#original vampire fiction

[gorbalsvampire]

Clarimonde Explains It All

She’s not what I expected.

You say “elder vampire lady” to me and I’m picturing floor-length crimson ballgowns, nails and cheekbones you could cut yourself on, lips the only thing about her with any colour in it.

Clarimonde is five-five of boho chic; dress over jeans, big hat on the back of her chair, OG Doc Martens she's not been assed to lace up all the way. She does have long nails, but I’m pretty sure they’re fakes. There’s a tiny glass on the table in front of her, and it’s empty; can she keep it down?

She leans back to air-kiss Dominique, real old-school mwah-mwah lovely-to-see-you-babe; introduces herself in French, and smiles when I stutter my way through my je m’appelles and have to say in English, “but everyone except my mum calls me Tish.”

“Tish. My pleasure. So, why has Dominique brought you to see another old lady?”

Dominique glances at me — permission granted — and I explain there’s something I’m not getting from her and she thought hearing it in another voice would be good for me.

“I’ve lived a very boring life, my dear. Dominique has been around the world three times and left a trail of nonsense in her wake, what could I —“

“It’s the way you tell it,” says Dominique, rolling her eyes. “And of the two of us, who’s been on television?”

It’s Clarimonde’s turn to roll her eyes, and she does it with a little sniff that’s much more my idea of “elder vampire.”

“I was immortalised without my permission,” says Clarimonde. “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you, Tish; they tell you that you’ll live forever, they neglect to mention ‘as a petty pretty monster who leads innocent young men around by their dicks and away from God’. It could be worse; look what happened to poor Louis and his confessional. How many books of revision to his life story are there, now?”

“For real? The guy from —“

“Yes. The first at least is a true story. There’s a grain of truth at the bottom of all the stories. For instance; mine is truly the world’s oldest profession. I liked being called a ‘courtesan’, I wasn’t keen on ‘moll’, ‘whore’ has always been an insult…”

“What do you think of ‘sex worker’?” It’s out of my mouth before I know what I’m saying. Go for woke, I guess.

“Matter of fact, boring — but honest, which has its charms.” She smiles. “But — to stay on topic, because Dominique is making the face,” and she is, “let me forestall the inevitable question. Him too, and he was a piece of work.”

“The thing Clarimonde does so well,” Dominique explains from her end of the sofa, “is talk about men.”

“About a specific class of people,” says Clarimonde, and her pout looks like she wants to poke her tongue out of it. “Mostly men, who did awful things, frequently to women, and who happened to be like us. I’ve collected vampire stories ever since I was in one, and for the longest time they all had something in common. Take Dracula. Born in the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth, he re-emerges with a grand plan; he’ll move himself to what he’s been told is the greatest city on Earth and he’ll re-invent himself as a modern monster. What does he do when he gets there? Obsess over the first girl he gets his teeth into, and stalk his solicitor’s wife to punish the man for escaping, or whatever mad reason he had. Not just a monster but a failure. Why do you think that happens?”

“He’s got really poor impulse control?”

“And you said she didn’t get it.” Clarimonde laughs behind her hand, and for a second I can see her in costume-drama gear, peeking over a fan. “He’d been around too long. Once he’d been an empire-builder, and he remembered being that, but — did he really remember? Can the mind hold on to what it was five hundred years ago? Four hundred? When we cheat ourselves and say we were better people as little girls, from only ten or twenty years away?”

“I get it,” I say, practically talking over her. “I think. You’re saying he was trying to be who he thought he was, what history said he was. But really, he was… just a vampire.”

“And what a piece of work is a vampire?” she purrs, declaiming at her little glass. “Just a being who thirsts. A paragon of animals. Over time, we forget what else we were. Dominique brought you to me because I’m old. Because there are so few older. I’m a simple girl at heart; I take money and a little blood from people who have both to spare. It’s a simple rule, and it’s not a big plan, and it’s not much to hold on to.

“I keep my memories in stories. I don’t know if I’ve always looked this way, or if I saw that girl pretending to be me and made myself like her. Do you know Louis went back to his maker in the end? After everything he told, everything in that book, he went back on bended knee because he’d started to believe what was made up about him afterwards. He went back to a man he’d tried to kill and he thought he was in love. But he’s still alive, and he’s doing no harm to anyone but himself. And maybe one day I’ll wake up with a rosary in my hand and a pretty boy in my bed and I’ll hope to God he paid for it. That’s what happens when we live too long, Tish. We start believing what they say about us.”

One of the core impulses behind Bloodspell was "literary vampires are real but the version of their stories you get is off." Deconstructing the vampire as antagonist/romantic hero, y'know?

[heartiella]

[annabelle--cane]

I am aware I have died on this hill before but people who really strenuously argue that fanfic isn't "real writing" drive me insane. what do you meeeaaaaannn. besides the fact that any attempt to define "real art" vs "fake art" is inherently reactionary, it just doesn't make any sense. it's Writing. people Write it. what the fuck are you talking about.

[elijahstwink]

i also have the fantasy of fucking elijah in red door mode yooo 😳 ... but if you ever feel inspired and want to write smut abt it , Im interested in reading it ofc,, and there is also just so few red door elijah shit out there 💔

𝓛𝓮𝓽 𝓖𝓸

(I’d let him punch me holy this gif is hot)

Your boyfriend is going through a rough time. You help him feel better ;)

Thank you for the request anon! I always feel like writing dark!Elijah smut so this was so fun! It’s also the freakiest thing I’ve written lol. I hope you enjoy - Dex

Warnings: Blood play, Spitting, Choking, Slapping, Oral F!receiving, Dom!Elijah, Sub!reader, Elijah’s pretty mean, overstimulation, blood drinking, degradation, use of slut, whore etc

Seperate warning for this one. This has CNC! (Aka Reader consents for Elijah not to stop when she asks him too)

Your white dress billows behind you as you sprint down the hallway and towards the red door. Your bare feet burn at each step on ragged tile. You glance back to see Elijah turn the corner. His stone cold face and bare chest are covered in blood, all emotion void from his expression. Desperation fuels your speed, your legs burning and your lungs screaming as adrenaline courses through you. Elijah follows at a steady pace, his deliberate steps echoing, his breathing animalistic. He could catch you in an instant, but he prefers the thrill of the chase. He wants to savor your fear, your pain.

His footsteps are unnervingly close as you near the door. Just a little farther…

You slam into the red wood, pain shooting through your arm as you grasp the brass doorknob. It’s locked. You pound on the door, scream, and glance back in terror as Elijah approaches.

“Elijah, please!” you plead, but he keeps coming. This isn’t your Elijah, the kind and noble man you loved. This is a monster.

You turn back to the door, pounding and screaming for help, but it’s too late. Elijah’s hand clamps onto your upper arm, yanking you toward him. You struggle, but his grip is unbreakable. His eyes darken, veins pulsing as he opens his mouth, revealing sharp fangs glinting in the darkness.

Elijah jolts upright in bed, his body drenched in sweat and trembling. Nightmares of hurting you plague him every night since the incident with his mother. The red door haunts his mind, and he can no longer ignore it.

Breathing deeply, Elijah clutches his hair and turns to watch you sleep. Usually, this sight calms him, reminding him that he isn’t the blood-covered man in his dreams. That red door Elijah is just a fragment of himself, a dark fraction everyone has.

But tonight is different. The dreams are more vivid, leaving him feeling feral and dangerous. Every small sound or touch threatens to make him lose control. He needs blood.

Elijah carefully slips out of bed, pulling on grey sweatpants. He moves silently through the dark compound, descending the staircase to the large kitchen. He rounds the island, opens the blood fridge, and light floods the dark space. He grabs three blood bags and rips into one.

As the blood overtakes his senses, veins web below his eyes. He grips the marble countertop harder, ripping open the second bag, anger rising. The taste of blood makes red door Elijah creep to the surface.

“Lijah?” you call from the doorway, wrapped in a silk nightgown. Elijah’s head snaps up, his red eyes meeting yours as the marble edge crumbles in his hand. You rush to him, but before you can reach him, he grabs you by the neck, pinning you against the wall.

Despite his aggressive state, you’re not scared. You’ve been worried for him since he returned, his personality flipping randomly between normal and red door Elijah. The worst was on Bourbon Street, when he tried to rip out a man's heart for bumping into you. Red door Elijah is possessive, never letting you out of his sight, fearing that if you walk away, he’ll start chasing you like in his dreams.

Elijah's grip on your neck is firm but not painful, and you see the conflict in his eyes.

“Hey, it’s okay, my love,” you say softly, cupping his cheeks and tracing the veins with your fingertips until they fade.

Elijah’s eyes return to their regular onyx shade, guilt washing over him as he releases your neck and drops the empty blood bag.

“Shh, you’re alright, I’m alright,” you comfort him, wrapping your arms around him as he breathes heavily into the crook of your neck.

“I- I don’t know what to do, I crave you,” Elijah growls into your skin, his fangs gently scratching along your pulse point. Your eyes shut at the contact, but an idea pops into your head. A crazy, probably stupid idea... but an idea nonetheless.

“Perhaps you need to release all the pent up anger.” You suggest carefully. Elijah pulls away from your neck and stares at you in confusion.

“What do you mean?” He places his hands on the wall either side of your head, keeping you trapped against him. You can tell by the look in his eye that he definitely knows what you mean.

“I mean,” You rest your hand flat on Elijah’s bare chest, sliding it down to cup him over his sweatpants. “Let go, take it all out on me.” You gaze up at him innocently, something you know drives him nuts. Elijah swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing with the movement.

“No y/n. I wouldn’t be myself, I could hurt you.” Elijah shakes his head, already feeling his alternate personality taking control as his cock thickens under your touch.

“That’s the thing, you won’t hurt me. And as soon as you prove that to yourself, you can start to move past this.” You explain, slipping your hand under his waistband and taking hold of his erection, his length warm in you grasp.

You completely believe what you’re telling him. You know that he would never hurt you if not for pleasure, but that doesn’t stop you feeling like this may be a mistake. After all, Elijah is pretty dominant in bed already. If normal Elijah can edge you for hours or make you cum so much you’re begging for him to stop. Who knows what red door Elijah will do.

“Do you kn-“ Elijah interrupts himself with a deep groan as you push his pants to his feet and bring your unoccupied hand down to play with his balls, rolling them between your fingers. You can’t tear your gaze from his swollen cock and the bead of arousal gathering at the tip as wetness builds between your legs. You could mentally pat yourself on the back right now for not dropping to your knees and licking it up.

He suddenly grips your wrist, rough enough to leave a mark, making you gasp in surprise and release your hold on him. When you look up, you see that his eyes have returned to that crimson shade with veins underneath them. He grabs your neck with his free hand and leans down till your faces are inches apart.

“Do you know what you are asking for?” He breaths against your lips, tightening his hold when you nod. “Words.” He commands sternly.

“Yes, Elijah.” You squeak. He smirks at you, the veins flowing under his eyes.

“And you are aware that if you say stop, I won’t.” Elijah growls. You can tell he’s holding back, needing your consent before doing anything more.

“I know. I want you…” You murmur, bravely grabbing at his crotch again before whispering in his ear, “to ruin me.”

You can visibly see when red door Elijah fully takes over, any apprehension within him vanishes as he suddenly rips your night gown off your body and steps out of his pants, leaving you both naked.

“I didn’t mean here!” You whisper, looking around anxiously. The kitchen is one of the main rooms of the compound. If anyone were to wake up it’s highly likely they’d come to this room.

You squeak as Elijah lifts you onto the centre island and pushes you to lay flat on it. The cold marble countertop against your back sends chills down your spine as Elijah stands between your legs. His eyes are clouded,

“What if someone walks in?” You ask as Elijah bends your knees so that your feet are on the counter and your core is exposed. Elijah doesn’t respond, instead grabbing the last blood bag and holding it over you with a smirk.

You don’t have time to even question what the hell he’s planning before he rips the plastic in half with his hands, drenching you in blood. God this man is lucky you love him because no other human would still be turned on while covered in blood. Elijah leans down so you are face to face, his chest is getting covered in blood now as well.

“If anyone walks in here,” Elijah dips a finger between your breasts, “I’ll snap their neck.” He growls, sucking on his now bloody finger, moaning at the taste.

Red door Elijah doesn’t seem to be the slow and steady type. His movements are rough and almost crazed as he grips your thighs and pulls your legs over his shoulders. Now eye level with your blood covered cunt, Elijah doesn’t hesitate to practically devour you. The filthy sound of his mouth slurping up the mix of blood and arousal between your folds echoes throughout the kitchen. You release a choked moan as he sucks harshly on your sensitive bundle of nerves.

Normal Elijah usually starts soft and gradually builds your pleasure to its peak. So this unfamiliar pace fills you with an uncomfortable sensitivity, causing you to grip his hair in both your hands and try to push his head away. Elijah releases a disapproving grunt at your actions. He moves his grip from your thighs to your wrists and pins them straight down at your sides. Your hands clench helplessly at the sleek countertop in an attempt to find something to grip as you squirm with oversensitivity.

When your wrists are tugged on slightly, you lift your head for the first time to watch the man between your legs. Elijah’s face is coloured crimson and veins are moving beneath his skin. A whimper passes your lips when his tongue thrusts inside you and his red eyes meet yours. His gaze is intense and demanding, practically shouting ‘behave’. You throw your head back against the marble with a loud moan as Elijah starts fucking you with his tongue. The feeling of the pointed muscle curling against your sweet spot has you arching your back. Sharp stabs of overstimulation are turning into waves of pleasure, causing you to clench your thighs around his head.

“E-Elijah I’m so close.” You wail, all your pleasure knotting together, building up in your lower stomach. Elijah hums in approval, his tongue working faster. and his nose nudging against your clit. Your moans increase in pitch as you’re brought closer to the edge, your hips jerking and your legs starting to shake. It doesn’t take more then a few thrusts of Elijah’s tongue against the spongy spot inside you before you’re coming, wailing in pleasure and practically grinding on your boyfriends face as you get lost in the euphoric feeling. Your legs are almost vibrating with the intensity of their shaking and your walls are pulsating around Elijah’s tongue as you come down from your orgasm.

Elijah pulls away quite suddenly, releasing his bruising grip on your wrists and dropping your legs from his shoulders. “Stand up.” He orders, taking a step backwards. You would have given him a ‘are your serious right now?’ type of look, if you weren’t too out of it. Instead you stay lying across the counter, trembling as you come down from your high. After a moment of silence you manage to speak out, “Elijah, Can’t.”.

“I said,” he grabs you under your arms and hauls you upwards so you are standing on shaking legs, all your weight being supported by him, “stand up.” He seethes, releasing his grip.

Your knees instantly buckle underneath you and you fall into Elijah’s chest. You would have hit the ground if not for him wrapping an arm around your waist, holding you against his chest and smirking at your feeble state.

“My naughty girl,” Elijah tugs your hair so that your head swings back, your eyes meeting his, “can’t even follow a simple task, hm?” He taunts.

His face has returned to normal, and he seems to have wiped the blood from around his mouth at some point. Elijah’s eyes are clouded with more than lust and you can see the red door version of him staring back at you. He usually talks much more during sex, and you can’t deny that you miss the comforting praise.

That thought is literally smacked away as Elijah’s palm meets your cheek in a light slap. You probably look like an idiot for a split second as you process what he just did.. and how much you liked it. You release a drawn out moan as he repeats the action before grabbing your jaw, holding your head up to his and smirking.

“Do you like that?” Elijah chuckles as you flush in embarrassment.

“If you wish to act like a slut, then I will treat you as such. Open.” He growls, pulling at your jaw as you open your mouth. Red Door Elijah is seemingly full of surprises, as he lines up his mouth with yours and spits. The feeling of someone else’s spit in your mouth would likely make you throw up. But this was Elijah, your boyfriend and the love of your life so of course it feels good. A rush of arousal wets your spent cunt as you gurgle slightly.

Elijah clamps your mouth shut, grinning like a maniac as he instructs you “Swallow,” The slide of his spit down your throat makes you moan, absolutely loving the filthiness of his actions, “Good girl.” He praises you for the first time, giving your jaw a light squeeze before releasing it.

The praise is gone as quickly as it came when Elijah spins you around, bending you over the counter. You gasp at the coldness against your sensitive nipples. He holds your hip with one hand, the other guiding his erect cock through your shiny folds. The pleasure of Elijah nudging your clit with every upstroke distracts you from the feeling on blood slowly drying on your skin.

Your mouth drops in surprise, screaming out as Elijah suddenly enters you in one bruising thrust and with no warning. The stretch is painful, but you’re wet enough that he slides in easily. Your hand shoots behind you on reflex, pushing hard against his torso. Elijah only chuckles at your pathetic attempt of pushing him away, grabbing your wrist and holding it behind your back.

“Too much Elijah, please just wait!” You plead when you feel him starting to move inside you, blood smearing the whit marble underneath you.

“Shh, take it.” Elijah shushes, not waiting for you to adjust before slamming into you again, his tip pressing against your cervix and causing you to sob out a moan. With every battering thrust of his hips, the loud clap of skin meeting skin fills the room.

It doesn’t take more than a minute before the pain dulls into a numbing ache and the pleasure overwhelms you. You’re moaning like a whore, taking every inch of his thick cock inside you, your walls fluttering around him. The way his shaft glides across your g spot makes you jerk with pleasure.

“That’s it, such a sweet little slut falling apart on my cock.” He coos, releasing your hand and pulling you up till your back meets his chest. He wraps his arm around your neck so your chin rests on his bicep and keeps working his hips back and forth, fucking into you in long, brutal strokes. The base of his cock throbs every time he bottoms out, and his balls slap against your slit with wet, filthy noises. His animalistic grunts mix with your cries of pleasure.

“Still too much for you?” He teases, laughing when his only response is a gurgle of incoherent words that you didn’t even notice came from your mouth. “Yeah?” He murmurs, pounding into you at an inhuman speed.

Elijah rests his other hand on your blood stained lower stomach, sending a jolt of warmth through you.

“Who do you belong to?” Elijah whispers, his breath tickling your ear. “Who owns this cunt, y/n?” He runs the tips of his fingers over your clit.

“Y-you Elijah!” You sob, tears forming in your eyes from the intense pleasure this man is giving you.

“That’s my girl.” Elijah praises before bringing his hand down hard on your clit. Surprisingly it wasn’t painful at all. You heard the smack before you felt it and suddenly you were gushing around his cock, the mix of his cock rubbing at your walls and the sharp pleasure to your clit plummeting you into an unexpected orgasm. Your eyes go blurry from tears as you squirt all over the counter and floor. Euphoria runs through you in a single wave as your walls uncontrollably pulsate around Elijah.

“Look at you, cumming on my cock like a good little girl. Making such a mess.” Elijah’s groans, pulling out of you suddenly. You whine at the loss, feeling your slick cunt clench at the air. Elijah turns you to face him before bending down and hooking his arms under your legs. You squeal as he lifts you up, essentially folding you in half as your knees touch your shoulders. Elijah’s hands cup your arse, and you wrap your own around his neck. He shows no strain as he holds you in mid air, turning you both so he can lean slightly against the counter.

You throw your head back and clench your eyes shut as Elijah pushes inside you again, the sensitivity of having just cum causing you to claw harshly at his back.

“Elijah, stop!” You call out, the overstimulation feeling like too much. He doesn’t listen, not that you were expecting him too.

