Starlight
Jordan Castillo Price
ISBN:n/a
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Copyright ©2005 Jordan Castillo Price
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Blood brought us together.
It was a night like any other night, dark and rich, full of possibility. I had already fed, and so I lingered deep in the park, far off the gravelly trails, watching the stars. I lay on the earth, my long black coat spread beneath me, hands woven together behind my head. They say you can’t see the stars in the city, but they’re wrong. If you get far enough from the streetlights and peer up between the trees, they’re there, countless small lights flecking the indigo-black night sky.
My thoughts flashed red as the smell of blood bloomed nearby, instantly sharpening my senses. I heard a muffled scream, belatedly realizing I approached like a sleepwalker, drawn by the scent of life.
The sounds changed soon, from struggles and screams to tearing and crunching, underscored by a continuous low growl. But the scent of blood grew so strong, so overwhelming as I neared that I could hardly hear.
I parted black tree boughs and found a small clearing where I saw him for the first time. I’d expected a predator animal of some sort, but he wore the shape of a man instead. Blood, black in the starlight, covered his nude body. Were it daylight, I’m sure the grass around him would have been painted red. But by starlight, I saw only him, his pale, sinuously muscled body dappled with dark, dark blood.
I stood, not even not even daring to breathe, and watched him feed. I’m not sure how he sensed me, but after a few moments he snapped to an eerie stillness, and then turned. His face was long and pointed, canine; his hands, in silhouette, splayed like great claws. And somehow, even in the shadows, even through my stillness, even in the very dark of night, he saw me.
His lips curled and starlight glinted off his fangs. He growled.
The skin prickled up the back of my neck at that sound, but I stood my ground and watched. I was unaccustomed to actually feeling threatened, stronger and faster than any mortal, practically invulnerable since my change centuries before. But the blood-covered beast before me was easily as magical as I—would I be immune to him, as well? Perhaps not. The thought stirred my belly.
His eyes narrowed as he continued to growl, huge gobbets of bloody flesh falling away from his muzzle. His eyes were locked on me, challenging me or warning me away, I don’t know. But finally, after a terribly long time, he broke the gaze. I can be very still.
He reached down with his peculiarly human hands and shredded what was left of his prey’s clothes. A set of keys and an empty beer can clinked against a stone. He grabbed up some other items from the prey’s pockets, and in a silvery blur, was gone.
My chase instinct surged—strange, because I wasn’t hungry, and yet a longing filled me that felt as sharp as hunger. I paused just long enough to glance at his prey, only partially eaten, belly open, ribs gleaming in the starlight. So different from the way I took my prey, so much more brutal. It intrigued me. Following the scent of fresh kill, I followed him.
Luckily I’d seen which way he went, though my surprise had made my reactions slow. I put some distance between myself and the prey, and searched instead for the scent of the hunter. I picked up the blood-animal smell of him with little effort, as he was so covered in gore, and yet I marveled at how quickly he must have moved for me not to have overcome him yet. As quickly as me. That strange feeling fluttered in me again, and I stopped for a moment to consider it. Arousal. I stood for just that moment to savor it. It had been so very long since I’d felt that.
Once I identified my motives, I pursued him still faster for fear of losing him. His trail snaked into the city, through a business district that slept, and into a poor, grimy neighborhood with warrens of filthy alleys. The smell of garbage nearly blotted him out for a moment, and I wondered again how he could be so incredibly fast. But then I picked up his scent again, noting that it was now less of gore and more of sharp, animalistic sweat.
I charged up a dimly lit street, nearly colliding with a group of smoking teenagers, then realized I’d lost his trail. I backtracked, lingering at the mouth of an alley, and then caught his scent again.
Alley, street, alley, I tracked him carefully, vaulting over tipped garbage cans and hulks of abandoned cars, ducking out of the view of mortals who should have been long asleep in their homes.
