and all the other men that had come before. If she had been alive she could have stayed with him after the act, and they both would have been hot and sweaty and out-of-breath as living things were, and she could have slept wrapped in his embrace under the soiled and damp blankets. Perhaps they would have done it again in the morning, with soft sunlight shining in through the window and birdsong in their ears, the breeze of summer cooling their slick, entwined bodies. What sweet pleasures lay there, in the daylight, beyond her reach? What sort of world was it, where the climax of sex didn't involve sinking her fangs into her lover's neck and ruining him forevermore, drinking down his future and draining the light from his eyes?
What was it, to be human?
Distantly she remembered the answer to that question. Vaguely, she could hear desert winds in her mind, feel the grit of sand on her face, feel someone's strong embrace around her torso, hear whispers of love in her ears. Who was he, that man in her memories who's face she could barely make out? Who had he been to her? She knew somehow that they had lain together under a tent and desert stars, embraced, knew that they had woken up to the dawn sun. That world behind her eyes was tantalizing and always out of reach, it was what she craved so desperately whenever she did this, what she thought of at the climax and sought to imitate in her actions. But she couldn't have it. That woman in her memories, had she ever truly existed, was gone.
As she dressed herself again, eyes avoiding the corpse on the bed, she wondered if the others felt these things as well. Did the other vampires, in their blood-feeding, remember what they had been before, as she did? Did they too, wish to be human again?
Her closest companion in immortality, she knew he did not feel this way; even if he remembered his old self, the thoughts would be no doubt of little consequence to him. But had she not chosen to befriend him for that? He was a simple man; his presence was comforting because he did not think deeply on anything, he did not resent his existence, he did not long for something more. Like a child, or like an animal, he existed entirely in the moment, finding contentment in the world around him and needing nothing else. His killings were indiscriminate and numerable; man or woman, adult or child, he cared not at all for who's blood he drank as long as he drank it. He sought not the meaning of life or death in his nighttime wandering, only his next meal. Without her, she suspected he would have been destroyed by now, found out by humans and ended (ended, for it was not accurate to say killed)- burned to ashes, or staked through the heart by the vengeful and the righteous, tracked back to and captured in his lair. He was not clever enough to protect himself. With no control he consumed endlessly, victim after victim, body becoming swollen and ruddy with blood, looking entirely monstrous, and yet somehow despite that he was innocent- he didn't know he was hurting humans, he didn't know that killing was 'bad', he didn't know that he was considered an evil creature in their eyes. He spent his nights bumbling from one thing to the next, full of simple joys and base frustrations. And another very important thing was that he loved her- but he had no sexual desires. He adored her, but did not want her, and so spending time with him was refreshing. He allowed her to escape what she knew she was, escape the thoughts and memories and feelings that wracked her body, escape the burning gazes of the men she snuffed out and what they meant to her. And despite his horrendous appearance, she could not think of him as a monster- he was too pure, too babyish, too unlike her.
Unlike the true monsters.
No, that one would never wish to return to humanity. The old one with the wild eyes, he knew what it was to kill, he knew the full weight and meaning of his actions, the suffering and horror that was death- he had debated these things as she had, but he had come to a conclusion. The blood, the feeding, the killing- he relished it. He tortured his victims, ripping them apart before he let them die, both physically and mentally. He was old enough now (older, he said, than all of them, save the First) to stave off his thirst, he did not need to drink every night as she did, and so he would often choose his victims deliberately, stalking them for weeks before finishing them. He would whisper things to their ears from cracks in their windows, learn their strengths and their weaknesses, what they loved and what they hated, the names and faces of their family members and lovers. She could never bring herself to learn the names of her victims, but he enjoyed getting so familiar- sometimes he would pretend to be the ghost of a lost loved one, or even a devilish version of someone still living; he could make people see things with his mind, his age giving him power, he could bring himself to look like someone else in the eyes of humans, and with this skill he ruined them. He liked making them believe that they were crazy, or that they deserved what he did to them, he loved when they begged for him to end it. And when he did, it was terribly violent- there were no delicate twin puncture wounds on the throats of his victims, he ripped their jugulars out, sometimes crushing their spines in his jaw. Like her, and unlike her closest friend he did seem to have a type, he preferred men, especially ones with blonde hair and golden eyes; the reason for this she did not know, but to them he was especially vicious. If, that is, he truly was a 'he'- there was something about him, something strange in the way he moved and dressed and spoke, something that at times made her wonder if the mind and thoughts inside his head were somehow actually those of a woman; mismatched parts, placed together incorrectly, making him even stranger and eerier to behold. An old creature that looked and acted very young, a man that looked and acted like a woman, he was the most unnatural-seeming of all the vampires she had met, as cold and hard as stone, with eyes that gleamed wickedly in the dark.
