If the hand on my shoulder belonged to a lookout I missed, someone come for revenge on the hunter who slew their kin, right now I’d let them have it. I find myself unable to muster relief that the hand belongs to Carmen instead.
“Well fought, darling. I have not borne witness to such a feat since Morris himself.”
I say nothing. A desolate wind scours the desert of my heart, my guilt a merciless sun burning pride into ash. For once I am not grateful for her touch. My self-loathing begs for someone to come and punish me for my sins.
“But you must be exhausted, of course. How callous of me not to notice. Here, let me help you up.”
With her assistance, I find myself upright again. It feels like watching myself at a distance, disconnected from my own movements, drifting off to the side as we pass through city streets to the car waiting for us.
“You will have to forgive me this pain, dear Hanna, but it will be better if I pluck the glass from your skin before you sit down. Tumbling about in that wretched lot has resulted in a constellation of nasty little shards embedded in you.”
My body feels the pain, but I don’t. A pity. I crave some kind of penance, but my loathing runs deep—there is no amount of suffering that can undo a lifetime of harm, and so the suffering I deserve must necessarily be infinite. That there is no one kind enough to offer me such punishment is another reason to resent the world.
The drive back home is not silent, but only because of Carmen’s generosity on filling the air with her words as I stare numbly out at the city passing by us.
“Was that the most difficult battle you have faced? I must assume so; it is clear how heavily this adventure weighs on you. Moreover, if you were regularly engaging in feats half as marvelous as that which you performed tonight, your legend would surely be known to all, eclipsing even your greatest ancestors, I suspect.”
What an awful legend it would be. I wish she would stop comparing me to the likes of those who sired this misbegotten bloodline of mine.
I must have made some displeased vocalization without noticing because I feel her hand squeeze my thigh, as if to offer reassurance.
“Perhaps I offer excessive praise for your prowess in battle when that is not what you need at the moment. I am sorry. Old as I am, I have experienced such war, death, and bloodshed as few living can even imagine, and it is all too easy to forget the impact these have on others. Let me assure you that it is perfectly normal to feel as you do. There is a thrill to fighting for one’s life, but what follows can be a dreadful crash. Rest assured that it grows easier.”
How can she be so cavalier about the deaths of other vampires? Why is there such excitement building in her voice, despite the gentleness of her words? I snuffed out whole lives in a few short minutes of work, lives that could have grown as long as hers one day, had I not intervened.
“It’s not that,” I manage to say from behind the hand I cover my face with. Disgust motivates me to push the words out. “Not just fighting. It’s about…” whose side am I on? “They’re…” vampires, “not just…” humans, “and I’m…” still a vampire hunter, despite everything.
I fail to articulate it. Everything I want to say sounds too obvious and misses the fundamental truth at the heart of my despair. All I can do is mumble and trail off and gesture in futility at the entirety of my life.
“Ah. I see.” Carmen replies as if the words I managed are enough. “That too gets easier each time. Killing those with whom you identify, I mean.”
Each time. No, I don’t want there to be a next time. If I become numb to killing vampires, then I’ll be just like…
I try to shake the thought from my head, but all I can see in my mind’s eye is my father, wearing my face, staking a teenage girl through the heart. I dig my nails into my skin and imagine peeling my face off, fingers questing through my eye sockets to rip my father’s lessons from my brain like so many weeds, prying my chest open to find the heart that pumps this fucking Boltman blood and throwing it violently into the road to be crushed by uncaring traffic.
“Far easier to kill those people we denigrate, is it not? The whole of history tells the story of how we frame our enemies as something less than ourselves in order to ease the burden on our conscience when we decide to end them.”
As she speaks, her strange accent colors her speech more strongly than usual. Her voice carries a strange, energetic cadence, and each sentence comes faster and faster, picking up momentum.
“Far harder to look someone in the eye, to recognize their fundamental personhood, to know in your heart that their subjective experience is just as rich and meaningful as your own, and to decide all of it still must end because you will it so.”