And finally, by the flickering light of a television that strobed through a window, I found him in a dead end.
He stood in the alley, man-shaped and clothed how, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. He must have been there for at least a few moments, I thought, to have dressed, and wiped away the blood. Fast, so fast. My groin stirred along with the pit of my belly, and the sensation baffled me. I could hardly recall the last time I’d thought about sex, let alone responded physically to the notion.
“What are you?” he growled, breaking through my stunned realization.
I wanted to ask him the same thing. I thought I knew, but what was the polite word? I plucked my long coat into place, as it was askew from our chase, and stepped forward. I had to get a better look at him. Which meant I had to let him see me.
“I am a blooddrinker,” I said. “But my name is Joseph.” Well, technically it is Yousef. But I do make some small allowances for modern society.
“A vampire.” He stopped clenching his fists. I could see he wasn’t totally finished dressing—his combat boots were unlaced, his belt hanging open. My eyes wanted to linger there, and then I decided it was probably rude to stare. I met his eyes. Even in the dimness of the alley, they were pale. Now, in his full man-shape, his hair was moon-pale, too.
“And your name?” I asked for his name, rather than his...species. To prove a point, I suppose.
He squinted at me, then wrinkled his nose. “Bite me, dead boy.” He turned on the ball of one foot, crouched and leapt. His jump cleared the two-story building that covered the end of the alley. He was gone.
Dawn prevented me from pursuing him further. That, and my own stupefaction.
I found myself back at that alley after sunset. A crumpled towel, stiff with blood, and a bloody, torn wallet marked the spot where I’d last seen him. I lifted the towel to my face. It smelled of old blood, the blood of his prey, but also of his sweat. I tore off a small piece for myself, stroking it between my thumb and forefinger, vowing to find him again.
I searched for weeks, combing the maze of alleys and streets, holding that scrap of fabric and breathing his scent to remind myself why I kept coming back. And just the scent of him became enough to arouse me.
I grew weary of searching for him among the mortals, and the mortals grew wary of me combing their neighborhood night after night. The teenagers tried to buy drugs from me. A police car trailed my wanderings. Frustrated, I returned to my roost and cursed him as the lethargy of daylight closed my eyes.
At sunset, I awoke and cursed my own stupidity. I needed to search the parks.
In only two more nights, I found him. If I had only been searching with my eyes, I would have passed him by, but his scent drew me like a beacon. He looked like a regular mortal sprawled on the park bench in his torn jeans, combat boots and leather jacket. A fast food bag lay beside him, and he idly swirled a french fry in a huge red pool of catsup. “You missed a pretty sunset,” he said to me around a mouthful of fries. He stared straight ahead, not turning to meet my eyes, and chewed with his mouth open.
I cursed the fact that a no pithy retort would spring to mind, because I could do nothing but rake the curve of his body with my eyes. I could see his profile clearly now, young and sharp, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones. He was perhaps a bit older than I was when I was turned, but probably less than thirty. If he aged as mortals do. It was a strong face. Not classically handsome. Impertinent.
Then he swiveled his head to stare back at me, and oh but he didn’t move anything like a mortal, and I was rock hard for him and my breaths were coming fast. His eyes were the palest amber.
“Well, Vampire Joe?” he said. “Whaddya want with me?”
“You still haven’t told me your name.”
He cocked his head to one side and regarded me, then dragged a fingertip through the catsup and licked the thick redness off, eyes locked on mine. My teeth ached. Did he know what he was doing to me? Could he see it? Smell it? I stood statue still. Surely he couldn’t know.
“It’s Danny.”
My eyes followed his finger back to the catsup, and again to his mouth. His tongue snaked out to swirl it. An image of shredded clothing and starlight on pale flesh flashed in my mind’s eye.
“And you can eat—that?”
He glanced down at the crumpled wrappers, then looked back at me and smirked. “It’s not filet mignon, but it’ll do.” He crumpled the castup-smeared papers in a ball and lobbed them at a nearby trash can, missing.
