#rapacity

[laceandsilkmusic]

Rapacity, a song written for the Asterion trilogy by Sam Farren. Album art by me.

Plays best with Chapter 22 of Book One

[unscramblerer]

Todays Word Of The Day is: Gulosity

Gulosity originates from the Latin gulositas(gluttony). English usage of the word began in the late Middle Ages.

[nildespirandum]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

When Thomas and Alice Sharpe’s great-great-grandson disappears in the ruins of Allerdale Hall, drawn in by a beautiful, dark-haired woman, Adam finds an old debt being called in. But when matters are too much for him to handle, he is forced to ask help of an old frenemy, and a few other unsavory types.

Includes characters from my works - Stories from the Bookstore Basement (https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683517) Rapacity (https://archiveofourown.org/works/24869515/chapters/60167785) Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it (https://archiveofourown.org/series/1179989) Perfection (https://archiveofourown.org/works/13706409/chapters/31484748)

18+ Eventually 

August, the north-west of England -

The old key was large, with an open, oblong loop on the top for hanging from what would have been an enormous ring.  The type of key that had not been made for any purpose other than for decoration over a hundred years.  Perhaps closer to two hundred, considering how old the gate to the property was.

Made of ornately decorated brass with delicately punched-out shapes of the phases of the moon and an even more elaborate fob that had been thickly embroidered with gold and red thread that was faded and fraying with age, the key was cold despite the warm, late summer weather.  Cold enough that for hours afterward, Mas could feel it burning along the headline of his palm like he’d picked it out of a fire and not his backpack.  

With it dangling from his fingertips, Mas rooted through his bag, finally finding the other key - this one a quite normal padlock key, a product of the 1980s rather than the 1780s.  Standing before the massive gates, he tossed it lightly in one hand, wondering if either one of the locks would actually turn after so long.

A sharp honk made him jump, the padlock key falling into the low, scrubby weeds that edged the massive, now all but useless wooden ‘security’ fencing that had been erected in front of the decorative fence that surrounded the property.  “Can you get on with it, Mas?  I know your posh, oppressor’s blood is no doubt stirred by this moment of returning to the family pile, but some of us have work to do before nightfall.”

He smiled over his shoulder at famed photographer, and nearly as famed pain in the ass, Owen Ganguly who was leaning halfway out of the window of their rental, camera in hand.  

“You took some shots of me, didn’t you?”

“Of course,” Owen got out of the SUV, which they’d needed to get up the terrible roads leading to Allerdale.  After removing his hoodie he took a few pictures of the top of the gate, where most of the letters that had spelled out “Allerdale Hall” were missing.  Only what would have been the last ‘L’ remained.  “I was thinking it would be the perfect first image for the book.  The Lord of the Manor returns.”

“I look like a tit in it, don’t I?”

“Gormless as a Labradoodle,” Owen reached up to ruffle Mas’s hair, which didn’t take much.  The wind across the barren scrubland and fields that covered the ruins of his family’s clay mines had fussed with his curls and left him red-faced.  Though they had been friends since uni, no amount of friendship would restrain Owen from a good pic, no matter how stupid it might make Mas look.  

Actually, there was no way that wasn’t a bonus for Owen.

“Fine,” Mas opened the padlock first.  He’d brought WD-40 on the advice of the handyman that worked on his mother’s cottage and with a few sprays, a little force, and some under his breath swearing he was able to get it open without snapping the key off.  

“Nicely done,” Owen snapped several pictures of the open lock, and of Mas opening the chained link gate that stood in front of the original, red brick and metal one.

“Are you going to document every moment?”

“You know how I work.  A hundred shots for every one used.  It’s too easy to miss the moment otherwise.  Even here, even when nothing seems to be happening.”

Owen’s reputation had been made in far more dangerous places than Cumbria.  Battlefields, gang-ridden cities, disaster sites, and casualty wards, but now that he was a married man and a new father, his husband had declared a moratorium on that part of his career.  At least until their infant daughter was old enough to walk herself to school.

Bored out of his mind, when Mas had said he was going to his family’s ruined estate in Cumbria as the first part of their process of finally unloading it, Owen had immediately come up with an idea of going with to do a photo essay - which at some point on the train ride from London to Carlisle had turned into a book - of the remains of the house.

“So no one has really been in here since the 80s?  Officially I mean,” Owen said as Mas slid the brass key into the massive lock, which went in with shocking ease.  “I am sure that local kids have used this place for a bit of scaring themself and partying since then.”

“From what I have heard, no, they haven’t.  Since the accident that led to these being put up,” he knocked on the now greyed and rickety wooden security fencing.  The concertina wire on top of it swaying distressingly.  “Apparently the local parents, who were kids back in the 80s, have put a real effort of putting the fear of God into their kids as to this place.  We did have a ghost hunting programme ask to do a feature from here about fifteen years ago.  Naturally, the family turned them down flat.”

“Naturally.  They were probably afraid they’d put that nude painting of your revered ancestor on the telly for all the world to see.”

“I sometimes think that there isn’t anyone who hasn’t seen my great-great-grandfather’s penis,” Mas grumbled softly.

The key turned effortlessly in the lock with a sensible and decided click, but it took both of them, shoulders to it, to push open one side of the gate.

Centuries of carriages, horses, and feet meant that the long drive was still clear, and the rough, harsh land combined with global warming giving England dry, unkind summers, meant that the wide, open land of the hill was all but empty of plant life.  Through the thin, patchy weeds that were hearty enough to grow anywhere, the red clay earth that gave Crimson Peak its name looked lurid under the too blue, cloudless sky.

From the distance the house - a massive, dark pile, with some of the high, neo-Gothic gables still intact, “like the horns on the head of a great beast” as his great-great-grandmother Alice had described it in a letter once - looked surprisingly like a house and not a ruin, but Mas was certain that illusion would be shattered as soon as they got closer.

“Walk or drive up?”  

“Walk,” Owen said, “I want to get the approach from a human-sized perspective.  Fuck me, that color is really something,” he squatted down to take some of the dry, red soil in between his fingers.

“Apparently when it’s wet it looks like the ground is bleeding.”

“Charming.  Let’s hope for rain.  Bloody earth will be perfect for the cover.”

The quiet was intense, the wind having dropped to nothing.  The soft sound of their footsteps on the path disturbed what seemed to be a murmuration of starlings that must have been nesting in the high parts of the ruin.  Owen pivoted on his heel, snapping shot after shot, as they wheeled through the air, disappearing in the distance.

“I’m amazed there is anything willing to live here,” Mas said.  

Owen opened his mouth but they were close enough to really see the house.  

They walked without a word the rest of the way.

—————————————————————————————————

September, the upper Midwest of the United States -

Kay sat behind the register, doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle as she always liked to on slow Monday nights, waiting out the last fifteen minutes until she could close up.  

The fall semester at the university had been back in long enough that weekday evenings were getting quiet again in the store. No more students rushing in, panicked because they had forgotten to get a specific translation of a novel, or had the wrong edition of a physics test, they were back to their usual light smattering of after-dinner dog walkers, night class non-trads, and the regulars who treated the Flitcraft’s the way other people would treat their bar, as a weekly, or in some cases daily, part of their lives.

It was still warm and Kay was sticky under her cream cashmere sweater set.  Yes, she had seen the forecast, but she had been waiting all summer to wear knits again, and it was September so she accepted the suffering.  Eventually, she had given in to slipping out of her matching tights, however, but even with that her green and purple plaid skirt with the viscose lining was hot.  

Earl refused to let anyone run the air conditioning after September 20th.  Not because he didn’t acknowledge global warming, he was cheap.  

The second the store was closed and Bianca had gone, Kay was going straight downstairs to take all of her own clothes and anything Adam might happen to be wearing, which was never very much, and lay on his chilly body until she was comfortable.

After which she would ask him to get her overheated again.  Assuming he wouldn’t take that on his own initiative.

She quickly realized that it was not a good idea to think about Adam taking initiative when she was trying to cool down.  Sighing, she slipped off her navy blue duck shoes and stood up to press her bare feet on the worn, dark wood floor, hoping for a little relief.  

Eventually, with five minutes to go, Kay sent Bianca outside to bring in the sale book cart, and she walked up and down the still rows of books in the main room, the layers of old carpets scratching her soles, then into the west room where the science, math, and cookbooks lived, where the floor still had the pink and beige linoleum from when it had been a small laundromat that felt wonderful and clearly needed to be cleaned.  

All blissfully empty.  

Finally, the art room, where Earl allowed a few comfortable pieces of furniture and where the main entrance to Adam’s basement was hidden behind one of the bookcases.

There, on the plum corduroy sofa, was seated an older black man leafing through a book on Joseph Cornell.  Alice didn’t recognise him, and he must have come in while she was in the bathroom doing the reverse of the putting on a pair of tights dance.  

