A Dowry of Blood

by Gibson, S. T.

  The rooms in Venice were small, and we all shared a large featherdown bed that we girls very rarely had to ourselves. Having Magdalena all to myself was a special delight that I didn’t intend to waste.

  I kissed every inch of her as though she were a holy relic, sloughing off her dress with the delicate care I might use while unwrapping a communion chalice from its linen. She whispered my name like a prayer as I worshipped the secret place between her thighs with my mouth. Her fingers tangled in my hair and she giggled as I brought her closer and closer to the brink, my own body trembling with desire. She was so beautiful like this, head tipped back, brow smooth and free of any worry. I wanted the moment to last forever: just her and I trapped in a small, perfect eternity of pleasure.

  Laying with her made me feel so vibrantly alive. It was almost enough to make me forget that I was already dead.

  Maybe I was drawn to her because she was so fully alive. Even your bite hadn’t yet snatched the high color from her cheeks, the sparkle from her eyes. I liked looking at her better than I liked looking at myself, for it became increasingly difficult to recognize myself in the mirror. My long reddish hair shone with the illusion of life but was always cold to the touch, even in the sunlight, and my skin had a pallor most women had to paint their faces with white lead to achieve. My eyes were dark and flat, more animal than woman, and I often startled passerby because I forgot to remind myself to blink. I wondered if eventually even my reflection would fade away, leaving nothing but the cold unbroken surface of a mirror.

  I was a perfect, immovable statue, painfully beautiful but without any of the small graces that mortality bestowed. I looked more and more like you every day.

  Even the thinnest rays of sun were painful to me now, and I couldn’t frolic with Magdalena in the soft light of dawn or dusk. I was less and less sated by bread and wine, although I sometimes slipped into the church for communion just to see if I could still taste anything at all. The hunger was relentless, my only companion in the quiet moments between travel and conversation about your newest theory of human nature. I took up diversions constantly to fill the void: needlepoint, viola, the rosary. Nothing made me feel full.

  So I lived vicariously through Magdalena, all her wide-eyed wonder at the world, all her brutal little firsts. We hunted together, broke the necks of wicked men and drew beautiful girls and boys into our bower for kisses and love bites. Magdalena and I brought these delicate young blooms to the edge of pleasure and pain, taking small, restrained sips from their still-pulsing veins. I supposed we wanted to see if we could do it, feed from someone without giving in entirely to frenzied bloodlust, and we didn’t think it was fair that every person we took our sustenance from should die. We fancied ourselves fair and just as we coddled our swooning beloveds and sent them home covered in hickeys and a few barely noticeable pinprick wounds.

  You, of course, found out eventually.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” you demanded, after a boy had stumbled out of our home with his lips swollen from kisses and blood drying on his neck but still very much alive. “You two are going behind my back trying to sire a new family, is that it?”

  “Of course not,” I scoffed.

  “No, no my love!” Magdalena crooned, wrapping her fingers around your arm. She steered you to the nearest chair. “We would never do such a thing.”

  “You couldn’t even if you wanted to, you know. You aren’t old enough, your blood isn’t strong enough. Is this Constanta’s doing?” you asked, though I had barely even spoken. “She’s infected your mind with her moralism.”

  “I’ve done nothing!” I exclaimed.

  “This is about your obsession with justice, isn’t it?” you said, dark eyes flashing. “You think those youths are innocent and so you let them live. Hear me Constanta: no one on this wretched Earth is innocent. Not you, not me, not those children.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes unbidden, and I scolded myself. I hated crying in front of you. I felt like it gave you even more power over me, like your heart was an empty lacrimosa waiting to catch my tears.

  “Beloved, please,” I said.

  Magdalena, bless her, stepped in before you could reduce me entirely. She settled herself at your feet, skirts pooling around her, and laid her head on your knee. She was the picture of coquettish contrition, but I was beginning to know her well enough to know that it was, at least in part, an act.

  We all developed our tricks for dealing with you: my invisibility, her sweetness.

  “It was just an experiment,” Magdalena said, thinking on her feet. “We were curious what would happen if it we let them live, if it could be done at all. You’re always talking about studying the nature of humans and vampires. We were simply releasing a few test cases into the wild.”

  You threaded your fingers through her hair while your gaze burned into my skin, searching me for any sign of disobedience. You usually looked at us like we were hoards of gold, precious and rarefied. But now you looked at me the way you looked at one of your books. Like you were draining me of all useful knowledge before tossing me aside.

  “Very industrious,” you murmured. Your voice was still suspicious, but you seemed to be willing to accept her answer. For now.

  I, for my part, tried not to hold how you came to love her against you. You hadn’t set out looking for a new bride. You had simply fallen in love, just the same way I had fallen in love when you had presented Magdalena and I to each other. I couldn’t blame you for that, could I? I tried not to think of the quiet machinations that had gone into our meeting as we followed the whims of Magdalena’s wanderlust from country to country. I tried to banish the clamoring thoughts of how long you must have been writing letters to her without my knowledge or consent, telling her all about our life together. Winning her over to your side.