“May I join you?” I gestured to the bench.
He stared at me, blond eyebrows pulled together in a quizzical vee. “Why?”
Mortals flocked to me like iron shavings to a lodestone, but this creature seemed quite immune to whatever charms mortals saw. And so of course I wanted him all the more.
“Don’t you wonder?” I left it at that, to let him fill in the blanks. How we are different, how we are the same. How we would be together.
He stood—or more accurately, uncoiled from his careless slump on the bench. He stood as tall as me, all wiry energy. “Curiosity killed the cat. Joe.”
I watched him walk away. Of course he had a fine ass, too, slim and muscular. It figured.
The next prey I chose happened to be a man. And he happened to be blond. And rather tall. With a strong jaw.
He bent his long throat to me in an alley a few scant blocks from the club where I’d found him. He wore too much cologne—the scent burnt my nostrils. And he wasn’t really blond; the peroxide had left him brassy. But I breathed in my scrap of towel and caught Daniel’s scent, and took a long lick up that mortal throat, and found I was half-hard. The arousal made me giddy. I wondered if I could actually take more from the mortal than my sustenance—not that I ever had, with a mortal.
My teeth sank into his soft (if overly-fragranced) neck, his hot life pulsing under my lips, and I drank, blood coursing over my parched tongue. My gnawing thirst receded as his blood flowed down my throat, while the mortal moaned and stroked my long hair, grinding his crotch into my thigh.
I held him loosely, one hand on his low back, the other cupping his ass, and slowed my drinking after the initial surge, allowing my fantasy to spin out a little longer. Daniel, weaving his fingers through my hair, riding my thigh with his hard cock butting my hip. Daniel who would moan my name as my hands ranged over his nipples. Daniel, whose canine blood would slake my thirst.
The mortal’s moans turned to whimpers, and I stopped feeding. He was light-headed, and it would be greedy of me to take more. And his cologne was truly cloying. I clasped him to me and he trailed kisses over my cheek, his tongue darting towards my ear, and I bent my throat to him and he covered it with his slick kisses and ineffective mortal nips. I was glad he didn’t try to kiss my mouth. Because the fantasy wouldn’t hold together if he did, not at all.
I pushed the mortal away far enough to catch his eye and willed him to sleep, and immediately he drooped in my arms. I eased him to the ground, propping him against the brick building and folding his hands over his belly.
I turned to leave and froze. A blond figure blocked the alley’s mouth.
“Wow. You don’t kill yours?”
I stared stupidly. That scent, that clean animal scent. I’d thought it was all the scrap of fabric. But it was Daniel.
I gestured toward the mortal. “Would you like...?”
Daniel’s eyes, pale in the ambient neon light, flickered towards my prey. “Nah. He’s got way too much cologne on.” His eyes came back to rest on me, and he was staring. I could detect a spike of something in his scent, feel his heart working a bit harder. Hunger, or lust?
I took a step toward him, slow and smooth, waiting to see if he would bolt. And then another. He stood his ground. I stopped with a hand’s-breadth between us, and stared into his eyes. Did he know about the hypnotic powers of my kind—and did they even affect his kind? The sound of his heart working filled my ears, and I was still hungry for him, though I had already fed. His eyes filled mine, huge. Then he blinked and shook his head. He thumbed a bit of blood from the corner of my mouth, and licked his thumb.
He smirked. “I don’t know how you can eat ‘em after you let ‘em hump you like that.”
He was gone, leaving a trail of laughter in his wake.
In the following days, I felt anxious. I’d never known another creature who could approach me without my hearing it, who could outdistance me, and break my gaze. I lurked in my lair, worried that he would sneak up on me if I set foot outside. Or hoping that he would, and then worrying that I wouldn’t know what to do with him once he did.
And then I started to worry that that he wouldn’t find me again. I decided I had to find him.