you're too young & eager to love

Last of the responses to the warm-ups, and first of the Monday writing session responses!

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For reference: https://dresslikeaparisian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Victorian-collar.jpg

“Hunger
stays with me
but it is not original with me.
Hunger sleeps in all things mysteriously.”
- Decreation, Anne Carson



It is her slender neck he thinks of, how he’d like to see it bound by a high lace collar with delicate mother of pearl buttons running down it, traversing the entire length of her spine. He imagines opening those buttons, exposing the untouched skin inch by inch, peeling away the fabric to study the constellation of freckles across her shoulders before sinking his teeth into the pulse point at her throat. She’s as pure as the winter snow, he knows, unspoiled by the needs of the flesh or the desires of man—he can smell that on her always, an untainted lily-and-sunlight freshness, the kind that most children have, a scent that’s light and desirable and rare.

He’d been hard with her earlier, he knew, using words like barbs to gauge her reaction. How many months had it been though since he’d befriended her now, since he’d put on his congenial mask? How many nights of quiet stalking from the shadows? Of intolerable banter and exhaustive theological debate as she swept the church stairs or lit the candles for evening Mass or spoke in her pleasant, thoughtful way or smiled her kind, amused smile? The nun was insufferably passive, imperturbable even, as full of grace as the saints she prayed to. And all the while, he could hear the rhythm of her heart, could smell her sweat, could see when the color rose to her cheeks.

Gideon was not unaware of his own charm. He knew how boyish he could seem still, especially when his hair, kept longer on top, fell forward into his eyes. Despite the width of his shoulders, the strength of his body, and his height, he could play the gentleman instead of the predator easily enough. He could bow and kiss the backs of women’s hands and dazzle with his humor and intellect. His smile was wide too, with lips that were full, plump, bee-stung almost, nearly womanly; the whores in Blackhaven love him for his mouth (until it’s red with their blood). Even his eyes, bright in their blueness, can be playful if he wants them to be, if he minds his temper and shields his impatience.

Women of the cloth were not immune to him. Before Philomena, he had sampled a number of Ravenstone’s supposedly pious Sisters with little to no coercion required. They fell into his arms like lamb to the slaughter, but they often tasted hollow, as empty as their convictions. He’d wanted one that would provide a challenge, wanted one to test, to torment, to mold.

Perhaps he had simply played too long at kindness, and the creature inside of him grew tired of the charade, or maybe Philomena’s offering of barley bread had infuriated him for its simplicity: a gift it was, without preamble, without expectation, so humble but made with care, shaped by her own hands and effort. The bread had still been warm, wrapped in wax paper and kept in a tin, only she’d dropped it hadn’t she? Dropped it when he’d pushed into her space and startled her with his viciousness, with his snide comments. She’d nicked herself on broken glass in her hurry to pick up the loaf and avoid the threat of his body; he’d smelled the blood like a shark then, even though she’d bled such a small amount, and he’d had to fight to keep his fangs from protracting.

Had it been the barley bread that made him think of Laith? His anger had gotten the better of him because of it. No, certainly not the bread, but the biblical stories of their namesakes. Sycophants, like his younger brother, undoubtedly nursing at Hadassa’s breast even now, with his skeletal fingers clinging to her and his devotion as palpable as the stench of the city factories.

Gideon rubs his knuckles against his eyes, groaning. The night sky is damp with chill, but it’s black as pitch; he still has time before dawn.

Basque caws at him irritably, sensing his longing, and paces back and forth against the broken window of the abandoned row house. His claws click against the crumbling exposed brick, and Gideon scatters a handful of corn across the windowsill for him to pick at before ducking under the sagging doorway and out into the street. He takes the path through the cemetery, following the train tracks, until he can smell the rot of Linemell, and then he follows the sound of Ravenstone’s bells all the way to the cathedral.

The main doors are always open for those seeking the solace of prayer or some respite from the winter wind, and it’s such an easy thing to slip in with the darkness, to be unseen in the shadows, to make his steps as quiet as the grave. When he finds the kitchen, it’s cold, the fires from the stoves long since extinguished. The basket of bread for the needy is on the main butcher table, the loaves covered with a cotton towel embroidered with golden crosses, and beside it is Philomena’s tin, the wax paper torn from where it had fallen earlier onto the floor.

Gideon rips the paper away and presses the loaf to his face, inhaling.

He can smell the yeast and the baked flour, the salt, and the honey. There, too, on the top left is where he finds her blood. He holds the bread between his palms and breathes deeply—smells a freshness like strawberries, a tart acidity like white wine, and something rich, something almost feverish. With his eyes closed, he runs his tongue across the top of the bread, slow like a cat licking cream.

