A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood, #1)

by S.T. Gibson

ven loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.

This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud. If you can still hear me wherever you are, my love, my tormentor, hear this: It was never my intention to murder you. Not in the beginning, anyway.

I wonder if you would have wanted me if you found me like that: vibrant and loved and alive. But you found me alone, my lord. Beaten down to a shadow of my former self and very near death. It was as though fate had laid me out for you, an irresistible banquet.

At the time, I would have called it proof of your love, burning and all-consuming. But I’ve grown to understand that you have in you more of the scientist obsessed than the lover possessed, and that your examinations lend themselves more towards a scrutiny of weakness, imperfection, any detail in need of your corrective care.

War is the whetstone that grinds down all sense, all humanity.

I didn’t start small, with the gentle siphoning of blood from a lover in bed. I launched myself into the midst of my attackers like a fury from myth. And I didn’t just kill them. I tore them to pieces.

I want to believe you weren’t just playing your part. I want to believe your kindness was not just another note in the well-rehearsed aria of your seduction, trotted out countless times for countless brides. But I have loved you too long to imagine you do anything without an ulterior motive.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathed, tipping my face to follow the line of the rafters until they disappeared into vaulting darkness. “It’s yours,” you said. No hesitation. Was this the moment we were joined in marriage, when you offered me a share in your crumbling kingdom? Or was it when your blood first spurted into my mouth?

I knew then I would chase your tiny moments of weakness all the way into hell and back. What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with wanting?

Your hunger for me was always more apparent under the cover of darkness, when you didn’t have to arrange your face into any semblance of civility.

think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.

I wouldn’t realize until later that you were irritable precisely because I was in bloom, because there were suddenly so many sources of joy in my life apart from your presence.

“You’ve never complained about my trysts before, nor have I complained about yours.” “We hunt together,” I corrected you. “We take lovers together, or find bedmates to amuse ourselves for a few hours alone. They have never been affairs.”

I had given up appropriate when I had given up my ability to eat mortal food, to walk abroad in the sun. Then why did my heart twinge whenever you looked at her?

How can I blame you for wanting her, my lord, when I wanted her so badly myself?

Now I understood why you were so enamored with her. She was as cunning as you were, and as cold as a Transylvanian winter. Beneath the fripperies and the giggles there was a girl made of steel, one who would do whatever it took to survive. You could never resist a survivor. Or a mirror.

esire makes idiots of all of us.

agdalena sighed into my kiss and I knew I would kill for her, die for her, do it all over again and then some. I had never wanted a woman like this, not even Hanne, not to the brink of such total desolation. It reminded me of the way I loved you, and that shook me to my core. One body could not hold such fervor, such feeling, I thought. It might rip me in two.

I fell in love with her quickly, even as my head railed against the stupid machinations of my heart.

“Don’t tell me you think we’re rivals, dear Constanta. Haven’t you realized by now that there’s enough of him for each of us?” “I’m not thinking about him,” I said,

I dashed through the door while you were kissing her, into the dark and the rain without so much as a bonnet on. I had no idea where I was going, I just wanted to get away from the life we had built together, from the cycle of brutality and tenderness.

In that moment, I couldn’t have predicted what would happen next. You could have kissed me or slit my throat and either would have made as much sense. Still I walked to you. Slow, obedient steps. I walked when I should have run the other way.

You kept her close at hand always, insisting it was because you loved her, because you wanted to protect her and couldn’t stand to be without her. As someone who had been loved in this way for centuries, I also knew it was much easier to keep an eye on someone who was close at hand, to guide their mind and direct their steps. You made it into an art form, this quiet sort of violence. You were so far into our heads your gentle suggestions so often felt like our own thoughts.

It always amazed me how you could play victim and aggressor at the same time.

“Love makes monsters of us, Constanta, and not everyone is cut out for monstrosity.

I thought that she was simply fading the way flowers denied sunlight droop and die. Magdalena lived for her freedom, and with it taken away from her, life lost its luster.

Potential. You always loved that word. You were drawn to potential like a shark to blood.

You must have known, my lord. You always knew. You could sense the moment one of us began to draw away from you with the acuteness of a bloodhound. That’s when either the iron fist or the velvet glove came out. Sometimes it was both.

I loved you too much, my lord. I craved you like maidens crave the grave, the way death burns for human touch: inconsolably, unrelentingly, aching for the annihilation in your kiss. I had no practice saying no to you.

I had a weakness for weakness, just like you.

You held out a gloved hand to Alexi, welcoming him through an invisible door that Magdalena and I had already walked through. My heart battered wildly in my chest. Part of me wanted to throw myself between you and Alexi and tell the boy to go home, to forget all he had seen and heard. But another part of me wanted to welcome him into our warm carriage and hand-feed him berries until he was sated.