Her first assumption was he must have been a visiting professor, as he had an old, leather attache case beside him, a beautiful, worn thing, brown with a perfect patina of age, and Kay coveted it immediately.  

However, looking more closely at the perfect, slim cut of his blue suit, the high gloss on his black oxfords, and his tortoiseshell frames, Kay realized he was far too expensively dressed to be a professor.  Even though, she admitted, she also dressed outside of her budget, this was extreme.

“I’m sorry, we are getting ready to close.”

“Of course,” he said, a Scottish accent ruffling his words, as he closed the book and stood up.  “I am sorry to stay so late but I was hoping to speak to the owner of the store in private.  I am here on behalf of a client.”

“Oh, I am sorry but Earl’s left for the evening.”

With a rueful smile, he shook his head, “No, no, I mean the actual owner of the store.”  Reaching into his case, he removed a large white envelope, yellowed around the edges with age.  On the front, written in faded ink and the graceful hand of a long-gone age, was a name that Kay knew.  One of Adam’s names, one that he had used decades before she had been born, when he was a jazz composer living in Paris after World War One.

The paper was heavy, expensive, with a high rag count.  Kay made herself frown at the name, to make herself look confused by it.

“I am sorry, but there is no one here by that name, certainly not the owner,” she said, handing the envelope back.  Her fingers had left sweat marks on it, and she moved slightly so her bare feet were hidden by a stack of old museum catalogues.  

“As a lawyer, I know when someone is lying, and you are probably the worst I have ever met.”

“I-”

“Kay, is something the matter?”

Adam’s deep, clear voice was slow and cautious and very close behind her.  She and the lawyer both jumped.  He rarely used his abilities in front of strangers for obvious reasons, so it was a double surprise to her.  His long-fingered hands wrapped around her upper arms from behind, and he whispered in her ear, “Is he bothering you?  You’re stiff as a girder.”

“No, I-”

The lawyer smiled and held the letter out towards Adam, who looked at it like it was a pile of steaming turds.

“Jeremy Addams, I presume?”

Kay tried to read, tried to watch a movie, tried to do anything to distract herself from fretting and freaking out while she waited in Adam’s place for him to return.  

Or to at least call.

Or text.

Even though she knew he would normally never do so, his opinion being that “the zombie need to unimprove every form of communication had reached its fucking apotheosis with texting.”  But clearly, these were exceptional circumstances and he had to know that she would be very, very worried indeed.

The last time a stranger with a connection to his past showed up at the store she had nearly been killed, Flitcrafts’s had been wrecked, Adam’s beloved car was destroyed, and the store cat had been severely traumatised.

But despite all of that Adam had left with the lawyer - whose name was Bell - abruptly and with no explanation upon seeing the handwriting on the envelope.  He hadn’t bothered to deny who he was.  Rather, he had hustled the man out of the bookstore as quickly as he could manage, telling Kay he would be back as soon as possible.

Which apparently was not before midnight, which was the time when Kay gave up and decided that if Adam couldn’t be bothered with caring about her nerves she couldn’t be bothered with caring about his fussiness and so she did what she did when she was home and having an anxiety attack.

She cleaned.

While scrupulously avoiding any of his instruments, sheet music, recording equipment, or notebooks, Kay still had more than enough garbage to throw out, laundry to sort and throw in the washer, books to shelve, albums to put away, floors to sweep, surfaces to dust, pillows to beat, and bedding to change to keep her busy until almost dawn when Adam finally returned, hollow-eyed, hair wilder than normal meaning he’d been running his hand through it over and over, and furious enough that he didn’t even notice the clean Kay had made of his precious mess.

Instead, he passed her without a word, going to the bedroom.  

“What was that all about?”  Kay followed, hoping her tone was aggrieved rather than worried.

From one of the many free-standing wardrobes that lined one of the walls, he pulled out a massive old piece of hard-sided luggage, opened it, dumped out the clothing that had been in it long enough to start dry rotting.  With a frustrated growl, he threw the whole thing across the room where it smashed over a lamp, and the decay was a cloud of dirty brown dust and stink.

“Goddamnit!”  Adam sat on the bed, pulling at his hair again.  

Kay slowly moved into the room, avoiding the glass but glad she had put shoes on again, until she stood in front of him, shaking a little.  After a few moments, Adam wrapped his arms around her hips and pulled her in, burying his face between her breasts, “I am sorry, I am so sorry.  Did I scare you?”

“Yes, but I was already upset so that probably made it worse.”

“Can you go get me a new suitcase when the stores open?  After you get some sleep I mean?”  He tilted his head to look up at her, his uncanny eyes red-rimmed with fatigue.

“Of course.  Why?”

“Because I am going to fucking England.  Do you want to come too?  Tomorrow night.  Earl can work at night for a change, you haven’t had a vacation in forever.  Please say you’ll come.”  His voice was uncertain, not a way Adam ever sounded.  

“Yes, please, but again, why?”

“I have an old debt to repay.  And I don’t want to be without you.”

Adam and his much-beloved wife Eve had been emotionally inseparable while living far apart for long periods of time.  With Kay, he preferred to be close.  Very close.  All of the time.  Because she was human, and fragile, and even if she was very careful and very lucky, was only going to live a handful of decades to come, more or less.  He refused to miss any time with her.

“What kind of old debt.”

“Do you remember when I told you about Thomas and Alice Sharpe?”

“Of course,” Kay said, looking over to the portrait of Eve that hung in pride of place across from the bed, a beautiful thing done by the early 20th-century painter Alice Sharpe when the two couples met in Paris.

“And do you remember the Christmas ghost story I told you about Allerdale Hall?”

“Yes, even though you swore it wasn’t actually a ghost-”

Adam pulled her down into his lap, “Well, I knew Thomas before then, a little bit.  Thomas’s family lived at Allerdale, and he was there when I visited.  He was a little boy then, maybe nine, I’m no good with children’s ages.  He and his sister.  And-,” his voice gave a little, “and I could have … they were treated very badly.  Very badly , fuck I’m starting to be so fucking English again.  They were abused.  Their parents were pieces of shit in expensive clothing and I did nothing to stop them from….”

Kay took Adam’s face in her hands, and made him look at her, “Tell me later, after we sleep.”

He nodded, and kissed her, not with passion, but with all of the tenderness that he had once failed to show two children who needed his help, once upon a time.

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[his-dark-materials-trilogy]

Alethiometer symbol: Crocodile

Meanings: America, Rapacity, Enterprise

Appearances: The Golden Compass film and video game

[cmesparkle]

Rapacious

It’s not always about the way you turn away, or the way I always want what I cannot have.  It’s not about the way you let me down, or the darkness in which you chose to drown.  It’s not about the sideways glances  or the way you hold something new over me. It’s not about the caustic coffin you chose, or the layers of betrayal beneath your clothes.

We are all naked deep down, stripped to the bone. I showed you where I wanted you, you left me here alone.

[nildespirandum]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

18+ only

Penultimate chapter!  I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this from a simple prompt from @just-the-hiddles​! 

Thank you again and again to @caffiend-queen for loving this story so much and beta’ing it so well.

Art by the so talented @dianamolloy

She was dormant for months, save for a few moments each night when her eyes would flutter open, empty, and I could feed her.

At first I needed to transfer the blood from my mouth to hers, like a mother bird feeding a chick, holding her up a little so it would slowly trickle down her throat, so little did she move.  

Then, after time, her body recalled what to do when a cup was held to her lip and she would drink on her own.  I missed the misery of that parody of a kiss, which cost me so dear every night, where I would end, afterwards, slumped to my knees beside her bed, my talons scratching the floorboards.  

After a time I tenderly placed my wrist against her mouth.  Though her fangs often descended she never bit, and I was not certain if the act was too complex for one who was a step above a vegetative state - if you could call it that, her not being human any longer.  Or, rather, if even as careful as I had been taking her memories, trying to use my thoughts as a scalpel and to never slip or scrape, I might have taken too much.  

That might have been all she would ever be again.  

I kept her clean, changing her night clothing and bedding every day.  Other than going out to hunt a few times, closer to home than was strictly safe but I did not care.  I would happily have mesmerized or slain an intrusive officer of the law to ensure I would never be far from her.  The rest of my time was spent writing.  

Never had my work cost me so much pain.  Each word needed to be exactly the correct word, each description to hold a mirror up to reality and give it perfect reflection, each phrase needed to be as clear as if heard spoken rather than read.

I filled each leather-bound journal with my neatest writing, drying pen after pen, and all but burning a trench in the rug as I paced whilst arguing myself over the choice between the words truth and veracity, red and crimson, yearning and longing.  

