Red Grow the Roses

by Janine Ashbless

  You will have to earn the right to be her victim.

  Unusual among vampires, Estelle is specific about the gender of her donors. For her it’s always men; she doesn’t touch women. Ask her why, if you dare. She has said, and quite possibly even believes, that it’s because of her sisters. She grew up looking after girls, after all: she can’t bring herself to prey on them. It’s not the whole truth, but she’s not introspective.

  From Chicago she moved to New York, where – ‘tall, tan and terrific’ as the management required – she danced and sang in the chorus line before all-white audiences at the Cotton Club, and began her first forays in singing jazz. She has a low, husky voice, does Estelle, and she still likes to sing. Her private collection of original 78s and studio recordings is worthy of a museum.

  In 1926 she signed on for a revue tour of France, and her life changed. To her bemusement, she became exotic overnight: ‘Une Princesse d’Afrique’, they billed her in the Folies Bergère. From une petite danseuse she became a well-known singer in the more exclusive clubs and restaurants, and soon she had a number of male admirers only too willing to supplement her wage with extravagant gifts. It was during this time that she developed her stage persona, haughty and merciless, and she grew into that armour like a crab into its shell.

  God, how those sophisticated men loved to play the trembling swain to that sassy, hard-edged chanteuse. To turn the world and its rules upside down in the perfumed sanctuary of her boudoir. To have her slap their faces and mock them and jiggle her dark-nippled breasts before their pleading mouths, flaunting her contempt for them. To have the proud African Princess thrash their flabby white backs and asses until they begged her for mercy, then make them crawl and kiss her beautiful cinnamon feet and bury their faces in the dark curls of her sex. It astonished and delighted her, what they wanted from her. She learned to use the whip and the paddle, the rack and the strap-on dildo, all instruments of a private theatre that earned her far more than the public stage. She learned how much strength and endurance is needed to wield a whip, and how much cunning and invention goes into breaking a man in ways he can’t anticipate but wants with all his heart.

  It was during this time that she met Reynauld and he fell in love, ignoring the self-imposed rule of centuries – and for the last time. He was not like her other lovers. Charmed as he was by her public persona, he saw beyond it. And there was of course the matter of his being immortal, ageless and terrifying. She could not despise him: not entirely.

  It was also at this time when the tuberculosis incipient in her lungs made itself fully known, flying its crimson flag. When she retired suddenly from the stage and fled Paris he tracked her to an exclusive TB sanatorium in Switzerland and offered her the only cure at his command. Coughing blood and fighting for breath, she didn’t hesitate to accept.

  He took her on a silvery night, under the snowfields of the watchful mountains. He’d fed from her before, of course, but only lightly. This time she had to surrender herself entirely to him, baring her long throat. This time she had to trust to his embrace and let his strength carry her to the edge and beyond.

  She hated that, and died hating.

  Crossing the dark waters of the Jordan, she found new life on the far shore: eternal life, just as she’d been promised when sitting on those hard pews in the whitewashed church so many years ago, holding her head high in order to catch the breeze from her mother’s fan. ‘Life in abundance,’ as the preacher had roared. She has, she believes, made good use of it. Almost the first thing she did after coming into her power was to return to the States, leaving Reynauld bereft. She spent a year hunting down every person she remembered as having hurt or exploited or slighted her, and took her revenge with consummate thoroughness, Alcibiades Nash first and last. But she didn’t stay after that. Mississippi was no longer her home, and at least in France she had status.

  She loves the limelight. Don’t ever forget that: what she craves is adulation. Adulation … and blood, of course. She regards both as her due, earned with hard work. She stayed in Paris until the Nazi invasion in 1940. Only then did she seek out Reynauld once more and make her new home in his domain, their relationship strained but mutually acceptable.

