Blood flowed like a thick ribbon from his chest over his cream-colored blouse and onto the soft white floor.  Twilight had just begun to filter through the open window on that chilly fall evening, but everything was still in perfect sight.  Jonathan looked to me with the same incomparable horror I felt at that moment; perhaps because he didn’t think I could do it.  But, there it was.  The heavy knife nested tightly in the breast of my husband.  He lay so lifeless and cold in his favorite chair, head cocked back in a heavy lull with his glassy eyes clouded and still open.  It was horrid.  Jonathan very slowly came to my side and placed his cold hands upon my arm.  I must have been shaking so violently, because I felt him trembling, he my solid Adonis.  My hands had plunged that wretched blade into his hollow heart.  I turned to the face of my accomplice to see his vision blurred with hunger.  The blood was too much for him.  It was collecting at the legs of the chair, running along the engraved onyx like a part of the masterpiece antique—liquid ruby set between the rock.  I felt Jonathan move beside me and begin to reach toward it.  I tried to hold him back—Richard couldn’t be touched.  He was dead.  I had killed him.

        I could never watch him feed.  I had always thought Jonathan as being a beautiful, timeless creature, and that he was, but to see him so eagerly drawing from the wounds of another brought out the beastly savageness of his being that I often tried to forget.  I sat in the darkness, my face in my sinful hands, until he finished.  He never left without a drink.  Once I heard the bottle fizz into a long gulp, I looked up to see him wipe away the taste.  He looked civil again, like the spirit I had grown to love.  I could only see his silhouette against the silvery window; wisps of his auburn crown fell about his face as he stared upon the former owner of my name.  “Jonathan,” I whispered harshly while I continued to shake with no comfort.  He turned and I could see that he was scared for me, as always.  I was always a quivering, frail ingénue who never knew what to do or where to go.  It was this horrible trait that had me married to such a waste of a man and left me broken when I had actually killed him, taken over, fought back.  That very moment I found myself changing.  There was no need for him to be afraid for me any longer.  “Jonathan, we must go!”  He sort of tripped, perhaps over the glass that Richard was holding before his fingers unfurled in death. 

        “Are there any servants in the house?”

        “No!  Richard wouldn’t have them sleeping near us,” I spat.  He took my hand, this time warm with new-found life that had sprouted so thickly in a fountain from my spouse.  We moved to the door, shadows stumbling through the night down the marble stairs and to the dew-dipped lawn.  Before I left my glittering cage behind, I stopped to look over all of the things I thought my life would contain.

        “Elise,” he called, nearly running, “Elise, come on!”  He had nothing to run from, he was once again expending himself for my sake.  I lifted the heavy ruffles of my gown from my slippered feet and leapt down the ivory steps into the dark face of the manor.

        “How did he taste?” I mumbled, eyes fastened on the silent tomb.  Jonathan watched where I gazed, but he had no sensation of what I was feeling.  His fingers laced mine tightly as his arm overtook my form and turned me to the shady road that awaited our escape.

        “Bitter.”