Kiss of the Vampyre Ch. 02

There was a shuffling, more crunching of plastic. "I'm going to strap you in. Let your arms relax, good girl. How's that? Not too tight? Good. Now let's have a look at your arms. Which one was used last time? The right one? OK, there's a little scar there. We'll use the left this time."

More shuffling, the sound of a trolley being wheeled -- or perhaps hoisted -- into position over loose plastic sheeting that would get bunched up under its little wheels. Instruments clinked with a bright metalic timbre.

"Alright, now we're ready. I'm just going to go fetch my partner, and we'll begin. Try to relax, I'll be right back."

Becca glanced at the window. The light had faded, the sun gone. Outside was safe.

She stood from the sofa, turned to the lobby, kicked her feet into the carpet, yanked open the door and ran. She heard a shout behind her, but ignored it. Her socked but shoeless feet took her down the stairs, stinging as they hit the hard tiles at the bottom, powered her clumsily to the heavy old Georgian wooden door, which swung ponderously open to her pull. She was half-way into the cold autumn air when a strong hand slapped onto her shoulder.

Her breath misted in the air, her heart thundered in her chest, but she dared not try to escape the grip that clamped around her shoulder; she had a feeling that her skin would tear free before the hand that gripped it did.

"If you really want to leave, then I'll let you go. Just listen to what I've got to say first." Elly said. She relaxed her grip, and let go. Becca remained still, facing the open air so that she could sprint away if she felt the need. "If you leave now, you will have to learn these things for yourself. You'll have to feed, and when you do, you'll kill people. You don't have teeth yet, so you'll have to cut them, something you have no experience of. It will be painful, and messy -- their arteries will be torn and they'll bleed to death in minutes. Already you're stronger than you think. Trust me, when you need to feed, you will kill for it. It's inside you now."

Elly's words were flat and undeniably laced with truth, or at the very least, a vehement belief. She had told Becca no lies since they had met, and Becca had no reason to disbelieve what she said now. But could she bring herself to go back inside and watch as Elly butchered a stranger?

"You should make up your mind." Elly continued. "She's afraid. It's not fair to leave her lying there."

"I don't understand." Becca said, at last. "I thought you said they liked it."

"You've a lot to learn about trust." Elly replied, her voice still deliberately flat, although Becca detected a hint of anger. "There are two voices in her head right now. The sensible one is telling her that she should call it all off, go home, not do anything stupid like this again. It's telling her that she's not normal, that this is wrong. She doesn't know who we are. We could be killers.

"Then the other voice, the masochistic voice, tells her that she needs this -- that the fear, and the pain, and the helplessness -- is what makes her feel alive, what makes her boring everyday existence worthwhile. The longer she lies there, alone, waiting, the more afraid she becomes. The donors trust us, OK? They trust us because they know we'll treat them well, that we'll bind them and bleed them and use them like toys, but we'll never put them at any unnecessary risk. If we leave her lying there, afraid, then we've betrayed that trust. She'll hate herself for daring to trust us in the first place, and she'll hate herself for what she is, because her society tells her it's wrong to get a kick out of being bled."

Becca said nothing, just stared straight ahead, across the park, at nothing. A few early fireworks went off somewhere over Bear Flat, bright pinpoints of red and yellow and green sparking and expanding in the cold, damp sky. Out there, normal human beings were going about normal lives, dressed up in their warmest socks and thickest coats to set off paper-wrapped explosives in their back gardens for that annual celebration of some long-past failed assassination. How many normal people knew what went on in a perfectly ordinary-looking flat in the centre of a perfectly ordinary English town?

"She doesn't know what we do with her blood." Elly continued. "As far as she knows, we're fetishists just like her; we enjoy drinking blood as much as she enjoys having it bled from her. The day we betray her trust is the day her enjoyable fear ends, and her vital fear surfaces. She might be lying there, right now, wondering if we're contemplating going a step further, bleeding her to death or mutilating her for our own pleasure. She's tied helpless, blindfolded, in a room that she's never seen with her own eyes. Nobody knows where she is. Nobody will come looking for her if she doesn't come back. That is the extent of her trust, that is the extent of her fear."

Still Becca was silent. "I'm afraid." She said at last.

"Afraid of what?"

