Page 3 of Once Upon a Dark October

Chapter Three

I lay in fevered agony for days that felt like lifetimes.

Trapped between mottled shadows and blurred candlelight, a film of endless red behind my eyelids. I was never sure how long.

An in-between of broken whispers and touches. A place that was not quite dreaming and not quite awake. A watery mist of cold upon my cheek, barely there, a tenuous voice I could not recognize that seemed to fill my thoughts instead of the room. Fingers laced with my own, then combed through my damp hair.

Morrigan.

An anchoring hand on my brow, cold to chase the fever from my skin, to flush it from my burning veins. The coppery-sweet tang of Morrigan’s blood—and I knew it was her blood, the blood that my body now craved, the blood that had given me another life—dripping into my open mouth, filling me, restoring me, satiating the hunger that threatened to shred my insides.

Soft hands in my hair again. Fragile breath against my cheek, the gentle massage of soap that smelled of ripened apples. A warm, wet cloth scrubbing the tender skin of my throat, working cautiously around the fresh bites, washing away the violence and sweat and dried storm-mist. Every touch turned into chaos within me, no matter how careful.

I was a raw, open wound, death and life congealing inside me in some strange new form. On the precipice of death, yet promised to forever.

I groaned, feeble and bruised.

Knuckles brushed the rise of my cheek. “You’re almost through the worst of it.”

Morrigan…

I was too weak to force anything beside a pathetic moan from my lips.

Delirious, my bones throbbing, my mouth aching, that new blood inside me seared my veins with such a fierce heat, I couldn’t find relief no matter how I tossed and turned. My body hurt, the soreness so complete that it felt like I’d spent a month without sleep, scrubbing, dusting, washing until I’d been broken. Restless with cravings for Morrigan’s blood, I wept, begging for release from the insistent pulse between my thighs that followed after.

I had never known a need like this—consuming, maddening, an ache of inescapable lust crawling beneath my skin.

Every muscle seemed to protest when I rolled onto my stomach, twisted up in the bed linens with furious abandon. I pulled my knees toward my chest, my legs spread, and even that simple motion left a new surge of need coursing through me. I tilted my hips down, desperate for anything that would give me the touch I craved exactly where I needed it. The sweat-damp chemise bunched around my legs, the knot of linens, the edge of a pillow that had slipped after my frantic thrashing.

A moan came spilling from my lips, but it was one of frustration, not breaking pleasure. It wasn’t enough. Nothing would be enough, not even my own fingers. The hungry throb in my sharpened teeth seemed to follow the same cadence of the arousal that wouldn’t fade. If I could just sleep —

But sleep wasn’t what my new immortal body wanted.

“Please,” I begged.

“It’s all right,” came Morrigan’s hushed voice, and I’d no idea how long she’d listened to me struggle or if she’d heard from rooms away. I’d fallen so far from the waking world, I had no certainties about where and when I was. “It’s all right, Elspeth. I’ve got you.”

The bed sunk with her weight as she gathered me to her, both of us stretched out onto our sides, my feverish body conforming and melting into hers. Morrigan swept the drenched hair from the back of my neck, her lips a soothing pressure at the top of my head. My fangs pierced her forearm the moment she offered it, her tunic sleeve rolled to the elbow, her skin lunar-bright. Droplets of scarlet marred her like an autumn leaf on a frosted windowpane as I drank greedily, tears running down my chin.

“It’s all right,” she said again. “I’m here. You aren’t alone.”

I shifted against her and felt Morrigan’s breathy exhale flutter my hair. Her lips seemed to burn the back of my neck, worrying delicately at my skin while I lapped up the blood flowing from her arm. When I moaned into the bite, sated from the drink but still wanting, she took hold of my leg just under the knee, her grasping fingers urgent once I’d released her.

With her warm blood coursing through me anew, filling those hollow, chilled places Death had nearly claimed, a sweat broke out across my skin again. Her blood was an endless conflagration.

Morrigan draped my knee over the curve of her hip, her fangs still nipping at my nape while she wrestled with the dampened chemise between my hot skin and her impatient hands. Her frustrated growl sent my heart into a thrilling free-fall. She had become all too eager herself, her thumb tracing over me through the tangled, sweat-soaked chemise. I moved into the teasing pressure of it to urge her on, to tell her without words—words I couldn’t find—what I wanted .

“This stars-damned thing,” she cursed, her breath heavy on the shell of my ear. I heard the thin fabric tear and shivered despite the blood-fever that still had me in its grip. Her, too, I soon realized. My bite had seemed to be just as claiming, just as arousing.

Morrigan arched against me. “Give me your hand.”

A gust of air replaced the chemise that’d been cinched up around my body, now exposed and vulnerable. But she banished the chill, her palm cupped between my spread thighs. Her long fingers held mine there, the one certain thing I could grasp onto in the chaotic throes of my own vampiric Turning. The rock that would shelter me in a churning scarlet sea. The one who had remade me, whose blood had set fire to my veins and whose body would unravel mine again and again if only I’d asked.

“ Please , Morrigan.”

Her mouth blazed a line down the side of my neck, and I rocked into her palm, into our entwined fingers, my arms trapped in her hold. “Tell me you want this.” She turned her palm over and pressed the ring she wore on her forefinger against the throbbing point between my legs. “Tell me.”

