Chapter 36
Sylvia’s teeth entered her throat, and Aster saw oblivion.
For a moment it was only white. Pure, hospital wall white, accompanied by a shrieking ringing in her ears. She almost swore it was death—that Sylvia had finally managed to kill her.
Not a terrible way to go, all things considered.
But at the very edges of her consciousness she could still feel the soft lapping of the bath water; the electrocuting feeling of Sylvia’s warm, insistent leg pressed against her center, the ridge of Sylvia’s nose grazing against her jawline as she drank.
Aster gripped the side of the bath, her vision pulsing in and out. She saw a blurry glimpse of Sylvia as she retracted her teeth. Felt Sylvia’s wet hand cup the side of her cheek, her pointed red acrylics scraping along her neck, circling the bite mark.
Sylvia’s eyes stared at the bite nervously, then looked at Aster, who was blinking slowly, like a patient coming out of a sedative.
As Aster’s eyes cleared, Sylvia slowly began to once again have one head instead of two, the hundreds of tiny black floaters that had once cluttered her vision fading.
And in their absence was a woman, drenched in blood and bath water, looking more stunning than any other creature of God’s invention.
“Did it work?” the beautiful creature whispered. Aster remembered that her name was Sylvia a moment after, her brain catching up with reality.
Aster whispered back, still stunned, “Did what work?”
Sylvia frowned. “I don’t feel it either,” she said, pressing lightly at the two indents in her own neck. “Maybe I executed it wrong somehow.”
Sylvia groaned, leaning over the tub and reaching for her book.
“Stupid, egregiously specific vampire rituals. Stay there. Give me one second to read the passage again.”
The deep disappointment—and relentless persistence—in Sylvia’s voice sent shocks down Aster’s spine when she realized what she was talking about.
Sylvia had meant to marry her with that bite.
And “oh, ok,” was all Aster could muster, pathetically, to address the situation.
The situation being that she was beginning to feel very warm and very cold at the same time. A fever spread across her forehead and through her limbs. She felt like she was throbbing all over. Inside, outside. She began to shiver, her arms trembling.
Sylvia didn’t notice her slow physical spiral for a whole five seconds, her brow knitted and her mouth made up in a determined scowl as she paged through the spellbook.
But when Aster’s foot kicked her on accident, her leg spasming from the shaking, Sylvia looked up at her again—as if remembering she was there at all—and her mouth opened. Concern frantically shot through her features.
“Oh Jesus.”
Aster glanced down at her vibrating arm. “Is this not normal?”
“No idea. Out of the tub. Now.”
Sylvia shoved her hands under Aster’s arms, dragging her upward. Aster was about to insist she could do it herself, but the moment she tried to put weight on her legs, they almost gave out underneath her.
“I’m fine,” Aster said, coughing. Was that… congestion? Her nose felt suddenly swollen, like she was ten again with a cold. “Must be allergies.”
Sylvia did not appreciate her input. Or hear her input, really. She was too busy with her favorite activity, which was chastising herself.
“I shouldn’t have been so rash,” Sylvia muttered as she lifted Aster over the edge of the tub, and grabbed a towel with her free hand. She led Aster over to the wall, still not looking at her. “Fuck me for trying to be romantic. Last time I’ll try that again.”
Aster’s heart shuddered in her chest. She couldn’t recall a single time in six hundred years that Sylvia had mentioned an intention to be romantic.
She softly propped Aster against the wall and began to methodically drag the towel over her trembling shoulders.
At first she was pure focus—trying to dry Aster off as fast and efficiently as possible—but slowly Sylvia softened, her fingers stalling, and her eyes lifted to meet Aster’s own as she pressed the towel to Aster’s collarbones.
“I’m shit at this, aren’t I?” Sylvia said, and Aster wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about—using a towel, being in love.
Aster could guess which one.
“No one is perfect at anything on their first try, Sylvia. Even you.”
Sylvia’s eyes crinkled with emotion, her fingers tightening around the wet cloth.
“I’d like to be something above desperately bad at it, though.”
Before Aster could inform her, for what felt like the hundredth time, that she was not bad at anything—that Sylvia had probably come out of the womb unnaturally talented at most things (breathing, screaming, crying, putting the fear of god into medical doctors)—she was being transported somewhere else.