He gets a flash of her then. Just a brief imprint of her on the backs of his eyelids. Dressed in lace and pale blue, her hands skimming the tops of wildflowers and grass as she walks through a field, her hair the red of the evening sun.

It’s gone as quickly as it had appeared.

Gideon feels his anger like a torch inside of him, an impossible ache that scorches, and he digs his fingers into the loaf, splitting it. The right side crumbles between his palms. He steps on the crumbs, smearing the bread into the cracks of the old floor. Crouching in the dark of the kitchen now, half-hidden by the length of the butcher table, he bites into the remaining part of the loaf.

The bread is like desert sand in his mouth. He wants to reject it immediately, and the need to spit it out almost overwhelms him. How long has it been since he’s tasted human food? Nearly three hundred years?

He does not swallow, but he lets the bread sit on his tongue, until he can taste the blood soaked inside of it.

Without knowing it, he moans, the sound pitched-low in his belly.

He sees her again, the blood-walking almost instantaneous, sparking a burst of images in the darkness of his mind, a rapid-fire succession of photographs caught in the wind. Philomena as a child, her freckled face bright with laughter, Philomena kneeling to take the holy sacrament, Philomena’s mouth wind-chapped and hair tousled as she helps to build a fence in a village he does not recognize, Philomena’s hands skimming the pages of a book.

The memories are miniscule, and then they are gone. It infuriates him all over again. He slams his fist onto the counter, and the nearby glasses rattle from the force.

Gideon spits the bread from his mouth, and in the morning the cook will wonder about rats.

3rd warm-up! Except not really because the muse took me in an entirely new direction, but it is what it is.

Welcome, audience members, to an early Gideon and Hadassa scene! Let me remind all new-comers here that Gideon was the original simp before Laith, so, Mena, if you're watching, well, be prepared for a horse of a (somewhat) different color.

Laith, we all know you simp better. No contest.

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“All I am is what you can’t let go.”
Elisabeth Hewer

“That I keep wanting to stay should
count at least for something. I’m not done with you yet.”
Carl Phillips



Hadassa in Sindan, a copper-colored hood drawn up to hide the gleam of her eyes and the blood on her mouth, Hadassa blood-drunk and laughing from it, reeling the way the human men reel over their bourbon and gin. Hadassa as a child, her hair almost to her tiny hips, hair like a dark waterfall that spreads over a slaver’s calloused hands as he sears a scar into the tender flesh behind her left ear. Hadassa, older, long-legged and fierce-looking amongst a group of women in similarly-styled desert robes, her gaze defiant. Kalil then, his features indistinct but Gideon knows it’s him—he knows because Hadassa knows, because there’s something of the other man’s blood in him even now, and he’s cradling Hadassa’s face between his hands, smoothing her hair away from her high cheekbones, opening her mouth with his, but no, not this—Gideon pushes it away, lets the memories sift through him as sand through a sieve. Back to her childhood, to her mortal years, to the moments he knows so little of. He sees her, nearly ten, with an overly ripe blood orange between her hands, crouching in the dirt of an alley. He can smell it, its sweetness and warm acidity. Her fingers are sticky with the orange’s drippings, like her lips, and she’s greedy with hunger. She’s pushing the fleshy segments into her mouth, hardly chewing, but he’s losing the moment or it’s becoming another time, a new memory yet similar because he can sense her voracious, ravenous need, is almost struck in the stomach by the sheer force of her craving, and is she younger than before? Yes, a child still, but hardly school-aged, bare-foot and disheveled. Bruised on the neck, on her stickly arms, with a face smeared by dirt, and there’s a group of them, these child-urchins, clustered around a carcass, he thinks, yes, some mangled heap of bloody bits, a loathsome rotten corpse, thick with flies, but the children pick at it like carrion crows and —

“Not that,” she says, her voice steely and cutting through the fog of images abruptly.

Gideon groans. He’s frustrated. She doesn’t understand. He doesn’t care about it, the vileness of her mortal childhood, the shame she somehow still feels after so many centuries. There is not a thought of hers he could not curl himself around, not a memory he would not willingly share, not an image he could not recast in a softer light. He feels close to her like this, closer than any of the others can be, because this is his gift; this is what he seems to do better than any others, this reading of legacies, this traversing of blood-links to the past, and it’s the blood too, of course it’s the blood. Hers, rich and thick and powerful, spilling endlessly into his mouth from the tender flesh of the inside of her arm, and it’s him whose greedy now, whose licking feverishly at her skin, making a mess, who's pushing—pushing back into her veins, searching, feeling with his own invisible power amongst the wavelengths of her blood, until he has it, yes, Sindan again, that foreign place, a place of dark markets and deserts, and then there’s her hungry little girl’s face, her orphan’s face, her slave’s face —

“No,” she snarls, and he’s been thrown aside, ripped apart from her. He’s staggering, disoriented, crumpled on the cold floor of her bedroom, stupidly staring at the flickering flames from the many candelabra near the balcony doors. His face is stinging from the scrape of her nails even as it’s healing.

