Blood Tales

-- By Aine Déande

I. Patterns in the Darkness

I.1. DARKNESS COME

~*~

The first time, I took her virginal blood.

She tasted of ashes, and raspberries; she reminded of hisses and cheers. She shook in rhythm to my thrusts; her tongue tracing silken strokes down my throat and jawline. Her eyes, for once, forfeited and still; though her hands trembled.

Her nails clawed into my back as I bit down into the sheets. Not that I could not have bitten her neck, instead, for I had both right and claim, however I did not yet wish to see my Bella maimed, in whichever way. For the craving overtaking my body at the sight of hers had been a frightening, unfamiliar emotion; coaxing me ahead, even there where I had not dared go in the past.

I had been predator, I had been beast... I had been savage where I had wanted to be tender. To earn trust in the one who would be chained only by her own covetings, if not her own demands. To realise her covetings were a reflection of my private ones shook me open, loosened me in coming breath, and I took her as brutally as a mating between animals in heat.

I was ashamed of myself, and yet when she shivered as I plunged ahead I had wanted to bite her neck. I had wanted to leave a mark of my possession, one more damning than any Dark link ever could. It was a terrifying concept, one that I did not wish to face, and so I did not challenge myself by leaving visible evidence of my lust on her ridden form.

Her blood, when I licked it from the inside of her thighs, kissing her down, had tasted of sunburn and mist. The sound of a bell chiming had started resonating in my head when she fell asleep in my arms afterwards, and I lay awake that night, listening to the bells reminding me of my childhood (though some, of forked tongue, might say I never had one) and the orphanage's standard Sunday visitations to the local church.

To worship a God that I would one day place beneath me was nearly as humiliating as the experience of my wrath on Bella's body: the passion overriding me, the undercurrent of torrid emotion that had wrenched from me my calm and sent me winding down, or up in a sort of vertigo fashion, into the threshold of her womb.

It had been a moment of such loss, of such tranquil destruction, as to make any lesser man a religious one. As it was, I bathed through the night with my eyes closed and my mind open. Bella slept restfully atop my chest.

But let us begin from whence time gives understanding of our circumstances. There is no true beginning in a life the nature of mine or Bella's, but our collective memory provides me with the perfect opening: her introduction.

For that is where it all started, is it not? First her introduction to the Circle; to me. Then, her introduction to the Dark Arts, though a certain time collapse as well as a change in surroundings was required to go from one to the other.

I arranged her coming of self, as well as if I'd written the history of her life: I could not have created her better if she had been my Eve... though as she could well have been formed from my rib, and it would not do to have me reduced to the character of Adam, I should perhaps look for a more appurtenant analogy.

But let us not get ahead of the facts. It began at Riddle Manor, my favoured house of tainted irony; in the year that Bella turned eleven.