Chapter 4: The Willing Convert
She stepped into the flour and it rose around her ankles like gray smoke, fine as talcum, cold under her bare soles. Renee kept her chin up. Her hands were empty. The knife lay somewhere behind her on the tile where she'd dropped it, and she did not look at it, and she did not run.
Amy was closer than she had been a second ago. Renee hadn't heard her cross the floor, only the small settling sound of silk.
"There she is," Amy said.
Her voice came low, almost pleased, the way someone might greet a cat that had finally come down off the roof. She reached out and slid her fingers along Renee's jaw, thumb at the corner of her mouth. Her skin was cool. It stayed cool against Renee's flushed face, and Renee noticed that, the way you notice a window left open in winter.
"I'm here," Renee said. Her voice shook, but it came out whole.
"Yes."
"Danielle."
Danielle stood at the pantry latch with her head tipped, watching. Flour dusted the front of her nightshirt and her bare shins. The punctures under her ear had scabbed black, two neat holes above the collar of her shirt, and she smiled at Renee the way she used to smile over a fence in summer, with nothing behind it.
"I'm all right," Danielle said. "It's better than all right."
"That's not true."
"It is, though."
Amy turned Renee's face back with one finger. "Don't look at her. Look at me."
Renee looked. The eyes were crimson and slitted and they reflected the under-cabinet bulb like a cat's in a driveway, and there was no shame in them, no apology, nothing she could bargain with. Whatever had walked into that alley months ago and come out wearing Amy's body had finished with pretending.
"Do it here?" Renee asked. "Or in the bedroom?"
Amy laughed, quiet. "You think this is about a bed."
"I don't know what this is about."
"You will."
Amy pulled her in by the small of her back. Renee let herself be pulled. There was a moment of flour and cool silk and the faint smell of the wine Amy had been drinking, and then Amy's mouth was on her throat, not kissing, just resting there, testing. Renee's pulse knocked against her teeth like something trapped under a floorboard.
Then the fangs went in.
It hurt the way a needle hurts, sharp and clean and deep, and Renee gasped with her mouth open and both hands flying up to grip the front of Amy's robe. Then the hurt changed. It spread out of her neck in a hot sheet, down through her chest into her gut, between her legs, and her knees went soft and her hips pushed forward against Amy's thigh like she'd been the one who asked for this.
"Oh," Renee said. It came out filthy. It came out like a sound she'd never made in front of anyone in her life, and Amy made a low noise against her throat in answer, and drank.
Renee's hands fisted in the silk. She was moaning now, steadily, small helpless noises timed to the pull of Amy's mouth, and her cunt was aching and wet and she could feel it, could feel herself soaking through her shorts, standing in a stranger's kitchen with her friend's mouth on her neck. Her head tipped back. The ceiling, the cabinet, the under-cabinet bulb. She was hot all over and cold where Amy touched.
Then Danielle's hand landed on her hip. Then Danielle's mouth found the other side of her throat.
Renee made a sound she didn't have a name for. Two mouths, two tugs, and her blood going out of her in two directions at once. Danielle sucked hard, hungrier and sloppier than Amy, and it stung, and it was the best thing Renee had ever felt, and she shoved her fingers into Danielle's hair and held her there.
"Don't stop," she said.
Danielle laughed against her skin. "I'm not going to stop."
"You're going to kill me."
"Not the way you think."
Amy pulled off her throat, just far enough to speak, her mouth wet and red. "Danielle. Slower."
"I'm hungry."
"Slower. She has to still be warm."
Danielle grumbled but gentled. She drank in long slow pulls now, humming, one hand sliding up under the back of Renee's shirt to press flat and warm against her spine, the opposite of Amy's cold. Renee swayed between them. The kitchen tilted. The flour was smeared across the tile in gray arcs where their feet had moved.
Renee's legs gave. They held her up, the two of them, and she hung there in their arms with her eyes half shut and her heart hammering something frantic and wrong, and she thought, distantly, that this was what it felt like to be eaten alive by people who loved you.
She was hard to hold up after a while. Her hands had gone numb in Amy's robe.
"Enough," Amy said.
Danielle grunted, reluctant, and came off her throat with a wet sound. "She's still breathing."
"She's supposed to be."
Amy let Renee down against the cabinet doors. Renee slid until she sat on the tile, legs splayed, flour blooming around her in a pale ring. She felt her own heartbeat all over, in her neck, in her fingertips, in the wet seam between her thighs, and it was too fast and getting faster and she understood, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was going to die sitting on her own kitchen floor at midnight.