Hadassa is disappointed and tired and furious. She wipes the blood from her arm in one clean gesture, licks her fingertips afterwards, and says something Gideon can’t quite make out. There’s an ocean swelling between his ears.

“What?” he asks. The word comes out slurred, and he struggles slowly to his hands and knees. He feels both nauseous and, paradoxically, invigorated. He presses his palms into the cold marble flooring, trying to anchor himself back into this moment, this time and place.

She shakes her head.

When he grins up at her, his teeth are red from her blood, but he’s put his fangs away as a peace offering of sorts. He crawls forward, slowly, like approaching an animal who is threatening to flee, but Hadassa is no prey. She stands still, her mouth pulled into a thin line of displeasure, but he can tell how she hides her smile when he grabs the ends of her silken skirts, when he presses a kiss beseechingly to the fabric, when he ghosts his mouth across her fingertips like a gentleman.

“Apologies,” he murmurs, pushing himself to his knees and circling his arms around her waist. He burrows his face against her hip, kissing her there, turning his cheek to the flat of her stomach until she laughs, exasperated. “How may I atone?”

She untangles herself from him gently then but stoops so that they are face-to-face, eye-to-eye. One of her dusky hands brushes his cheek, pushes a messy blonde curl away from his eyes. He thinks she must be looking for something there, in the topography of his face, some lie or misgiving, a flaw he had not realized he wore so openly.

“You are not a man desiring expiation for sin. Don’t pretend otherwise, blood of my blood,” she says.

It is not what he was expecting. He sits back on his heels, scoffing some. “At least tell me what I did that was so terribly offensive.”

“You want too much, and you want too much too quickly. You do not respect boundaries, Gideon.” When he rolls his eyes, she snags him by the chin like a mother does a child, her nails sharp. “Kalil called it blood-walking, a rather romantic and misleading name for the way we can steal into a shared bloodline, and it is stealing, make no mistake. You may be able to see what another allows if the trust is there, if the donor is willing, but when you snake your way into gated paths, then you are treacherous. No better than the worm invading the rose garden.”

At this, he laughs, pulling free from her grasp. “A snake? A worm? What next, am I to be a spider?”

“Why not? Spiders are insubstantial creatures, easily crushed.”

“If you crush me, you will lose all your happiness.”

“If I lose Orson, I will lose all my happiness.”

He sneers at her then, but he wants to frown.

“You forget your place,” she tells him, not cruelly, as she rises to stand. “Like I said, you want too much too quickly.”

Gideon snatches a fist full of her skirts. “I want what you promised me.”

From below her, Hadassa’s expression is hard to read. Her face has become as smooth as polished gold. She tilts her head to the side in the softest of movements, like she’s curious or pitying. “Promises,” she says thoughtfully, “are also insubstantial.”

“Is that supposed to be profound?”

She’s annoyed again, he can tell by the way she yanks her dress from his fist, and the quick strides she takes to the balcony doors. She throws them open hastily, letting in the warm night air, but also the stink of the city.

Gideon gets to his feet. He wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve. After a moment, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Doubtful.”

“I am. I’m sorry. I’ve made a mess of the night, haven’t I? You can tell me it’s my typical behavior, I won’t deny it.”

She’s silent, her hands on the door frames, her eyes on the dark streets below. Truth be told, Gideon likes her annoyance, her irritation, her easy frustrations. He likes the way her eyes change from molten warmth to cold indifference. He likes her brutality, envies it even, and sometimes seeks it out. Her strength impresses him, almost as much as her capacity for violence.

“Let me take you out,” he offers. “I can find you a virgin.”

She laughs then, a short, surprised sound, but it’s enough to make him grin.

“Or an infant?”

More laughter, and he knows that she’s forgiven him when he folds his arms around her from behind and she leans back into the embrace. He nips at her ear, turns his face into the thick fall of her dark hair and breathes in her nighttime smell of lilacs and blackberries.

“What haven’t I given you?” she asks, and he hadn’t thought he’d hurt her earlier, hadn’t thought she’d cared.

“Nothing,” he lies.

Too lazy for a cut! Sorry-not-sorry.




