you're too young & eager to love

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Keep these pieces rolling.

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Harrow asks about your mother, and you can’t remember her except for the shadow of pressure that might be small, calloused hands on your shoulders, the twist of a smile that could be another woman’s mouth, another mother’s expression. She had blonde hair. Or was it more brown?

You tell him about your second mother instead, the one whose blood replaced the first.

“She was very strong. Vain. Reliable and complicated and surprisingly affectionate.”

“What happened to her?” Harrow has the look of someone who is waiting for a slip to occur. You have been by his side for two years now, and he still cannot trust you completely. You understand the urge to protect yourself, the inability to break down walls. You are not offended, and maybe that’s why he’s able to have these conversations with you. A sharing of not-secrets and hidden alibis. An explanation for the way men are how they are.

You roll your shoulders in a shrug and throw down another card from the collection in your hand. You almost have a royal flush. “What happens to all mothers.”

“She is dead?”

You fight the urge to smile. You’re both dead, but you’re both alive too. So much more alive than the human across from you. You feel a nostalgia for blood and ignore it. “Lost, rather.”

“I do not understand.”

“Children outgrow their parents. It is inevitable. What of your mother?”

Harrow’s tight-lipped smile is secretive. He pours himself another glass of whiskey and changes the subject.



Adira speaks French; it makes her German softer (her English is poor, but you won’t realize that yet). She is not conventionally pretty for the time period – her chin is weak, her hair an off shade of auburn, her hands large for how small her body is. She is almost elfish, her body caught somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Her hips look as though they’ve only started to round, but the top of her body is boy-like and flat. You realize you are much taller than her before she even stands.

She is too young to be out so late, you think, but she asks you to buy her a coffee, and you do. She doesn’t drink it but cups it between her palms, breathing in the warmth and scent hungrily.

You think she is a child of the streets. Another vagabond orphan looking for a soldier’s bed. You tell her as much and she laughs, brazen, loud. It startles you.

When your hair falls forward against your face, she brushes it aside in a gesture of intimacy that is just as jarring. You are not used to a woman being so forward. Your mother would have told you it was inappropriate, unladylike, but you never did listen to her much. You find yourself studying Adira’s knees, the hem of her dress rucked up high from the angle of her body, and they are very white. Practically translucent. You brush your knuckles across them impulsively and she does not rebuke you.

You have had many whores. Some you have paid for and some you have taken for free.

This will not be so different, you think, leaving a tip for the waitress on the counter when Adira asks you to escort her home.



Afterwards, she tells you that she has been watching you for months. Your sturdy gait, the way you throw your head back when you laugh, how you crush women to your mouth as though they are something to be devoured.

She is naked and straddling you, her bones deceivingly fragile, her body as weightless as snow. There is still blood on her plump mouth. The wounds in her neck from where you greedily tried to latch on to her have not yet healed; they trickle red tauntingly. The sheets are torn and sticky with your life and hers and the mix of death and rebirth. She says she is four hundred years old and you, her soldier, are her very first.

She isn’t really sure what she’s doing.

You cradle her face in your newly dead hands and try to kiss her.



She teaches you everything. You are a quick learner, which delights her. She is remarkably open, as though she has spread herself before you and is prepared to give everything. When she disappears without a backward glance or hint of a warning, you panic like a five year old.

You are crushed with a sense of abandonment and loneliness that threatens to drive you mad. Your sadness makes you irresponsible and you let your hunger free from restraint. You create a tantrum with the lives of others.

It doesn’t help.

You think of walking into the sun, and you test your will in the early morning dawn, feeling your flesh scald before the daylight even breaks.
After a month, you wake to her presence in the house. She is playing the piano softly but expertly and when you try to embrace her she throws you back, sends you against the wall. You could have been a fly hovering too close, annoying her concentration.

You are wounded and then you are furious. You launch yourself at her again, but she just as easily counters you. This time, she offers you a hand up, and you snarl at her.

“Next time, become angry first. Do not give room to grief. It is a useless emotion when you live as long as us.”

You bring yourself to your knees, and she lets you wrap your arms around her thin waist, lets your bury your face into the thin fabric of her dress. She tsks and chides and calls you weak, but her voice is affectionate and she strokes your hair.



She has not let you inside of her since the night she first made you.

She speaks about your relationship in terms you do not understand. Blood bonds that are synonymous with mothers, sisters, and lovers. A kinship without words appropriate enough to connate true meaning. Adira laughs at your discomfort, murmurs mocking words of pacification, and brings you whores as presents. She likes to watch you with them, the twist of their human bodies against yours, the dominating way you hold them by their neck with one hand as you thrust into them. You let her watch, enjoy it even, but you look for the signs of disapproval that flicker onto her face – a twitch of her mouth, a narrowing gaze, a tap of her fingers against the arm of her chair. This is how you learn to love her from afar.

