Chapter 3: The Turning Point
The name shattered him.
“Simon—“
It wasn’t a question. It was a certainty, ripped from her throat on a crest of pleasure so high it bordered on pain. The sound of his true name, in her voice, in this room, after four centuries of silence… it didn’t just echo. It detonated.
He froze, buried deep inside her, the relentless rhythm of his hips stuttering to a halt. Every muscle in his body went wire-tight. The humid air of the flat, thick with sex, seemed to crystallize.
He pulled back just enough to stare down at her. Her eyes were glazed, unfocused, her lips swollen from his kisses. “What did you call me?” The question was a low, dangerous rasp.
Yaa blinked, trying to surface through the fog of her climax. The intensity in his grey eyes was terrifying, a volcanic crack in the ice. “I… I don’t…” she mumbled, confusion wrestling with the aftershocks pulsing through her core. “Ghost…?”
But she had said it. Simon. The syllable hung between them, vibrating with ancient gravity.
It unlocked a door in his mind he kept welded shut. The sensory blast was instantaneous. The scent of hibiscus and amber wasn’t just a memory; it was the air in his lungs. The feel of her body wasn’t just familiar; it was her body, the one he’d held as it bled out on sun-hot marble. The weight of her legs around him, the clutch of her inner muscles—it was the courtyard in Accra, the desperate, final joining before the world ended. He wasn’t in a Brighton warehouse. He was home. And she was here.
“Yaa,” he breathed, the word a prayer and a curse.
All reason, all modern pretense, evaporated. The predator and the heartbroken man fused into a single, ravenous need. To claim. To reconnect. To sink so deep into her that the centuries vanished. A low growl vibrated in his chest, a sound not human. His canines, hidden for so long, elongated with a sharp, aching pressure behind his gums. They felt like bone knives, slick and eager.
He drove into her again, a punishing thrust that made her cry out. But the cry melted into a moan as he found a devastating angle. His mouth went to her ear, his voice guttural, thick with an accent that hadn’t touched his tongue since the 1600s.
“Let me feast, Princess,” he begged, the words slurred with lust and a drowning need. “Let me taste you. All of you.”
She was teetering on another peak, her mind unspooling, unable to parse the archaic language, the shift in him. All she knew was the overwhelming sensation, the building pressure. His question sounded like dirty talk, a dark fantasy. In her delirium, she gave the only answer her body would allow.
“Yes… god, yes…”
It was all the consent his fractured mind required.
His mouth left her ear and crashed down on the junction of her neck and shoulder. There was no gentle teasing, no erotic preamble. It was a strike. His fangs punched through skin, tendon, into the rich, pulsing river of her carotid.
The pain was a bright, searing lance. Yaa’s eyes flew open, pleasure obliterated in a instant of pure, animal shock. A strangled gasp stuck in her throat. The feeling wasn’t just pain; it was a violation of physics, a intimate puncture that went beyond flesh. Then, a bizarre, radiating euphoria bloomed from the wound, a narcotic flood as his saliva and the raw act of feeding sparked her neurotransmitters into chaos.
She was climaxing again, a brutal, involuntary convulsion that shook her whole frame, even as her rational mind screamed in horror.
He’s biting me.
He’s drinking.
The wet, sucking sounds were unmistakable. The pull was deep, rhythmic, a grotesque parody of the fiercest kiss. She could feel the pull inside her veins, a terrifying hollowing sensation. The pleasure-curse shattered completely.
“N-no… stop…” she whimpered, but her voice was weak. She tried to shove at his shoulders, his back, her fists pounding against rock-hard muscle. “Stop! Get off! GET OFF!”
He was lost. The taste—oh, God, the taste. It was her. Precisely her. Not similar. The same. The unique, bright, spicy-sweet essence of Princess Yaa of Accra, untouched by time or reincarnation. It flooded his mouth, down his throat, a baptism of memory and life. He drank with a frantic, starving greed, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other gripping her hip, holding her still as he pumped into her, the movements becoming jerky, uncoordinated. Sex and feeding twisted into a single, obscene act of consumption.