  She likes power. She likes notoriety, of a certain sort. She likes money because it gives her control, and allies herself with Reynauld because his rule is peaceful, which allows her to make more money and enmesh donors. All those she feeds from are men in the prime of life: big, hard, confident men at the swaggering apex of their prowess. For her, blood isn’t enough: she likes to inflict pain. She gets excited beating up on men – especially but not exclusively, in fact, white men. Luckily there are more than enough willing participants for her games, and she’s got the self-discipline to make sure she doesn’t fall foul of Reynauld’s rules even in the extremity of her desire.

  They are queuing up, all those men who want her to test their manhood to the limit, who want to make their pain an offering upon her altar. The fight clubs and the BDSM dungeons under her aegis, both gay and straight, are flourishing. The Pleiades is only one of several locations where the secret needs of men are met; and the deepest and darkest human need is to be not simply the one who sacrifices to his god, but the sacrifice itself.

  The Seven Little Sisters are commemorated now only as a nightclub sign: the years when she herded and hugged them, slapped and comforted them, a memory coated in nacre. If she ever thinks of those six little girls it is with an uncomfortable twitch of the shoulders and a faint sense of nausea at their tears and their fear and their silliness, their helpless need exposed before a world of hurting and injustice, as unappealing in its nakedness as a hairless baby possum.

  This is something even Estelle doesn’t know about herself: that it’s not entirely lust or vengeance she brings to her cruel games, though both are there in abundance. There’s a twisted admiration too. The traits she values – physical strength and courage and independence – she sees in men, so she spares women not out of kindliness but because they’re not good enough for her. She wouldn’t take well to being told so, but it’s decades since she last identified with any gender, ethnicity or species that isn’t top of the food-chain.

  If she had her real desire, it would be vampires that she fed from.

  5: Six for the Six Proud Walkers

  The dark of the moon always made me tense.

  Reynauld had only four women in with him that evening: he was keeping it brief because he was expecting the others of his kind for their monthly meet. On the night of the new moon the five blood-drinkers were expected to pay homage to their king in the shadows, and it was never a relaxed affair. I was prepared to welcome them at midnight, so while I waited I curled up on the chaise longue in the private bathroom beyond the playroom, ready should he call. I didn’t expect him to need anything from me, but I needed to be on hand.

  I could have chosen to be inside the room, of course, and join in with the other girls. He’d never said anything to stop me, and sometimes I still did take part, but I had to be in the mood. It’s hard at 49 to have to compare one’s body to those sleek, pretty young things. I felt self-conscious. I’d always taken care of myself and I’d never put on any weight, even after having Tim. I was trim and fit and not at all unattractive – for my age. Ah, there’s the rub. When you used to be truly beautiful it hurts bitterly to lose that edge.

  So while I waited outside the bedroom door with my chin in my hand, I could easily picture what was going on within. Four girls tonight. I knew all about them, since it was my job to arrange their arrival and departure. There was the R&B starlet who’d just had her first Top Ten hit, all big-eyed wonder at the world she’d found herself in and suffering from a slightly hyper desire to be liked. Big breasts too, and big bum; the sort you wanted to roll in. Not as pretty as she looked in her videos, but then very few people are, and certainly pretty enough. She was the one I could hear squealing at intervals. I doubted she’d get invited back, not unless she learned to c
alm down a bit.

  Besides the pop star there was a weather girl from breakfast TV, very popular with the nation’s dads, very sweet and girl-next-door. And the current Miss Malaysia, who was over here on a publicity tour of some sort and finding out things about Western culture that I doubted she’d ever anticipated. And some girl that he’d picked up at a Home Office reception, a ministerial aide of some sort. She was a bit on the thin side but had big, watchful eyes in which there was no trace of fear. I quite liked the look of her; she had probably been put up to the job by her department, but she might be a keeper.

  The weather girl was five months pregnant, her breasts swollen and her belly a ripening curve, and I knew that Reynauld found that utterly charming; he could hear the foetal heartbeat as he fed from her. I remembered what he was like from when I was pregnant with Tim – oh, not by him, of course; vampires don’t breed that way. I was married then and had just given up my modelling career and then this man … oh, this man. This beautiful, beautiful man with the honey skin and the aquiline nose and the eyes that said he wanted to eat you alive and the mouth that promised you would love him for it. All of which was true, of course. I loved him. I loved him so much.

