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

by S.T. Gibson

To those who escaped a love like death, and to those still caught in its grasp: you are the heroes of this story.

♥️

I was your war bride, your faithful Constanta, and you loved me for my will to survive. You coaxed that tenacity out of me and broke it down in your hands, leaving me on your work table like a desiccated doll until you were ready to repair me. You filled me with your loving guidance, stitched up my seams with thread in your favorite color, taught me how to walk and talk and smile in whatever way pleased you best. I was so happy to be your marionette, at first. So happy to be chosen.

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.

My grandmother always said creatures like you made no sound when they descended onto battlefields to sup on the fallen. You were supposed to be a night terror made of smoke, not a man of flesh and blood who left footsteps in the dirt.

“Such spite and fury,” you said, your voice a trickle of ice water down my spine. It rooted me to the spot, like a rabbit entranced by the hunter’s lamp. “Good. When life fails you, spite will not.”

“So determined to live,” you breathed, as though you were witnessing something holy, as though I was a miracle. “I should call you Constanta. My steadfast Constanta.” I shuddered as the rain began to pool around us, streaking through my hair and filling my gasping mouth. I know I had a name before that moment. It was a sturdy name, warm and wholesome like a loaf of dark bread fresh out of the oven. But the girl I had been disappeared the instant you pronounced me yours.

You swept your hands over my cheeks, cupping my face and taking me in. The intensity of your attention was staggering. 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.

I am not your wife anymore, my lord, and I don’t think you ever truly saw me as a whole woman. I was always a student. A project. An accessory in the legal and decorative sense. You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world, you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night’s fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of debts being wiped clean.

our home was half in ruins, covered by the slow creep of ivy and time. It was perched high above the village, in the craggy mountains where few of the common people ever ventured. Crumbling and faded, it looked almost abandoned. But all I saw was splendor. The fine parapets and oak doors and black peering windows. The way the tips of the towers seemed to puncture the gray sky, calling forth thunder and rain.

“All within it is yours to command,” you said, leaning down. You were so tall, and had to bend towards me like a tree in the wind to whisper in my ear. In that moment, my life was not my own any longer. I felt it slipping away from me the way girlhoods must slip from women who are given proper church marriages and cups of communion wine, not bruising kisses and battlefields full of blood.

You must have sensed my weakness. You always did.

I was more shocked by your tenderness than by your miraculous arrival at the moment of my death. In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the convenience with which you arrived. There are no angels in this world to accompany the dying in their final moments, only pickpockets and carrion birds.

Water streamed from my body in rivulets as I enfolded you in my arms, suddenly emboldened. You ran your hands over my slick skin and made a sound like a man agonized. 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?

I cannot remember the details of your room that first night, only the gentle contours of complete darkness, of heavy damask and carved wood beckoning me in deeper. At the time I thought it felt like a womb, nurturing and soft-edged. Now I only remember it as the tomb where we slept through our living death.

You were not my first, but this was something entirely different than a giggling, fumbling encounter behind a barn with my childhood sweetheart. This felt cosmic, like a piece of me was being excised so it could take up residence in you.

You were the air I breathed and the blood in my nursing cup; I knew nothing else except the strength of your arms and the scent of your hair and the lines of your long white fingers. I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn’t any room for tracking time. There wasn’t any room to examine the past or the future; there was only the eternal now.

I didn’t know what to call any of them then, but now I know I was looking at beakers and abacuses, mechanical compasses and astrolabes. All manner of medical and scientific tools both rudimentary and advanced, from Greece, Italy, Persia, and the vast reaches of the Caliphate’s empire beyond. They were laid out in gleaming heaps atop sheaves of parchment. Some of the devices were well-used and others appeared to not have been touched in a century.

“I have an interest in my own condition and so I must have an interest in theirs,” you said, running your finger over a page covered in tight handwriting. I couldn’t read in those days, but I could recognize drawings of human feet and hands, a rudimentary sketch of what looked like a heart. “Don’t you wonder what power animates us after our first death? Grants us our long, unaging lives?”

I wanted to dash myself against your rocks like a wave, obliterate my old self and see what rose shining and new from the sea foam. The only words I had to describe you in those early days were plunging cliffside or primordial sea, crystal-cold stars or black expanse of sky.

He smelled of strange waters, drying herbs, and the slow rot of disease. The scent of sickness quickened my heartbeat, inflaming deep-rooted self-preservation instincts. Vampires learned to fear the smell of infection early on in their second lives to keep them away from meals that might putrefy in the stomach. We don’t die of disease, but infected blood makes for foul meals.

