Chapter 5
Sylvia’s entire face had gone shy. Which, again, was not really a facial possibility for Sylvia—or at least Aster didn’t think so until now.
“Need to tell me what?”
“About the bite…”
Sylvia’s mouth screwed up into a tiny puckered button of an expression, like a baby tasting a lemon, and Aster would have thought it was adorable under any other circumstance, but right now all she could feel was the anticipation rocketing through her—fear, undoubtedly, mixed with something else. Anticipation. Heady and urgent.
“The fourth thing…” Sylvia trailed off, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Look. I don’t know how to phrase this without it becoming like, a thing. And it doesn’t need to be a thing.”
“Sylvia.” Aster was starting to feel insane. “If you don’t just say whatever you’re trying to say in the next ten seconds, I’m going to have an episode.”
Aster’s joke-not-joke seemed to help the other vampire get over herself, because she released a breath, and chuckled dryly.
“Have you heard of marking?”
Aster’s brows screwed together in confusion.
Marking? She’d heard of it vaguely—mostly, again, from Sylvia, but only ever used in the derogatory sense.
She’d use it to describe couples on the street that were too into PDA.
They’re just marking all over each other, Sylvia would say, and Aster would laugh, but secretly have zero idea what she was talking about.
She wrote it off as some weird Maroven clan terminology.
“Not really, no.”
“Ugh.” Sylvia had started blushing. “I really do not want to have to explain this.”
“Too bad. You have to.”
Sylvia placed Aster’s hand down, as if she’d just realized she was holding it. The vampire instead hugged her knees to her chest, forming a protective shell with her body.
“So, well, er,” Sylvia began, and Aster had certainly never seen her stutter this much in her entire life. “I know I’m like the only vampire you’ve ever actually been friends with, so it makes sense that you don’t know this—but it’s kind of awkward to explain without… context.”
Sylvia ran her hands through her wild hair. Aster tried her best to concentrate on her lips, and not her fingers. This woman was so constantly in motion; it was distracting.
“Essentially, when two vampires… like each other… very much…” Sylvia said, then groaned, then started again, “They sometimes bite each other. The kind of bite you do when you want to enthrall someone. This is called marking.”
Aster’s eyes widened, her pulse quickening. Sylvia had begun to pick at her nails incessantly to avoid looking at the other woman.
“But why would they do that?” Aster asked, genuinely confused. “What if they accidentally enthrall their partner? That doesn’t sound romantic, turning them into an effective slave.”
Sylvia looked up at her and smiled softly.
“No, it doesn’t. But marking is different.
When you enthrall someone, they, well—they fight it, right?
You can feel their soul resisting. But with marking, when your lover, partner, whatever—” She blushed harder.
“When they bite you, you don’t resist. You trust them so completely that you don’t fight it at all. That’s called a soul mark.”
Sylvia’s lips stilled, apparently finished with her explanation. The knowledge roiled around in Aster’s mind, desperately finding a folder to fit in. It all made sense, somewhat. But then again, it didn’t. She didn’t see the point. Why would you ever risk that?
“I still don’t understand the purpose.”
Sylvia laughed coldly. As if Aster had said something funny.
“Me neither.” She shrugged. “Never have. In my clan, it was just something you did to whoever you were arranged to marry. You can imagine how disinterested I was in that.”
Aster smiled easily, imagining younger Sylvia.
They just looked at each other for a moment, caught in memory, like whatever tension had existed an hour ago had evaporated into thin air.
Sylvia clapped her hands together. “Great, so now that we discussed this, maybe we can go back to watching Lauren Graham do her thing—”
“—but what does any of this have to do with what’s going on with me?”
Aster realized that Sylvia had completely avoided the whole purpose of this conversation.
And in true Sylvia fashion, she had done it so deftly that Aster had almost failed to notice.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sylvia muttered, like this was an episode of Scooby Doo, and she’d been caught red-handed. “Okay, okay.”
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath in, then delivered her next words in a mumbled, disorganized, barely intelligible sigh:
“As we talked about before, I was really hungry the other night, and you had just gotten out of the shower, so you smelled good, like that dumb rose petal body wash you use, whatever, fuck, and you took my phone, so I was annoyed, maybe a little turned on for reasons unknown, I just get like that, alright? A woman has needs. And you’re not ugly.
And I haven’t been to the club in days. Weeks.
Maybe years.” Aster glared at her as if to say Cut the shit.
“Okay, days. I haven’t been in days. So I was a little…
wound up. So my teeth enter your neck. Oops. ”
Sylvia’s hands were gesticulating wildly. It took everything in Aster not to wind them behind her back—they were making it almost impossible to concentrate.
“And because I didn’t bite you with the intention to kill you, or enthrall you, I guess I must have bitten you a little bit the other way.
Look, I didn’t know I could even do that!
It’s never happened before. It just sort of…
” She bared her fangs, then shrugged. “And I think it’s all because you—well—you didn’t—”
“I didn’t what, Sylvia?”