Amy knelt in front of her.
"Look at me," she said.
Renee looked.
"Open your mouth."
Renee opened her mouth. She didn't know why. There was no strength left to refuse, but it wasn't only that; she wanted to do what Amy said, the way you want to put your tongue into a bad tooth. Amy raised her left wrist to her own mouth and bit it. The skin tore with a sound like wet cloth. Blood welled up black in the dim light and ran down the inside of her forearm to her elbow.
"There," Amy said. "Drink."
She pressed the wrist to Renee's lips.
Renee didn't want it. Renee put her mouth on it and sucked and it came hot and thick and salty-sweet and wrong, wrong the way copper is wrong, and she swallowed and swallowed and her throat worked and she thought about all the women she'd ever kissed and how none of them had ever tasted like this.
Danielle knelt down beside them. She peeled the hair back off Renee's cheek and held it, gentle, and pressed her mouth to Renee's temple.
"It's good," Danielle told her. "It's so good, Renee. You'll see."
Renee drank.
The tile was cold under her thighs. Behind Amy's shoulder, past the corner of the counter, the stove sat in the dark with its black glass front, the one thing in the kitchen that had never shown a face. Renee lifted her eyes to it out of habit. Every night of her life she had glanced into it walking past, seen the blur of her own pale hair, her own narrow shoulders, the woman she was.
She saw the kitchen. She saw Amy's back, the green robe, the smear of flour on the silk. She saw Danielle's hand in her hair. She saw the cabinet doors and the flour and the counter's edge.
She did not see herself. She was gone from the glass, and where she had been there was only the room, and then even the room seemed to be thinning, the way a photo yellows, the way a person's handwriting fades off an old receipt.
She was still drinking. She could feel the pull in her throat and the warmth going down and out to her fingers and her toes, and she could feel something else, something under her skin that had not been there before, turning over, looking for room.
Amy's free hand cradled the back of Renee's skull, fingers spread, holding her steady like a mother with a bottle.
"That's it," Amy said softly. "Don't fight it. It hurts worse if you fight it."
Renee's eyes stayed on the black glass.
The last of her reflection went and did not come back.
She was still drinking when the change found the rest of her. It came up her spine like a struck match, not hot, not cold, some third thing that didn't have a word, and it gathered behind her navel and made a fist. Renee tore her mouth off Amy's wrist and arched hard enough that Danielle had to catch her shoulders.
"What's happening to me?" she gasped.
"You're turning," Amy said. "It's the good part."
It did not feel good. It felt like every nerve in her body being pulled taut at once, wired to something that had no off switch. Her heels drummed the tile. Flour puffed up around her thighs. She heard herself make a long, broken noise, and then the noise turned into something else, a groan that came from low in her chest, and her hips lifted off the floor in a slow roll.
The pain was folding over into need. She could feel the seam of her shorts pressed up against her cunt, wet through, the fabric dragging on her clit every time she moved, and she was moving now, grinding down against nothing, shameless, in front of the two of them.
"I can't," she said. "I can't, I can't."
"You can," Danielle said against her ear. "Just let it."
Amy hooked her thumbs in the waistband of Renee's shorts and peeled them down her legs. The cotton came away stuck to her, stringy with how wet she was, and Renee whined at the exposure of it, cool kitchen air on her bare cunt, flour on the inside of her thighs.
"There," Amy said, looking at her. "Now let it happen."
She put two fingers inside her without asking.
Renee came almost immediately, clenching down on Amy's knuckles and sobbing, and it did not stop. The first one rolled into the second before she'd finished shaking. Her whole body bowed off the floor and Danielle held her up by the shoulders and Amy's hand kept working, in and out, slow and deep and completely unhurried, like she had all night, like eternity was on her side.
"You're so tight," Amy said mildly. "Hold on to Danielle."
Renee grabbed her. Danielle pulled Renee back against her chest so Renee's back was flush to her front, her head lolling onto Danielle's shoulder, and Danielle ran both hands up under Renee's shirt and over her bare tits. Her palms were warm. They closed over Renee's nipples and pinched, and Renee's whole spine lit up and her cunt clamped down again on Amy's fingers.
"There she is," Danielle murmured. She sounded almost fond.
"You bit me," Renee managed. "You both bit me, you fuckers."
"We did," Danielle said. "It was the best thing I ever did. You'll understand in a minute."
