“Your thrill-seeking will kill you,” was all you said, flatly. “You shouldn’t drink from each other.”
“Why?” Magdalena whined, her mouth smeared with her brother’s blood. She didn’t get to finish her line of questioning, because I started kissing it off her insistently.
“Because I don’t know what the effects are. I haven’t done enough research.”
“Well then get in here and do some research,” Alexi said, pulling you into bed.
His charms were hard to resist, as you well knew, and so did half the city of Paris. Alexi must have had a hundred friends scattered throughout the city, and he did his best to split this time between all of them. You disapproved of these connections and did your best to keep him at home, within arm’s reach. Relationships with humans were all doomed from the start, you insisted. Either they died unexpectedly, breaking your heart, or they caught on to your true nature eventually and had to be put down. But Alexi wouldn’t be deterred. He kept befriending actors and poets and jazz musicians, and he kept pushing you to let him roam freely outside the house.
“It’s been ages since I was on the stage,” Alexi pleaded one night. We were all coming back from a night at the theatre, taking our time walking home in the warm summer air. “Why won’t you let me audition?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” you said with a heavy sigh. This was not the first time you and Alexi had had this conversation. “Eventually, people would start asking questions. They would notice that you don’t age. Use your head, Alexi.”
“Then I’ll switch troupes! You’ve never even seen me act, I was very good! I would be responsible, I promise.”
You gave him an indulgent smile.
“Why don’t you do a monologue for us at home, then? We can have our own private performance; we don’t need all those other people. Besides, I don’t want to share you with them.”
You were speaking in a low, cajoling voice, the way you spoke to him when you were trying to entice him into your bed. Alexi didn’t look convinced, but he nodded anyway.
Later that night, Magdalena accentuated his features with dabs of her makeup while I created a backdrop of bedsheets. He performed scene after scene from memory, declaring valiant love before launching into a tyrant’s triage and then dying beautifully on the ground as Romeo. You cheered him on and tucked roses into his lapel, waxing poetic about his once-in-a-century talent. Alexi, ever a lover of the spotlight, grinned so wide that I thought his face might get stuck that way.
“See?” you said. “You don’t need to go running around on stage with the rabble of Paris. Our home will be your theatre, and we your devoted audience.”
Alexi’s smile faltered a little, but he let you kiss him all the same.
Alexi was entirely rapt by you, following you around like a dog at the heels of its master. He adored everything about you, good and bad, from your soft-spoken declarations of love to your flashes of foul temper. The love he had for you was the cartographer’s love for the sea, trembling and all-consuming and so far beyond the reaches of right or wrong. Far from shrinking from your bad moods, he welcomed them.
Alexi provoked and riled you at every turn, seeming to delight in the conflict, and he did whatever he pleased despite your litany of rules. Nothing was sacred to Alexi, and he was happy to commit the most outlandish and egregious of faux pas whenever it pleased him. For the most part, you ignored his antics as though he were a misbehaving child, probably hoping he would settle into his new life with time. But the opposite happened. The longer Alexi lived with us, the more restless he became. Eventually, even your sweetest words and most luxurious gifts couldn’t placate him.
One night, you and I came back from the hunt to find all the lights burning in the apartment. We were greeted at the door by the sounds of tinkling champagne glasses and uproarious laughter, sounds so foreign to that house.
You froze in the entryway, your hand still gripping the door knob, and listened in gobsmacked silence for a moment.
“Alexi,” you growled.
I followed after you at a brisk clip as you strode down the hallway towards the parlor. Alexi lounged on the couch with a glass of wine in his hand, holding court over a ragtag group of seven or eight guests. I assumed they were actors from their florid but frayed clothes, and the smears of greasepaint still clinging to hairlines and shirt cuffs.
Far from looking contrite, Alexi burst into a smile when he saw you.
“Darling!” he crowed, beckoning you over. “Come have a drink with us.”
You stood glowering in your own parlor, looking like the Red Death come to break up a lively party. There was no way you would have given Alexi your approval to bring people over to the house. It was our sanctum; no one stepped foot inside except servants and meals.
You deliberately removed your gloves one finger at a time.
“Alexi,” you repeated, heavy and low. You had an uncanny ability to turn any of our names into a warning when you wanted to.
Alexi ignored the threat, slinging his arm around the shoulders of a young man seated next to him on the sofa. The boy was gangly and hadn’t quite grown into his limbs yet, around the same age Alexi has been when you turned him. Magdalena sat on his other side, looking entirely enchanted by the ruckus in her living room. She had probably been surprised when he brought the actors home, but she didn’t seem upset at the diversion in the slightest.
“These fine players just closed a marvelous show,” Alexi prattled on. “Totally modern, avant garde , as they say. It was a revelation. Come, sit with us! Constance, you too, dear one.”
I looked to you for my cue but you were staring straight ahead at Alexi, boring holes into him with your eyes. Eventually, you gave a dismissive wave of your hand, bidding me sit. You stalked over to an open armchair and perched yourself on the edge of it, your face dangerously placid. I never knew what was going on beneath the surface when you arranged your features like that. It frightened me.