I had become so accustomed to your company that I had forgotten how much it thrilled me to walk among humans, but Vienna brought me back to life. I could see it in my mirror, a new shine in my eyes, the ghost of a bloom in my dead cheeks. It was like falling in love all over again, only instead of falling for the lord of death, now I was in love with the seething, shouting mass of life outside my home.

You only had eyes for the university, and spent long hours haunting the lecture halls with your notebook in ink-stained fingers. I’m still not sure what you studied: maps or abacuses or corpses drained of blood so you could appreciate them with a clear head. But you slipped out at dusk to catch as many evening classes as you could, and you came back with a line of deep thought furrowed between your brows.

You mocked my lofty aspirations, cynical as ever. “We are not arbiters of justice, Constanta,” you said after I left an abuser’s body slumped over and drained in a cesspool. A magistrate, well known about town for skimming off the top of his ledgers and dragging his wife through the house by the hair when she displeased him. “When will you give up this ridiculous crusade?” “It isn’t ridiculous to the woman who no longer has to cower in fear of him, I’m sure,” I said, taking your offered handkerchief and wiping off my mouth.

“And it isn’t ridiculous to the poor who will no longer be threatened with destitution now that he’s dead.” “You will have the poor with you always; is that not what your Christ says?” you said with a sneer. I recoiled. An unexpected harsh word from you was as jarring as a slap from any other man, and your temper had been spiking more and more recently. Vienna made you irritable as much as it made me blossom. 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.

had been taken by a voracious passion for theatre since our move to Vienna, and was always straining to see bits of morality plays through whatever crowd we found ourselves in. But you had no patience for “common” entertainment, and always complained that humans had lost their flair for the dramatic arts after the fall of Athens. A colorful traveling show lit by firelight was exactly my idea of a night well spent, but I doubt it even ranked for you.

The city called to me, and I was desperate not to be alone, but what if you came back and found me gone? Would I have failed another one of your mysterious tests, proving my fallibility? I sent away the artisans when they came knocking at the door, even my precious Hanne, who I never spoke to again. To do so, I felt, would be a betrayal of you.

You smoothed my hair and shushed me, rocking me like a babe. “It’s all right, my jewel, my Constanta. I’m here.” I held you tight as life, and let you scoop me up like a doll and carry me gently into our bedroom.

"Tight as life"? That's not a phrase I'm familiar with. Or—does she mean she held him as tight as she held onto life, in becoming a vampire...?

It wasn’t a vendetta now; it was a purge, my last-ditch effort to cleanse the city of the wretches who haunted her dark corners. I would not leave Vienna in their clutches. Despite the way you turned your nose up at my nightly vigilante activities, my heart was steadfast.

I knew nothing about this woman except for her reputation as an iron-fisted ruler, and her appreciation of your insight into the control and rulership of local provinces. I didn’t even know how you came into contact with her. Just another one of the many details of your life you guarded jealously, forbidding me the indecency of a simple inquiry.

Inappropriate. The absurdity of the word struck me and I almost scoffed aloud. What, if anything, in our life was not inappropriate? We killed to live, we lied and cheated and took lovers, we slipped from town to town like ghosts, draining the populace of their money and blood before moving on. Not a month ago we had brought two young men home with us from the streets and taken our pleasure with them before draining them dry in our marital bed. I had given up appropriate when I had given up my ability to eat mortal food, to walk abroad in the sun.

No one could deny the light radiating from her face when she looked at you, like the halo of gold on a holy icon. Her cheeks were flushed pink from the vigorous dance, tantalizing proof of the hot lifeblood pulsing just beneath the surface of her skin. How can I blame you for wanting her, my lord, when I wanted her so badly myself?

Did she? I'm not getting that from all we've seen. She just seems jealous of her to me. Simply noticing someone is attractive isn't "wanting" them.

Moving with shameless deliberateness, Magdalena cupped my jaw in her hand and kissed me full on the mouth. Not the light touch of a friend’s kiss catching the corner of my lips, but a kiss full of intention and warmth.

Oo, no, I don't like this. She had no clue who this woman was the day before and now he's telling her it's wife #2? Constanza better get to choose the next part of the polycule.

You’ve got to dunk the octopus in boiling water a few times before butchering it; that’s the secret to keeping the meat sweet.”

Octopus are intelligent creatures. That is torture. 🫤

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.

But I knew I had to go into the bedroom eventually.

No you don't. You have your own room, which you could have retired to.

You kissed her throat, the tender junction of her neck and shoulder, and then spoke. With your lips still on her skin, with your prick still inside her. “Constanta, I can feel you over there brooding.”

🙄

“Am I to be bidden to my own bed like a dog invited to beg at the master’s table?” I said coolly. You did look at me then, dark eyes erratic with lust and irritation and some other, less pronounceable emotion. Admiration, perhaps. You showed it to me so rarely I hardly knew how to recognize it.

