One night I snuck from the mansion to pounce upon my beloved family. Joe, Mary, Leah, Eve. I lived with the selfish attitude that they were my possessions, my dolls. Their blood, their memories. All mine.

But before I got to their house I saw Nell, the Pale Girl I’d seen with the Dark Man, Lowen.

I noticed her because she was watching me. No one saw me unless I let them see me. But she saw me.

Lowen was nowhere in sight. Couldn’t smell him or hear him either.

Nell seemed to know me. She knew the monster I was. She had no fear of me at all.

She smiled at me. She waved at me to follow her. She turned from me. She went skipping away.

I followed her.

She didn’t have Blood Vivicanti speed or strength. But she was elusive. She could hide herself from me.

If I lost her, she would appear from behind a house or tree, far ahead, waving for me to follow her farther.

She led me through Idyllville. She led me through the forest, around tree and rock.

She led me to the cliff where it all began. The place where Wyn had saved me from the two men. The place where I’d fallen and broken. Wyn had pierced me there. He’d saved me. This was the place where I started to become what I became.

 

 

 

 

Nell was on the edge of the cliff, balancing, walking back and forth on it like a tightrope.

She turned and faced me. Her toes on the edge. Her heels poised over the fall.

Her voice was high and soft and gentle. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

No one had ever been waiting for me.

She tilted her head to one side. She pulled her collar away from her neck, exposing the sweet spot on her throat.

“Pierce me,” she said. “Drink me, Blood Vivicanti.”

I was amazed. How could she know me?

“You’re a monster,” she said.

I was under the assumption that only Theo, Wyn, and Ms. Crystobal knew about the Blood Vivicanti.

Nell smiled at me, trying to be coquettish, but she seemed too pitiable. “A ghost told me about you.”

She speaks with ghosts?

“Only one ghost.”

Who would want a monster like me to drink their blood?

“I don’t want you to.”

Then why was she offering herself to me?

“I need to.”

Did she want my venom to make her feel better?

“I need to feel something.”

I understood how she felt, the poor thing.

She nodded sadly. “I am a thing.”

 

 

 

 

Nell put her face in her hands. She began weeping. “I’m not your friend,” she said.

“That hurt,” I said.

“Feeling hurt is feeling something.”

“I’d like to be your friend,” I said.

Nell looked at me through the divide of her fingers. A horrible sound came from her throat. I couldn’t tell if it was laughing or wheezing.

“You covet me,” she said.

I covet much.

“You shouldn’t pity what you covet. You should have it.”

Nell took her hands from her face.

“Have me,” she said. “If I give you my self, then I’m a gift to you.”

I was stunned. I didn’t know how to respond.

She pointed to her neck – the sweet spot.

“Pierce me,” she said again. “Drink me.”

 

 

 

 

Much was going on inside me. I was thinking of Joe and his family. I was thinking of Theo and Wyn. I was even thinking of my biological father who drank his way out of my house and home.

Ages zero to seventeen had been a life of making the best decisions for a girl trying to survive the thoughtlessness of others. But now that I had the power to move mountains, all my decisions had seemed so reckless while I struggled to survive crossing the threshold from girlhood to womanhood.

The urge to pierce Nell was as small as a grain of sand compared to all my other thoughts and feelings. Yet this urge was the lust of my body. I didn’t lust for blood, only for escape. It was the animal of my self-control that I fed until it consumed me. And I fed my self-control until my self lost control. My lust overpowered my reason.

 

 

 

 

I prowled closer to Nell.

She waited for me, showing only one emotion. Not fear, not worry. Just the phlegmatic acceptance of a courtesan who had a job to do.

I leaned close to her neck.

Her skin smelled like ice.

I opened my mouth. My Probiscus extended from the tip of my tongue. Wave upon wave of pleasure rolled down my throat and into my stomach.

The tip of my tongue touched her neck. Then my bee stinger pierced her skin. The flesh opened. The muscles widened. In slipped my tongue. Out flowed her blood. I drove down deep into her neck.

Nell’s blood tasted ice-cold.

Her Blood Memories were a black hole.

She had no heartbeat. She had only one thought… Pain. That’s all she felt – pure pain – the torment of the damned. So that’s all she fed me.

Into my mouth poured the brink of brokenness and the breadth of woundedness, the edge of rejection and the cut of replacement.

Nell was a creature bred to be forgotten, alone, and lonely. She was the furthest form of the thing I could have become.

And now she was inside me, her blood, her Blood Memories. Who she was was flowing through my veins. How she was was feeding my sinews and my spirit. I could not vomit up all the agony that I’d already swallowed down.

 

 

 

 

I released Nell. I fell to the ground.

I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed my throat.

The Pacific Ocean with her powerful waves had not been able to drown me.

But the gentle current of Nell’s blood smothered my every attempt at breath.

The stream of her consciousness was a vast expanse of emptiness and sorrow.

 

 

 

 

Yet one image lived in Nell’s blood like a cancer. The image was of the man I’d seen with her. The Dark Man.

Lowen.

Lowen was laughing at me in her Blood Memories. His cruel laughter filled the void of Nell’s existence.

He hated her. He hated me.

Now his laughter was filling my last thoughts as I suffered the suffocation that lurks within the woeful mind of an abused girl.