Chapter 14
Aster crumpled what was left of the security camera in her hand, and searched the street corners until she could toss it into the nearest garbage bin.
She would never be caught littering, even with murder evidence.
Sylvia, meanwhile—
Aster heard a loud splash as the second body hit the East River.
The other vampire met Aster’s frown with a grand grin. Aster didn’t have to open her mouth for Sylvia to hear what she would have said about her disposal process.
“Oh, come on. It’s not littering. I’m feeding the fish,” Sylvia huffed, before pausing, and glancing down at the putrid, foul-smelling water. Her nose wrinkled. “If there are any left. God, the city really needs to do something about the sewage smell.”
Says the woman tossing in corpses.
Aster sighed. Pick your battles. “That’s not what I’m worried about.” She gestured to the slow-moving, or rather nonexistent tide in the river. “You’re not hiding evidence. You’re introducing corpse-shaped pool floaties. They aren’t even moving, Sylvia. They’re just… sitting there.”
“Sure they’re moving,” Sylvia muttered petulantly. “They’re… bobbing up and down.”
Aster pinched the bridge of her nose tiredly, the cold midnight air making her damp, blood-covered clothes stick to her like prickly icicles. She was covered head to toe in red—completely doused.
I feel like an extra in a low budget horror film.
Sylvia had gotten a bit too creative with that shoe heel, and Aster got splattered with gore like she’d been front row at the whale show at SeaWorld.
Not to say it wasn’t intensely sexy. It was that.
But it was also, if Aster was being completely honest—terrifying.
Because, well, that kill had been possessive.
She could find no other word for it.
Because Sylvia Maroven had killed more than her fair share of people in her long and morally grey life—but she really wasn’t a career murderer.
No, if Aster had to give her a job title, one she could stick as a headline on LinkedIn, she’d call Sylvia a world-class con artist and a petty thief.
She left cold blooded disembodiment to Aster while she stole the corpse’s jewelry off their clammy hands and fished through jacket pockets for cash.
If Sylvia could help it, she preferred not to get her hands dirty. She hated the feeling of dried blood under her fingernails.
And yet.
That kill was the type that would have her washing her hands for months.
Blood in every crevice, gore in every wrinkle of her dress.
Sylvia took that man apart gleefully, blood splattering the walls like an unaired episode of Dexter. Nostrils flared, snarling. Repeating the same phrase over and over under breath, barely audible—
“Don’t even look at her.”
Like a woman possessed.
And then she’d just laughed, curt and business-like, turned to Aster with a wide smile, and slid her bloody hands over Aster’s shoulders.
“Now.” She licked her lips like a wild animal who’d just picked clean a bone. “Where were we?”
And as much as seeing Sylvia Barbie-Shoe man to death had turned Aster into a complete and utter mess beneath her dress—it was hard to get back into the swing of things knowing their chances of being discovered were teetering somewhere near one-hundred-percent.
And Aster was in no mood to go back to federal prison. Not when she’d just gotten her first taste of what she hoped was the rest of her life.
So Aster had taken care of cameras, and Sylvia the bodies. They’d stowed them away in the big trash bags hiding behind the club’s dumpsters, then dragged them through a series of alleys until they emerged by the lip of the river.
Luckily, this wasn’t the first time Sylvia had killed someone at this particular club—it was her favorite spot for a reason—so she knew just the path to avoid the more crowded streets and potential cop cars waiting to bust drunk hecklers.
Dusting off bloody hands like some kind of midnight janitor, Sylvia rejoined Aster in the corridor, the two of them illuminated only by a half-broken streetlight.
Sylvia looked like a specter under the sharp white light. Blood streaming down her arms, dribbling from her hand. The mortal in Aster trembled at the sight, as if a deep part of her was remembering what it felt like to be scared of monsters.
“I want the pigs to find them like this, anyway,” Sylvia explained, leaning against the wall and tilting her head back. “Something to distract from the news cycle around the Ashcrofts.”