Sylvia threw up her hands in annoyed huff.
“You didn’t resist!”
Aster blinked at her. Sylvia bit down on her lip, hard.
“I guess I just trust you,” Aster said. Because it was the truth.
“Which, like, thanks. I appreciate that, or whatever,” Sylvia muttered. “But that backfired. Because I think I gave you the vampire equivalent of blue balls.”
“You… wait, what?”
Aster’s stomach did somersaults. Did she hear that right? No, she couldn’t have.
But instead of backtracking, Sylvia plowed forward.
“I didn’t do it all the way,” she clarified, her voice throaty, and Aster felt those words in her stomach, no, lower. She felt them throb. “I stopped too soon.” Her heartbeat thudded in her chest. “So your body was like, what the fuck. Give me more.”
Fuck. Aster swallowed. She wanted to say something; Sylvia was looking at her like she was supposed to say something–but she couldn’t.
Her mouth was so dry. She felt so needy.
What could she do? Confirm it? Admit it?
But it’s not like Sylvia actually wanted to kiss her.
And it’s not like she actually wanted to kiss Sylvia.
This was all one long, drawn out vampiric misunderstanding.
They weren’t going to blow six hundred years of friendship on a stupid biological blip.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said earnestly, which was about as rare as a pig growing wings.
“I wish there was something that I could do to help.” Aster couldn’t stop staring at her lips.
Fuck. Fuck. “But I really wasn’t joking when I said I’m not a vampire doctor.
I know some basic information about our physiology, but I left all my books on the more specific subjects back in London, and—”
“Sylvia,” Aster said weakly. Her fingers were shaking. “How long does it take to wear off?”
Sylvia bit her lip in a frown. She did look horribly regretful, which was making this all so much worse for Aster. Because Sylvia regretted almost nothing. But this, somehow, was so terrible?
“I don’t know.”
Aster groaned. “Fuck.”
They sat in silence for a moment, Aster’s head in her hands, Sylvia’s mouth uncharacteristically still. Aster wasn’t sure how much time passed until Sylvia spoke again.
“What does it feel like?” she said, then continued, “Like—what are the symptoms?”
Of all the things she expected Sylvia to say, she didn’t expect that.
Sylvia’s pupils were dilated like two small suns, her eyes narrowed in genuine curiosity.
Aster burned with embarrassment. Because what was she supposed to say?
It makes me feel insane. Like I want you to devour me.
Like I want your teeth so deeply inside my skin that they never come out.
Aster tried to sound apathetic and emotionally removed when she said, “I have this absolutely unquenchable need for you to bite me again.”
The admission sat like a heavy block between them. Aster stared at Sylvia, and Sylvia stared back, neither saying anything. Aster watched as Sylvia’s neck bobbed. Her fingers dug into the cushion of the sofa. The other vampire’s eyes were glowing redder by the second.
Wait. What?
Was this… doing something to Sylvia, too?
Aster thought the effects of the bite only went away, but maybe the consequences were mutual? Confirmation came almost as soon as Aster could think of it.
“Me too. I want to bite you again so badly,” Sylvia breathed. “I wonder if... Maybe if we just gave into it once... Things would reset back to normal?
Aster had never felt her body react in the way it reacted to those words.
“Maybe so,” she said weakly. She tried to sound apathetic when she proposed, “Why don't we try?”
Aster's words were all the excuse Sylvia needed.
Sylvia lunged forward, pinning Aster to the couch just like before. Only this time, there was no pretense—no struggle—Aster was simply prey, her body a ragdoll. She arched into the contact as soon as Sylvia’s fangs connected with the spot—that same spot—plunging in.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Aster cried, unable to help the sound from escaping her throat.
Faintly, like a far away television, Aster could hear Sylvia drinking. Blood seeping out of her veins into Sylvia’s open mouth.
It was the most pleasurable sensation in the universe, Aster decided. Nothing would ever compete.
Everything, every tiny motion of Sylvia’s hands in her hair, Sylvia’s hips on her hips, Sylvia’s tongue on her neck, took on an overwhelming level of intensity—it was like she was seeing color she’d never seen before.
Aster’s breathing was coming faster and faster.
“Aster.” Sylvia whined.
Aster’s hips bucked up, unprovoked. Sylvia had never said her name like that, not in six hundred years. It was something between a growl and a confession.
Then, abruptly, Sylvia stopped.
"God, what are we doing?"
Sylvia’s teeth ripped from her neck. She pulled herself backwards. Her chest was heaving, her pupils so large they were nearly black discs.
“I’m...” Sylvia stuttered. “I thought I should stop before we... before I drank you dry. That was probably enough of a bite to get rid of the urge, anyway. Problem solved, yeah?"
“Of course,” Aster agreed, pretending like all of this was reasonable. Because it was, of course, totally reasonable. They were just responding to symptoms. Addressing an… ailment. It was a simple biological reaction to stimulu. “Problem solved."