entry four Life had been going pretty normally that evening. I went hunting alone because the Mistress had effectively called dibs on Aaric for the night. After a week at the same club, it was time to switch stalking spots before someone caught on to the fact that patrons were having very odd and strikingly similar acid trips, daydreams, nightmares, or whatever. Without Aaric’s more dignified tastes to accommodate, I chose to go down to the dilapidated industrial district. I wasn’t in the mood for a complicated night. All I wanted to do was feed as quickly as possible and get back home. The area had once been filled with prosperous factories pumping out tons of pollution into the air, water, and ground. Now it was coated with the soot of those bygone days, covered with graffiti, and ridden with rats and disposable people who wouldn’t be missed for the couple of minutes it would take me to get what I needed, or forever for that matter, or believed if they happened to remember what happened during those few moments. A few months before, I would have been repulsed by the mere thought of what I was about to do.
It had been a solid year since I had been Changed, and I was getting pretty comfortable and, in retrospect, cocky about being a vampire. I was good at what I did and had a natural talent for it. In the beginning, my conscience had kept my gory urges in check, but 365 days, or rather nights, surrounded by amoral bloodsuckers had worn me down. If I am going to be a monster for the rest of eternity, I wanted to earn the title. The only person that seemed less than enthusiastic about my transformation was the man/vampire that set it all in motion, Aaric. It’s sort of ironic if you think about it; if he hadn’t marked me as a meal the year before, the transformation would never have begun.
I spent a good hour going in every alley and down every back road I could find without any luck. The few people I found there looked too sick or doped up to be of any use. They all stared at me as I passed with varying degrees of disinterest until I reached a particularly deserted part of town. Suddenly an arm reached out and spun me around by the shoulder.
“It is you!” an excited male voice yelled as he gave me a huge bear hug. When I was pushed back to arm’s length, I finally saw my friendly attacker’s face. Just barely, I recognized it as belonging to a guy from one of the night classes I had taken to make sure I’d get out of college in four years. Certain things had changed during the semester, and I ended up dropping the class. “Where have you been? Everyone thought you were dead!”
The confused look on my face finally caught his attention. “You don’t remember me, do you? I guess I’m not surprised. We only spent one hour once a week in the same classroom; you probably never even noticed that I existed.” Either I was losing my mind, or he was beginning to sound angry.
I smiled carefully, managing to keep my fangs hidden while I dazzled him with a toothy grin. “No, I remember you; I’m just surprised that you remembered me. Like you said, we only saw each other for an hour every week. I was just surprised, that’s all.” Well, that and confused. My hearing should have been able to catch any human before he managed to bear hug me.
The guy smiled for a moment and let me catch my proverbial breath before continuing. His eyes were pure innocent naiveté. He had no fear of danger even though he was standing in a dark alley surrounded by who-knows-what kind of people with a girl who had been reported dead a year previously. Behold my dinner.
“So, where have you been all this time?” he asked conversationally, walking slowly forward.
I followed amicably with a shrug. “Around.”
He smiled lopsidedly as if I had just made a subtle joke. “So, I guess you didn’t bother to tell anyone where you were going tonight.”
“Not really, no. Why? Are you going to blow my secret?” Like with all my victims, I was flirting shamelessly as we reached the end of the alley.
“Not really, no.” I hadn’t found it odd that my victim had been leading me down a blind alley until just then as he turned his face fully toward me with fangs out for all to see. Unfortunately, “all” constituted only of me right then.
I didn’t even have to time to think “Oh shit!” before he threw me into the wall by the arm. Vampires can recover relatively quickly from injury, but I personally was not good enough to get up before he came over and lifted me back up by the throat. I was just proud that I managed to stay conscious.
“Perfect,” he growled at me before ripping my jugular open. The wound should have killed me. It had killed the girl on whom I had practiced the move a few months before, but, then again, she had been human.
My throat hurt like a bitch in heat and then some. I wasn’t sure if vampires could bleed to death, but something told me I was about to find out. All I could do was lay there with my assailant licking and sucking at the wound on my neck for a few shocked moments.
