Inspired by this photo:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d6/4e/5f/d64e5f73268f272bb3dbce2284a0ff50--karen-elson-my-photo.jpg“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark?”
- Werner Herzog
On the first day of her absence, his hunger is a pinprick. A scratch down the inside of his arm. A fly circling fresh decomposition - he can still swat it away.
Three days later, the hunger simmers deep in the pit of his stomach, caught in the teeth of the demon inside of him. He’s gnawing at himself.
By day six, it is a pick-axe in his temple, a wedge of ice severing his brain. An infestation.
Roman can feel the pressure it causes between his eyes. His brows knit together. His mouth feels dry. He’s agitated at meetings, his usual sarcasm giving way to a quick temper and a streak of cruelty. When one of the familiar companions – a brunette he’s sampled before with easy enjoyment – slips into his lap after dinner, a quip on her mouth and a suggestion in her gaze, he pushes her away, watches her scramble on the floor in confusion. He knocks her arm with the tip of his boot. Makes sure she knows to stay away.
Later, in the darkness of his Spartan room, prone inside of his wide bed and sterile sheets, he tries to silence the cacophony of heartbeats surrounding him.
Closing his eyes, Roman thinks of starvation.
The singer is remarkable.
Hers is a remote beauty – a Gloria Swanson face with glacier eyes, her mouth the color of pomegranate wine, her eyebrows thin carved arches the width of a razor blade, her high cheekbones and square jaw framed by her full garnet hair. When she smiles, the severity of her beauty softens, the gaunt sharpness of her face relaxing, and she is made warm. But like stoneware reverting into clay - made pliable once more, all the preciseness within the finished product lost outside of the kiln - the warmth doesn’t suit her. She looks better stoic, statuesque, withdrawn.
Her beauty becomes unimportant when she sings. Secondary to the crushing, poignant, impossibly rich voice. It seems inconceivable that such a small mouth could hold such a voice, one bursting with control, but evocative, sublime, heading towards rapture. Her voice pushes and assails, crowding into the minds and hearts of those who listen, fluttering their pulses, making them dizzy. Many within earshot cry.
Roman does not. He’s too hungry for emotion, too unfocused. The soprano’s performance of an aria (he knows it – he’s heard it before – it was famous once, in another lifetime, but he can’t recall the composer or the sounds of the instruments that should be accompanying the voice – he can’t hear anything other than pulses inside thin wrists and the scent of blood is everywhere – just out of reach) adds to the pain in his head. He keeps a hand on the tufted arm of his wingback chair, his fingers white and pressing into the fabric, the other holding a tumbler of untouched whiskey. Inside the glass, there’s a solitary ice cube melting, diluting the amber liquor, cutting the bite.
The chair to his left is noticeably empty. One chair further, Augusta sits as stern as a schoolteacher, her hulking bodyguard behind her. If she’s effected by the singer, her face does nothing to show it.
After a week, Harrow’s absence is beginning to become noticeable everywhere – especially now, here, where his nonattendance must be an insult to the soprano who has traveled by caravan from compound to compound at Harrow’s request, specifically for tonight’s private performance. Roman has seen the woman’s eyes stray to the empty chair on more than one occasion, the expression interfering with the performance required by the aria’s depth of sadness. Between lifting one ivory arm with a rising note and turning her face towards her shoulder, there’s an expression of anger that Roman understands well.
But Harrow is still recovering from his fractured cheekbone. When Roman saw him the day before last, his eye was still red from blood and broken capillaries. He could open it, but that side of his face was bruised, swollen. Physical proof of the injustice done to him. Harrow would not show himself in such a state, so his sister and his lieutenant have had to make due, hoping to placate the artist with their own presence and gratitude.
It’s a poor substitute. Augusta finds any art to be fanciful, unnecessary, a waste of resources. Roman’s charm should be enough to offset her cold professionalism, but every time the singer opens her mouth, all he can see is the wet, red column of her throat, her tongue inside a pink muscle that he would like to tear free.
Not for the first time, he thinks of Lene. Lene whose apt fist is the cause of Harrow’s foul mood, his fractured cheekbone, his absence. Lene whose smell suddenly seems everywhere, trapped inside of Roman’s rooms, impossible to ignore once she herself has vanished. Lene whose blood, ambrosial with its own preternatural strength and heady thickness, has been so easily offered to Roman month after month that its sudden disappearance has left him teeth-aching and gutted.
It’s his hunger now that makes him miss her, more than anything else: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air under water. His thirst pounds over him in waves that leaves him stiff-jawed and sore, every vein inside of him keenly aware of its own emptiness, that useless organ inside of his chest a dry, dusty thing. When the waves wash back, Roman is barren. Empty. A husk.
Part of him hates her for this weakness she has caused him. He has not felt this type of ravenousness desire since he was a fledgling, eager to nip at every available throat, desperate to fill that seemingly insatiable thirst, and weeping at the incomparable pleasure of each new mouthful of blood that his fangs could rip from his prey. If he could think, he’d find his own hatred despicable – he knows the particular catalyst of events that led to Lene’s punishment within the desert box, knows his own accountability, knows that his missing of her should be more than just a biological response, that there’s a loneliness inside of him as boundless as the sea – but he can’t, so he doesn’t.