And there was the other man as well, the rebel, the charming and devilish rogue. He was unique in that he did not try to hide his nature from humans; when he smiled at them, his fangs were clearly displayed. He made a show of it, strutting through the night with a kind of pirate-like swagger, taking anything and everything he wanted with complete brash honesty- yes, he would say, look at me, I am a vampire. Somehow, revealing the truth of the matter made him more appealing instead of less, attraction coming in the place of fear. His victims were slatternly young women, mostly, mad from drink or drugs that at times he supplied, the kind that stamped their feet in sparkling spiked shoes to loud club music and spoke loosely with their bodies and untied hair- babes, would be the word of his choosing. They always knew what he was, what he wanted, and they adored him for it, clinging to him in bars and back alleys and throwing their heads back to bare their necks for him. Eager and aroused, wanting to be swept away by the bad boy. But he drew others to him as well, like the center of a hurricane, picking up lost souls who rotated around him. He had many loyal human companions- people he did not kill, 'friends' maybe, though to the other vampires he called them subordinates (to disguise, perhaps, that he cared for them). His charisma allowed him to take whatever he wanted from humans, blood and jewels alike; he lived as a wealthy human man would, somehow achieving a juxtaposed existence where he told everyone what he was, and yet went unpunished for it, though his action danced with the risk of ending them all. And he was old as well, she knew, but despite that he shone like a sun, not taking on the stonelike dead qualities that others did with age. At times he could have been mistaken for a living man, so high on life was he, so engaged and vigorous and full of human ambitions. Still trying to reach the top of the world, even in death. In a way, he was admirable for it. Would he be human again, and walk truly in the light? Perhaps- but some part of her doubted he would be willing to give up immortality and eternal youth, he was too greedy a man to sacrifice anything.
Then there was the mother and child; though they were not truly related she couldn't help but think of them that way, as one unit in her mind, a perverse contortion of the purest familial love, a hellish version of the Virgin and her son. The boy was a wild and terrible thing, death having turned him at a tragically young age, capturing a child in eternity like an insect in amber. It was a cruel thing, to have been made that way and then abandoned to fend for himself. She had been told by the First that he had clawed himself from the earth entirely alone, deep in a forest and from an unmarked grave, learning the rules and necessities of undeath with the blood of wild animals under a feral moon; he had become a savage infant, and even now, many years later, civilization had not managed to grip him fully. At times he seemed entirely young and naive, and yet in others the look in his eyes was that of an adult; he spoke with a sarcastic and bitter tone one moment, and in the next stomped and screamed like a toddler in a tantrum, unable, perhaps, to reconcile his true age and the age he had died with. Middle-aged women were his victims of choice, with fair skin and long black hair if he could have them- and interestingly, he avoided children at all cost. Perhaps he did not want to have them suffer as he did, or perhaps it was not so complex; maybe they reminded him of things he wished not to remember. To the women he killed he attached a childlike need for comfort, curling in their stiffening arms and drinking as a baby would from their throats, and it was with this same obsession of motherhood that he clung to his companion- a young female vampire, younger than he was, possibly the youngest of them all. She was a dull and apathetic creature with no expression or outstanding interest. She went along with the rules of immortality, she accepted what she was told and what was expected of her, her victims were whoever was nearby and easy to get to at the time. Like water, following the path of least resistance. She only stayed with the child because it was more convenient to befriend him than it was to push him away. She existed in a mild and lacklustre, unmotivated state, without the wildness of her child or the fire of the rogue or even the cold and serpentine evil of the old one. Had she been that way in life? Or was it death that had made her so flat and empty? Perhaps the woman she had been before- not long dead, still no doubt remembered by any friends or lovers or children she had left behind- had been wonderful, sweet and kind and full of life. There was no way of knowing. But she suspected that these two, at least, longed for humanity as she did- the child, for a chance to grow up, a luxury so many people did not consider, and the woman because, surely, life was easier than death, easier than this malformed half-state that was the eternal night.
In another world, maybe she would have asked them about it, brought herself close to them, expressed the desire aching in her breast and sought out a way to satiate it. But there was no way- she did not dare, not under the watchful eyes of the First, the Mistress, the one who had brought them all together. The one who had sought them all out, one after the other, bringing them into her coven with sweet promises layered over hidden threats, come with me and you will be rewarded, abandon me and you will be destroyed. That woman was unassuming at first glance, seeming ordinary and even human, but she represented everything terrible in this dark existence, her ordinance a mask for ancient power and cunning. She often made her afraid- afraid as humans were of closed closet doors at night, of hidden spaces under beds and wind on the back of the neck, afraid of the unknown. She had never seen the First feed. She had never seen her use any of the powers she must surely have. This ambiguity made her more terrifying than any raw display of strength and viciousness could. She dared not disobey the Mistress.
Did that make her a coward? A pathetic thing, resenting her own existence here, and yet refusing to try and help herself?
Perhaps. Perhaps in some distant future she would try and rebel, escape this cursed city- cursed country, really- and the family of tragic monsters dwelling here. But that time was not now. The little purple flowers had yet to bloom along the roadside.
The blood in her mouth, she could still taste it- what was it, really? Sweet power, triumph over mortality, the mark of strength and perfection? Was it something miserable, cruel proof of her cursed and unnatural being? Or were these thoughts too grand- perhaps it was a just normal thing, another existence in a huge world of billions of existences. Water, not vinegar, or wine.
Perhaps it all meant nothing, and that thought was enormous, almost too much to bear, and so she shut it out, closing herself off from it and cutting away its tendrils in her mind.
For now, she was full of hot liquid life, and the night was only just beginning. Her friend wandered nearby, she could sense his presence under the moonlight. Surely there were still good things to be had.
Yes, for this night, as she had so many nights before, she would turn off the tap that flooded her with these dark and introspective thoughts. She would ignore it all, pursue these black hours and her own lust. How long could she keep this up- her misery and her questions piling up behind locked doors, compounding like her sins, growing monstrous inside of her?
At least one more night, and that was all she needed.