Chapter 13
Most mortals lived in constant fear of death. Which of course, Aster would allow, was mostly understandable—death meant disease, corpses, flies, and most fearsome of all (if the adults were to be believed) money for funerals—but Aster had never really understood what the big deal was.
Ever since she was a young girl in Lugo, sneaking around the village graveyard, hiding behind stones and silently imitating the way mourners shoveled dirt into a shallow grave, Aster felt comforted in the singular ending death presented.
She liked it in the same way she’d always liked lines (they had a definitive beginning, and a definitive ending), counting (numbers always pleased her in ways people didn’t), measuring cups (she’d sneak into the kitchen just to measure milk before drinking it), and symmetry (later in life, she’d arrange corpses by height, always ascending).
It wasn’t until she approached ten years old that she feared anything at all.
That fear, as she’d eventually come to name it—was Transformation.
It all started with an abrupt and sudden moment of loss, as most phobias do.
It was her first pet—a caterpillar. Small and green and wriggly and perfect.
Aster kept it in her room in secret, in a glass jar, fed it leaves and let it climb on twigs, freed it occasionally to go on daisy walks in the field.
But then one day, as summer crested over rural Spain, her pudgy fingers screwed off the top of the jar, and Aster first encountered that thing—that something that was worse than death.
Her beloved wriggly creature was no more. It had been replaced, and now it was hard and rigid like the shell of a pea.
Aster was inconsolable for days on end; she refused to follow her friends into the fields, or eat the breakfast porridge with her favorite berries, or even play card games.
Her parents’ explanations did not help. She only grew angrier when they told her the creature had no choice but to become something else, that it was predestined, that it would change once more, that it would someday become something even more beautiful than what it was to begin with.
Something even more beautiful. That part disgruntled her the most.
Beauty, Aster had believed, came only through intention—Aster’s aunt knitting herself a new skirt for the spring, her mother plucking her eyebrows to more perfectly arch over brown eyes—beauty was by design, not painting the village pig when it was sleeping.
But eventually, the prophecy did come to pass. Blue wings peeked out of that hard pea-shell she so detested, newborn eyes blinking up at her.
She wanted to ask the butterfly, “do you remember who you were before?” but it could not speak her language, and she could not speak its—so she was forced to watch it flutter away through the window, and sit with her own frigid emptiness.
Ever since then, Aster always suspected—with that eerie sense of divination that most children possess—that she’d suffer the same fate.
That something foreign would root itself deeply and violently into her, like the stems of a demonic tree, replacing her blood cell for blood cell like a corporeal Ship of Theseus.
That she’d become an alien in her own body, flailing desperately for the controls.
And of course, the fear did eventually manifest, when the man in the suit arrived from out of town – Hola Sra.
Castelmar, Senor Castelmar, ?puedo pasar?
– his skin frighteningly pale like a spectre.
The man had bitten her and left no evidence.
Even Aster’s memories eventually bore no witness to the past.
She was left with just a cloud of assumptions about her life as the caterpillar. More fiction than fact. So in the years since, Aster sought to prevent another transformation at all costs—
By controlling herself, controlling others, controlling her environment.
Few enemies, fewer friends.
Anything that got within rooting distance was clipped at the stem.
Except Sylvia.
Sylvia, who Aster had been drawn to for her obviousness.
Sylvia was manipulative, but in the way that came with a wink and a tip of a top hat. She was a Vaudeville showgirl, not Dracula hiding under the bed.
Of course, this didn’t mean that Aster hadn’t tried at every turn to make Sylvia reveal herself. She tested Sylvia incessantly at first, bore her most grievous wounds and waited for her to run and hide.
But Sylvia never did.
Her acceptance of Aster’s quirks—the way she counted her steps when she walked, or got lost in a train of thought mid-sentence, or murdered for the thrill of it—didn’t scare Sylvia; Sylvia never sought to change her, only to exploit—and eventually, even appreciate, in her own way—the strange creature that what was already there.
So Aster had never suspected her.
Never once, until it was already over, the surgery was done, forever irrevocable—and Aster was exiting the cocoon again, newborn eyes peeking out into broad daylight, and wondering who she ever was before. If she’d ever remember, or if this new her would be all there ever was.
That was how it felt when Sylvia whispered those words into her ear—
“I think it’s terminal for me, too.”
And her fangs sunk in.
