Unbreathing Vampire Denies His Fevered Human

Roman’s mouth is already at my throat when the first distant cockcrow of the exile-hour sounds, his fangs a hair’s-breadth from breaking skin as he whispers that we have until the light takes him and then he pulls back, leaving only the ghost of cold on my pulse.

The crow is thin, strained through the stone of the old manor until it is barely a sound at all, and still it lands in my blood like a fingernail tapped once against a windowpane. I feel it in the tendon of my neck before I hear it. His lips have not entirely gone. They hover a finger’s width above the leap of my artery, and the cold they left behind is worse than the mouth itself was, a frost-ring drawn on my skin that refuses to fade. My hands are still fisted in the torn front of his shirt. The linen is cold the way linen is cold when it has lain folded in a cellar trunk for sixty years. Under it, nothing moves. His chest does not rise against my knuckles. There is no breath on my cheek, no exhale to warm the inch between his face and mine, and that absence is the first thing that undoes me: the knowledge that the weight pressing me into this mattress has never been alive the way I am alive, that the hardness ground against my hip is river-stone and hunger and something older than the house whose bed we are breaking.

I make a sound. Not a word, just the ragged catch of my breath against a chest that will not answer it, my air breaking on him like surf on a seawall in January. He answers with the wet click of his fangs retracting, a small, obscene unseating I feel more than hear, two points of pressure that had been dimpling the skin beneath my jaw now lifting by the width of a hair. The growl that follows is pitched below hearing. It does not travel through the room. It takes up residence in the bone behind my ear and hums there, a low, caged vibration I will feel in my teeth for the rest of the night.

“Until the light,” he says, and the words carry no warmth. They are a draft moving across the hollow of my throat. “Do you understand what that means, Josephine? I could open you now. Right here, where I am counting it. I could drink until the fever you are burning with is in my throat instead of yours. The light will take me whether I do or not.”

I understand it the way a body understands the edge of a roof, in the backs of the knees, in the sudden lightness of the stomach. I grind up against him anyway. My shift is rucked to my waist, his trousers open, and when I roll my hips to seat myself on him the shock of his cock against my slick heat is the shock of being pressed to a statue that has stood in snow all winter. He is not hard the way a man is hard, with blood rushing to fill him. He is hard the way a blade is hard, the way iron is hard in a cellar where it has never been touched by the sun. My wetness drags over him and the contrast is obscene: my own fever smeared across something that has no true body heat, only density, only the plain predatory fact of him. My thighs shake. I cannot stop them. I am trying to take the last thing I will ever be allowed to take, and I am trying to take it fast.

Then my pulse spikes. I feel it happen, a wild drum under the place his mouth just vacated, a stupid bright flutter of blood that wants out of me. And he knows. He hears it. His head turns toward it the way a hound turns toward a snapped twig, and I feel his fangs come down against the side of my neck. There is no sound to the descent. It is only pressure, two cold points pressing a dimple into the skin over my artery, the tips of them resting exactly where the blood runs closest, and in the same instant the head of him notches barely inside me, a freezing stretch that promises everything and gives nothing, and his entire body locks.

It is not the stillness of a man holding still. It is the stillness of a stopped clock, a predator that has decided the second of the strike is not yet. He freezes mid-motion with both brinks held at once, the point of his cock splitting me and the points of his fangs bending my skin without breaking it, and his hands, which a heartbeat ago were tearing at the remains of my shift, go hard on my hips and then colder than hard, a crash of temperature so sudden I gasp and the gasp fogs in front of my face. The air thickens. I can taste his hunger in it, metallic and sweet and heavy, the smell of the air before a storm breaks into a closed room. Nothing about him moves. Not his chest, not his jaw, not the hands that are turning the skin of my hips numb.

He lifts me off him.