My mind never really came back, but, after what seemed like an eternity of lying on my back, whatever insanity made me a vampire snapped into place. I grabbed my former classmate by the throat and lifted him off me with one hand. His shock kept him from struggling as I threw him across the alley into the brick wall of a surrounding building. There were bloody crescents where my nails had gone through the skin of his neck.
It took a moment for my attacker to regain his composure and come after me. I took the opportunity to stand and prepare for the attack I knew was coming. The wound at my neck wasn’t healing as it should have been, but, instead, was leaking down my body, leaving a bloody trail down the front of my shirt and beyond. I tried to ignore that fact, though.
My opponent rose to his feet like the stereotypical B-movie vampire: stiff as a board and looking coolly pissed. An honest-to-god growl rumbled from his throat as he snarled at me. “I will suck the life from your still-beating heart and bathe in your blood for this, mortal.” His voice wasn’t half as amicable as it had been before he ripped my throat out for some reason.
I smiled, flashing every inch of fang I had for affect. “Sure you will.” I sounded a lot more confident than I felt.
My toothy grin made the man pause long enough for me to dive at him. Cocky as I was about being a vampire, I knew that I wasn’t strong and/or a good enough fighter to win if he made the first move. My fingers dug his shoulder and ripped away bloody flesh as they traveled across and down to his abdomen. He roared with pain and anger as I moved to strike his neck. Fangs in the trachea will shut anyone up, though, so, other than a period of angry gurgling, the vampire was quiet as I bit into his throat. Perhaps reflexively, he tried to pull me from his neck. With my teeth securely settled into him, though, he only managed to rip out his own throat.
I caught him by the hair as the shock of that wound made him fall to his knees. His eyes were full with fear as I stared down at him. Granted, standing there with his blood dribbling from my chin, I was most probably a fairly fearful sight.
I rewarded his petrified stare with a sadistic little grin, running my tongue over my lips and exposed fangs to get every drop of his blood in my mouth as possible. Before he could faint or try to fight back, I used the hand not holding him upright to punch through his rib cage and rip out his heart. I was still smirking as his face went slack with death. Immediately I let go of his hair and threw the heart across the alley where it made a satisfying squish as it burst apart, leaving only a bloody splatter on the brick wall. The vampire went limp and crumpled to the ground in a puddle of his own body’s fluids. I stood over him like a vengeful goddess until there was no doubt that he wouldn’t be moving again. Then, the adrenaline effectively wore off, and I fell into a slump against the wall behind me, completely exhausted.
I sat staring at the stinking pile of flesh and bone coated in a lacquer of vermilion blood that had once been my opponent. He hadn’t been an enemy, just a rival: someone against whom I had been matched for the night like a gladiator. I had killed him, and I didn’t regret doing it. He had tried to kill me first. It was the classic “he started it” defense.
The only part that concerned me was that I didn’t feel worse. Stupid though it was, I wished that I felt worse about killing someone, even a fellow monster. But, such was afterlife. It was survival of the fittest….yeah, yeah, yeah. Somehow, that didn’t make me feel much better. Then again, my throat was still bleeding. An open wound can always squelch a good victory buzz.
I tried to push myself back up the wall, but couldn’t manage it. Be it due to blood loss, exhaustion, shock, or whatever, I didn’t have the strength to get up. I was stuck sitting there until someone found me or the sun rose, whichever came first. It wasn’t a particularly promising future. Even with the supposed promise of eternity from vampirism, I was still going to have a shorter life than most people. Ah, irony.
There was a gust of wind suddenly knocking into me, unnaturally cold for the season. Within a moment it was gone, and the sound of calm, even steps echoed toward me. Someone cleared the corner to my little dead end and stopped abruptly in his tracks. From my vantage point, he was just a shadow for the moment. Other than a general guess at gender because of the lack of prominent breasts, I couldn’t tell a thing about my visitor.