“He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press ... against the firm red muscle of her heart." — Tim O'Brien, In The Lake Of The Woods

“Jesus Christ― "
"Is not here right now," the man in black replied, "and even if he were, he could not save you.” ― Brian Keene, A Gathering of Crows

“Behind every great hatred is a love story.” ― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors






What Gideon doesn’t tell her, what he never tells her, is that the mausoleum is his (she will learn this, eventually, from Laith). It is not his as in the tomb belongs to his ancestors or holds some skeletal remnants of his long dead relatives, but it is his by birthright―if death can be considered a kind of birth, which he knows it can.

As he had left Philomena to the rising sun and the beginnings of her metamorphosis, so Hadassa had left him, prone and blood-drunk on top of the same entombed coffin. For years he had visited the mausoleum on the anniversary of his human death, laying flowers on an altar nobody saw, for a date few others found so significant. It had felt right, this little tradition, just as it had felt right to break the urns inside and crack the western-facing stained glass window.

When Gideon carries the murdered nun, limp and unconscious in his arms, to the cemetery, she is already changing. Her green eyes flutter behind her thin eyelids, the dusting of freckles across her face marred by the smears of dirt and blood from the forest floor. The foliage in her hair too, and his skin under her nails, all of it evidence of the fight she’d tried to give. Her mouth is streaked with his blood, with hers.

“Do it again,” he’d told her after he’d drained her body of all that it could give and replaced it, mixed it, with his own strength and immortal vitality. She’d gagged against the wrist he’d pressed to her mouth at first, and then she’d clutched at it, her mouth working the skin with the same eagerness the way a babe latches to its mother’s nipple. She’d given a cry of protest when he’d taken it away and cried again from fear and pain when he’d tore into her neck once more, the wound gaping and raw, the blood in his mouth so like cannibalism now.

The death had hit her swiftly, but Gideon knows she’ll remember little of it. She’ll wear the massacre instead, on the long column of her throat, on the fabric of her stained collar and down, even, between her breasts. When he places her on the cool marble inside of the mausoleum, she grasps at his sleeve. Her eyes aren’t open. She’s mumbling something incoherent, her head lolling to the side. Her wrist drops to hang, seemingly lifeless, over the edge of the marble coffin, and Gideon does not think of Shakespeare’s doomed heroines: Ophelia, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Lavinia. He thinks of Philomena’s precious Bible instead and of Salome’s request for John the Baptist’s head.






“What’s happening to me?” she asks the following night, her voice the crack of dry autumn leaves. Her eyes are bright from the blood, from the changing, but the rest of her is marred by sickness and death. Her hair is a tangled nest of red. There’s gore on her mouth and the wound on her neck is barely healed, clumpy with congealed blood. It will be red for weeks like a virus against her skin.

“You’re dying. It is a process, but like Lazarus you will be born again. To walk and hunt and feed and live.”

Philomena lets this sink it. The weight of the words seems to literally bring her closer to the ground and she sighs, a sound full of suffering, of despair, of confusion. Against the mausoleum floor, her hands are almost as white as the old marble now. Her nails scratch feebly, unconsciously, against it. “What are you?” she finally asks, looking up at him from the curtain of her hair. It is not the first time she has asked this.

Gideon’s grin is a nasty thing and it stretches his full mouth wide. “The same as you now. Unholy one. Blooddrinker. Descendent of Cain.” He gives a flourish of his hand in the air, his pale fingers dancing against the still crypt air. “Although I have never preferred such titles. We are as we are, much like any other animal.”

“No better than a beast then.” She gives a short disparaging laugh. This too sounds like the night now, the rustle of beetle legs and the snap of dry wood beneath a predator’s step. Her throat feels tender and unhealed but somehow arid, impossibly dry.

“Come.” He holds out his hand to her and, when she does not take it, he grabs her elbow and hauls her, unsteadily, to her feet. She tries to shrink away from him, and Gideon takes hold of both her shoulders. He pushes her snarled hair away from her face until he can stare into her eyes, her gaze still bold. “Enough. What’s done is done. Besides, what more can I do to you now?” He says it like a threat and laughs before letting her go.

The mausoleum door had once been bronze, but now it’s oxidized green, a shade like old pennies, and worn by time. It creaks when he opens it, the night air bringing in its cold and all the sounds and smells of the world. They seem to assault Mena; he can tell by the way she turns her face from it, how she lifts her dirty hands to her ears.

“Come,” he says again, and again he holds out his hand. “You stink.”