One night I heard a splash, which would have been too soft for human ears, yet for me was louder than a bomb in the silence of my home.

My fingers had started to bleed.

I looked to the bed and thought how I would have loved to offer them to her.  How once she would have already been leaning on my back, lifting my hand to her mouth, savouring the taste of me as I savoured being tasted.  

A sob, humiliating and deep, rose from a place that had been closed as a tomb within me.  

“Enough!” I sneered at myself.  “As if we have time for such maudlin theatrics.”

Wrapping the quickly closing sores in a silk scarf I bent back to my task.  

The early, early morning she woke had no special significance.

My name is Laurel.  

I know this because the man whose house I live in told me that.  Or, he called me that, and when I didn’t know what he meant or who he was talking to he took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes as if they pained him, and he said, “That is you.  That is your name.  Laurel.”

To say that he had the most beautiful voice I had ever heard was true, but meaningless.

Sitting up in the bed I was tucked into, neatly, snugly, as if I were being stored there, I asked, “Like the tree?”

“Yes, like the tree. Laurus nobilis , the leaves of which were made into crowns of honor long ago.”  He stood, which seemed to take a long time, both because he was very tall and because everything seemed slow to me, and much of it still does.

I asked him why.  And said I was hungry.  

My name is Laurel, and his name is Loki, even though I didn’t know that then.  There is no special significance to our names having the same first letter he has assured me.

“For the young - particularly the very young - time goes slower, for their minds are learning everything.  The older a creature grows, the faster time will seem to pass for their minds have already absorbed much of the detail of the world about them, so they need only learn the specificity of a situation.”  

And then I noticed something very wrong.  

It was not, as you would probably guess, that I didn’t know anything about myself, not only my name or where I was or anything else.  What I noticed was I wasn’t breathing.  

Scrambling up, out of the bed, clutching my chest, panicking but without my heart racing, trembling but without breaking into cold or hot sweat, shuddering, but with not a single breath.

There is a terror to trying to force air into lungs that cannot move, and a pain to it too.  My chest heaved but the emptiness ached around the edges, and the bronchioles and lobes and my poor, useless trachea all ached with trying.  

My mind thought I was dying, and I fell to the floor, gasping nothing.

“Laurel!  Laurel, listen to me!”  Loki, the man, grabbed my upper arms, his long, pale hands wrapping entirely around them, lifting me with ease, “You are fine.  Look at me, look, you are fine!”  He moved his head like a snake until he managed to catch my eye, and I was caught in his.  “Calm now, ease yourself.”

It is hard to calm yourself when you don’t have breaths to take in, slow and steady.  Instead, I felt a sort of… wave within me, like an ebbing tide.  He held me there, locked in his hands, staring at me.  

No, watching.  

His eyes were impossibly green.  

He was so handsome, so tired, so worn down.  

“What’s wrong with me?  What’s wrong with me?  I can’t breathe!”

Over time I was to find out that there were a lot of answers to that question.  “You aren’t breathing either!”  That was a shriek.  

“I know.”

For some reason, that simple, unadorned answer stopped my freak out in its path.  “Why?” I asked again, encompassing more than merely asking about our mutual lack of respiration.

(Please don’t think I was so flip or clever or clear-thinking then.  So much time has passed since then, and it is only in finally sitting, filling out the beautiful leather journal that Loki gave me as a gift, who knows how many years after the fact, that I can find some humour in it.)

Loki started with the simplest one.

“We have no need of breath.  We are- .”  He stopped himself and slowly unclasped my arms, stepping back a few paces with caution, as if fearing he would need to run to catch me.  Then he gestured to the space between us, “We are not mortal.  We are vampires.”

“Get the fuck out.”

Laurel was Laurel still.  

I thanked the dead gods that once I worshipped.

I may not have known my name, or anything else, even how to breathe which is supposed to be automatic, but I did know bullshit when I heard it.  

And, apparently, I knew what a vampire was.

Hell, I even knew that this glamorous lunatic looked right for the part.  As did the elegant, wood paneled bedchamber with the floor to ceiling blackout curtains and the cold fireplace.

I didn’t know how I knew any of it.

Loki whose-name-I-did-not-know-yet’s head dropped, burying his chin in his chest, his long, black, black, black queue bounced with it, and his whole body began to shake.  

He was laughing.  

Looking back up, he smiled at me.  

Such a smile, that it made me aware I had been cold, because of how warm it made me.  “Ah, but I can prove it.”  He took a step forward, “You breathe not, yet you speak.”  I backed up, he kept pace.  “Your heart is still, yet your lovely mind functions - for now - imperfectly.”  A step back from me, another closer from him, until my back was against the wall beside the curtained windows which radiated tremendous heat.  He did not touch me, but he gracefully arched his long body and he rested a forearm above my head, “And then there is this.”

Snaking his free hand between the curtains, fast enough that they parted but didn’t stir, a tiny ray of not very strong sunlight that was too bright for me to tolerate showed around his wrist.  His teeth were gritted, and I stood on my toes to look closer.

There were fangs, long, ivory fangs, perfectly curved and with tips too sharp to be seen.  

Pulling his hand back in with a hiss, he held it up for me to see.  His perfect skin was seared and smoking, covered in deep red welts and enormous blisters and even the tips of what were not nails but closer to bird’s claws, were singed.  

As we watched, it healed completely, leaving it dirty with char and the liquid from the broken blisters, but otherwise whole.

“Oh.”

“I apologize for the shock theatrics, but you will need to eat soon and considering our diet I thought that I would cut out a certain amount of awkwardness.”

I wasn’t really listening.  Grabbing his hand I turned it this way and that.  I have no idea what I was looking for.  Prosthetics?  Make up?  Mirrors?  All I found was a large, well-made, dirty hand attached to a man who looked like he very much wanted me to let go of it, which I did.  It seemed we were hand-burning close, but not hand-holding close.

“If I tried that?” I asked.

“You would be left with an arm useless for little more than offering torchlight.  You are not so strong or old as I.  Yet.”  

“I think I could use a drink.  Or is that joke in poor taste?”

He gave a half-shrug.  “Yes, but I shall consider the source.”

“I can’t remember anything,” I told him.

“I know.”        

Laurel took my hand and all but unmanned me.  Though I had spent years alone, once close to a century, the few months that passed with her in that limbotic state had kept me suspended as well, between bereavement and hope.

My knees longed to bend to her.

He told me his name and that we lived together as he took me downstairs, both of us moving slowly.  Or, rather, he made me move slowly, as if I were made of a number of fragile, random things that were badly held together and too much jarring would make me fall to pieces.  I felt fine.

It was only later that I started to realize that I was made of fragile, random things that were badly held together.

Though he had guided me in getting out of bed and putting on slippers and taking that careful walk down the stairs he never touched me.

“Though you are not technically so very young,” he continued, after bringing me into a large, darkly furnished dining room and motioning for me to sit, “the principle is largely the same.”  

From another room - probably a kitchen - he brought to the table a tray holding a full carafe and two wine glasses.  

Filling the glasses from the carafe, he slid one of them across to me by one fingertip barely touching the stem.  The table was glossy enough that it moved silently and barely sloshed.  

It reeked of iron, copper, and salt.

My mouth watered.

It was good.  

My name, and my being a vampire, and his being Loki, and how delicious blood was were hardly the only things I didn’t know.

I didn’t know my father’s name, or the color of my mother’s hair, or if I had any siblings at all.

I didn’t know if my grandparents were alive.

I didn’t even know how old I was.  

I didn’t know where I was or where I came from or if I liked motorcycles, or pears, or the movies of Jim Jarmusch, or the way a pencil scratched across a piece of heavy paper, or basketball, or going to the park, or which color was my favorite, or which season, or which place to go on a trip.  I didn’t know if I knew how to caramelize onions or play the piano, or drive stick, or hem a pair of pants, or rewire a house, or speak German.  I didn’t know if I went to college, or graduated high school, or was homeschooled.  I didn’t know what jobs I had worked, or if I were good at any of them, or anything at all, or if I had never worked, or if I were rich, or had a vocation.  

That is the start of what I didn’t know.  What I came to know was that there was constantly another thing for me to learn that I didn’t know.

You probably feel bad for me, but you don’t need to.  I did know quite a lot.

I knew the world was in a pandemic, and that the star the planet I lived on circled was Sol, and the name of the current President of the United States was, and what the United States were, and what was hot and what was cold, what was darkness and what was brightness, how to play a record, about the internet, where the Balkans were, the texture of velvet and the sound of various birds’ song, and about World War II, space exploration, what the Large Hadron Collider was (though not anything else about it), the names of every flower in the garden of the house I was living in and more, the trees as well, and how to dress and bathe and read.

In English.

And the lyrics to a lot of songs.  

I knew more than that, of course.  I could list pages and pages of things I knew.