Her struggles weakened. The pounding fists became feeble pats. Her vision tunnelled, the edges blooming with dark, velvety spots. The sound of his swallowing was loud in her ear. A profound, icy cold began seeping into her limbs, starting at her fingertips and toes, leaching up towards her core.
“S…Simon…” she choked out, a final, fading breath.
Her voice, even now, even like this, pierced the red haze of his frenzy. Simon. It was a whimper of betrayal. A ghost of the scream from the courtyard.
A memory superimposed itself: Yaa, the first Yaa, going limp in his arms, her life not stolen by him, but leaving despite him. The parallel was a bucket of Arctic water.
He wrenched his mouth from her neck with a wet, tearing sound.
He stared, panting, at the ruin he’d made. Two deep, vicious punctures welled dark blood that streamed in rivulets down her golden-brown skin, staining the black sheets beneath. Her eyes were half-closed, unconsciousness claiming her. Her breath was shallow, almost undetectable. The vibrant, fierce woman who’d kneed her way through life was a pale, still doll.
Horror, clean and absolute, flooded him.
He had done it. He had almost killed her. Again.
“No. No, no, no.” He pulled out of her body, the action suddenly vile. He pressed his trembling hand to the weeping wounds, trying to stanch the flow, but his cold skin was useless. The vital heat was leaching from her.
He had found her only to destroy her. The pattern of his existence was a closed, cruel circle. He was a ghost, and all he touched turned to death. The numbness he coveted was gone, burned away by a single night. What replaced it was far worse: a feeling, sharp as his own fangs, and it was the pure, unadulterated terror of having something to lose, again, right as he felt it slip through his fingers.
What replaced it was far worse: a feeling, sharp as his own fangs, and it was the pure, unadulterated terror of having something to lose, again, right as he felt it slip through her cooling fingers.
He scrambled back from her, his own nakedness suddenly obscene. The room smelled of sex and iron, a slaughterhouse stench. Her chest gave a terrible, shallow hitch.
In her lucid, fading state, Yaa wondered what got her here. The clinical part of her brain, the psychologist trained in crisis, detached to observe. This was the data point. Cause of death: exsanguination via erotic misadventure. How would the police explain to her friends, her mum, that she’d died getting fucked by a thing? A monster. A handsome one, at least. That was a pathetic silver lining. Darren would get a sick satisfaction, wouldn’t he? He’d wonder how the “frigid bitch” wound up in this messy, undignified heap. It was embarrassing. It was so profoundly sad she wanted to laugh, but her lungs had forgotten how.
She looked up at the shape of the man—or being—above her. His grey eyes were wide, the hollows suddenly filled with a raw, animal panic that didn’t suit his brutal façade. She saw that sudden look of pain in his eyes, a reflection of her own, right before the darkness at the edges of her vision ate everything.
Meanwhile, Simon was panicking. He fucking fucked up. Centuries of control, incinerated in a minute of desperate recognition. He had prayed to nothing for years, centuries, for this, for her scent to mean something real, and now she was slipping away because of him. His vampire state was the true evil, not the sun, not silver, just this ravenous, selfish need that corroded everything good. He was evil. Just like the mob in Accra had screamed. Just like the priests had denounced. Just like he, in his quietest moments, had always known.
He withdrew completely, freezing, unsure as she took another labored breath that sounded like gravel in a sieve.
No.
She couldn’t die. Not again. Not by his hand. Not on another damn floor.
“No,” he growled, the word ripping from him. He lunged forward, not to bite, but to mend. He forced his head down to the bloody mess at her neck. His tongue, rough and cold, lapped at the twin punctures. Vampire saliva held a weak, clotting agent, a biological afterthought meant to close feeding wounds on cattle, not save them. He worked at it, swiping desperately, pressing his palm hard against the side of her neck to stifle the flow. The metallic taste of her life was now a horror. He waited, frozen in time, his own dead heart a silent drum of dread.
Her body gave a violent, whole-body jerk. A shuddering, deep breath rasped into her, followed by a wet cough. Her eyelids fluttered.
She was alive. For now.
Her amber-brown eyes focused, blearily, on his face hovering inches above hers. Confusion, then a dawning, furious understanding hardened her features. The weakness in her limbs visibly battled with a surge of pure adrenal spite.
