Chapter 16: The Newborn's First Hunt
The girl's fangs were out and her eyes were fixed on Chloe's throat with an intensity that made Chloe's own dead heart stutter. Jessica. That was her name. The psych student with the oatmeal cardigan and the late period and the book about blood rites open on the table behind them.
"Hungry," Jessica said again, and her voice had that new ring to it, that hollow music, like something singing down a long pipe.
Chloe put a hand on her shoulder. The skin under her palm was cool now, and going cooler. "I know. Come on."
She pulled Jessica up from the carpet. The girl rose light, too light, like her bones had been hollowed out and replaced with something else. Her skirt was still rucked up around her hips and her thighs were slick with her own cum and Chloe's blood where the bite had been. She didn't seem to notice.
Alisha watched from the chair, rebuttoning her skirt with the two-fingered speed of someone who had dressed in worse places. "Keep her out of the light for tonight," she said. "And if she eats someone, make sure you hide the body. The grounds crew starts at six."
Chloe nodded. Alisha was already moving toward the window, coat settling around her shoulders like she was heading to a faculty meeting. She paused at the sill, looked back, and for a second her face had something almost soft in it.
"She's going to be messy the first time. Don't let her take too much and pass out. You need to be there to stop her."
Then she was gone, a shadow folding itself into the dark, and Chloe and Jessica were alone in the third-floor stacks with the smell of blood and sex and old paper.
Jessica swayed. Her hands found Chloe's waist and held on. "It's so loud," she said. "Everything is so loud. There's someone downstairs. I can hear their heartbeat. I can hear their blood moving."
Chloe pulled her in close. The girl's mouth found her neck, not biting, just pressing there, breathing in. Her tongue came out and tasted the skin and a low noise came from her throat.
"No," Chloe said. She put her hands on Jessica's shoulders and held her back. "Not me. I'm your maker. You want to feed, we go hunting."
Jessica's eyes were huge and crimson and desperate. "Okay."
"Say it."
"Okay. We go hunting."
Chloe took her hand and led her through the stacks to the east window. The glass was old and wavy, and the quad below spread out under the moon like a silver lake. The nurse's station sat at the edge of the grounds, a low glass building with warm fluorescent light spilling out of its tall windows. A figure moved inside, a woman in pale scrubs, bending over a desk.
"See her?" Chloe said.
"Yes."
"What do you smell?"
Jessica closed her eyes, and her whole face changed, nostrils flaring. "Coffee. Vanilla hand cream. And something else. Salt and copper. She's tired. She's been on her shift too long. Her blood is moving slow."
"Good." Chloe squeezed her hand. "That's what you want. Tired prey is slow prey. She's heading home soon. We follow her, we take her in the dark, on the path between the lampposts where the light doesn't reach."
Jessica opened her eyes. The hunger in them had sharpened into something focused, almost clinical. "Why do we have to hide her body?"
"Because there are rules." Chloe let go of her hand and pushed the window open. Cold air came in, smelling of cut grass and the distant cold metal of the science buildings. "And because if someone finds her with bite marks, they'll start putting garlic in the dining hall and checking everyone's reflections. We move quietly. We stay hidden. We take what we need and we leave nothing that talks."
Jessica looked at her, and some of the wildness had gone out of her face, replaced by something steadier. "You've done this before."
"Once." Chloe smiled, and her fangs came down on the smile, catching the light. "Come on. I'll show you how it's supposed to go."
They dropped from the window and landed on the grass without a sound. The quad was empty under the moon. The nurse came out of the station eleven minutes later, a cardigan over her scrubs, a water bottle in one hand, keys jingling against her hip. She walked the path toward the north gate, head down, shoulders curved against the cold.
Chloe and Jessica followed at a walking pace twenty yards behind, their steps silent on the grass verge, their eyes tracking the woman's shape in the dark.
"Not yet," Chloe said in a whisper. "Let her get to the trees."
The nurse turned onto the gravel path that cut through the small copse of oaks separating the campus from the street beyond. The lampposts along the path were spaced wide, and for one stretch of thirty feet, the light did not reach. The gravel there was dark. The shadows were deep.
"Now," Chloe said.
Jessica moved.
Jessica hit the nurse low and hard, both hands around her hips, driving her forward off the path into the deep grass under the first oak. The water bottle flew. The keys scattered. The nurse opened her mouth to scream and Jessica's right hand clamped over it, palm flat, fingers digging into her jaw.
Chloe came up behind them in three silent strides. She knelt in the damp grass, her knees on either side of Jessica's hips, and hooked her fingers into the waistband of Jessica's skirt. She pulled it up, bunched it around Jessica's spine. No underwear. The girl's ass was bare and pale in the moonlight, and slick between the cheeks with everything that had happened on the library carpet.
"Don't bite her yet," Chloe said. "Taste her first. You want to. I know you do."
Jessica's head came up from the nurse's neck like she'd been slapped. Her fangs were already down, wet with spit, and her eyes were huge and red and lost.
"I can't wait."
"Then don't. But you're going to come so hard you pass out if I'm not on you. So I'm doing this."