But I wasn’t on that list, and neither was anyone else.  

I was alone inside of my mind, without even myself for company.  

You would think that wouldn’t hurt because I didn’t know any better.  You’d think.

You might also assume that I adjusted to the fact that I was what I was quickly and easily.  And I supposed it was quick.  Loki supposed that it was due to my mind “understanding the organic truth of my body.”  

I think what he meant is I just knew what I was because I was it.  I think.  

Finishing the blood, that first dawn, I was not tired.  What I later learned was the normal exhaustion that overtook a vampire, especially a young one, starting at dawn didn’t affect me that day.  I wasn’t exactly buzzing with energy but my brain was starving.  Dying for information, for sights and sounds and things specific to me.

For memories.

Loki poured me another glass, and leaned his head wearily on the palm of his hand, smiling at me with a fondness that I didn’t know yet was reserved for me alone.

“Is, er, is amnesia part of my becoming a… you know…” I took a drink to cover my awkwardness, it was hard to know how to make conversation with anyone - let alone a dead man - when you can’t remember ever conversing before.  

“Can you not recall yourself due to being a vampire?  No.  No that is not one of the transformations, though perhaps it should be.  A creature without a past would have an easier time living so long.”

“Do you know why I am like this, then?”

“Yes,” he said, not actually answering.

“Then why?”

He fidgeted.  Gracefully, even elegantly, but he did it, rubbing a finger over his upper lip, then slowly rubbing his hands together.  Finally, he stood, in that quicker than sight way, his chair scraping on the floor and looked about the room as if he didn’t know where to go.  

Now Loki was the one who needed to put some space between us.  

Finally, he ended up in a corner, beside the door to the room I was to learn was the kitchen.  Not looking at me, his healed hand stroking his white shirtsleeve in a gesture of self comfort, he told me.  

“I have taken your memories.  It is… It is a gift… you might say… that I have.  They are not gone.” The first part he said slowly, as if the words were being pulled out of him like a bit of yarn being unraveled, but the last rushed out, the words falling over themselves in his eagerness for me to hear them, “I have them.  I have kept them.  They are safe.  I hope,” and then he was slow again, “I hope to restore them to you.  One day.  I hope to do that.”

Then he looked at me.

If I weren’t so mad I would have almost felt sorry for him.  He looked as if those words had left all of him as scoured out as my brain was.

“Why?” Was all I could make myself say.

He told me that, too.

Writers do not care for the truth overmuch.

If we did we would be reporters.

I… I like the truth less than most.  It had never done me much good, and as someone who has seen the panoply of history I can tell you that accuracy is an overrated,and not near the virtue the unimaginative like to prate about.  Oh, honesty is fine, honesty still allows for a little play, and a little… adjustment to the angle at which a story - even a story like ours - that can smooth the road forward, making villains into anti-heroes, curses into complications, and bad acts into understandable mistakes.

The truth with its ugly, bright light, shows only what is with no comforting ambiguity.

I told you the truth then, fighting the fear of your hating me and the strength of the risen sun.

For you alone, my love, I would lower myself to veracity, and have continued to do so ever since.  

Up to this evening, when I placed this, the last volume of the story of your life that I have written for you, into your hands.  Both of us holding it, you asked me why I was shaking, and I told you, “Because this is the part of the story where I become part of your life, and I am afraid you will not like me very much.  At least at first.”

You stood on your toes, and gave me a featherlight kiss, “Perhaps not, but when it’s over this is where I’ll be.  This is who I am.  And I like you just fine.”

“Well, if it's any good, maybe I should see about publishing it.  Vampire stories are making a comeback.  Again.”  

We laughed and then you walked out into the garden of our latest house to read the book I had written for you.  The book that started with, “ My bank has a surprisingly cheerful app for something that offers nothing but depression and pain.”

I watch, and like every writer, wait impatient to hear what the critics think.

Let me know if you would like to be added or subtracted from any of my fic lists.​

@caffiend-queen @myoxisbroken @just-the-hiddles @justthehiddleswrites @dianamolloy @dangertoozmanykids101 @toozmanykids @someillplanetreigns @archy3001 @piggledy-higgledy @catsladen @lokislastlove @yespolkadotkitty @is-it-madness @ransoms-sweater-holes @mischiefmaker76 @evieplease @clove-pinks @nerdygirl8203 @perksofeatingbacon @ladyacrasia @hopelessromanticspoonie​ @death-unbecomes-you​ @myelfroot​ @sylviefromneptune​ @wrathkitty​ @winterisakiller​ @latent-thoughts​ @redfoxwritesstuff​ @emeraldrosequartz​ @servent-alearika​ @frostbitten-written​ @wine-and-whines​ @joyfullymassivewhispers​ @shiningloki​ @mariwild​ @alexakeyloveloki​ 

[nildespirandum]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

18+ ONLY!

This is it!  The final chapter.  Thank you for @just-the-hiddles for the idea, @dianamolloy for the beautiful art, and @caffiend-queen for the beta’ing and the soul searching.  

We live in the mountains now.  

The air smells green and it’s cold most of the time and we are far enough away from light pollution to see every star, something I had never experienced before.  

At least, it is not in the memories I have read about.  And I think that it is something I would have remembered.  The first time I saw them Loki covered my eyes, like something out of a hokey old movie, shuffling me outside and then looked at me looking at the sky.  There is red in the night sky, deep violet red and black that is deeper even than his hair, and pine greens arc and grow lighter to a violent lime if you are able to see far enough, and stars are not white.  

They are everything but white.

We have been here for years.  First, it was for safety.  

When we first came here Laufeyson wished to teach me to hunt things that were not human, to stalk and chase and drink and kill.  Or, as he put it, “You must learn to hunt.  The world is too uncertain for you to be safe without those skills, but your heart is too tender and modern to bear the guilt of that bloodlustfull time if it is resolved in human lives.  I have hopes that -”

He turned and looked at me, those glasses he wears for the aesthetic and nothing else reflecting the highway lights as he drove.  “I have hopes,” he finished, very, very quietly.  

Looking out of the passenger side window, I could see a fox weaving through the weeds and wildflowers that sprouted on the edge of a cornfield.  For me, even in the dark her fur was bright as fire, the purple asters were distinct enough that I could see every feather-fine petal, the drooping softness of the blue marys moved fitfully in the slight breeze and I could see each dancing motion.

“Is ‘bloodlustfull’ a real word?” I asked.

There was what seemed to be an arctic silence from Laufeyson for what would have been a few heartbeats if those existed in the car and then he snorted.

Now I looked at him.  He had taken off those pointless specs and was wiping his eyes, which were tearing from his trying not to laugh.  

Vampires do not weep blood.  That was a relief.  I didn’t know why I thought they would.

I would tell you how strange he was, but I don’t know how.  Maybe he wasn’t strange, maybe everything he said or did was entirely normal for a person from his time, for a person who was over a thousand years old.  Long silences would be punctuated by bursts of talk - explanations, lessons, or reading over my shoulder when I was working my way through the story of my life to expand on something he had written - then falling back into that silence.

After the first night of my new, memory-free existence Laufeyson was polite, kind in his way, kept a scrupulous distance, and when asked would answer any question but rarely offered up anything without a question coming first.

What I learned in those few weeks - told in a cool, ever so slightly clinical way as if he were my extremely professional gynecologist and not one of the dark and sexy undead - was that I had only been a vampire for a very short time, after having been extremely sick for a while, and that something in his bloodline that he hadn’t really understood caused me to, after I first drank directly from a human, to go insane and commit a, again as he put it, “not too large number of atrocities.”

Which was massively comforting.  I probably should have been more upset about that, if I were human any more maybe I would have been, or if there were any shred of it I could remember.  

His removing my memories was his way to try and salvage my mind.

“Um, so why didn’t you just take that part?” I asked.  We were packing to go to the mountains then.  I had a bedroom in his house but before I lost my mind I hadn’t had much chance to unpack, since it seemed I had moved in with him recently.  I had lots of books and things relating to music - albums, sheet music, a guitar - and not much else.  My clothing, what I had of it, was very simple and expensive.  There was a laptop and some pictures of strangers, and a few odds and ends like a red glass vase, a blue toolbox filled with costume jewelry, a brass pipe, a notebook pasted with ticket stubs, and flyers for a band playing at different venues around the country.  

Memorabilia for a life I didn’t remember having.  I threw it all away.

He pulled my belongings out of the garbage and gave them to me later, as I remembered the things they signified.

