We are all born of violence, and screaming, and bloody flesh. Kat said that. Kat said it, when we were standing outside a poorly lit bar on some back-alley Philadelphia street holding hands tight enough that I could feel the blood surging sluggishly through her veins, like every centimeter took a metric-ton of energy. We are all born of violence, and screaming, and bloody flesh. Some of us are lucky enough to die the same way.

I had felt lucky, standing beside Kat, in the white cocktail dress she had bought for me at a nameless boutique in Italy months ago. Thick starched cotton. Cutouts that left my ribs visible, vulnerable. It went with my skin, she assured me, the dark tan I’d developed from so many days basking in the Mediterranean sun. Kat liked my skin. She liked to run her fingers over it and test its firmness as if her fingers were a stand-in for her sharpened teeth.

We had been there for a reason. I had to remind myself, because it felt distant now, like the amber glow of Kat’s eyes above that breakfast buffet when she’d stolen me away. The ritual, it required blood. Copious amounts. Enough for Kat to lose, and it couldn’t be mine. So instead, we chose a poorly lit bar on a back-alley Philadelphia street and Kat ordered me a drink, fruity, sugary, the way I liked it. Her arm draped over my shoulders possessively and I liked the coldness of her skin. I had grown accustomed to it. She whispered low in my ear, and I pointed to the men I thought deserved to die.

And then she killed them. Just like that; messily, chaotically, the way Kat did everything. She took two men by the hand – she said two men would be enough, for what she had planned – and led them to a quiet, unoccupied, industrial alley behind the bar, and she tore into their necks. And I watched.

I loved the way she killed. It was messy, ferocious, animalistic. Kat sliced her steaks into delicate portions with a fork and knife but she gnawed on the meat of a man’s throat, sucking sweetly from the jugular, teeth reaching for vertebrae. She would lift a man into her lap with one arm or prop him against the wall on her thigh, her muscles flexing with deceptively hidden strength, while she ate away at him. Cries for help gargled into watery nothingness. I loved how she stood there that night, blood dripping from her teeth, her lips, gathering in the hollows of her collarbones. She grinned at me, and I grinned back. She was like a child freshly fed, gleeful and fidgety, but the way she lingered there, the bodies of two dead men at her feet, throats torn out and small, slippery pieces of skin still clinging to her lips – it was impossibly erotic in a way I would never, I was sure, be able to put into words.

“You like the taste of blood now,” Kat had teased, pressing me against the damp brick wall. Her Louboutin heel pushed away the head of one of the men so that she had the room to step between my legs, to skate her fingers possessively up my stomach, to kiss me. “You’ll like it even more tomorrow.” She said it like a singsong, like a promise.

I don’t remember how long we stood there, kissing, lost in each other like it was the first time. Kat had long given up caring about privacy, just like I had, when the truth of our shared invincibility had settled into my bones after one too many victories over fate. We kissed loudly and violently, and were surely making a mess – Kat’s palm slammed against the side of a nearby dumpster when I put my hand up her dress – and we drew attention.

A man across the street, smoking a cigarette, outside a music venue which advertised on its flickering marquee a C-list conservative country star performing two nights from now. The street was dark and his baseball cap hid his face in shadow, which I would have found ironic if I was paying any attention to him. “Hey!” he called; his boot made a scraping noise against the gravel when he stubbed his cigarette out. “Take that nastiness inside!”

Ranking among Kat’s favorite pastimes was terrifying hecklers, so she made a point of turning her head and leaning just enough into the light that he could see the shape of her canine teeth and the blood staining her chin and neck. The blood getting on my nice white dress.

“Freaks,” he said at first, as if he couldn’t think of a better word. It was nothing we hadn’t heard before. Then, “disgusting” – again, commonplace, and I almost wanted to laugh – but when his eyes narrowed and he looked at us, really looked at us, I got the sense that he did not like what he saw.

“Unnatural,” he whispered, like some big unpleasant truth had been revealed to him, the heart of all of our ugliness, all the things we’d done or let each other get away with. “You’re unnatural!” he said again, hollering this time, one accusatory finger leveled at the space where our bodies met, where the blood seeped from Kat’s dress to mine. He spit on the ground, and a minute later he went back inside.

Kat brought my attention back down to earth by squeezing her fingers into my sides. “Such nice compliments,” I giggled, because I wanted her to know that I was okay.

“Such a kind man,” she agreed, and kissed me even harder than before.