Chloe bent down and put her mouth on Jessica's cunt from behind. The girl was soaked. The taste of her own blood and cum filled Chloe's mouth all at once, sharp and metallic and sweet underneath, and Jessica gasped in a way that lifted both her shoulders. Her hand slipped off the nurse's mouth for a second. The nurse took a breath, one thin inhale, and Chloe said, low against Jessica's clit, "Shut her up."
Jessica's mouth came down on the nurse's throat. Not clean. The first bite scissors sideways through skin and muscle, and the nurse's whole body went into a single violent arc, heels digging into the grass, spine bowing like a kicked plank. Chloe heard the wet release of blood, a sound like a straw finding the bottom of a cup.
Then Jessica drank.
Chloe felt it happen through Jessica's whole body. The girl's thighs clamped around nothing, trembling, and her cunt clenched against Chloe's mouth, and Chloe licked into her with a flat stroke that went all the way from her opening to her clit. Jessica moaned onto the nurse's wound, the sound muffled and hungry and wrecked.
Chloe worked her tongue in circles. She ate Jessica the way she'd wanted Alisha to eat her, slow and thorough and filthy, her hands spread over the girl's ass cheeks to hold her open. Jessica's hips pushed back against her face, grinding down, one hand still fisted in the nurse's cardigan and the other clawing divots into the grass.
Blood ran hot down Jessica's chin and pooled in the hollow of the nurse's collarbone. The nurse's hands had gone from pushing weakly at Jessica's shoulders to gripping them, fingers digging in like she was holding on, her body responding to the feed in a way that made her bare teeth and her eyes roll back as a guttural sound left her throat.
Chloe came up off Jessica's cunt just long enough to breathe. "She's close. You feel it?"
"The heartbeat," Jessica said, her mouth wet against the wound. "It's doing the skip thing. Alisha said to stop."
"You don't want to stop."
"I don't." Jessica's hips drove back hard, clit grinding against Chloe's chin. "It's so good. I can't stop. I don't want to stop."
"Then don't." Chloe dove back in and closed her lips around Jessica's clit and sucked, hard, while her tongue flicked fast against it. Jessica's whole body locked. After that she stopped holding anything back. Her jaw worked against the nurse's throat, pulling and swallowing, and her thighs clamped around Chloe's head and she came with her mouth full of the nurse's life, a sound climbing out of her like a long wet note.
The nurse's heart stuttered, caught, and then went quiet. Jessica kept drinking for another three swallows after that, her body rocking through the tail end of her orgasm against Chloe's mouth. Then she lifted her head, slick and black in the moonlight, her chin dripping.
"I think I killed her," she said. It came out wondering, not sorry.
Chloe gave her clit one last slow lick, pulled back, and kissed her hard on the mouth. The blood tasted like both of them. "You did. You did so good."
The nurse lay in the grass between them, pale and still, her chest not moving, her eyes open to the moon. Chloe helped Jessica stand, pulled her skirt down, and looked at the body. Then she took the nurse by the wrists and dragged her into the deeper shadow under the oak, rolling her into a thicket of rhododendron and elder where the branches hid her from every angle. She kicked the scattered keys into the leaves and threw the water bottle into the bushes after them.
When she came back, Jessica was standing in the middle of the path, licking the blood off her fingers one by one. Her eyes had settled to a steady, satisfied crimson. She looked at Chloe and smiled.
"My first one's yours."
"No," Chloe said. "She's yours. She's always going to be yours."
Jessica stepped close and put her hands on Chloe's hips. The wet heat between her thighs was still smeared down the inside of her legs. "I'm still hungry."
Chloe looked across the dark quad toward the east gate, where the streetlights burned yellow over the empty road. "Good," she said. "Come on. Let's find you another one."
They crossed the east gate, and the road beyond was empty and yellow-lit. The campus behind them faded into dark lawns and stone. Jessica walked close, shoulder against Chloe's arm, the wet of her thighs still drying in the cold air.
"Where do we go?"
"Around the dining hall, past the maintenance sheds. There's a path that runs by the forest edge."
They skirted the back of the sciences building. A single car sat in the staff lot, engine still ticking. No one else around. The forest came up on their left, a wall of black pine and oak, and the path ran between it and the chain-link fence of the old greenhouse.
Jessica stopped. Her whole body went still, and Chloe felt the shift in her, the way a needle finds north.
"That one."
Chloe followed her gaze. A man came out of the greenhouse service door, locking it behind him. Fifty, maybe. Grey hair cropped short, a canvas jacket over a thick knit sweater. He carried a clipboard under one arm and a paper coffee cup in the other hand, walking toward the staff lot with the unhurried tread of someone whose life happened in even, measured pieces.
"He's alone," Jessica said.
"He is. Middle-aged, regular hours, nobody waits up for him. He's the best kind." Chloe watched him pass under the floodlight by the greenhouse and disappear into the dark just beyond it. "With this one, you do it different."
"Different how?"
Chloe turned Jessica to face her. The moonlight caught the blood still dried on Jessica's chin, and her eyes were wide and hungry. Chloe put her hands on Jessica's hips.
"He's got thirty years of wanting. You let him feel like he caught you. He'll walk into the forest with you holding his hand."
