xx
xx
12.
lunacy
xx
xx
With her gone, it was death in the chamber.
She had cast the die, left him at her mercy. The monster succumbed to the madness he had accused his master of. He began to claw at himself. Slowly, then the black silk of his suit was reduced to ribbons and the white snow of his skin was reduced to gouges and the red sacrilege of his sanguinity was reduced to puddles on the basement floor.
There it was. The heart he wanted to throw at her feet.
Cold and dead.
Little coquette, you say such pretty words, but what will you do with this once you have it?
His crimsoned hands dropped wetly to his sides. Perfect, he deemed. A malfunctioning pet. She would be delighted. Ah. If what she wanted was a kiss, if what she wanted was even this worthless organ, all he had to do was deliver. So what was the problem?
What was he afraid of?
It's only a kiss, Alucard.
From far away his sanity rang a bell. It was a moonlit night. Luna had been gaining on her pulchritude this past week and was now unleashing her lunacy upon them. Not to be a captive of any entity but one, he reconvened. His blood spiraled sluggishly beneath his boots, and the tissue around the heart that had not met air in centuries knitted back together.
So he was here.
He was here, her captive.
And there was little he could do but close his eyes.
Her bare foot—aptly, an oft fetishized part of the body—smelled of the earth, the grass, the evening dew and daisies. There was a lace of them sitting on her vanity woven with a child's clumsy adoration. Pitiful, Alucard thought. Don't you know?
She's fit for roses.
Beside the daisies was the coat, folded, as red as the roses he envisioned—he spared it only a glance.
He kissed the foot and felt her tremble.
The vampire was more aware of her than he had ever been, aware of her as he was of silver against his skin. Her presence pained him now in that exquisite way, yet he was here, tending to her. As a suitor must. But no suitor would be so obscene. As certain as no beast would be so devout.
This, was merely another facet of their nonsensical courtship.
In his kiss he dared to protrude his fangs, and graze them against her smooth flesh in a manner lighter than a feather. One half of the conglomerate of souls within him clamored for the sweetness bitterness underneath—he, to answer her query, was not above jealousy. Alucard did not crave her as a dead man. He craved her as a dying man, and it was a state surely worse than death. The dying remained crawling on his hands and knees, his famishment blurring into fear of losing a single drop.
Must I be deprived of the prize you shed unknowingly?
And so he kissed as a proxy for a nibble.
Integra gave a little laugh.
It echoed in her bedroom, which was dark but for the moon outside her window. He met her gaze.
Nothing else could unravel him so thoroughly.
Her blue diamonds held a famishment rivaling his own.
"It seems you've caught me."
The shadows sang.
Integra, Integra, Integra, daca te-as prinde-ntr-o zi...
Alucard brushed the last of his kiss into the hollow of her foot, and savored her erratic pulse before raising his head.
"Will you limp?"
"If you can come up with a good excuse," she said, a bit too breathlessly for it to sound the cavalier fashion she had intended.
He was barely retaining what was left of his sanity, and would have kissed her in places such that she would be unable to move at all, yet managed to parry. "Ah, so this is to be a clandestine affair? The truth that you are afraid to crush my kiss cannot suffice?" Then again, letting the butler have a heart attack would be much less fun than boggling his mind with insinuations.
Integra half-smiled. "You said there's an order to these things, but you've gone about it in the wrong way, Count. The capture is supposed to be the objective of a courtship, not its initiative."
His fingers titillated the spot he had kissed. "An inverse order, then. Suits the nature of our dance."
"So the capture first?"
"Of course," Alucard said. "It's only fair."
A glimmer of something—something like tragedy, something like heartbreak—appeared in Integra's eyes and suddenly, inexplicably she looked old. The moonlight rendered her hair silver and threw the contours of her face into pithy relief. When she spoke, there was a note of deep-seated weariness.
"I wonder what that will mean for our end."
His grip tightened though she stayed still, and tendrils of ink twisted up her ankle, mindlessly possessive. He growled. "End, my Master? Have you forgotten? You ordered me to never leave you."
The strange glimmer in her eyes sublimated into a kind of hysteria. Lunacy, he thought. Integra laughed. Longer and louder and cruder than before. The laughter suspended the dark room between mirth and grief, while in the background lurked that bitter poison.
Regret.
And while Alucard could only suspect the source of her regret, he knew he wanted her to stop.