She laughs, and not with her usual playful humor. It’s a cruel bark, filled with that rare venom of hers which she usually hides from me. The engine roars, and the car hurtles through the city streets at reckless speed. Something barbed in her words catches in my throat and pulls me from my self-pitying spiral.
“But how important a thing it is to kill a person. A whole person! Not to content ourselves with killing the pale ghost we cast into their image when we dehumanize our enemies! How much better it is to look with unclouded eyes and bear witness to the essential atrocity of the act—for each and every life we choose to end!”
I turn to look at her, feeling a small pinprick of fear toward Carmen for the first time. Her eyes are wild, manic, with a gleam in them as if reflecting the red traffic lights that never dare to show themselves in front of her. She’s practically shouting now, bearing her fangs with a rapturous expression and cackling like a woman possessed.
The outside is a kaleidoscopic blur of motion. The wind whips through my hair and roars in my ears, but somehow Carmen’s voice rises effortlessly above the din.
“Better still to know your victim personally, to grow close, terribly close, to learn to see them better than they see themselves, to witness what makes them special and unique above all others, and to conclude that they must die for you, to hold that life in your hands and make that choice. Such a perfect end it makes! There can be none better!”
Fear inspires a return of the adrenaline in my blood, shocking me back into my body, and I realize that this is what everything has been building toward. Carmen means to kill me. Not ignorant of my durability as Vicky was when she might have tried on our first night together or as Ylio was when they tried to assassinate me, but fully aware and understanding the true limits of what I can—and cannot—survive.
I have never once seen her feed properly, but older vampires typically feed less often than younger ones, as I understand. They also tend to develop idiosyncratic feeding rituals, as I remind myself now. All this time together, like fattening up an animal for slaughter, like marinating your meat for maximum flavor, she drew me closer to her in order to better savor the experience of drinking my blood and ending my life.
At our destination already, the car screeches to a halt, and the wheels have barely stopped turning when she pulls the passenger side door open and hauls me from the seat. That frenzied look in her eyes has not dimmed an ounce, and her arm snakes around my waist to pull me close to her and usher me forward with soft yet irresistible force, a steel bar sheathed in silk.
The body armor that helps protect me in a fight does little to deter Carmen in the elevator. I am exposed everywhere I need freedom of movement, and her mouth seeks out the nearest unprotected bit of flesh at my shoulder. My breath quickens as I feel fangs drag like a razor across my skin, the sting of her tongue digging into my exposed nerves where my skin has been sliced open underneath her clamped lips. I whimper, in spite of myself.
With a cruel, melodious chime, the elevator doors open, and I realize that if I wanted to escape, the opportunity is definitely behind me. Not only is escape a laughable prospect, but—
Carmen turns my face toward hers and grips me with her gaze in that way she has, peering into me like she sees every dark and dismal corner of my soul, and I can no longer conceive of resistance. I am weightless, frictionless, without mass or substance at all, and the two of us glide on air into the heart of her lair.
As I fall to the bed on which we must consummate our relationship, my fear coils around my heart, no longer inspiring thoughts of flight, but merely settling with the weight of inevitable doom in my chest.
No inspiration to resist comes to me; instead my mind soothes me with all the reasons I have to accept my fate. Wasn’t I hoping for penance? Wouldn’t this, after all, be the best way for things to end? What a welcome way to die, at the hands of a woman I love, a vampire who can accept my sacrifice so that I may pay this wretched debt I was born into.
It’s a better fate than I deserve.
When Carmen pounces on me, it’s with a crazed, feral fury unlike I’ve ever seen from her. Gone is any pretense of self-control, leaving only animal hunger and the impulse to sate her urge to rip into me. Her fingers become claws sharp enough to shred my clothes and slice me open and leave crimson lacerations across my breasts and belly and thighs.