You’re absolutely helpless as he starts moving you up and down his length, using you like some type of fuck doll. You fidget and squirm relentlessly in an attempt to make him stop.

“Look at me!” Elijah barks. You use the little strength you have to lift your head, meeting his intense and feral gaze. “You are going to shut up, take my cock and you’re going to fucking enjoy it. Do you understand?” He sneers, slowing down so you can catch your breath and come up with a coherent sentence. You’ve never heard Elijah speak so vulgar before and it strangely turns you on.

You know that if you put up enough of a fight, your Elijah would come back and stop immediately. He’d probably beat himself up with guilt while he holds you and apologises way too many times. But you don’t want Elijah to feel bad, you asked him to do this in the first place.

“I understand, wanna take it.” You rush out before crashing your lips onto his, you can feel his grin as you try to shove your tongue into his mouth. He parts his lips for you and you whimper when he sucks heavily on your tongue.

Elijah thrusts his hips up erratically, his thrusts reaching vampire speed as his climax steadily approaches. You break the kiss to bury your face in his neck when you feel your own rising in your gut.

Elijah lifts one hand to grip your hair and pull your head back to present your neck. Searing pain rushes through you as his fangs pierce your skin, mixing with the pleasure of his thrusts. Your vision goes black as your third orgasm of the night crushes you. The feeling of Elijah’s cum filling your tight cunt only prolongs your pleasure. You feel Elijah retreat from your neck as his moans fill the air, mixing with what you realise is your own screams.

Elijah slips out of you when his cock stops spurting, feeling the aggressive, lust filled haze of red door Elijah dissolving with every passing moment. He sits you on the counter momentarily to unhook his arms from underneath your legs. Then he lifts your trembling form back into his embrace, one hand holding your bum for support and the other cradling your head into his neck. Your grip around him loosens as you continue riding the waves of pleasure, shaking like a leaf in his hold.

Elijah chuckles endearingly as you moan into his neck. “Still coming baby?” He grins, kissing the top of your head. You manage a small whimper of agreement as you feel him start to walk somewhere.

Thank god for vampire speed, because Elijah has you in a warm shower within the minute. You rest against him, half asleep, as he washes the dried blood off your skin. After you are both clean and dry, you settle under the covers of your bed, cuddled up to the love of your life.

“Please tell me you don’t regret it.” Elijah mumbles into your hair. You release a tired laugh, your face pressed against his chest.

“No my love, I don’t regret it at all. Did it help?” You yawn, cuddling further into his comforting embrace.

“Definitely.” Elijah sighed, his mind feeling a lot calmer and his body tired. You tilt your head up, capturing his lips in a sweet kiss.

“Love you lijah.” You smile into the kiss as you speak. Elijah copies your grin as he responds, “Love you so much baby.”. He gives you one last peck before leaning back into the pillow and closing his eyes, waiting till he hears your cute snores before drifting into a dreamless sleep.

The couple are passed out cold by morning, still recovering from their late night. Klaus however, is very much awake as he stumbles into the living room, where Freya and Kol are engaged in an intense game of chess.

“Do not go into the kitchen!” Klaus gags, collapsing onto the couch in a dramatic heap. “And remind me to kill both Elijah and Y/N.”.

T A G L I S T (msg or comment to be on it)

@b1tchy

[venusbyline]

i can fix them (but i kinda prefer them crazy lool)

[theoxenfree]

vampire x crime scene cleaner!reader | 16.1k

you're a crime scene cleaner who happens across an advertisement for a mansion housekeeper in exchange for room and board. it's close to work, close to your university, and an easy job. the ultimate package. right away, you notice the owner's beauty as well as his eccentricities, but decide to commit to it. the spiral into depravity and debauchery begins when you're tasked with cleaning the site of a savage murder, solidifying you as a irreplaceable treasure.

warnings; dead dove do not eat; explicit non-con, extreme dubon, sadomasochism, blood play, overstimulation, choking, cigarette burns, smoking, hypnotism, theological themes, exploration of morality, gunshot wounds, extreme & graphic depictions of body horror + gore + grotesque details, graphic depictions of crime scene cleanup, possibly inaccurate depictions of crime scene cleanup (not looking for feedback on it), obsessive & possessive behaviors, heavy prose & details, the entire work is allegorical, murder, vampire is written as a monster bc that's what they are lmao, dividers are used between scenes

reposted from 2kmps; previously proofread by @ceruleansol

I shouldn't have to say it, but I will: nothing in this oneshot is indicative of my personal viewpoints. it is entirely fictitious.

this was a project that took me quite a bit of time to do, so I would be immensely appreciated if you'd please reblog + interact with it!! I'd love to hear your feedback!!

Another internet search bore fruit.

The image bouncing back at you from your phone had been hastily taken with a tremble in your hand, all the while launching a few too many cautious looks across your shoulder to either end of the dim, long hallway making up part of the second floor. There wasn't any particular rationale for your apprehension and busy eyes but the belief the mansion owner wouldn't be too pleased to see you taking pictures of his valuables rather than cleaning them.

That fear hadn't stopped you from reverse image searching a good couple of curiosities over the widening gap of time you had been living there.

Tonight was a Chalmette table vase displayed on a pedestal in the hall; brassy gold gilding cradled a somewhat drab white bloom that reached high and sprouted open to a hollow inside. Similar surviving articles went for thousands.

You totaled the prices of everything so far as enough to outright buy a house on the more modest side of town.

There was a daring thought that loomed in the back of your mind, an ugly little thing that told you one or two missing antiques wasn't any big deal. He wouldn't miss them, let alone even notice they were gone, because he was the strangest man you had ever met.

Four months ago, he had only ever introduced himself by the name Montague, letting an anticipatory stillness hang in the air while you waited for him to finish. He never did, handsome features lifting as his dark eyes thinned and smile inched higher. He had you in a tight handshake.

"I enjoyed reading the resume you sent in with your response to my advertisement." He had traces of an accent intact but had cleverly adapted to one more common to the area. "You're the first person I've come across wanting the room who's done that. It really stood out to me. A crime scene cleaner? Must be a difficult job."

"I know it was probably overkill, but I think this will be perfect for me." You were led to a suede armchair, his hand anchoring onto your shoulder to lower you into the seat. He sat across from you in something similar, one leg crossing. "I recently had to move out of my other place, and the university will be about an hour closer. My work won't be as far of a drive, either. I—I, uh, clean some gross stuff, so taking care of your house won't be anything."

Even after that spiel, Montague never let his smile slip. Rather, it seemed to widen as though delighted by your oversharing. He looked like a man basking in glee over a rare find, an offer he couldn't possibly turn away.

"All amenities in the house are yours." This was after he showed you to one of the rooms on the second floor: a capacious, well-dressed space behind a red door at the end of the hall. "As long as you listen to a few rules and keep things clean, we should have a very amicable... cohabitation."

You thought it was an odd choice of wording. "Okay. Well, what do I need to know?"

"No guests." It was immediate, his tone suddenly a touch edgy, razored, unyielding. "Not unless I give you explicit permission beforehand. I keep many important valuables; they're very dear to me. Also, do not invite anyone in unless I am there."

Again, odd, but it was his house.

"Sure," you said agreeably, having half the thought to write down these peculiarities of his. "What next?"

He was set on your shoulder, reaching out to pull a thin, frayed thread off of your jumper. "The downstairs—as in, the basement—is my personal space. If I need you down there, I will ask you for you to go down. You can go anywhere else in the house, on the property. None of it concerns me."

"Why the basement, though?" It felt damaging to press a question like that so early on, but you figured it was innocent enough. "This house is so big that we could be on the same floor and hardly see each other."

The muscles around his mouth twitched slightly, only once. You still noticed it. Noted: he didn't like to be questioned. "Sorry, I'm not trying to-"

"It's cold downstairs." he injected, shifting to look around the room as though taking in the newness of it as well. "I make sure it stays comfortable all year, all throughout the house, but the cold suits me best."

With how downright frosty his skin felt in that handshake earlier—on a mild day in mid-spring—you thought that explanation checked out. He must have only just come up to greet you at the front entrance.

You tried to forget the feeling. "Alright. Next?"

"Oh," he restrained an unseemly laugh, using one hand to crowd into a pocket on his dark blazer, "there is nothing else, at least nothing pertinent. It's my understanding that we're both quite busy, so this would be the current arrangement unless something changes."

What changes? You wanted to ask, thwarted to silence when he revealed some sort of silver thing pinched between his fingers with a thick handkerchief. It was a dainty-seeming contraption with chains linking several old skeleton keys at the end. The fabric he used to hold the clip concealed all of the elegant tracery that made up its shape.

"Traditionally, this is called a chatelaine. It’s something I’ve modified for you to get around the house. It’ll be easier to clean." Montague said, fast to force the mess of cold silver and chains into your palm, rubbing down his fingers with the handkerchief afterward. "The smallest key is to your room. The largest one opens the doors to go outside, so don't lose that. One of them is meant for doors in the basement—can't recall which."

He could see the wariness behind your eyes, a worrying crease forming in your brow. "This house has been around for a long time. I've just never gotten around to modernizing the locks."

Other questions came to you, but he hardly acted interested in entertaining them. You let him swivel on black soles, stopping him just as he reached the doorway.

"Why haven't other housekeepers worked out?"

Montague let his fingers rest on glazed woodwork framing the threshold, drumming out a soothing rhythm while considering an answer for all of two seconds. "In short? They couldn't follow the rules. Now, let me show you to the yard."

Afterward, the so-called cohabitation had become a seamless blend for you both. You had learned right away that Montague wasn't one for idle chatter and niceties without purpose. He had deviated from it once, on move-in day, to reassure you that the mysterious nature of your life schedule and odd hours you were called to a clean scene wouldn’t be a source of concern.

Shortly after settling your things around the house, the reason for his amenable attitude was a little more apparent. Several times a month, you would be pulled from your forensics projects to the landing at the end of the hall, piqued by fresh voices always indistinguishable at first, and folded your waist over the railing to see down.

The top of his head, hair short, impeccably styled, and ash-brown, was the first thing you noticed, followed by someone on his arm. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man—always conventionally attractive, always utterly enraptured by him. It struck a nerve with you once or twice, finding your thoughts swimming bitterly: Of course a man who looked like him would go for types like that!

Why did he act so much differently with them than you?

He wasn't nearly as friendly and affable as he was making himself out to be.

You stopped peeking down on him after an instance where his eyes shot straight up, pinning you where you stood. He simpered at you before leading his companion away to the basement, and that was it. You never saw them leave and never bothered to ask.

Tonight was different, however, both in the way you nearly toppled the two-figure Chalmette vase off its pedestal with flighty fingers and a duster, and the echo of a scream piercing the hollow halls to you. It stayed in one spot on the first floor, luring you down the center staircase with your duster clutched to you like a sword. At that point, your heart bursting in your ears was louder than the agonized cries resonating around the corner.

You looked around, spine wrapped in dread as another scream, weak, garbled, and wet, came from the basement, and then nothing at all. It was soundless in the house. Distantly, one of the clocks mounted in the kitchen archway toned onward. You followed its beat with the shuffle of your feet.

Hello, hello? Those words clung tightly in your throat, yet you were too afraid to announce yourself like that. Still, nothing came as you slowly pulled at the basement doorknob, brass and freezing and unlocked. The stairway plunging down inside was filled with inky black, so dark you couldn't get your eyes to adjust to it.

Is everything okay down there? Hello? Hello? You ran the imaginary chatter through your mind, lips sealed but trembling during your slow descent, the path now illuminated by white glow from your phone. At the bottom, the stone stairs turned into seamless gray marble and red wetness crawling toward the soles of your slippers.

"What–" You gasped, taking a step back while flicking the flashlight higher, deeper into the basement. The vivid red puddle glistened in your light, widening around a motionless figure with pale skin—a blonde woman you didn't know. Her face pointed up at the ceiling, twisted in terror, black tracks of mascara curving along her cheeks.

She was naked on the floor, surrounded by her own blood, something you didn't have to look at twice. Your breaths grew harsh, taking in the sight of her neck, or lack thereof; there wasn't much left of it. Only a few stringy bits of sinew and muscle kept it from a full decapitation, and blood still pulsed out in spurts from mangled arteries and veins.

A motion nearby made your nape prickle. It was like feet padding across wet pavement after a fresh rain, except this smell carried the malodor of rust and something sour under your nose.

You settled a pillar of light on the source, capturing the view of Montague standing amid the bloodbath, sickly skin bare and saturated in rich crimson.

Something was wrong with him, came an instantaneous, instinctual reaction the moment his head spun toward you, catching pale eyeshine in the white light.

The bones in his jaw cracked as the length of it began to recede into the semblance of something more man to you, rows of jagged teeth retracting into the depths of his throat until only a pair of long incisors remained.

Montague skimmed the tip of his tongue along his lower lip, smiling at you affectedly, saying as though it were some trife thing, "She started screaming."

You were gone and out of the basement after that, clearing the woman's body and kicking away the slippers on your feet when they squelched with blood. Montague said something after you when shrieks ripped out of your lungs and reverberated through the house. You winced as the basement door let out a hollow rattle when he collided with it, heart matching the rhythm of the skin on your feet slapping against old marble, thoughts disarrayed, frantic the closer you got to the front door.

Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! You were panting in unison with the vicious chants.

The doorknob was in your hand. The door was open—and it was thrown shut with the force of your body thrust against it, fingers wrenched off of the handle and enveloped in Montague's cold fingers as he pushed himself flush into you.

You felt his palm clamp around your mouth, whittling your screams into panicked whimpers, nostrils flaring with your ragged breaths.

"Ah, no, no." He had to stoop his neck to talk into your ears. "Shh, shh, shhh. Far too loud. I don't like screaming. Shh, shh, shhhh."

Tears seared red behind your eyes, making you think you could follow the warmth down your face as they filled the crevices in his hand. "It's really, truly a pity. She was a pretty one but far too smart. I'm usually decent at picking out the ones who wouldn't suspect anything or, at least, catching them before they try to scream.

"You'll have to forgive me. I swear to you I'm not ordinarily that messy. I prefer to keep everything tidy, especially so you don't have to go down there. After all, you're already so busy. You're already doing so much. I can't recall when I last saw you relax."

The weight of his palm softened, a wordless agreement that you honored with continued silence as he used that arm to lean against the door. His voice shifted around your head to your other ear. "That's it. Just wonderful. There's no need for screaming, is there? It's only the two of us."

"Are—are..." You couldn't get it out, lips and throat suddenly sucked dry. "Don't kill me, please. Please. Please."

His chest quaked while a subdued, eerily delighted laugh hissed through his lips. "Kill you? Oh, no, no, no. Never. How could I ever kill you when you're so remarkable? My home has never looked so beautiful and lived in. I'm enjoying how it looks with you in it."

You wilted away from his lips sinking to a spot below your ear, now taking far too much notice of his erection curving up along your lower back. It felt disgustingly wrong to wonder whether the violence and blood turned him on, or it was you and your fear. The man wasn't even human; that much was clear.

"What are you?" There was no shortage of daring questions in your arsenal. Montague was beginning to find the charm in them.

"That's quite difficult for me to answer." He let his chin lay on your shoulder. "I've been called many things over the centuries. I suppose the closest anyone has ever gotten is vampire, but even that's not quite right. You're free to guess as much as you'd like, though."

He was satisfied when you didn't, freeing the weight off of his arm to slide his hand under the hem of your shirt, fingertips still slick with that woman's blood as he explored your navel. You were too aware of the roundness of his fingernails stepping across your flesh, sometimes pressing deep, and other times a light touch you needed to scratch. His throat vibrated against your shoulder.

"What are you thinking? I'd love to hear it." He wanted to devour your fear in more ways than just feeling you wince. "Well? Tell me."

"I want to go." Go? Where could you possibly go that he couldn’t find you? If he ripped out the side of a woman's neck, he could track you down.

He leaned his cheek into your ear again, relishing the warmth that spread into him. "Where would you go? Who would you tell? Humor me, where is the first place you'd go?"

"The police," you said.

Montague let out a pleased hum. "Of course. It only makes sense to report a terrible scene such as that to them. Forensics and the police play together often, don't they?"

Your nod was weak.

"I know how hard you've been studying, how much stress you're under to commit to your degree, your work—to me." His hand crept along to your stomach, fingers splaying wide across the protective layer of skin and fat. "Let's say they were to find something I left behind. Who becomes a suspect in their eyes when they learn that I have someone who tidies up after me? Who knows the dirty insides of cleaning up anything and everything?"

You were starting to panic, fitfully struggling against his body. It's like he was made of stone. "They wouldn't accuse me of murdering anyone."

"Haven't you seen the news lately? Are you so sure?" he said derisively. "No, perhaps you're right. Maybe you'd be fortunate, and they wouldn't have your head for murder, but they would certainly try to peg you with something else. As an accomplice, maybe? And that's assuming that I don't disappear and let rip you apart.

"Can you imagine it? Can you feel your heart break at the very thought of losing it all? Your degree? Your job? Safety? The world is cruel, darling. You'd never have another moment of peace or anonymity. Anywhere you'd go, you'd be found, every alias sullied with your sins. All because you decided to speak up about it."

You knew he meant to send you downstairs to do something about the mess, spend hours scrubbing and mopping until what had once been there was a secret that thickened your tongue and made it hard to swallow. No one would ever find out, but you would carry it in every waking thought until, one morning, the cute barista on Market Street had an eerie semblance to that dead woman, and the light roast in your hand suddenly looked so red.

"Thump. Thump. Thump." Montague mocked the heavy thrum of your heart behind your ribs, his cold fingers skimming your nipples before resting over your sternum. "You can go if you'd like, but I'll find you. I'll hear your little heart until it bursts and drag you right back here. You're mine."

The push of his body gradually faded away, giving your chest the room to expand, leaving you to gulp quivering, greedy breaths that didn't stop even as the pads of his feet grew distant.

He called back to you, "Give me ten minutes or so, and then come down."

You were already partway through the front door with your car keys to pop the trunk when, floating like a spectre's moans in still night air, his voice reached out once more, "You may want to clean up yourself first. You have blood all over your face."

༺ ♰ ༻

A damp towel came before your descent back into the basement. In tow on your shoulders were three bags of absorbent, the fancy stuff hospitals liked to use to throw on puke and piss and anything else they just lazily wanted to sweep around. It worked for blood in smaller quantities, blood that was still wet, anyway.

The woman hadn't been dead long enough for her body fluids to dry, so you didn't anticipate needing anything except the basics stowed in your car trunk.

You weren't sure what you expected to see down there, noticing the lights were turned on high, fully illuminating the gray marble, the furthest reaches of the blood puddle with your slippers saturated dark red and ruined. What came as a shock was the woman's dead eyes and shredded neck being nowhere in sight. Montague had moved her body but to where?

For some reason, you were drawn to ridiculous spots like the walls, ceiling, and tiny cramped corners that he could have feasibly stuffed her in. There was no sickly trail of blood leading any which way, droplets only reaching as far as the stairs and first landing where you had been pursued—nothing else.

Where did he take her? Part of you was ready to turn a blind eye to all of this because you knew you would have to in order to keep everything. If you kept your head low and groveled a little bit, maybe he'd get bored and leave you alone, biding you the time you needed to finish your degree. But, that'd be two years of this.

You weren't sure you could stomach it.

As you moved granules of absorbent through blood with coarse bristles from the kitchen broomstick—shifting the puddle more than the actual absorbent—you wondered if he could hear your heart now from wherever he was.

