Chapter 15: The Hunt Begins
The library after midnight belonged to the ones who did not breathe.
Alisha walked the third-floor stacks with her heels silent on the carpet, and Chloe followed a half step behind, because half a step was what a newborn could manage. Everything reached Chloe at once. The glue in the old bindings. Dust roasted by the chandelier bulbs. Underneath it, warm and wet and alive, the blood of a girl somewhere to the east, sitting alone at a study carrel with a highlighter in her hand.
"You're panting," Alisha said.
"I'm not."
"You are. You do it out of habit." Alisha stopped at the end of an aisle and turned. Her eyes caught the light, crimson and slow, and her ears came to soft points above the collar of her coat. "You don't need to. Try it, stop."
Chloe held her breath. Nothing happened. No burn, no black spots at the edges. She let the air out in a laugh that came too loud, and Alisha's hand closed over her mouth.
"Quiet." Alisha's palm was cool and smelled of Chloe's own skin, faintly, from the night before. "Feel her."
Chloe closed her eyes. The girl's heartbeat came in through the shelves like a radio left on in another room. Chloe's fangs dropped with a soft click she felt in her jaw, and a slick heat spread between her thighs so fast her knees nearly gave.
"She's in the occult section," Chloe whispered against Alisha's fingers. "Four rows over. She smells like coffee and cheap shampoo."
"Good girl. And what else?"
"Her period's late." Chloe opened her eyes, startled at herself.
Alisha smiled, and those long canines showed, white and wet. "You'll learn to read a throat the way you used to read a syllabus." She pulled Chloe in by the waist, and her mouth found the side of Chloe's neck without biting, just breathing there. "Now. Walk like you own the building. If she runs, you catch her. If she screams, I'll handle it."
They moved together.
The girl was maybe twenty, a psych student with a ponytail half fallen out and a cardigan the color of oatmeal. She had three books open around her and a phone face down beside them. The title on the top book was Rites of the Bloodbound. Chloe almost laughed. Of course it was.
Alisha went left. Chloe went right. They came down the aisle from both ends, and the girl looked up when the shadow crossed her page.
"Who's there?"
"Sorry," Alisha said, warm as a tenured professor. "We're closing up. You didn't hear the announcement?"
"I've got an extension." The girl's pulse jumped anyway. Her eyes went from Alisha to Chloe, and stuck on Chloe. "Hey. Aren't you in my psych seminar?"
"Probably," Chloe said, and her voice came out lower than she meant. Her fangs were against her lip. "What are you reading?"
The girl glanced down at the book, and Alisha was already behind her, one hand on the back of the chair, the other sliding along the girl's shoulder.
"Don't you want to know what she is?" Alisha said.
"What?"
Chloe stepped close. The girl's fear rolled off her in a smell like copper and salt, and Chloe's mouth filled with saliva. She knelt down beside the chair, and the girl went very still, the way a rabbit does when it understands the field is open and it is not going to make it.
"It's okay," Chloe said. She put her hand on the girl's knee. "It doesn't hurt. Not really."
"Please."
"Shh."
Alisha took the throat first. She did it beautifully, one hand fisted in the ponytail, her mouth opening wide and sinking in just under the jaw. The girl made a sound like a swallowed sob, and then a wet, heavy gasp as the blood started to move. Chloe watched it travel up Alisha's throat, watched her swallow, and felt her own cunt clench around nothing at all.
"Do it here," Alisha said, pulling back just enough to speak, her lips red. She tapped two fingers on the inside of the girl's thigh. "Where she's soft."
Chloe pushed the cardigan off, then the skirt up. The girl's panties were damp already, not from want but from shock, and Chloe did not care which. She hooked them aside with her thumb, lowered her mouth, and bit down into the crease of her thigh where the skin was thinnest.
Blood hit her tongue like something she had been missing her whole life. It was hot and bright and faintly sweet, and her whole body lit up from the inside, a wire pulled taut from her mouth straight down to her clit. She moaned into the wound and the girl's hips bucked against her face.
"Not too much," Alisha said, and she was lifting her skirt too, stepping out of her underwear with one hand while the other kept the girl's head tipped back. "I want her awake for this."
Alisha climbed onto the chair behind the girl and straddled the back of it, one leg on either side, her bare cunt pressed against the back of the girl's neck. Then she reached down and pulled Chloe up by the chin, blood running off Chloe's lips and down her throat, and kissed her. It tasted of copper and of both of them.
"Against me," Alisha said. "Now."
Chloe understood. She got up on the chair, straddling the girl's lap face to face with Alisha, and their cunts met, wet and slick, and Alisha ground down hard. The girl was trapped between them, breathing in shallow pulls, and Alisha leaned over her shoulder and sank her fangs back into the same wound, drinking slow.
Chloe rode her. She rode Alisha's cunt with the girl's blood still hot in her mouth and the girl's heartbeat going thin and fast under her own hand, and every slide of Alisha's clit against hers pulled another noise out of her, low and filthy in the quiet room. The chandelier hummed overhead. Somewhere below, a page turned.
"Fuck," Chloe gasped. "Fuck, I'm close already."
"Then come."
