Women of the Dark Streets

by Radclyffe

  “Feed from me, vampire,” I urge her. I can’t remember ever wanting something—someone-—so much. Who knew I would find what I sought in a vampire? “Make me yours.”

  She bites down. I gasp at the twin darts of pain. Pain quickly turns to pleasure. Spasms rack my body as her throat works. She swallows hungrily. Greedily. She soon withdraws, careful not to take too much. She holds me until my quivering muscles eventually relax and go limp. Then she regards me through eyes heavy-lidded with desire. “Deliciosa.” She slowly, delicately licks the punctures on my neck. I can feel the wounds already starting to close. “You are exquisite, hunter.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself.” I draw a pale pink nipple into my mouth. Scrape it with my teeth. She hisses again. This time in approval. She arches her back, offering herself to me. I want to take her. I want to feel her submit to me. But not here. Not like this. I cover her exposed flesh—so pallid it’s almost luminous—and help her to her feet. “Let’s go back to my place. I want to claim my prize in private.”

  “That’s the best offer I’ve heard in four hundred years.”

  She lifts me into her arms. The full moon lights the way as we fly through the night sky. She locates my loft without asking me for directions.

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  “As I said, I have been tracking you for quite some time.”

  She lingers outside my door, waiting for me to invite her inside. I don’t extend the invitation right away. First I toss my ruined tank top on the floor. Then I kick off my boots and shrug off my pants. I stand before her in nothing but my bra and boy-cut briefs.

  “Do you like what you see?”

  She murmurs in assent. “Very much.” Her nostrils flare as if she’s on the verge of losing control. “I’d love to see more.”

  I extend my hand. “Join me.”

  She takes my hand and steps across the threshold. In the living room, she lingers in front of my cache of weapons. Her long fingers caress a wood-handled mace with steel spikes. She lifts a cat-o’-nine-tails. When she flicks her wrist, the crack of the whip sounds like a rifle shot. “Someone’s been a naughty girl.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet.” I lead her to the bedroom, where I intend to show her just how naughty I can be.

  I undress her with deliberate slowness. Why rush when we have all of eternity to be together?

  Her body is amazing. Free of wrinkles or imperfections. She lies on the bed. Her hair fans across the pillow. The ebony tresses provide a stark contrast to the crisp white sheets. I kiss my way from her feet to her lips. Then I slowly lower myself onto her.

  She holds my hair away from my face. “Tan hermosa,” she says in Spanish. “So beautiful. So beautiful and yet so deadly.” She traces a finger over the battle scars that decorate my body like badges of honor. “I would much rather have you as a lover than an opponent.”

  “I could say the same.”

  I lower my head. Kiss the lips that whisper my name. I slip my hand under the pillow her head is resting on and wrap my fingers around the stake I keep hidden there. She stiffens when she sees it. Her hand covers mine, seeking to impede its steady progress.

  “What’s the matter, vampire?” I ask, continuing to slide the point of the stake across her skin. “Don’t you trust me?”

  Her eyes meet mine. Her hand falls away. “I trust you with my life.”

  I toss the stake across the room. It imbeds itself in the heart of the mannequin I use for target practice.

  Sienna smiles. “Beautiful, deadly, and accurate.”

  I press my lips to her chest. How strange it is not to feel a heartbeat skip at my touch. I move lower. Her hips rise to meet my mouth. Her legs spread to accommodate my shoulders. I part her lips with my tongue.

  “Yes, hunter,” she sighs, her head lolling on the pillow. “Drink from me.”

  Her wish is my command.

  When she comes, color infuses her skin. She looks almost human. The illusion is only temporary. The rosy blush in her cheeks soon fades, but my desire for her grows stronger.

  She rolls me over. Her fingers slip inside me, penetrating all the way to my soul. It’s my turn to submit.

  “Abide with me, hunter. Be my consort.”

  “Yes, my queen.”

  Remember my earlier rant about not allowing myself to fall in love with a vampire? Let me amend that. I could never allow myself to fall in love with any vampire except Sienna Jones. She drove a stake through my heart the first time I laid eyes on her. Now she wants me to rule at her side.