  I still did.

  Part of me, inside, was still young and that part wished it need never end: the games in his commodious bed; the thoughtless living in the present, like a summer holiday that stretched on for ever. Listening to the muted sounds through the door I knew what I would see if I looked in there. His strong, spare, muscled body riding the waves of their flesh like a long-distance swimmer in a rolling sea. His cock, thick and dark with one prominent vein, webbed and glistening with cum and sex juice, sliding from one pink hole and twitching with impatience as he guided it into another. The shadowed muscles of his thighs and ass flexing as he thrust between their thighs or up against their cushioning bottoms. The clench of his jaw as he nuzzled hard into ripe flesh, splitting that peach-fuzz skin with his teeth and drinking their juices. He never tired. He was never sated.

  It’s weird. You get used to the assumption that a man has only one shot in him. Not vampires. I don’t know what it is – maybe the liquid diet, but I hesitate to apply pseudo-science because science flees the room in the face of some of the things they can do. Vampires, male as well as female, can orgasm over and over, and there never seems to be a night when they’re not itching for sex and never an end to the supply of jism; as soon as their balls are empty they’re recharged. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times Reynauld had fucked me over the last 27 years. I would arrive home, when I still had a home that wasn’t this place, with my legs trembling with exhaustion, my well-used bum-hole burning and my pussy swollen and numb.

  Nigel didn’t cope well with that. What man could? My marriage died but Reynauld kept fucking me and I didn’t even surface for air. Not for years and years.

  Part of me wished that it could have gone on for ever. Another part of me knew I had to grow up. He’d made his decision that there were to be no more new vampires, and that was that. It was a matter of principle. I was allowed to grow old, and one day he would allow me to die. He’d go on unchanged, immortal, when I was ashes. I still wanted him, but how much longer would he want me?

  That’s why I’d made some changes. I’d realised I needed to be useful to him in other ways. I learned to know and appreciate the wines he liked in order to be able to manage his cellar. I honed an interest in the kind of music and books he enjoyed so that I could indulge him that way. I started to organise the comings and goings of the house: the other girls, his diary, his purchases, his travel and contacts. I even drove the car when he went out in public. So that’s how I became what I was now: PA to a vampire. I liked to think he needed me, though I didn’t really know.

  I needed him.

  He was fucking those girls, while I sat there in my grey skirt and jacket waiting, my own sex wet with neglect. I buried my face in the crook of my arm and thrust my hand between my legs, not to masturbate but to hold myself. Some poor comfort.

  You’re too old to cry, I told myself. Suck it up. This is the life you chose. This is what it means to love a vampire.

  Concentrating on my breathing, I practised the meditation I’d learned in yoga class, emptying my mind. It didn’t have quite the intended effect of empty awareness but slowly the wash of self-pity did ebb away, and I came close to dozing off.

  ‘Amanda.’ A murmur. A hand stroked my hair, running through the silvery threads of my neat bob. My blonde hair had gone grey early; perhaps a result of my being fed upon too often, perhaps not.

  I sat up then, flustered. God – I hadn’t expected to hear his feet, he made practically no sound when he moved, but I hadn’t even heard the door open. A glance over the back of the chaise and I saw him running water into the sink, stooping to rinse his face and hands. The low light gleamed on his bare back and I stared, struck with aching need. Drying off with a hand towel, he moved to stand by the window. All the windows had big hardwood shutters that sealed out any daylight, but he drew one back to look out. I could see the neon glimmer of the river, the bridge, the embankment buildings: this one we lived in was used in the eighteenth century as a bonding warehouse where goods were unloaded and it’s still called The Bonding. From the outside it was all red brick arches, but the vast interior had been converted at phenomenal expense into a private residence. I’d been in charge of some of the redecoration myself.

  Here’s a tip on interior decoration for vampires: no carpets. But white towels. They like to see fresh bloodstains on the white.