Alisha bit down harder, and the girl's body convulsed between them, and Chloe came with her mouth open and nothing coming out, her whole cunt seizing and soaking, slick running down her thigh to mix with the blood. Alisha shook above her a heartbeat later, jaw tight on the girl's neck, riding it out with her eyes shut.
The girl was still alive when Alisha finally lifted her head. Pale. Breathing. Alisha wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist and looked at Chloe the way a teacher looks at a paper that turned out better than expected.
"Now," Alisha said. "Your turn to finish her. Or your turn to let her go. Choose."
The girl's mouth moved before any sound came out of it. Her lips had gone the color of wet newspaper, and her hands found Chloe's thighs and held on with nothing left in them.
"You're not going to kill me," she said. It started as a fact. It turned into a question at the end.
Alisha looked over the girl's shoulder at Chloe. Her mouth was still wet. "Do you want to keep her?"
Chloe's fangs were out and blood was drying in the crease of her lip. She could feel every grain of it. One night ago she had been a girl in a dorm room with a journal under her mattress. Now her maker was handing her a life like a coin.
"She saw us," Alisha said. "She knows your face. She sits two rows behind you in seminar. If you let her walk out of here, I spend the night cleaning up, and you spend fifty years thinking about it."
The girl turned her head, slow, and looked up at Chloe. Her eyes were huge and wet and entirely clear. "I heard what you said to each other. I know what you are."
"Say it."
"Vampire." The word came out soft and reverent. "I've been reading about it since freshman year. I don't care what it costs."
Chloe almost laughed, because the book on the table was still open to the same chapter she'd read a dozen times. Rites of the Bloodbound.
"Please," the girl said. "I don't want to die. But if that's the door, I want it. I want to be like you."
Then she said please again. She said it four more times, her voice cracking on every one, and she said she would do anything. She promised things in a whisper that made Chloe's dead heart do something stupid in her chest.
Chloe looked at Alisha. "Can I do it?"
Alisha touched her jaw with two cool fingers and turned her face up. "You can drink her. You can't give her the blood yet. You're one night old, and there's barely enough of you in your veins to feed a cat." She let go. "I'll do the second part. You do the first. Don't stop until her heart starts skipping."
The girl heard all of it. She pulled Chloe's collar until their mouths met, and she kissed like she was already drowning, and her tongue was hot and tasting of coffee and fear and the faint copper where Alisha's mouth had been.
Chloe got off the chair and knelt on the carpet. The girl slid down into her lap, all of her weight at once, and Chloe held her with one arm and put her mouth back on the wound in her thigh.
This time she didn't stop at the first bright hit.
She pulled. The blood came steady and hot, and the girl arched against her like a bowstring, heels skidding on the carpet. Her hands knotted in Chloe's hair and pushed her down instead of away, and she made a noise that was half sob and half something much worse.
"Don't stop," she said. "Please don't stop."
Chloe slid her free hand between the girl's legs. Her cunt was still slippery from everything that had already happened on that chair, and two of Chloe's fingers went in without any resistance at all. The girl clenched around them and moaned loud enough to reach the ceiling.
Alisha watched from the chair with her skirt still rucked up around her waist. She didn't move. She smoked a cigarette she didn't have, just the gesture, two fingers against her lip, and her crimson eyes tracked every swallow Chloe took.
Chloe worked her fingers in and out and drank. The rhythm of it made her dizzy. Every pull of blood tightened something down low in her belly, and she ground her own wet thighs together against the carpet. The girl's pulse was coming faster now. Thin. Fast. Like a bird in a box.
"That's it," Alisha said. "Feel her going."
The girl came with a long shudder, gripping Chloe's hair, thighs clamped around Chloe's wrist. Her blood came faster with it, and sweeter, and Chloe had to fight not to lose herself in it entirely. Somewhere above them a chandelier buzzed. Somewhere far off a door opened and closed.
The heartbeat stuttered, then caught, then stuttered.
"That's enough."
Chloe pulled back with a wet gasp. The girl was gray from her lips to her fingertips, and her chest was barely moving. She looked at Chloe with unfocused eyes and said something that wasn't a word.
Alisha came down off the chair. She knelt on the other side, took the girl's slack head in one hand, and bit open her own wrist with a neat twist of a fang. Dark blood welled up fast and thick.
"Drink," she told the girl. "Don't think. Just swallow."
She pressed the wrist to the girl's mouth. For a long second nothing happened. Then the girl's throat moved, once, and Chloe heard the swallow from the inside of her own skull.
Alisha kept her there until the girl was pulling at the wound with her whole mouth, greedy, both hands locked around Alisha's forearm. Then Alisha took the wrist back and licked it closed.
The change was fast. Chloe watched it happen this time, from the outside, and understood what she must have looked like an hour after her own turning. The gray skin went silver at the edges. The fingers lengthened. The ears drew up into small sharp points, and the face on the carpet stopped being the psych student with the fallen ponytail and became something else, still young, still soft at the mouth, but not breathing right.
The girl opened her eyes. They were crimson and slow and confused for about two seconds.
Then her fangs clicked down, and she turned her face toward Chloe's throat like a compass needle finding north, and she said, "I'm so hungry," in a voice that was not quite hers yet.
Alisha stood, straightened her coat, and looked down at the two of them on the library carpet. "Congratulations," she said. "She's yours now."