Toxic

My dark lover brings me food in the form of a catatonic servant. I don’t want to hurt him. I’ve known Georgi since childhood. I cry and try to run, but my creator holds me. He forces me to smell Georgi and his sweet scent is too much for me to resist. My mouth waters and I scream at the sudden tearing pain in my gums. My creator lets me fall to my knees. With trembling hands, I reach up to touch pointed teeth. I moan in despair.

My new lover kneels beside me and strokes my hair. “Hush now. We must not show weakness. You are one of the elite now, and you must feed.”

“But must it be humans?” I cry.

“Think of them as rabbits. Now come, eat and discover true strength. Drink of his essence and live forever.”

I want to cling to my humanity, but I cannot fight the lure of the blood-and the promise of immortality. I throw myself on the human and I force myself to forget his face and his name. My teeth scratch the skin and a trickle of blood teases me.

“Bite him,” urges my dark lover as he lifts my skirts from behind. My thoughts are frenzied, but I do as I’m told. I bite down as my creator takes me with a forceful thrust. Warm, pulsing blood, fills my mouth, stroking my taste-buds with its sweetness. I devour my first human down to the last drop as my dark lover avails himself of my flesh. The shudders of my body as the life leaves my victim confuse me. They are too painful for an orgasm. My creator laughs at me as he pulls away from my body. I barely hear him as he explains I have ingested the spirit of the man I killed, a spirit that will forever be a part of me. The soul of the human fights me, a psychic battle that leaves me hoarse from screaming. My body aches from the thrashing. But in the end, I win.

The horror of death and its whiplash doesn’t stop the hunger though. Night after night, I hunt and kill. I cannot help myself, for my dark lover disappears. And alone with my insatiable lust for death, I go slightly mad.

And thus my time as the Blood Countess is begun.

Silence reigned when I stopped talking, the story of my creation not a flattering or pretty one. Unfortunately, too many tales of my atrocities, both real and imagined-and actually worse than recorded-were common knowledge. I left some details out, such as the fact we absorbed a person’s essence, their soul if you would, at their moments of death. Some things humans just didn’t need to know.

“Who was your creator? What happened to him?” Dr. Angelus chewed the end of his pen after he asked.

I laughed. “He told me his name was Valor. I never knew where he came from. I discovered later that he was killed by a father who came across him as he was having his way with the man’s daughter.” Out of a sense of duty to my creator, I killed the father, then bathed in his daughter’s blood.

“So what happened next? Did you move away from your home? When did you discover that bathing in blood would turn back the signs of age?”

I smirked. “What happened next was I fed my newfound hunger. I killed nightly.” Ahh, what a glorious orgy of death those years were. With each spirit I consumed, I got stronger. And crazier. “It was quite by accident that I discovered if bathed in blood, I could reverse the mark of time on my body, virgins’ blood being the most potent. I learned on my own how to bind my servants to me so that they would obey. They brought me victims from outside my lands and helped me grow stronger. But, not strong enough to save myself when they came to arrest me.”

“Who arrested you?” He stared at me raptly, my morbid story fascinating the researcher in him.

His expression surprised me. I’d expected horror, disgust, even condemnation, but instead he scribbled away as I spoke, his excitement obvious. “I was arrested by a council of my peers. The villagers not under my control complained that I was killing them. So they came to investigate.” Oh, the dilemma. They hadn’t wanted to kill me, a noblewoman, but at the same time they could not allow me to continue to kill. “I was never formally charged, and I retained enough of my wits to ensure I didn’t reveal too much of my new nature. In a quandary, they placed me in my rooms and bricked up the entrances, leaving only a tiny slot for food.”

His jaw dropped. “That must have been awful. How long were you locked away?”

“Too long,” I growled. “I wasted away without blood to sustain me. I could only manage the occasional nibble on a wrist when I caught it slipping my food through the hole. Several years after my imprisonment, I began debating killing myself. But then she came and liberated me.” I paused. It always awed me how she’d come to my rescue and saved me. Forgiven me for numerous sins and taken me under her wing. I owed her everything.

“Who saved you?”

“My queen did. She released me from my prison and taught me about vampires. How to feed unnoticed. What we were capable of.” The most important thing she’d given me, though, was friendship.

All this talk of my past and how I’d lost my humanity made my spirits sink. And there was only one cure for that.

I leaned forward, the material of my blouse parting and revealing my braless state, a fact the good doctor noticed. He didn’t have a choice given that in his kneeling position they were right in front of his face.

“Thanks for the background,” he said straightening and turning from me. “I’ll probably need to ask some more questions later, but this will do for now.”

I watched his back as he stuffed his notebook back in his bag. I’m beginning to think the doctor is hiding his true reaction to me. Curious, I stood and glided over to him on soundless feet-a cool vampire trick for sneaking up on dinner. “Would you like for me to show you to your room?”

He didn’t jump as expected. In fact, he didn’t turn to face me at all. He just picked up his bags and, clutching them to his midsection, nodded his head. I moved towards the hall, turning my head only once to give him a sultry smile and check he followed. I caught him unawares-my favorite kind. I got a brief glimpse of his face, tight with strain, but as soon as his eyes met mine, he wiped his face of all emotion.

He can try and hide it all he wants. The doctor is not as immune to my charms as he’s trying to make me believe. I did so enjoy a challenge.

I showed the doctor to his suite, a large room done up in dark blues and mahogany furniture. His suitcase was neatly lined up at the foot of the massive bed.

I flopped onto the bed as he placed his briefcase and laptop on the surface of the wide desk I’d had brought up for his use. I twirled my hair as I watched him trying to pretend I wasn’t there. “So, given you humans like to sleep at night, did you want to wait until tomorrow night to see the lab?”

Squaring his shoulders first, he turned to face me. “If I’m going to be examining you, I guess I’d better adjust to your schedule. It’s my understanding from the vampire stories I’ve read that your kind are allergic to the touch of the sun.”

“Bloody UV rays,” I replied. “We’ve got scientist working on a sunblock, but given our tendency to burst into flame, they’re having a hard time finding volunteers to try out their attempts.” I didn’t mention that the older we got, the more we could stand small doses of UV. A girl did need her secrets after all.

“What about cloudy days?” he queried.

I grinned. “Only if I want a sunburn.” While cloud cover reduced the amount of UV rays filtering through, they were still present. “So, Dr. Angelus, are you ready to see your lab?”

“Please, call me Raphael, or Rafe.”

And you may call me your fantasy and nightmare rolled in one was what I wanted to say, but I behaved instead. “My friends call me Ellie. Now, Rafe, if you’ll follow me, I shall show you the Frankenstein lab I’ve had setup.”

I rolled off his bed and sashayed out of his room and across the hall to the large room I’d had converted into a state of the art medical facility. The hospital bed in the middle of the room beckoned, and I lay down on it with a theatrical sigh. “I’m ready, doctor, when you are.”

“Are you ever serious?” he asked, wandering around and checking out the toys I’d bought for him to play with.

“Oh, I take this very seriously,” I replied-after all the fate of both of our kinds were at stake. “But that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. It’s like love making. Sure you can suffer it with arms and legs spread as your partner grunts over you, or you can have fun with it.” My husband, when I was still a human, had never managed to please me despite his boasts of being an exceptional lover. As it turned out, I wasn’t cold and unresponsive. I just needed the right male incentive and skill. Of course, my choices since I’d become a vampire were limited given my deadly touch. Not that the death of my partner stopped me if the mood hit.