He let go of her foot to seize her wrists, pulling her toward the precarious edge of the bed. "I'm charmed you see the humor in our predicament," he said with forced levity, "yet must you be so tasteless? Cease this. You're making a fool of yourself."
She did not.
It seemed she could not help it, much like the tears she had shed mere days ago.
Was not the line between uncontrollable tears and uncontrollable laughter a fine one, truly? Both were the excess of emotions hoarded, often glasslike, shattered remains. He should know. He should know.
There is a man with blood on his mouth, his hands, his feet, watching the sun rise. It burns. Laughter escapes him long and loud and crude and regretful.
Alucard then let go of her wrists, to take her face in his gnarled fingers as though they could anchor her to this time and shook her, forcing her to look blearily into his red, red depths and there, she swallowed a breath.
"What has made you become me?" he whispered and Integra thought, finally, he was asking a worthy question.
xx
xx
What is death like?
Thirteen-year-old Integra asked this question with no other inflection than that of curiosity. The monster considered his young master. She was the picture of demureness with her ankles crossed, and she was polishing a pistol.
She had scored perfect tens that evening.
"Why don't you pull the trigger and find out?"
"Unfortunately, shooting myself on a whim tends to be a bit fatal," Integra said, and he cackled, black hair shaking like boughs.
"My Master."
It was a compliment on its own. The girl tried not to focus on how that made her feel.
"You are not the first to ask this question, nor will you be the last. You humans and your fascination with death."
"But it's a very human question, don't you agree?"
At his distinct lack of reply Integra gave herself a pat on the back.
When he did reply, it was toneless. "I was decapitated, Master. Not a very scenic lane." His eyes were perceiving the far horizon of a place she would not yet reach. "I briefly recall a darkness. A never-ending expanse of it. I wanted not to take root there, so I returned here."
"Was the darkness itself the destination?"
"How can I say? Nothing is certain, least of all death." He smirked. "Though it will be safe to assume that those whom I have devoured have found the great beyond to uncannily resemble a beast's belly."
Integra continued to polish her pistol.
The beast advanced. "Why, did you expect fanfares and cherubs?"
She considered taking aim. No, that would be counterproductive. She had discovered early on he gained perverse enjoyment from getting maimed. "Not for you, no."
"You don't mean you expect it for yourself? Cherubs are so plebeian."
"You said it," Integra grumbled.
That was rather childish, she would scold herself later—though not as childish as the vampire who had instigated—but at that moment he was a wall of red before her chair. A part of Integra tensed, thinking he would stop, yet Alucard passed her by. He chose a spot under the moon.
He looks like he belongs there. An ancient. Suspended in space and effaced by time...
"Death is the end—so you humans expect it to be, believe it to be—yet here I am." Alucard spread his hands. "By the bargain of blood, but of course, death leaves its mark." Moonlight pooled in his palms. "We can deduce thus that the path to the beyond is less than straightforward. Perhaps one day you will feel the burn of your gun rather than its chill, my Master, and see what answer lies in wait for you."
"I don't see what my gun has to do with it," said Integra, "but in any case. It's only unfortunate that I won't be able to give you my impressions when that day comes, Alucard."
xx
xx
Death leaves its mark.
She, of course, did not answer. She did not wait for him to ask another vain question or to make a move.
She kissed him this time, too.
Gunmetal could not be so simultaneously cold and hot as these death-marked lips. Integra slipped past his stunned hands and craned her neck forward, gripping the mattress to prevent herself from falling. She kissed him hard, but she did not close her eyes, yet. They beheld that most carnal color. That dilated, blazing red.
She parted her lips, warmed his with her breaths, wanting them to follow suit so she could partake of his taste of copper and wine at last. "Will you make me do all the work, you fool?" she murmured.
The sound he made, that sent every nerve in her body trembling, was not human.
He moved.
At last! At last!
Alucard moved and everything became fire.
There was anger but also desperation in the way he retaliated, in the way he seized the back of her head and crushed her mouth to his with such force that she was a few fingers shy of tottering off the edge, and she was sure she would bruise. He thrust. His serpentine tongue was heavy and grew warmer and slicker with each second he spent rubbing it against hers, bereaving her of air.
"Integra..."
Around them his shadows pulsated scarlet. Integra decided this was not enough. She pushed herself off the bed. Into his lap.
Her upper lip snagged on one of his many deadly teeth. Ironically it was the resulting blood that stilled him, even as his arms embraced her. Their chests heaved together. Her skirt had ridden up. Her thighs were splayed awkwardly and brushed near his groin.
