By Blood We Live (49 page)

And then you learned about others of your kind. They came to you just as the clock struck midnight: all women, with hair flowing like forest vines around their faces and leathery, batlike wings. All of them were also able to separate their upper halves from their lower halves, the edges of their stomachs distended and glittering from a night's frenzied feeding. You wanted to weep when you saw them, floating outside your window, looking at you with dead eyes, calling you forward. You knew what they were, you knew the stories, half-whispered to children in order to fear the dark, the beat of shadow wings. You thought that being in the city would make you safe.

But you had to accept it. A part of you knew that this was all your fault, and you had to learn how to accept consequences. And if this was punishment for that one night of bliss, then so be it.

Kian's apartment was no bigger than a large walk-in closet. Two steps forward and you were in the kitchen, two steps back and you were almost stumbling into the bed. There was no couch. You look at him expectantly. "Bathroom's over there," he says, waving carelessly at a wooden door that was held shut by a length of chain. He rummages inside a synthetic textile closet, the one with a zipper for a door, and hands you a rumpled t-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts. You thank him quietly and close the bathroom door behind you. In the dim light of a single orange electric bulb, you pour the freezing cold water over your head from a pail. There are warning bells going off inside your head, but you force them to be quiet, to still. Kian won't touch you, and you certainly will (try) not to have any physical contact with him.

(
He has a girlfriend!
)

You stumble out of the bathroom and into utter darkness. "Sorry," came his disembodied voice from somewhere to your left. "I'm too tired. I'll take a shower in the morning."

"Did you even change?" you tease, keeping your voice light.

"Of course," he says. "Come to bed, Chel."

You carefully maneuver around the plastic furniture and the plastic bags of clothes and groceries scattered on the floor. Your fingers encounter a soft material, which means you've probably reached the bed already. You slip into the space Kian has provided, painfully aware of the dip in the center of the mattress, which means that he's already on the other side. Positioning yourself on the edge, you cross your hands over your chest and turn your back towards him. You're not sure whether your eyes are open or closed; it doesn't make much of a difference.

Behind you, Kian moves forward and wraps his around your waist, pulling you to him. You whisper worriedly, wondering what's wrong, but he simply buries his face at the back of your neck. You feel something warm and wet trickle down your nape, and you turn around to face him. "Are you crying?" you ask quietly, wrapping your arms around his shuddering shoulders. His face is in your shirt, burrowed between the valley of your breasts, and you have never held him like this, not even when Anita, the love of his life and his first girlfriend, left him for her classmate Jasmine Toledo. He had also cried then, and refused to eat anything but Meat Lovers' Pizza from Pizza Hut (because that was the last meal that he and Anita had shared) for two weeks.

You hold him to you (
it's not so bad after all
), until you feel him shift slightly and his lips press against your skin, through the fabric. You look down, and he looks up, and then you are reminded of the way the
Titanic
slammed against the icebergs—the impact was enough to bring the mighty ship shuddering to its knees. Kian's kiss feels that way: breaking all the barriers, refusing to acknowledge their existence, cracking the walls that you have surrounded yourself with. (
Twelve years' worth
. . .) You bite down on the flesh of his lower lip; your tongue swipes the drop of blood that wells across the surface. He tastes of metal and cinnamon, bitter and pungent, the salt of the seas. You store the memory inside your mind, where later on, when you are alone, you will roll it over and over in your mind, like a particularly beautiful and intricate plaything.

You gasp as his hands slip underneath your shirt, stroking the flat of your stomach, tracing the line of your wound. "Is this it?" he whispers, his voice grating the still night air. You nod desperately, squirming underneath his touch, everything be damned.

He lowers his head and you feel the tip of his tongue, like a flower petal dipped in morning dew, slipping/sliding across the cut, tasting your blood. You tangle your fingers into his hair, allow him to uncover your skin beneath the clothes, his hands memorizing the language of your movements. You know you are sinking, that you have abandoned all hope of resurfacing, You, who have known flight, known the names of all the winds that encircle the city—now, you know how it feels to drown. The waters are slowly, slowly closing over your head.