  Most of my fellow hunters won’t approve of or support my decision to become her mate—after she turns me, some might pursue me as diligently as they would any other child of the night—but my mind was made up the day we confronted each other in that piss-stained alley in the Dominican Republic. All she had to do was ask the appropriate question. All she had to do was come for me. In more ways than one.

  I’m not going to stop doing what I do after I become a vampire myself, but I will become more selective. Instead of staking every vampire I come across, I will seal the fates of only the unrepentant. Those who seek to kill for sport, not feed to survive.

  Just as vampires cannot change their natures, I cannot change mine.

  My name is Alex Whitney. I’m a vampire hunter. I always get my woman. This time, I get to keep her. Forever.

  Contrition

  Mel Bossa

  When she calls my name, I know who I am.

  “Berenice,” she says, and kisses the cleft of my throat.

  But that’s not my name.

  Why can’t I bring myself to correct her? Somehow, I know she’s never been wrong about anything in her life. It’s in her hands—the way they touch me.

  She doesn’t need to get my name right. I don’t mind her calling me Magdalene, Athena, Isis…

  “How much longer?” she asks me.

  I don’t know. I don’t know when yesterday was, and tomorrow is only a gaping hole. I can’t remember how I let her in—how did we get so deeply intertwined?

  I always want to ask her name. Then she is with me, as she is now, and I realize she told me days ago.

  I just can’t remember what it is.

  “How much longer?” she says again and again.

  Why is she here? I should be with Aimee.

  Where is Aimee? My Aimee.

  I am thinking of her now.

  Yes, Aimee, I am thinking of your eyes—the July sun cutting diamonds inside them.

  I am thinking of when we met. I loved you before you even spoke. You looked at me from across the tables—it was a crowded restaurant, an awful steakhouse smelling of charred meat, Thursday morning, closing time, thirsty, hungry, elated from a night of dancing—and you stared at me without blinking, without playing. You stared until I looked away.

  I’d never even thought of looking away, but you made me. You owned me from the start.

  Did we know how to fall in love? We never really jumped, now did we? No, we were shoved in, both of us together. We thought we were holding hands on the way down, but they were bound, Aimee.

  We couldn’t have let go if we’d tried.

  We walked out of the restaurant and the sun was rising.

  It was like walking out of a dungeon.

  Where did we go that night? My place? Yours? Does it really matter? I knew we’d make love wherever our bodies landed from this fall. Your bed or mine. It was a fantastic feeling, wasn’t it? To know for certain, yes without a doubt, that the body, face, lips, skin you crave to touch are yours. There will be no resistance, no games. I walked side by side with you and I knew you’d let me burn all night. You wouldn’t put me out with stories of old spiteful lovers or broken childhood dreams.

  There was no need for conversation, Aimee. No, that’s not it: There was no way for conversation. We’d been hit in the throat by love’s five knuckles. Recognition. Intuition. Physical Impulse. Scent.

  What is the last knuckle of lo
ve?

  I don’t know, Aimee. I can’t remember.

  It comes and goes, your face.

  “Sophia,” the other woman calls me now.

  What does she want? I wait, but she never answers me. Who is she? How did I end up in her arms? This is the longest night of all nights. I don’t know how to tell her I need to leave. But when morning comes, I’ll know what to do about her. I’ll get rid of her, Aimee, I promise. And I’ll find you—we’ll fix this. We’ll put the thing back together. Our thing.

  The thing that feeds the world.

  “Murderer,” she whispers close to my ear without breath.

  This word seems to excite her. She is slipping her hand between my thighs and I swell under the touch.

  “Killer,” she moans.

  This is her game? Have we played it before? What does she expect of me?

  Aimee, we never needed to role-play in bed, did we? No, we watched TV, turned out the light, and all you ever needed to do to kick-start my heart was kiss my mouth and pull my hand into your worn-out panties.

