by Alex Severin
She felt stifled. Her throat was tight. Constricted. Couldn't breathe. The air felt as if it were full of impurities that made her throat swell and made it necessary for her to clear her throat every few minutes. She felt like she had a lump there, a lump that made it hard for her to swallow, hard for her to eat or drink, or even just talk. Although she'd not being doing much of either lately.
But she knew there wasn't really many impurities in the air. She knew there wasn't really a lump in her throat. She'd had this before. Suffered from it since she was a teenager.
Globus hystericus.
A nervous condition which gives the impression of a lump in the throat or constriction of the esophagus.
My hysterical globe.
The tension she felt throughout her whole body was unbearable. It got worse by the minute and she knew as soon as her vision started to blur and she felt as if the floor was rising up to meet her, that a full-blown panic attack wasn't far off.
She really didn't want to have a panic attack right now.
A panic attack was the last thing she needed.
And there was only one way she knew it could be avoided.
Just one.
She needed a release from the stress and the anguish and the guilt that was eating her up from the inside out. She needed – even if only temporarily – to reduce the level of rising panic in her head and in her guts before it drove her completely insane.
Lily needed to be cleansed, to be rid of all the spilled blood she felt now flowed through her own veins. She needed to cut.
Lily sat on the cold white-tiled floor in the bathroom and rummaged through her vanity case. She found a disposable razor and a nail file. She used the metal file to carefully prise open the pink plastic casing and liberate the instrument of her redemption.
She gazed at the razor blade as if it were something mystical, something mysterious, something that held answers to unanswerable questions and all she needed to do to gain that knowledge was to feed the blade.
Her mouth became dry as she stared at it in anticipation of the release she knew was imminent. Her excitement mounted and she knew she was getting wet just looking at the glinting steel edge.
She knew there was nothing in the world that could make her feel so instantly normal, so instantly fine – nothing on earth.
Some fix themselves with chemicals, pharmaceuticals, some use booze, some use destructive habitual behavior like alcohol or food or gambling. Some people use sex to sedate them or to make them feel more alive. Lily used razor blades.
She looked closely at her fingertips and her palms, and the top of her arms. She closed her eyes after looking at the larger, more prominent scars on her shoulders. The tiny marks left on her fingers were barely visible – you'd only notice them if you already knew they were there. She smiled as she studied them. Rather than remember the pain and the anguish that bled out through them, she remembered the elation that cutting brought on, the chemical rush of endorphins and adrenaline that made her feel alive, made her feel well, made it okay to be in her own skin instead of wearing it like a hair shirt.
Lily drew the blade slowly across the pad on her index finger and closed her eyes; she savored the pain, the immediate release. The blood welled up like a glistening garnet, swelled until it overflowed and began to trickle down the length of her finger and onto the palm of her hand. The tears followed. She sat there, her bloodied palm outstretched before her, watching her own blood flow like an ecstatic stigmatic.
And her dry mouth suddenly came alive with gastric juices. She moistened her parched lips with her now-wet tongue. She swallowed hard – the motion was easy now instead of dry and labored. The imagined obstruction in her throat was forgotten, disappeared in a red gush of blood and brain chemicals. They coursed through her body and washed away the tension from her sinew, chased the weariness from her bones and purged it from the open wound in the fingertip, and landed on the clinical whiteness of the floor.
Lily raised her hand to her mouth, slowly extended her tongue to the scarlet stream and licked. The flavor of piquant metal on her tongue sedated her, began to thaw out the chill in her bones and made her feel a few moments of calm, of peace.
But she wanted more. Needed more. A trickle was not enough when what she needed was a red sea to flush out so much dirt. She had to cut deeper, harder. She needed to see it flowing from her wound, rushing out of her body.
Lily didn't want to die. She didn't want to not exist. She just wanted to bleed.
She needed to drain the blood.
She knew how to cut safely, how to avoid major veins and arteries. She knew how deep to cut. She knew where to cut.
Lily drew the blade down the length of her forearm, deep enough for the wound to piss blood, but not deep enough to bleed her dry. And then she felt another wave, a wave of pristine chemicals from her brain kicking in as the blood flowed from her wound. The stab of pain made her close her eyes tight and take in a sharp breath. The gash stung and throbbed. But it thrilled her beyond anything she'd ever experienced. It was a sensation that transcended the physical, eclipsed the sexual.
She grinned and laughed mirthlessly as she wondered if this was what what a vampire felt when he drained his victim of blood and felt a thunderous heartbeat against his body, then felt that heartbeat fade away.
She looked at the pool of blood on the floor in front of her – warm, wet, screaming scarlet; the contrast to the cold, hard, white ceramic tile was stark, beautiful. She dipped her fingers in the crimson pool and began to write on the floor.
She wrote in bold letters...
VAMPIRE RED
A Color
Make the streets run Vampire Red the Ministry of Lily had told cult members on their website.
“Vampire Red,” she said. Her words echoed off the cold, hard walls and came back to her like the whisper of a ghost.
Lily cleaned the bathroom until no trace of blood was visible. She was sure that if it was ever sprayed with Luminol it would look like an abattoir, but to the naked eye it was once again hospital-white and pristine-clean.