Her mortality assaults him. There’s only a little human left in her now, but the modicum of mortality that persists along with the stink of her vomit and the waste she’d expelled for her body to adjust, to change into this new creature, disgusts him. He can smell her death, smell how her skin rots before it shifts, hardens, whitens, how her blood fights then yields to his own, how even her nails are turning to glass beneath the thinner, weaker layer of keratin. They will decay within the next few nights and her new nails will be exposed, hard and glossy as pearl. He does not give her his heavy winter coat to hide her wretched state as he guides her through the Linemell streets, but he keeps a hand on her shoulder, the other pushing against the small of her back when she stumbles or tries to shield herself from the many sights and sounds of the bustling city.

“I cannot,” she says and digs her heels in when he comes to a stop in front of a bath house. There is genuine fear in her eyes.

Gideon’s fingers are like iron as they dig into the crook of her elbow. His nails cut into her skin when he presses his mouth to her ear. “Don’t be a stupid bitch. You can stay here, stinking, in these rags and I’ll leave you on these streets to fester like the idiot newborn you are or you can come inside, your modesty be damned. Consider it your baptism, my little nun.”

He must coerce her into everything, it seems. She winces from the electric light inside, from the rush of water in the sunken bath, the heavy steam scented with lavender and jasmine. The exotic mosaic tiling and stained glass windows stun her into silence with their beauty. She runs her fingers across the Turkish designs, the rich Arabian colors made all the more extravagant against her skin. When Gideon, crouched by the gold, oversized faucet, looks up at her, he realizes that she’s crying. Small blurs of reddish tears beneath her eyelids, sticking to her long copper eyelashes. She doesn’t even seem to be aware of it.

“Over here, little nun,” he says, and it’s the first time his voice hasn’t been cold in months.

Philomena turns, startled, as though she’d forgotten for one blissful moment that he was there. She looks at the water, wide-eyed, and at him. Her fingers close into pale knots against the tattered remains of her clothing, clothing he’s responsible for ripping, for tearing. It’s all she has left and her fingers worry against themselves with the revelation.

“I—”

“You can.” Still soft. Insistent, confident, but soft.

“You will feel better,” he adds when she does not move.

She shakes her head, hair wilted from the oppressive steam and sticking to her nervous, angled face. Her fingers won’t stop fidgeting against her chest, clutching her dress.

Gideon’s patience is thin. He grits his teeth before, with the turn of the faucet knob, he tells her again, “Come here.” The final syllable breaks some invisible barrier between them and suddenly, painfully, he seems to be everywhere, as omnipresent and invasive as a spirit. He is pressing beneath her skin, against her bones, pushing at her muscles. He is dragging her forward, her body unable to resist, and she cries out, a shrill, shattering noise, her fingers raking at the sides of her face, clutching her own head, as though she can remove the infection that is him with her own hands.

Shaking, trembling, Philomena breathes raggedly. She does not remember walking across the room to the low steps leading into the bath. She had thought Gideon had dragged her, but he is still by the faucet. He’s gathering an assortment of oils and ointments and washes from a nearby bar cart. Looking over his shoulder, he does not give her a chance to ask and instead says, “I am more a part of you now than your God ever was or will be.”

The declaration seems to be enough for him because he turns his back to her. It takes her a moment to realize that he is giving her privacy. Another moment, and she notices how thick the steam is, how like smog. The water itself is murky, full of bath salts and oils, and she thinks this, too, has been a kindness of sorts.

“Philomena.”

It’s a warning. How long has she been staring at the water?

Quickly, before she can think, she removes her ruined clothes and slips into the bath. The heat is almost unbearable. It pervades her entire body, and every ache that she thought she had forgotten, every bit of grime that she had collected as some obscene armor against (or testament to) the last twenty-four hours, begins to coalesce.

She’s crying again, those same little wet smears as before. She’s unaware of it again. She keeps crying even as Gideon, kneeling at the edge, lifts each of her hands from the water and scrubs away the dirt and blood beneath her nails. She cries while he collects her tangled hair between his hands and guides her head back until the full length of it is submerged. He works the lather between his fingers, into her scalp, and she cries, staring straight ahead at the beautiful tiling.






When it’s over, when he seems satisfied by the look and smell of her, she is hardly even present. She is riding some warm tide, made numb from shock but also from the heat of the bath, the perfumes in the air, and the steady, blessedly unpainful, work of his fingers.

Gideon, wiping his hands on a towel, walks towards the door. There’s a small mulberry-colored rope dangling there, and it sends a cacophony of chimes through the hall when Gideon pulls it. Outside, there’s a soft flurry of noise, but Philomena smells the woman before she’s even knocked on the door. Philomena sits up, the water still at her collarbones, and looks at her maker. A foreign expression is struggling to take form on her face. Gideon, like her, can hear the maid’s heart through the walls. He can hear the whirlpool of her blood.