“Uh huh.” Aster only half-bought that story.
It wouldn’t be Sylvia unless she left behind a scene. It was her signature—a Bucharest ballroom with half a dozen beheaded monarchs strewn like confetti, a London cafe with baristas sagging against metal machines, blood dripping into the coffee.
Sylvia liked crafting a puzzle. Murder and mayhem were her performance art. If some twenty-something wasn’t writing a literary analysis on her latest massacre, Sylvia would write in to the papers and complain.
But this showpiece—Two Bodies in a River, Oil on Canvas—was surprisingly tame.
Almost if Sylvia had other things on her mind. Other things that became abundantly clear when she slunk close to Aster in the shadows, the heat vibrating off her body like a small, earthly sun.
“So…” That wolfish smile was back on Sylvia’s face, like clockwork, as if the bodies of Vincent and Not Vincent weren’t bobbing like apples in the river just ten feet away. “Should we pick up where we left off?”
Aster’s breath hitched as Sylvia pushed her gently into the wall. The monster had her cornered like prey, both hands placed on either side of Aster’s head, nose bowing down to inhale Aster’s neck. Her bite from earlier was crusted over with dried blood.
“I was thinking I could…” Sylvia’s hand pinched at her waist, then began to trail down. “Repay the favor?”
When Aster said nothing, Sylvia withdrew her head to look at her, an eyebrow perched, asking for permission without having to ask for permission.
And oh, God.
Aster realized she had never seen want in someone else’s eyes until now.
Mortals had desired her before, with a kind of huffy, lustful insistence. But Sylvia wanted her in the same way that children clung to toys in the sandbox. This is mine. This will never be yours.
But Aster couldn’t differentiate if this was something Sylvia really felt, or if it was a transient state passing through her. A drunken urge intermingled with Aster’s blood in her veins.
But no matter what it was, Aster could see the way Sylvia’s lip trembled when she bit it, how her eyes blazed so bright, her pupils couldn’t even focus.
Sylvia wasn’t in her body anymore.
An animal—that monster Aster had sensed, that her humanity had shivered at—had taken her over, something raw and biological. A wild tiger operating human legs and human arms, human wants and human needs.
And two things became true simultaneously.
One, that Aster was so wet she could sink the Titanic.
And two, that she couldn’t do this again when Sylvia was like this. When she was in such a heightened state, numb to the repercussions.
Because Aster cared about her too much.
No, it’s not that. It’s not that selfless.
Aster frowned.
It’s because you want more than just this.
The thought warped and contorted, until it unwrapped itself in Aster’s mind, plain and obvious like a knife through the neck.
I want her to want me even when she doesn’t have my blood in her mouth.
I want her to want me sober.
The realization pierced through Aster like a bullet, and she swallowed the fiery casing. It burned all the way down.
And the current began pulling her in.
But what if she doesn’t?
What if this is my one chance to feel her hands on me before she comes to her senses?
What if we live forever and I never touch her again in a million immortal years?
They were caught up in a drugged up smoke cloud, a bubble made of cigarette ash—pure, undisguised lust. Murder on their hands like the world’s finest stimulant. Any intrusion from reality could pop the dream like a fingernail.
Sylvia’s hand slipped with an arduous slowness down Aster’s hips, her fingers halting at the sheer piece of black fabric covering her underwear.
Aster had to stop herself from arching toward the other woman’s hand like some kind of possessed magnet.
Like a voodoo doll that Sylvia had put enough pins in to make her burst.
“Tell me about—tell me about the biting thing first,” Aster breathed, finding the self control somewhere within her to grab Sylvia’s wrist to stop it from moving further down. “The ritual.”
Sylvia’s mouth formed a surprised o, and she bit down on her lip, a fang exposed.
And then, in a petulant tone that was so thoroughly Sylvia, she frowned and mumbled, “Let’s discuss that later. Need to touch you.”