“Memory is not a series of events. Once you experience a thing it loses the sequence of time,” he was carefully folding my clothing, after looking in despair at how did it.  “For instance, last night I saw a cat running across the street, carrying a leaf in its mouth.  At this moment I can tell you the pattern of its fur, that the maple leaf was badly tattered along one edge and curled against her whiskers, yet at the same time, that cat has become one of an ocean of cats I have seen in my life.  The leaf is one of the leaves that number beyond any counting have fallen from the endless forests of trees that I have seen.  Within those forests are animals I have hunted, friends I have hunted with, houses are made from those trees, peopled with family and lovers and enemies.  They are massed together in a way that cannot be undone.  Not really.”

There was a sound of leather and plastic squeezing together as his black gloved hands tightened on the steering wheel.  I had never seen anyone out of a movie wear driving gloves before, but Laufeyson did.  

“I might,” he forced out, ”have taken such a risk on myself, and I have done it with others, but I would not take it with you.  The possibility of leaving part of a dangerous memory behind, or of cutting in half something precious that would hemorrhage and spoil in your mind.  It was safer to take everything.”

I wanted to say that he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, but I could tell he knew that.

He was giving up his beautiful house, and what was probably a beautiful life, in order to make sure I could care for myself, so I could be nice.  A little nice.

When we were in the mountains, in the beautiful wood and stone lodge, Laufeyson started wearing jeans and sweaters and stopped wearing the glasses he didn’t need.  We watched old movies and took walks in the forest and drank blood from bags that were delivered regularly by a drone.

If you are rich, you really can have anything you want.

Though we were together near constantly, I made certain Laurel had all of the space I felt she required.    

I often woke up hard, surrounded by shredded bedding, aching, from smelling her from down the hall, her scent mixing with cedar and wood smoke and the musk of animals.

Yet…

The first time Laurel caught a rabbit, after frustrated months of trying to teach her how to be certain to use her speed to stay down wind, to be stiller than the earth, and then to take the bite, the look on her face - of triumph, and then disgust at the taste of Oryctolagus cuniculus’s bland yet bitter blood - cause me to nearly kiss her.  Laughing together, it was so easy to step close in, to lean over her glowing, bloody face, and -

Shoving my hands through my hair, I turned the kiss on her lips to one on her forehead, “I have an excellent A positive that I have saved for a special occasion.  That shall wipe the taste from your mouth.”  I turned to climb back up towards our lodge, adding, “I have something for you as well.”

“What?” Laurel asked, gently laying the dead coney down, as if apologizing to it.  

“You shall see.”

Laurel’s first memory was being held by her grandfather, near an old fence, and a cow’s slightly slimy, grass-scented nose, snuffling her.  

She laughed.

I gave her the book that started with that memory after we drank.

Deer were much more difficult to hunt.  Easier to find, but way harder to catch.

It didn’t matter.  Their size, their hardness to catch, triggered my bloodlust the way no rabbit could.

And they are so beautiful.  Killing something beautiful should be harder, but when you are hungry it makes no difference, and with each larger kill, I grew ravenous.  Hunger upon hunger.  For blood, for so much blood.  I would finally grasp a buck by their horns - they would try and get in my way to protect the does and their young - and draining every drop of their burning blood wouldn’t feed me.

So I would chance another, though before I could Loki would tackle me, straddling me under the bow of the sky, pinning my taloned hands beneath his knees, and would open a bag of human blood to splashing into my gaping mouth.  Eventually being full and logy, I would stop fighting and he would toss me over his shoulder, running through the woods as graceful as any animal I had chased, so we could beat the sun home.

It took nearly a year before I could stalk and catch one without needing to kill, even though I worked harder knowing that he would give me another book for another milestone.  

Reading the book was like reading any other book when turning the pages.  When I was… dormant, though, the words, Laufeyson’s carefully chosen and curated words worked in me.  As if he had screwed off my head and poured the memories in.  

It hurt like hell.

He knew it too.  I would wake up with my head throbbing, and he would sit with me while I stared at nothing and let the thoughts order themselves.  

Once, when I read too much the night before, I was all but blind with pain the next day and I found myself clutching a pillow for comfort on the couch.  After a time, rocking and moaning, I heard Laufeyson make a noise in turn, and then I found myself on his lap, now being rocked rather than rocking, and he whispered, “Drink from me.  Bite me deep.  It will help.”

I bit his shoulder, my teeth clicking on bone, and he shuddered.

Nothing tasted like he did.  Oh god, not only rich, not only delicious, but like life itself.  Like all of the lives he had lived and taken and all of the people he had been and he let me take enough that I thought I might have hurt him.  Rather, he then pressed my cheek to his arm and stroked my hair until I rested.

After that, I called him Loki and learned to read more slowly.

Over the months after that I had learned to read with caution, not delving into it every night.  Rather, I would do a few pages a week.  Even though I was impatient for more I wasn’t bored.  Loki taught me the names of everything on those mountains, from the types of soil to the stars above.  He told me fables and stories and some of them were his own.

I wanted to eat him all of the time, though I kept myself from asking.  That seemed rude.

I was in love with him, too.  Which was obvious.  Neither of us said anything about it, me because I assumed as I got more of my memories back it would fade, and show itself to be my dependence and loneliness.  He didn’t say anything, and I can only guess it was his version of good manners.  

After I gave Laurel the book that told about her brother dying, and her parents inability to come back from the loss, and her much-beloved aunt dying as well she cried herself sick.

I longed to offer anything to her I could.  But there are wounds that have no healing.  I know that better than most.  

When I was able to kill a bear it drove me mad again, but not very.  Loki was able to corral me against a tree and keep me there until I calmed myself down.

The rough of the bark at my back and his body pushing against me….

I didn’t want blood then.  I could feel that Loki wanted me as much as I wanted him.  That he was as hard as I was wet.  Still, he did nothing.

I learned to stalk a wolf.

I refused to kill it, I didn’t even want to.

I did confuse the fuck out of it.

I got the third book for that.  

I could play the guitar and the piano.

Loki ordered me one of each, saying that the old guitar I had was not good enough, even though it was perfectly fine.  The guitar was delivered to the town at the foot of the hills and he left me when he went to get it, the piano would take longer.  Since we had moved to his lodge he had gone away for a night or two from time to time.  There were business and money matters that he had to attend to, and I knew that from time to time he would go hunting.  I enjoyed being alone for a while each time.

I’d play loud music he didn’t like, and dance around like an idiot.  Not because I think he would have objected.  His eyes were hot and hungry on me when he thought I wasn’t looking.

And when I touched myself he was who I thought of, I knew he could smell it.  Not because he was the only person I knew.  By that point I had the memories of a number of lovers - a pretty fair number - as well as crushes and fantasy objects, to fill any number of spank banks.  

Since the day I fed upon him the part of me that was capable of lust and wanting and a hunger that wasn’t belly centered had woken up.  Starving.  Loki Laufeyson was desire itself and I was finally getting whole enough for that to be a big fucking problem.  

Minus the fucking.

For the fifth time, I checked the restraints holding Laurel to the wall.  Though I did not need to worry about cutting off her air or circulation I still found myself fretting.

“Would you stop, please?  I’m not the one we have to worry about here,” she grumbled at me, her fingers stretching and making fists, her talons biting into her palms.  She was fretting as well.

With a nod, stopping to press my forehead to hers in a gesture as old as humankind, I went to fetch the blodarbeider .  I had arranged for a private plane for her from Montreal and first-class accommodations at the ludicrously expensive and luxurious ski lodge on the other side of the mountain.  She was said to have the most delicious blood imaginable.  

This was a big step and it terrified me.  Though she still was not fully who she had been before - and would never be her entirely again - she was whole and healthy and I would not survive losing her yet again.

Refusing to think of it, I found Aure in the main room of the lodge, lounging on one of the long, blue divans by the sunken fireplace.  Her skin was perfect, her long golden hair gleamed red in the fire light, and she was texting.  

Needless to say.

Outside the sounds of the forest were muffled by the heavy snow that had been falling for hours.  Fortunately, the ski lodge had a special Snow Cat to chauffeur wayward guests.  It was the most idiotic vehicle I have ever seen, with curtains and champagne.

“Are you ready?” I asked, offering her a hand.  

“I am always ready, sir,” she said, her spiky boots clipping up the three stairs so she stood before me.  With their added inches she would be the right height.  “Will you be dining here or elsewhere…?”  She looked hopefully at the curving wooden staircase and I could smell her wet.  

“The basement,” I said, not in the mood for flirtation.  

Without a blink, but rather with a heightened anticipation, she nodded slowly, her lips parted and her breath slightly heavier.  

The basement itself - a plain, largish room with a utility carpet and a large, comfortable chair but no other furnishings - confounded her a little.  Until she saw Laurel shackled to the wall, her expression slightly annoyed but her lovely, curved fangs visible and glinting in the light, then Aure went from erotically excited to a level of overstimulation like that of a small child at a birthday celebration.

“Oh.”