Gideon leans against the tiled wall and folds his arms over his chest. He smiles knowingly, one foot tapping a heartbeat’s rhythm. “What you feel inside of you? That insatiable hunger? That longing and ache and fury? That’s me too.”






The washmaid is pretty and voluptuously plump. She is not much younger than Philomena, but she has the calloused, experienced hands of the working class with a contrasting bare-faced freshness that makes her radiant. Her toffee colored hair is pulled up and wrapped in a white scarf, the ends of her curls flopping messily over the sides, and her cheeks are the colors of strawberries from bustling between steaming, humid rooms. She wears a linen skirt that she’s tied up near her knees and her chest is wrapped in simple cotton bands so the soft curves of her stomach and hips and the fleshy, sensual weight of her naked arms are all exposed.

“Mr. Edwards,” she says, cheerful, dipping into a quick curtsey. “We did not know to expect you tonight. I would have had the Madame prepare your usual room.”

“Quite alright, Tenley,” he tells her.

She darts her eyes up and down his clothed figure. Even his shoes are still on. “Is the bath disagreeable, Sir? I must say the jasmine is awfully strong, and I always took you for a bergamot fellow myself.”

He waves his hand dismissively then points through the steam. “The lady, Tenley.”

Tenley squints her warm eyes, focusing through the steam, then smiles with a glint of mischievousness. She dips another curtsey before approaching Philomena. Tinley has her arms full of soft towels which she places carefully next to the bar cart before plucking an amber oval shaped bottle from the top. “Missus,” she says softly by way of greeting before kneeling near Philomena’s side. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, we just don’t see many ladies here. Not that it’s completely uncommon or unheard of. Most prefer the washouses by the station since we cater to the gentlemen of Linemell, but a quid is a quid, as the Madame always says, and everyone deserves to be pampered.”

When Philomena does not respond, Tinley’s smile twitches and she flicks her eyes to Gideon who strolls slowly closer. He nods at her reassuringly.

“Might I …?” Tinley asks, but she does not wait for a response. She slips Philomena’s wet hair away from her naked shoulders and neck with the casual expertise of one accustomed to nudity and pleasure. After pouring a small amount of oil from the amber bottle she’d chosen earlier and rubbing it between her palms, she glides her fingers down the back of Philomena’s neck and over the tops of her shoulders. Tinley manages this for all of ten seconds before the redheaded woman is shoving away from her, pushing towards the other side of the bath.

“Stop,” she says, urgently, but hardly above a whisper. Philomena keeps her back to the washmaid. And then, eyes lifting to Gideon, she says, “Make it stop. Please. I can’t… I can’t bear it. It’s so loud. Make it stop. If it doesn’t stop, if it doesn’t stop, I can’t― “

Tinley stands and steps back, her brows knitting together in concern. “Mr. Edwards?”

“Shh,” Gideon says, and Tinley thinks he is talking to the woman in the bath, but then he has cool hands on her hips, her shoulders, and he’s loosening the fastening of her bindings. He’s slipping the scarf from her hair, letting her golden curls fall, ghosting his mouth below her ear and she almost doesn’t feel the quick slice of pain against her throat.

Philomena refuses to look. She’s crossed her arms across her own body, she’s dipped further into the bath, but she can smell the instant Gideon’s teeth break the girl’s skin. The scent of the blood, caught between Tinley’s neck and Gideon’s mouth, makes her nauseous with hunger. Her mouth pools, like an animal’s, with spit. If the girl’s heart had been loud before, it was deafening now. She is sick and desperate all at once. She has never felt such a desire, such a yearning. It’s as though her entire being has been replaced by an empty pit, a gashing maw. She doesn’t even have time to think of God or sin or damnation, but she’s keenly aware of Gideon walking Tinley forward, urging her down the marble steps, into the waters like an offering. And that’s what this is, isn’t it? An offering because the girl isn’t even frightened. She’s glassy-eyed and flushed, her hands clutching, grasping, in an odd needy way at the arm Gideon has draped around her stomach, like she wants to get closer to the monster feeding at her neck.

When Gideon draws back, his mouth red, he catches Philomena’s eyes, his face half-buried against Tenley’s curls but his gaze vicious.