Aaric’s voice broke the silence. “What happened here?” It sounded empty of emotion as usual, but something told me that he was shocked by the bloody carnage. I would have been dumb with amazement.
I felt no urge to answer the question right then or ever. If he couldn’t figure it out by himself, it wasn’t worth explaining. Besides, I was getting a little woozy. So, instead I changed the subject.
“That was quite a showy entrance you made. Why all the theatrics?” Aaric could and usually did just appear in places without so much as the swish of cloth to alert people of his arrival. Yet, his shoes had made very loud clattering noises that echoed as he came toward me tonight. The wind had been overkill to say the least.
“I thought that you might have a victim with you, and deemed it best that I give you warning before I invaded.” His eyes scanned the scene slowly once and then back again. After he had had his fill of the situation, he stepped calmly over the bloody corpse to kneel beside me.
He gently fingered the periphery of my neck wound. I hissed as the pain hit my brain, and he retracted his hand. “That is a quite a wound.”
I shrugged. “It’ll heal, though, right?”
“Did he do it?” Aaric signaled over his shoulder. I nodded my head and he shook his. “Not without help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Mine.” He smiled when he said it. That almost made me believe that it was possible to get through all this alive, so to speak. “The first step is to get you home.” He slipped one arm under my shoulder and lifted me effortlessly onto my feet. For a split second, I felt fine. Then the world swirled around me and darkened to nothingness. Before my knees had a chance to truly buckle, Aaric swept me off the ground. I lost consciousness securely cradled in his arms.

I woke up in bed, but not my own with its matching purple satin and flannel sheets. Instead, I was tucked in naked under layers of cool silky cream blankets with a rough, hand embroidered muslin quilt, yellowed and worn with age on top of it all. My upper back, neck, and head were propped up on a mound of pillows until I was practically sitting up in bed. There was a bandage over my throat. The wound underneath had healed over, but was still sensitive enough to make me gasp from pain as my fingers pushed gently against it. I wasn’t completely healed, but it was a hell of a lot better than when I lost consciousness. Whatever Aaric had done had obviously worked.
Speaking of my hero, he was nowhere to be seen. Every previous time I had woken up from such grievous injuries, he had been nearby. This time, nothing. As much as I hated to admit it, I was disappointed that he wasn’t around, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I just closed my eyes and tried to sleep. Aaric was probably with our joint mistress. She would return him when she was done. That thought both repulsed and amused me, but, either way, made me smile.
The bedroom door eased silently open to my left, the light it allowed to spill into the pitch-black darkness of the room my only indication that anything was happening. I opened my eyes as the light spilled over me to see the same shadowy male figure that had signaled Aaric arrival in the alley. Call it a wild guess, but I was thinking that this was him again.
The door closed just as silently as it had opened, leaving the room in inky darkness once more. Slowly, light began to fill the room again after a moment. It came from a single gas wall fixture by the door that looked original to the house. The room it revealed was the same almost barren room with its dust covered faux antiques that I had woken up in my first night as a member of the undead.
Aaric stood with his back to me, lighting the lantern. We made eye contact as he turned, and my jaw practically dropped. There were fresh gashes across his left cheek that looked amazingly like claw marks. He noticed my staring and smiled.
“Good evening,” he said, amicably coming to sit on the side of the bed near my waist. “I see you have healed enough to be awake without screaming in pain.” Gingerly, he reached out to the bandage at my throat and pulled it off in a quick motion. Like with any band-aid removal, it stung, and I gasped in a surprised breath at the sensation. Aaric smiled at my thoroughly human reaction and smiled even wider, more sincerely. I blushed.
To avoid further embarrassment, I pulled the blankets up closer to my chin and tried diverting attention away from myself. “What happened to your face?” My hand rose a few inches off the comforter of its own volition to stroke his injured cheek before I realized what I was doing. Immediately, I dropped it back down.