In your mind, there will be no chance for redemption, so you will decide to run away. You will change your city, your name, your face. But to the women, the others of your kind, the foulest of blood that flows hotly through your veins will still sound a clarion call, and everywhere you go, they will gather outside your window, waiting for you like ghosts at a funeral.

You will taste the blood on your mouth, feed because you need to live, but there is no more pleasure in the succulent liquid taste of meat. Even flight has lost its pleasure: every time you take to the air, you remember the fall into his arms, and everything is made bittersweet by the memory.

When you feed for the last time, you will find yourself crouched on the rooftop of a beautiful white house in the outskirts of the village where you are currently hiding in. You will hear the fervent prayers of the woman in your mind. She does not want this child. Carefully, you will unfurl your tongue and search for a gap in the roof. You can smell her already: strong and warm, full of flesh and life. Your tongue enters her belly, laps up the scarlet-and-sunset child that will never know light; only the warm beat of the darkness. You will swirl the liquid inside your mouth, and realize that it tastes of metal and cinnamon, bitter and pungent, the salt of the seas—

(
I know this taste.
)

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including
Silk
,
Murder of Angels
,
Daughter of Hounds,
The Red Tree
, and the vampire novel
The Five of Cups
. Her short fiction has been collected in
A is for Alien
, and in several other volumes. She has also published two collections of erotica, and a third,
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart
, will be released in 2010. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
 
This tale was inspired, in part, by Edvard Munch's painting,
The Vampire
. "But I was much more interested in writing a story about immortality and time, about our smallness in the face of the passage and the gulf of time, than I was in writing a traditional vampire story," Kiernan said.
 
Kiernan says that she usually accounts for the prevalence of the vampire in modern literature to the marriage of sex and death. "In the vampire tale, and especially in the more romantic sort, we have a sort of socially sanctioned necrophilia," she said. "A vampire is essentially a cannibalistic corpse, through which a 'kiss' combines the act of feeding and copulation. To be preyed upon by a vampire is to become Death's lover, and it's hard to imagine a more powerful frisson."

I find her, always, sitting on the same park bench. She's there, no matter whether I'm coming through the park late on a Thursday evening or early on a Monday evening or in the first grey moments of a Friday morning. I play piano in a martini bar at Columbus and 89th, or I play
at
the piano, mostly for tips and free drinks. And when I feel like the long walk or can't bear the thought of the subway or can't afford cab fare, whenever I should happen to pass that way alone in the darkness and the interruptions in the darkness made by the lampposts, she's there. Always on that same bench, not far from the Ramble and the Bow Bridge, just across the lake. They call that part of the park Cherry Hill. The truth is that I haven't lived in Manhattan long enough to know these things, and, anyway, I'm not the sort of man who memorizes the cartography of Central Park, but she
told
me it's called Cherry Hill, because of all the cherry trees growing there. And when I looked at a map in a guidebook, it said the same thing.

You might mistake her for a runaway, sixteen or maybe seventeen; she dresses all in rags, or clothes so threadbare and dirty that they may as well be rags, and I've never seen her wearing shoes, no matter the season or the weather. I've seen her barefoot in snow. I asked her about that once, if she would wear shoes if I brought her a pair, and she said no, thank you, but no, because shoes make her claustrophobic.

I find her sitting there alone on the park bench near the old fountain, and I always ask before I sit down next to her. And always she smiles and says of course, of course you can sit with me. You can always sit with me. Her shoulder-length hair has been dyed the color of pomegranates, and her skin is dark. I've never asked, but I think she may be Indian. India Indian, I mean. Not Native American. I once waited tables with a girl from Calcutta, and her skin was the same color, and she had the same dusky brown-black eyes. But if she is Indian, the girl on Cherry Hill, she has no trace of an accent when she talks to me about the fountain or her favorite paintings in the Met or the exhibits she likes best at the Museum of Natural History.

The first time she smiled. . .

