The Girl Who Bit Me

Chapter 1

A thousand years ago, Aster would have ruled over a castle. A proper fortress on a mountain, or at least a dramatic hill. The kind of place you could toss a body from, and it would look like the corpse had fallen straight out of heaven.

The castle would have had hundreds of rooms, and just as many servants. Grand ballrooms, golden chandeliers, stained glass windows, shrines and statues with her likeness carved out of marble. Masked balls every night that dragged late into the morning.

None of this was truly hypothetical. Aster knew she used to live like that.

Not just once in her lifetime, but a dozen times, in various estates scattered across Europe.

She could remember the fuzzy outlines of the tall turrets and stone arches.

The elaborate gardens. The sharp vinegar smell of the soap the maids would soak their sponges in.

But when your age starts to number in the hundreds, and then the thousands, memories become more like fiction than fact. You’re constantly having to parse through what is real and what is imagined.

It was all a little hard to believe, really, given her current situation in New York City.

“Five thousand dollars a month for a single bedroom?” Sylvia laughed shrilly as soon as they were (barely) out of earshot from the rental agent. “Aster, I’m going to kill myself.”

Sylvia stepped onto the pavement in her murder-weapon stilettos, kicked a crumpled McDonalds bag aside, and sat on the curb. She wrestled with her umbrella until it opened, an instrument responsible for keeping them shaded from the bothersome sun.

“Can you remind me why we don’t just kill the landlord instead?” Aster asked.

In response to her very genuine question, Sylvia glared up at her with impatient green eyes, then gestured toward a camera that was perched on a nearby streetlight.

“The modern surveillance state, Aster,” she groaned. “We’ve been over this. Remember when I was on the CIA watchlist in the early 2000s? We couldn’t go on vacation for a decade.”

Aster frowned. “That was unpleasant.”

“Yes, it was.”

Aster took a seat on the damp curb, her knees knocking against Sylvia’s. Cars whizzed by in front of them. Big yellow taxis. Trucks and tiny Kia Souls.

She thought back to when she and Sylvia traveled by horse and buggy. The streets had smelled better then, somehow, even covered in horse shit. A rat raced by Aster’s eyes now, voyaging from one sewer grate to the next. She thought she and Sylvia weren’t much different than that rodent.

She and Sylvia had known each other for roughly six hundred years.

Right around the invention of the printing press.

Vampires had lived well back then. Less, as Sylvia put it, surveillance.

Murder was a lot easier to get away with.

Riches were more material; less digital, no credit cards.

If you lived forever, it was quite easy to accumulate a lot of gold.

But a little incident involving the King of England had wiped out their latest source of wealth, and then there was the Bubonic Plague, and too much gambling, and too much drinking, and suddenly she and Sylvia had lived with a little less for much too long.

Still, she was lucky to have a friend like her.

Friend felt like too small a word to describe it, really. Partner wasn’t quite encompassing; associate was underselling it.

They’d met over bodies. Aster had killed Sylvia’s mother, Catrina Maroven, leader of the Maroven Clan, the most notorious vampire clan in the history of, well, Earth.

She’d expected Sylvia, Catrina’s first and only daughter, to retaliate, but instead she’d clapped Aster on the back as they stood over her mother’s corpse and said: “I think we’re going to be great friends. ”

In the years since, they invested most of their time in murder.

Murder for power, murder for money, murder for fun.

Sylvia was unquenchable, and Aster just liked to watch her work.

But as technology had advanced, their favorite hobby had gotten trickier—a stint in federal prison for Aster had turned them both off of it since the 2010s.

They’d been living off their savings ever since, but even medieval gold bars weren’t safe from inflation.

“Alright,” Aster sighed. It looked like there was no other option. “I give up. We can do it. You have my permission.”

Sylvia brightened, grinning wide, and interrupted her.

“Your permission to enthrall a billionaire and take all his money?”

“Yes.” Aster rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t look so excited.”

It wasn’t that Aster was against creating thralls on principle.

It was more… the consequences.

Creating a thrall meant there was a small chance that whoever you put under your control could eventually fight off that spell, and become a vampire in their own right.

And when thralls regained sentience as vampires, they tended to have only one thought on their mind—revenge.

The last time her and Sylvia had created a thrall, it had been the King of England. That had gone poorly. Sylvia-almost-died levels of poorly. Aster was picking the stakes out of her back for days.

She would never admit it to Sylvia, but it had been the worst day of Aster’s life, seeing the light fade in and out of her best friend’s eyes as she flirted with oblivion. Aster was not interested in repeating it.

But desperate times, desperate measures.

They had to fund Sylvia’s coffee habit somehow.

***

Sylvia was curled up on their Airbnb couch, the NYC skyline painting a pretty picture of flickering lights into the night. She had a copy of the Forbes 30 under 30 pulled up on her phone. When Aster leaned over her shoulder and spotted the article, she barked out a laugh.