“You,” she croaked, her voice shredded. She tried to push his face away, her hand smacking weakly against his cheek. “Get your weird… sexy fucking face… away from me.”
The incongruity of the insult, the sheer, defiant Yaa-ness of it, hit him like a physical blow. A sound escaped him—a weak, broken chuckle that was mostly air. It was the first honest sound he’d made in a hundred years.
“That’s me,” he whispered, his forehead coming to rest gently against her damp temple. He was shaking. “Weird. Sexy. Fucker.”
She tried to glare, but exhaustion was winning. Her body had been ravaged twice over—by ecstasy and by mortality. The cold was receding, replaced by a deep, systemic fatigue that felt heavier than death. “Passed out… during sex. You’re a fucking… legend, Ghost. Top marks.”
“Go to sleep, Yaa,” he murmured, his arms carefully sliding under her. He gathered her up, ignoring the blood tacky between them, and cradled her against his chest. He stood, moving to the clean side of the massive bed, laying her down on fresh, black linen. He pulled a heavy duvet over her, tucking it around her shoulders with a clumsiness that spoke of inexperience.
“Gonna have questions,” she mumbled into the pillow, her eyes already closed. “So many… fucking questions.”
“I know,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, a sentinel in the dark. He watched the slow, steady rise and fall of the duvet. “In the morning.”
He had no idea what he would say. How do you explain a four-hundred-year-old curse, a murdered princess, and a reincarnation to a school psychologist from Brighton who you just almost drank to death? The truth was a fantastical wound. But the alternative—letting her walk away thinking him merely a dangerous pervert—was impossible.
The sky outside the warehouse windows began to lighten from pitch to a deep, maritime grey. Dawn was a threat he could feel in his bones, a dull ache. He didn’t move. He watched her sleep, memorizing the new peace on her face, the normal human warmth slowly returning to her skin. He had to make up for this. The scale of that debt was continental.
He would have to tell her everything. And that terrified him more than the coming sun.
And that terrified him more than the coming sun. He remained perfectly still as the grey light bled into the cavernous space, etching the contours of piled books and dormant electronics. His skin began to prickle, a faint, unsettling warmth building just beneath the surface. When the first direct spear of sunlight breached the high industrial window, slicing a molten gold line across the concrete floor towards the bed, he finally moved. It was a slow, pained retreat into a deep alcove shrouded by heavy drapes, where the darkness pooled thick and safe. He watched the light climb, millimetre by millimetre, until it illuminated the edge of the mattress where Yaa’s hand lay, fingers curled softly in sleep. He did not blink.
The next morning, Yaa woke up bleary eyed, groggy, aching. Everything was aching. A deep, muscular soreness radiated from her thighs, her core, a used-up feeling that was both familiar and excessively sharp. Her neck throbbed with a specific, pointed tenderness. Did she have a weird wet dream about a handsome vampire that made her climax multiple times and almost killed her? The question floated, semi-serious, in the cottony void of her skull.
Her eyes tried to focus on the room, and then she realized it wasn’t hers. High ceilings, exposed brick, a chill that her nakedness beneath the duvet felt acutely. Bunched up sheets and her torn green dress lay in a heap on the floor like a shed skin, darkened with rusty, brownish stains. Blood. That wasn’t a dream.
She shot up, then instantly regretted it. A wave of dizziness and a symphony of pains lanced through her. Her head pounded. Her neck screamed in protest. She pressed her fingers to the sore spot and felt two distinct, raised scabs, rough and precise. Her breath hitched.
Her eyes fell on the large, antique mirror opposite the bed. The reflection was a stranger. She looked drained, her rich skin ashen, a purple undertone of exhaustion shadowing her eyes. She’d lost vitality, like a plant pulled from the soil and left in the sun. She held her breath as flashes of the night seeped in past the mental barrier she’d erected: the crushing weight of him, the blinding pleasure, then the searing, invasive pain at her neck. The wet, sucking sounds. The chilling cold spreading through her limbs. What the fuck did she do? What did he do?
The door to the room opened silently.