“Please roll up your sleeve,” I said, then considered for a moment.  “The left one.”

Pulling off her cashmere sweater quickly, which left her shining hair perfectly disordered, she unbuttoned the cuff of her black silk blouse, rolling it back with practiced ease.  Examining her arm, not only did I find her veins were perfect, but with barely a mark on them.  I raised a brow towards her.

“That is not normally where my clients choose to indulge,” she whispered, her head down.  

Holding her by the wrist, I led her to Laurel, who grew more nervous as we approached.  Her bare feet shuffled, as if she would back away into the wall if it were possible.  “Is this your first time?” Aure’s voice was even softer, shocked, delighted, deeply aroused.  

“Er… not exactly…“ Laurel said.  Then she looked at me.  Her brown eyes were pleading with me for something.  

“Shall I start?” I asked.

Grateful, nodding vigorously, she watched studiously as I sank my fangs carefully into Aure’s perfect median cubital vein, whilst staring into Laurel’s eyes, moving slowly, blinking slowly, calming her as best I could without exerting any force of will upon her.  I had meddled enough there.  

She blinked back at me, the scent of blood making her pupils go wide.  I could all but feel her mouth watering.  

I suckled the wounds I made for a moment, and Laurel’s fangs grew long enough to force her mouth open, scratching into her lip, causing a bead of blood to form there.  Aure forgotten, unable to stop myself, I leaned in and placed the tip of my tongue to it with a moan.  

We were so close-

Grabbing Aure about her waist, I lifted her arm and placed it rather than against my own mouth against Laurel’s.  Though she drank deeply and well, her eyes remained sane, her suck controlled, her body at its ease.  We never looked away from each other and when a lock of her hair dropped over her eyes I pushed it back in place and left my hand there.

“Min kona,” I could not stop myself from murmuring, and Laurel stopped drinking briefly to press a shy kiss to my wrist.  

When she was done, I helped Aure to the chair and returned to Laurel. When she started to speak I placed a finger to my lips, “Let yourself have a moment,” I said, wiping her mouth with a bit of linen.

“I’m fine, you ridiculous man,” she said to me, with a laugh of pure relief.

Afterward, I half carried the blodarbeider up the stairs, reasonable blood loss and several quiet, shaking paroxysms left her too weak to risk the climb.  Excited as I was at this breakthrough, that my chosen course had seemingly worked, I was energized enough that I could have carried her over the mountain through the snow and danced home.  

After I had her situated by the fire with a cup of the Mexican hot chocolate and the cheese plate that were part of her requested aftercare, I excused myself for a moment to check on Laurel.  “Take your time, sir.”  I nodded, and she added, “And thank you, for making me a part of whatever that was.”  She stretched, satiated, taking the cup in both hands, “It was delicious.”

“As were you,” I said, sending the text for the Cat to come for her, hoping that she would be gone by the time Laurel was ready to come upstairs.  I wanted very much to be alone with her.  

Reader, I did not lose my mind.

And in return, I got the last book.  I told Loki that, “This is who I am.  And I like you just fine,” when he gave it to me, looking nervous, looking boyish even.  Unlike the other books when I read this one I could tell he hovered, but when I looked up to see him, or went to find him, he was gone from the lodge.

Each morning I waited as long as I could, but being a young vampire the push of the sun, its radiation draining me, would send me up to sleep in my bedroom, under the lovely pile of down comforters and soft sheets, before he would race back in the last minutes.  There were times I would wake at sundown and could smell where the light had smoldered the tips of his hair, he cut it that close.

I don’t know how Loki managed to keep dodging me without my ever actually catching him at it. Maybe when I am older than dirt I will have extra superpower level-ups, too.

There were things I read that made me angry, things that made me terribly depressed, or had me laughing, or sad.  I learned things about both of us that I needed to know but made me wonder if we deserved to be happy.  After all, he was an ancient monster and I was someone willing to sacrifice my humanity to live, so not exactly the most likely candidates for a happily ever after.

Made me angry that he held himself back from me.

Made me grateful for it, too.  It would have been so easy for him to overwhelm and own me, to use how lost and dependent I was to sway me, or to make me over, make me whatever he might want.  

With all of that said, when I finished the book much more quickly than I had the other I didn’t let on.  I needed a little time to have it all to myself.  To hold it close and let these last, most intimate memories move to fill me up and make me whole, or at least as whole as someone like me could manage, before I turn back towards him with enough of myself intact to be worth offering to him.

Which was just as well, because he had one more test for me.

Laurel took in the massive great hall of the ski lodge and then turned to me with a raised brow.

“Are you serious?”

“At this moment? Quite,” I answered.  “Pick one.”

The space would have been gorgeous, with a lofty ceiling and a wall of glass showing the side of the mountain where night skiers carrying torches were like fireflies, save that the current ownership was courting a younger, more… easily excited and distracted crowd of the wealthy and indolent.  Gone were the old skis adoring the walls, the elegant, Scandanavian designed furnishings, and the solitary piano player near the door.  In their place there were pink and blue lighting effects, music that was not EDM since that was no longer a thing, but was just as annoying, and barely clad servers wearing fur-lined knee boots, carrying trays of hot chocolate spiked with different liquours.  

Everyone was young, athletic, dressed in very expensive and tight ski wear - even should they never make it farther outside than the designated outdoor smoking lounge, which was heated and had its own bar - and had the kind of frivolous beauty than only those who had lived without fear of the slightest want could have.

That Laurel would loathe it was a given.

“I hate all of these people.” she finally said, after we had done a circuit of the room, her judgement and disdain making her tremendously attractive to many of the revelers.  Adding in my appearance meant that we could have had nearly anyone there.    

Laurel crossed her arms and scowled at a youngish man with a splendid head of ginger curls and irritatingly elaborate facial hair who started to walk over towards us, bearing small, copper cups piping steam.  “Except the people who work here.  Of course.”

“Of course.  Which is why we will not be feeding on any of them,” I said, nodding to the young man in my turn.  “If you refuse to pick, he will do.  Should you decide to feed from his neck that distressing chin pet of his will hide your mark nicely.”

For a moment he was confused then, as is no surprise, he chose to accept my invitation and ignore Laurel’s clear distaste.

“I’m not sure if I-” there was a resigned fear in her voice.

“I am.”  Taking her hand for but a moment, sliding my fingers down her palm to lace with hers for the length of time it took for her dinner to reach us.

He gave us the traditional greeting of his people. “Hey,” holding up the cups, with a hopeful expression.

Laurel was incredulous in my direction for a few seconds, then sighed, “Let’s get this over with.  Do you have a room, hey?”

“Um, er, yeah…” he thought about it for a moment, then brightened, “Yes I do.  I have a room.  Of my own.”

The conversation in the elevator had mainly been about his favorite DJs and the last four places he had vacationed before this trip.  He talked non-stop and it took approximately seventy-five years for us to go up five flights.  

Had I not needed to evaluate Laurel’s condition I would have drained him in the lift and climbed down the side of the building.

I could describe to you how, on entering his neon-lit room, Laurel caught his eyes and held him trapped in her gaze as firmly as she had the animals she hunted, stepping to him, the weight of her contemplation forcing him effortlessly backward, grateful to be relieved of the burden of his personality.  Whatever it might have been.  

She did not bite his neck, for which I was silently glad.  There was an intimacy to it, as well as a certain degree of physical difficulty, that meant I myself preferred not to feast from there.  Rather, she bit him as I had the blodarbeider, and drank deep.

But, and for this I was thankful enough that I swayed a bit, my mask of calm slipping as I admitted to myself my fears of how wrong this might have gone.  But Laurel’s control, like everything else about her, was perfect.  

Afterward, she stepped back, leaning a hand on his shoulder to keep him pinned to the wall, “Want any?”  

I shook my head.  

“Ok, Hey,” she said to him, letting go once she was certain his legs would hold him up. “Um, clean up, wash your arm, it’s fine.  It doesn’t hurt.  Unless you want it to.  Then it hurts exactly like you like.  But get some sleep soon, don’t go back downstairs.  When you remember this, you will remember that we… er… we were really hot and great in bed.  And that you decided to shave your beard.”

We were out of the door before he had finished turning on the taps in the bathroom.  In the elevator, we did not look at each other.  

Could not.

Nor as we moved through the crowd that gave us way without knowing it did so.

Finally, outside, Laurel said, still not looking at me, “I don’t want to drive back.”  There was a tremble in her voice, in her whole body.

“I can get the car tomorrow night,” I said, trying to remain calm as well.

Walking into the treeline, the lights and electric pulse from the ski lodge fading behind us, we did not speak again, but once we were far enough away by a silent agreement, we began to run.  