He doesn’t have to tell her to come this time. She does it willingly, rapidly, forgetting her modesty and shame in the haze of newborn bloodlust and the desire to quell the throbbing ache that she’s become. Gideon releases Tenley from the step, and the washmaid stumbles into the bath, disoriented, into Philomena’s clutching arms. There’s a trail of blood down the girl’s throat, and Gideon watches as Philomena licks there, her fingers holding Tenley’s face, pressing against her skull, bruising the skin, as the girl awkwardly bends to accommodate the taller woman. When Philomena tears at the girl’s throat, against the bite Gideon has made, she gives a terrible groan of urgency and hopelessness. It isn’t enough. She doesn’t have his fangs; they haven’t come through. She has dull, weak, dying human teeth. She has to tear, Tenley’s skin caught between her useless incisors.

Maybe it’s the tearing, the pain, or maybe Philomena, simply so unaccustomed to this new, tortuous life, has no concept of how to use her own influence on others. Either way, Tenley’s eyes, once so cloudy and content, are bright and terrified. She’s screaming, struggling, the water churning between them with her distress, but Philomena is stronger, more brutal, more demanding.

Once the blood touches her, she is no longer herself.

After this night, she will struggle. She will fight against it, this new being that has come to live inside of her, this murderer.

But here? Now? With Tenley dying in her arms, with the blood salty and rich, coating her throat, soothing her parched insides and filling her with an unprecedented love, Philomena gives in.






She doesn’t remember leaving the baths, seeing Gideon’s dreadful home, or how she’d fallen into such an unresponsive sleep in the depths of his basement. But she wakes with a terrible, sudden force, and she’s immediately sick.

He’d dressed her in the same tattered clothes from the night before, and all the efforts of the bath seem to have been wasted now. Only the hunger remains.

And Gideon.

She vomits again, tears stinging her eyes out of memory, like her body still thinks she’s living. “Why?” She gasps around the black bile and wasted blood. It smells foul, like swamp and noxious decay. Philomena clutches her stomach then turns to be sick for a third time, doubling over, ropes of the vile remnants trailing from her mouth.

“You took in her death,” Gideon explains, shrugging a shoulder. “You must stop before the heart does. You were gluttonous, little nun.”

“You let me!” She groans, digging her fingers into her own mouth to desperately scoop out the fetid blood.

“Now, now,” he chides. “Why would I do such a thing?”





The hunting becomes harder and easier, a nightly testament to their battle of wills and her own ravenous desires.

The boy is simple because he’s fragile, delicate.

He smells like chemicals, like the stink of the factories. They waft up from his skin and his eyes are wet and tired behind his dirty hair, and in him Philomena thinks she can sense all his ancestors before him, and she’s surprised he doesn’t recognize her for what she is. For what they both are as Gideon trails, lazily, behind her in the alley—fingers skimming the brick while he whistles an old forgotten tune. He has the collar of his coat turned up against the cold, and he’s already losing the warmth from his own fresh kill, but he’s devilish all the same. It’s the gleam in his steely blue eyes, like a hawk scenting a kill.

Philomena had refused the whore and, before he could stop her, had rushed from the brothel to avoid lunging at the tender arm Gideon had offered. Now, he’s making sure she feeds, and she can feel his presence lurking at her peripheries, the thick tension in the air an invisible sign of his command.

He’d picked a child. Her first. A street urchin barely over the age of ten. It’s a punishment for refusing the whore, she knows, and feels guilty for each.

Still, Philomena tries anyway. “Run away.” She tells the child, but the words get lost in the hunger pooling on her tongue and come out as a croaking whisper.

The boy stares at her for a long moment then says, “What are you?” He takes a step back.

So he does sense Mena for the monster she is and maybe even Gideon behind her, but not in a way he can fully acknowledge. Somehow this is worse and better at the same time. Her life has become a cycle of paradoxes.

I’m sorry, she wants to tell him, but she grabs him instead. She holds him when he fights and still, still her teeth are not sharp enough. It’s so much worse this way, so much harder than it should be. There is no mercy, and she makes a mess of it. When it’s over, the urchin’s skin is staining red. It’s not a stain that he’ll ever be able to remove now. His pupils are fixed and dilated, his mouth open in a way he’d never let it hang in life.

Gideon steps over Philomena. She watches, dazed, as he grabs the boy’s chin between his cruel hands, presses his knee against his forehead, and snaps the hinge of his jaw as easily as cracking a walnut. Before she can do more than give a horrified, bewildered gasp, Gideon is digging his fingers into the corpse’s mouth, forcing his hand in impossibly deep. He curls his sharp nails into the gumline, by the back canine tooth, and pulls. The tooth is stubborn because the body is still fresh, but his nails cut into the bloody root and with a wet audible tear it eventually loosens. He shifts his fingers to the other side and pulls the left one out.

Gideon lets the body drop. He rattles the canines in his bloody hand like dice then holds out his palm to Philomena.