You thought about a lot of things while letting your eyes roam the space. It was enormous, taking up the entire underside of the house, outfitted impressively with mahogany accents, sprawling bookshelves, armchairs, and loveseats pulled tight in leather and velvet. Across the room was a disheveled bed, creamy sateen sheets in a luscious heap but otherwise undisturbed.

To the adjacent end of this expanse were two doors you didn't notice at first, one a little taller than yourself in height, about as wide as any normal arm span, and looked old, so old that everything else was too new. Even from where you stood, you knew it'd take a skeleton key. The other door was more coherent with the rest of the basement, cleaner but certainly still part of the house's original construction.

By the time Montague had returned, you already had much of the ordeal pitched into a biohazard bag with some trace remnants putting you on your knees to scrub away. You hadn't realized he was even there until the tips of his shoes—brown leather loafers with a scalloped tassel near the toes—appeared in your peripheral, sending you launching back onto your hocks.

"This work is spectacular. I knew I had a good feeling giving that room to you." he said with a beguiling smile. All of the blood was gone; he was clean in a dark dressing robe with black trousers, a look you hated that you saw as alluring. "Don't forget to clean the floors upstairs. We made quite a mess there as well."

"What happened to that woman?" You were asking your pesky questions again. Montague wasn't so sure he found them as charming now, but you were still a prize.

You leaned away as he crouched in front of you, nearly risking the soles of his shoes in the blood and hydrogen peroxide. For the first time since meeting, you kept eye contact and saw that his reached a depth you didn't think could be possible for a human. He wasn't touching you, yet it felt like he had you caged, trapped in a vise that held you tight.

He did touch you then, grazing the side of your face with a thumb. Suddenly, he brought it to his lips and licked it as he rose to full height.

"You still had some blood just there on your cheek." There was an armchair a few feet away that he dropped into, withdrawing a gold compact from a chest pocket on his way down. "Don't worry. I wouldn't ask you to carry away the bodies. I'm not that Roman."

"That's not what I asked." you rejoined.

Montague tucked a cigarette between his lips, igniting it with a match he kept inside the compact. His first few puffs looked like they calmed him as he crossed a leg and settled deeper into the leather. "You shouldn’t expect answers to things you don’t need to know—or want to.”

But he humored you with a slight lean of his head towards the old door far away. "The original owner of this house was ingenious and built tunnels that were used to shuffle people in and out. Mistresses. Servants. More unsavory things—you must remember the era. At any rate, it stretches beyond the house and some ways off. I do not recommend ever going inside."

You understood now why you never saw any of the dates he brought home leave. And you believed every bit of his warning.

It inspired you to move away from the grim reality dwelling beyond that old door. You hovered over the same spot, drenching the floor with more of the disinfectant, grasping for a distraction. "I didn't know vampires could smoke. Isn't blood enough for you?”

Montague flicked his cigarette over an ashtray beside his chair. "Well, we all have our vices. Mine just happens to be five or six of these a day. Keeps enough of the edge off so you get to sleep at night."

Something about that comment made the entire stretch of the basement feel so confining—claustrophobic, even. Your back was wide open to it, to his ravening gaze and leather toe turning fluid circles as though to pace himself before lunging.

"I have class in six hours." You finished the job by tying off the bag. "I'd like to get the upstairs done and take a shower."

"Of course. Try to get some sleep, you've had quite a night." He didn't move to see you out. "Oh, and leave the bag. I'll dispose of it."

༺ ♰ ༻

Meredith Nimu died approximately twenty-three days ago after a stroke left her immobilized in her favorite armchair. Her body wasn't peeled away from the murky-green polyester until day twenty-four, following enough neighbor complaints about a bunch of rats dying in the vents.

Getting rid of the chair was half the battle in this case, something that Meredith's overzealous, recently divorced daughter spouted off as sacrilegious. She insisted that the carpet cleaner she used for her obese dogs with raw patches on their legs could do it all. Your supervisor had been inflectionless when telling her it didn't work like that.

One of your teammates, a middle-aged black man affectionately nicknamed “Hoss” had unceremoniously slammed the apartment door shut and flipped the lock so the daughter's rancorous eruptions were somewhat contained outside. The other half of the duo responsible for pitching the chair, T.J., a white man who could never tan, wheezed out a laugh as he labored a hard bristle brush through the gunk left behind from Meredith's decay.

"Boss ain't gonna be happy about that." T.J. couldn't commit to the act of a brownnoser even if he wanted to. A couple more chortles rattled through his respirator. They were infectious, ridiculous sounds that coaxed similar from Hoss when he rejoined the effort to get the job done and over with.

You could still hear the daughter on the other side of the door, never once allowing your supervisor a word in edgewise. A part of you wanted to pity her, perhaps conjure up a shred of empathy for someone so completely enmeshed in the throes of grief and anger. She was clearly spiraling, her entire life yanked out from under her—and she was free-falling with nothing to catch her, no thin wire she could snag in the bend of her fingers and watch as the velocity of that cruelly, cleanly severed white tendon and bone.

Where would she fall after that? You didn't know. You didn't care. She could regain control over her life even without fingers, but what about you? No one understood how disconcerting it was to know that your survival depended on a vampire's good mood. An old woman was meant to expire, but you were young and had aspirations—yet that could be stolen from you just as quickly as a clot could kill the brain.

It wasn't fucking fair.

Hoss had called out to you repeatedly until the hard brushes stopped scratching the floor, and he and T.J. were settled back on their heels, staring at you. You were used to leveraging your commitments in life as a means to get them off your case, but even they could tell this was different.

"You've been real spacey lately." It was enough to gently reel you back to the moment, eyes unstuck from remnants of putrid matter hidden under a deluge of chemicals and soap. Now you were thinking that the landlord would probably have to replace this entire spot in the flooring. It would be an expensive fix.

"Everything okay at home?" Hoss tried again, emulating fatherly concern in his tone and sidelong stare. It was something he couldn't help since you were so similar in age to his adult kids. "I don't think I've seen you eat today. We oughta finish up here up and grab somethin' quick on the way back.”

"Sorry, yeah, it's just the usual things." They didn't know what that meant to you, but readily accepted with dour expressions masked by their respirators. "I think I saw a gyro truck down the street."

As many times as you had regurgitated the same thing when they pried into your well-being, you were surprised they still asked at all. That made it hard to wave after them as you pulled the lever to the trunk, waiting to be left alone once the job was done to stack half your weight in absorbent until the back bowed to it.

It was just past two in the morning when you were locking the front door of Montague's sprawling estate behind you. Every time you did, a part of you hesitated to seal it the whole way, as though if you did, your final traces of freedom would be stripped away entirely.

"Welcome home!" Montague came out from prowling somewhere in the shadows, seeming to materialize from the darkest parts your eyes couldn't adapt to. He was in a dressing robe again, this one forest green with gold embroidery and a burgundy handkerchief tucked away nicely in his breast pocket.

He already had a cigarette lit between his knuckles, fussing with the little stick as he went to an open window, sucked in, and expelled pungent gray smoke. "I apologize. There's a bit of a mess for you tonight. It's unlike me to be so untidy, but it shouldn't take you too long—oh, darling, don't make that face."

"Why can't you get blood from other sources, like a blood bank?" It's been on your mind for a while, but Montague had a habit of turning petulant if you asked him too much.

He was in good shape tonight, though, despite still puffing away antsily. "Where's the satisfaction in simply being given what I want? Blood banks are a finite supply, but out there"—he gestured through the open window—"there is an infinite supply from any walk of life that I so choose. Did you know that not all blood is equal?"

You sensed him at your back, awash with that same vulnerability as the night on your knees in the basement. He strolled along with you while you collected your things, examined his leftovers, which fortunately wasn't as sensational as before. It looked like a Rorschach inkblot almost, purple-red and pristine, obviously untouched for some time.

Just like that dead blonde woman, there was nothing left behind of the victim except what Montague was too careless to handle himself.

"The worst blood is what you find in hospitals or on the streets. It doesn't matter their type; it all tastes like shit." he continued, even while you worked. Just like before, he sat himself nearby and observed your process with gross fascination. "In a pinch, though, I do what I must. It doesn't matter if a man is homeless or a woman is looking for a night out. When I hear their hearts dance, that thump, thump, thump—oh, I have to have it. I can taste them through their skin, even before I sink my teeth in.

"The fear in their eyes. The ragged breaths I see in their chests, watching their bellies pulse. I like to think in those moments they know exactly what's going to happen, like little flies in a spider's web."

Montague let more smoke slither out from his lips in skinny, swirling wisps that dissipated once it touched the air. The haze of it remained, just traceable to your eye. "I always find it interesting that they all struggle, even as they're writhing in their own blood. Sometimes I'll count how long it takes for them to die."

These weren't confessions of a madman because that would imply he was human. He was treating you akin to the way an old man recounted the fondness of his flawed, flickering memories. There were sensations of joy and affection in the work he did, a true love and visceral desire for carnage and suffering that made it hard for you to stomach. A few times throughout his soliloquy, you needed to bear your weight on the kitchen broom to keep yourself from toppling from nausea.

You shouldn't have been curious. "Has anyone ever survived?"

The surrounding space grew darker, not from loss of light but from the way his lower face sunk behind the hand wielding the cigarette. You saw his smile widen through sickly appendages and faint smoke.

His response pierced straight through you. "I'm looking right at it."

Suddenly, the urge to run rushed forefront in your mind, an instinctual reaction that you had trouble wrestling over with logic. The broomstick was easily pulled from your fingers and discarded onto the floor with a reverberating clatter that made your spine race with cold needles as Montague stepped into your proximity.

You shivered against the hands slowly climbing your neck to the underside of your jaw, cradling your face as he lifted it to meet his eyes. Something was so wrong with how black they were; you didn't see a pupil, nor did your reflection stare back at you in them. It's almost as though there was nothing there at all, the dark of them growing into an abysmal chasm that made your vision cross and blur, eyelids weighing like lead when you felt him kiss you.

His lips were the same kind of cold as the rest of him but full and unrelenting, never granting you the chance to mold the kiss in any other way. Surprisingly, the taste of stale smoke on his breath was just slight, a mediocre vexation you overlooked the moment his hands started groping you under your clothes.

And you didn't think much of it when your back settled into the clean linens on your bed, skin flushed with the crisp evening air and lips mapping their way south across your stomach and navel, delving lower to your core. It was too dark in your room to see down your body at the top of Montague's head, but you felt him with your fingers, coiling pieces of his ash-brown hair to your knuckles while he pushed your thighs wide open for him.

An anxious patter swelled in your chest, a vague understanding that something was horrible about this, but you were too wrapped up in a dreamy fog to think about it. More than the resounding boom of your heart, you heard your own breaths dissolve into lewd moans and slurred pleas for him to do more, more, more.

It didn't sound like you. It didn't feel like you despite knowing that build-up in your abdomen better than most things in your body. The hands in his hair, the back bending off of the mattress like an archway, the shaking limbs, and the cries begging for more were someone else entirely up until the very moment rapture fluttered behind your eyes in searing white, body deluged in hot release that left your scalp tingling and toes curling and spend on your sheets.

"Give me more." You tasted him again, his tongue pushing hard into your mouth where those salty notes of yourself lingered on your cheeks. His silhouette melded with the rest of the room, tangible only in the way he roamed every surface of you.

Montague had shucked the clothes from both your bodies earlier, preferring to lean into the flush of heat you radiated. Everything was only skin-deep away from him; he could feel your pulse throb on his lips when he teased himself against your carotid, your radial, trailing all the way to the powerful beat of your femoral nestled there in your groin.

His teeth came close many times to piercing you, allowing him a sliver of a taste like a parched king waiting for a drop of golden wine. But half the thrill of having you around was denying himself of you, knowing well that if he were to start, then he'd never be able to stop, and he'd fully hamper your dreams of escaping.

The air smelled like you now, heavy and like damp skin and your fluids soaking into the linens. He watched your face bunch and fall apart when he split you open with his cock, hips colliding, your skin sure to bruise as his thrusts turned savage. There wasn't much left in his heart anymore. Most of it had atrophied over the centuries, and yet the sound of yours spurred him on.

He could follow the path of your blood through your body, an extensive subject he had studied and dissected at length in his lifetime. The most vulnerable spots were gorged and worked the hardest, almost glowing red through your skin for him. When he thrust a little bit harder, a little bit faster, and felt your fingertips pushing against his chest, he heard your heart be the loudest it ever had been.

"That's it. That's it. That's it." His own breaths were ragged now. The sheer exhilaration of pushing his lips deeper, hot sweat leaving a slick layer on them, and that one big artery in your neck pounding out was doing everything for him.

Your frantic pants were a close second. He could feel you unraveling, tightening around his cock until you were soundlessly writhing on the mattress, clutching anything you could bunch together. The final few thrusts he made were purposeful; they were forceful and jolted your body, a show to make sure you wouldn't forget the feeling of him inside of you.

The clean linens were sodden with cum, some still dripping out of you while you lay there, legs splayed enough so you wouldn't feel it stick to your thighs. Whatever haze had been hanging over your eyes before lifted away, leaving you ruined and exhausted on the sheets but not alone.

"You've got class in a few hours, don't you?" Montague said from above, shoulders nestled in your headboard while one leg hung off the side of the bed. He was smoking again, acting the calmest you had witnessed him. "I don't really think you're in any shape for that. Why don't you stay home today?"

You were too spent to respond to him, somehow using the occasional breaths he blew out into the vast room to lull you into a dreamless sleep.

༺ ♰ ༻

Shin Nakamura had been a selfish man in life. Mid-fifties, thinning hair, and twice divorced from women who knew better—his tenants did not. He had built a reputation on the north side of town for hidden costs and faulty appliances that were never fixed. Once or twice in the past four years you had cleaned up scenes, they came out of Nakamura's buildings in the summertime, stuck to the floor and infested with maggots and flies in different orifices.

Everyone had asked at one point, yourself included, how he was able to get away with that level of blatant cruelty and disregard—and the answer was as simultaneously simple, complex, and terrible as poverty. The north end was an area notorious for local crime and violence, but more than that, it was forgotten in favor of gentrifying other areas of the city—pretty little boutiques that'd make a splash on social media and a couple of upscale dining spots, all of those meant to change the online scales deeming an area's walkability, and therefore, profitability.

The blind eye most city commissioners turned to the north end made it an easy life for Shin to do as he pleased without many consequences despite living in the area himself. Most of everyone found it an odd sort of justice when he was discovered in his office, unrecognizable from how badly the dozens of stab wounds had disfigured his face and body. One look was enough to know that it was personal, a tenant who had received their condemnation via a neon-pink eviction letter hastily taped to an off-white door.

Only, this time, Shin chose a person backed into a corner at their breaking point. There wasn't much left to lose, yet Shin had ultimately lost it all. Rumor had it that no one sold out the tenant who committed the crime, something even the more moralistic part of yourself could fathom. These were the cases that painted a grim picture of your future in forensics and often speared to the front of your mind at the worst of times—could you really be part of the reason why a person shattered by the powers of society goes to jail?

Shin Nakamura was a terrible man, but were his crimes punishable by that sort of torture? What about the tenants who probably heard Shin screaming for help, crying in agony—were they any better than murderers themselves?

What did that mean for you? An accomplice who quietly scrubbed clean murders at a monster's behest, you allowed those people to be swallowed up by Montague under a guise of fear, or was it selfishness?

That discomfort lasted you your entire shift, like an incredibly nauseating pill with a bad smell that sat in your nose for hours. You couldn't wipe away the thoughts like you could dried blood on smoke-stained walls or lumps of serrated flesh and fat wedged between slabs of wood on the floor.

"Man, he coulda been cleaner about this." T.J. had his feet planted solidly on the middle step of a ladder, well at work with a long-handled brush pushed flat to the ceiling. The splatter had gone that far, earning a few awestruck coos from him and Hoss earlier. "It would've made our lives easier."

It was a normal joke. You'd laughed at the exact same one many times before, even finessed your own commentary in there on occasion because the dead can't sue, and a murderer had no rights—but now, you thought it'd taste bad on your tongue.

The two hulking men noticed, far sharper than you gave them credit for. Or maybe you were just worse at hiding things than you thought. They didn't allude to anything until everyone was packed up in the van, dried from the sweaty protective suits and summer heat by the AC.

"Listen, it ain't my business, and I swear I've been trying my best not to ask." There was a furtive look linked between Hoss and T.J.; it was something they had talked about when you weren't around. "That guy you're living with. He isn't doing anything to you, right? You used to talk about him all the time in the beginning. Haven’t heard a peep about him in ages. God, you're not living in your car, are you?"

From the outside in, you weren't doing much to try to embellish fancy stories and reasons onto your drastic change over the months. You simply let it be and navigated every day with the hope you'd remember where you were going with your head down. It probably didn't look too good to a paternal man like Hoss, and to T.J., who had several younger siblings.

"No, it's not him—" But, of course, it really was and everything surrounding his cruelty, everything he made you do, and what you never refuted. "I'm just perpetually exhausted. I'm sure you've heard that from Sylvie and Deshaun while they've been in uni."

"All the damn time." Hoss beamed, chest perked a little higher with the mention of his children. It wasn't enough to diffuse the tension lingering in the van, however. "Just know, I'd do for you what I'd do for my babies—put the fear of God in that man. If he puts a finger on you, you let me know."

T.J. gave an agreeable hum, fingers sticking to the steering wheel as he moved them around, making a turn down some street. "We'll catch him by surprise and everything. I'll call in a couple favors, grab a few shovels and bags of cement from my dad's place. It's all good."

For some reason, their entire spiel only spiked your uneasiness, and suddenly you were far too aware of your bladder. It was enough initiative for T.J. to floor the gas and get back to headquarters, giving you the chance to break away and race the remnants of daylight all the way home.

༺ ♰ ༻

It had never happened before, but you managed to catch Montague by surprise when he walked through the front door to find you standing there in the foyer. The kitchen broom wrapped in your hands was a nasty ploy, along with the look you cast between him and a young man not any older than yourself. Again, just like all the others, you didn't recognize him. Montague's victims were fast, fleeting fixations for him, none worthy of names or an identity in his eyes. You suspected this guy was much the same.

Montague's bewilderment was swept away by a smile and laxing posture. He had settled back into his element. "You're home early today. I didn't expect to see you until much later. Not much to the scene, I assume?"

"It was pretty bad." A certain stiffness trailed on the end of your words, letting them echo through the hall and hang in the cool evening air. The young man was fast to perceive that tension: the tightness in your shoulders, fingers subtly wringing against the cracked wooden broom. Montague's anticipative smile climbed higher the longer he looked at you.

Would it be such a bad thing to turn around and pretend you had never seen him come home with that other man? You considered doing it, hiding upstairs and using your headphones until everything seeping through turned into an amalgamation of ambient noise that meant nothing to you, and you willed away the guilt like you'd always done.

In that moment, you thought about Meredith Nimu's apoplectic daughter, a woman so embittered by her own suffering that she was foul and relentless to anyone she crossed paths with. You thought about Shin Nakamura, a greedy, pitiless man who'd rather let coroners scrape up his tenant's remains rather than grant them mercy while they were alive and had been left in pieces because of it.

You thought of them and all their wickedness and edged your gaze towards the young man still standing in the doorway with his hand holding it ajar, clean fingernails picking at chipping paint, just steps from outside. "I think you should leave."