And for all the ways that Aster’s reality had just shifted irrevocably, for all the reasons that she could (and should) be pissed that they hadn’t done this six hundred years earlier, that Sylvia hadn’t given her the choice to fall in love — asked her at some point along the way, “do you mind? It might be painful”— instead of blindsiding Aster into it, luring her like a lost dog until she was at the bottom of a well with no ladder, all Aster could muster was a useless, whimpering, hopeful,
“Really?”
Then Sylvia’s knee pushed up against her center, and every lovely overwrought metaphor in Aster’s head emptied like a water can.
“Don’t believe me?” Sylvia mumbled against the open wound in her neck. Aster could almost hear how red her eyes were. “Feel it.”
Not for the first time, Aster had no idea what she meant. Also not for the first time, Sylvia forewent words and used her hands instead, clawing Aster’s wrist and placing it, with an electric shock to Aster’s entire being, between Sylvia’s legs.
Aster hoped she said something salvageable like Sylvia or Dear God or informative like Fuck Me, but in reality whatever came out of her mouth was a considerably less sexy mixture of vowels and consonants that muddled together into one long, obscene moan that the nightclub CCTV would most definitely record, reproduce, and send to the police.
She could see the Daily Mail headline already. Blood sucking murderers get frisky moments after beating a man to death with shoe heel. But she couldn’t find it in herself to care. This alleyway was discreet enough, dark enough. And even if it wasn’t…
Sylvia’s fangs left her throat with a pop, and she leaned back, her cheeks flushed, her chin painted red with Aster’s blood, and her pupils dilated to hell and back.
Aster wanted her in a way that she could barely put into words.
Sylvia made it so she didn’t have to. “Hitch up the dress, Aster.”
And Aster obeyed with a singular focus that terrified her.
Is this what it feels like to be a thrall?
To do someone else’s bidding and feel like it was all your idea?
Maybe, but either way, the end result was the same. Aster hitched up the dress so it was just above Sylvia’s underwear, a silky black piece of lace.
She felt a feral urge crop up inside herself at the sight of it—something monstrous. She needed it gone. She needed to know, needed to feel—
“Can I?” Aster said weakly.
Sylvia nodded slowly, her hooded eyes still pinned to Aster like a stone gargoyle. Aster had expected her to remain in her neck, to suck her dry while Aster touched her, but Sylvia was surprisingly immobile.
She likes to watch.
Of course she does.
Aster’s stomach coiled even tighter at the thought.
Carefully, with a reverence a priest would reserve only for the scripture, Aster slowly peeled damp lace to the side, and—keeping her eyes trained on Sylvia’s face, on her shallow breathing, on her blood red eyes—slid her fingers against Sylvia’s center.
And oh—oh god.
Her own hips bucked up uncontrollably against Sylvia’s thigh, and the pet name slipped out like butter. “Baby, you’re so—”
Sylvia laughed crassly, cutting her off.
“Wet? I fucking know. I’ve been like this for hours. You wouldn’t stop—” Sylvia bit down on Aster’s neck again, only a nip, and groaned. “—Teasing me.”
Aster’s mouth opened, the information somehow even hotter than the way Sylvia’s fangs were grazing against her nape. “You were like this while we were dancing?”
Sylvia whined. “Of course I was. Fuck the dancing, I’ve been like this ever since you killed Ashcroft. I’ve gone through half my underwear drawer in the last two days.” She slid against Aster and groaned. “Fuck, fuck. Enough talking, I need, I need—”
I’ve been like this ever since you killed Ashcroft.
Aster’s stomach tightened impossibly more at the words.
That couldn’t be true. If that was true, then that would mean Sylvia had been wet for her—had been wanting this, couldn’t stop thinking about this—at work, at home, on the couch, in bed at night, twisting and turning, in the morning when she made Aster breakfast, when she smudged the food of Aster’s mouth—
“Aster,” Sylvia growled. “Touch me before the cops come, or I’ll call them myself.”
Aster whimpered like the thrall she was. She dragged her thumb past Sylvia’s clit—once, experimentally—and the other vampire bucked against her with a cry, her fangs sinking full mast into Aster’s shoulder. Aster felt the pain like the most exquisite knife.