“Magdalena, what’s going on?” I whispered to her sidelong.
She colored a bit.
“I know I should have turned them away, but it was just so nice to have company after all this time… Alexi said he had permission.”
“Alexi is a liar,” I muttered back, looking between our golden prince’s smiling face and your stony one. He had bitten off more than he could chew this time, I was sure of it. There was going to be hell to pay the instant you two were alone.
But I could hardly blame Alexi for bringing the merry band home, nor blame Magdalena for letting them in. They filled the living room with light and sound, and made the drafty old apartment seem snug and lived-in. A party was just what these beautiful old rooms needed, I decided. That was how they were meant to be appreciated.
A pretty young woman in a shift dress and feather earrings circled the room, pouring the dregs of a wine bottle into mismatched glasses. They had raided our untouched kitchen and made do with what they found there, apparently. I smiled weakly at her when she pressed a glass into my hand. Then she moved on to you, suddenly looking a little nervous under the weight of your eyes.
“Do you drink wine?” she asked hesitantly. “We’ve got absinthe, too.”
You smiled at her, cloying and irresistible. A little shudder went through her and she gave a laugh. The next thing I knew you had gallantly taken her by the hand and pulled her into your lap.
Warm laughter rippled through the room, and Alexi clapped his hands in approval. His pretty friend flushed and covered her mouth with her hand, but her eyes sparkled with delight. Who could deny you, after all, with that rakish smirk on your face?
I clutched my glass of wine warily, marveling at your sudden good humor. It wasn’t unheard of, for your mood to change on a dime. But it usually swept from content to contemptuous, not the other way around.
“You see?” Magdalena whispered to me with a smile. “It will all be alright.”
You kissed the girl’s wrist and murmured something to her. She
leaned in closer to hear you over the happy chatter of the party, her chestnut curls falling to the side to expose a beautiful brown throat. You lightly kissed the juncture of her neck and shoulder, earning a flutter of her dark lashes.
Then you parted your lips against her skin, so gently at first, until I could see the sheen of your teeth all the way across the room.
“Don’t — ” I started, pushing myself to my feet.
You squeezed her hand and drove your teeth into her neck, holding her fast when she screamed and tried to wrench away.
The room erupted into chaos. Alexi’s friends shrieked and dropped their glasses onto the rug. They shot to their feet and clutched each other in terror. It all happened so fast, none of us had any time to so much as formulate a sentence.
You dropped the girl’s body unceremoniously to the ground. It slumped onto the hardwood glassy-eyed and pale.
Alexi screamed your name. I barely heard him, over the clatter and rush of bodies fleeing the room. In moments, all of his friends were gone.
Magdalena shrieked her rage. She was on her feet, fists trembling at her sides. I was frozen; my wine glass shattered at my feet while I watched the life drain out of that poor girl’s eyes.
“What have you done!” Magdalena wailed.
“Go to your room, Magdalena,” you snapped, wiping the blood from your mouth with the cuff of your shirt. “I don’t want to look at you. This is your doing, you and Alexi’s.”
“How can you possibly say — ”
“ Leave us ,” you hissed.
Magdalena opened her mouth to argue with you, but the ferocity of your gaze silenced her. She stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind her hard enough that I jumped. I was still rooted to the couch, struck with shock.
Alexi was having fits. He hadn’t stopped screaming at you since you bit that girl, and now, in the ensuing quiet of the near-empty living room, I could finally make out what he was saying.
“You bastard! You absolute monster!”
“We are monsters, Alexi,” you shot back, thrusting your hand towards the dead body. “This is what comes from forgetting that. How could you be so careless and stupid to bring humans into this house? This is what happens to them, you know that.”
“They’re my friends!” Alexi shouted, going red in the face. He looked every inch the petulant prince in his loose white shirt, but his rage was that of a grown man. “Why don’t you let any of us have friends?”
In any other scenario you would have walked out and left Alexi with his tempestuous emotions, but he was blocking your way to the door. I knew from experience that if Alexi kept pushing you, you would explode. I tensed involuntarily.
“They aren’t friends. They’re humans. Prey animals, ghosts of a past life. You forget yourself, Alexi.”
“I’m not forgetting anything! Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one around here who remembers anything. The taste of food, the feel of warm skin, the sound of laughter.”
“Alexi,” I said quietly, holding my arms out to him.
“Don’t defend him!” Alexi shouted. “All you ever do is defend him.”
His words pricked my heart like a hornet sting, but I knew he was right. All those years living under your thumb and I still justified your behavior to the others, hoping to make sense of the madness.
“Alexi,” you hissed.
He turned the full force of his wrath back onto you. “I didn’t sign up to waste away in some tower room while the world went on turning outside. You told me I would live. I want to live .”
“The world has no place for us,” you snapped, eyes flashing dark fire. “We are wanderers by nature, lions among lambs. We have no recourse with our food.”