Sometimes you are too brutal. You have broken bones and split necks.
She helps you with the mess.

She brings men home, men with dark eyes and darker intentions. She does not give you the same luxury of watching, but your preternatural ears can hear every groan and whimper. You imagine her sinking her teeth into their necks at the brink of orgasm, draining their life as she trembles with fulfillment. She is always rosy-cheeked and affectionate afterwards, smelling like human sweat and joyous death, letting you lick her fingers from where the blood has stained them.

You do not know the lesson here. Only that you are aching with envy and jealousy, that the gulf inside of your threatens to break free and never rebuild. You turn on her with words and betrayal and anything that might wound. She listens to your tirades with a practiced patience and infuriating smile.

Adira says, “Only when you stop wanting can you be free to conquer.”

You tell her you have been conquering for years, and she laughs dismissively at you. “You know nothing about conquering, soldier.”



The world changes but the both of you do not.

You know there are others like you that exist. You have seen them, but Adira believes in isolation. Nests are problematic, she says. They breed pack mentalities and, more often then not, disintegrate after a few centuries. Survival correlates with one’s ability to adapt. Do not form relationships that you would not die for.

“Vulnerability is a leisure we cannot afford.”

But you love her - in the way men love Gods, the way small children worship parents, and with the protective nature of siblings. You tell her as much, lifting her thin body up into your arms, pressing kisses to her mouth, cheeks, eyelids.

It has been seventy years, and she smiles approvingly. “So now you know.”

That night, you bury your teeth into the tender crook of her elbow, and she lifts your arm to do the same to your wrist. She crawls onto your lap, her legs hooking around your waist, and does not stop you when you dip your hand between your bodies, your fingers reaching between her thighs. Adira croons and for two hundred years you never sleep alone again.



The expansion of the west did not separate you. The advancement of industry and technology had little barring on your life. Neither did the world wars or the split of Europe. Now, the earth is turning to deserts and institutions and ideologies crumble, replaced with worse alternatives.

It is the savagery of men and their sudden awareness of preternatural entities that shakes the foundation on which you stand. The humans find the lycanthropes first, then the shifters. Camps that mirror the experiments and purposes of their European predecessors are built.

“We are smarter than those beasts.”

Adira scoffs. “You are a fool to think that what affects others cannot affect us. You, of all people, should know that, mein Kommandant.”

“But we are not born, not like the animals. We are human.”

“Were. We were human. They will think we are corpses and, more importantly, a threat. Shifters cannot offer immortality. They will drain us, recreate our blood, then kill us … if we are lucky.”

You kiss the center of her palm, trying to soothe away her worry, and she pushes your face to the side with her soft fingertips.



The desert is greater, wider, and the days are longer now. The sun threatens to rise soon, but for now the lingering darkness is a mercy. The humans are coming, and Adira has fear in her eyes. You have never truly seen it before, not in her.

“We will burn, Roman.” She says it plainly, already believing it true.

“Fire?” You ask.

Fire, the humans hunting them echo across the dunes, and in their faces they have the same expression your fellow Germans once wore. War and hate and animal cravings. Kill or be killed. Humans make useful things, but underneath they are the same as they were when the world was younger.

Fight or flight. Your instinct must be broken, for you do neither. Adira must take you by the throat (you have somehow forgotten how much stronger she still is than you) and shove you into the direction of the last blessed moments of darkness.

“The east!” She yells, turning her back to you, a small woman facing an impending danger. You catch a glimpse of enjoyment in her eyes, a will that overpowers her fear, and you remember her love of challenges.

The rising sun is causing her skin to begin to blister.



You are not a child anymore. You know the tricks of your body, the power of your blood, and you run at a speed that causes you to blur. Before the sun breaks the horizon, you take to the skies. You are not a child, but the exertion of so much strength exhausts you instantly. It is will and will alone that causes you to concentrate, but you fall to the ground within moments of your feet hitting wet rock.

An ocean. One of the lasts.

You remember it from your human youth, the cave where you and your brothers hid. You crawl into its shelter, too drained to stay awake.



The Insurgence finds you.

They do not find Adira.

They tell you that these things happen, as though the current state of affairs is common and predictable. They tell you to honor her memory, to make a stand, that you are valuable and they can do good with you.

The implication being that you haven’t been doing good until this moment. The implication being that your maker is dead, ash on the winds, and there is no time to wonder.

But you do, because there was no and has not been any ache inside of you. No shred to mark the moment of your severing with her. You would know, you tell them, you would know if she was no longer in this world. They do not argue with you, but they accept your denial as a side effect of grief.



Harrow asks about your mother, and you tell him that she was always one to believe in reckonings.