There is no effort in it, no grunt, no shift of weight I can feel. I am simply in the air, my wetness going cold in the gap he has opened between us, my inner thighs still clenching on the memory of him, and then I am set down on the sheets as if I weigh nothing, placed to one side like a thing he is moving out of the path of his own mouth. His mouth follows my throat through the air the whole way, and his fangs leave my skin last. I feel the dimples ease. Then the hinge of them unseating, a wet, deliberate retraction, loud as a key turning in the dark. My breath hitches against the space where his chest should be moving. It isn’t. It never will.

“Not yet,” he says, and his lips are against the shell of my ear, so close the words should have temperature and do not. “You will not come on me until I decide the hour is spent. You will not bleed for me until I am finished listening to that clock.” Another crow, farther off, or the same one warped by the old trees. “Beg if you must. It will not hurry the light. It will only make me hungrier.”

I do beg. The word comes out broken in half. His name. Please. There is a clock running in my chest now, and every inch of him I am not touching feels like an inch I will never be given back, the last friction, the last cold mouth, the last chance to be opened and emptied by something that is not a man and has never pretended to be. I reach for him and he lets me. He lets my palms slide down the hard, unbreathing plane of his abdomen, lets me press my hand flat over the place a heart should be and find nothing there, not a flutter, not an echo, only the dense quiet of a body that does not need me and wants me anyway with a want that has teeth.

He comes back as a draft before he comes back as a body. The air at my hip turns cold, then the air at my thigh, and then his fingers are on me, colder than they were the first time. He does not warm them. He never will. Two of them press into me with a slow, claiming stretch, and my back leaves the sheet because the chill at my center drives it up, because there is nowhere else for my body to go. The sound of it in the hush is wet and shaming and I cannot stop making it. His mouth begins to map me. The inside of my wrist first, a long drag of a tongue that has no warmth, only texture, only the precise knowledge of where the vein lies thinnest beneath the skin. Then the inside of my elbow. Then the hollow of my throat again, where his lips rest without pressing, just resting, tasting the beat through the skin. Then, devastatingly, the crease of my thigh, where he inhales as if he could draw the artery to the surface by wanting it badly enough.

“Here,” he whispers against that place, and the whisper arrives inside my ear though his mouth is far below it. His voice does not obey distance. “This is where I would open you if the crow had not sounded. You would flood my mouth in three swallows. You would taste like panic and salt and the last hour of a life. I can already taste it, Josephine. I am choosing not to. Feel how hard that choice is. Feel it in the way I am shaking.”

He is shaking. The hand that is fucking me with such controlled, unhurried depth carries a fine, continuous tremor, and when he looms over me again I feel it in his chest too, a vibration in a body that does not breathe, the jaw locked so tightly I can hear the small creak of it beside my face. I am shaking worse. Sounds I do not recognize fall out of me each time his thumb finds the swollen, frantic nerve of me and circles, and circles, and brings me up to the place where my hips stop obeying and start to grind on their own, and then it stops. The thumb lifts. The fingers withdraw. The temperature in the room drops as if he has opened a door onto a snowfield, and before I can follow him something pins my wrists to the pillow above my head. Not his hands. His hands are gone. It is the weight of his will, invisible and absolute, flattening my arms into the bedding so that I can lift my hips and arch and beg and chase nothing, held fast by a thing that has no heat and no heartbeat and only intention, and the pleasure of being held by it is so dark I cannot tell it apart from fear.

His fangs come down against my throat while I am pinned. I feel the pressure of them first, the two points settling, the skin giving a fraction, and then the snap of enamel seating back into his gums as he forces them up. His growl this time barely qualifies as sound. I feel it in the roots of my teeth.

He almost enters me. His hands find my thighs and spread them, two cold brands on the insides of my legs, and the blunt, freezing head of him splits me just far enough that I sob, just far enough that the stretch becomes a promise, and then his hips withdraw. Only his hips. His hands leave my thighs, and I am empty and clenching on cold air, but his mouth does not go anywhere at all. It stays at my ear, holding its ground there, and I hear my own breath tearing, and the sheets, and under those sounds the thick, pressing hush of his hunger, a quality in the air that feels as if the room itself has been filled past what it can hold.