Amy pulled her fingers out and held them up. They were slick to the knuckle and glistening in the weak light. She looked at Renee over them, crimson eyes steady, and licked them clean one at a time without ever looking away, and something in Renee's chest turned over and lay down.
"Why do I want you to keep going?" Renee asked. Her voice cracked on it.
Amy smiled. "Because you're mine now."
Then she bent her head and put her mouth on Renee's cunt.
The first pull of Amy's tongue was a shock, cool and flat and deliberate, and Renee screamed. There was nothing left in her to be embarrassed about, no neighbor to wake, no one to hear. She clamped her thighs around Amy's ears and rode her face on the kitchen floor while Danielle held her up and sucked marks down the side of her throat with blunt, human teeth, no fangs yet, though her teeth were getting longer, Renee could feel them scrape.
Amy ate her like it was the only thing she'd wanted all night. Her tongue was cold and quick and she knew exactly where to put it, up over the clit and down and up again, and she slid two fingers back inside and curled them, and Renee came a third time so hard her vision whited out at the corners.
"That's nothing," Amy said against her thigh. "You haven't even seen yet."
The change was still working, and it hated being ignored. It came back up through Renee while she was still coming, and this time it took the pleasure with it and made it bigger, stretched it past what a body was supposed to hold. Renee's hands locked on the cabinet handle above her and her heels skidded in the flour and she writhed, flat out writhing, hips jerking up into Amy's mouth and back against Danielle's hands, tears running down both sides of her face and snot and spit and she did not care, she did not care.
"Please," she said. "Please, Amy, please."
"Please what."
"Do it again. Fuck, do it again."
Amy laughed and did it again. She kept the rhythm until Renee lost count of how many times she came, until her thighs were trembling and the flour was mud under her and Danielle was murmuring to her the way you'd murmur to a foal, until the pull inside her chest went quiet and heavy and found its place.
Then it settled. That was the strangest part, the settling. The need did not leave, it just stopped having to be answered. Renee lay there in the wreck of the kitchen with her legs open and her shorts somewhere behind the fridge and her throat ringing where two sets of punctures had already begun to close.
She put her fingers to her neck. The holes were closing under her fingertips, smooth and bloodless. Her skin felt wrong. Cool, the way Amy's had.
"Mirror," she said.
Danielle reached up and wiped the flour off the stove's black glass with the flat of her hand.
Renee looked. Amy's back, Danielle's shoulder, the green silk, the cabinet doors. The room. Only the room. There was no woman with short platinum hair sitting on the floor of it, and there was no wet mess of her on the tile, and there had never been a face in this house that belonged to her.
She waited to be afraid. The fear didn't come. What came instead was hunger, thin and sharp and entirely her own.
"Now what," Renee said.
Amy stood and held down her hand.
Renee took the hand.
Amy's grip closed around hers and pulled, and Renee came up off the tile in one long, graceless heave. Her legs had opinions of their own. She stood with her weight braced against the cabinet and her bare feet sliding in the wet flour, and Amy's hand stayed on her elbow until the swaying stopped.
The room looked different. That was the first thing. The under-cabinet bulb had a halo on it now, a ring of faint red, and she could see the individual hairs on Danielle's forearm from where she stood. She could hear the refrigerator humming two rooms away. She could hear the wood of the house ticking as it cooled.
"Steady," Amy said.
"I'm steady."
Renee let go of the counter. She was, mostly. Her knees held. The flour was packed into the creases of her toes and the wet seam between her thighs had gone cold, and none of it mattered because there was a pressure building behind her upper lip, two points of it, dull and hot, pushing down through her gums.
She put her tongue up against them and felt the hard tips slide.
They came down slow, unmistakable, like teeth she'd always had and never used. Her whole mouth filled up with the ache of it, the length of them, the way the points dragged across her lower lip when she closed her jaw. She ran the flat of her tongue along one and the ache went straight down her spine into her cunt.
"Oh," she said, and her knees buckled a quarter inch.
Danielle was watching her with her head tipped, flour pale on her chin, saying nothing.
Renee lifted her hand to her own mouth. Two fingers, the same two she'd been holding flour with, and she pressed the pads of them against the tips of the fangs, just to feel. Cold porcelain. Smooth as the inside of a shell. She slid them down the length of one, all the way to the gum line, and the ache fired again, sharper, and something in her belly pulled tight and let go.
She came standing up.
It was not like the others. There was nothing in her and nothing on her, no fingers, no mouth, no tile under her ass, just her own two fingers on her own new teeth and her back going stiff and her thighs clamping shut on nothing and a long, raw groan coming out of her throat. Her vision flickered red at the edges. She stood through all of it, both feet planted, hand still at her mouth.