Jessica frowned. "I bite him. That's the point."
"You bite him and he screams and fights, and then we drag a body through forty feet of undergrowth. That's a mess." Chloe leaned in, voice low. "You let him fuck you. You get him in the trees, you drop to your knees, you let him put his hands on you. He thinks he's winning. Then you open your throat to him and you drink while he's buried inside you."
Jessica's breath came faster. Her tongue touched the corner of her mouth where the blood was.
"And the whole time he's coming," Chloe said, "his heart's wide open. You take everything. You drain him completely. Then we bury him deep and no one finds him for months."
"How deep?"
"Deep enough that the dogs lose the scent."
The man had reached the staff lot now. He unlocked a grey sedan, tossed the clipboard in, then stood by the open door for a long moment, looking up at the moon. He yawned, rubbed the back of his neck, and shut the door without getting in. He started walking down the path that ran along the forest edge.
"He's not going home," Jessica said.
"He's taking a walk."
"Doesn't he have a wife?"
"He's tired. He wants something easy." Chloe squeezed Jessica's hip. "Go catch him."
Jessica moved before her hand dropped. She walked, not ran, and her footsteps were soft on the gravel path. She pushed her hair back from her face as she went, smoothed her skirt, and by the time she came up behind the man she had changed the whole shape of her walk, a sway to her hips, her voice going light and warm.
"Hey, sir? You know the way back to the main lot?"
He turned. Up close he was older than fifty, lines at his eyes, but he looked at Jessica's face and her bare legs and smiled a little too long.
"You're a bit far from the dorms."
"I was walking with a friend and we got turned around." She moved a step closer. "You're not supposed to be out this late either."
"Greenhouse," he said, gesturing vaguely. "I'm the night supervisor. Check the irrigation."
"In there all alone all night?"
He laughed. "Mostly."
Jessica reached out and took the edge of his jacket between her fingers. "I bet you could use a break."
He looked at her hand on his jacket. Then he looked past her shoulder at the dark line of the forest, and something settled in his face, a decision.
"There's a bench in there," he said, nodding at the trees. "By the stream. Nice and quiet."
"Show me."
He went first. Jessica followed, and Chloe came up behind them, ghost-silent, her feet finding the dry leaves without a sound. They went in thirty feet, under the pines, and the gravel path and the floodlight died behind them.
The bench was there, beside a shallow stream you could jump across. He sat down, and Jessica lowered herself onto his lap, her skirt riding up, her knees on either side of his hips. He made a small, startled sound, and then his hands came up and found her thighs.
"You're quick," he said.
"I know what I want."
He laughed nervously, looking at her legs, her breasts. His cock was already hard through his trousers, pressing against her. Jessica rocked her hips down and he groaned, hands sliding up her thighs to her bare ass.
"Jesus."
"Shh." She unzipped him. His cock sprang free, thick and flushed, and she stroked it once, slow, his noise climbing. "Fuck me while I kiss your neck."
He didn't need more. He pushed her skirt up and drove into her, all at once, and Jessica's head fell back and her mouth opened in a long, silent breath. He was big enough that she felt it in her stomach, and he pumped into her with the frantic need of a man who hadn't had this in years.
Chloe came up from behind the bench, silent, and knelt in the leaves at Jessica's side. She could see everything. The man's hands gripping Jessica's ass, the slow rise and fall of his hips, Jessica's back arching as she rode him.
"That's it," Chloe whispered. "Take him."
Jessica leaned in. Her mouth found his neck, lips parting over the pulse, and he moaned and pushed deeper into her, losing the thread of everything except the wet heat of her cunt. The first bite was so gentle he didn't even flinch.
Then she drank.
His hips bucked hard. A choked sound came out of him, half pleasure, half confusion, and his hands tightened on her so hard he might have bruised her. Jessica didn't stop rocking. She drank and fucked him in the same rhythm, swallowing with each downward push, and his cock throbbed inside her and his whole body seized in a long, shuddering orgasm that turned into a weak, thrashing arch as the blood drained out.
She drained the last of him with one deep pull, and let him sag back onto the bench. His heart was gone. She stayed on top of him for a long moment, breathing through her mouth, her cunt still full of him.
Chloe took her hand and helped her stand. The man's body sat there, head lolled back, eyes open, his cock still wet and soft on his thigh.
"Deep," Jessica said. "You said deep."
"Show me you can dig."
They dragged him further in, past the stream, past a fallen oak, into the dark heart of the pines. The ground was soft loam and needles. Chloe found a flat stone for a shovel, and they took turns. The hole went four deep. They rolled him in, packed the earth back on top, scattered needles and leaves, and dragged a fallen branch over the spot.
Jessica wiped the dirt off her hands and looked at the black ground. "He's not coming out."
"No. He's not." Chloe looked at her, at the blood still smeared up her throat and the wet shine of her thighs. "You good?"
Jessica smiled, slow, and her fangs caught the moon. "I'm better than good."
Somewhere beyond the pines, a single car engine started. Someone was going home. They were not going home. They stood in the dark with the forest around them, and Chloe felt the whole night spreading out ahead like a road with no end.