“Vampire Red,” she whispered again with a satisfied smile on her lips as she closed the door behind her.
BLOODY LOVERS
Only when she was sure every candle was lit and in place did she turn off the main light in her apartment.
There were dozens of them, all shapes and sizes, but each one made from virginal-white wax and placed in a black glass holder. They covered every flat, stable surface in the room.
A plume of heady-scented incense smoke swirled lazily into the air; the room was filled with the aroma of red and black berries and a hint of frankincense, a top note of exotic musk and spices from far away places. The scent made her think of excited sweat on dark skin.
Krista's stage was set.
The splendor of her nakedness was exaggerated in the shadow cast on the wall by the flickering light of the candles. She admired her own fine form on the mirrored wall opposite.
She gazed at her damaged flesh, an expression of love on her face. She was proud of her scars, and felt they made her utterly unique in the world. And they said so much about her. Her scars told a story - the story of her devotion, of her trust.
Krista ran a finger over the heart-shaped scar on her left breast; she smiled at the difference in texture it had from the skin which immediately surrounded it. She loved the fact that particular scar was so prominent, so raised, that you could easily tell the shape of the scar without looking at it.
This scar was special.
Only one person in the whole world was allowed to drink from her heart.
Krista’s heart belonged to Lord Ruthven.
Each inch of changed flesh on her body held a memory. Each one of them reminded her of a day, of a person, reminded her of an emotion or a phrase, of a song. Some of them reminded her of a particular sensation - either pleasure or pain, or both. But all of them, each and every piece of scar tissue on her body made her feel love, lov
e for the one who gave it to her and love for herself.
Each new scar she acquired made her feel even more beautiful than she did before. The more scar tissue she collected the more confident she became.
Krista admired her own body and ran her fingers over every scar, delicately touched each raised reminder of a steel caress or an ivory stab.
Lord Ruthven watched her. Although he did not love her, he was fascinated by her, and she allowed him to do things to her no other blood doll would ever tolerate.
Most of the donors he’d come into contact with were little more than weekend vampires. They would dress up in pseudo Victoriana, donned over-the-counter costume fangs from a joke shop and paint their faces with clown white.
But Krista was different. Lord Ruthven knew that from the moment he met her and immediately saw the mosaic of scars that adorned her body.
She was beautiful, olive-skinned and raven-haired and the myriad of scars and her opulent clothing made her look like an old pre-Raphaelite painting with a cracked temper coating.
She was the only one he’d ever indulged in blood-play with who actually allowed him to bite.
She loved it.
She reveled in it.
She needed it.
Each time they had a session she would writhe beneath him, grab fistfuls of his hair in her hands and force his bite deeper. She scream at him to bite harder, to suck harder, to fuck her harder.
And when the blades came out, she was so far into the whole thing that she actually scared him.
He had the notion that she would like him to murder her. He was sure she would die with a dripping cunt if he were to slice her flesh into ribbons with a cut-throat razor and bleed her white.
As he watched her, he was suddenly overwhelmed by his own need for blood. Her blood.
His need rose inside him, swelled, grew into a passion that was just the right side of hatred. He launched himself at her across the room, wrapping her long, dark hair around in his fist and jerking her head back violently.
Krista screamed, but it was not a scream of fear or displeasure. It was a scream of excitement, a scream of lust, of need for the kind of pleasure only torn flesh could give them both.
A new scar was about to be born.
They both grunted with need all the way to Krista’s double coffin bed.
Lord Ruthven couldn’t help but smile each time he saw it. It was one of these things that just made the phrase goth as fuck run through his head and turned the corners of his lips upward in a wicked grin.
They tumbled onto the red satin lining.
“Bring me the crucifix on the wall,” she said, pointing behind her.
Lord Ruthven looked up at the large cross with the impassioned Christ on the wall. He half-frowned and half-grinned, wondering what Krista planned to do with the religious icon.
She knew exactly how to stoke Lord Ruthven’s fires.
She took the crucifix from him and licked the body of Christ. Her eyes burned into him and he could hardly contain himself. He ached to be inside her and to feel the heat of her blood on his lips.
At that moment he realized something; what they had was stronger than love, deeper than love. What they had was something that could never falter, never die, never fade away.
Krista wrapped one hand around the top of the cross and one around the bottom. She pulled downward, the wood on the bottom half slipped off; inside was a long, thin blade, as sharp as any razor blade and twice a lethal.
Her eyes sparkled as Ruthven loomed over her and wrapped his hand around hers, still holding the crucifix dagger. Ruthven rolled one nipple between his fingers and took the other into his mouth.
“Cut it open.”
“What?”
“Cut it open.”
“Cut what open?” he asked her.
“My nipple. Cut it open.”
He looked at her, mouth gaping in disbelief.
In that moment, he thought it might just be possible for him to fall in love with her after all.
He knew she wanted it, knew that she was serious. If she had not meant it, she would not have said it.
He didn’t hesitate more than a second or two.