“The light will take me in forty breaths,” he recites, and I believe the number, because he can hear the sky. “Your breaths, not mine. I have none to spare. I could drink you dry in the time it takes that light to find this window. Your blood would be the last warm thing I ever hold. And still I am not inside you. Still my fangs are up. A man would be fucking you by now. A man would have spent himself in you twice and gone slack on your breast. I am lying here with my mouth an inch from the one vein in you that could end this, and I am listening to it, and I am not drinking. Tell me you feel the difference.”

I tell him. The words are wrecked. I feel it in his body, in the way his tremor worsens every time my pulse climbs and eases every time I go still. He is not stopping because he is kind. He is stopping because the spike in my blood is the thing he wants in his mouth, and he will not take it until the taking and the fucking are the same event, and if he lets me come now he will not be able to hold his teeth. His hunger is the hand on the brake. His hunger is the thing that keeps throwing me down from the edge, and that understanding does something to me that the pleasure alone could not. I am starving. He is starving. We are trembling at the same edge, and only one of us has ever been human.

He comes back heavier. Three fingers now, a stretch that pulls a cry out of me, his mouth open over my breast, not sucking, not biting, just the cold of his tongue tracing the blue thread of vein that runs toward my nipple, following it, circling, until I am shaking so hard the bedframe knocks the wall in time with my hips. I hear my wetness on his hand. I hear the hitch of my breath against a chest that does not answer it. I hear the growl begin in him, low and rising, as his fangs come down and the points of them press into the swell of my breast above his tongue, and I am one grind away, one circle of his thumb, I can feel it gathering in the small of my back.

Then his tongue leaves my skin and his hand leaves my body and his weight leaves the bed all at once, and I am chasing up into air that has gone cold enough to sting.

I fall back. My hips lift again, twice, for nothing. The fangs retract somewhere above me in the dark, a wet, final click, and his hands return only to pin my thighs open against the mattress, cold palms holding me wide and entering nothing.

“I can hear the chambers of your heart,” he whispers. “I can hear which one would empty first. I can smell how close you are to coming on my hand. If you come, I will bite. If I bite, I will not stop. Twenty-two breaths, Josephine. I am going to make you wait until waiting is the only thing left in you.”

He makes me wait. He lowers himself over me without entering, the dense, cold length of him lying along the seam of me so that every twitch of my hips drags my swollen heat across him and gets me nothing. One palm stays clamped on my left thigh, holding it flat to the mattress; the other leg he pins wide with the cold wedge of his knee, freeing his hand, and he puts his fingers back inside me and does not move them, just holds them there, curled, pressing, while his mouth returns to the side of my throat. His tongue finds the artery. It rests there. It does not lick. It only lies flat and cold over the pulse, feeling it the way a hand feels a drum, and I begin to come apart around his unmoving fingers from nothing but that, from the fact of his mouth and the fact of his stillness and the fact that I have perhaps a dozen breaths left of him. My thighs begin to shake, one against his palm, one against the stone of his knee. My inner muscles grip his fingers in the first involuntary flutter, the one that comes a second before the fall, and I hear the sound I make, a thin, climbing keen, and I feel his fangs descend.

Pressure. Two points. The skin over my artery dimpling inward, whitening, bending so far that I feel it will give, and his whole body goes rigid as iron above me with the effort of holding it there, the tremor in him so violent now that I feel it transfer into my ribs.

He tears himself off me. There is no other word for it. His tongue rips from my throat, his fingers pull free of me mid-clench so that I spasm on nothing, his palm and his knee leave my thighs, and the cold that crashes into the space he has vacated is so complete that my teeth begin to chatter. I lunge after him. I get as far as my elbows before his will lands on my chest and flattens me, and I lie there pinned and sobbing, my body still trying to finish on an absence, my hips rolling on air. Across the room, in the deepest shadow by the window, I hear the retraction of his fangs. I hear him swallow nothing, his throat working on the taste he refused.