Run! Run! You'd better run away as fast as you can! Nothing would stop Montague from keeping his prey there, if that's what he chose to do. He did the opposite of that, and that was, simply, nothing at all. No pretty blandishments, nor a mouthful of teeth. Rather, now, he was particularly piqued by what you were trying to do.

To the young man, he had meddled into something rather egregious, probably convinced it was extramarital. You battled a surge of pride blooming inside you, shifting your chest a little higher, anchoring your spine back into your body.

"Don't come back here." You didn't need to say anything else. He was gone after pinching out a look of disgust towards Montague, tutting at him with his upper teeth showing through a curled lip.

Nothing happened for a while, not until the front door was secured after his departure. You were left to that responsibility, triple-checking the lock, while Montague ambled deeper into the house, but not too far away as you could follow the leisurely path by his heel strike. There was a rhythm in how he moved. It was deliberate, as though mimicking something.

It took you five paces to figure out he was miming your heartbeat, and he only stopped once it quickened in your chest. He appeared from around the corner, still taking his time reaching you, toying with some trinkets displayed on shelves built into alcoves throughout the lower floor.

You couldn't explain what you were feeling at that moment. Of the thousands—maybe millions—of victims Montague had taken in the previous times, you had just deprived him of one. That man would continue living, and he would tell his friends tomorrow about the weird night he had, and he would never have to be grateful that you saved him from a hellish death.

Yes, oh yes. Even as Montague approached you, carried by his deft gait with both halves of his gold compact open in his palm, you couldn't help but be in complete awe of yourself. A life continued outside of this mausoleum, and it was all because of you. You were entirely different from Meredith Nimu's daughter and Shin Nakamura, and, for once, your hands weren't sullied by bleach, blood, and body matter.

All that heaviness you had been carrying was suddenly so much lighter, and you felt like your chest could open up as wide as the room where you stood. The breaths you took were dry and cold in your throat, yet fresh as though you were walking outside in wintertime.

Montague must've seen something he didn't like on your face because he sucked down on his cigarette for a while, winding his wrist with it at his side once he was adequately calm.

"Did it feel good? I've only seen you this happy while I was fucking your brains out." It was jarring to hear him talk like that. He took another quick drag and let it out slowly as he rounded you. "Truthfully, darling, I didn't think you were the type to break the rules—on purpose, anyway. But I suppose we all get a little wound up every now and then, right? I've already forgiven you."

And then, you watched him drop the cigarette to the marble and snuff it underfoot until the weak ember was turned to soot. A black smear was left behind when he took his foot away. His stare into you was unwavering. "Clean it up."

You figured this was how a frightened animal felt when it wanted something within reach of an observant predator because you were trying to think of all the ways to get close without getting too close. It was a pitiful, humorous sight to him, seeing your steps forward so light and on the verge of bolting. But he showed no intention of doing anything more.

Still with the broom in hand, your knuckles turned stark around the handle while sweeping the remains towards you. It would take more elbow grease to get up that smudge, and he knew that just as well.

He reached for the broom and snapped it to a halt, making you jump, jaw clenching. A noiseless gasp lurched in your throat, his fingers wound tight into the hair at your crown as he yanked your head back to show all the fleshiness of your neck.

"What will you do about it, darling?" His lips were already cold and flush to the artery dancing in the curvature built of skin, muscle, and tendon. Your teeth chattered as the wetness of his tongue followed that intricate, breathtaking network inside of you as far as the neckline of your shirt would let him. "A man has to eat. Have you ever seen it? A man near starvation and the sorts of things he'll do to survive? Why, I've heard stories of desperate, little men eating their own lovers—their children—themselves just to claw around for a little longer. It's inspiring, I think."

He dragged you away then, up the stairs and through the hallway on the second floor to your bedroom, fingers still nested your hair until the moment you were shoved down onto fresh linens. There wasn't anywhere for you to go once he joined you on the mattress, feeling it bend towards his weight.

"Don't be afraid." he said this with all the fond familiarity of a lover, blunt fingernails digging crescents into your thigh through your clothes. In the waning moonlight that filtered through the dusty window over your bed, his pale eyeshine snared you like roots bursting from somewhere within your busy sheets to keep you there—keep you tame. "That's right. Come to me. Come to me."

There was a new drowsiness behind your eyes, one you couldn't stave by blinking. Montague's face was closer now, and you were struck with just how beautiful he actually was. The longer your gaze lasted, tips of your fingers exploring every shape and edge of his exquisite features, the less you were convinced he was a threat to you—that he couldn't have possibly been all that you'd feared up until now.

"I want you." His lips inched up like he expected you to say it. He felt your hands rest on the sides of his face, guiding him down into a soft kiss that he returned, that he kept clean and let you command until he was bored with it. You chased after him, lower lip pulled between both of yours and eventually out of reach. "Don't you want me too?"

"I wish you could understand just how much I do." He rummaged his pocket for the gold compact, losing it somewhere in the sheets, and then busied himself with stripping himself and you of clothes. Each piece discarded showed a greater expanse of your skin, a delight in his eyes because he could see that gorgeous webbing of arteries and veins throughout you, even in the darkness, through every defense your body created to protect you from every bacteria, virus, infection—from him.

He didn't need the breath, but he took one and held it anyway. You withered against his touch, those freezing, lithe fingertips traveling down all the areas where he wished his teeth could be, clear down to your groin. His smile stretched, feeling you search eagerly for a fistful of his hair with his lips smoothing across your inner thigh and then going higher.

There was warmth between your legs, a colorless glisten that leaked out onto the thin sheets, darkening a spot on them that tempted his tongue out for a taste. He came close to entertaining the notion of giving you that glimpse of heaven, allured by your hips leaping off the mattress and against his face.

"You really do think this is all about you." Montague kept you still by pressing down into your abdomen as he rose onto his knees, erection fitting tight between your bodies in the moments before he guided himself lower and hitched up into you. The sharp motion knocked a startled gasp out of your throat, where it quickly dissolved into a slew of filth and breathy panting. Your nails clawed into your palms, a sight he thought to make worse by digging himself deeper into you.

Montague had no issues biding his time this way, looming over the sprawl of your body beneath him, manipulating parts of you until he saw your face flinch and the first moans of discomfort shake all the way from your chest, up, and through your teeth. They matched the pace of his hard thrusts, smothered by sharp slaps of skin that carried in the inky air.

Indeed, I can wait. That thought of his unsatiated hunger melted in the back of his mind with the precedence of arranging the course of blood in your body. The drum of your heartbeat was deafening to him, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't loud enough. He wanted to be able to envision the arteries and veins bursting in his teeth, saturating the sheets and walls and both your bodies in hot red. He wanted it to paint his skin while he fucked you to absolution.

"It really, truly, is all about you in the end, isn't it?" He could still speak clearly, despite you being unable to utter noise beyond the air being forced out of your lungs. "You really are magnificent. How could I ever think to let you go? Not after everything you've done for me, how beautiful you look next to all of my things."

His hand shifted away from your abdomen at last, tracking across the soft span of your stomach and the muscles spasming there under his fingertips. All he would have to do is dig through you a little bit, and he could bury himself in those twitching fibers and insides. But he continued on his path to your pert nipples that he rolled against his palm a few times, higher still to fold his fingers together against your sternum where he felt your heart thundering there against your ribs.

"Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump," came his mocking chant that cracked into raspy moans as he lingered there. It had been a long time since something had made him feel this good. He had forgotten what bliss was truly like.

He reached your neck before long, trapping the underside of your jaw against his knuckles, forcing you to see him as his weight bore down on your throat. You both heard the cartilage and muscle in your neck shift, a subtle crack that sent your limbs flailing. You were thrown out of the rhythm of his thrusts in an attempt to grab at him.

"You really are despicable, aren't you?" He let out a gleeful laugh, letting your fingers turn ashen while you wrung his wrist. You weren't able to do much with your legs except use them to plant your heels into the mattress, vaulting your hips in the air to try to wrench yourself free. His cock slipped out of you, but he was hardly bothered by that. "Does it feel good that you chased off my guest? I could get him back, you know. You're aware of this. I know you are. But righteousness just feels so… rewarding, doesn't it? You couldn't resist. Desperation must've been eating you alive."

Strings of saliva glistened in your mouth, breaking apart the further your jaws spread. You were convinced, in that moment, that you would die like that in a silent scream. None of the words that Montague spoke truly reached you, not as your chest quivered and lungs burned as though swallowed in an inferno.

"Every misdeed in life vastly outweighs the good, you know? The scales have never been leaned in our favor—not I, and especially not for you. If that's the sort of thing you believe in. Isn't that what you're taught? Goodness for the sake of salvation at the end of a short life of inhibitions? How miserable." Montague took his hand off of you and let you breathe. You sucked in crisp air, gasping from your side through wet coughs and the sourness of vomit spat out on the floor.

Your respite was brief, weight on the mattress shifting as the hair on your scalp was used to lever you to your knees, body suspended upright only by his fingers tangled at your roots.

"This is all I can see." Montague loosened his hand from your head, moving south along your spine to your ass. He kneaded the bruised parts of your hips for a while after, lips ghosting their way along your neck up to the ear. "All I can see is what's right in front of me. And how it tastes. All that matters is that I have my fill—and that I feel good."

He smeared slick into the heel of his palm, rolling the head of his cock in that mess as he instructed you with every bit of lewdness how he wanted you to bend against the headboard, how far apart for you to spread your legs for him.

Every bit of it was humiliating for you, while he wished he could memorialize that moment of sinking back inside of you as your breaths broke into stifled sobs, face warped by anguish.

"Does it hurt? Tell me, I have to know, what does it feel like?" He enjoyed the suspense of not receiving an answer, listening as your fingernails dug tracks into the wood headboard and the dark room filled with obscene wetness that grew louder as his thrusts turned wild.

"Mmm—" He hinged forward, bracing his weight on top of your hands with his own. You shied from the surge of coolness that came with his cheek pressing yours. "You and I aren't so different. It makes me wonder if you actually like this. Isn't there something so freeing about it?"

"Mer—mercy, please." It was a coarse whisper from your dry throat, so much of your time having been spent with your mouth agape. The idea of having you that way was as tantalizing as all the others he thought up. "Montague, please—mercy."

Oh, now you were begging.

This was more than what he deserved. He managed a few more thrusts, spilling over into you by the third with a moan that he felt no shame to leave ringing in your ear. "Every part of you, every single part—I'll burn myself into your skin and your bones. You'll feel me in your veins, your blood. I'll make for certain that I'm all you remember—forever."

The vastness of your bedroom had grown warmer, permeated with the thickness of sweat and salt that left your palms slick against the headboard. You let your body slump against it, skin sticking to the wood. It didn't offer you the relief you wanted at that moment: a glass of ice water, all the tenderness of a soft bed to lull you into a blank dream—you just wanted to rest.

Montague knew this just as well, fishing his compact out from a muddled heap of linens and clothes. He checked inside to grab one of the two cigarettes left, making a mental note he'd need to replenish again tomorrow before lighting it and savoring it. At this rate, he anticipated he'd be empty before the end of the night.

For a while, he sat there cushioned on his haunches, admiring the way the smoke coiled towards the ceiling in dainty wisps and mingled with the stench of sex.

"It's not enough." he said, barely eliciting more than a glance from you. His current cigarette was already burnt to the filter, forcing him to pull the last and light that one too. "This is my last one. Such a shame."

You smelled the smoke strongly now, just seconds passing before you were yanked across the bed onto your back, the soreness in your scalp near excruciating as you yelped. Montague made a place for himself between your thighs again, leering down the length of his nose at you.

If he wanted to, he could trace the dread etched in your features with a finger, feeling all along your hot skin, into all the cavernous lines he wished he could preserve—right there, just like that. There had never been a more gorgeous visage than the one you wore right now. Only your gleaming, glowing, pink insides were more beautiful.

He watched your lips twitch while he teased a fistful of his hard cock against your sorest spot. You were swollen and bruised, and he could only imagine what it felt like when he bottomed out in you again.

The curve of your spine arched off the mattress, fingers frantically raking the air at him, reaching for any part you could sink into to get him out. Even your body seemed determined for the same, wonderfully stimulating walls squeezing around him.

It made a shiver roll all along his spine to his tailbone, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling, with his first thrusts feeling positively divine. Especially when you jolted, an almost exaggerated response amplified by jagged cries and wet gasps you couldn't seem to swallow back down into your chest.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry—" You sputtered around the mucus piled in your throat. "Montague, I'm sorry. Please, stop."

He had burned away half of his last cigarette when he leaned over you, his body eclipsing what poor light had managed to illuminate the room for you. You could only follow the dainty mesmerizing glow that worked away from his mouth—his exhale barely masking a moan that he blew away with the smoke—and towards you.

"Keep doing it." His other hand was crawling up your neck, forcing you to suck in a hard breath. "Beg me again. Keep doing it."

All sound but the steady pulse of the headboard striking the wall had deadened, lasting well until the moment the cigarette touched your skin—and you screamed. Your throat vibrated, suddenly stopping when his palm closed around you again, silencing all your noise, his thrusts sloppy and rough while you thrashed under him.

This time, he kept you pinned by his chest, letting your feet dig for traction and slip and slide on the sheets. The bright smolder turned dark as he twisted it into your neck, taking all the remnants of restraint he had not to drill into you as far as it could go. He curled his tongue behind his jaws, keeping them tight.

Montague let go of your throat to allow you the grace of a stifled wail before that same hand sealed your lips. "Ah, ah. You know better than to scream. Shh, shhh, shhh. It's such an ugly sound."

He rubbed the cigarette into your skin until it crumpled, leaving him to lament for a moment once flicking it away to the floor. For him, it left behind a beautiful burn: raw, mad, red, and enticing. As his hand fell off of your mouth, daring you to do more than whimper and cry, his tongue was already flat against your wound.

"Oh, God," you wheezed, voice hoarse and jarring with the force of his hips knocking into you. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry! Stop, stop, stop! I swear I'll never do it again! I swear. I swear!"

Montague caught the wrist you swung at his head, giving the taste of your seared flesh time to settle on his palate before turning towards the pulse in your thumb. He tried to match how he was fucking you out to how it throbbed on his lips.

"Oh, I'm well aware that you won't do it again. That much is a given." His strokes into you were suddenly languid and intentional, so achingly deep that your eyes rolled back. "I've already said that you're forgiven, haven't I?"

You could barely speak over the depth he reached. It didn't feel right. "Th-then, why?"

A smile flourished across his face, but your eyes couldn't pierce that dark veil to see it. You could feel the damp path he left on your wrist, how the muscle writhed all around the sprawl of your veins, going as far as to wind your fingertips before it receded back behind his lips.

"Because I'm enjoying myself." There was a weight of finality to those words before his mouth engulfed the side of your wrist, away from your fragile network of bluish-purplish channels. And when he bit into you, it was the incisors that sank through.

You didn't know what it was. A clamp seized you by the neck like his fist, steeling itself there and robbing you of a scream. The pain was unlike anything else—paralyzing and deep, like a pair of sharpened, narrow skewers made of molten fire piercing you with such an agonizing ache that you could do nothing but lay there.

But you still felt everything he was doing. His thrusts had grown truly vicious, chasing a high that came as the warmth of your blood seeped from a pair of punctures he had created. The steady flow he fed from was something he lapped on at his leisure. Enough of it streaked the length of your arm and dripped onto your bedding, onto your naked, warm skin when he guided the fall over your neck and chest, south to your stomach and abdomen. He let it fill and pool the seams of his fingers while smearing it with the fluids between your bodies.

At last, breaking the trance to speak, feebly, in between intermittent pockets of pain and numbness rolling through you, you asked with some hopefulness, "Are you going to kill me?"

"You? Kill you?" Montague dropped your wrist. It felt like a limp, dead thing that didn't belong to you. He dove at your neck for those drops he teased himself with, nudging your chin high with his nose to reach it all. "Death would mean letting you go. You're all mine, darling. Whatever other existence waits beyond death will never have you."

His tongue wet a trail to your chin, collecting a watery essence of blood and spit that he pushed into your mouth. Your lips were sealed by his ravenous kiss, relenting to the thickness of his tongue swirling the taste into your cheeks and down your throat, a nauseating intermix of iron and stale smoke that lingered and made you pucker.

And then, you heard him back in your ear, craning his neck only as far as to aggravate the cigarette burn with his breath. It gave several angry throbs. The weight of his body was almost flush on you, spreading the blood around as though your skin together was a single canvas.

To his eyes, it bloomed breathtakingly, seeping into every crevice, pore, and scratch that made up your design, an impermanent stain that he could saturate you in again and again and again. The things he whispered in your ear were vile and wicked, all on unlabored breaths while his strokes turned sluggish and stayed seated deep inside you until the final hitch of his hips left you full of him.

"I don't think you should go to work today."

You were only scarcely coherent of him—or anything for that matter—eyes unmoving from the black void above and unfeeling of how he chose to manipulate your body, still, hours later. All you could think about was the flutter of your lashes weighing down heavily over your eyes and how this world only survived on suffering such as yours.

༺ ♰ ༻

A small pile of things was arranged fussily in a duffle bag Hoss had given the day you returned to work after an impromptu leave of absence. It had only lasted three days, just enough time to acclimate to the pain that seemed to synchronize to every part of your body, throbbing everywhere, all at once, and at times with sharpness so great it toppled you to the ground. You could only lay there—wherever you dropped, on whatever cold slab of marble or concrete until it dissipated, unfurling from your limbs and organs to a rapturous wave of relief that melted the tension out of you.

It had only happened once while at work on a scene amidst a balmy summer night and came out of nowhere like an electric shock surging to your fingertips and toes, a hammer landing on your bones and leveling you on the sidewalk leading back to the company van. And that was all it took to incur a ruinous sort of anger in the two hulking men.

"You're going to take this bag, pack some shit, and you're leaving. Tonight." Hoss had to shake out the dust on the old duffle bag he pulled from somewhere in his car. "You ain't gonna tell me the reason, but I know he did something to you. T.J.'s calling in a favor."

"No. Don't—don't do anything. Don't try to come to the house—" There was a bandage around your wrist that you couldn't stop fiddling with. "I don't know what'll happen if you do. Just fucking don't."

"Nah, not us." T.J. slapped his phone back into the clip on his belt loop, eyeing the motions of your fingers on your wrist uneasily. "One of my old buddies—name's Roscoe—said he wants to handle it. Apparently, he and your guy have a history of some kind. He says to be ready to go by three."

The meaning behind what he said was left nebulous and concerning to you, even after you returned home with the duffle bag and started pulling things from your closet. Some ways across your room, high up on the wall and out of your reach was a clock. Its monotonous ticking brought your eyes over to it.

It was just after one-thirty, still enough time to change your mind if you wanted to. There was something so effortlessly easy about following along to the whims of other people. It felt safe, reassuring—their confidence was infallible. Not once in four years had T.J. or Hoss given you a reason to doubt their intentions, but right now, it boiled over in your mind.

But where will I go? What am I going to do? He'll find me. He'll find me. Montague would find you, but he wouldn't stop you from leaving. You could see it with clarity—him perched on the armrest of a chair, watching you walk through the door. He'd give you a headstart, a few days, maybe a few weeks.

You weren't sure you knew what to do without him. There was nowhere else in the world you could go, no one you could confide in that wouldn't be destroyed. He would keep your heart beating all the while breaking you apart until he had his fill, reminding you that this was how it was meant to be. This was how he showed you how you belonged.