“God, fuck, yes. Right there, right there.” Aster could feel the blood leaking from Sylvia’s moaning mouth onto her shoulder, and it turned her on even more. “You can’t even imagine how many times I…”
Aster was so distracted by Sylvia’s words she momentarily forgot herself, stilling her motions on Sylvia’s clit—but Sylvia quickly repaid her with a snarl, bucking messily against Aster’s wrist and pressing another warning bite higher on her neck.
“Sorry,” Aster whimpered.
“You better be,” Sylvia hummed before moaning again when Aster picked up the pace. “God, you’re so good at this. I should have known you’d be so good at this. You take direction so well. Why haven’t we done this sooner?”
The praise made her head go dizzy, but still Aster couldn’t get Sylvia’s trailed off sentence out of her head. “I wouldn’t believe how many times you what, Sylvia?”
Sylvia’s motions were getting unsteady now, thrusting unevenly into Aster’s palm, which had become a slick, drenched mess of dimpled skin. Meanwhile, the sounds coming from the back of Sylvia’s throat were high and ragged.
It took some coaxing with Aster’s fingers, but eventually Sylvia confessed. “You wouldn’t believe… how many times I’ve touched myself this week,” she mumbled almost shyly against Aster’s neck as she slid against her fingers. “Thinking about coming with my fangs inside of you.”
Aster nearly came undone just at the thought of it.
“Oh god. Sylvia—”
“So I’ve been doing research.”
She said the words so plainly and apathetically against Aster’s skin, Aster almost laughed in shock. But the feeling of Sylvia’s cunt grinding against her hand stopped any chance of that.
Aster nearly choked. “Research?”
“Yes. About the soul bite—eternal marking—thing,” she groaned, pressing Aster harder into the cold cement wall. She was certain they’d leave a dent. “And it turns out we won’t—fuck—we won’t activate it unless—oh god—unless—Aster, baby, I’m going to, I’m going to—”
Sylvia’s fangs melted further into her, and Aster didn’t know what to do with herself—with her hands, with her legs, with the emotions bubbling like rockets in her stomach—so she just kept the pace, and used her free palm to press against the back of Sylvia’s head, pushing her deeper in.
But Sylvia’s unfinished sentence scared her. Was this how the ritual worked? Was she doing something wrong? Would she accidentally trigger it?
“Sylvia— Should I—should I stop?”
“Fuck no,” Sylvia cried. “No, I—I’m so close. God, you feel so good. Aster. Aster.”
As the last syllable of Aster’s name came out of Sylvia’s lips, a fresh coat of wetness covered Aster’s palm, and Sylvia shuddered against her. She rutted slowly, once, twice, her breath haggard, before coming to a stop, and slowly extricating her fangs from Aster’s neck.
Then, like an angel falling from heaven, Sylvia slowly bowed backward, so their faces were levitating like two magnets, drawn in and out of each other’s orbit. Sylvia’s mouth was stained so completely red she looked like her very own murder scene—but her eyes were as wide and innocent as a doe.
She looked almost startled by her own desire.
“Fuck,” Sylvia breathed. Then, without pretense, she whispered, “Thank you.”
As if not having Aster really had been tormenting her for weeks.
Unable to do anything productive with that information, Aster swallowed in agreement, her hand acting of its own volition to clean the blood from Sylvia’s lips, then softly cup her cheek.
Aster expected to feel desire in that moment, and she did—low and nearly incapacitating in her stomach—but, taking in Sylvia’s soft, stunned expression, something else presented itself.
Aster wanted…
No, Aster needed to kiss her.
She looked at Sylvia’s lips, then her eyes, asking permission.
She felt the other woman’s heartbeat pick up. But she didn’t nod yes or no. She just blinked, mouth agape. Like a machine whose gears had ground to a halt.
But before Aster could use her mouth to clarify, someone a few feet away from them screamed like they’d just found a dead body.
Oh wait.
“Vincent?”
It was a testament to just how lost in the moment both of them were that it took them, with their vampiric agility, at least five full seconds to react. Aster moved first, her fingers sliding out of Sylvia’s cunt in a way that made her knees weak, and she turned toward the sound.
And standing there, one hand holding Sylvia’s favorite Pink Margarita, the other holding his iPhone flashlight, was that skinny man from the bar.
Vincent’s… friend. Right.
Sylvia groaned, then rolled up her sleeves.
“Seriously?” she clicked her tongue. “Before I even get to return the favor?”
And she pulled off her other heel.