“Here,” he says, smirking, “while you wait for yours to grow in.”






“Are there others?” she asks while they prepare for the coming sun, her long knees drawn up to her chest. She hates this basement, the smell of it, the damp earth and the old bones and the dried blood and the misery. It suffocates her from every corner.

In contrast, Gideon is unperturbed. He swings himself down easily from the broken opening above, using the shattered, busted remnants of stairs near the bottom as a landing matt. Basque caws as though unimpressed and fluffs his wings, balancing on half a floorboard above his master.

He does not answer her.

Philomena looks at Basque. “Why does he follow you? And do your bidding—he does, doesn’t he? How can you speak to him? Or him to you?”

Again, Gideon does not answer. He drags an old chair, mildewed and missing a leg, from one dark corner and situates it against the far wall. Folding his long body into it, Philomena knows he’ll sleep like that, a posed statue.

She stares at her hands. “You took my life and gave me this, and yet you will tell me nothing? Teach me nothing?”

At this, Gideon scoffs. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do? You refuse to eat, yet you want other lessons? Be what you are and then see how gracious I can be.”

Philomena lifts her gaze to him, unflinching, and there is something of her old self still there. “I see no grace in you.”

Mockingly, he reaches down and grabs a handful of dirt, dirt that stinks like the grave, and flings it at her. She turns her face but feels the bits of soil scatter across her cheek, her eyelashes, her lips.

“Careful, or I’ll come over there and rip your virgin cunt bloody with my teeth. Or maybe you would like that? Maybe that’s why you test me so.”

He watches as she draws a breath, settling herself. She brushes the dirt from her face and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, nestling her cheek against the top of her knees so that she can stare into the darkness to her right.

“Will I die if I do not eat?”

“I will not allow you to starve.”

“Will I die?”

He groans, exasperated. “You will be a wraith. A fate worse than death. Emaciated and no better than a walking corpse dug from a grave.”

She is silent, considering. It annoys Gideon.

“Be thankful Linemell is a city of sinners and death. We can kill with hardly a worry. You waste such opportunity on this relentless ordeal. Think of what we could be, Philomena, together. What triumphs—”

“No,” she says, simply, honestly.

He scowls at her although she cannot see the expression before telling her, sardonically, “No martyr was ever sainted without first suffering.”

Here we go again!

Notes:
* Francesca’s death is violent. I mean, it is no joke, but I tried to show restraint. There’s also some animal deaths here and the typical vampire-appropriate gore. Just a fair warning!
* “Such games we’ll have now” is blatant thievery since the line comes from Penny Dreadful.
* I make an allusion to Yeat’s “The Second Coming.” That’s intentional and not, in fact, a blatant theft.
* Annunciation is supposed to happen in March and mark Gabriel’s visit to Mary. Do churches have festivals for this occasion? No idea. I’m making this up as I go, people!
* There’s so many similes throughout this thing. I don’t know why. I’m not usually simile-crazy (I don’t think?) but whatever.
* I tried (as much as possible since I just love to write in 3rd person omniscient) to keep this Gideon-centric so that other aspects of the piece could be written from Mena’s perspective.


( & so many horrors )

Here we go, the final set of shorts, the second half of the thank-you gift! daintiestmartyr, I hope you enjoy!

Notes!

* There’s some repeat kiddos in this second set of shorts, but I intentionally tried to make them differ completely in tone, mood, and, well, even the subject matter. Also, it’s okay to have favorites. There, I said it!
* The Haven and Luke short is toxic as hell. It’s essentially a drunk fight-and-fuck scene, but things get nasty and violent. I also begin in the middle of it, so there’s not much context as to WHY they’re fighting. I just wanted them to fight. Fair warning.
* In an effort to not write sex scenes for every single short (I have to practice writing something else, damn it), I accidentally get Margot and Jasper into a bit of a tiff. So sorry. They deserve better. I don’t know how to write happy scenes! They're so boring! I said that too, okay!
* Harper and Oriol’s short is set a short time after they’ve started getting physical as a trio with Zane but before they’re going behind Zane’s back together due to their ~pair bonding~.
* Introspective!Palmer is the hardest thing to write. He really doesn’t get enough time/attention in my brain, so I struggled to, well, think about what he’d think about.
* The final short introduces a new set of characters! As a surprise! I kept it all vampire-centric to avoid stepping on fleshing out the nun’s personality and details and all that creative licensure. I’m also really digging the idea that older vampires “claim” territories, so Gideon gets to claim Linemell, running off lesser vampires and defending his turf until some bigger baddie comes in. If that ever happens.

( so Eden sank to grief )