"That I won't be any good at it. At being a vampyre, I mean."

Elly sighed harshly, almost angrily. There was a long pause in which she said nothing, but gave several short breaths that became steadily shorter and more forceful. "So this is all about you?" She spat. "You know, your mood swings can be quite infuriating? You walk out enough times, and your friends won't come after you. I thought you'd have learned that by now. It's childish, the way you deliberately act morose and grumpy until somebody gives you sympathy. You should grow up, because the world doesn't just revolve round you."

Becca said nothing. Elly's anger penetrated her skin and multiplied in her belly. She suddenly felt furious. How could Elly talk to her like that, after what she had done? But then came a realisation: after all these years of hearing her parents say exactly the same thing, and dismissing it as typical parental failure to understand, she realised: they were right. Elly was right. Regardless of her anxieties, she was acting like a little girl. She had always acted like a little girl, because she'd always felt like one. "I just..." She began, then stopped. Her voice sounded pathetically whiny. She swallowed, loosened her throat, and tried again with a more adult tone. "I've never been any good at anything. I've failed at everything I've tried. People have always laughed at me, or never taken me seriously. Nobody has ever assumed that I've got anything worth saying. Why should that change now I'm a vampyre? What if I can't ever fly like you can, or my eyes don't work properly at night? I can't even drink blood without messing it up! I just know I won't be as good at it as you are."

Elly said nothing. Becca wondered if she'd offended her. That would be about normal -- she offended all of her friends sooner or later. Many of them didn't want to know her after they'd seen how childish she was. Perhaps she'd get what she wished for -- perhaps now Elly would turn her loose, go back inside and lock the door, leave her to fend for herself. Now that it was a tangible option, she realised that she didn't want it. She needed Elly's support. She wanted it.

"I've never laughed at you." Elly said, her voice far softer and higher than Becca expected. "I always took you seriously."

Becca relaxed her posture as her anger seeped away into the cold pavement at her feet. She turned around to focus on Elly's deep green eyes. They were glassy, swimming with water. "It's just... You're the kind of person I've always wanted to be." She said. "You're smart, and you're sexy, and you're charismatic, and... You're just the perfect vampyre."

"Becca..." Elly mumbled, her voice tightening so much that it cracked. "You couldn't be more wrong." She said, her voice juddering. "I'm a useless vampyre. My father kicked me out because of what I am. All my adult life I've been nothing but a shadow of what I should be. I could never live up to my father's expectations, and so he hates me, because I should have married into another vampyre family long ago." Her lips quivered, her eyes creased, tears began to flood down her pale cheeks.

"I can't even date another vampyre. Lesbian vampyres are rare, and they prefer to stay in the closet. They keep their desires hidden throughout their arranged marriages, preferring a loveless life to an ostracised one. I couldn't do that. I wanted to love someone, I wanted it so badly that I came out, and was told I could never belong in the Netherworld. I can't even date human girls in the Netherworld -- my family would find out and put a stop to it, thanks to vampyre tradition.

"Look at me. I don't belong here. I can't go out during the daytime, I live in a filthy old flat, I have to buy my blood from local deviants... I even have to abduct innocent girls to get laid. I don't deserve you."

Elly's hands covered her eyes and she cried silently into them, her back stubbornly straight and stiff as tears ran down her arms and dripped from her bare elbows to the frosty pavement below. Becca thought for a moment, filing away everything Elly had said. At first it made no sense, but then all the pieces fell into place.

All this time, Becca had thought she was the only person in the world who felt the way she did; she thought she was the only person with the nasty whining voice in the back of her head that popped up from time to time, just when she was feeling good, and told her she was useless and pathetic. She thought she was the only person who could never make a success of anything, could never be understood by anybody; but here, in front of her, was another girl who, it seemed, felt just the same way. All this time, behind that mask of strength and confidence and maturity, there was another lost soul, an outwardly perfect person who sometimes felt too weak and helpless to handle the world and all that it contained.

Was this that thing called self-esteem that she'd heard her parents talking about, when she was in her deepest lows? Was this why, when she found a new friend who took her seriously or read her poems or listened to what she had to say, she actually felt a little better, until she managed to drive them away?

Was there ever a way to break the cycle, now that she finally understood there was a cycle to be broken?