  I tried to be generous with you my love... but the seeds of doubt, once planted, put down deep and stubborn roots. Soon, the suspicion that you had not been entirely honest began to gnaw at me, despite the joy of a life shared with you and Magdalena. I was suspicious, and even more dangerously, I was curious.

  Asking you directly was out of the question, and I didn’t want to needle Magdalena for information either. If you found out I had gone behind your back to ask questions about your behavior you would be furious, and I was loathe to disrupt the idyllic family life we three had in those early days. Perhaps, my lord, I was simply a coward.

  You must forgive me. You had overstepped so many of my boundaries and left me so little of my own privacy that it didn’t seem unfair for me to deny you a little of yours.

  We were staying in a rented house in the Danish countryside, with a repurposed barn in the back for your workshop. You spent more time out there than you did in your own bedroom. I waited for you and Magdalena to go out on the hunt together before I went looking for your letters. You two loved hunting together, the thrill and the sport of it. You left me to my misguided sense of justice in those days, having given up on converting me to killing for any other reason.

  I let myself into the barn quietly, careful not to leave so much as a footprint in the dirt or a fingerprint in the dust. This is where you hoarded all the new inventions flooding the scientific markets, barometers and handheld spyglasses and calculating machines. They were lined up carefully on your worktables. You also had laid out human bones, harvested from victims and hand-washed, and had somehow acquired an entire skull laid out next to a pair of forceps and scribbled notes.

  I ignored the evidence of your grisly work and set about searching for something more precious; a simple wooden cigar box where you kept stationary and letters of sentimental value. I had never so much as seen the inside of this box, but I knew it was cherished by you, because I was forbidden from going near it.

  My heart hammered at the weight of my indiscretion as I looked under papers and stooped below the tables to rummage through wooden crates. Touching that box was a sin worthy of excommunication from your good graces, I was sure. Bu
t then again, I was strictly forbidden from ever entering your workshop unaccompanied. What was one more sin to add to my litany?

  I found the cigar box laying out in the middle of a table, carelessly exposed. You never once thought I would have the strength to disobey you, did you? The possibility that my will was stronger than yours never even crossed your mind.

  I opened the lid so, so delicately. My reward for my tenacity was sheaves of letters in your tight, prim hand. I flipped through the papers, looking for ones addressed to Magdalena. I only wanted to know how long you had been in contact with her, I swear it. I just needed to know if you had been courting her for years, right under my nose, or if your fascination with her was as recent as you claimed.

  I found her letters, my love. And I found so many more.

  At first, I was confused. I couldn’t read with your lightning efficiency, but I had taught myself well enough to know that there was correspondence here dating back centuries, since before you and I had even known each other. Some of it was written in strange alphabets, in any of the many languages you spoke and I didn’t, but there were a few I could decipher.

  They were love letters. Written to absolute strangers, stretching across time and space. Strangers that you called husband. Lover. Wife.

  I recoiled from the box as though I were Pandora herself, pouring woe out into the world. The letters spilled from my hands and hit the table. Impossible. You had never mentioned other spouses. I was your firstborn, your Constanta. I had sacrificed everything for the crown and you had raised me into queenship in return. I was unique in your eyes. Special, even after we brought Magdalena into our world. I was the love that started it all.

  Wasn’t I?

  It wasn’t that I didn’t expect you to have taken lovers, to have sought out human companionship during the many years you spent wandering the world. But I had thought you had truly been alone, without an equal at your side possessing your same power, your same sweet-edged curse. But you had turned these people, at least a half dozen of them, and the evidence was right there in your own hand. You seduced them from afar and then coached them through first meetings and first seductions, promising whole worlds if only they would allow you to take that fatal bite. You even used some of the same language when you convinced them to take up with you.

  A gift.

  A life without laws, without limits.

  The choice is yours.

  You had specifically sought them out; poets and scientists and princesses, all wracked by some recent trauma. There were fire survivors, victims of brutal marriages, starving artists, and wounded soldiers among your ranks. All exceptional in some way, all vulnerable. It made me sick to think of them, to imagine their glassy-eyed faces when you finally appeared and told them you had come to raise them up out of the dirt and into an immortal life of ease. And you had kept meticulous record of all of them, the same way you kept meticulous record of your little experiments.

  I hastily gathered up the letters and put them back where I had found them, doing my best to remember their correct order and arrangement. Then I rushed back into the house, letting the door to the barn slam shut behind me.

  The awful truth threatened to swell up and engulf me like a wave, and I was almost driven to my knees by the force of it. I was not your first. You had been keeping secrets from me our entire life together.

  I swallowed hard and forced these thoughts from my mind.

  You were entitled to your privacy. I shouldn’t have impinged on it if I didn’t want to find out something that upset me.

  But try as I may, I couldn’t rationalize your lies away.

  I couldn’t work up the courage to confront you about them, either. At least not at first.

  I tried to run away once. Even now, I’m filled with shame at the thought. I wish I could say I broke away from you over and over again, valiantly flinging myself towards freedom. But that would be a lie. I was only brave enough to flee once, and it was on such a petulant whim it could hardly be called premeditated.