"You're a vampire?" I asked, as though it were the sort of thing you might ask any girl sitting on a park bench in the middle of the night.

"That's an ugly word," she said and scowled at me. "That's a silly, ugly word." And then she was silent a long moment, and I tried to think of anything but those long incisors, like the teeth of a rat filed down to points. It was a freezing night near the end of January, but I was sweating, nonetheless. And I had an erection. And I realized, then, that her breath didn't fog in the cold air.

"I'm a daughter of Lilith," she said.

Which is as close as she's ever come to telling me her name, or where she's from, or anything else of the sort.
I'm a daughter of Lilith
, and the
way
she said it, with not even a trace of affectation or humor or deceit, I knew that it was true. Even if I had no idea what she meant, I knew that she was telling me the truth.

That was also the first night that I let her kiss me. I sat with her on the bench, and she licked eagerly at the back of my neck. Her tongue was rough, like a cat's tongue.

She smelled of fallen leaves, that dry and oddly spicy odor which I have always associated with late October and jack-o'-lanterns. Yes, she smelled of fallen leaves, and her own sweat and, more faintly, something which I took to be woodsmoke. Her breath was like frost against my skin, colder even than the long winter night. She licked at the nape of my neck until it was raw and bleeding, and she whispered soothing words in a language I could neither understand nor recognize.

"It was designed in 1860," she said, some other night, meaning the fountain with its bluestone basin and eight frosted globes. "They built this place as a turnaround for the carriages. It was originally meant to be a drinking fountain for horses. A place for thirsty things."

"Like an oasis," I suggested, and she smiled and nodded her head and wiped my blood from her lips and chin.

"Sometimes it seems all the wide world is a desert," she said. "There are too few places left where one may freely drink. Even the horses are no longer allowed to drink here, though it was built for them."

"Times change," I told her and gently touched the abraded place on my neck, trying not to wince, not wanting to show any sign of pain in her presence. "Horses and carriages don't much matter anymore."

"But horses still get thirsty. They still need a place to drink."

"Do you like horses?" I asked, and she blinked back at me and didn't answer my question. It reminds me of an owl, sometimes, that slow, considering way she blinks her eyes.

"It will feel better in the morning," she said and pointed at my throat. "Wash it when you get home." And then I sat with her a while longer, but neither of us said anything more.

She takes my blood, but never more than a mouthful at a time, and she's left me these strange dreams in return. I have begun to think of them as a sort of gift, though I know that others might think them more a curse. Because they are not entirely pleasant dreams. Some people would even call them nightmares, but things never seem so cut and dried to me. Yes, there is terror and horror in them, but there is beauty and wonder, too, in equal measure—a perfect balance that seems never to tip one way or the other. I believe the dreams have flowed into me on her rough cat's tongue, that they've infected my blood and my mind like a bacillus carried on her saliva. I don't know if the gift was intentional, and I admit that I'm afraid to ask. I'm too afraid that I might pass through the park late one night or early one morning and she wouldn't be waiting for me there on her bench on Cherry Hill, that asking would break some brittle spell which I can only just begin to comprehend. She has made me superstitious and given to what psychiatrists call "magical thinking," misapprehending cause and effect, when I was never that way before we met. I play piano in a martini bar, and, until now, there's never been anything in my life which I might mistake for magic. But there are many things in her wide sienna eyes which I might mistake for many
other
things, and now that uncertainty seems to cloud my every waking thought. Yet I believe that it's a small price to pay for her company, smaller even than the blood she takes.

I thought that I should write down one of the dreams, that I should try to make mere words of it. From this window beside my bed, I can see Roosevelt Island beyond the rooftops, and the East River and Brooklyn and the hazy blue-white sky that can mean either summer or winter in this city. It makes me think of her, that sky, though I'm at a loss to explain why. At first, I thought that I would write it down and then read it to her the next time I see her. But then I started to worry that she might not take it the way I'd intended, simply as reciprocation, my gift to repay hers. She might be offended, instead, and I don't think I could bear the world without her. Not after all these nights and mornings, and all these dreams.