After ensuring she was dry enough to not ruin the sheets, Sylvia carried her to bed, carefully laid her down, and covered her in a truly stifling amount of comforters.
She then proceeded to do what Aster could only describe as Sylvia’s very specific brand of ADHD problem solving—which meant attacking a problem with as many simultaneous solutions as possible.
The tea kettle whistled, the mini fridge door slapped open and shut, and slippers furiously padded around the room.
A whirlwind of seconds later a warm compress was being slapped over her forehead, a cup of chamomile tea perched on the bedside table, and the other side of the bed was sinking with new weight; Sylvia, now half-dressed in her purple robe and a black lace bra, was propped up beside her with the book again in her hands.
Aster recognized two things quietly then, as she studied the space between the two cups in Sylvia’s bra, where pale, unblemished skin was taunting her. One, she felt the urge to sneeze, which she hadn’t felt in over a thousand years.
And two, she didn’t know it was possible for her to want somebody else so much.
“Human-flu-like symptoms may set in for the recipient within sixty to one hundred and twenty seconds,” she read off the page, then frowned. “Of course these buffoons would regale this incredibly important information to a footnote. It’s barely readable. Two-point font. I missed it entirely.”
Aster found it overwhelmingly endearing and absolutely on brand that Sylvia, instead of verbally recognizing the fact that she’d just bit Aster with, again, the intention to marry her, was instead treating this whole thing like an impersonal science experiment.
As if a college student in a lab coat had come into the room—asked her “left arm or right arm?”—injected some mysterious chemical into her shoulder, and then told her to sleep it off and see what happens. Maybe she’d wake up with four heads, maybe she’d wake up pregnant with Sylvia’s children.
Aster turned on her side.
“Sylvia,” she said. Sylvia didn’t hear her. “Sylvia.”
Sylvia finally looked up from the book.
“Yes?” she said quietly. Aster could hear her heart beating a marathon in her neck.
This idiot. “What is supposed to happen now?”
Sylvia’s mouth opened, then closed. Her eyes drifted to the page, but Aster could tell she wasn’t actually reading it. She obviously already knew the answer.
Finally, she cleared her throat. “The book says we have two options.”
Aster’s brow creased. “Options.”
“Yes. Either I go get you some blood from that Tiktok-addicted twig downstairs, and all of this blows over in around three hours, or you drink from me until the sun sets, and the shivering stops, and…” She sucked in a sharp breath.
“You spend the rest of your life needing to drink from me every full moon. Again and again until the end.”
Again and again until the end. Goosebumps sprouted all over Aster’s body. An effect that only got worse when Sylvia reached for her trembling hand underneath the comforters, and intertwined their fingers. Squeezed Aster’s palm softly.
And Sylvia—Sylvia looked utterly terrified. As if there was a chance on Earth that Aster would pick the first option. As if that was a likelihood.
Aster inhaled slowly, squeezing Sylvia’s hand back.
“So, this whole ritual causes us to be… what, exactly? Permanently addicted to each other, like two codependent mosquitos?”
“That’s certainly a way to put it. But yes.”
“That’s all?” Aster said, as if that were some small, unobtrusive thing. “Does it have any other lasting effects?”
This time Sylvia seemed to look at the page in earnest.
“The description leaves a lot to be desired,” she muttered.
“But it alludes to the fact that our own powers will be triply enhanced, especially during the full moon; something about an increase in, um, passion, on a cyclical basis; and then another thing, in small print in the footnote section, but it's too faded for me to read. It just says in extremely rare cases… then I can’t parse the rest.”
“Extremely rare cases. Whatever that part is, it’s definitely happening to us, then.”
“Naturally.”
Aster laughed, rickety and throaty through her congestion, and a crack ripped through Sylvia’s facade, too; she grinned, fangs peeking out.
Aster let the gentle silence envelop them for a few more seconds, thoughts stewing behind her eyes, before finally breaking it with a whisper.
“It seems a little pointless, doesn’t it?”
She surprised both herself and Sylvia with the statement. But she didn’t let Sylvia pull away. She held her hand firmly, even through the trembling.