All this pleased her very much.
Integra pulled back. She swept the tip of her tongue over the shallow cut and tasted her blood and their mixed saliva, and found it sweet.
Alucard's eyes were unhinged.
"Countess."
A thrill shot across her being. She knew he had felt it as well. Integra closed her eyes. Her hands rested on his shoulders. She touched her forehead to his and laid her entire weight upon it.
"Allow me to hypothesize," he said mildly, belying the bind of his claws which strangled her clothes. "Hypothetically, a girl went to sleep one night, none the wiser, drifting off in the arms of Morpheus so sweetly, so sweetly... Yet the images that he hailed for her must have been terrible and vivid, for when she awoke, it was as a woman, with war in her eyes."
The sibilance of his voice both soothed and stirred. I would like to stipple these cheekbones with the red that coats my lips, but you're not to be deterred now, are you? My dear Count.
"These images had the power to undo the prudent regard in which she had held her servant, and on this night she bares herself to me," his third-person narration went downhill, "and ruins me."
"Not herself?"
"You have ruined me," Alucard said hoarsely, "and I require indemnity."
"Shall I ask for your hand in marriage?"
He did not take the bait, and she was not very surprised. With her eyes still closed and their foreheads pressed together, their limbs rustling against each other, his voice seemed to come from the beyond.
"Were you my Countess?"
Integra licked her lips once more. The blood had crusted over the swollen flesh. Her lashes fluttered open a bit stiffly due to the wateriness her laughter earlier had brought about, and she was back to admiring the chaos in her Count's gaze.
"I call you Count, do I not?"
There was a clock in her room, she thought, that ticked loudly when everything else was silent. It was ticking quite loudly right now.
His chaotic gaze flicked to the door. Integra managed not to jump when seconds later, a shadow appeared in the crack of light under her door. "My lady. Your dinner."
"A moment—ah—" Whatever shite excuse she had been meaning to make was thwarted when Alucard wound his arms around her even tighter. He slanted his head and started to kiss her jaw.
Integra tugged at his gleeful hair over his shoulder. "Quit!" she hissed.
He emitted an ominously perceptible chuckle.
"My lady! May I enter? What was that noise?"
Integra yanked hard. "Nothing!" Her reprimand had no bearing on his ministrations whatsoever and Alucard kissed her more boldly, one of his hands sliding up and tangling in her own hair while he sucked sensitive spots down her neck and along her clavicle. When had he undone her buttons? "I'm not—decent and—" She could feel the smugness radiating from him, the insufferable monster!
Said monster's mouth found her ear briefly. "Not decent," it mocked. "Forsooth, the best lie is the truth."
"I'm not hungry," Integra gritted out. "I'll—see you in the morning—"
The shadow under her door was worryingly still. Did he suspect something? She would not put it past her butler.
And what if he does? Old Integra snorted. What if he walks in on you baring your neck to the beast you were born to kill? Comeuppance.
No. She resisted the haze of arousal. Alucard's legion was surrounding the solitary shadow like a pack of hounds raising their hackles at unwelcome company. She tried again. "Good night, Walter."
At length, the shadow made a move, presumably a bow.
"...Good night, my lady."
Subsequent to the dismissal Integra felt doused in ice and no longer as eager to kiss. Alucard sensed this; his efforts grew more urgent. "Countess, Countess, Countess..."
"Stop."
He snarled against her throat.
"This is what you get for pulling that stunt," she told him coldly. "Release me."
She had been pressed into him for an inordinate amount of time. When he obeyed, his lips thinned into an angry line, she was left wanting. Not that she let it show. Integra seated herself back on her bed and watched the legion of shadows, the wraiths that had nigh encompassed her room return to their crevices. There was the moon, and Alucard. He looked starved anew.
"You smell of blood," he moaned. "You smell of me."
Integra straightened her blouse.
"I would not have compromised you. I would not dare…to let anyone...see you as I do." He reached out to take her foot. "Countess—"
She stood and went to her vanity, where the coat lay. "You forgot to conclude your hypothesis, Alucard. And it needs a reliable source."
Alucard eyed her intently.
A kiss, a kiss and then what?
The truth, or what mirrors it.
Integra checked her reflection. Hair mussed. Cheeks flushed and eyes bright behind glasses, and lips tender. It was a stranger she saw—but on second thought, not a stranger at all. It was simply...new Integra, she supposed, and new Integra wore her kisses well, despite the fact that the one who had given them was a git. Picking up a comb, she casually ran it through and observed him grow restless in the background of the frame.