  It could have been like that for eighty-five years between us and it would have been all right. You didn’t care if we never tried anything. You didn’t care if we never used our imaginations.

  We didn’t need to. We always came. And with every day we loved each other, we came harder.

  It’s true, don’t tell me it isn’t. You’d be lying if you did.

  “Berenice,” she pesters me now. I feel her face—hand?―brushing my inner thigh. Why doesn’t she just go down on me already?

  “Taker of life,” she says, softly. And I raise my hips to her mouth.

  She moves away from me. Where is she going? I can’t see anything tonight. Not even my window. I’m sealed into the black—part of it. I wait for her to come back, my body pulsing under the cover of darkness. I want to touch myself while she’s gone, just a little—I need to relieve this ache, but I am fighting off sleep, or maybe I am already touching myself and numb.

  Or…I’ve already come and I am sleeping.

  When you got that job at the market, that’s when it all went to the pits, no? Why did you have to fall into that net? Those girls—those pallid girls in their overalls smelling of compost—they wanted to be around you, but they never understood you. They lured you into their inner circle, offering you up to their Vegan Gods, celebrating your beauty, but all the while, they diminished it day by day. You stopped wearing perfume. You didn’t want to dye your hair that lovely gold anymore. You didn’t flush the toilet unless you shat.

  You were so eager to be part of something, and it didn’t matter what it was. So I let you. I let you set up your castle of cards knowing the hurricane was coming.

  All weekend, you left me. And you went to stand behind a table of vegetables. No one ever sold so many beets, corn, sweet peas, before you. It’s your smile, Aimee; it convinces us cynics to believe in beauty again.

  I’d call you every hour, but you never answered your phone, now did you? You couldn’t, you said. You had to be available and approachable. Do you know how much that angered me? How much I suffered all those weekend days? Pretending to work on my thesis, drinking six cups of coffee a day, barely eating, jumping when the phone rang, but it was never you. Never you. And you had the audacity to leave the market with those cucumber witches to go get drunk every Saturday night?

  Fuck you, Aimee. And fuck them too.

  I’m here tonight because I want to be. I want this woman. You’re not here. You’re not here and I don’t care.

  “Come with me.” She’s back now. She’s close to me again.

  I want to ask where she went, but I’m sure she’s already told me.

  “You come with me now,” she says again. And her voice is raw. What time is it? How long have we been playing this game? I can’t break free from her. Not tonight.

  You slept with all of them, didn’t you? Yes, Aimee, you did. I talked too much and I read too much philosophy. You didn’t need John Dewey’s Pragmatism—you needed passion!

  You screamed out all of your dissatisfaction to me one afternoon. I didn’t see it coming. I stood there with the wooden spoon in my hand, the sauce dripping from it, and looked at you. You hated me looking at you. You hid your face inside your hands and I thought of the elephant man—just like him, you were diseased and these growing deformities on your soul were not your fault.

  You threw things at me. You spat and cried. I thought you were ashamed of neglecting me and I played to your remorse like a child plays to his mother’s tears after he’s been whipped by her hand.

  I held you and told you you were perfect. I believed it.

  What did it feel like? To lie to me? To betray me? To snuggle up against me, red-nosed, bleary-eyed, pitiful, loved, knowing you were sneaking behind my back, making a fool of me? That night, that very night we had our final confrontation, you kissed me and fled out the door. You wanted to take a bike ride along the water to clear your head.

  Things felt right. Things felt so right.

  I sat back, leaned my head against the couch, and pulled my T-shirt up to my nose. It smelled like you. Your new earthy smell, and I thought of soil—what can come of it. I smiled for the first time in two months. We were going to be all right again. We’d reached another level. You’d matured. You’d understood I was the only sane thing left for you.

  Yes, Aimee, I felt satisfied and vindicated. Your tears had soothed my worries.

  And while I walked around the apartment—our apartment, our home—seeing every object with new eyes, feeling grounded, capable, efficient, you’d been in the arms of another woman.