When it passed she looked at her fingers. There was a thin smear of her own spit on them and she licked it off and it tasted like pennies.
"What was that," she said.
Amy was smiling at her. Not the wide showman's smile from the couch. Smaller than that, and worse, because it looked genuinely fond.
"Everything's wired together now," she said. "Everything's a door."
Renee ran her tongue along the fangs again and did not come this time, though it was close.
"They're real."
"They're real."
"I have fangs."
"You have fangs," Amy said, "and you have about four hours of self control left, so listen to me."
Renee listened. She was listening so hard her ears hurt.
"Right now you don't feel it yet," Amy said. "You will. It comes up from your gut and it has nothing to do with being hungry the way you used to be hungry. It's a hand around your throat. It doesn't care about food or wine or sleep. It wants the one thing."
"Blood."
"Blood."
Renee pressed her hand flat against her own sternum. There was something under there, coiled, quiet for now, the way a dog is quiet in a parked car.
"You're going to want to fight it," Amy said. "Don't."
"I fought you for a month."
"You didn't fight me. You looked at me and said nothing and went home and locked your door." Amy stepped closer, near enough that Renee could smell the wine on her breath and the blood under it. "That's not the same thing."
"It felt like it."
"It wasn't."
Amy turned her head toward Danielle, and something passed between them, a nod, a permission.
"Here's what I think," Amy said, and she reached up and tucked a strand of Renee's hair behind one pointed ear. "I think we need to find a nice ripe human for Renee to feed on."
Renee jumped.
She didn't plan it. She went straight up off the flour-covered tile with both fists at her sides like a kid at the end of a school year, feet clearing the floor, and came down hard enough to knock the cabinet doors loose in their frames. A noise came out of her that she had never made in her adult life. It was high. It was delighted.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, fuck, yes."
Amy laughed, actually laughed, and put her hand on Renee's shoulder.
Danielle was there before the flour had settled, stepping in close behind her. She'd lost her nightshirt somewhere in the last ten minutes and her breasts were smeared white down one side, and she moved with that same fluid glide now, water over tile.
"Look at you," Danielle said against the back of Renee's neck. "You're glowing. You're literally glowing."
"I'm not."
"You are. Your eyes. I can see them in the dark."
Danielle's hand came around Renee's waist, flat and warm, and slid down over her belly and under the hem of her windbreaker. Renee's breath went out of her in a rush. The hand kept going, down past the waistband of nothing, because her shorts were still behind the fridge, down through the wet mess of her, and stopped with the heel of her palm pressed hard against Renee's clit.
Renee's head dropped back onto Danielle's shoulder.
"Hello," Danielle murmured.
"Don't you dare stop."
"I'm not stopping." She rubbed slow circles with the heel of her hand while her fingers went further down, slicking through everything Renee had already made, and Renee's hips started moving on their own again, rolling into it like a wave coming in. "I barely even got to do this to you at dinner. You would not believe how long I've wanted to."
"Danielle."
"Mhm."
"Get inside me."
Danielle got inside her.
Three fingers, all at once, no warning, and Renee shouted and grabbed the counter above her head with both hands. The stretch of it was enormous, clean, the kind of full she'd only ever read about. Danielle's fingers shoved in to the knuckles and stayed there, and then twisted, slow, and the twist rolled over something deep and Renee's whole body arched like a strung bow.
"You're so wet," Danielle said, into her ear, delighted with herself. "It's dripping down my wrist. Amy, she's dripping down my wrist."
"I can smell it," Amy said.
She was standing in front of them now, close, watching them both with the crimson eyes gone narrow. She had untied the green robe and it hung open, and her gray body under it caught the small red light from under the cabinet, and she was smiling at Renee the way you smile at something you made.
Danielle pulled her fingers out to the second knuckle and shoved back in. Renee's heels came up off the floor. Again, faster, and again, and the wet sound of it was obscene in the little kitchen and she did not care, she wanted it louder, wanted the whole street to hear what she had become.
"You want to come before we go?" Danielle said. "Because you should. You should come first. It's better after."
"Am I going to kill somebody tonight?"
Amy answered that one.
"If you're careful," she said. "If you stop when I tell you."
Renee's fangs ached in her mouth. Danielle's fingers were curling inside her, up and in, working that spot until Renee's vision went soft at the corners and her hands slipped down the cabinet face.
"Then let's go kill somebody," Renee said.