Page 38 of Nosfer-Meet You

Afew nights later, Juliette and I are listening to some music while she paints. We haven’t discussed what happened between me and the Helsing, which I appreciate. We don’t need to. What’s done is done. A dark night of the soul, I guess they’d call it, if I still had one. That’s what I adore about Juliette. She just … gets it. Gets a lot of things. I guess that comes with the territory when you’re as old as she is. Not everything needs to be a complicated dissection. She never psychoanalyzes me. Not like Eli used to.

I get up to turn the record over to the other side, and she sets her brushes down.

“You never told me the end of your story,” she finally says.

I freeze in place. “No, I didn’t. But you didn’t tell me the end of yours, either.”

She tilts her head as she stares at me for a long, pensive moment before wetting her lips. “I suppose not. Would you like to hear it?”

I nod. “Only if you’re up for it.”

“I wouldn’t have offered if I was not,” she says with a shrug, then she turns around completely on the crate and hugs her knees to her chest.

Sometimes I forget just how much of a badass she is, because when she’s perched on the crate like that, she looks just like a normal girl. Small. Delicate. Totally huggable, too. Since our night at the drive-in, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about touching her. Making her squirm and sigh again. Making her come felt like a privilege, almost, one that I wish I could earn again. But whenever I try to bring up the subject, she just shuts down.

A one-off, then, I guess? Probably doesn’t want to make our friendship weird, which I respect. I’ve had friends with benefits before, and it was fine. I’d rather be something else to Juliette, but at this point, I’ll take whatever she wants to give me.

I flip the record over and let it play, then sit down on the cloth in front of her. “Then I’m all ears.”

“Where were we?” She taps one of her claws against her bottom lip. “I suppose you would like to know what happened to my sire in the end? I’m afraid it’s rather anti-climactic…”

Chapter 21

Juliette

THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE

1897

The evening it happened, dinner was a simple affair. After the turn of the eighteenth century, Dante had hired a decorator—a fellow vampire, who came highly recommended—to re-do the entire mansion. The dining room table no longer takes up the span of the entire room; now it is far more intimate. We sit directly across from each other while Selene lingers nearby in a corner like a cobweb.

“You’ve hardly touched your peasant’s heart, my dear,” Dante mutters before drinking deeply from his goblet. He dabs at his blood-stained mouth with the vintage napkins he took from a king he ate sometime in the year 1415. I never asked him for the details, and I don’t care to know them. Most of the furniture and things inside the mansion were stolen as trophies from the people he killed, like some sort of macabre museum.

He's right. I haven’t touched the heart on my plate. Ever since he forced me to gorge myself on my own mother’s heart, I’ve lost my taste for offal and other organs. Yet he serves it to me at least once a month anyway, like some sort of twisted reminder.

“I’m not hungry,” I say, pushing the plate away.

Dante’s eyes narrow, and he sets his silverware down. “You haven’t eaten anything at all today. You must eat if you are to remain strong, little dove.”

Selene takes a step forward, but Dante shakes his head.

“No, no,” he says. “We do not need that this evening, I’m sure, Selene.”

I press my fingertips to the indentation of my throat and wince. I can still feel Selene’s malicious grasp around my neck. She tormented me for years, forcing me to eat when Dante couldn’t bring himself to do it personally. Self-preservation kicks in, and I grab the dessert spoon from my napkin and dip it in the pool of blood collecting around the heart.

“That’s a good girl,” Dante says in a tone bordering on affection. But affection was reserved for humans, not creatures like us. He said so himself, once, when I asked him for a hug. That was at least a hundred years or so ago. One evening, he came home from a raid on a nearby village, and I greeted him at the window, my arms wide open.

“Little dove,” he said to me, not unkindly. “That sort of thing is for mortals. It is beneath us. We are not humans any longer, are we?”

The memory of the rejection still makes my eyes sting with bloody tears. Dante notices the look on my face, because he leans forward on his elbows and says, “What has you so upset this evening, my dear?”

I force myself to look him in the eye, then lick the spoon clean before setting it back down like I am a timid barn swallow. “Nothing,” I lie.

His expression hardens. “You know you cannot lie to me. I know when you are lying, Juliette.”

“I just … I— I would like to leave the mansion, I suppose,” I rasp. “Sometimes the mansion is a little suffocating.”

“You do not leave the mansion unless it’s important, you know this. It’s not safe for you out there. Besides, we have been raiding often these nights,” he says. “Surely, that should suffice.”