“Look at how lovely our new bride is,” you said, nipping her earlobe. “Come and kiss your sister. Show her there isn’t any animosity between you.”

🙄🙄🙄

I was furious with you. You had manufactured my consent every step of the way, a mere formality. This had always been your design for the both of us; we were always going to end up here, in this bed. But I was also delirious with want, and half-convinced that you had been right all along. It was so much easier to believe that you always had my best interests at heart.

This is so gross—a proper horror scenario, where I honestly feel disgust. - Dude acting like he was taking another wife for her too, when obviously he just wanted someone different in his life. - Her lust being used against her, so she is fooled into feeling like she is welcoming it. - Two young women now stuck with a selfish, condescending husband who can't handle and won't stomach questioning. Can't wait to see his death.

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.

This is so forced. She barely knows her. They hung out for a few hours and she wants her more than a woman she spent months becoming close to? She compares their brief acquaintance to a relationship she was in *for years*...? Ridiculous, author. Simply ridiculous 😬

We passed the night drinking from each other and making love, taking full advantage of the heightened sensitivities that flooded Magdalena’s system. None of the servants bothered us, and none of the dinner guests came looking for us. They were well-trained, after all. And as Magdalena wound her fingers around my wrists and covered my chest in hot kisses, calling me sister with that mischievous smile on her face, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being trained, too.

She left the manor in the care of one of her highest-ranking servants, promising that she would return sooner rather than later. I wonder if she knew that sooner had a way of becoming much, much later when you lived as long as we did. But she was young, optimistic. Maybe she didn’t believe that taking up with you meant the total obliteration of her previous life. She would learn, in time.

She held my gloved hand in hers whenever the carriage went over a bump and she fed me little bites of treacle from her traveling bag and she dozed against me with her mess of curls tickling my cheeks. She thought up word games to keep us diverted, and woke me every evening with a little kiss in the corner of my mouth. I fell in love with her quickly, even as my head railed against the stupid machinations of my heart.

See, this is better—having her become fond over time and with casual affection. Earlier, Constanta claiming instant feelings was stupid.

Magdalena was connected to a seemingly endless network of informants, rivals, friends, and philosophical sparring partners whose letters found her wherever we stayed. You warned her against too much correspondence with the outside world, against jeopardizing our secret, but you indulged her habits in those early years. It was your honeymoon after all, this grand tour across all the European cities she had always dreamed of visiting. She should be allowed some little indulgences. It was her right as a new bride. You wouldn’t start hiding her letters and discouraging her from answering her aging cohorts until much later, when her novelty had worn off.

Magdalena gossiped about all the city officials and their wives. She knew their families, their position on politics, and which of them were taking bribes, and she had her own opinions about all of them. I marveled at her mind for diplomacy. If only the Great Council of Venice would bend their ears to a foreigner, and a woman no less, they would have a powerful weapon at their disposal.

“They should have let her fight,” Magdalena whispered to me behind her fan. The lovely Judith onstage lamented her position in Israelite society, desiring to fight back the invading horde alongside her brothers. Moved by the plight of her suffering countrymen, she swore vengeance against the Assyrians. “I would have let her fight, if I was in charge.”

This is a weird rendition. Judith's story was about using her wits and getting close in a way a warrior never would have been able to, because she was underestimated as a woman. She played to her strengths and triumphed for it. This "women should all be warriors" mentality is such a juvenile and poor understanding of feminism. Yes, women should be able to be in positions men are, but being able to fight isn't feminist in itself.

I was a perfect, immovable statue, painfully beautiful but without any of the small graces that mortality bestowed. I looked more and more like you every day. Even the thinnest rays of sun were painful to me now, and I couldn’t frolic with Magdalena in the soft light of dawn or dusk. I was less and less sated by bread and wine, although I sometimes slipped into the church for communion just to see if I could still taste anything at all. The hunger was relentless, my only companion in the quiet moments between travel and conversation about your newest theory of human nature. I took up diversions constantly to fill the void: needlepoint, viola, the rosary. Nothing made me feel full.

You never once thought I would have the strength to disobey you, did you? The possibility that my will was stronger than yours never even crossed your mind.

“Ah, my friend, you’ve made it,” the artist crowed, clapping you on the back. The gesture startled me. I couldn’t imagine someone speaking to you so familiarly, but you seemed at ease around him. Perhaps acting the congenial comrade was one of your new personas. You spun whole personalities out of silken promises to get close to whoever you needed to. It was one of the reasons you were able to keep us alive so long, and one of the reasons I sometimes woke with a start in the middle of the day and stared at you, wondering who I was sharing a bed with.