Aaric watched my every movement with his usual intensity and stared at the resettled hand for a moment before rising gracefully off the bed and walking a few steps away. He had already lost the jacket of the business suit he had been wearing previously, and now kicked off his shoes. Turning away from me, he said calmly, “Our Mistress lashed out in anger when I refused to give a satisfactory answer as to why I saved you last night and then dismissed me.” He unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off to reveal a muscular back. All he wore now was a pair of charcoal slacks that looked completely alien on his chiseled body. I actually had to swallow my lust. “Her anger will fade soon enough. By this time tomorrow I will again be in her good graces.” The voice was almost harsh with resigned anger. For approximately the millionth time since we had met, I wondered how he and his, our, mistress had met and come to have their somewhat singular relationship.
Aaric turned toward me, and I was almost relieved to see a scar marring the perfection of his left pectoral. “Did she do that to you, too?” I asked when he quickly noticed where I was staring. One blow to the head and suddenly I was acting like a smitten twelve year old.
“No,” he ran a finger over the jagged line. “This I received from a traditional vampire hunter who chose his timing very badly. He obviously knew very little about anatomy, as well; he missed my heart completely.”
“Why do I get the feeling that you didn’t make that same mistake?” I smiled at him. A year ago, I would have been horrified by just the presumption of what he had done to the man. What a difference a year makes.
Aaric retook his position at my waist. “Because you and I are very much alike, and you know that you would not have let the man live.” A year ago, I would have argued that point or, at least, not taken it as a compliment. Now, we shared a smile. After a moment, his faded back into a business-like visage. “Your injuries have almost completely healed.” Again he reached out and touched the tissue. It was a soft, barely palpable brush of fingertips that made my skin tickled enough to send a shiver down my spine. This time, Aaric didn’t smile.
Suddenly, I was aware of how close Aaric and me were sitting. “How did you do it?” I asked to ease the tension that might have just been in my head.
It took a moment for Aaric’s eyes to leave the soft tissue of my throat, but when he met my gaze, he was again all business. “Your assailant, like all of our kind, is endowed with anticoagulant that, in small doses allows us to feed without blood clotting. The wound he gave you last night was a killing one in many ways, including a high amount of the chemical. In order to heal you, I had to reopen the injury and bleed away the remaining taint.”
It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. I hadn’t realized that chemistry was involved in feeding, but that wasn’t what had me shocked. “You bled the wound. You mean you fed from me?”
“In a way, yes, but it was no worse than what you did to me as a suckling.” He wasn’t smiling, but I could hear the mirth barely hidden in his words.
I couldn’t get mad at Aaric for saving my afterlife, so I let it go. Besides, he was right. “So, now it should heal on its own?”
“No, I could not safely remove all of the contamination in the few times I have undertaken the process, so a small amount of it is still within the wound. It will take at least one more attempt to purge you of it. If you do not object, I was planning to do it when I came back from my meeting with the Mistress.”
I shrugged. “It’s fine with me. What do I have to do?”
“Nothing, just relax and don’t resist.” He scooted a little farther up the bed. I watched him come as I placed my head back on the pillow and tried to obey his orders. It was a lot harder than it sounded to relax when I knew someone was going to be biting my neck. Finally, I had to just close my eyes and concentrate my every thought on relaxing my body.
I could feel Aaric’s breath tickling the skin around the wound as he closed in for the strike. There was a sudden shock as his fangs entered low in my throat, almost at the spot where it met my collarbone. My body jerked involuntarily forward, and only Aaric’s arms holding me down kept me from jumping out of bed.
It was much easier to relax once the initial strike had been bypassed. Aaric’s gentle sucking was almost sexual, which, I suppose, tells you how depraved I was becoming in my old age. He released his hold on my shoulders and slid his arms behind my back, pulling me toward him. Meanwhile, the world within my eyelids had become a velvety darkness into which I was happily sinking.
A sensual groan slipped out of my lips and my eyes flew open as Aaric finally finished feeding and retracted his fangs from my flesh. Suddenly, my skin was tight from head to toe. I looked down to see him staring back at me with eyes filled with something dangerously near the hunger to feed.