  As I lifted the newspaper in search of my eyeglasses, the truth of you hit me like a bullet through the cerebral cortex. You were out cheating! Oh, at first I dispelled the thought as one dispels the first drop of rain on the last day of vacation.

  No, no, I told myself, you were out riding your bike along the water, and I clung to that idea. I clung to my sanity.

  But I knew then. It was only that, an idea.

  And ideas are hardly ever true.

  “Come,” she beckons me now, reminding me of her presence, reminding me that she never leaves. And I want to come, leave or stay. Her hands move along my body and I want to reach out, but I can’t—or she won’t let me. She is rolling onto me, pressing the length of her along my legs, womb, heart. I’m bathed in darkness, but her face is near mine, and if I want to, only if I want to, she’ll flash her face for me to see.

  But I don’t want to see it. Oh God no. Don’t let me see her face. I think I know what it looks like. I think I’ve seen it as a child. She was in my room once.

  “Do you feel the hate in me?” she moans into my neck. There is a putrid scent to her breath and I want to recoil. I want to go back to where this started, but how can I bend back to a place that is out of reach?

  Do you know the rage I felt that night? My body hardened like old clay around my soul. I clutched the newspaper inside my hand, hoping to strangle the malevolent passion that threatened to overcome my mind.

  Then, as if all of the ocean’s currents had come to a stop under the moon—as if they now refused to obey her command, I felt my own blood turn quiet and my pulse decelerate. I would find you.

  I knew where you were. You were with Cass. That little tomboy heartthrob—Ms. Youth, Swagger, and Jest. She’d always left the room when I entered. She’d always turned her eyes from me.

  I grabbed my keys and quietly left our home. Outside, it was twilight and I looked up to the blue stars, the fat sister moon, and drove through our neighbourhood, slowly, without angst or emotion. When I found you, I’d say, “You lied, bitch.” And then I would leave, drive under the blue stars again, the sister moon, without angst or emotion.

  It would be so.

  I would have my vengeance through the look on your face.

  I climbed Cass’s stairs, knocked on the front door, waited, and turned the knob. The door swung open, showing me a darkly lit
hallway and a light in the kitchen. I didn’t skip a breath. I didn’t skip a thought.

  “Come now,” she whispers, caressing my left breast. Under her touch, my heart is silent. How can it be silent? “You’ve chosen your path,” she says. And there is a threat in her voice.

  Where am I, Aimee? Where are you?

  I walked into Cass’s apartment, following the sound of your whispers. I came to the bedroom doorway and looked into the dim room. A candle lit your body. You were beautiful.

  “Aimee?”

  You didn’t try to cover yourself.

  Cass jumped out of bed, her small breasts heaving.

  “Easy now,” she breathed, looking not at me, but at my hand. “You don’t have to do this.”

  What did I do, Aimee? What did I do? I hadn’t noticed I’d picked it up. I hadn’t known it had been near me, on the passenger seat—I hadn’t felt its weight in my hand, walking up the stairs to you.

  I hadn’t minded the cold steel feel of it under my fingers.

  “You come with us, now.” She is still with me. She will never let me forget that night. No, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go there with her. She has the face of Midnight Tales.

  No, I can’t go with her.

  I want you, Aimee. I want to go back to you.

  “You cannot go back to what you’ve torn apart.”

  Who is speaking to me? Aimee? Who is here with me?

  “You blew her head off.”

  I open my eyes but there is nothing. There is nothing to see and nothing to hear, but her face, her voice. I can’t be here. I can’t leave like this.

  I didn’t know it was in my hand, Aimee. I’d been studying too hard. Not eating enough. I didn’t know what day it was anymore. Believe me, Aimee, please, oh God, please. Don’t let her take me. Not like this.

  “Think of her eyes—how they questioned everything she’d ever believed—as the bullet tore through her frontal lobe. Think of her last experience and you will know where you are.”

  I scream, but hear nothing.

  I can’t move, but I am moving. I am sliding across the sheets. No, no, they can’t be sheets. The surface under my skin is smooth—polished. Aimee, please, tell her to stop.