And you—silly little you with your consciousness floating on the fringes of inscrutable ecstasy and some personal purgatory built on agony in your bones and blood—would believe him.

"Going on a trip?" His voice drifted to you from the doorway, far sweeter than it usually was. "I wish you would've told me. I can't imagine what it'll be like without you here in this house. You breathe life into it."

He was lured over by your silence, fitting his fingers between your shoulder blades to push along your spine, easing away the discomfort that had settled there. It was hard not to lean into that relief, a misstep that shattered any lasting hold of willpower when he stooped his neck to sweep you into a kiss.

"Why don't you stay instead?" He knew you wouldn't be coming back, not without dragging you back himself. "Stay with me instead. Right here. In this bed."

"Montague, stop—" He pressed down harder on your lips so those words withered into guttural frustration in your throat.

The duffle bag was flung far away, opening space on your bed for him to lay you out and begin to unravel the bandages around your wrist. Once he had access, his mouth was already full against the two puncture sites.

"Stay." He wasn't playing coy now. "I'll take care of you. It wasn't enough before. I can see that now. What can I do? It'd be too easy to break your legs. What if I chained you to this bed? What if I locked you up in this room? I wouldn't mind keeping you downstairs with me, but it would be too cold for you, I think."

"I want to leave." you said, mustering your composure through tight lips while he teased the infected purple holes with his flatter teeth. "Let me go."

He smiled derisively. "I don't think you know what you want."

"I—" You balked at him, reiterating with a stumble, "I—I just want to leave. Get off."

"How will you ever survive without me?" You didn't know if you'd be able to. "You'll be all alone, all alone in a world that's just ready to tear you open and spit you back out. I've told you before: Society doesn't reward virtue over vice—only those who play along. You won't last, not after you've known and tasted me."

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything, whereas he swelled like a man who had salvaged a victory, lying himself down to kiss you again—

And then, the doorbell rang with an immense melancholic echo that you could feel vibrate up your arms and legs. Nearly a year later, you were hearing it for the first time and grasping onto the lapels of his suit vest, keeping him still when you remembered T.J.'s promise.

"Ignore it." you said.

"We have a guest—" Something in his tone made your stomach clench. "It's not polite to leave them waiting, especially at this hour."

Montague had untangled himself from you and was gone before you could stop him. Another wave of pain put you on the floor when you moved. Drool piled from your mouth. An ache so unreal pounded in the wrist he had played with. The crawl to your duffle bag was far, arduous in that every inch felt like carrying stones on your back.

I'm going to die. I might as well already be dead. You didn't have any more time to wait, so you slung the strap over your shoulder and used the wall to guide you along the quiet hallway, bumping into every pedestal and display where Montague's most treasured things had stayed undisturbed.

You were one of them, something he could keep on the second floor with the rest of his stuff, but unlike brittle porcelain and fraying embroidery—he could break you as much as he wanted, again and again and again, and fit you back whole. He could do it forever while you wasted, longing for an end he would never give you.

But as you crept along the bleak wallpaper and all of his curios, you were so gentle with them, steadying any wobbling base or piece as you went. The central staircase was close, voices at the bottom of it faint and unintelligible, drifting alongside you as though part of the house—

The air exploded. Just once. A single gunshot brought back all the alertness to your body, neck and shoulders at full length, pain dulled to where you could shuffle faster and look off the bannister at the landing below.

Montague was staring back up at you from the floor, entirely still and soundless. His jaw was unhinged, askew, frozen in a position that should've been impossible. A black hole gaped between his eyes, but didn't bleed.

"If you're not ready, that's going to be bad news." Another man stood nearby sheathing a gun, unfamiliar and yet with sameness in the way his gaze felt hollow and reached through you. "I'm repaying my debts. I'd like to make good on this one."

You were slow descending the stairs, even slower while you rounded Montague's body and denied yourself the chance to stop. Something invisible wanted to pull you to him, plow your knees into hard marble and weep over his chest. However, your insides bending in disgust and twinges in your bones kept you onward.

This man, Roscoe, was just as sickly-seeming and gray as the other, every slot of space on his arms and neck filled with images of religious iconography and portraits of saints—Mary being the only one you recognized with just a glance. It was tempting to touch him, something he noticed and stepped out of your reach.

"Is there another way out of here?" He made a weak motion towards the front door just ajar, but his eyes were stuck on the wrist wounded and unusable to you now. "We need to go. Now."

You were racking your brain for an answer, turning half-circles in place before pointing to the archway with a clock. "There's a backdoor, but the yard is fenced in and there's nothing but forest for three miles. There's also—"

Roscoe waited expectantly, ushering you to continue when he went for the gun in its holster. "Start moving, we'll figure it out." He unloaded another round into Montague's head, a near indecipherable twitch in the fingers made the hair on your neck shoot straight out. "Silver only keeps him down. It won't kill him. Go!"

"Th—there's, there's the basement." You smacked your lips, trying to swallow around a bulge in your throat. "There's an old door. He said there are tunnels, but I don't know where they go. I don't know if he was telling the truth. I don't—"

He threw a hand into your back, thrusting you forward at least three feet. You almost didn't catch your footing. "Then that's where we're going."

"Not a friend of yours then, I assume, darling?" Montague's voice from the floor was as much of a relief as it was terrible. The silent gaps of air all around were disturbed by sharp snaps and cracking bones as his jaw moved back into place and he sat upright over his thighs. You were transfixed by the silver bullets being sucked into his skull, holes shrinking until they closed completely. "I'm not surprised you're still fraternizing with the wrong crowds, Roscoe. You and that entire Society have always been a fucking eyesore."

Roscoe readied his aim. "Parasite."

Montague laughed all the way to his feet, tugging at the edge of his vest to make it neat again. He opened his mouth just enough to let his tongue roll out, shards of silver bullets tinkling as they hit marble underfoot. "You can't take what's mine."

He looked to you, stepping closer every time Roscoe moved you back with his arm. "Come here. Come back to me, darling. This is where you belong. This is your home. You belong here with me, here with everything that you know."

"He doesn't mean that." Another gunshot snapped you to attention, blinking out of a stupor you hadn't realized you were in. The bullet landed in Montague's forehead, teetering his balance in such a way that his back curved towards the floor, arms hanging like useless instruments, yet he still somehow kept his soles planted. "Time to go. Get to the basement."

Roscoe didn't fail to reach you this time, running tight on your heels through the house to the basement floor. He stopped partway to the old door to help you scour the duffle bag for a key—one attached to the chatelaine Montague had given you the day you accepted to move in.

Your breaths were ragged, heart ablaze and beating against your ribs. In that moment, as you flipped through the assortment of keys with an unsteady, slippery grip, you wondered if Montague heard your blood racing in your veins, if he could follow the suffocating drumbeat your heart made in your ears.

Just above, fast approaching the locked basement door, came a thunderous roar so inhuman and reverberating that it scared the clip of keys out of your hands into a clattering heap on the floor. Time was up.

"Move!" Roscoe shoved you aside, illuminated by the hectic flare of your phone as he fit his fingers through a gap in the door and ripped the entire thing off its hinges. He pulled you by the scruff of your shirt and heaved you inside the tunnel. "Go! Go! Go!"

The first thing to hit you was a putrid smell intimately known but always through protective equipment and a respirator. And as you went deeper into the tunnel, led by a single route and the light off your phone, the dirt packed under your feet turned soft, sinking to the tops of your shoes.

And then, you saw bodies.

Numerous—countless corpses in varying stages of decay with twisted faces reflected your terror and pain right back at you. Most were intact with missing limbs or dark red chasms in their abdomens that had been scraped hollow and dry under the white light. A few had been fully decapitated, briefly reminding you of the dead blonde woman from that night, but most of what lay stacked against the tunnel walls were emaciated figures with skin pulled so taut to their bones you could still make out their faces.

You were doubled over your knees, sucking in fetid mouthfuls of air and retching them back out on the ground. It burned in your throat, in your nostrils, and behind your eyes, but stifled your sobs as Roscoe dragged you alongside him.

"What did he do? What did he do?" You were crying, wheezing out those words on every shallow breath you took all the way to an end just ahead. The more you thought about it, the more you smelled the rot, tasted the bitterness of your own vomit, the more came out. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"

Roscoe had to let you rest in the grass once you both surfaced. One of the exits turned out to be near the house, less than half a mile. But the tunnels kept going and so did the bodies. You suspected that there wouldn't be any reach of that underground labyrinth that didn't have some form of decay along it.

The thought brought the tears back, but now you could relish the sticky summer night humidity and touch dewy tendrils of grass under your hands.

"Can you drive?" Roscoe had a pair of keys hanging from his index finger, giving you a long moment to take them. He saw confusion in your watery stare. "I'll tell you where to go, just drive."

That's how it had been for hours at this point. You kept your hands locked around the steering wheel, one stronger than the other, gnawing the inside of your cheek while ruminating everything—tonight, the night Montague had bitten you, every other night before that, and your decision to have ever trusted him.

"How long ago did he bite you?" Roscoe had the seat reclined, arms over his eyes to shield them from oncoming headlights. "It doesn't look good."

You tested your grip on the steering wheel, but you couldn't do much without a sharp sting in your wrist. "I don't know—a couple weeks ago? I've tried everything short of going to the emergency room."

"That won't help," he said. "Modern medicine can fix a dog bite, antibiotics can kill an infection, a vaccine can protect you from a virus. Those aren't going to do any good."

Solemnly, you asked, "Am I going to die?"

Roscoe didn't sit up but had your wrist in his hands, turning it in little ways that didn't aggravate you. Besides the occasional glare from passing vehicles, there was no light in the car, and the holes in your skin were hardly distinguishable, though they had gotten darker. You weren't able to move it with any ease now.

"What you need to know right now is that he's never going to stop following you." He put your hand back on the steering wheel, careful as he enclosed your fingers around it. "It doesn't matter how long it takes, what you do, where you go—a parasite finds a host, and it latches on. And it doesn't let go."

You glanced between him and the road several times, tongue wetting the dry parts of your lips. "He's a vampire—you're a vampire. There's got to be something—"

Roscoe finally sat up in his seat, now cramped sideways with his shoulders flat to the window. The car veered a bit into the other lane. "You need to understand something. What you're saying would imply he ever had any humanity. Vampires are created." He paused for a beat, waiting for the realization to strike you. "Montague was never created."

"What—what the hell is he, then?" A horn abruptly blared by, prompting you to yank the car back onto the correct side. "He drinks blood. He has teeth. He—he hunts. He doesn't like silver. His eyes are the same as yours."

Roscoe lowered his gaze, but remained in that uncomfortable position. "There's a story I heard about him once. I don't remember the details except for one: ‘If the devil exists, they're one in the same.’"

You kept your eyes on the road, counting every car that flitted on past. They were probably going to work at this hour—green numbers on the dashboard showed it just after four—and they'd be able to have a place to return to at the end of the day. Now, you didn't belong anywhere, and twenty-four hours from now you still wouldn't.

The town where you had lived with Montague for a year was long behind you, backtracking would take hours, and you wouldn't know how to get back from the direction that Roscoe had told you to go. Dim streetlamps and cozy houses with spruced yards had morphed into an endless network of concrete, signs, and off-ramps to places you'd never heard of.

It was scary how everything could change in one night, and how it did. The only semblance of normalcy to you right now were the aches throughout your body, which had returned the moment you fully comprehended that you had escaped that house.

"Why…" Roscoe looked up at you, seeing your lips shake and eyes turn red. "Why do I want to go back to him?"

He fixed himself right in the seat, tousling a hand through his hair while looking out through the windshield. "You shouldn't do that. But you'll never be able to stop running."

You never saw Roscoe again once the car ride ended several thousands of miles later, mentioning something about how he repaid his debt to T.J. and had disappeared from a restaurant you both walked into. When that happened, you sat paralyzed at your little table for most of the day with a soul-crushing realization that you were truly alone with nobody in the world—just like Montague said you would be. And, for the sake of others, you'd never be able to have anyone else in your world.

It stayed that way for close to two years. The hardest part hadn't been the homelessness or constant vigilance, not the door revolving each person to come into your life since, but the fact that you still yearned for what you once had. Everything so awful about what you experienced sometimes looked like heaven when you thought about it, like soft, cloudy nostalgia from a time where the throes of agony were all you had ever known.

You were capable of thinking soberly as well, and with that came the understanding that a part of you would always want that time back—want him back. He had left you with a permanent scar and neurological damage that could never be corrected. It was anticipated you'd lose that wrist at some point in the future, but for now, you could still hold a cup and brush your teeth with enough conscious effort.

The pain never went away either, but you refused to let it impede your work in the field. And your two roommates were a couple of engineering geniuses who'd managed to make the flat more accommodating to your needs. They'd been patient with you during every step of your transition into a new life, calling you an enigma because you had nothing to your name except a dusty duffle bag and a "strange-looking dog bite" on your wrist when you first met them.

Sometimes, especially on the weekends after clinking together enough shot glasses, they tried to probe your brain for some clue as to who you were, who you had been historically. You had decided it was better that they—that no one—knew about it or what actually existed out there in the world.

And when you returned home from the lab late that Saturday night, you were surprised to find the lights off and the flat immersed in the kind of soundlessness that made your ears feel clogged with cotton.

You were slow in lowering your backpack to the floor, keeping the front door slightly ajar so a slither of light from the residential corridor slipped inside. "Jordan? Felix?"

No answer. You didn't hear anything from their bedrooms upstairs either.

"Jordan?" The nearest light switch didn't work, neither did the one after that, or any others you hunted down with the diffused beam from your phone screen. "Jordan? Felix? Are you guys home?"

It was possible they had gone out somewhere for the night and just hadn't mentioned anything to you, as unsound as that logic actually was, considering it simply wasn't their personality. But as you wandered through different rooms checking the switches, you knew you were rationalizing to keep yourself in check.

The light from the hallway still piled inside like a narrow pillar, raising all the hairs on your neck and arms, knowing that it wasn't a building-wide outage. They had never left you in a situation like this before. Something was wrong.

"Jordan! Felix! Whe—" Your foot nearly shot out from under you when you slid through something slick on the laminate. After a moment to fix yourself, bracing the edge of the countertop with a clammy palm, you steadied the white glow of your phone at the floor.

There, glistening back at you, was the vast richness of blood in a tall puddle that spread like long winding tendrils through grout in the flooring. It looked almost black under your light at a certain angle, estimating it had been there for several hours—untouched.

You held in a breath and grit your jaws together as the more you moved, the more you saw. And when the top of a head came into view, silky hair shining like fine thread before clumping together at the base where the blood had pooled the most, it was everything you could to keep yourself from hitting the floor.

Both of them were there, perfectly out of sight of the front door and completely unrecognizable. Their bodies had been left in one piece, though where their faces had once been were cavernous holes with pale, pink ribbons of flesh and fat left behind. The roundness of their skulls let blood fill inside it like a vessel. What little pieces of brain matter remained had floated to the surface.

You staggered back from them, phone loosening from your weak hand and returning them to the maw of darkness, while groping the wall behind you as far as your arm could reach. This wasn't a result of crude knife work or even bludgeoning; no, it was a slow kill, one meant to steep someone in torment so immense that you prayed to whatever was out there that they succumbed immediately.

"Help…" Your voice was trapped in your throat, barely registering as a whisper even to yourself as you sidled along the wall. "Someone—anyone, please help."

The patter of your heartbeat was torturous. Your every step back to the entrance was leaden with fear. You couldn't get your legs to move fast enough, and the light reaching in through the gap seemed to stretch on forever—further, further, and further still.

You thought back to that day you met Montague and shook his hand, noting how unnaturally cold it had been despite it being a nice day in spring. You remembered the dead blonde woman with mascara tears, and the bodies he used to decorate the tunnels, and the young man who was able to walk away that night believing it was all some shallow quarrel—never knowing he had sealed your fate.

You regretted all of it.

The door was in your reach now, and you could get out, call for help, and go back to running. This time, you wouldn't be tricked into false satiety or let anyone too close. You would see mountains and forests and oceans a thousand times over before you stopped again.

Two years hadn't been enough time for you to accumulate many things, you thought. It wouldn't be hard to leave most of it behind, just like you had before. You would unpack that old duffle bag from the back of your closet, fill it to the brink, and that would be enough.

You had your hand over smooth metal, but that cold reached greater depths in you as the door was pushed shut from behind, light shrinking away through the slot until you were swallowed whole in the dark.

"Hello, darling. I've missed you." He sounded the same against your ear. For a split second, you felt relieved. "Don't worry about cleaning up. We're not staying long."

He clamped damp fingers over your mouth before you could scream.

[klaroveins]

Was it casual when he allowed her to drink his blood straight from the vein while she was dying?

Was it casual when he came all the way from New Orleans for her graduation in Mystic Falls?

Was it casual when he allowed Tyler Lockwood to come back to Mystic Falls even though he was in love with Caroline but understood she was in love with Tyler and only wanted her to be happy?

Was it casual when Tyler was her first love but he intended to be her last?

Was it casual when he offered to show her anywhere around the world, Paris, Rome and Tokyo?

Was it casual when he drew a beautiful picture of her even after she insulted him and didn’t give in to his charms easily?

Was it casual when he let his guard down with her considering he was a paranoid person and she hated him?

Was it casual when he constantly pursued her even when she hated him?

Was it casual when he sacrificed one of his Hybrids that he’d spent centuries working to create, just for a single date with her?

Was it casual when before his death, they shared one final kiss?

Was it casual when she believed he was worth being saved?

Was it casual when she always knew he was never the villain in her story?

NOTHING ABOUT KLAROLINE WAS CASUAL.

[blackleatherjacketz]

Shadow and Sin

Klaus Mikaelson, Elijah Mikaelson x Female Reader

Summary: (NSFW) Having just recently moved to New Orleans, you get intimately acquainted with both Mikaelson brothers, but don't find out who they truly are until it's too late.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Final Chapter

[marypsue]

Man, it's cool and all if you see a metaphor for marginalisation in the monstrous, and if you want the power fantasy of 'what if you could just eat anybody who threatened you/pissed you off'. Me too.

However, as soon as you start saying 'no, these monsters are a 1:1 on Specific Marginalised Group, and you have to treat them in the fiction like they are directly representative of real human members of the marginalised group', BUT you also, in the fiction, make them hurt/kill/eat humans? And then try to shame me, your audience, for noticing or engaging with the bit where they kill people, because you made them directly representative of a real-world marginalised group? You have lost me, and also, I think, the plot.

[perseephoneee]

PLEASE do something super fluffy with kol mikealson

i love ur work sm!!

babe you're making my day. hope this is something akin to what you wanted.

"you're red." "shut up." "like actually vermillion." (kol mikaelson x f!reader)

warnings: kissing?? also hatred towards bed and breakfasts

a/n: i forgot how much i love writing for kol. sorry for the large writing break...hope this makes up for it?

↳ masterlist  ↳ ship exchange ↳ taglist

You hate Kol Mikaelson. 

He’s cocky, impulsive, and constantly getting you into danger that you would never find for yourself. He also relentlessly flirts with you until you’re warm and deeply frustrated.  He’s complicated enough that you wish he wasn’t a part of your life so it could resume a sense of normalcy. 

Getting caught up in Mikaelson drama was never your plan. You just happened to make the mistake of working as a bartender at Russo’s—where they frequented. Klaus took a liking to you, and the rest is history. Being a human that’s friends with vampires is like poking a bear; not recommended nor convenient. 