——

Now I laid in a plush king-sized bed in Kat’s basement, in one of her houses I had never been in before. I wasn’t even aware she had a house in Philadelphia. It seemed the least like her of any of her places I had been in until now; no idiosyncratic touches, no rare art pieces hanging on the walls, no abandoned sweaters or coffee mugs left on end tables. The house in Philadelphia was clinical and hard. And the basement was dark – in a literal sense, because the only lighting were the red votive candles balanced precariously on crooked wooden shelves – and in its atmosphere. Perhaps I wouldn’t be the first to die down here. Perhaps many people had, even before Kat owned the place, bricked up inside the walls. Angry spirits vengeful at their own vices, at being led into a place so obviously evil and trusting the man who shook the wine bottle in front of them. Or perhaps I hadn’t yet grown out of the habit of seeing dreamscapes everywhere.

Kat was holding a glass of wine. She was coming towards me, swinging her hips in that way she had, a theatrical seduction she must have learned from watching movies. The liquid in the glass was thick and red. “For later,” she hummed, and set it on the table to the left of the bed.

She had me tied. Tied with silken white ribbons, because she said white was my color. My ankles were secured to the low bedposts and my wrists high above me, to the headboard. She had undressed me, stripped the pretty white cotton from me with reverent hands and peppered little kisses across the available skin. She had given me a lacy white top and matching underwear and stood politely facing the corner while I changed, even though I told her she could look, even though I wanted her to look.

The knots around my limbs were gentle. The extra lengths of ribbon lay down my arm and fluttered in the room’s breeze. I couldn’t be sure where the breeze was coming from. Kat – now straddling me, sitting atop my thighs – played with the ribbons, letting them slide through her fingertips, and I wondered maybe if the breeze came from her. Her cool breath, fanning across my face, smelling of blood.

“So beautiful,” she whispered. I strained against her, although I wasn’t sure why. “Let me make it better?”

As her lips parted, as the candlelight glinted off her teeth, I had a primal reset that I wasn’t entirely in control of, one I hadn’t expected or needed; a switch flipped in my brain from aroused to afraid, and I tensed, I scrambled, I thought, what needs to be made better? What’s wrong?

My knees tensed of their own accord, but my legs – restrained – had nowhere to go. I tucked my chin into my chest to hide my neck. Kat looked at me with such pity, such softness, and stroked my hand. Weeks ago, when we had planned this, she had told me she would need to tie me down and asked me for permission as she ran a gentle thumb across my jaw, as her eyes glowed amber. Sometimes the turning makes you thrash, she had said so patiently and gently I felt like a child in a doctor’s office learning about the benefits of the flu shot. It can hurt, at first, but I can’t risk you shoving me off in the middle. And just like a child in a doctor’s office, I had agreed, because Kat knew better than me, and she always would.

It's good for me, it’s good for me, and I wanted it, I had asked for it – I reminded myself, I knew it in my chest, and then Kat sunk her fangs in.

It did not feel like it felt when she had bitten me before. Then, there had been pleasure – dark, uncomfortable, but an unmistakable surge of it nonetheless. This was a kind of pain that tore the breath from my lungs and the sight from my eyes and left me with a searing, untreatable burn. I felt like I was dying. I realized that was the whole point.

“This is violent,” Kat tried to explain, “this is different from before,” but her mouth was full of my blood and it poured down and pooled on my stomach, on the delicate white lace, ruining it instantly.

I couldn’t care much, because the fire in my mind had sunk down to my limbs, my very veins, and made a home there. Something was burning inside of me. The pain felt intrinsic, internal, like a sleeping beast inside me shaken angrily awake. Each inch of my skin ached. Kat pet my hair and kissed my lips, staining them with my own blood, and dove back in. She spoke directly into the open, weeping wound on my neck, red and violent.

“I’m killing you, my darling, my dearest Amelia. This is what dying feels like.”

But I was not aware of my own self dying because I was too preoccupied with her. With the soft feel of her, heavenly, glowing, sitting atop me like a stone-weight. She smelled like death, which smelled like home. With each suckle at my neck, each tiny tear into my skin to gain more access – she was near to the bone, that I could feel, the muscles and tendons of my neck making room for her voracious starving mouth – I felt her. I felt her. I felt her inside of me.

And then in moments it was gone, and I keened, I howled, I felt outside of myself. Nothing in all the world mattered but Katerina, Katerina, Katerina. I needed her in ways I couldn’t describe. I needed to be inside of her body, to feel the way her blood felt embracing her bones. I needed her to never stop looking at me.

“Shh. Hush, baby, darling, I’m right here. It’s right here, look,” she hummed, her voice eternal, and raised her wrist into my eyeline. Her pulse thundered. Loud in my ears. Her skin was flushed from the earlier feeding, and oh, she looked so sweet. “Right here for the taking, my love.”