This was not as we had run when I had taught Laurel to hunt, but for the sheer pleasure of it, for all of the pleasure of sharing the luminous dark of the forest and the scent of snow and the endless colors of the night sky that only we could see, for the joy of how fast we were, and the dancing steps as we avoided ice and root and branch.

I had not laughed in years, it seemed, even though I knew I had.  Yet I had not laughed like I did on that run.  Pure relief, and a little mockery at Laurel’s still fledgling gait, by comparison to my own agility.  She laughed at herself, as well.  

And when we were back at the door of our home, before we entered Laurel stopped, suddenly serious, “There is something I need to tell you.”

If my heart worked it would have beat itself sick within me at that moment.  “What?”

She looked down at herself and then at me.  I had picked out our clothing for the night, sleek and black as befit our role.

“I still think it’s weird when couples dress alike,” her voice was serious, solemn even.

For a moment I had absolutely no idea what she meant.  Then I did.  “You finished it.  The book.”  

“A few days ago,” she said, cautiously.  Waiting.

I waited too.  Then, I could stand it no longer, “What did you think of it?”

Rather than answering my question, she questioned me, “Why did you include those parts about yourself?  Those aren’t my… I wouldn’t have known any of that.”

“Which is why.  Our… our love is….”  The writer lacked words.  

Then, I made myself speak, “I know every moment of you, Laurel.  Every.  Moment.  And though I would have spared you the suffering you endured, my greedy heart is glad for it.  I love you for all that you are.  I wanted there to be some parity between us.  For you to know the ugly and the damned within me, and the shreds of good that are there are as well.  It was the least I could do, after all of the harm that has befallen you.  To let you decide if I am someone that you can love in turn.  The very, very least.”

“Oh, my god.  You are so old, and so very, very… I’d say brain-dead, except that sounds rude considering.  So how about bone-headed,” she stepped to me, burying her hands in my hair, whispering, “so fucking bone-headed,” before kissing me.

I gathered her against me, with care, for even now I knew I could hold her too tight, and I would.  Every bit of me relaxed, as if only fear and concern had kept me upright for years, and she had to all but bear me indoors.

Loki fell against me and let me take his weight, let me take the burden of his sudden weakness.  

For close to seven years my beloved, my maker, my teacher, my dearest friend, my companion in all things, had waited for me, to be whole.  The terrible loneliness of it, after having been alone for so long before our brief time together… I could feel it from him.  He gave me a soft, ironic smile, his black, black hair falling over his face.  “I love you,” he said again, dipping his head to kiss me again.

My own seven years of hunger had its teeth in me.  I wanted to rip him open.  I wanted to stroke his hair and kiss him gently.  I wanted everything from him and he gave over everything to me,

Rather than bother with the stairs, once we were near enough to the couch I dropped us, glad that he could afford something sturdy enough to not even creak under our combined weight.  He was spread beneath me, one of his feet on the floor, his other leg hooked over the back of the seat.  I pushed his arms over his head and kissed him again.  This time it was deeper and more and more invasive, as he ceded himself to me without a struggle.  I lapped into his mouth, stroking his tongue with the tip of mine, and then teased back so he had to arch up, desperate to keep our contact.  

I straddled him, so even though we were still dressed the hard bar of his cock lay along the groove of my cunt and each move he made rubbed us together.  Balancing on Loki’s, moaning as I minutely bucked on him, I whipped off my sweater and bra off at the same time.  

He cupped my breasts with reverence and pinched my nipples cruelly, his perfect, thin upper lip sneering slightly as I bent backward to offer him more.  Each twist had a matching ache of pleasure from between my legs and soon I had soaked through all of our clothing.

“I want to lick you until you bleed, until the sun rises and we fall into torpor and I awaken still there, my tongue inside you.”

“Not tonight.  Tonight is for me drinking you ‘til you are too weak to move, and then my riding you until I break you apart.”  

Both our fangs were out now, and when we kissed now it was bloody and messy and hurt barely enough.  Reaching between us, together we fumbled, he for the first time ever ungraceful, undoing his belt, shifting down his trousers enough for his cock to be freed.

His big, hard knuckles ran up and down between my legs, then he pressed two rough fingertips to my clit and rubbed so softly, so softly, circling, little spirals of pleasure and neediness that made me sob into his mouth.  Then, he broke from kissing me and we looked at each other.

If I told you how beautiful he was then, the severe elegance of his bones and the soft starvation in his eyes, you would never believe me.  “I love you, min verr ,” was all I could say, and I was not sure where those last words came from, though I knew in some way what they meant.

“Again,” his voice was dark and sonorous.

“I love you, min verr ,” I said again.

His eyes fluttered close, he bit his own lip, and offered me his throat with a groan, “Bite me, fuck me, own me, Laurel.”

I let the head of his cock, thick and leaking, slip into me, and then dropped hard, so I was speared through at the same time I brushed the tips of fangs over his skin and then bit fiercely, so I was in him at the same moment he was in me.  

Blood, cool and salty, flooded my mouth and I sucked even as I rode him, my hips scooping, and Loki wrapped himself about me as much as he could, arms about me, hands digging into my sides, I tangled his hair, ripped the silk of shirt to touch more of his skin, to be in more contact as I ground on him helplessly.  

Every point of contact was a point of pleasure.  My fangs ached and I sank them into the holes I had already made.  Loki babbled, a stream of consciousness in what I later learned was old Norse, begging me, threatening me, worshipping me with obscenities.  I could feel the juddering of his body, his hips moving up in hard, small thrusts, all he could manage with how deep he was in me.  

Then-

Then-

Then!  

I pulled out of him, and pushed against the thick muscle of his chest, rocking back with a cry as my orgasm came in hard jolts, the pressure of waiting so long making it go on and on and I kept riding him, making myself come again, and Loki ripped into the couch and held his every muscle perfectly still and ridged so I could use him until he couldn’t wait any longer and he yanked me down against him to kiss his way through his own finish.

Collapsed on him, because we are what we are, we were still able to move and speak - it’s amazing what you can do when you don’t need to breathe, when your heart doesn’t pound so hard it hurts.  We awkwardly rolled onto our sides to face each other, laughing at ourselves and each other.  Our noses all but touched, the green of his eyes was nearly all I could see, and he reached up to stroke my hair.  “I have missed being so close to you more than I knew.  Will you move into my bedroom?” he asked, almost shyly.

I wanted to laugh but I didn’t.  “You should move into mine, you gave me the bigger one.”

“Mine has the better view.”

“Mine has the nicer bathroom.”

We bickered softly, not moving, until the sun rose and we were dormant.

We still live in the mountains, but they are different mountains now.  My city-born wife having decided she is a wilderness girl at heart.  Provided the wilderness comes with a goodly supply of hot water, plenty of books, and a way to listen to her absurdly large record collection.

The humans are fighting again, another war, this time over resources, but we have extended our protection over the towns that crouch in the valley in return for what we need.  I have acquired more than a little money and resources through my existence which keeps them supplied with water, food, and medicine, and Laurel takes a particular pleasure playing with any soldiers, police, or other authorities who decide to interfere with our peace.

I am too old and lazy for such play, generally, yet I still allow her to cajole me into joining her now and again.

Mostly our life is peaceful.  We have little need or interest for other company, our occasional visit to the valley coffeehouse for Laurel to perform a song or two, or to pick up a new consignment of books and clothing is enough of others for us.

Even now, we sit in the tiny garden I have made space for beside our old stone house, the night-blooming flowers glowing in the dark.  Laurel’s head rests on my thigh as I read to her from my latest work, drinking from me now and then, lifting her head to offer trenchant but valid criticisms, and I have never known such contentment.

May you know it one day, as well, gentle reader.

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[nildespirandum]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

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Things go wrong....

art by the lovely @dianamolloy

Chapter 22 - It’s quite a thing, to experience that urge, to let it wash over you, to give in to it. It’s addictive. It’s all-consuming. You lose yourself to it. - Derek Landy

It was a beautiful night, capping what had been a beautiful autumn.  

Do you remember?  

Of course, you don’t, it was so long ago and…

It was a beautiful night, you may take my word for it.  Crisp is the term Americans like to use for their autumn nights and all triteness aside it is apt for a night such as that one.  The neighborhood had put on its best face for the sake of the young, about to be trapped again by winter and the rising number of the sick and the dead.  Just as in my childhood days.

Ah, nostalgia.  

For more hours than usual for Halloween, the doorbell rang, and at some of the neighbor’s homes they had set up fire pits in the yards so they could sit in the cooling, darkening air with candy offerings.  

If I should say it reminded me of the past I would be lying.  The noisomeness of the petroleum and synthetics that either made or infected all but the most remote or zealously guarded places in the world, added to light pollution, and the constant noise of transformers, engines, and human nattering made it impossible for me to even pretend I had retreated into the peaceful horrors of the past.  Still, the woodsmoke was rather nice.