And oh God, the neediness in her voice, like if she didn’t get to touch Aster she might just cry, was just about enough to make Aster break; to let Sylvia ravish her within an inch of her life.
She breathed a shaky breath out and tightened her grip on Sylvia’s wrist. “Sylvia. As much as I would like that—” Need it, really.
As much as she needed blood, Sylvia’s fingers on her, Sylvia’s mouth.
Oh god, oh god. “I think we should go home before someone finds us — finds us like this — five feet away from a dismembered arm.”
As she considered it, Sylvia’s eyes slowly dulled back to green. Her hand went limp where Aster was gripping it, and she looked toward the river.
“Fine. Killjoy.”
***
The apartment had never felt so large.
As they slowly descended into the space, shucking off jackets, scrubbing their hands free of blood under hot sink water, Aster felt a phenomenon she’d never felt around Sylvia—awkwardness.
It seemed to fill the space like a water bucket, magnifying the distance between their bodies. The couch felt as big as a fallen tree trunk, the windows as tall and thick as a giant’s spectacles.
Aster dragged the curtains closed, and when she turned around, she saw Sylvia just standing there, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, lip bitten in a frown of concentration. Staring at her.
She looked nervous.
Sylvia looked nervous.
God, this was a day for firsts.
The other vampire took in a long breath, and began to walk toward her, silently, her footsteps like mouse prints on the floor, her shadow streaking long and lithe across the wall—almost an entity in itself.
It reminded Aster of those 80’s vampire movies Sylvia had all the DVDs for.
How the camera always lingered on the hints of the monster—their cape in the wind, their hands, always scarred up to the knuckles—never showing the full creature right until the very end, camera pushed right into its face, every wrinkle and detail projected terrifying, ugly glory.
But as Sylvia stepped into the light of their living room lamp, her sharp nose and full lips painted under the softest glow, Aster could only describe her as the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
“Hi,” said Sylvia quietly, lips curling up almost shyly, and that only proved to confirm it—
“Hi,” Aster breathed back.
It was so obvious. The whole time, it had been staring at her, plain in the face.
“Looks like we’re alone again.”
“Looks like it.”
Sylvia brought her hand up and put it to Aster’s beating heart where it sat below her dress, curling her fingers around the fabric.
And Aster couldn’t help but think it, the terrible, obvious thing—
She was in love.
She was in love.
She was in love.
Oh god.
She was in love with Sylvia Maroven.
Packaged with that realization was a headline from an old Bucharest tabloid, which popped in Aster’s head almost at random, unbidden.
It was a report on a sudden shock of untraceable murders across Eastern Europe. Detectives had searched and plotted and dug to the point of exhaustion, but the perpetrator—a woman with untamable raven hair, seen only once, riding a train south, to Spain—was like a ghost.
God must favor the devil, said the headline on the front of the paper, written in black, Because He gleefully lets her get away with the worst of sins.
“Sylvia,” Aster whispered shakily, her hands moving of their own volition to Sylvia’s warm cheeks. She found herself unable to find the right words. Everything felt too big and too small at once. Like a straight jacket in an open ocean.
Sylvia breathed, “Yes?”
And Aster inhaled sharply.
“Do you want me?”
She knew it was only a half-question. She knew it was cowardice disguised as bravery.
She knew that Sylvia might still wake up to regret this when all the drugs and the adrenaline had washed off, that Sylvia might only want her for a night when Aster, in fact, needed her—and for much longer than that.
She knew she had never felt more terrified in her entire life.
And yet she didn’t regret asking it.
And Sylvia froze.
Froze for so long that Aster nearly reeled back everything she’d ever said and ever thought, like a desperate fish on a line.
But then Sylvia shifted. She leaned forward, shoved her hand roughly into Aster’s hair, so she was clawing at the back of her scalp, and then, with a voice as honest as Aster had ever heard it,
“God,” Sylvia moaned. “Desperately.”
And crashed her lips to Aster’s.