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She awoke with the taste of blood. Her cave was damp and mouldy, her coffin dark and oppressive, but the blood was rich like hot chocolate and embers from a loved hearth. It raced through her, waking her muscle by muscle, cell by cell.
It was agony for a few seconds only, but felt like forever. Before her meal knew what was happening, she was out of her coffin in a blur. The vampire grabbed locks of golden blond hair and pulled, exposing the neck. She looked into the blue eyes of a girl no older than twenty and bit into the girl’s flesh. She tore through her veins, filled herself with the cornucopia of her life.
The girl screamed, but it didn’t matter. They were six feet underground, and there was no one to hear for miles.
Her hunger satiated, the vampire wiped her mouth. Blood was still running down the girl’s shirt. She’d never let half her meal go to waste, but she’d been starved for months, years.
“Do you want to hear a story?” she asked and stretched the body frozen in youth.
The human, in turn, only swayed on her knees, her blue eyes filmy.
The vampire paid her no mind. She waved her hand and propped her shoulders on the far wall.
Here’s how the story goes.
You're a young woman, a freshman in college. You have a boyfriend and you love him very much. You’ve been together since you were fourteen. He’s sure you’ll get married one day.
You’re not.
He’s lovely, but he’s a small town boy with small town ambitions. You have always dreamed of the city, of lights and art and a life beyond 10,000 people.
Your boyfriend wants you to have that but the best he can do is take you to a concert of your favorite band. It’s your birthday, so he’s bought you backstage passes. You love the concert, and you go backstage. The frontman takes a liking to you. This is not uncommon—rock musicians often take a liking to beautiful young women with blond hair and blue eyes. He invites you to stay and party with the band. He does not invite your boyfriend.
You love your boyfriend, but it is your favorite band and you desperately want to stay. You don’t remember the rest of that night, but you wake up in bed with your favorite singer. You’re naked, your hips carry bruises you don’t remember getting, and when you roll out of bed, your head hurts so badly you vomit in his toilet. You put on your clothes, cheeks flushed, and flee. Afterward, you tear away the posters of your favorite band and you delete all their songs from your player.
A girl disappears from your town that night. You go to her vigil. It’s very sad, you think, but accidents happen.
This was no accident, but you don’t know that yet.
You are changed after that night. You never walk alone at night. You avoid alcohol like it’s poison. Your boyfriend wants you, but you no longer know how to want him back. He suffers, but you find his closeness oppressive and each time his throat is to your lips, you ache. His heartbeat is too loud and you want to feel it in your bare hands. You want to tear his flesh and taste his insides. You want and you want and one night,
You do.
His body is still warm on the floor or your dorm, when your new fangs retreat into your gums. Your mouth dries and you feel sick down to your stomach.
This isn’t you, this isn’t real.
But it is. And you have done it.
You put on your coat, you get into your car and you drive. You find your favorite singer’s next concert on your phone. The thought of him makes your guts churn, but you don’t know where else to go. You head for his city with only enough money to change your gas. You don’t stop to eat or drink—this has already been taken care of. You don’t even need to sleep. You drive day and night. The sun makes your head ache, but it does not burn your skin as you thought it might.
You find his concert and you barge backstage. The guards try to taser you, but you only wince and seconds later, the electricity subsides and you’re just fine. They give up. You’re grateful, as you don't want to kill more innocents.
You meet your ex-favorite singer. With your new strength, you ram him into the wall and you scream that he made you a monster.
He only laughs and tells you he gave you forever.
You blink at this. Your hands weaken and your eyes fill with tears. He pulls you to his chest and encases you in his strong arms. He strokes your hair and tells you he never intended for this, but he’s your Maker now, and he’ll take care of you.
You don’t want him to. You’d rather die, you say.
You want to mean it, but you still dream of the city.
He does as he promised. He gets rid of your car, gets your hair cut and dyed (though he says he prefers you blond, but it’ll grow back and maybe one day you’ll even be blond again). He even gets you a new ID. Your human name was no more. You are now Rose and you were his. Now the police won’t find you and even if they do, he says, you can always tell them your late boyfriend died from an animal attack and compel them to believe it.
You ask if you can go home and see your parents one last time. You never had a chance to say goodbye. He says that’s not a good idea. He says you should stay with him.
So you do. He travels the world with you by his side. He shows you big cities, and you have art and riches and comfort, but when he touches you at night, your mind goes someplace else.
City after city and the lights lose their lustre. One day, your ex-favorite singer takes another girl with a woozy walk to his trailer and you see red. It happens so fast, you don’t know what you’re doing until you’re on top of him. You use your nails and your fangs and you tear and you tear and you tear until all that’s left are ribbons of red. The girl is awake, cowering in a corner, and covered in blood that’s not hers. You don’t need a mirror to know that so are you.
She looks at you with large, pleading eyes. They are blue, just like yours.
You don’t know how to tell her that you did this for her.
Then you’re found.
Not by the human police, but by your own kind. They don’t like when you make yourself known to humans and they love to punish race-traitors. They take you to a cave deep underground, shut you in a coffin. Without blood, you dry up like a raisin.
“And that leads me to…” The vampire raised her head, looking into the young woman’s blue eyes. “How did you get here, Sera? They should have compelled you, you can’t remember me.”
The human girl only shook her head, but her trembling was painfully familiar. “They did. I started to remember last week.”
Rose’s stomach dropped. She had been too late. “How far along are you?”
“The concert was last month.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her palm. “You never asked my name.”
Rose smiled with no humor in her frozen irises. “The band told me. He has always had a type.” She jutted her chin, eyes raised to the girl’s neck, where the blood had already coagulated. The vampire reached for Sera, brushing the next tear with her own thumb, and touched her forehead to the vampire’s.
“One question,” Rose whispered. “Do you want forever?”
Sera gasped sharply. “N-no.”
“Then let me take care of it.”
Her fangs popped. She sunk them deep into the human’s neck, shredding arteries and tendons.
When she was done, Sera’s bloodless body slunk with a low thud to the damp, stone floor of the cave. Rosalie lay back into her coffin and thought that her Maker had been wrong after all.
Nothing truly lasts forever.
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Athena Kane is a queer SFF and Horror writer, living in Europe, where she teaches ESL in high school. When she's not working or writing about terrible, complex women (in both long and short form), she is working on her MA thesis on lesbian necromancers in space. This is her first publication.
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Bsky: bsky.app/profile/athenakane.bsky.social
Instagram: instagram.com/athenakane_books