“Just shut up and listen to me,” Alexi shouted, tears springing to his eyes. I had seen Alexi cry only a handful of times in our years together, and the sight frightened me. I wanted terribly to fold him up in my arms and hide him away from you, but this was his fight. He had been itching for it for months, and I wasn’t going to rob him of it. “I need friends. Don’t you understand? The way I need blood, or rest. I’ll lose my mind without them.”
“You have your sisters.”
“We cannot exist only for each other!” Alexi screamed, right in your face.
You slapped him.
It was sharp, deliberate, and the force nearly knocked Alexi to the ground.
That slap snapped me out a reverie I had been living in for hundreds of years. It obliterated any grace I had left to give you, any lies I was still telling myself about your good intentions and your savior’s heart.
I had always comforted myself in the dark hours after any of our arguments with the thought that at least, you had never hurt any of us. You would never hurt any of us. You only wanted what was best for us, and you were harsh with us because you loved us.
But now, all my carefully crafted excuses for you dissolved like sugar under absinthe, revealing a truth I had spent centuries avoiding.
“You hit him,” I blurted. It was the only thought screaming through my mind. “Oh my God. You hit him.”
“We’re leaving,” you announced, looking a little unsteady, as though you were surprised by your own violence. You always prided yourself on your restraint, after all. “Pack your things. Both of you.”
I rushed over to Alexi and pulled him into my arms, letting him bury his face in my bosom.
“You can’t just make us leave,” Alexi spat, cradling his wounded cheek in his hand. The fight hadn’t gone out of him entirely, but the fire of his rage had been dampened. “We have a life here.”
“Any life you had here died with her,” you said, jutting your chin towards the corpse quickly going cold on the rug. “There were witnesses, Alexi. A half dozen of them. They know what you are now, and they’ll run you through with a hot iron or make you eat silver bullets if they see you again. The police will be coming soon, looking for death and someone to blame. Do you really want to be here when they arrive?”
“Do not do this,” I heard myself say. I felt so small, so pathetic and useless. You had laid hands on my beloved Alexi right in front of me and here I was, pleading like a schoolgirl. I should have torn your throat out in that very instant, and every day I regret that I was too frightened to try. “Don’t drag us out onto the road again.”
You gave me an almost pitying look. It made me sick to my stomach.
“None of you have left me any choice,” you said.
The chateau you found for us was miles away from the nearest city, a crumbling pastoral house that had seen better days. The money had begun to run out by then, I suspect. No amount of sound investments and jewels handed down through generations could outlive the slow grind of time, and our lifestyles had become less and less extravagant in recent years. Our finances were in as much a state of decay as that house was, wasting away with stubborn slowness.
You shut us up in that great house like misbehaving children in a nursery. Every shutter was closed, ensconcing us in a world of eternal night. You added locks to all the windows and doors, claiming that they were to keep out the superstitious peasants, but they locked from the inside, and you carried the key around with you at all times.
Magdalena lapsed into melancholy and took to spending long intervals in her room alone, languishing under silk sheets and refusing food for days at a time. I wandered the halls during the days, sleepless as a mad woman from a Gothic novel. Alexi, for his part, railed. He became prone to fits of rage that reminded me so much of you that my chest hurt, bursting into shouts or slamming his hands against the locked door at the slightest provocation. It was never directed at us girls, always at you, at his circumstances, but I still ached for him. I wanted to spirit him away from your corrosive influence, nurse his heart back to health somewhere where the doors were always open and no one ever raised their voices except in mirth.
As the days wore on, my hopes seemed more like flights of fancy. We were entirely alone out in the country without
any reprieve from your tyrannical chaperonage, and the villagers around us were suspicious gossips. None of them would help us, I was sure. They would sooner bind us hand and foot and offer us up to the parish priest as devils in need of exorcisms. Word travelled fast in small villages, and it was common knowledge that the strange disappearances of unattended maidens had only happened after we moved in.
I chafed against the rustic meals, all the more sick with the knowledge that I was dining on innocents. They were peasant girls, just as I had been a peasant girl once, open-hearted and trusting. You strictly forbade me from any of my avenging tendencies and did all the hunting for us, leaving us alone in the house for long stretches of time. I wondered if withholding yourself for those hours was another kind of punishment. You would think we would be happy to be rid of you, but we had been weaned on you like children on mother’s milk, and we were always just as relieved to see you come home as we were to see you ride off. You had debased us all over time, as slow as dripping water wearing a hole in stone. We couldn’t abide you, but we couldn’t live without you.
“He’s like a sickness,” Alexi said, lying close besides me on Magdalena’s lace-trimmed bed. She was having one of her good days, when she was awake for most of the night and bright-eyed.
“How so?” I asked, my fingers latticed over my belly.
“Being around him is like burning up with fever. I know I’m not well, but I’m too delirious to do anything. What medicine is there for that sort of thing?”
“A bracing walk through the cold,” Magdalena murmured. “And patience. Fevers have to burn themselves out.”
A Dowry of Blood Page 12