  It was a dreary English summer night, with rain trickling down from the moonless sky. We were on our second decade in the country, and the two of you still had that honeymoon glow, that sparkle in your eyes when you looked at each other. Most days, that looked filled me with warmth, but that night, my heart was cold.

  I watched you looking at her in the firelit glow of our flat, your hand on her knee as she bent her head close to yours to show you one of her skillful drawings, and my blood burned in my veins. Earlier that evening you had shouted at both of us for making eyes at the messenger boy who brought you letters from the university, and now you were as sweet as a hen tending her brood once again. It made me sick, watching Magdalena preen for you. She had always been better at fawning over you when your whims turned dark, and so you must love her better, no matter what you said. If I had given it a moment’s more thought I would have realized that I loved you and Magdalena both fiercely, so it was perfectly reasonable for you to love the both of us the same, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was sick with misery and jealousy, and the confines of the small London flat suddenly felt oppressive.

  I needed air. I needed the starlight and the wild throng of humanity outside our door, I needed to feel like I belonged to myself again.

  I dashed through the door while you were kissing her, into the dark and the rain without so much as a bonnet on. I had no idea where I was going, I just wanted to get away from the life we had built together, from the cycle of brutality and tenderness. My legs carried me out of habit to the doors of the great Gothic Southwark cathedral, looming beautifully on the edge of the Thames. I often came there by night to pray, to think, to watch the delectable people come and seek their absolution. Seeking their own scrap of the eternal, which I had in such abundant supply.

  Yet, that night, I would have given anything to be a mortal girl once again, flesh dying around me just as quickly as my beauty had come into bloom. An infinitesimal life seemed preferable to an endless one trailing after you like a dog.

  I retreated into the darkness of the cathedral, my hair dripping and the hem of my skirt dragging mud across the marble floors. As a girl I had been taught that churches were the dwelling place of God. I used to peer into every tiny shrine and crevice in the cracked walls of our village chapel looking for Him. The priest had told me that God was in everything, in the communion bread and in the cry of newborn babies and even in me. It had made me feel clean as newly fallen snow to hear him say that. But it had been a long time since I had felt clean.

  Like Christ, I had become intimately acquainted with violence and the sins of the world, but I had not come away unblemished. Only violence felt like holiness to me anymore. Perhaps I had given something away the night I had first tasted your blood, and now the place inside me where God used to dwell was empty. I hoped not, on that night of all nights. I needed divine strength in my veins. I needed some sense of worth beyond your hard-won approval of me.

  Sinking into a nearby kneeler, I bowed my head and took a shaky breath. I had been praying less and less, and the words of the Our Father felt clumsy in my mouth. But I pressed on, my fingers laced together so tightly the knuckles turned white.

  “Please, God,” I begged, my tiniest whisper echoing through the cavernous cathedral. “Make me strong. I’m so tired of being weak.”

  I don’t know how long I stayed like that, bent over and reciting a litany of prayers. Darkness pressed in around me like a familiar friend, shrouding my tears and disguising my face from the few other penitents who wandered past. I prayed in silence as they lit their candles, as content with my shadowed corner of the church as a child was in its mother’s embrace.

  All the sermons equated God with triumphant, searing light, rising in the east to drive away demons and disease. But I wondered if the Creator of the day also dwelled in night, guiding us all in the darkness. Perhaps I had not been forsaken when I made the night my eternal home.

  The thought sent a warm shiv
er through my body, and in that moment I understood the rapture of mystics who burst into tears when they felt the presence of God.

  “Constanta,” a voice behind me said. I gasped as I was roused from my reverie. For a moment I didn’t know where or who I was.

  But it was not God who had spoken.

  It was you.

  You stood behind me in your long cape, holding your hat between your hands. You might have looked apologetic, if it hadn’t been for the expression on your face. Haughty as ever, but with the telltale signs of restrained fury that I had trained myself to look for. Your lips were drawn tight together, and there was a furrow between your brows.

  “I’ve been looking for you for an hour,” you said, in such a calm tone of voice that my stomach quivered. I don’t think I had ever seen you so angry. I had no idea what you were going to do, and I was terrified.

  Good, I wanted to say. I wanted to spit the word out onto the ground at your feet and watch the shock cross your face. I wanted to cause you a lifetime of inconvenience, dig my heels in the next time you tried to move us, kick and scream when you tried to enforce your curfews. I wanted to fill the cathedral with accusations of every unkind and controlling thing you had ever done to me or Magdalena, and make you answer for them.

  But instead, all I could say was:

  “I’m sorry.”

  You held a hand out to me silently. I pushed myself up onto shaking knees and took a few tentative steps towards you. In that moment, I couldn’t have predicted what would happen next. You could have kissed me or slit my throat and either would have made as much sense.

  Still I walked to you. Slow, obedient steps. I walked when I should have run the other way.

  Your hand slid up my neck and your fingers threaded through my hair. Slowly, they tightened into a painful grip, and you tipped my head back so I was looking up at you. Your eyes were entirely dark, devoid of any pity.