Laurel was growing restless.  There is something terribly mortal about once you know a grim task must be undertaken, to then wish to rush towards it.  When you have little time there truly is no way to put things off.  

Her hands flexed and squeezed, she brushed her hair more than was her wont, which is to say more than once, and she refused to meet my eyes.

I was not agitated, not anxious.  I was cold.  Colder than I had been since she had come to me to find a place to live.

There are those undead who can tell you the provenance and past of an object with a brush of their fingers.  The rarest of my kind are those who see glimpses of the future, who have survived so long that they are able to defy the linear way that our minds organize time.  

My own gifts, as you know by now, are for touching the minds of others, and they have grown as I have aged to the point where it is at times harder to not use them.  

Never had I shown such prescience, but I was very old, and that night a thing I could not name chilled me.  Which chilled me further.

For I know the name for everything.

Finally, the voices faded, the smoke dissipated leaving the comfortable scent of wet, charred wood in its place, the cold reached its peak, and we went out.

After I made Laurel change her clothes.

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” she asked, looking down at herself.

“Put on something black.”

She raised an eyebrow at me, “Isn’t that kind of on the nose, Vlad?”

I was in no mood for levity, “Black will hide the stains.  And there will be stains.  No child eats neatly the first time it holds its own knife.”

“That’s usually a spoon,” she said.  

When no banter was forthcoming she retreated to our room and then came back in a black sweater and trousers.  “Better?  I always thought it was weird when couples dress alike, ”  Laurel held her hands out at her sides, frowning at my own, similar attire.

I nodded, holding open the door, “Let’s go.”

We drove in silence, searching for a demesne within it.  A place where the disease was being treated with negligent disrespect, as would another’s hunting ground.  Laurel rolled the window down and leaned an elbow on the door, her hand on her chin, her short hair blown back.  

Now and then she would close her eyes, raising her chin to the wind.

Would that I had skill with paint to preserve what she looked like to me that night, for even I do not have the words.  Only the memory.  

Eventually, we found a place.  It does not matter any longer where the place was, or who was there that I deemed worthy of predation.  

When I first became I fed like a beast because I was little better than a beast before that turning, starving and empty.  I thought this was because I had been bled and abandoned, because I was not guided or taught.

I had taught Laurel everything I could think of in those nights before I took her out, making her repeat her lessons until they were rote.  I stayed by her side, attentive and cautious as any she-wolf with one pup and a long winter ahead.

I was cold as we walked through the night.

I was wrong about everything.

I killed him.  

The man.  One of the men who had wanted to ‘play’ with us.

Loki had caught him, bled him, so fast I could barely see.  The chase through the streets and into the little park that smelled of freezing dirt and dog shit having left me edgy, with something horrible and burning in place of the adrenalin I no longer had that was making my senses spike, even as my body remained inert and dead.  Then there was blood and-

One moment he was a man, and the next he was just… food.

A spigot of food.

He was nothing that mattered, other than bountiful.

I had sprung on him, the heels of my boots digging into his sides, biting so hard at his neck that I took a chunk out of it, which I spat away as I rode him, grey and clammy with shock, blood soaking my chin, my clothes, giving me hot mouthful after mouthful.  I could not drink fast enough to keep up with the surge of it.  So unlike drinking from Loki, where no heart, no lungs, made the blood move.

Full of fear.  It was full of fear, and life.  It tasted of his dying as I drank and drank, not caring about the mess I made.  

It was so hot.  Boiling.

Then it started to get cold.  I didn’t like that.

I could smell heat from somewhere else and threw his body aside.  I don’t remember catching the second man, the one who ran.  

I drank from him through his death, even as Loki shouted, wrapping his arms around my waist, trying to pull me away the blood started to cool so quickly and my talons locked into the corpse, so when I was lifted I brought the body with me, still latched and sucking.

Thinking back, I imagine it could have looked funny.

It was grotesque.

“Enough!” Loki roared in my ear.  My maker’s voice.  My sinews stiffened, halting, unable to even blink.  The body fell away from me.  He had been large and there was a hard, breaking crack as his head hit the corner of the brick building we were beside.  

Where had the building come from?  We were in a park.

Loki clutched my unmoving body to him for a few moments, then set me down, “Enough…”

A sigh, and I was free.  Taking a step, I nearly fell, tripping over something large and soft.  Loki caught my arm.  

Then I realized, I hadn’t only killed the first man.  And it was not the same night.  And we were not in the same part of the city.

I looked at my hands.  They were covered in half-healed burns.  

He squatted, snagging his hands through his hair over and over, pulling it out of its braid, rocking slightly on his heels, his beautiful face perfectly blank.

“What happened?”  I asked.

He shook his head, and then stood, taking my disgusting hand in his with no sign of flinching.  “Let us go home.”

It took me three nights to find her.  The Wanderer alone knows where she hid by day, her instincts ruling all she might have dug into the earth to stay away from the sun, or climbed into a dumpster.  She was so covered in clots and filth anything was possible.

The next afternoon, late, late in the afternoon when it was almost still light, I couldn’t make myself stay asleep.  

Vampires don’t dream.  Loki doesn’t know why, but it’s true.  “What we have instead are memories.  Eventually, in our torpor everything returns to us.  Sometimes the memories are so old they feel like dreams, because the one who made those memories is so far gone from you.”

I had not been dead that long.

I remembered what I did.

I remembered.  

I deserved to be dead.  I deserved to have died the miserable death I tried to spare myself.  I was no more important than anyone else and I had done terrible things, and I still wanted to live, but I -

I smelled Sofia’s blood.  

Were Sofia not wise, were the door to pantry not old and thick with iron hinges, were I not fast, were Laurel not struggling, driving her fists over and over into the ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor, breaking both them and her own bones as she tried to resist the blood call -

You must understand that Laurel did fight it.  Far more than I did.  The burns on her hands and the ones she did not see on her face came from trying to face the sun rather than harm anyone else, though her desire to live always made her shy away into the dark before it could happen.  The damage to her ruined fingers as she gouged them into the walls to try and hold herself back from the killing.  She did these things and more to fight but it did no good.

I held her, sitting on the couch, rocking her like a fretful child as she sobbed against me, alternating between self-hate and what felt like starvation to her but was merely appetite.

Sofia never came back, of course.  I sent her a large severance and told her I would continue to pay her monthly if she vowed to keep quiet.  

Sofia was a practical woman, and had seen plenty of terrors, she accepted.  I missed her presence in my home, but I miss so many things.  What was one more?

After that I rested little, afraid of what Laurel would do.  Please understand that several weeks passed and she grew no better.  Raving and violent, she would try to escape the house, tossing the blood I purchased for her away saying it tasted bitter, spurning me, then biting me, savaging me.  I opened my arms to her every time.

The first time the Good Doctor came to deliver he started to open his mouth, to make a sarcastic or gloating observation when Laurel’s wail of hunger came from the basement where I had shackled her to the wall for his protection.  He took his money in silence, and after that sent an underling with my supplies.

As those exhausting weeks passed, as I grew weary, and Laurel was no better I researched what little could be found that was factual about our kind and discovered, to little surprise, nothing of help.  Over the years since, I have found more and more evidence that certain lines of our kind are afflicted more than others with a bloodlust that takes decades to tame.  The bloodline we are from is especially dark.

Of course.

That I turned in a dark and bloody time, with dark nights and humans with no help at hand so often, meant I could rave and rage and eat and be a monster and slink away into the nothingness and wilderness between settlements and towns.  Because I was a killer before my turning, my heart was already calloused to the pain.  

My Laurel, min kona, was not.  

She was only a woman who was afraid to die, who was young, and who I loved.

Who loved me.

At times, her eyes would clear, and she would shake, “I still don’t want to die.  But you can’t let me hurt anyone else.  You have to kill me, if I try to.  You have to, if you love me you have to.”

I stroked her hair, because in those moments she would allow it, and lied to her that I would.  

And also, in a manner of speaking, told the truth.  

Then she buried her face against my neck and cried and cried, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.  I’m so scared.”

You will judge me, certainly.  Feel free, but do not for a moment assume that what I did I came to easily, or was easy to do, or was done without dreadful fear and awareness of how it would resonate.  If I should have my way you will never be lonely enough for long enough, you will never want for another for so very long that you would have to consider such a dreadful thing.  

One night deep, deep into the winter, I had managed to persuade her to eat enough that she fell into torpor.  Enforcing it with my will, I kept her that way.  She was so tired then, almost as tired as she had been living that she gave me no fight at all.

Then, with care and so, so slowly, more slowly than stones erode to start and then with a little more speed as the touch of my mind grew confident, I began to cut her memories away.  

And placed them deep within me, where they would be safe.

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