“I finally lifted the thrall ban, and you're settling for mid-twenties tech scammers?” she said in disbelief. “I never thought I’d be the one telling you to dream bigger.”

“Of course I’m not settling,” Sylvia scoffed. “You injure my pride.”

She slid her hand up Aster’s neck from behind, tugging at her hair and pulling her down to the couch, all without glancing up from her phone.

Sylvia’s grip strength was like a rhinoceros, and just one tug caused Aster to land ungracefully on the cushion next to her, the back of her scalp stinging faintly.

“Ow. You could have just asked me to sit down.”

“And you could be quiet for two seconds. Neither is going to happen.”

Her words were cold, but Aster could see Sylvia fighting a grin.

That was Sylvia, always stifling something into submission. And then came Aster’s job, wrenching it out of her. It being just about anything: an emotion, an idea, a corpse Sylvia had just sucked dry.

This time, it was her phone.

“Hey!” Sylvia scowled. “Give that back.”

“No. Tell me your plan first,” Aster said, holding the red iPhone to her chest like a hostage. “I’m impatient.”

Sylvia took this simple inquiry as a challenge, as she took everything, and pushed Aster down onto the couch, climbing over her like a rabid animal, tugging at the device with her sharp fingernails. Her eyes shone bright, blood red. Her fangs dropped from her canines.

“Give. Me,” Sylvia breathed hot, venomous. “That.”

Pinning her down into the cushions, she dug her fingernails into Aster’s palms, deep enough to prickle a bit of blood.

A normal human being would have screamed. Aster barely registered it.

She chuckled as she looked up at her friend’s utterly frustrated face. “What, your phone? Yeah I’m good, actually. I think I’ll keep it for a while.”

Sylvia snarled, then leaned down. Aster thought she was going to headbutt her, but instead her face veered right, and her lips brushed against Aster’s shoulder.

Aster’s eyes went wide at the contact, her pupils dilating in seconds.

What the hell is she doing?

They tussled like school children every so often, just to get it out of their system, but Sylvia had never done anything as disarming as plant a kiss to her shoulder mid-game. No, that would be awfully strange; foul play, really, outside the rulebook.

She was about to push Sylvia off of her and demand an explanation when the other vampire threw the rulebook out altogether, and sunk her fangs into the flesh of Aster’s shoulder.

Aster squealed.

“What the hell!”

She shoved Sylvia off of her. Breath heaving raggedly from her lungs, all Aster could do was stare at her friend in complete bewilderment, feeling like she was looking at a stranger.

Wild brunette waves framed Sylvia’s pale, blood-stained face.

Her lips were swollen and red. She was smiling like an imp, obviously pleased with herself.

Aster found herself speechless. Her heart rabbited in her chest uncontrollably, faster than it had in years, so fast that she failed to notice that Sylvia had gained repossession of her iPhone, and was now wiggling it in the air victoriously.

Aster blinked.

She bit me just to get her stupid phone back?

“You’re insane,” Aster said incredulously. “You’re actually insane.”

Sylvia’s grin only grew brighter. She wordlessly lifted herself from the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. When she returned a minute later, she was carrying a wet wipe, a roll of paper towels, and the remote control for the television.

She slowly came up from behind Aster and began to clean the wound, then pat it dry.

“Sorry,” she said, but her light tone betrayed her. “I think I got a little hungry.”

Aster laughed shortly, because she wasn’t sure what else to do.

Because in six hundred years, Sylvia had never bitten her.

Not even when they had been starving in the streets of London. Not even out of excitement after they’d killed off the entire mafia in Rome. Not even when Aster had gotten enthralled by another vampire and tried to tear Sylvia limb from limb.

Even then, Sylvia had refused to use her teeth to subdue her. Fangs were for killing. Well, killing, and, that one other thing—

Aster reddened.

No, she definitely didn’t mean it like that.

Sylvia was just being herself. Disarming, impulsive. She’d do just about anything to get what she wanted. She wanted her phone back, so she used her fangs to get it. It wasn’t like it could physically hurt Aster to get bitten. It couldn’t change her. It meant nothing.

Sylvia raised the phone screen in front of Aster’s face, pulling her from her thoughts.

Aster blinked, her eyes adjusting to the light, and her mind recalibrating back to the present moment.

There was a picture of a man on the screen, from the 30 under 30 list. Tommy Ashcroft.

Aster’s eyes scanned his profile. Tech startup founder, based in NYC, yada yada.

Nothing special. Why would Sylvia care about this guy?

They could fry such bigger fish. Shit. Aster didn’t even care.

Her head was swimming. Why did Sylvia bite her?

“I thought you said you were going for bigger targets…” Aster began.

Sylvia interrupted her. “Keep reading.”

With a reluctant sigh, she did. And that’s when her eyes landed on the last line in the article:

Tommy Ashcroft is the son of Richard Ashcroft, billionaire CEO of Ashcroft Oil.

Richard Ashcroft. The second richest man on planet Earth.

“Oh, dear God, Sylvia.”