In that moment, a thin fracture ran through my heart that has never been repaired. It was a wound in the shape of Alexi’s name, and I scarcely knew how to hold all that feeling inside me. My heart was expanding, making room for him in a world already defined by two great loves, and it hurt so sweetly.

There was no saying no to you, not now, when you had drawn Alexi into your world of lust and finery. He had passed the point of no return the moment you first smiled at him.

You held him by the throat, watching waves of rapture cross his face while Magdalena and I drank from him. He looked like a lithe young Christ, crucified between two beautiful women with you as his cross.

There was no way you would have given Alexi your approval to bring people over to the house. It was our sanctum; no one stepped foot inside except servants and meals.

“You have your sisters.” “We cannot exist only for each other!” Alexi screamed, right in your face. You slapped him.

I wondered if withholding yourself for those hours was another kind of punishment. You would think we would be happy to be rid of you, but we had been weaned on you like children on mother’s milk, and we were always just as relieved to see you come home as we were to see you ride off. You had debased us all over time, as slow as dripping water wearing a hole in stone. We couldn’t abide you, but we couldn’t live without you.

You were content to share Alexi with us so long as he remained soundly in your thrall. When he started to wander out of your grasp, you tightened your grip so much he could scarcely breathe.

here was no huge argument that predicated my decision to betray you, no ultimate act of tyranny. I simply broke under the weight of a thousand tense nights, a thousand thoughtless, soul-stripping words. I felt like I was losing my mind in that place, and eventually my desire to do something about it, anything about it, outweighed my fear of you.

“I won’t tolerate sedition,” you said, bringing your face close to mine. “I made you and I can unmake you. You belong to me, Constanta. Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. Say it.” “Blood of your blood,” I wheezed, barely able to form the words. You tossed me aside and I let out a cry like a kicked dog when I hit the floor.

“It would be easier if he hated us,” she said. “But he loves us all terribly. And if we go on letting him love us, that love is going to kill us. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

You had Magdalena pressed against you when you opened the door and Alexi nipping at your ear, but you stopped short when you saw me. The breath caught in your chest and your pupils went wide with desire. Even after hundreds of years and countless other lovers, I could still arrest you, in the right lighting and with the right pliant expression on my face. “My wife,” you said, taking my face between your hands and tipping my chin up just so into the angle that you so enjoyed. You liked me best when I was like an oil painting, perfectly arranged and silent.

“I love you. Look at me, Constanta, my jewel, my wife. I love you. Don’t do this.” I saw every soft moment we had shared flicker over your face, and you were so beautiful. Desperate, vulnerable. Fear for your life made you look like a man who could really love and be loved, like you might hand over your heart and all its secrets without my having to crack your ribs open to get to them. Magdalena must have seen it too; she squeezed her eyes shut and wrenched her face away even as she perspired with the effort of restraining you. Alexi only looked scared, a child caught between two warring parents. I was grateful for his innocence, and his strong arms.

The taste of you was unparalleled, dark and rich with grace notes of every person you had ever fed from.

There was nowhere to go but forward. I looked back only once, just in time to see the villagers hold their torches to our home and cheer as it caught fire. The entire house was up in flame in moments, scorching the small empire you had built. Everything, our clothes, our letters, and the memory of the long days we had spent confined in the country house were consumed by the flames. “Gone,” Alexi babbled, the fire flickering in his wide eyes. “It’s all gone.” “We will rebuild,” I said, urging him forward. “We will survive. It’s what we’re best at.” We pulled each other through the muck and the mire, heading for the nearest road. We held each other and we wept, but we never looked back again, my love. Not once.

The first kiss from Magdalena always felt like nicking your finger on the edge of a knife: a sharp shock, and then throbbing warmth. Constanta, on the other hand, was like slipping into a warm bath after a day of hard labor. All relief and unwinding muscles.

Happiness beyond comprehension washed over me. Magdalena was here with me, my stern, beautiful Magdalena with her heart like liquid gold. And so was Constanta, lovely, dreamy Constanta with her mouth shaped like compassion. My sisters, my most intimate friends. My girls, mine.

Here is a secret: I may be fond of the games of love, but I am fiercely possessive in my own way. A little bit of my heart travels with them when they circumnavigate the world, and I am always desperate to be reunited with it. We three were made to fit together, and I am not entirely myself unless I am nestled between the two of them.

Constanta was beautiful enough to make an apostle out of an apostate, and I was no exception. I wanted to worship at the cathedral of her body until she cried out like ringing Sunday mass bells.