Jemma Green
Content Warning: Death and Violence
It is a ruefully prevailing myth amongst the common world that to vampires, the blood of virgins tastes the sweetest. But I know this to be untrue, for the immortal tongue prefers a darker drink, and as my mistress always says: there is no flavour greater than the red euphoria of sin.
Sinners are not hard to come by. In the decade I have served my mistress, I have found them in every step, every shadow. Today, however, I find one in the sun. He is shoveling soil by a farmhouse beyond my village. The sinner stands there amidst the wheat fields – his black hair and young face incongruent in the burnished swelter, his knife still drying its throat-slit coat where it is wedged in his belt – burying all evidence of his crime. Golden stalks hide him from passing eyes as he gives his sin to a grave, thinking it hidden, thinking it secret.
He has not seen me yet.
I stalk through the crop between us, my boots rasping like the wind. For a moment, I feel like a vampire, predatory and hungry, but unlike my mistress I possess no silence of step or grace of movement; I am human, from heartbeat to bone. If he wanted to, the sinner could hear me approach, could turn and run. But it is a common thing I have noticed about sinners – they are wanton and desperate, and all too often plagued with a subconscious urge to be caught. There is no thrill to sin without witness. Priests who forsake their vows, knights who take their good swords to plunder, dutiful husbands and wives who lay outside their marriage bed. Each one of them enjoys the risk of judgement, and just like the murderous sinner who now stands deaf to my approach, now reaches for his knife as I press a cloth over his face, now falls limp into my waiting arms, each one’s veins are a sate offering for the daggered mouth of my mistress.
Like so many before him, I bring the sinner to her. Often, I lay them upon the rugs of her parlour, or against the silken sheets of her bed for her to attend to when she hungers. But as I unload her feast from a cart in the courtyard and drag him inside by the ankles, I find my mistress already has an appetite. She sits by the hearth, her pallid bones stretching long. My mortal body aches from the effort of wheeling the sinner all the way from the field, through the cobbled village, and up the ridge of my mistress’s estate without being seen, but I cannot rest until my work is complete.
I drop his feet and take up the food’s shoulders, draping him gently over my mistress’ thighs. She allows me to lay his head reverently into her lap, stroking my cheek as I withdraw and wait. She cradles the skull, as she has with a thousand skulls before, drawing the jaw back from the chest, and exposing the long column of his throat. It’s mesmerising – each contour, ridge, delicate bone, the tendons and muscle unconsciously flexing as the sedative wears off and the sinner opens his eyes. He blinks, groggily, as though waking from one dream into another. But the nails along his skin, my mistress’ face looming above him in the firelight is no dream. There is always a struggle at first, no matter how strong a sedative I use on the food. Like headless hens, they thrash, they try to run.
But there is no running from a vampire.
The sinner wrenches his head away, but my mistress is too fast, too efficient. Her teeth are moonslices, delicate canines that always find the perfect place along the throat to puncture, to pierce and drink from, like the precise beak of a hummingbird pierces the trumpeted petals of a honeysuckle. They do so now, swiftly making their mark along the sinner’s neck. She breaks the skin and sucks, bringing blood forth. It beads from the seal of her lips, running tracks down the slope of his collar. This is always when her prey panics, when their struggle becomes a fight, and the fight, ironically, becomes confession.
‘I’m sorry,’ the sinner babbles, ‘I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t mean to kill them. I’ll be better. I will. Please, let me be better. Please.’
I have never understood this part – why the sinners, being drained of their life, suddenly beg forgiveness for their crimes, their indiscretions. But it is exactly this, the bearing of the soul, the flaying of all pretense, all pride, that my mistress relishes most.
This is why vampires cannot resist the sinner’s blood: there is ecstasy in vulnerability.