"I don't care what your family says about you. I don't care what you deserve." She said at last, once her spinning thoughts had come to a stop. Elly sniffed loudly, wiped her red-rimmed eyes with her fingers. "Deserve me or not, you've got me."

Elly sniffed again. "I have?"

"Yes." Becca reached out, wrapped her arms around Elly's waist, threaded her hands under her wings and clasped them together at the small of her back. "I know you took me away, and I'm sad to lose what I've left behind, but I'm glad you did it. I want to stay with you."

"You do?"

"Yes."

Elly rested her damp chin on Becca's shoulder. "I thought you were going to leave."

"I don't want to leave you. I like you. You've been kind to me. You've looked after me. And..." She paused, swallowed heavily. "And you're sexy. I never thought I'd say that to a girl, but you are."

"You really mean that?"

"When I was in the shower, I... When it happened, and I... When I did stuff... I was thinking of you."

Elly straightened, brushed back her luscious green hair. "We should go back inside." She said, breathily. Her face was still damp and her eyes still red and puffy, but she seemed stronger, despite the weak quality of her voice. "That girl is still waiting for us. Are you ready to feed?"

Becca nodded. "If you'll show me how."

"Yeah. Just let me wash my face first."

"Alright."

They stepped back over the threshold into the ground floor lobby, socked feet padding on the bare tiles, and began to ascend the stairs. Becca's first feed, and all that it entailed, awaited her on the second floor.

Elly headed straight for the bathroom, scrubbed her face and hands with soap and dried them on a clean towel. A second clean towel waited, and Becca was ordered politely to use it after scrubbing her hands clean.

"We're not at risk from infection, but our donor is." Elly explained. Her voice had changed, along with her posture, since climbing the stairs to the flat. Gone was the tight, miserable timbre, back was her soft, confident tone. Her back was straight and her shoulders proud, and her face, although blank and businesslike and still a little damp, showed none of the emotion that she had displayed on the step at the front of the building.

She was good at masks, Becca realised. Perhaps most people were, and she'd never noticed before. Perhaps that was why everybody else seemed so content while she always felt so miserable.

Elly pushed the feeding room door open with her hip, holding her hands aloft and away from the door and walls, and held the door with her foot for Becca to enter.

A young woman lay on the table, arms and legs strapped in place. A thick white sheet, triple-folded, was tied over her eyes. A small button nose poked out from under it, and above it lay short black hair, deliberately unkempt and styled into spikes. Her bare arms were tattooed, not tastelessly so, with intricate Celtic designs and words that Becca didn't understand. She wore a loose white t-shirt and blue sweat pants, and small clean trainers on her feet. Her thin lips were open, her chest rising and falling with rapid breaths that passed noisily between them. She jumped visibly at the sound of the door swinging shut on its sprung hinges.

"Alright Chelsea, I'm back. I have someone else in the room, her name is Becca, and she's going to watch. She's not going to touch you, but she is going to drink your blood. Say hello, Becca, so Chelsea knows where you are."

"Hello." Becca said, her voice rough and broken in her dry throat.

Elly stopped by her polished trolley, now laden with surgical tools that gleamed in the bright light. She reached immediately for a small plastic fluid bottle with a push-trigger top and pressed a clear, strongly-scented gel into the palms of her hands, which she rubbed until they were dry. "Becca, this is alcohol gel. Put some on your hands and rub it in."

Becca obeyed, her footsteps crunching loudly on the plastic sheet. The gel felt horribly cold, gave off a pungent aroma that made her giddy head spin faster.

"Now go stand against the wall. Watch, but don't speak. I need absolute silence. Don't move your feet, don't interrupt me. Can you do that?" Elly's green eyes peered out from under a serious brow. Becca nodded in reply, stepped backwards until she was against the wall and stopped.

"Alright, Chelsea, are you ready?"

"Yes." The girl replied, her voice breathy and faint.

"Alright. Any problems, you tell me immediately."

Elly knelt down reverentially on the floor, took hold of Chelsea's hand and turned it over, exposing her veined wrist. She looked over it closely, feeling with her delicate fingers as well as inspecting with her eyes. She seemed to find what she was looking for and picked up a swab of cotton wool from a kidney bowl full of spirit, wiped it over the area.