Distantly, Roman realizes the room has filled with applause. He tilts his head, the response of a marionette on tight strings.
Augusta is politely clapping. She glances at him with open disapproval as though he’s made some irrevocable social faux-paus and leans across the empty chair to whisper, “You had better look more impressed than that. She’ll be expecting to dine with you now. Considering the money Harrow has spent on this pointless fiasco, you might as well enjoy it.”
Roman clenches his jaw, the hand holding his whiskey tight enough to shatter the glass.
Harrow’s private dining room is intimate but gilded, a fire crackling in the stone fireplace, the wood floor gleaming in tones of amber and oak, the distressed walls opulent with their crown molding. The compound’s kitchen staff has prepared a spread of luxuries: charbroiled oysters, prosciutto-wrapped pears, sugar-sprinkled strawberries, walnut and ricotta crostini, soft boiled eggs with cracked pepper and arugula, and endless bottles of chilled sparkling champagne.
The scene has been set for a seduction. It’s as clear to Roman as it is to the soprano, but the smell of so much cooked dead meat and slowly spoiling fruit makes his stomach clench. If he was a different creature, he’d be sick.
The woman holds a flute of champagne with dainty fingers, standing near the fire, unimpressed by the display and the silence.
“I apologize, miss Fulton,” Roman says while clearing his throat, pushing a hand through his slick-backed hair, “for Harrow’s absence. He fell ill shortly before your arrival. I hope I can be a suitable replacement.”
His smile is a shark’s that makes the soprano raise an eyebrow. “Are you a fan of opera, mister …?”
“Roman, my name is Roman.”
She peers at him with the cold look of the Arctic. The same unimpressed, disbelieving expression and makes a hum of acknowledgement. “I only ask because you seemed to find my performance underwhelming.”
He places a hand over his heart and dips his head, deferring. “If it underwhelms me, miss Fulton, it is only because of my brutish upbringing. I’m afraid I am more suited for war than art.”
“Evianna. Enough with the miss.”
Roman takes the seat furthest away from the table of appetizers and watches her, trying not to stare at the pale column of her neck, the naked gleam of her shoulders above the sapphire cut of her rich dress.
When he doesn’t say anything, she laughs, mirthless and with a gesture of her fingers in the air. “Yes, I know. It’s a fiction, of course. I was told Evianna had a more elegant, refined quality. My real name is Coral. Like the color.”
“And what a color it is.”
She can’t seem to decipher his meaning, so she makes that humming noise again and sips from her champagne.
Three glasses later, there’s a flush of pink on her cheeks. He’s distinctly aware of it, his eyes hawkish, sharp, following the line of her body as she walks the perimeter of the room, trailing her fingers over the woodwork and the molding. She has an elegant gait – something she’s surely practiced – and her strapless dress pinches her waist, outlining the smallness of her body. Weak. Vulnerable. When she brings her glass to her mouth, Roman can see the lines in her lips, the nearly imperceptible imprint of lipstick left behind on the crystal.
She’s been discussing her own fame, casually, without a shred of humbleness. It’s the type of speech he would expect to find in one of Augusta’s propagandist pamphlets, highlighting all the qualities that place man’s ability above a beast’s: the arduous hours she spent training as a child, the fear of losing her voice after a bought of sickness, the admirable blurring of innate talent and practiced skill that made her remarkable in a world turned wasteland. Unlike a beast born with God-affronting advantages, hers was pure, traditional, the archetypal story of self-made success.
“Does he do this with all his important guests?” she asks at the end of her monologue, pausing at the table to slip a strawberry between her lips. She looks like a woman eating a tiny heart, and the crush of her teeth into the fruit causes Roman an immediate pang of lust.
He has difficult following her non sequitur. “Who’s that now?”
“Harrow.”
“Does Harrow do what with all his important guests?” His thoughts feel like sludge, moving slowly, as thick as syrup, inside his brain. He’s aware of the way he’s snapped at her just now, impatient.
Coral grins at him, the first true expression of the evening, her mouth stained by the strawberry. “Wine and dine them. Like the old days. This is supposed to be a seduction.”
“Is it?” He unbuttons his waist jacket, and she grins more. “You seem acquainted with how this is done. I’m at a disadvantage.”
“I don’t believe you for a second.” She tips her glass back, head following suit, and drinks the rest of her champagne in one mouthful. Roman follows the dip of her throat as she swallows.
He wants to be more business-like when he stands, more efficient, a paradigm of self-control to match her earlier reserved nature, but he crosses the room in four steps, one hand catching her beneath the ear, his fingers tangling into her hair and pressing into the curve at the base of her skull, the top notch of her spine. She gives a startled cry of surprise, but it’s as artificial as her sweeping arms and turned face had been, another performance for an admiring fan.
Coral has to look up at him. There’s a tiny smirk on her face. She places a hand on his chest, below his shoulder, where his heart should be. It’s a damsel’s gesture.