I have seen it, the moment my mistress’ pupils dilate in violent delight, the full eclipse of her irises, the mad flush of her cheeks rolling from face to chest to limb. I have seen her knuckles whiten on the skulls of her food and watched in awe as she cradled them in her lap, climbed wholly over them, swallowed their bodies in her arms, closing like the jaws of a venus flytrap. I have heard her heartbeat, where before, undead, there was no pulse. She finds life in the blood of the fallen. She has told me; it is the closest feeling to love.
I want to know that feeling. And as my mistress’ food stops confessing, his voice vanishing, his prayers unanswered as his head lolls and his body is dropped carelessly to the floor, I decide that tonight, I will.
As soon as she is sated, my mistress leaves. It is dark out, and there is much fun to be had on a full stomach in the village at night. While she is gone, it is my job to clean. The cleaning is always long. I am meant to move the body, divest it of its clothes. It is a ritual of nakedness, one where I take the flesh to fire and burn away the sins. I then will clean the parlour and scrub blood from the stones. I must salt everything. Vampires are particular about their homes. My mistress enjoys the taste of sin, not it’s ghost upon her rug.
Usually, I am as quick in my cleaning as my mistress is in her feeding. But for now, it can wait. I kneel beside the remains of my mistress’ dinner on the floor. Without his blood, the sinner looks younger, waxy with the pallor coming death. His shirt’s collar is torn and stained from feeding. His fingers twitch toward the fire, it’s banked coals and flickering warmth. I think he mistakes it for the sun.
Looking at him now, dying on a vampire’s floor, I’m still not sure why he’d killed them, what drove such a young man to murder. But my job has never been to question the sins. My knuckles brush the curls from his face. There, along his neck, his blood is drying in tidelines. I stretch his head back, revealing the two sharp incisions from my mistress, red and raised. They look painful. Festering. Rotten.
The sinner’s breath is ragged and fading, and his eyes are closed. He will not see this violation.
My mortal heart races as I lean in. He smells of salt and iron, sweat. Shivering, I touch my tongue to his neck and lick a trail of dried blood. It tastes grimy and unpleasant, but I do it again. Again and again, impulsively, until I feel his weak pulse against the grooves of my tongue, reverberating through my teeth, shaking my bones.
I suck.
The blood itself is wrong. My humanness rejects it and demands I spit it out. I refuse. I swallow each slow draw, close my eyes, and feel the throb of life sliding into me. A giddy looseness, a drunkenness, crawls over me in goosebumps, prickling down my neck, tingling in my joints.
I suck harder and let my hands wander over the sinner’s body. He has no more confessions, only pleas that he whispers hoarsely, though I do not listen to them. I am lost in sensation, in the rolling back of my eyes beneath their lids and the feeling of heavy falling, like the rain becoming flood, the ocean swallowing the sky, the knowledge that there is life in my jaws, and I can do whatever I want with it. This sinner has committed the most egregious of deeds, stolen life, and yet here he is in my grip. I control him. In this moment, forbidden, I can taste his soul.
My mistress was right, it is the reddest kind of euphoria.
Author: Jemma Green is an emerging writer and editor based in Meanjin/Brisbane who is currently in her final year of a BFA Creative Writing at QUT. With publications in Glass, Forget Me Not Press, FROCKET, and ScratchThat, she is the winner of a 2022 AWC writing contest and is a facilitator for a pop-up salon at the QWC’s 2024 QPoetry! event. Working fluidly between forms, she writes both prose and poetry, focusing on a combination of intimate emotion and a lush use of language.
Artist: Callum Ross-Rowland (he/him) is a Meanjin (Brisbane)-based creative writing student at QUT. He was the 2023 Literary Salon’s Photographer with his recent Diploma in Photo Imaging from Billy Blue (Torrens). He was recently shortlisted for Photographer of the Year in the Animal and Nature category and regularly photographs for Artful Heads magazine, where he captures portraits of artists from different mediums. Find him on Instagram @alrightatart.
Edited by: Ricky Jade and Benjamin Forbes