Lord Ruthven squeezed the mound of her breast forcing the blood into her nipple. It would heighten the sensation, give the pain a keener edge. Slowly, he dragged the blade across Krista’s the rigid bud. Her back immediately arched and her breath stuck in her throat.
Blood flowed from the wound in her breast at an alarming rate. Ruthven was afraid he may have cut too deeply, although he knew from his sanguinarian forum-lurking that there were no arteries in the area and she was unlikely to bleed to death from this wound. He was sure her blood would clot before she could lose a dangerous amount.
She knows what she’s doing she does this all the time there’s nothing to worry about.
As if she’d read his mind, Krista reassured him.
“Don’t worry; it’s not deep enough to hurt me,” she laughed at the irony of him worrying about hurting her or killing her.
The irony did not pass him unnoticed. He grinned at her.
“Suck it,” she ordered him.
Lord Ruthven obeyed.
~
“I want to do it with you,” Krista said.
“You just did.”
“No, not that, silly! I want to be a part of your work. Please let me.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, Krista. Things get more complicated when there‘s more than one person to consider. It‘s more difficult. All my plans have been arranged to be carried out by me alone. It would take a lot of reorganization to include you. And there‘s a bigger chance of getting caught.”
She pouted like a spoiled child.
“Please. Just one. We can do it here. I just want to know what it is like to take the life of another, to drink from a living vein and feel the flow of their blood cease.”
Lord Ruthven raised an eyebrow. She tinted her words purple - she knew he loved that. And she always thickened her accent when she wanted to manipulate him. He was a sucker for her dulcet Romanian tones.
“OK, I’ll think about it.”
She clapped her hands then nuzzled him with her face like a happy puppy.
Krista would do anything in the world for this man - she would lie for him, she would steal for him, suffer for him, die for him. And she would kill for him.
With her head resting on Lord Ruthven’s naked chest smeared with her own blood, Krista fell asleep with thoughts of what they would do together, of who their victim would be, what they would be like.
Anything he experienced, she wanted to experience too, for the simple reason of being able to relate to him. She wanted to experience it all, share his life and his lusts. Share in the carnage.
Krista needed to know what it felt like to be drenched in somebody else's blood.
Krista needed to know how it felt to hold the balance of a life in her hands.
She had to know what it felt like to be a killer.
An Excerpt From -
VAMPIRE VINTAGE BOOK ONE :
BELLADONNA IN HOLLYWOOD
CHAPTER ONE : THIS IS HOLLYWOOD
HOLLYWOOD, CA – NOW
Lust hung heavily in the air as he smoldered his way through another song. Drums like a heartbeat throbbed behind his voice.
The warehouse was packed, wall-to-wall, the air wet with excited sweat and perfumed with need, the crowd exhaling their desire into the atmosphere.
Belladonna grinned grudgingly and shook her head as she watched the crowd of his disciples. Not much had changed in almost 80 years.
Vivant still needed an audience.
Men and women still wanted him. Still needed him. And some would die for him.
Not even fashion had changed all that much. Most of the females in the crowd looked as if they'd just stepped from the celluloid of a silent movie, bathed in black and white in a world of color.
It was pointless trying to hide; Vivant would h
ave known she was here long before she crossed the threshold. She knew that no one could successfully sneak up on him.
Belladonna wondered why he had never left Hollywood for any significant period. He'd arrived here from eastern Europe and not left for more than three months at a time in nearly a century. But it was a silly question.
The answer was simple.
Because this is Hollywood.
And there's no place on earth quite like it.
Hollywood is where the widest dreams come true and heart's desires are shattered. The place where stars are made and souls are lost.
Hollywood is where fantasies can become a reality and reality a nightmare.
Hollywood is love and hate.
It is desire and despair.
And it is where there is always hope. Hope that maybe, just maybe, you are the one. Hope that maybe someday it'll be you sipping ice-cold Cristal from platinum-rimmed flutes in the back of a Limousine, instead of parking it. And Hollywood is where that might just happen. There's always a chance – no matter how small, how miniscule, that it could happen.
Because this is Hollywood.
That's why everybody always comes back.
And why some never leave.
Belladonna was home again. Home again in Hollywoodland.
~
CHAPTER TWO : BELLADONNA IN THE ROSE CITY
1929
The farmhouse was silent save for the frequent creaks and groans the old place made as the Oregon night cooled its timbers. Her Philco 70 radio crackled at her as the transmission of The Shadow rounded off the Detective Story Hour on CBS for the night. She waited patiently in the dark until she heard the wall-shaking snores of her father as she lay in bed, fully clothed with the covers pulled up to her chin.
Her muscles burned with tension as she lay there, eyes wide open, barely daring to breathe for fear of discovery.
Her mother was a light sleeper, but, fortunately, the mere creak of a floorboard was unlikely to rouse her from her room; she would figure it was her son, Cal, coming home late from the local speakeasy, full of moonshine and stolen kisses. But her father - he would spring out of bed at the slightest sound and snatch his 30 caliber Springfield rifle from the corner, cuss the air blue then be chastised by his wife for his language in front of the kids, even if one of them was full of illicit booze.