"Hypothetically, there was a Countess," she began. "There was a war. And the Count, he had come to her with a gift."
He smiled. "Ah, so I did bring that war to you."
Yet before he could gloat, she set her comb down.
"The Countess won the war, but lost her Count."
He lost his smile.
"He left her on the battlefield."
The moonlight was wintry, and it was Alucard who rivaled it.
His response was to laugh hysterically.
"My dear Master is still quite the maiden, to have let such an absurd illusion affect her so. A fine vindictive form indeed." He stopped shaking and glared at her through a writhing web of black locks. "I am insulted. This is the grand reveal? Your night terror was this?"
Integra did not begrudge him his laugh. It was just what she would have expected of him.
"Leave you," Alucard spat, "when I cannot. When you know I cannot, when you know I cannot be defeated."
When the knowledge of something you have held to be indisputable is shattered in front of your eyes, and the methods you have used for years prove faulty, it yields a deep and permanent scar. The coat was pulled from the vanity to hide her clenching fists.
"Pray tell, Countess...when was it...that this war took place?"
"You certainly aren't wasting a minute calling me that," Integra derided. "I know what you'll say. It's only fair. But since I am cruel, I don't want to make this easy for you."
His expression immediately turned wary.
"We have here a dream, a kiss, titles not in use and my—obvious—fondness for you—and yours for me." She regarded the red coat. "And we may have gone about this in an inverse order, as you put it. That, however, excuses nothing. Don't you think I deserve better?"
She turned, and there he was in front of her.
"I don't insinuate otherwise."
Integra stared at him for a long, long while. "Maybe you don't," she said finally. "You never do seem to mean it, when your carelessness invites a mess that is mine to clean up. It's simply who you are."
A monster with no consequences. And so in the end, even the things important to you become nothing but a game.
"But when you degrade this intimacy I have allowed, for the both of us, as something to be put on display, and flaunted—to Walter, no less—well." Her quiet was his disquiet. "I shouldn't have to feel—don't deserve to feel—like I'm a chess piece between you two a second time."
"And when was the first?"
Her quiet broke.
"Are you speaking of the scene mere days ago, or another fragment of your dream? In fact," Alucard's words came out visceral, "are you truly angry at me, or at the Count who abandoned you?"
She looked at him almost pityingly.
"They're one and the same. Either way, you end up disappointing me."
She could have taken a stake and tore it through his sinews, and it would have been more merciful.
Integra shoved the coat into his chest, returning it to him once again and a final time. "If you want answers, Alucard, earn them. If you want to call me your Countess, prove yourself worthy. Until then, you are not to call me by that title, and I will not call you by yours."
Master. Integra.
She smelled of blood. She smelled of him. She wore his kisses.
His.
She was his—yet not his.
Countess, yet not Countess.
The coat contorted in his grasp. "No matter," Alucard said softly in contrast. "I shall do as you desire. Who knows, I might just bring a war to you as a dowry. Just to show you."
Luna illuminated them both, cold and merciless.
"Anything but that."
xx
xx
xx
xx
something
xx
wicked
xx
this
xx
way
xx
comes
xx
xx
The forest in summer was draped in bolts of lethargy as well as energy, and it was this paradox that made it a site of old wives' tales. Do not linger when the fog rolls in, they said. It will cling to the leaves and branches. It is very easy to get lost, and very easy to get stuck.
Look! A hiker.
(Our victim.)
He saw light beyond the fog and was glad, believing he was out of the woods at last. He was disheartened, to say the least, when upon closer examination he realized he had found not an electric signboard that marked the end of the trail, but an old shack, with a single source of light inside.
Perhaps it was lucky he had chanced upon a place to stay until the night passed and the fog lifted. It was hard to tell, however, whether the shack was occupied. He rapped on the door. "Hello? Anyone?"
It opened. Too easily.
Weird. But falling victim to human curiosity, he entered anyway.
The light was not a lamp.
The light was not even the moon, reflecting off the surface.
Under the moon, the fog seemed to glow. It clung to the leaves and the branches and hung, like a web.
It was very easy to get lost, very easy to get stuck and, alas, very easy to get eaten.
xx
xx
NOTES
This chapter was published on June 19, 2017.
It has been updated for grammar, formatting, and word choice on January 29, 2021.
The original end note for this chapter can be found in the link in my profile.