This recent conflict was forgettable but proved to be a disruption to your life. One of them annoyed someone, and that someone wanted revenge, and now apparently you were in danger, and so on and so forth. You have repeatedly debated sending an invoice to the Mikaelson compound for restitution. You don’t think Klaus would find it very funny. 

You almost forgot about your life being in danger until you were forced to go on the run with the youngest brother, Kol. Kol, who insisted on driving you nuts. You kept trying to tune him out in the car, listening to the radio or focusing on the trees speeding past your window. Still, he was relentless and wouldn’t leave you alone for a minute. Plus, he was a horribly reckless driver, and you were gripping the door so tightly that you might hurt a muscle any minute. 

“I’ve lived for a very long time, but I’ve never visited Fes,” Kol said, one hand on the wheel as the other tapped on the door. You barely spared him a glance. “Would you visit Fes?”

“Not even sure what Fes is,” you answered through gritted teeth, suppressing a yelp as Kol took a turn obnoxiously fast. 

“City in Morocco considered its cultural capital.”

“You sound like a Google search,” you scoffed, sparing him half a glance. Long enough of a glance for Kol to give you a toothy grin, his canines glinting in the sunlight. 

“I like knowing things,” he states, squinting at you. “I don’t know much about you. Tell me something.”

“No.”

“Please?” he begged, every bit a kid enjoying picking on the new kid on the playground. You fixed him with a dead stare. 

“I hate your driving.” That caused him to laugh, which made him throw his head back and speed up even more. You clutched the handle and clenched your teeth till you felt your whole body would seize up. Kol eventually took pity on you and slowed down. It was enough for you to relax…slightly. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere. Anywhere. Haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Brilliant. I’m going to die out here,” you sighed, sinking deeper into the leather seat. 

“Nonsense. Nik would dagger me if I let that happen, and I’m very tired of being daggered.”

“Not because you care about me or want me to live?” you jested, quirking a brow at him. 

“Now, why would I care about you at all?”

You pretended it didn’t sting, even though it felt impossible for you to care about Kol. Still, hearing him say it felt a bit like a slap in the face. You just turned more out the window, ignoring him. You didn’t notice the sharp look he sent you, as if he regretted what he said. 

Instead, you notice a sign advertising a Black Bear Diner. You perk up immediately, tapping the window and looking back at Kol. 

“There. Stop there.”

“That piece of garbage?”

“Yes! Stop the car!” you shouted, regretting your words when Kol slammed on the brakes. “Stop the car slowly, you asswipe.”

“You should’ve clarified that,” he smirked. You jumped out of the car, ran towards the restaurant, and experienced euphoria when the smell of waffles and fresh coffee hit your senses. Kol walked up slowly, hands in his pockets. The sun was obnoxious out here, but there were enough trees in the area to not make it feel like a desert. You could even see the mountain in the background in all its snowcapped glory. 

The inside of the diner was a welcome breeze on your damp skin. It wasn’t very crowded, and you got seated immediately as you happily flipped through your plastic menu. Kol looked slightly uncomfortable sitting in the diner, but you ignored him. You were getting pretty good at ignoring him. 

“I used to go here all the time with my family,” you said, flipping to the drinks page of your menu. “Not this exact location…but this chain. I went to it when I first moved to my hometown.”

“It’s barely gourmet.”

“Fuck gourmet, I want comfort. I want to feel like home,” you laughed, closing your menu. “Don’t you want that?”

“Home?” Kol inquired. “Not sure what that is anymore.”

Your lips turned down in a frown, but you offered nothing else. He didn’t seem like he wanted to talk, and you wouldn’t force him. The waiter came over to take your orders, and you happily ordered a black coffee, orange juice, and a waffle platter. After they left, you started packing your bag with the tiny jams and creamers they had out on the table. Kol just looked at you in disdain. 

“You are pathetic.”

“Rent is expensive, groceries are expensive, give me a break,” you snorted, taking a few sugar packets for good measure before you stopped looting. Kol laughed, running a hand through his hair and leaning back in his seat. His leg bounced from anxiety, and his fingers tapped the table in a paradiddle pattern, just left, right, left, left, right, left, right, right over and over again. He looked shockingly young, like the boy before he turned, and not the man he paraded as. For a split second, you could see yourself having a crush on him in high school if he was one of your peers. You erased that thought as soon as it came. “Can I ask a question?” you leaned forward on the table, arms folded in front of you. “Why are you guys always protecting me? I’m definitely a liability.”

“I think my brother just wants to sleep with you,” Kol sighed. You snorted, biting your bottom lip to subvert your laughter. Honestly…you have managed to weasel your way into our family—like a parasite.”

“Aw, your words are so kind,” you rolled your eyes, kicking Kol under the table. He just kicked you right back, wearing a smirk. “And I would never sleep with your brother.”

“Why’s that?” Kol questioned, crossing his arms. 

“His face is weird,” you answered. Kol put his head in his hands in laughter, and you joined him a second later. You weren’t sure if that was the reason, but it was the first thing that came to mind, and you didn’t think to change it. Plus, it made Kol laugh, which kind of made you happy. The arrival of your waffles made you even happier. 

“Bloody hell, you’re going to eat all of that?” Kol looked shocked, eyes flicking between you and your waffles. He had ordered a much smaller plate than yours. Yours likely could’ve been a party platter. 

“Yes, and I will do it with pride.”

You did eat all of it, and enjoyed Kol’s expression the whole time. He looked so disturbed it made up for it. You also drank all your coffee, orange juice, and free water refills. Your plan was to eat enough to enter hibernation. You even think Kol was a little impressed at some point. Kol asked the waiter for the nearest hotel, and they pointed you to a place three miles down the road that would likely have openings. By the time you left the diner, it was starting to get cold as the sun was setting. You could hear crickets; you probably would’ve gotten fireflies if you were more south. Kol drove surprisingly slow towards the hotel, which you attributed to his worry that going fast would cause you to throw up your entire waffle extravaganza. He slowed down even more when you came up to the “hotel”—which was actually just a bed and breakfast. An extremely cutesy bed and breakfast. 

The inside of the building was somehow worse than the outside. 

The outside had small-town charm. The inside was where doilies went to die. 

Both you and Kol exchanged glances as he went up to ring the bell. You counted seven cat portraits before a portly woman came out with a cheeky smile. She wore a linen frock and a floral dress right out of the 1960s. 

“Well, good evening,” she smiled. “What can I do for you?” She had a thick Minnesotan accent, and her smile made her eyes. Overall, she radiated friendliness. 

“We’d like a room?” you inquired, leaning against the counter. 

“Oh, you betcha! Lucky for you, I got the best suite in the house available. It’s perfect for you two lovebirds,” she chirped. Your eyes widened. 

“Oh, uh, we’re not together…,” you coughed. You turned to look at Kol, who just shrugged his shoulders. Completely useless. “Do you have a double?”

“Unfortunately, all our doubles are booked for our birding convention. I might have a futon available to bring to your room?”

“Perfect,” Kol smiled, finally interjecting. “We’ll take that.”

“Splendid! Here are your keys, and I’ll have you sign in there.”

You brought your one bag with you up the stairs and to the right to a room at the end of the hall. The wallpaper was mocking you at every turn, a plethora of orchids and pinks staring at you, along with the eyes of fifty million felines. You were certain Dolores Umbridge was hiding somewhere amongst the foliage. The room was less pink but still reminiscent of something in a senior home. The bed was the nicest part: a large four-poster with mahogany bedposts. The wallpaper was sage color with pictures of ferns. The ensuite bathroom had a clawfoot tub and gold décor. A painting of a young boy eating ice cream was on the wall. You immediately took it off the wall and turned it around so you didn’t have to look at it all night. 

“It’s a little…”

“Cozy?” Kol interjected, closing the door behind you two. 

“I was going to say tight.”

“It is the lovebird suite, darling,” Kol whispered in your ear, a smirk in his voice. A shiver ran down your spine. 

“I’ll take the futon.”

“I doubt you could fit a futon in here,” Kol scoffed. He was right. There was really only room for the bed and bedside tables. Whoever designed this room intended to spend a lot of time in bed. Your cheeks heated at the thought. You tapped your foot in thought before eventually sighing in defeat.

“Just…don’t get too handsy,” you shrugged, glaring at the vampire’s ever-present smirk. 

“Handsy? You must think me a rascal,” Kol cooed, stepping closer into your space. The room was tight, which meant you were backed against the wall. You felt like a rabbit being targeted by a fox, his mischievous grin and wandering eyes taking all of you in. Your eyes were drawn to how he licked his lips, and suddenly, your blood pressure spiked. Heat crawled up your neck, and you knew that Kol noticed. He always managed to notice. 

“Knock it off, Mikaelson,” you hissed, tilting your head up defiantly. 

“You’re actually red,” Kol chuckled, brushing a strand of hair away from your face. 

“…Shut up,” you slapped his hand away, maneuvering your way from his grasp. 

“Like actually vermillion,” he laughed, and you gave him an unsavory gesture as you escaped into the bathroom, closing the door behind you. Back against the door, you breathed out, groaning into your hands. You pushed off the door, getting ready for bed in an effort to put this night behind you. You cleaned up, brushed your teeth, and put on pajamas. In hot weather, you usually just wear a T-shirt and shorts to bed. Your t-shirt said, ‘I got lobotomized at Freddy Fazbear’s,’ something idiotic that you couldn’t even fully be ashamed of. When you exited, Kol was lying on top of the covers on his phone, having changed into a t-shirt and sweatpants. He looked up when you exited, snorting as he read the shirt. “You have an odd sense of humor.”

“It’s too evolved for you to understand,” you rolled your eyes, getting in on the other side of the bed and leaving space between the two of you. Kol smelled sweet, like vanilla, and it was slowly suffocating you. You both sat in silence for a second before Kol disrupted it. 

“Y/N,”

“No.”

“Darling,” he purred, inching closer to you. 

“What, Kol,” you turned to look at him, eyes narrowed. 

“You like me,” he said. It was not a question, just something he exclaimed. You scoffed. 

“I do not.”

“You do. It’s why you blush vermillion when I call you things like darling,” he smiled, propping himself up on his elbow as he lay on his side to stare at you. 

“You’re incorrigible.”

“So, if I kissed you…you wouldn’t care,” Kol inquired, voice soft as he sat up slightly. You felt your heart skip a beat, and Kol’s mouth turned up slightly when he heard it. You knew you just proved his point, but you refused to concede. 

“I wouldn’t care,” you whispered, holding his gaze. 

“So, when I do this,” Kol leaned up, kissing your cheek, his lips burning your skin. He kissed right under your jaw, finally on your pulse point. “…it doesn’t matter?” 

You bit your tongue to stop yourself. “It doesn’t matter,” you choke out, but all you’re doing is spurring Kol on. You’re a hare caught in his trap, and you can’t even find it in yourself to hate it. Kol sucks on your pulse point, nipping lightly and moving down your neck, one hand coming up to tilt your head more to the side for easier access. His touch was shockingly gentle as if he was giving you an out. Your will was thinning by the minute, though, and eventually, you grabbed his hand, causing him to stop. 

“Darling—” he starts, but you cut him off by kissing his lips, soft but passionate. For once, you’ve taken him off guard, and a sense of pride spurs through you as you part, kissing the corner of his mouth and looking at him through thick lashes. 

“Does it matter?” you ask, voice breathy. “For you…” You’re not sure exactly what you’re asking, but you know there’s a line you’ve crossed that you can’t return from. Kol’s thumb brushes your cheek, so gentle from the reckless, hotheaded vampire you are acquainted with. A grin crosses his face. 

“It means everything,” he smiles, kissing you again, fingers tangling in your hair. Your hands find his arms, sighing as he deepens the kiss. You’re on fire, every single part of you, and you’re sure that Kol can feel your racing heart and hot skin. You like kissing him, though, and you realize you like him a lot. 

“Kol?” you breathe. “Don’t sleep on the futon.”

“For you? I would never,” he grins, kissing you again. You make sure to put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door for later. 

…

Afterwards.

It’s the middle of the night when he wakes you up.

“I guess Nik won’t be able to sleep with you now.”

“Kol.”

“Because I’ll be the only one sleeping with you.”

“Go to sleep.”

There’s a shuffling of blankets as his arm wraps tighter around you, his breath hot on your neck. 

“You’re going to be stuck with me forever,” he whispers. 

You smile. “I’m okay with that.”

taglist:: @rafecameronswhore

[dragongirlpoet]

Dark Signs

Pt II I Pt III

Alucard x you

Summary: A flirty, playful night with Adrian takes a dark turn.

TW: Dark fantasy, horror, blood, smut (explicit) 🔞 I Words: 1.6k

This is my first fic & attempt at smut. I hope you enjoy it!

“…And there, in the dead of night, under a moon so maroon, the White Wolf prowled — ravenous. Sturdy were its footsteps, calculated were its gait. Ahead, still as a rosebud in a windless twilight, its prey lay splayed out — helpless. 

Something about its small intakes of breath, its unsuspecting demeanour, made it all the more enticing for the imposing predator. Ever so slowly, the White Wolf, eyes like the golden gleam of a rising dawn, emerged from the thicket, pressing forward, inching closer, closer, closer…”

Body hovering over mine, Alucard’s words were a rasp above my cheek. The antiquated tome he had been reading from now a forgotten humdrum between our bodies. As velvet lips collided into me, I melded into his being. He was a hypnotic wave crashing into shore, and I was but delicate driftwood being dragged underwater.

His kiss was insistent, impatient. I had no escape, no cavity of air to quell the lack of oxygen in my lungs. Still, I kept going, because he was the only breath I needed. My fingers clawed ruthlessly at his back — muscle and bone Herculean from years of battling night creatures and evil forces. Skin so utterly cold, yet I wanted — needed — more.  

His body was a frigid storm to my fervent summer. “You are glorious as the solstice sun, darling. With you I am forever warm, within you I live eternally,” the confession falling easy from his lips the day he had taught me how to hunt.

Faces lost in each other, bodies entwined and limbs tugging like our lives depended on it, Alucard let his hand roam under my nightdress, finally finding solace in the swell of my chest. I shifted slightly at the unusual chill. Was he ever this cold?

Over the months I had become accustomed to his half human intricacies. His unnerving stillness, his undeniable thirst for blood try as he might to hide it, his erratic need to stay up nights in a row roaming the castle “just to be sure…” 

I was no fool. Those witching hours almost always had him back in his childhood room — he would stare, as if entranced, at the spot he had staked his father. And I would see the grief in his eyes — the absolute contrition at his travesty, one he wished he could take back, but couldn’t. 

Alucard, the son of the great Dracula and benevolent Lisa Tepes, the almighty dhampir. A being so beautiful he could bring a kingdom to its knees, yet one so cruelly tormented by his past.

“Baby, eyes on me.” My eyes fluttered open, realising I was lost in the wrong moment. He crashed his lips into mine once again. 

As if in a bid to stop my obsessive thinking, he started to grab at my breast, kneading furiously, thumb toying with my nipple. I leaned in closer, but alas my human endurance had reached its limits and I pulled away for air. 

“I want to know what happened to the prey. I am most opposed to unfinished stories,” I tried to play coy in between ragged breaths. Nose to mine, he wore a smirk on his handsome face. He had a playful glint to his stare — contemplative, as if taunting me to continue with my officious fib. 

Alucard picked the tome up from my stomach, grazing his fingers ever so slightly over my abdomen. He trailed the book slowly down my navel, its cracked spine against my bare skin sent fireworks to my core. I watched with bated breath as the print finally landed where he wanted it — in between my legs. He dragged its spine down, then up again, repeating the motion, teasing, eyes never leaving mine. 

Satisfied with how wet my undergarment had become, he hushed, “I think it better if I showed you instead. Don’t you agree, princess?” 

“Ye..yesss,” 

“Do you like that?”

“Yesss…”

“Open your legs wider.”

I obeyed. Submitting to him was easy. Too easy.

“Let’s see just how wet you are for me, hmm?” 

Without warning, Alucard ripped my soaking cloth off my hips and plunged two fingers inside. I cried out at the shock and how good it felt, and as if by instinct grabbed his hands and guided them deeper into me. Alucard let out a stifled moan at my brazenness, his erection growing fast under his black britches.

He watched with eyes half-lidded, completely spellbound as I bounced into his hand, my breasts rising and falling with every thrust. Body and mind so turned on he reached urgently into his pants and started stroking his length. 

For a long moment we just sat there, eyes locked on each other, legs spread wide, our sex stimulated. And what a profane sight it must have been for our bed chamber was filled with nothing but wanton “fucks” and the squelching of his fingers coated in my lust. 

I fucked myself into his fingers harder, and reached desperately for his cock. With more force than necessary, he caught both my wrists with his free hand and pinned them to my stomach. “That’s for later,” he chided. 

Alucard was usually wary of his inhuman strength around me. But tonight, tonight he was carnal, rough, like an animal being let out of its cage. His knuckles went white with how much pressure he had put on my wrists, and I bit my lip knowing it was going to bruise. 

As if to edge me further, Alucard pulled his fingers out and gazed at them ever so intently, admiring the slather of fluid glistening like diamonds on his digits. If his etherealness hadn’t killed me, then perhaps what he did next would have driven me close to death. With deliberate calm, he brought his fingers into his mouth, swiping his tongue over my juices, savouring every single trickle.

My dhampir, hair like a divine cascade of golden waterfalls, on his knees, drinking my lust as if it were vital sustenance, yet all that he was was in direct contrast to his reverence — powerful, dominant and deadly. I marvelled at his masculine elegance — the way his pectorals tensed as he licked his fingers dry, how his faded sanguine scar stood distinct against his alabaster skin, the definition of muscles that ran down his pelvis…

I swallowed. 

“God, you taste so good. Only for me, yes?” 

“Yesss…” Being thoroughly educated and well-read, I was fairly ashamed it was all the vocabulary I could muster.

And it would seem that more crude words were soon to follow, as Alucard then dove in between my thighs and sent his tongue plunging — deep, depraved — into my clenching walls.  

“Fuuuck, Adrian!” 

Hearing his name sent him over the edge, and he started sucking hard — wet pillow lips against wet pillow flesh. I was heaven and hell collided, rising from it like the luminescent birth of a star. I ground my core into his face, hands grasping his woven-gold hair, willing him to dive further into me. 

Alucard groaned in pleasure against my clit. Powerful, cold hands gripped my thighs apart, and my sweet lover lay soft kisses to the insides, thumbs expertly caressing my sensitive folds. In all his vampire glory, he bared his fangs ever so slightly, sharp teeth just barely peeking through, grazing them over my clit and thighs, nibbling, never breaking skin. I was undone. 

“Adrian…Adrian please…”

“Please what?”

I was all heavy pants and delirious to give a coherent reply.

Head still positioned at the apex of my thighs, his eyes raked over his masterpiece — delicate features coated in sweat, nipples hard from stimulation and the soppy, pulsating cunt laid out like a feast inches from his mouth. What a mess he had made of me, and a mess he was most certainly proud of. 

From in between my legs, Adrian was a fallen angel from a paradise unknown. His eyes like gold afire were so wholly glazed over they looked like one with the smouldering flames nestled atop our chamber candles. 

Patience waning, he asked again. “Please…” humming the words into my clit…“what?” A loud moan escaped my lips. I arched my back in sheer pleasure, feeling the build up in my core.