He closes the gap between their bodies. When he kisses her, it is hard, angry, full of a week’s worth of tension. There’s a flavor on her tongue and teeth - strawberries and champagne and copper.
With their mouths together, he can taste into her heart.
She is pale moonlight. A blood ocean. A siren calling from the wreckage. There’s a beguiling, confident manner to the way she stretches herself across the wall, pressing her front to the crown molding, one arm poised above her head as though she’s already expecting to use that hand to brace herself, to claw away at the paint beneath her nails.
Roman ignores the shake in his fingers when he pulls down the silver zipper of her dress, splitting the fabric open, revealing the cream contours of her shoulders, the subtle half-hidden outlines of her breasts. He sweeps her hair to one side.
Stares at the spot where shoulder curves into neck.
He does not think.
He only feels.
Feels the nervous, excited beat of her heart inside the cavity of her chest, dimly protected by thin skin and fragile bone. Feels the sea-crash roar of her pulse points. Feels the way her blood travels through her like a musical score. Feels her hushed breathing as she waits, anticipating the strike.
He has not hunted in what feels like decades. He has survived on what has been given, what has been offered.
Inside of him, something deep and restless stretches its jaws.
His fingers over her mouth. The press of his chest against her back, his weight pinning her, a hand between her shoulder blades.
The smell of fear.
He tears into her throat the way wolves tear into a fresh kill. He rips her flesh and muscle at the apex of shoulder and neck, the blood flowing instantaneously, as red as sin against her skin, running down her arm, over her right breast, seeping into her dress, turning blue fabric purple. When she screams, his hand is a shackle across her mouth, silencing even a soprano’s power. She is liquid copper, tart as lemon, and when was the last time he’d tasted human blood? Base blood, but hot and sticky and powerful all the same, still churning with its secrets and desires and emotions, all of it funneling into his hunger, making him monstrous, making him ache with a different pain. A pain of splendor. A pain of power. Every frantic beat of her heart is the pounding hooves of wild horses. Every mouthful of blood is a carrion bird’s cry.
Her breath rattles.
He’s moved his hand from her mouth, is gripping her side again, pushing her into the wall. She slips like a doll between his body. A murmur or gasp breaks free from her pale mouth.
Her heart is a distant beat now.
Her fingers curl against the wall. She’s too weak to scratch.
The darkness inside of him tells him to drink, to feast, to swallow her life.
Roman pulls away with an effort, like breaking one’s own chain. His mouth is slick crimson. There’s blood across his jaw, matting his beard.
What’s left of Coral slips into the curve of his arm, the right side of her body streaked in red, her dress stained. Suddenly weary, as full as a tick, he places the singer in a chair, watches her head roll back on her neck, and surveys the damage he’s done with a clinical detachment. She gives another one of those rattling breaths, the whites of her eyes glaring beneath her cracked eyelids.
Roman removes his jacket. Rolls up the sleeves of his undershirt. He tilts her head more to the left. There’s a chunk of meat missing at the base of her neck, the wound seeping, wet and raw as gristle.
Coral whimpers.
“Oh, I know,” Roman soothes, speaking in a murmur, all the fierceness of his voice gone. It’s the tone used to calm lambs before the slaughter. “Hush now, don’t worry. I will fix this.” He feels the weakness of her pulse and says something in German, stroking the inside of her wrist.
Cradling the back of her head, he opens his own wrist, lets his blood slide against her cracked lips and into the cavern of her mouth.
“Coral.”
His voice like a beacon. Breaking through the fog. She blinks and feels some odd, displaced sense of dread fade away from her consciousness. When her vision focuses, she realizes she’s been staring into Roman’s eyes. A blush crawls up her neck, and she turns her head away, pressing the pads of her fingers to her closed eyelids.
Something there. Some flicker of memory in that darkness.
From across the room, sitting in the chair near the fire, fresh-faced and calm, Roman calls to her. “It’s the wine, I think. Goes to our heads too quickly. Would you like a glass of water?”
“Wine?” Her voice sounds different to her own ears. Vibrant. “You mean champagne.” She presses her fingers into her temple, rubs at the spot above her eyebrow, and looks at him with veiled confusion. It’s easier to regain her composure now that she’s looking at him. In fact, she hardly feels dizzy at all. Quite the opposite. If asked, she’d say she felt five years younger. She’d say she wanted to sing.
Roman barks a laugh, and Coral smiles without knowing why. “Wine. You spilled it. I’m afraid your dress suffered the worst.”
She can’t see any bottles around the room, but there’s a definitive stain on her dress. A sloppy spill, by the looks of it. At least an entire glass. She makes a noise of disappointment, tsking, running her hands over the contours of her waist, up the stitching on the side, fretting over the hemline.
He still has her blood in his veins when he pulls Lene from the desert hotbox, when he washes her, when he tucks her into the soft folds of his bed, when he brushes her hair back from her face, when she asks if he’s ravenous.
“I’ve taken care of it,” he says with a wave of his hand.
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