We lay naked, spooning, on her four-poster bed, the silk sheets having been thrown back during our nocturnal activities. I curl my body up, trying to avoid skin contact, but she curls more tightly around me, not letting me get away, this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It will only hurt for a second, my love.” Her\nvoice is nearly a purr in my ear. I tuck my hair behind my ear to keep it in\nplace, to keep her breath from making it dance, tickling me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I don\u2019t care about the pain.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She traces a finger along my side, and I force myself not to\nflinch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“What is it, then?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I take a measured breath to avoid sighing. “You know\nwhat.” I may not be afraid of pain, but I am afraid of death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Oh, dear heart. You shouldn’t fear that. You are\nstrong enough.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her tone, rather than making me feel better, makes me feel\nworse, like she’s talking an ignorant child, lying about how bad the day’s\nrations were going to taste. We always knew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“How can you be sure?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Her hand goes from tracing circles on my arm to cupping my\nbreast. “Because of what you’ve endured thus far.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her voice smolders with lust, her hand showing her\npossessiveness of me. I should be afraid. I should feel cold. Used. Put off.\nBut the claim she’s laid on my body is seductive. I have some power here, after\nall. My skin flushes and my lips part. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She chuckles deep in her throat as she senses my body\nrespond to her, and she nuzzles my neck. I allow it, for the moment, letting\nmyself get lost in a wave of passion. She’s right. I’ve been through a great\ndeal to get to this point, to be the bed mate of a brood mother. I’ve pleasured\ndozens of these super-human beings, but that’s not even the worst of it. I’ve\nbeen hunted, beaten, bitten, nearly drained of all my blood, and forced to\nwatch friends fight for their lives and still die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All for the chance to become one of them. To be young\nforever. To never get sick. To be inhumanly strong. To become immortal, nearly\nimpossible to kill. To never fear the night again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The nights are long, now, the daytime grimy and pale under\nthe burned sky. And there are things in the darkness that will kill you quicker\nthan thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So yes, I endured a lifetime of suffering to get here. To be\noffered this chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One I may have become too afraid to take. For not everyone\nsurvives the change. I have fought so hard to live all my life that it terrifies\nme to now put my life in the hands of chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her<\/em> hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her teeth graze the skin of my neck, and I do flinch this\ntime. It’s a mistake, a show of weakness. She may have once been human, but now\nshe’s a predator. She wraps herself around me tightly, making sure I can’t\nescape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I am tired of your games, Lana. You will become one of\nus, or you will die, but it will happen tonight.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her voice chills me, and I don’t move, like a rabbit caught\nin the light of a night rifle’s scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She sighs. “Come, now. I would rather you do this\nwillingly. It increases the chances of the change taking root.” Where her\ntone was banded iron only a moment ago, now it’s back to talking to a child. I\nsuppose we are children, to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I close my eyes and think about my mother. She died giving\nbirth to me. I never met my father. He went into the dark and never came back\nbefore I was even born. A common enough story that the midwife didn’t think\ntwice before handing me off to the super-humans, to be raised like cattle until\nold enough to be slaughtered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I escaped several times, but they always caught me. Or I\nalways came back. The super-humans meant safety, of a sort. Only they were\nstrong enough to fight back against the other creatures that live in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I want to fight more than anything, except live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the brood mother won’t want me when I’m old, having\nlived a good, long, human life. She’s right. If I shun her, if I don’t accept\nher bite that will fill me with her brood mother poison and hope that it turns\nme rather than killing me, they will turn me out of the complex. I might not\ndie tonight, but I will die within a week. Exile is worse than a death\nsentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I turn to face her, searching her face for something, I’m\nnot sure what. Love? Compassion? There’s neither of those things there. Just\nthe cold, hard eyes of something not human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the lust is back in her eyes and her voice as she looks\nme over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You came to me, Lana. Isn’t this what you want?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether I want it or not, her hands are on me again, her\nanimal need taking over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to be able to fight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Yes. Yes, I want this,” I murmur as she clutches\nme to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pain rips through my neck as she feeds, and then the\npain gets worse as the poison fills me. And as my heart thuds to a stop, I grow\nfurious. She promised I would survive! I don’t want to die!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through sheer force of will, I push myself up, away from\nher, away from the poison, away from death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sit up and look at my hands, then down at her, where she\nlays with her hands behind her head, smug smile on her face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You lied to me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I didn’t lie. The change took, did it not?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The change did take. I am powerful. Full of energy. The dim\nlight in the room now seems incredibly bright. I can hear the noise of the\ncomplex outside. I smell blood, and realize it’s all over the sheets. My blood.\nMy life blood. Every last drop that was in me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, the change took, but the horrible truth is, despite the\npower the super-humans wield, they had to die to get it. They’re not\nsuper-humans. They are vampires. They are the creatures in the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You said I wouldn’t die.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The brood mother gives me a calculating look. “I never\nsaid those words.” Her expression softens. “You are lovely, Lana.\nCome to me.” She holds out her hand, cold but inviting, her flawless skin\nglistening in the lamp light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She’s right. She never said I wouldn’t die. She said I would\nsurvive. She said I was strong enough to endure the change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I did die, and something else is born inside of me. I\nstill want to fight, but now I also want to kill. Need to kill. Need to kill to\nsurvive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So with my newfound power, I lurch forward and rip the brood\nmother’s head from her body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I hold her head in my hands, staring into her vacant\nexpression, and realize I no longer have anything to fear in the dark but\nmyself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We lay naked, spooning, on her four-poster bed, the silk sheets having been thrown back during our nocturnal activities. I curl my body up, trying to avoid skin contact, but she curls more tightly around me, not letting me get away, this time. “It will only hurt for a second, my love.” Her voice is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}