He dragged his fangs against my thighs, eyes fixated on mine, drinking in my desire. 

“I want…I want…” my chest heaving so violently from how close I was to release.

“What do you want?” Adrian moved to whisper against my ear. This was too much. 

“I want…I want you to turn me.”

Alucard went very still, his pupils blown wide. Everything went very still. The flames lost its dance, the curtains absent of sway.

“What did you say?” His voice was still water with undercurrents of danger. 

His statuesque figure towered over me, pinning me under. 

“I said, I want you to turn me.” 

Alucard held my stare, and as I took them in, an unearthly shadow seemed to lurk beneath those incandescent irises. 

If my question threw him off guard, his unsettling stillness made it clear he wasn’t most fond of surprises. It took a long moment before he finally moved, his supernatural speed having him by the window in seconds. 

Frustration soon shrouded my orgasmic high. I forced my spent body off the reprieve of our mattress. He was going to answer me whether he liked it or not.

“Adrian! You cannot disregard my question any longer! I’ve wanted this from the first time you made love to me, don’t pretend it was never asked of you,” exasperation evident in my tone.

“Peril or not, I am not afraid. I…”

A sudden squall of wind extinguished the flickering flames. Our bed chamber was plunged into chasmic darkness, summoning a bitter chill that seeped through the wooden floors. There, still as a predator hunting prey, hovered the glowing golden orbs of Alucard's eyes, the blacks of his pupils far wider than I’d ever seen. 

“A…Adrian?” 

Pt II I Pt III

[gorbalsvampire]

The Answer May Surprise You

We’ve done this quite a few times, since we met Dominique and Sylvester. The four of us meet up on the Quay and start walking, out of town and around the headland and then down to the beach once we’re safely out of sight. We build a fire, and once it’s going we sit close enough to stay warm and far enough to feel safe (and look spooky, if I’m honest), and we talk about what it’s like.

There’s something on my mind tonight. I curl my toes up in the sand, on instinct, bracing for the revelation or something, and I ask “have you… how many people have y’all killed?”

Dominique blinks, deadpan, then laughs. Throws back her head and practically roars with laughter. I’d be offended, but I’m too busy thinking how incredibly hot she is. I’d never admit it, but the reason I suggested these little meetups was at least eighty per cent to spend more time talking with, and looking at, and thinking about Dominique. She glows in the firelight, shimmering dark and sleek across from me, and the next breath I take as I’m about to apologise for being such a weapons-grade dumbass is rough and unready because what I’m actually thinking about is jumping across the fire and burying myself in her giant hair and covering that long throat of hers in bites and kisses and —

I was gonna say something, but that’s Dominique for you.

“It’s not the sort of thing I count,‘Titia,” she says when she’s finally come back to Earth. “One thing to let it happen now and then, by accident, or to do in need when the damn fool’s decided you’re a monster and you gotta burn. But you don’t sit there, brooding and preening over what a monster you are. No pride, but no shame either. And never trust anyone who says you have to keep score.”

She leaves us no choice but to stan, says a stan who has no choice.

Dorian follows my eyes and coughs. I know they’re nervous about this. They’re not stupid, they have eyes and a bunch of brain cells, and they know — because we had the talk about this around the time we had the talk about that and the other, and what I’m saying here is that babe, I’m a vampire led in good time to babe, I love you and I don’t want to see you die one day and because we’d reached that point we had to negotiate with ‘til death us do part is a lovely sentiment but I’m poly and I have to know — will you get jealous?

D doesn’t get jealous, or at least they never admit to it, but they are a one-at-a-time kind of lover, and I think something buried deep in their psyche still worries about competing with Dominique. I keep telling them a) it’s not a competition and b) I have more than enough love to give and c) I don’t even know if Dominique swings my way and d) I live with Dorian and I let Dorian turn me into this and dear God I love you Dorian, you stupid sweet sexy jazz dork. I don’t tell them e) which is that nobody could compete with Dominique anyway, and I would hate to ever have to choose between them because if Dominique said yes, but it’s me and only me I might not immediately want to say no.

Anyway, Dorian coughs again and pokes up the fire to hide it and says, huskily as they can manage, “It’s not about keeping score, Dominique. If you reach a point where they’re just numbers, you’ve already gone off the deep end. But I think if you’ve happened to kill someone — if you’ve had to kill someone — you owe them something for the life they might have led. I keep diaries, and I write down every single name, every time for eighty years, just in case. Someone ought to remember them, and I’ll be here a bloody long time.”

Dear God, I love them. That’s what surprised me most about them. Not that they were a vampire, not even that they’d left the whole concept of ‘gender’ down the back of a sofa when Prohibition was still a thing and sort of got along without it ever since, but the sheer decency of them. The same petty, prissy, fussy little things that make them such a good teacher make them such a good vampire — according to my extremely limited ‘is it like a horror movie in here?’ sense of what makes a ‘good vampire’, anyway. Of course they keep notes in case they forget what happened last time. Of course they never throw away a diary in case they need it forty years later to remember some obscure fact about someone who might well be dead by now. Of course they care.

Sylvester. We all look at Sylvester. Dominique smirks, feline, and I crush the obvious joke as it bubbles up in my head even as I think about stroking her (stop it) and whether she purrs (stop it). Dorian’s lips are thin and tight, their eyes owlish behind their glasses, turning the firelight back. There’s some history there, and I’m afraid to ask.

“What are you all waiting for?” Sylvester grumbles. He’s kicked off his worn old man shoes and his worn old man feet are closer to the fire than any of ours. Words flit around my head — weatherbeaten, salt-stained, tanned — and as Sylvester shuffles himself a bit closer I catch a glimpse of scars and tattoos on his legs and the glimmer of heavy gold rings in the dark. If Sylvester the vampire pirate didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him. He’s just too good to be true.

“C’mon, Sylv,” I say. “How many?”

“None.”

The word falls out of him grudgingly, a single penny in a slot machine, no lights or sounds blarting out at you, just the smallest kind of victory.

“You?” The word’s out of my mouth before I can cram it back in there, and “I don’t believe you,” says Dorian, and Dominique doesn’t say anything, she just sits there and smiles.

“Not for this. Not to eat. That’s what you’re aksing, in’t it? You live a kind of life where you kill a man and go to gaol, ‘less you’re in the army or the navy or what-have-you. So you’re aksing me a question as makes sense to you.”

Dorian’s mouth is open and they’re saying words — “You know very little about the life Laetita’s led” — and I put my hand up.

Sylvester nods to me and he says: “I don’t know how many men I killed at sea. Don’t know how many I knifed or hit in dock as died later. One or two women, I do know, and I amn’t proud of it now, but…” He rubs his beard, tugs at it like he does when he’s thinking, and points at Dominique. “Since that ‘un brought me over? Not one for eating, and I never tried to kill none either, after we ‘scaped Haiti and came to shore. Believe it or don’t; still God’s honest truth.”

It’s always the ones you least expect.

Bloodspell is a PWYW indie vampire TTRPG it's a little bit pretentious but it's my baby and i love it

[wholoveseggs]

~Your local egg carton~

{masterlist}

18+

THANK YOU so much for all your love and support; it truly means the world to me.

lets get cracking!

Warnings: Its all mostly smut

(or soon to be published smut)

~Elijah Mikaelson♡~

~Daemon Targaryen♡~

~Kinktober 2024♡~

hi :) my name is Lissa ♡♡

I started this blog in November of 2023, mostly as an outlet for my own personal Elijah Mikaelson-based thirst. ♡ It has since become so much more. I love my engaging and passionate followers, I love writing for them, and I love being part of the community. I hope you'll join us, and find something that makes you smile {or gets you hot~ hehe} ♡♡♡

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[animasola86]

🦇 FANGS TO REMEMBER

m!vampires x f!reader 🔥 very explicit 🔥 words: 3.6k

On your way back to the party, you come across a graveyard. Unbeknownst to you, you are trespassing onto someone's property, and they are not happy about it. Or are they?

WARNINGS: NSFW! Explicit sexual content! Vampires! Noncon/dubcon! Threesome! Spitroasting! Biting! (READ ON AO3!)

A/N: This is part 5 of my CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE smut series! 1 🔸 2 🔸 3 🔸 4 🔸 5 🔸 6 🔸 7 This is the continuation of OPTION 3/PART 4 - but can be read individually, let me just set the scene:

CONTEXT: You were invited to a Halloween party in a mysterious house, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, and after drinking a strange drink, you decide to get some fresh air, running into a werewolf who instantly decides to knot and breed you, and after that ordeal is done, you flee from him, and come across a graveyard...

ADDITIONAL WARNING: This one is very dark. It's more noncon than dubcon, so if you don't like the themes, you can skip it (imagine something dark happening) and read the next part here.

You look around, but there's only one way forward: through the graveyard. It's too dark to see anything else, no maze, no garden, no house, you can't even see the cabin anymore you just left. The night is eerily quiet, no critters, nothing. Even the wind seems to take a break for now.

Inhaling deeply, you hug your arms around your body and take a step through the large wrought-iron gates, looking left and right at the rows of crooked tomb stones. A strange mist wafts close to the ground, giving off an otherworldly glow. The moon is long gone it seems, the sky too cloudy to show any stars, but still you can see the various shapes around you.

You're not easily spooked, usually, but being alone in a cemetery at night makes your imagination run wild, wilder than it has been all evening. The slightest movement makes you flinch as you tread carefully along the path, goosebumps rippling over your exposed skin whenever something brushes against your bare legs. The shirt is soft and warm, but in the end not long enough after all, no matter how hard you tug at its hem.

A sudden shuffling sound makes your blood run cold and you freeze on the spot, your heart beating out of your chest, cold fear gripping your limbs. It came from behind one of the larger tomb stones, decorated with a small angel statue. You stare into the darkness, pressing your lips together to keep the noises from spilling past them. Probably just an animal. Your mind is surely playing tricks on you.

But when the same sound comes from right behind you, you whirl around with a shriek, stumbling back as you see a large black shadow blocking your view. You expect to fall onto your butt, but something keeps you from it, another shadow – and this one has hands. Hands that grip your arms, holding you tightly. Another scream rips from your throat as you thrash about, trying to get away, before another hand finds its way to your mouth, muffling all the noises you want to let out.

Your eyes are wide when the shadows around you form into the shapes of two big men, pale in the eerie light, tall and muscular, dressed surprisingly well for creatures that lurk in the dark.

“What do we have here?” the one with his hand on your mouth says, tilting his head, giving you a smile that makes his handsome face look almost diabolical. “A little rabbit? In our cemetery?”

“Did you get lost, little one?” the other man, the one behind you, whispers as he leans his head closer, rubbing his smooth cheek against yours. It's cold to the touch.

You stiffen, unable to do or say anything. Maybe you're still dreaming, or again. But the way these men grab you feels too real. They are strong. Intimidatingly so. You swallow hard, gasping when the one behind you gives you a deep sniff.

“Ugh, she reeks of dog,” he says with a drawl. “Had some fun with the beast, didn't you?”

Suddenly you feel a hand between your legs, a cold touch, coaxing a muffled yelp out of you as you feel probing fingers right against your warm crotch. “Huh, yeah, he got to her alright. Filled to the brim...” He pulls his fingers away and raises them to your face, and you can see the thick substance coating them. “Too bad, really, I was looking forward to ravaging that sweet cunt...”

You glare at him, both in shock and indignation. He pulls his hand from your mouth and shoves his soiled fingers between your lips. A muffled grunt of protest slips from your throat, but your attempts to get away are futile as the other man still holds your arms tightly. A bitter and slightly salty taste fills your mouth, but with how the man presses his digits onto your tongue you can't do anything but flick it around them, licking them clean.

“At least she seems quite obedient,” he muses with a menacing tone, watching you closely, moving his fingers in and out of your mouth.

“We can still have some fun with her,” the man behind you says quietly, his nose nuzzling your neck. “He hasn't marked her yet. She's fair game.”

“Splendid,” the other replies with a laugh and pulls his fingers away with a wet popping sound. You quickly swallow the spit gathered on your tongue and lick your quivering lips. “So, little bunny, do you wanna try to run? I would die for a little hunt... if I wasn't already dead,” he adds with a reverberating laugh that makes you shiver deeply.

You just stare at him, your chest rising and falling faster. “I don't think she'll come far,” the man rubbing his hands over your arms retorts. “She seems weakened. The beast clearly got her good. Let's just enjoy her until her heart gives out, hm?”

You gasp at the implication, immediately silenced by a hand reaching out to grab your chin. “Fine. It is already enough to hear this beautiful beat,” the man in front of you whispers as he leans closer. “Are you scared, rabbit?”

Your eyes dart over his pale face, and when he bares his teeth and licks them slowly, you stare at his pointy canines. After having just met a real werewolf (or so you think, it's all so fuzzy in your head right now), you shouldn't be surprised to meet actual vampires, in a graveyard no less, pale and cold and strong, with sharp fangs and insatiable appetites, but your body still reacts as if you were indeed just a bunny cornered by two predators. A tiny whimper escapes your throat. “Please...”

“Hmm? Please what? Use your words, darling!” the man behind you snarls, rubbing his nose against your neck before you feel his lips on your pulse, nibbling teasingly.

“Please let me go...” you press out.

“Not going to happen, sweetheart,” he replies, his low voice muffled. “You came to us. Walked right onto our property. It's our right to do with you whatever we like...”

You squirm in his hold when he laps his tongue up your neck. The other man watches you, rubbing his thumb over your bottom lip before he suddenly leans closer, pressing his forehead to yours. You gasp, staring at him. “You won't regret it, little one,” he breathes against you. His skin feels cold, but the close proximity makes your cheeks burn up badly. “We'll give you a good time, don't worry your pretty little head!”

And suddenly you are being lifted, nausea rolling over you as you find yourself somehow floating in the air. It's all a blur at this point. Footsteps crunch over gravel and dead leaves, thump against stone plates, old hinges screech as a door is being opened. The fresh air becomes stale and dusty, the light even darker. You move down a set of stairs, but you can't move, your head is swimming, your insides tensing up in a way that borders on painful. You can barely breathe, and you have no idea why.

Candle light flickers to life when the men take you through a large wooden door. Your eyes blink into focus slowly. You seem to be in some sort of mausoleum, old looking, corners full of cobwebs, aged statues lining the walls. In the middle of the round room, there are two stone coffins, both of them open, their heavy stone slabs pushed to the side. You swallow hard, trying to see this as a scene, a decorated room fit for an elaborate Halloween party.

But somehow you doubt this is part of it.

“Excuse the mess,” one of the men says as he walks to the coffins. “We didn't expect company tonight...”

He raises a hand – and as you're being set down on your feet again, you witness how the heavy slab moves seemingly on its own or by a strange unseen force, leaving you even more confused. Both coffins are closed now, and before you can question anything else, you are being draped over the short side of one of them, stomach pressed to the cold stone, arms and legs hanging off the edges. A groan escapes you.

“Let's clean her up first, I can't stand the stink of wolf,” one man says as he steps behind you, pushing your legs further apart. You feel a strange coldness rushing through your body, like water, but not really wet, a sensation that leaves you choking on your own spit. “There, better. Don't you feel better too, darling? No longer stuffed full of disgusting beast semen? Well, I don't want to kink shame or anything, maybe you are into being bred, but we do like our holes squeaky clean – for us to soil all over again.”

You squirm on the stone slab, your hands trying to find purchase on the smooth surface, your legs kicking helplessly, but before you can do anything, the other man steps in front of you, grabbing your chin and lifting your head up. You find yourself face-to-face with his throbbing cock. They don't seem to waste any time, huh? He presses his thumb and finger into your cheeks, forcing your mouth open. You issue a groan of protest that is quickly muffled by his surprisingly warm member. You have no choice but to close your lips around it. (Even if you wanted to bite down on him, you couldn't, his hand is still holding your jaw open.)

“Good bunny, you know what to do, hm?” he tells you, slowly rolling his hips against you, his tip scraping along your gums, teasing at the back of your throat. Saliva pools on your tongue, and you feel the need to swallow it before it drips past your lips. When you do, he groans quietly. “Oh, yes, like that. Do that again.” Somehow his words seem to encourage you, and you swallow around him once more, straining your throat enough for tears to fill your eyes.

Behind you, you feel two cold hands rubbing up and down your thighs, gripping them, pulling them apart, before they slip up your rear and push the large shirt out of the way. “So I assume after your little werewolf ordeal, your poor little cunt is a little tired, wouldn't you agree?” he rasps teasingly. “Good thing you have another hole, huh, my sweet?”

You let out a series of muffled cries around the cock in your mouth when you feel probing fingers between your ass cheeks. “Mhmmnngh!” you croak out, thrashing on the stone slab, trying to get away. A sudden slap on your soft rear makes you howl, but ultimately stops your fidgeting. Your skin burns and throbs horribly. “Shh, relax, rabbit. You can take it. See?”

Before you can react, you feel a strange pressure against your sphincter, a teasing touch but unrelenting, and suddenly you have a finger in your ass. Your tight muscles clench around the thick digit, and you wriggle in your compromised position, almost gagging yourself on the dick between your lips when you push yourself against the man's groin and his cock deeper into your mouth. A jerk goes through your body, your hands fruitlessly trying to hold onto anything.

You don't feel in control of your limbs anymore, it's strange. You can feel everything, but you can't move, only rock back and forth on the coffin. The man behind you pushes his finger deeper, then pulls it out and replaces it with two. The stretch hurts, and you let out a muffled wail. Your noises seem to encourage him when he moves them in and out faster, deeper, a hard press against your protesting muscles.

Meanwhile the man holding your jaw increases the pace of his hips slamming against your face. His cock pushes deep, and you gag violently when he breaches your throat, your body convulsing, spit filling your mouth. He pulls back slightly, allows you to breathe and cough and swallow, but then repeats the motion, and you gag again, and the cycle continues. Your head is spinning by the fifth time he forced his length down your throat, and you feel too weak to protest anymore.

Not even when you notice that the man playing with your ass has added another finger and is plunging his hand hard against your rear, a dizzying rhythm, forceful, stretching you for whatever comes next. You can guess and it scares you. But there's nothing you can do as he suddenly pulls his fingers out with a wet pop and you feel his cockhead pressing against your slightly gaping hole. A deep grunt escapes him when he rocks his pelvis forward, sinking into your depths without mercy, carving his way through your impossible tightness.

Your muffled scream is overpowered by loud gurgling noises as the cock in your mouth pistons in and out fast, always pushing deep, bulging your neck, his crotch slapping into your face with each thrust. You are pushed and pulled, rocked back and forth, impaled front and back, cold hands holding your head up or digging into your hips as the two men use you for their pleasure, their grunts filling the space around you.

Despite their rough handling, you feel a strange heat growing inside you, and you realize that with every slam into your ass or snap into your throat, you are rubbed over the rough stone, and your clit quickly feels raw and swollen from the added stimulation. Moaning into the rapidly moving cock in your mouth, you focus on the good feelings, not the burning friction in your rear, not the rawness of your throat, the lack of air or the helplessness, just the bliss that tries to fight through the pain and discomfort.

But before you can even imagine any edge to fall over, they suddenly slow down, languid strokes that push deep until they stop altogether, one cock buried deep in your ass, the other pushed all the way down your throat as pubic hair tickles your nostrils. Your eyes roll back, your lungs burn, your body spasms fruitlessly. Groans echo in your ear.

“Let's turn her around,” one says.