She clutched the sheets like armor on her naked body, yanking them up to her chin. Simon appeared, fully dressed in dark jeans and a black sweater, the skull mask absent. His face was a closed system, pale and impassive, but his grey eyes were watchful, tracking her every micro-movement.
“What the fuck happened?” Her voice was rough, scraped raw.
He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. His expression remained unreadable. “What do you remember?”
“I remember you…” she trailed off, the images too visceral, too insane to voice. “I remember blood. Lots of it.” She gestured weakly toward the ruined dress. “My blood.”
He gave a single, slow nod. His gaze flicked to her neck, then back to her eyes. “You lost a significant amount. I cleaned you up. The wounds are closed.” He pushed off the frame. “You should come down. Eat something. You need the energy.”
It was so profoundly normal, this suggestion of breakfast, that it felt like a trap. “Are you kidding me? Eat something? I need answers. What are you? What did you do to me?”
“After food,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He turned to leave.
“I could call the police,” she blurted, the threat sounding thin and childish even to her own ears.
He paused, half-turned back. He shrugged, a minute lift of his broad shoulders. “You could. I wouldn’t stop you. My mobile is on the kitchen island. The landline is by the sofa.” He met her stare, utterly calm. “But you won’t get the answers you need from them. Only from me. Food first.”
He disappeared down the hall, leaving her alone with the echo of his certainty. He was right. The police would see a mess, a torn dress, a frightened woman with unexplained scars. They would not see centuries. They would not explain the haunting, dusty scent of hibiscus that somehow felt like hers. They would not explain why she had screamed his true, hidden name into the dark.
The fury that warmed her was better than the cold fear. She swung her legs out of bed, hissing at the ache between them. She wrapped the duvet around herself like a cloak and shuffled out of the bedroom, descending the open iron staircase to the main living space. It was stark, almost unlived-in. He stood at the kitchen counter, methodically slicing an avocado. A plate of toast, eggs, and berries sat waiting on the island. The mundane sight was utterly surreal.
“I’m not hungry,” she lied, her stomach clenching at the sight of food.
“Eat anyway.” He didn’t look up from his task. “You’re pale. You need the iron.”
“The iron,” she repeated flatly. She didn’t sit. “You drank my blood.”
“Yes.”
The simple admission, devoid of embellishment or shame, froze her. “Why?”
“Because I am a vampire.” He said it like someone might say ‘because I am a architect’ or ‘because I have brown hair’. A simple, immutable fact. He finally looked at her. “And because, for a moment, I forgot you weren’t her. I lost control.”
“Her?” Yaa’s mind spun. The princess from his cryptic line last night. ‘Let me feast, Princess.’ A cold, sick understanding began to drip into her. “You think I’m someone else. Some… reincarnation bullshit.”
“I know you are.” He put the knife down. “The scent is exact. Your blood is exact. You said my name, Simon, which you had no way of knowing. It is not a theory.”
“It’s insanity!” She shot back, but the protest was weakening. The memories were not her own, but they felt like ancient, fevered dreams she’d carried all her life: sun-baked courtyards, the feel of linen, a profound, desperate love laced with terror. “So what, you just… claimed me? Like I’m a fucking snack and a souvenir?”
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “I tried to kill you. There is a difference. It was the worst mistake I have made in four hundred years. One I will spend whatever time you permit trying to atone for.”
“Atone?” A harsh laugh escaped her. “You bit me. You drank from me while you were… inside me. That’s not a mistake, Simon. That’s an assault.” She used his name deliberately now, watching him flinch. “You left me with these.” She pulled the duvet aside just enough to expose the twin scabs on her neck.
He stared at them, his grey eyes stormy with a self-loathing so deep it was palpable. “I did. I can offer you explanations. Context. I cannot erase it.”
“Context.” She scoffed, but she was trembling. She finally slid onto a stool, pulling the plate of food toward her. She ate because her body demanded it, the eggs tasteless, the toast like ash. He watched her, silent, giving her space. The normalcy of chewing, swallowing, under his ancient, haunted gaze was the strangest part of all.
She finished half the plate before pushing it away. “Start talking. Start with Accra. Start with her.”