Perhaps simply through years of practice, Aaric had managed to do all that was necessary without a drop of blood landing on his lips or beyond. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I slowly lifted my hand from where it rested on the bed sheets and allowed it to gently caress the unchanged marks on his cheek. He nuzzled that hand for the briefest moment before lowering his face back down, this time a little lower than it had been to feed.
Adjusting his position to accommodate the new target, Aaric came to be lying halfway across the length of my body and beyond as he gently nibbled the skin of my collarbone and down. He had to pull back the sheets to reach my breasts, and I let him. Before death, I hadn’t exactly been a prude, but I wouldn’t have let this happen. Now, I couldn’t even think straight for the need to have him in me.
My brain fuzzy with pleasure, I raked my fingers gently through Aaric’s thick hair as he buried his mouth temporarily into the space between my breasts. After a few moments, I cupped my hands underneath his chin and pulled his face up toward me. I also rolled sideways so he wouldn’t have to arch his back oddly as he would if he stayed on top of me while we kissed.
The feeling of kissing a thing with fangs is mind numbing, if for no other reason than the possibility of violence, intentional or not. Aaric’s hand trailed down my side until it came to rest on the curve of my buttocks, pushing our groins gently just that much closer.
The comforter and all but one silken sheet had been pushed down to my thighs somewhere along the line, so basically the only thing separating us were his pants and possibly underwear although, for some reason, I didn’t think he was wearing any. Through the small material barrier, I could tell that Aaric was not really fully enjoying the moment. I didn’t ask questions; maybe blood just stopped flowing there after a few hundred years or something. The rest of him seemed to be more than happy enough to make up for it.
As Aaric gently pushed the last sheet away, I deftly unbuttoned and unzipped his pants, then pushed them down. I sat up briefly to pull them completely off. His hands never left my body; he sat up with me when I got too far away to reach from a reclining position, and pulled me back toward him once the offending article of clothing was finally removed. He laid back down with is hands still on my hips, gently forcing me to follow his motion.
I ended up kneeling, straddling Aaric in order to combat the slope of the pillows which, in retrospect, we could have simply just pushed off onto the floor, but that’s not the point. Slowly, I lowered my face to gently kiss the scar on his chest. A sigh escaped his lips, but it didn’t sound completely content. This time, it was my turn to look up into his face. His eyes were still filled with desire, but now there was something else.
I actually had to clear my throat before I could manage to get real words out of it. “What’s wrong?” I asked in a voice breathy with lust.
“We should not…cannot give in to this.” Unless I was hearing something that was not there, Aaric regretted that fact. “The Mistress will know. She will feel this and punish us for our indiscretions.” He smiled dejectedly at my confused look as I straightened. “She already suspects that I would happily leave her bed for yours, if not for the threat of her wrath. Already, she is doing everything in her power to prevent that.” Without really thinking, my eyes fell onto his cheek, and I allowed myself to gingerly touch the torn flesh. He smiled and took my hand in his. “If we give her reason to more than suspect, she will make our continued existences hell on earth.”
I remembered the angry way the Mistress acted around me, as if everything that I did enraged her. Now, I knew at least partially why: her boy toy wanted me, not her. Because of that, she hated me and punished Aaric for every kindness he showed me. I felt like apologizing. Aaric beat me to it.
“I’m sorry to have dragged you into this.”
All I could do was smile blankly. How exactly was I supposed to react to this? Finally, I just shrugged. “What’s done is done. You’re not to blame.”
I moved to get off Aaric and out of bed, but he was suddenly sitting upright with his arms around my back, preventing all movement. He kissed me gently, a completely chaste brush of lips. “Stay.”
Now, I was confused. I wanted to stay, but “Won’t she know?”
Aaric smiled from mere millimeters away from my face. “Our Mistress will sense any actual intercourse, but nothing else.” He brushed his lips against mine quickly, lingering just over my mouth afterwards. “Stay.”
I stayed.