Her hands aggravate every ragged wound and leave bruises that bloom into aching life across my red-smeared body. She clutches my face in those claws of hers, drawing bloody lines in broken skin even as she presses her mouth to mine hard enough to bruise there too, shoving her tongue down my throat until I gag.
Without warning, she pulls from the kiss only to descend abruptly to my neck, piercing into my artery for the first time. The pain is exquisite, as it always is, in the way I always long for it to be, and it moves me to tears that Carmen should at last be drinking from me.
“Yes…” Weakening as rapidly as I am, the word comes out as a whisper, but if I should get just one last thing to say in this world, I want it to be this. I want her to know how I welcome this sweet agony—the bliss of punishment for one truly damned and guilty.
Hurt me, Carmen. Violate me, Carmen. Ruin me, Carmen. Kill me, Carmen. Let me die, as long I get to die for you, Carmen, greatest and most beautiful of all vampires!
Yet to my surprise, she stops herself. “No. Not completely. Not yet.” Her voice is ragged and breathy. “I wish to prolong this a while longer, at least. I must savor all you have to offer.”
If I have more to give, let her take it all. For myself, I savor the way the air stings all my new wounds. I savor the taste of my own blood as it runs down my face and slips into my panting mouth—the blood of a hunter, fit only to spill, to decorate the floor, to feed on.
“You will drink from me as I drink from you, darling Hanna.” It is not a request. She offers no option of refusal. Carmen uses a claw to slice into her own breast, drawing out a dribble of precious, dark ichor for which I salivate even before she forces my mouth onto it.
It tastes like blood, of course, beautiful and delicious, like salt and iron, rich with an indescribable flavor all its own. It’s also vampire blood, a nectar I’ve never before sampled, dancing across my palate with a tingling sensation that almost seems effervescent. Best of all, it’s Carmen’s.
I suckle at her breast like a starving newborn, desperate for every last drop of such precious fluid, hungry as any vampire to drink her in completely, to drain her dry. She offers such grace even to the vile and unworthy. However long she grants me this pleasure, it will never be enough to satisfy me. I could fill my belly to bursting with her blood, and still I’d beg for more.
Did she once describe her blood as an opiate? She was wrong. It’s far better, far more addictive, far more pleasurable a fog to get lost inside.
When at last she pushes my face away and shoves me back to the bed, I make such a pathetic whine it surprises even myself. But how could anyone judge? I have tasted heaven and been ripped away from it. Still, to my delight, heaven’s touch lingers as a gentle caress swaddling my mind in a warm, soothing blanket.
“Let that sustain you while you continue putting that eager mouth of yours to good use, darling.”
Without further warning, Carmen straddles my head and shoves her vulva into my face. Of course I kiss her. What could be more natural?
“You love this, Hanna. I know you do. Always seeking an excuse to put your mouth on me, are you not? Tell me.” She grips my hair in a fist. “Tell me how well it pleases you that I force myself upon you so.”
I have no reason to deny the truth, though when I try to speak, she grinds herself on my outstretched tongue with such force I feel it press into my teeth to break the skin. There is no pain at all, just the welcome return of the taste of blood. I am high as can be after drinking from her, my mind out among the stars, and I happily babble incomprehensible joy around a mouthful of pussy.
“Just so. Keep talking. Let your ancestors witness how their scion has proven herself to measure among the very greatest of their number, and let them see how she puts her talents to use.”
Yes! Let them look down upon me in shame. Here, at last, I prove my worth and meet my end. I greet it with open arms and clouded mind. Let them see how I give myself to their ancient enemies and never tell them “no.” In the end, let none deny that I was yours, Carmen!
When she clamps her thighs around my head, I know the end has come. The pressure is too great. I can’t breathe. I fear that I will pass out from lack of oxygen and miss the climactic final moment when she sucks me bone-dry.
But in the end, Carmen is merciful. She releases me, runs her hand across my blood-soaked body, and her words could not sound more loving as she bids me goodnight.
“I am not yet through with you, beloved.”
Her fangs pierce my neck again, and everything fades to black.