He didn’t move from his spot across the island, a calculated distance between them. “Her name was Yaa. She was a princess. I was a mortals-older, turned into this against my will, washed up half-dead near the sea” His voice was low, each word measured, as if lifting stones from a grave. “She saw the monster and called it a man. We loved each other. It was discovered. Her betrothed, from Kumasi, exposed me. Called her a witch for protecting me.”
The story unfolded in his flat, unpoetic tones, but the images were vivid. The blinding sun. The bound vampire. The princess throwing herself between him and the light. Yaa listened, her own heart hammering, as he described her past-self’s defiance. Then the prince’s blade. The feeling of her life leaving in his arms. The rain.
“I failed her,” he concluded, the sentence final and absolute. “I have been waiting to fail her again ever since. Last night, I nearly did.”
Yaa was silent for a long time. The story was ludicrous. It was also, in some deep, inexplicable way, true. It resonated in the hollow places those strange dreams had occupied. “And now? You just expect me to believe I’m her? To pick up where some tragic, bloody fairy tale left off?”
“No.” He shook his head once. “You are Yaa Mensah. A school psychologist from Brighton who is owed the truth after a profound violation. What you do with that truth is yours. You can walk out that door. I will not follow. Or you can ask more questions. I will answer every one.”
She studied him—the sharp scars, the eyes holding centuries of fatigue, the rigid posture of a soldier awaiting a verdict. The fear was still there, a live wire in her chest. But beneath it, curdling alongside the horror, was a terrifying, magnetic curiosity. It was the same curiosity that made her probe the worst wounds in her patients, to find the source of the pain.
She looked at the phone on the island. Then back at him.
“The blood,” she said quietly. “Just now, you said you lost control because you thought I was her. But before that… when you bit me…” She forced the words out. “I came. Why?”
A flicker of something raw crossed his face—shame, perhaps, or a stark memory. “My bite… it releases a neurotoxin. A euphoric agent. It subdues prey. It can trigger involuntary pleasure. It’s a biological manipulation. It wasn’t real.”
“It felt real,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. That was the core of the violation, wasn’t it? Her body had betrayed her, convulsing in pleasure while she was being consumed.
He had no answer for that. The silence stretched, filled only by the distant hum of the city outside.
Yaa stood, holding the duvet tightly. “I need my clothes. These are ruined.”
“I have sweatpants. A hoodie. They’ll be large.” He moved to a drawer, pulling out simple, dark garments. He placed them on the island and retreated again, giving her space.
She dressed in the bathroom, the soft fabric smelling faintly of him—cinnamon, rain, old books. She looked at her neck in the mirror, touching the scabs. They were real. It was all real. When she emerged, he was by the vast window, his back to her, staring out at the leaden Brighton sky.
“I’m not her,” Yaa stated, her voice firmer now.
“I know.”
“But you think her soul, or whatever, is in me.”
He turned. “I think the universe sometimes repeats a particularly resonant note. I think you carry her… essence. Her courage. It is why I did not destroy you entirely. That essence fought back. It called my name.”
It was too much. She needed air that wasn’t shared with him. “I’m leaving.”
He simply nodded. “I’ll call a taxi.”
“Don’t.” She walked to the large industrial door, her bare feet cold on the concrete. Her hand on the heavy handle, she paused. She didn’t look back. “I have to process… all of this. I don’t know what it means.”
“Take your time.”
“Will you be here?” The question left her lips before she could stop it.
“If you want me to be,” he said, the words barely audible.
She opened the door and stepped out into the damp, salt-tinged morning. The cold air was a shock. She didn’t look back, walking quickly down the quiet street, the oversized hoodie swallowing her frame. She was free.
Halfway down the block, she stopped. She turned and looked up at the warehouse. High in the window, a shape stood in the shadows, watching her go. She couldn’t see his face, but she felt the weight of his gaze.
She turned away, her mind a riot of blood, history, and the unsettling, phantom echo of a love she’d never lived. The story wasn’t over. She knew it, and the knowing felt like a hook, gently set deep in her soul. She kept walking, but the direction felt less like an escape and more like an intermission.