  His expression as he looked out was troubled, I thought, not his normal post-coital satisfaction; he seemed intent on some private thought. ‘Is everything ready?’ he asked as he turned back.

  Reynauld was naked. He wasn’t shy. I caught my breath, still mesmerised after all these years by his beauty. His build was athletic rather than broad, but every inch of it was muscle and when he was unclothed the muscle made hard angles in all the right places. His legs, his belly and his chest were flecked with dark hair, like someone had taken a fine fibre-tipped pen and inked flow-lines down the sculpted contours of his pectorals and his abs, all the leys finally converging in his crotch. I tried not to look at his cock and nearly succeeded; it was quiescent for once, hanging long and sleek, though because he was circumcised it always had a suggestion of readiness.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I got up, feeling slightly discomfited at having been caught napping, and smoothed my clothes. My outfit looked very formal, almost like a uniform, and that was the point of wearing it tonight. I glanced at my watch. ‘You’ve got about forty minutes before they’re due. Do you want to wash?’

  He smiled a little. His black, slightly wavy hair was swept back from a high forehead with a widow’s peak; you’d think it was starting to recede but it hadn’t retreated any further in nearly 1,200 years. ‘I don’t think so.’

  I nodded, understanding. Vampires don’t sweat, I’d learned, and have almost no body odour of their own – but they do have a phenomenal sense of smell. Reynauld meant to walk among his fellows stinking of sex and blood. It was a blunt but effective message of dominance. ‘Clothes? I’ve laid out a suit, a dinner jacket …’

  He twitched an eyebrow, amused at the cliché of a vampire in evening attire. I sighed, exasperated.

  ‘There’s the leather coat if you prefer.’

  ‘No. I think I’ll … dress myself.’

  With a twitch of his hand he summoned the shadows. From out of the cupboards and from the dark places under the furniture they came flowing across the floor towards him, like great swathes of cloth, textureless and insubstantial. They swooped up about his legs, furling him momentarily in layers of black, then settled about his shoulders, taking on the cut of a robe with a deeply split neck, its skirt so vast that it encompassed the room, fading to transparency at the furthest reaches. Only his face, hands and breastbone were bare, but I knew that if I stepped up to him the opaque robe would have no m
ore tactile resistance than a layer of soot. When he moved, every shadow in the chamber moved with him, the darkness drawn to him like filings to a magnet.

  That’s when I knew that something bad was going down that night. I bit the inside of my lip.

  The shadows whispered as they flowed in his wake. He looked down into my face. ‘Am I presentable?’

  Of course he couldn’t check himself in a mirror. His reflection would be nothing but a blur, as if the glass were warped. I reached up a hand to pull a long blonde hair out of his small beard and studied him critically. Dark beard, dark brows, dark eyes, prominent cheekbones. I burned to kiss his lips but I didn’t dare. He’d feel warm to the touch now, I knew, because he’d just fed. ‘You look fine.’

  ‘You’re nervous.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I can hear your heart, remember.’

  I looked down, hoping he wouldn’t see the yearning in my eyes. He didn’t like neediness in his girls. It was one of the reasons I’d stopped joining him in bed so often: I’d been too fond of being bitten and I’d needed to take control of that. ‘I’m always nervous on these nights,’ said I quite truthfully. ‘I don’t want you to get hurt.’

  A smile escaped his lips on a breath: ‘You worry for me, Amanda?’ He touched my face, gently, then drew me into his arms to plant a kiss softly on my forehead and then my hair. I was right; his lips were warm. ‘How can there be anything to worry about? You’ll be there to look after me.’

  Not always, thought I. Not for ever.

  * * *

  I made sure I was downstairs to greet the guests well before midnight, and that the front doors of The Bonding were standing wide. Reynauld didn’t like unpunctuality, especially on these nights. The purpose of the monthly meets was in part to maintain contact between the disparate individuals, to make sure instructions were passed on and to gather news, but primarily it was about Reynauld’s authority. He summoned them because he could and they came because they didn’t dare ignore him.