Page 19 of Nosfer-Meet You

My legs tremble, threatening to give out on me. Desperation forces me to let out a syrupy gurgle that feels sticky on my tongue. “I-I…”

Miraculous. There is no pain. Selene was right. Her blood did heal my throat after all.

“Juliette Lefebvre.” The words tumble out of my mouth, each one laced with Selene’s blood. I push down the nausea as Dante’s face dissolves from one of anger to pure elation. He claps his hands together, making me flinch, and then extends them.

“Juliette! What a beautiful name for such a beautiful new daughter of the night,” he says, and makes his way over to envelop me in a tight embrace. He reeks of carrion, wine, and something else. Patchouli incense, perhaps? Whatever it is, it’s the only pleasant note about him. I swallow hard as he ushers me into a seat at the dining room table. Within moments, a covered plate appears in front of me. Dante sits at the end of the table, watching me with intense fascination.

“Eat, darling. Before it gets cold. It is your last meal, after all,” he says. “Eat.”

Wincing, I lift the cloche—and nearly drop it. No. That isn’t … it isn’t real. Just a trick of my mind, I tell myself. There is no way this creature expects me to eat that. I draw in a deep breath to steel myself and lift the lid again, then place it down beside the napkins. In the center of the silver plate is a fist-sized, still-beating heart. It throbs and quivers in a grotesque, slippery way that makes my skin crawl. This is impossible.

“Now. Eat it,” Dante says, the very vision of a prim and proper gentleman sitting at the head of his own dining table. But there is nothing proper about this. I stare down at the heart, then gape up at him, my lips slightly parted. “Juliette. You either eat it on your own, or I will force it down your pretty little throat. I assume your ears still work, so do you hear me?” he asks, pointing his knife at me. Selene places a silver platter down in front of Dante and uncovers it for him. Instead of a heart beating on his plate, however, it’s … a spleen? Or a liver? My hands tremble to the point I can’t even pick up my fork.

“I can’t eat this,” I mewl pathetically. “Please. Please don’t make me eat this.”

Dante’s gaze darkens as he points his knife at me again. “Darling, it’s for your own good. The chefs worked tirelessly on this meal, and I won’t have their hard work go to waste.”

My eyebrows shoot up into my hairline. “What manner of kitchen staff do you employ that they would … would have to work hard on this? This is the work of a butcher!”

Dante drops his fork and knife with a clatter and disappears in a puff of black smoke. I let out a soft gasp. Selene’s throat hitches as she steps away from the table and scurries off into a dark corner. Where did he go? Am I hallucinating, or did he just … evaporate into thin air? Within seconds, he reappears behind my chair and snatches my throat in his bone-white claws. I don’t even have time to scream before he’s digging his claws into the beating heart, rending it to bite-sized pieces. Then, one by one, he forces the flesh into my mouth.

“Chew.” Dante’s voice is a serrated knife against my own beating heart, sawing away at its tendons.

My blood turns to ice in my veins. Abhorrent. This is unnatural. Inhumane. I struggle against his grip.

“You will chew and swallow, little dove, or you will perish. Although, seeing as how you threw yourself from my balcony earlier without hesitation, perhaps that’s what you want. I will have to make you eat for your own good.”

My stomach upends itself, purging the coagulated blood from earlier out onto his shirt sleeve. He slaps me across the face. Hard. I let out a soft cry as I drop my head, and he picks up another piece of heart. I look up at it on the plate. It’s still … it’s still beating. How is that even possible? What evil magic is this?

There’s no way he’s going to let me leave this place without eating. Defeated, I part my lips, and he places a piece of heart on my tongue, then forces my mouth closed with his fingers. His eyes bore into mine with the intensity of a summer storm, and I roll the bit of meat back to my molars. Then I chew. Each bite into it is an agonizing defeat.

“Good little dove,” he says in a thick, purr-like rumble. He strokes my cheek across the spot he struck. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

I finally swallow the piece of raw meat and shudder in revulsion. Dante steps to the side, allowing me a moment’s reprieve.

“What devilry is this?” I ask, pointing to the beating heart. “How is it still beating?”

Dante’s scowl slips away into a cruel smirk. He raps his claws against the tablecloth. “This, my dear, is the heart belonging to the one who broke yours.”

My eyes fly open. “Wait, what?”

Dante paces around the table as he speaks. “A necessary piece in the intricate puzzle of your transition. The beating heart of the one who ruined your mortal life. You consume it, and you absorb the power of your greatest adversary.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. But who would my greatest adversary be? I didn’t know many people back in the village. There was Papa, and Maman, and⁠—

Realization washes over me like a cold bucket of water.

Mother.

I look down at the blood and viscera on the plate. The hacked off pieces of still beating meat.

Dante stops pacing and leans against the table. “Yes. You’ve figured it out. The one who failed you in life, made you who you are now. She wouldn’t miss you, little dove, if the roles were reversed. In fact, when my subjects found her, she was fleeing the village, bag in hand. Didn’t look back once. Never went back to the burning village for her own daughter and husband.” He shakes his head, and more coagulated blood forces its way up my esophagus. “And your kind calls us monsters.”

The party is a sordid affair held in the gloomiest ballroom to ever exist. Most of the other vampires in attendance ignore me outright as I stand in a dark corner, fidgeting with the lace sleeves of my dress. If I could tear this horrid thing off and throw it into the fireplace, I would, but there’s no way Dante would allow me to have such an outburst without consequences. Somber, discordant notes squelch out of a violin, the lone instrument to grace the estate tonight.

A few curious Nosferatu stare at my hair with strange expressions on their faces, as though they are seeing the moon for the very first time. When Dante touches my elbow, I nearly jump out of my skin. I never even noticed his approach. A disquieting thought. He offers an apologetic bow and hands me a wine glass. I take it, of course, and give it a sniff. More blood, of course.

“You move like a cat,” I mutter under my breath, then sip the thick liquid. I nearly spit it back out. “And this tastes like⁠—”