“I just mean, if we miss a month, we suffer for it. If you die, I’ll be caught in some sort of endless feral cycle, and vice versa. And, not to be immodest, but we’re already the most powerful vampires on Earth, so we don’t really need the extra power.”
To Aster’s surprise—and relief—Sylvia, after the initial shock, nodded her head, and chuckled. She turned on her back to face the ceiling as she spoke.
“No, you’re right,” she said. “It’s completely pointless.
Disturbingly pointless. It’s the peak of the vampiric tendency toward performative, masochistic symbolism.
We gain nothing from it except the knowledge that we both wanted each other so badly that it seemed rational at the time to become each other’s blood-thralls. ”
Aster breathed shakily at the half-confession in that sentence.
“Right,” she said.
Sylvia bit her lip, sighed—as if in defeat—then turned back to face Aster.
“The problem is, I do want you that badly.”
Aster’s entire body went cold, Sylvia’s words like an icicle falling from the ceiling of a cave and striking her right through the chest.
“You… what?”
“I want you that badly,” she reiterated, quietly, but surely.
She was looking at Aster with complete, devastating honesty.
“I’ve spent six hundred years skirting around loving you.
You can say it was my mother’s fault. You can blame my powers misfiring.
But the truth is, no matter which way you frame it, it’s still cowardice.
Because I could have bitten you much sooner.
Instead I slept with mortals and called them Aster. ”
Aster’s heart swelled and twisted. With happiness, with jealousy, with every utensil in the emotional kitchen sink.
“Sylvia…”
“No, listen— Just let me—”
Sylvia sat up in bed with a huff, pushed the covers aside, and slipped over Aster’s body, so she was straddling her, her thighs pushing Aster into the mattress, her arms coming to rest on Aster’s shoulders.
She locked eyes with her, and let out a shuddering breath.
“You know I’m allergic to the truth, so don’t make me repeat it twice, okay?”
Aster laughed so she wouldn’t cry. “Okay.”
Sylvia nodded—maybe to Aster, maybe to herself—settled in Aster’s lap, dragged her hands down to Aster’s hips, and held them like they were anchors.
And Aster felt it coming like a tidal wave. Call it foresight, call it inevitability.
“Here it is,” Sylvia said. “I’ve been in love with you for six hundred years, in twenty-two different countries, speaking six different languages, causing three revolutions, destroying two empires, beheading fifteen monarchs—and it has been the most exquisitely painful experience of my life.
And the achingly pointless part of it is, even if you forgot it all again right now, I’d repeat it in a heartbeat. ”
Sylvia’s eyes were swollen with unshed tears as she laughed, bright and beautiful and wrecked. Aster’s heart tried not to burst in her chest.
Sylvia continued, “I’ve always considered myself the anti-romantic, because I don’t like poetry or pop music or Notting Hill or Shakespeare or the Old Testament.
But I actually think I might just be overqualified in the subject.
Because if romance is about finding the point in pointlessness, I found it very early, and latched on like a dog.
You are the point to me, Aster. You create meaning in this big, sloppy, pointless soup. ”
She lowered herself down to Aster’s face, a breath away. “So, yes, maybe I’d like to be a vampire about it, and show it with my teeth. But if you don’t want to, that’s okay. I’ll probably ask you again in another millennia. It turns out I’m deceptively patient for the right woman.”
Aster’s breath caught thickly in her throat, tears threatening to spill from her eyes, because she knew Sylvia meant it. Knew it from the aching softness in her gaze. Knew it from the way she wasn’t leaning forward, wasn’t forcing her into any corner.
Sylvia loved her. Sylvia loved her, and, somehow even more significantly, she was inviting Aster into something she had, throughout her life, had very little access to—
Choice.
The ability to say no, and still be loved the same in the aftermath.
But Aster didn’t want to say no.
Aster wanted to stay something stupid, because she was in love, deliriously in love, and for the first time in her life, absolutely aware of it. Consequences be damned.
Because if everything is pointless, why not make wonderful mistakes?
She looked up at Sylvia, hanging above her with that big, stupid, evil, conniving, wonderful smile on her face, and laughed.
“Just put your fangs in me already.”