“You wanna switch places too?” the other replies, almost a little breathlessly.

“Sure, I bet she doesn't mind a little ass to mouth action, huh, sugar?”

A loud slap against your bruised rear makes you gag violently, and as spit fills your mouth and tears stream down your face, you are being rotated on the cold stone slab, arms still hanging limply to the ground while your legs twitch as they're being pushed up and against your heaving chest, opening you up further. Cold air brushes over your exposed skin, and for a short moment they let go of you, cocks pull back, leaving trails of stickiness all over your face and crotch.

You are lightheaded, barely able to function, and that moment of reprieve is short-lived. You didn't even get the chance to swallow or breathe properly before a cock is being shoved back into your mouth. Hands curl around the back of your head, holding it up as the stiff and slimy length is pushed straight into your bruised throat. You can only croak out a muffled grunt before a heavy pair of balls slam against your nose.

“Tongue out,” the man above you orders, and you comply, hoping it'll be easier with your mouth wide open and your tongue extended to guide the throbbing cock in and out. “Good. Just like that. Look at that neck bulging. Ugh,” he continues, groaning as he rams deep into your throat and rests there, cutting off any air flow you may have had earlier. You squirm on the coffin, limbs twitching helplessly.

Before you drift off into unconsciousness, he pulls back and slaps your cheek. The pain drags you back immediately. “No fainting, rabbit, we need you awake for this.” You cough hoarsely, spit and precum flying through the air. You're too weak to open your eyes, and it doesn't matter anyway. His hand is on your neck now, squeezing slightly. “Ahh, yes, listen to that frantic heartbeat,” he rasps, slowly slipping his cock back between your lips. “Are you afraid to choke, hm? Or does that turn you on?”

You gag when he presses into your throat slowly, your whole body jerking against the man on the other side, who's holding your legs open and pressed to your chest. You are allowed to cough and swallow before it happens all over again, again and again, and while one man fucks your throat with reckless abandon, the other rubs his cold hand down your mound, teasing at your swollen clit, parting your puffy labia, but then he dips his finger into your ass, completely ignoring your hungrily clenching cunt.

There's no further preparation, and a moment later he shoves his cock into your tight hole, making you wail against the dick in your throat. He lets go of your legs, causing them to flop about wildly with each thrust as he starts pounding into you hard and fast, then you feel his long fingers on your burrowed shirt. You barely register how it's ripped open, but you do feel those cold palms pressing onto your soft mounds, pebbling your skin, your nipples hardening instantly. The touch is almost soothing among all the other things happening to you.

It's a whirlwind of sensations, the lack of air and strain to your throat and jaw on one side, the rough friction and burning heat and hard pummeling on the other. You are moved back and forth on the stone surface, a limp body to be used. You don't know how long this is going on, but these guys seem to have incredible stamina. They just won't stop.

Whenever you feel as if you're slipping into the welcoming darkness, you are slapped and brought back, your cheeks burning and throbbing, but it's only one of many aches by now. You can't decide which is worse, the suffocating stretch when a cock buries deep into your throat, or the rough pummeling of sore muscles when the other cock rams into your tight ass. It's all a blur in the end.

The men are groaning and grunting, snapping their hips against you, uncaring of your discomforts. They're chasing their own orgasms while you remain teetering far away from any sort of release. The room is filled with loud squelching noises, gurgles and slurps, slapping of skin against skin, a soundscape that seems to be your only form of stimulation. Not even the cold hands on your breasts push you further to the edge, they are just there, holding you, groping hard, anchoring you as you are pushed back and forth.

At least they have a rhythm now, in and out in an alternating way, almost like a seesaw, in goes the one in your throat, out moves the one in your ass, and then it's the other way around. And somehow you find comfort in it as you lie there, held in place, unable to move, your eyelids fluttering, tears and snot drying on your sweat-slick skin.

It's then that you feel cold fingers brushing down your quivering belly, down, down, until they rub against your clit, and you arch your back, inhale that cock in your throat, jerk your hips against the one pounding into your ass, and you come, clenching down hard, stiffening, eyes rolling back, bliss exploding through the veils of darkness.

You feel like floating, leaning into the wave of pleasure that washes over you as you let it all happen. And as you do, the men's motions grow jerkier, rougher, faster, and they come too, almost at the same time. Cum shoots down your throat, and you'd expect to feel the same sensation in your ass, but the man there pulls out and empties himself all over your mound and stomach, all the way to your neck. The pressure in your throat loosens then, and similar spurts of wet warmth hit your face.

Raspy breaths make it past your soiled, swollen lips as you lie there with your eyes closed. Strong hands move you until you're lying fully on your back, legs outstretched, arms put at the sides of your body, head supported by the hard stone slab beneath you. Cold fingers trail your skin.

“I wish we could keep her,” you hear a quiet voice that barely makes it past the cotton in your head.

“I'm not risking another war with those savages just because of one puny human...” says a different voice. “We'll find another one.”

“Let's feed and get her back onto the path.”

You blink your eyes open, noticing the two men, the two vampires, standing over you, staring down at you from both sides of the coffin. Their teeth are bared, fangs glistening in the swaying candle light, and before you can do anything, they lean down, one goes straight for your neck, his pointy canines sinking deeply into your skin, and you feel it, despite your fucked-out state, you feel the cold crashing through your veins.

The same sensation happens between your legs, on one of your inner thighs as the other bites down into your soft flesh. You whimper soundlessly, throat hoarse and sore, body too weak to move against the assault. They suck your blood noisily, like the thirsty monsters they are, and you just let it happen, again, what other choice do you have? Your head is spinning as you feel the cold spread through your trembling limbs.

And the world fades...

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End notes: The last part is here!

By the way, this is a nod towards my standalone Vampire oneshot Down the Rabbit Hole which also has dubcon elements and more than one vampire, but isn't as dark.

MASTERLIST // AO3 // ORIGINAL WORKS

KINKTOBER 2024 MASTERLIST

[thornart]

"My soul, once devoted to the light, now serves the darkness. I am a creature of shadow, forged in the blood of the night. The warmth of life has been replaced by a cold hunger, and though I long for the peace of my former existence, I am bound to the eternal dance of predator and prey. Yet, in the stillness of the night, I can hear the whispers of my past, a mournful dirge of what was lost and can never be regained. And do you know what terrifies me the most? I like this feeling…"

[theoxenfree]

OF FLESH SIN

vampire priest x reader | 2.6k | 18+

you're the child of a monastery groundskeeper and come to find out that one of the senior clergy, father marius, was brutally maimed in his chambers overnight. you're approached by the monastery's new recruit: father shaw; who claims he had witnessed the scene of the crime and invites you to his chambers to tell the tale.

warnings; dark content bc of descriptions of gore and violence towards the end, obsessive behaviors, theological themes, probs inaccurate representation of monastery life lmao, outdated + deragatory mention of psychiatric care to fit the narrative, very brief mention of animal death, classism (mc getting shit on for being poor and coming from an "uneducated" family), kinda honestly cheesy if you think about it, roughly proofread, vampires are monsters y'all—that's the only way I write them

shouldn't have to say it, but: none of this is indicative of my personal viewpoints. it's just fiction, folks.

second prompt fulfilled for my lil' october writing project! this won the second poll! please reblog + leave feedback to be kind and help a sister out 🥹💕

Father Marius died in quite some awful way last night, as reported to you by the nuns hanging fresh washed garments on the clothesline in the waning, purpling daylight.

“A look of horror! Utter terror! So frightened that his jaw had become dislocated in forever a scream,” shivered one young nun, Lucy; recently a convert from the slums. “I, well, I didn't see it myself. Neither did the rest of us, actually. They say it was that new Father Shaw who found him at dawn.”

You had been raking gravel out of the yard, tiny stones kicked off of the path into the kempt lawn by prancing horses and wagon wheels, when Lucy and the other nun, Esme, had caught your attention with their hard, dense gossip. They regarded your approach with less caution than they would have had with their other sisters, as gossip was deemed inappropriate, a violation, a flickering serpent’s tongue carrying covert temptations leading to luscious sins and debauchery.

They saw you—poor, morose, the groundskeeper's only child and reminder of loveless trysts—and thought nothing of snaking you into their prattle. You were not the sort to divulge anyone's secrets without gain, without reward, and you knew that the nuns kept nothing to their names once they took their vows and donned their habits.

“Father Shaw,” you continued the discussion with some intrigue, mostly from the fact that he was very new, very young, and modestly handsome, “why was he awake so early? Why was he in Father Marius’ chambers? Curious to me.”

Neither of them gave much caution to your questions, shrugging as if to dismiss your ambivalence and accusatory tone. You were bold in the way that the faithless and lost always tended to be: asking senseless things, always concerned with the wrongdoings of others, always suspicious, always inquiring—forever inquiring.

“Oh, my, you're so defensive,” Esme fanned a yellow bedspread out with an oncoming breeze, catching the wind beneath the fabric so it billowed and rippled midair. “If that’s how you're going to be, then: why does your father stumble around the yard at night with a lantern, swinging around a pistol like a madman? Won't he hurt someone?”

Because he's a godless, superstitious drunk. Perhaps, even, a bit disturbed in his mind, but you couldn't bear to think that way, that he might be the type to need his head locked in a metal cage, gagged, arms bound, and padlocked in some damp, distant corner of an asylum.

“He's a good man,” you relented, taking your hands from the top of the smoothed out, worn handle of the rake and resumed your task. The gravel made an awful, grinding sound as the teeth of the rake collected pieces of stone and led it back to the rest. “He's served this monastery well. I don't mean offense about Father Shaw, I'm simply curious about what transpired is all.”

“No offense taken,” came a voice from behind, startling both the twittering nuns and yourself at the same time. They saw it to be Father Shaw standing there, hands cuffed behind his back with a particularly demure disposition, hiked their skirts and whisked themselves away back inside. “Ah, am I really such a frightful figure? I couldn't really find an opening during your conversation to invite myself in. I apologize.”

You were of a similar fretful nature, quickening your clawing and the reach of the rake. “Nay, Father. I think it's simply because you're a strange man to them still. A handsome face, a warm voice, mysterious; give them time, they'll come around.”

“Have you?” Father Shaw asked, taking measured strides in a half-circle around to your front. He concentrated on where the teeth of your instrument struck next, tips temporarily wedged into the soft dirt before being ripped up with chunks of earth and gray gravel. “It wouldn't do for me if you… were still ill at ease with me as well. I consider you my one, true friend in this place.”

Your father held a certain destestation towards Father Shaw that you'd never witnessed before, saying nothing else than that something was terribly wrong with him and not to place yourself in a position to be alone with him. This you attributed to his unsoundness, but it was always the sudden flicker a sharp breath against candlelight—a jarring shift in his demeanor when he spoke about the Father, neurotic and prone to throwing things about the cottage interior, that caused you to pay some mind to what he told you.

“And, you're a great friend of mine as well,” you hoped you sounded coherent and paced your words evenly enough. “I'm sorry if you thought I was accusing you of something, sir. I really meant nothing to it.”

Father Shaw’s lips sprawled tight and pale into a fond smile, never showing his teeth, though the imprint of them seemed massive and the skin of his lips startlingly thin across them. “I know. You have nothing to fear. My feelings were not affected. If you'd like, come to my chambers later, we may pray together first, and I'll tell you everything you wish to know about what I saw to sate your curiosity.”

“That seems improper, sir.” You said.

“How so?”

“Inviting someone to your chambers at night seems an unbecoming venture for a pious man of status, such as yourself,” you continued, now standing upright beside your rake, “if any of the sisters were to witness it, worse another priest, aren't you afraid you'd be horribly chastised? Even worse, excommunicated altogether?”

Although Father Shaw’s dark eyes reflected no light, holding such demanding depth to them that it was hard to keep your bearings whenever you realized you'd been staring, his entire face was alight in amusement.

“Wherever did you learn to speak like that?” he asked candidly, still glowing despite his pallor. “Forgive me when I say, but your father is not an educated man. I mean no offense, please don't look at me in such a way. You are so well spoken, I only wish to know more about you.”

“I've lived here my entire life,” you told him. “The nuns taught me how to read.”

He looked impressed. “You can read?”

“I can!” From a near distance, you could make out your father’s haddard form, bent sideways on a walking cane and limping towards the pair of you. You looked up at the priest’s smooth face. “It'd be best for you to leave before my father can speak to you. He isn't the kindest soul after a long day.

Father Shaw didn't react with any semblance of worry, but agreed that there were other things needing to be done and began away. Just as he passed you on his way towards the monastery, he let his hand rest atop of your shoulder and leaned you towards him to whisper in your ear: “come to me tonight. I'll be waiting for you.”

There was something so luxurious and cooling about his voice; fine silks sitting in the shade during autumn gliding across your bare skin, wrapping your neck, your chest, your nether parts. His voice was a fine, chilly mist after the first rains in spring which felt refreshing and new after a glacial winter, yet still had capacity to soak you to the bone. It was a nighttime breeze caressing your cheek, sweeping through the hairs of your scalp, making your skin burst all over with bumps.

“I don't like the way he looks at you,” said your father with a mouthful of porridge you'd seasoned with herbs of the season. It was wonderfully fragrant and warm during nights that were still a bit too uncomfortable to sip anything cold. “He looks at you like you're a slab of meat! Some prize after a hunt. I don't like him, love. Not one bit. You'd do well to stay to mind yourself and do your chores and nothing else, y’hear?”

After dinner, you cleaned up, swept the floors with hard bristles, and snuffed all the lights except for the fireplace where your father sat in his old chair, fiddling with his favorite pistol.

“It's time for bed, old man.” You watched him fit a couple of small bullets into the loading chamber. They glinted against the orange flames. “Goodness. What have you gotten this time? Something new?”

“Aye!” he grinned, nearly toothless and in a sickly sort of way. “Went to market the other day while the nuns bullied you and picked out some fine bullets from the silversmith,” he cracked the two halves of the pistol shut. “Better to be prepared.”

You waited until sometime later once he was finally asleep, possibly after midnight, before leaving the humble cottage sitting on the fringes of the massive monastery yard and rushing across the grounds to get inside.

Once, they'd kept a guard dog on the property, one of those meaner breeds that were used for gambling, but the poor thing wound up shot dead in the middle of the night by a traveling friar who'd come to seek refuge at the monastery. The sisters, and yourself, were horribly distraught by the entire ordeal and all vetoed the consideration of bringing another dog here.

Since then, it was no task for you (or anyone else) to get inside the building and shuffle along the shadows through the corridors. At night, the place stirred with patient insects, feral rodents large and small in the pantry, and hungry owls tamely whining from the rafters when something startled them away from their hunt of vermin.

Your feet were a light sound on the masonry below, padded by thin leather soles which alerted you to your enthusiasm as the thwap thwap thwap became louder, aggressive as you closed in on a wall and turned down another hallway for a sturdy wood door at the end of it.

As your knuckles rapped, hoping the sound wouldn't disturb the animals’ nighttime caroling, a swift darkness moved across the floor from behind the door, briefly blocking out the soft light seeping out from underneath.

The next moment, you were being pulled inside and sat at a small table tucked to the side of Father Shaw’s rather generous room. It was a simple space, sparsely furnished for the barest of comforts—only for what was needed to live—but what had been made for him was of exquisite craftsmanship, some made of teakwood, which Shaw assured you was remarkably durable and highly resistant to rotting.

“It's wonderful for boats,” he said, pouring a light amber colored brew from a metal kettle he'd heated a short while ago. “It’s good for all elements, really. Exceptional longevity. I've heard it has become a popular option in the city for burying the deceased.”

“Will Father Marius be buried in a teakwood coffin, then?” you asked, sipping politely from the cup even though you had no appetite for it. You already felt ill at ease enough having disobeyed your father by sneaking into a priest's personal chambers at night. The things the sisters would say about you—

“He will be entombed underneath the monastery with the rest who have served here and passed. I believe that is all stone down there, my dear.” Father Shaw smiled tepidly, kettle aside, no tea of his own. “But, I know that your curiosity led you here to me with questions, yes? About the state I found Father Marius in, yes?”

You tried to disguise your intrigue by drinking more of the tea, of whatever it was he had given you, and listened to the sounds of your fingertips sticking to the porcelain from sweat and steam.

“If you wouldn't mind sharing…”

“I wouldn't!” he leaned on his arms on the table, closer towards you as though with a secret. “As I've said, you are truly the only soul here who I can confide in. You are not a sheep. And you do not fear sin as the rest do. So, you can ask me anything and I'll tell you everything.”

“Tell me about Father Marius, then.”

Father Shaw reached across the table for one of your hands; his far larger, fingers much longer and colder than your own and held it as he recounted the event.

“Dreadful sight, it was. It was, oh, perhaps sometime after three o'clock when I heard a massive racket. A struggle. When I knocked, all of the noise subsided at once and there was complete stillness. Silence, my dear, silence so deep, dark, and damning that I knew something awful had happened.

“I didn't knock again, I was too afraid to! But, Father Marius was getting on in age, so I couldn't just stand by, either. I kicked the door in—just once was all it took—and I rushed inside to see the room was a complete mess. A fight had clearly taken place, and the walls—oh, the walls—”

His remorse was carefully placed, stiff, and uncertain and he couldn't be seen in the vastness of his black gaze. You were moved by the vulnerability he was trying to show you, going as far to abandon your drink to place your warm hand on top of his.

“The walls, my dear, were a mess of blood. Something vicious and awful had happened in that room. But, then, I found Father Marius lying there on the ground next to a broken window. I think he'd tried to throw himself through it. His face was shredded to pieces, his eyes gouged. When I got closer, I noticed that his tongue had been severed from his head!”

You were holding Father Shaw’s hands in a bloodless grip, face ashen, teeth chattering behind your lips. “What on earth! That is not only horror, but cruelty!”

“Oh, my love, it gets worse!” Father Shaw held you mesmerized in his gaze, the conviction and anguish with which he told his story. “Closer still, Father Marius’ face was locked in one of pure terror, I've—I’ve never seen a human react in quite a way such as that before, to fear. The man unhinged his own jaw in a hideous scream, and it seemed to me he was skeletal. By that, it's like he was, well, quite dry.

“So, I crouched down so much lower and inspected him all over. Do you want to know what I found?”

“Yes.” You spoke breathlessly.

Father Shaw had moved out of his seat and was on one knee in front of you, both of his frigid hands on your face to smooth across your cheeks, pushing away pieces of hair obscuring some part of you he'd wanted to see.

“My love, I saw marks in his neck. Two, beautifully, wonderfully symmetrical marks that were far too clean to be of any animal that we know of. The bite was clean, it was patient and cunning. And the fangs that had sunk into his tender flesh had drained him of blood, of the very essence that kept his heart beating until the very last.”

“Sir—” your stomach plummeted, falling forever, when he smiled, teeth longer than any humans should be shown through to you. He wouldn't let you go when you went to move out of his hands, away from him. “Father Shaw, please—”

“I wish you could have seen it, my love. It was a breathtaking sight and I long for someone else to admire the beauty of my work alongside me.”

It was unthinkable that a vampire could walk on these holy grounds and in the bright of day, yet Father Shaw had for countless days. Evil held you sweetly by the cheek and in your hair, kissed you with a corpse’s cold lips, and laved the skin of your skin with a long, serpentine tongue.

“O’, my merciful lord…”

Father Shaw bent your head back with a fistful of hair and spoke from your throat:

“There is no God, only me. Come into the endless night with me, my love.”