"Hold your hand there for me, Chelsea." She said, and let go. Chelsea's hand hovered and swayed slightly where it had been left. Elly picked up what looked like a stainless steel funnel with a looped metal handle and hung it from a bracket on the table, adjusted it so that it was beneath Chelsea's wrist and hand. She returned her attention to the swaying hand, took it, positioned it into the funnel several times in several positions, until she seemed satisfied that however Chelsea's arm lay, her blood would run into the funnel.

Another bracket arrangement hung from the bottom of the funnel, onto which Elly clipped a clear glass bottle with capacity markings on its side.

Deftly she picked up an odd-looking cutting tool, a curved razorblade on the end of a small handle, like a miniature scythe. Becca felt her hips judder as light glinted from the blade, which curved towards Chelsea's wrist.

Elly twisted her arm so that the light shone full onto the inside of her wrist, angled it so that Becca could see exactly what she was doing. She wanted to pull her eyes away, but was unable to do so. Her mouth was dry as parchment, her lips agape, her head spinning so fast that she thought she might topple over. Her feet creaked on the plastic flooring as her legs shook, and she wondered if that alone might be enough to distract Elly's concentration.

"Chelsea, I'm making the incision now." Elly said flatly. "It's going to be very painful. You know what to expect, so keep as still as you can." Gripping her wrist with her left hand and angling the blade by its slender handle with her right, she sliced carefully into Chelsea's skin. A small red line appeared along the trail left by the blade, which quickly welled with blood. It seeped through, began to dribble around her wrist and drip from the back of her hand into the funnel.

"There." Elly said, withdrawing the blade and placing it carefully in the spirit-filled kidney bowl. She gently placed Chelsea's hand into the funnel. Becca watched, rapt, as blood began to trickle across her palm, licked around her fingers, and poured into the funnel. It pooled in the bottom of the bottle, began to fill it slowly.

"It will take a few moments." Elly said softly; Becca couldn't be sure if the words were directed at her or Chelsea. She wasn't really listening, for the sight of the blood pouring over Chelsea's fingers had set off a screaming in her head.

At first she thought she was going to faint, and she steadied herself against the wall with her hands. Her wrist ached with a sympathy pain, and her mouth began to fill with saliva. Perhaps she was going to be sick. Her breaths deepened, and she let out what she thought was going to be a sigh, was shocked to hear a girlish but feral growl reverberating from her throat. She tried to stop it, was even more shocked when it failed to stop, until she was almost out of breath.

She tore her gaze from the bottle, almost a quarter full. Elly was looking at her intently, her pure face unreadable. She looked away, deftly unfastened the bottle, removed it and placed another in its position with a move so swift and choreographed that not a single drop of blood was spilt from the dripping funnel.

Becca's eyes became glued once more to the bottle as Elly lifted it and held it towards her. She realised Elly was looking at her, but she couldn't take her eyes off the bottle for long enough to meet her stare. The screaming in her head intensified, and she could barely resist the urge to clap her hands over her ears. What was happening to her?

"You want this, don't you?" Elly said flatly. Becca said nothing, could only just hear the words over the cacophony in her head. "You want it?" Elly held it out for Becca to take.

Her shaking hands rose and snatched for the bottle, quicker than she'd intended, but Elly pulled it away swiftly, held it at arm's length behind her. Becca gave an unexpected girlie growl, pushed from the wall and ran for the bottle, but Elly stopped her with a strong hand around her throat, gripping so firmly that she almost couldn't breathe. Her growl turned to snarls, high-pitched and pathetic but animal nonetheless, and her vision became so focussed that everything around the bottle turned into a swirling blur and the blood was magnified until it filled her eyes.

She reached outwards, arms stretching in vain for the bottle. She jumped, wriggled, lashed out with her feet, but could not reach that which she strangely, shockingly desired.

Her eyes darted away, focussed on Chelsea, who lay on the bed, her legs moving as her thighs rhythmically clenched and unclenched, her mouth open, breathing rapid shallow breaths. Becca focussed on her hand, covered with blood that trickled from her fingertips and spattered into the funnel. Even the sound of dripping blood was amplified in Becca's head, louder than the screaming.