Hot for Slayer

by Ali Hazelwood

what’s a girl to do when the only constant presence during the last millennium of her life has been a guy who’s contractually mandated to murder her?

“Thankfully. Like that time you tried to kill me in Constantinople. Or the time you tried to kill me in Lampang. Or the time you tried to kill me in a courtyard in Venice. Or the time in Saskatoon, where—and you may start to notice a pattern—you also tried to—”

dagger. When he noticed my eyes on him, he lifted the blade up to his face. And with a smile that did not feel like a smile, he began to lick it clean of my blood.

“Some lives run invisibly. Undetected by most. And when a person comes along who sees those lives for what they are, who acknowledges their reality, who reminds people that there is value in different ways of existing . . . A minute of that is worth more than a thousand nights with a lover. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Sex and blood have always lived in two separate buckets for me. Pleasure and nutrients. Luxury and necessity. Different, isolated, never to meet. But this . . . It’s good. The taste of Lazlo’s blood filling my mouth is delicious, vital sustenance, an addling drug that I’m already addicted to. It’s never been this way for me, and the reason hits me as I take another shameless deep pull: This is the first time I’ve drank blood that was freely given to me.