Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,23

To turn a capable wife into a crazed neurotic, to kill a first-born son here, a beloved daughter there. Just to darken their lives once in a while, as the generations came and went.

So every few years I return to Ireland for old times’ sake, and listen with pleasure when people say, “That Blackwater Hall is haunted; it’s cursed the family are!” And I slip silently into the house and torment the hapless inhabitants a little more. I could have killed them all, but I let them stay and survive. Why?

If I were of a more violent disposition, I would have ousted the usurpers long ago. I prefer to play a long and subtle game.

How much more sense it makes to let them stay, to enjoy the slow burn of revenge over a century or three. I tolerate them for the pure pleasure of haunting them.

“Just a sip, just a drop of your lifeblood,” I whisper to Elizabeth in the darkness. “It must be freely given. Without it, I’ll fade from Earth and be dragged into hell.” In the euphoric convulsions of our lovemaking I draw on her neck as she groans with delight and pain. I resist the urge to take too much; she’s too delightful to me, alive. And so she thinks she’s saving a poor damned soul from the abyss!

For a while, anyway. By the time she realizes the falsehood, she no longer cares.

It helps that I have this supernatural glow of beauty—the honey in the trap—that her new husband lacks. And she has the darkness in her soul that welcomes me, loving the danger and deception of it, loving the sheer sin.

I was right about the husband. He’s some remote cousin of hers and his name is George. He’s an older man, experienced in the ways of the world to the point of debauchery. He’s handsome enough in his way; tall and strong, with a ruggedly arrogant face, thick brown hair, an overpowering sense of arrogant masculine entitlement. (Probably I would have been just like him, had my human life progressed as planned). George has made a fortune from trade in Dublin. He’s been everywhere and done everything, and yet he expects as his due a shimmering, untouched maiden on his wedding night! To me, he seems coarse and charmless. There can be no love in this match. Society has shackled her to him, but her hidden self writhes and lashes against it like a serpent.

Elizabeth acts well the part of his new bride. How innocently she glides from church to bridal chamber, trembling and virginal, God-fearing and full of nervous anticipation. How flawlessly she feigns pain and inexperience! Attentive to detail, she even covertly pricks her finger on a pin to fake a few drops of virgin blood (ah, her sweet blood) on the sheets. Drunk on wine, blind in his triumphal lust, the husband suspects nothing.

As he takes her, grunting and oblivious, she looks at me over his shoulder. Her lips part and her eyes shine as she smiles at me, her secret lover in the shadows.

Every girl should have one.

I am standing once again in the courtyard, which still seems to echo with the screams of Mary and her pallid weed of a lover as I tear them apart, feasting on their blood, ripping the still-moving fetus from her womb to suck the tender fluids from it as if from an unborn lamb…

I write about all this as if I still cared, but in truth, I don’t. When the unholy trinity of vampires came to feed on my blood and grief in the rain—golden Simon, dark Rasmila and pale Fyodor, as white as ectoplasm—I entered a clearer state of consciousness in which human pain no longer tore me. Since I was determined to burn down Blackwa-ter Hall at the time, you could say that they saved the house, my three demon-angels. Should I thank them?

Whenever Elizabeth and George are absent, I walk through the salons as if I own the place. It has an eerie grandeur. There are high ceilings with elaborate plaster decoration, impressive fireplaces surmounted by coats of arms, rows of long windows hung with gorgeous curtains. Exotic rugs sprawl on polished floorboards. Along the walls are the antlered heads of stags, staring out with black marble eyes. And countless dark portraits of ancestors, fixing their painted gazes on mine.

Double doors lead from one great room to the next; here a drawing room that is insistently golden; wallpaper, frames, curtains, the