A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(6)

Tears trickled down my cheek at the thought of an instant of night without you close at my side. Quietness seemed to me a creeping sickness, one that would infect my brain with images of the horrors of that night. I didn’t want to see my father’s charred face again, to remember the screaming of the raiders. I just wanted peace.

“I don’t want to be alone. Please.”

You nodded, sweeping open the door for me.

“Whatever my wife wishes is granted to her. Let there be no secrets between us, Constanta. No divisions.”

I cannot remember the details of your room that first night, only the gentle contours of complete darkness, of heavy damask and carved wood beckoning me in deeper. At the time I thought it felt like a womb, nurturing and soft-edged. Now I only remember it as the tomb where we slept through our living death.

You produced a nightdress of fine, soft linen for me and welcomed me into your bed. I pressed my body against yours, the house totally silent except for the sound of my breathing and the slow, steady pulse of your heartbeat. Too slow, like your body was only playing at a process it had long ago stopped needing. I couldn’t get close enough to you to make the numbness creeping over my skin go away. I needed to be touched, to be held in a way that made me feel real. I feared I would slip away into horrible memories of my family being burned alive. Or even more frightening, into sheer, blank nothingness.

“Kiss me,” I said suddenly, my voice ripping a hole in the silence.

“Constanta,” you murmured indulgently, turning your face towards mine. Your lips traced a light line over my cheekbones, my chin. “Constanta, Constanta.”

It almost put me in a trance, to hear you call me that. My skin burned unnaturally hot as I kissed you, over and over again until I was shaking. I don’t know if I trembled for fear or want, or because my body was still breaking itself into pieces and being remade. The change takes days, weeks even, to take full effect. We mature over hundreds of years, moving every night a little further away from our humanity.

I was young, then. I would have let you do anything to make the burning stop.

“Take me,” I whispered, my tingling lips brushing against your own. “I want you to.”

“You’re still weak,” you warned, your hand already sliding up my thigh to rest on my hip. Your mouth moved lower, pressing bruising kisses into the crook of my neck. “You need sleep.”

“I need you,” I said, tears springing to my eyes. I wanted to scrape out some little joy from the harsh, ugly world, to find sweetness despite all the blood and screaming.

“Put out the light,” I said, steeling my voice. I wanted this, I reminded myself. It was all that would make me feel strong and whole again.

You did as I asked, plunging the room into total darkness, and then your mouth was on mine with a ferocity that almost frightened me. I sensed pure, exquisite violence behind your kiss, a desire to rend and devour that reminded me more of a wolf than a man. Your hunger for me was always more apparent under the cover of darkness, when you didn’t have to arrange your face into any semblance of civility. I was always your little mouse, kept in a gilded cage until it was time for the cat to play. You never hurt me, but you delighted in my racing heartbeat, my frightened gasps.

Your fingers found the laces on my dress and deftly unfastened them. I trembled, pressed skin to skin to you as you moved your mouth over my collarbones and breasts with increasing insistence. You were not my first, but this was something entirely different than a giggling, fumbling encounter behind a barn with my childhood sweetheart. This felt cosmic, like a piece of me was being excised so it could take up residence in you.

“Open your mouth,” you said.

You nipped your index finger with the sharp edge of your tooth, then circled it around my lips to coax my obedience.

Blood smeared my lips in a slippery kiss until I opened my mouth for you. I let you slide your fingers inside my mouth and I circled them with my tongue, sucking you clean.

“No teeth,” you ordered, and pressed your heat into the deepest part of me.

Do you remember how I trembled, valiantly battling with my new instincts? My mouth watered and my gums ached, but I obeyed you. Was it a test? Like holding a piece of meat in front of a dog and commanding it to sit, just to push the limits of its obedience?

I drank from you drop by agonizing drop as you slid all the way inside me, obliterating any memory of a life before you.





I slept for days after that first night, waking only to sup on thimbles of your blood. I tossed and turned, desperate for water, for my mother, for the long dream of my life to be over. The change was agonizing and slow, a calcifying of entrails and reordering of muscles. My skin turned from delicate flesh to smooth, unmarked stone, and my hair and nails grew a quarter inch every day. Only my heart remained the same, faithfully pumping hot blood through veins that burned with my every tiny movement.

You tended to me with the faithfulness of a nun attending the dying, daubing my forehead with a cool washcloth, washing me and dressing me, and trimming my hair every night by candlelight. I eventually adjusted to our sleep schedule, waking in the evening and falling back into a tormented slumber as soon as the sun threatened to rise. And you were always there, steadfast and wise, shushing me wordlessly as you kissed me.

When I was well enough, we made love, my fingers digging into your flesh with the mating drive of a creature that knew it was dying. When I wasn’t, you read to me or plaited my hair. I didn’t know where you went when you weren’t with me, but you were almost always there.