“Nine breaths,” he says from the dark. His voice shakes. “Eight.”

The last crow is different. It is closer. It has a colour in it, a grey, the sound of a bird that can see something I cannot yet see. Roman goes utterly still at the window. The weight lifts off my chest. In that stillness I understand that the exile-hour is no longer a threat being whispered into my ear. It is a fact arriving through the trees.

He stops denying.

There is no warning that a human body would give, no tensing, no breath drawn. One instant he is a shape by the window; the next he is on me, in me, his fangs sinking at the same instant he drives fully inside, so that I cannot separate the two. The stretch of him is shocking, cold and dense and without give, a claiming that fills me to the root in a single stroke, and the bite is two points punching through the skin of my throat, the give of the flesh, the sudden hot run of blood freed from the vein, and then the suck. My blood floods his mouth. I feel the pull of it, a drawing-out that tugs at something beneath my sternum, and I hear his swallow, thick and greedy, and the groan that comes up through his chest is not a man’s groan but a long, low sound of a hunger finally fed. His cold seed floods me in the same wave that his venom enters my blood, a spreading, glittering wrongness that moves up through my veins faster than blood should move, and the climax it drags out of me is not only the lock of muscle and the sound I make. There is a taste of metal at the back of my tongue. There is a roar in my inner ear like a river under ice. My body locks around him as if it could hold him here, as if I could keep the window dark by clenching hard enough.

I come with his name in my mouth and my blood in his. I feel myself pour into him. That is the only way to say it: the heat of me draining out through the two holes in my throat, a warm current leaving, and in the same minute his cold creeping into me, up the insides of my thighs where he is seated, into the clench of my belly, until I can feel the exact place the two meet, a line just below my navel where my fever and his cold press against each other and, for the length of a few swallows, stop fighting. His swallows slow. I hear each one, the wet pull at my throat growing longer, lazier, the greed going out of it. The venom does something to my hearing. I can hear my own blood moving, hear it rush through the thin places at my temples, hear it slow as it goes into him, hear the dumb, frantic drum of my heart begin to drag, and drag, until it is beating in time with something that does not beat at all. For one stolen minute his skin under my hands is not cold. For one minute mine is not warm. The room holds that minute the way a held breath holds a room, every sound in it swollen and close, the sheets loud, my own pulse loud, the crack of a floorboard somewhere below us loud, as if the venom has opened my ears the way his teeth opened my throat. I am consumed. I know it in the loose, floating heaviness of my limbs. His mouth stays sealed to the wound it made, no longer drinking, only resting there, his fangs still seated in me as if he means to keep them there until the law that owns him says otherwise.

Then the first true light of exile finds the window.

It seeps. Grey first, then a yellow thinness at the edges of the glass, and I feel him begin to leave me not with his body but with whatever law has governed him for longer than this house has stood. His fangs slide free. His mouth lifts from my throat. The wound is already sealing behind it, a cold pucker, a pull at the skin like a thread drawn tight. He kisses me, finally, and the kiss tastes of my own blood, copper and night and the last of the dark. He is still inside me as the light takes the first of him; the dense, cold weight of him goes less, the edges of him thinning under my palms like frost going off a windowpane, and his last whisper settles against my ear like a claim he is leaving behind because he cannot take it with him.

“You were the last warm thing,” he says, and it is not poetry. It is inventory. “I will carry the taste of you into the exile. Remember the sound of my fangs. Remember that I chose the hour.”

Then there is the echo of him, and the cooling sheets, and the taste of my own blood on my tongue, and from the trees the distant, ordinary crowing of a bird. I lie in the imprint of a body that had no heat, the two sealed points on my throat aching with cold, and I listen to my pulse as it remembers, beat by beat, how to be only mine.