I couldn’t do it myself. This, she had explained to me weeks ago; this, the reason for the small curved blade on the nightstand beside the glass of blood, its origin unknown. It was a ceremonial knife and it had Katerina’s initials carved into it, KLK. The first time I had seen it I had flashed with a kind of jealousy I didn’t know I was capable of feeling. No one else should have laid across this bed and bled for her. No one else should have drunk from her, long and deep, and known her in this way.

But now, Kat took the knife and raised it to her own right wrist, even as I gnashed my blunt teeth at nothing, chewed at the air. She drew the thin blade across her skin. The cut was so fine that at first it was invisible – but then, small swells of blood, ruby-red, kind as teardrops, they fell from her wrist and landed on my chest. My bare skin burned. It made me even hungrier.

Kat knew.

Her brows quirked. Her eyes hardened. Cruel, I thought, with the last of the mind I had left, as she held her wrist far above my head. Blood dripped, landed in small puddles on my lip, and when I went to lick it up and taste, she pinched my thigh. Her smile was as sharp as the knife. She laughed.

“Pretty girl,” she hummed, a mean singsong. “Aren’t you so hungry?”

I was hungry. I was starving; I was empty. Some far and distant part of me wanted to spit in her face, blood and all, wanted to screech and claw my way out. I was so empty that I surged forward and tugged hard enough at the white silk tying down my wrists that it frayed and tore. I saw Kat’s brow crease for the briefest of seconds as I got my hands around her neck, as I pressed her to the bed with my pelvis and wrenched her wrist up to my mouth.

This was not the soft, gentle want I felt when I woke Kat up in the middle of the night just to hold me. This was ravenous and impersonal. We had spoken of this, in clinical, abstract terms. I knew it now. This was hunger.

The second her blood touched my tongue, the burning turned to an inferno, unquenchable, raging. No matter how much sweet blood pooled in my mouth, dripped from the corners of my lips, I needed more. In retaliation, I sucked harder, watched her laugh breathlessly as I yanked at her, contorting her body however I needed it best to drink.

I was inexperienced. I was young. I didn’t know how much was too much, or that she might let me kill her, because she loved me too much to fight back. I didn’t realize when I tore at her wrist so hard the bone snapped, and still I kept her pinned there, tasting her.

“Amelia-” she gasped in pain, trying to pull away from me, but I wouldn’t let her. I needed her close. I was now the one with a mouth too full of blood to speak, but I looked into her eyes, and I tried to tell her, you taught me to do this. You brought me into a life of violence and bloody flesh and held my hand while we waded through the wreckage and now I crave, I want, I thirst because of you. I owe it all to you.

I didn’t know if she heard my words exactly, but she recognized something in me, something primal yet restrained. It was the very same thing she had recognized the first time she ever met me. The girl in the ill-fitting sundress with the ill-fitting husband and the pathological need to fuck something up.

I fucked her up. I crashed into her life and made a home for myself without asking – and she never complained. I begged to go through what she’d gone through, to get a taste of the unreal – and she gave it to me. Gave it all to me without caring, because Kat had never asked for permission, so why should I? I was of her. I was with her. I had gotten so close that I had control of her. And now she would demand it back.

With a deliberate move, Kat used that strength I ogled so frequently and flipped me onto my back. Her wrist tore free from my mouth with a wet squelch, and I whined, unconsciously, a needier sound than I was sure I had ever made in my life. She cooed and murmured loving words and retied my arms to the bed with what remained of the silk ribbons. Then she slid off of my body, overheated, exhausted, and lay next to me on the blood-soaked sheets. She still looked at me like she loved me.

I caught my breath. She straightened the bone of her broken wrist so it would heal right by the morning.

I was still hungry, but Kat did not give me any more of her blood to taste. I looked into her eyes and let her stroke my hair until an impossible sleepiness clouded me, until my eyes closed of something else’s accord and I passed out, boneless. In my sleep, she peeled herself away from me and sat beside the bed, watching me rest, watching me die. She thought about taking a wet washcloth and cleaning the rapidly-drying blood from my skin, but she liked the way it looked there, so she didn’t.

When I woke up, she was there at my side with the wineglass of blood tipped towards my lips, and I swallowed, but it didn’t taste the same. If my arms and legs had been free I would have sprung at her, pinned her to the ridiculously soft mattress and taken her blood again; from her neck, from her chest, maybe torn apart her ribs and dragged her heart out with my sharpened teeth.

She knew that. Perhaps that’s why, for a little while longer, she kept me tied.