I gasped, the metal and stone a chilly kiss on that searing ache, pleasure tingling through me. “Touch me.” Somehow, I found the words to beg. “Morrigan, please, please , touch me…I need it…”

I hadn’t the coherence to feel shame or embarrassment. There was only the wanting, the burning weight of her blood inside me. If only I could find release, then perhaps it would douse the fire, the restless aching. Perhaps those furious waves would finally break over me.

I was already so close.

Another slow graze of her ring’s stone drew out a moaning whimper. The barest touch was all it took. Morrigan turned her hand over, letting me thrust, shameless and panting, into the heel of her palm. I felt her heart pounding against my spine as she matched the frenetic motion of my hips, greedy for her heat, for the pressure of her lithe fingertips, teasing me into oblivion.

“That’s it,” she said again. “Take what you need.”

A moan slipped from me, a feral, needy desire that I’d never heard from myself before. But I was too far gone to care, my blood humming with the promise of pleasure, that tingling ache building between my legs. Morrigan must’ve sensed my impatience. She laced her fingers with mine again, guiding me, dragging our entwined fingertips through the hot arousal at the seam of me. Letting me feel how wet and desirous her vampiric blood—her sorcerer’s blood—had made my fledgling body.

She could hardly restrain her own moaning. I felt the stutter of her breath beneath me, her sudden inhale as she drank in the scent of my desire.

Together, our twined fingers sought the pulsing ache I could nearly hear echoed in my temples. A curse flew from my lips at the first stroke of our fingers over my throbbing clit. I closed my eyes and gave into the pleasurable dance that Morrigan let me lead. Cradled in her body, we settled into a quickening rhythm. Tight, sweeping circles, Morrigan’s thumb against the pulse of my clit, each stroke teasing a moan from somewhere deep within my chest. My hips moved into the press of our fingers, a tremor running through my legs.

Her panted breaths ghosting along my ear brought me over the edge. My thigh quivered where Morrigan held it thrown over her hip, my head tipped back against her neck while the waves broke over me, delirious as the blood-fever. It pulled a last strangled cry from my lips—the wild sound made Morrigan’s breath catch.

She raked her fingers through my hair while the waves ebbed. “Sleep now, Elspeth,” she whispered. “By the time you wake, the fever will be through with you.”

Morrigan had been right. Though I slept through the breaking of the fever, waking came with a strangeness I couldn’t explain. For a few minutes—lying motionless, eyes shut tightly—I was unfamiliar in my own body. Bewildered at my own flesh and bones and roaring blood following a new cadence. The sinew and senses of me reborn, made anew, something so different I felt like a stranger unto myself. Everything sharper, sensitivities all the more fragile.

Underneath the scent of woodsmoke from the bedroom hearth, I smelled the tang of old blood, the rainwater and mist glazing the stones outside the window, a rich, floral perfume trapped behind glass and lightly suffusing the room. The aroma of apples seemed stronger than it had ever been, my washed hair fashioned into a loose plait. A freshly laundered chemise, soft linens to cradle me. The fatigue lay heavy in my limbs still, but I couldn’t explain it…this new strength from within, a power surging through my resurrected veins. The dregs of Morrigan’s blood resonated on my tongue.

A vampire , I realized with a new sense of clarity. I’ve been Turned. By the stars, it worked.

It was better than being drained and left to die.

I poked my tongue against my new fangs. Prodding carefully, I felt their pointed blades, the gums still tender and aching around them. It hadn’t been as terrible as I’d imagined, though it was perhaps for the best that I didn’t remember when exactly they’d come in. It had only been a short while since Morrigan last fed me, yet my mouth watered for another taste of her.

This craving was the strangest of all. Hunger and thirst, but not quite, gnawing somewhere deeper than the pit of my stomach .

“ Elspeth?” Morrigan, except her voice seemed to fill my head instead of the room. “Are you awake?”

The beating of wings close by, stirring the air with the scents of moonlit autumn wind and sea brine, made me open my eyes at last. I blinked against the harshness of the firelight, the richness of the colors, though they were sensuous and dark. A first glimpse of the world behind new eyes, new and dizzying. I sat up, squinting, hesitant, my fingers pressed to the center of my chest. I heard someone else’s heart thumping wildly. Morrigan’s? It didn’t feel like hers; there was a certain feral pulse to its cadence—and to the others, now, that I heard somewhere, rooms and corridors away from me.

“Morrigan?”

I opened my eyes fully and saw a gigantic bat fluttering near the hearth. Glossy eyes—crimson red, I noted distantly—and membranous, leathery wings outstretched in a span that could’ve embraced me. Silver-white fur and perked ears, an elongated snout that appeared a mix between a fox and a dog, with the exception of vampiric fangs.

Instinct claimed me first. Screaming, I jumped from the bed, bare feet slapping onto the freezing stone floor. The bat circled overhead. Its wing skirted my hair and I ducked, running for the hearth it had vacated.

“Elspeth, wait!” Morrigan’s voice echoed in my head again, but I was already seizing the heavy wrought-iron poker from its stand.

When the monstrous bat swooped again, I swung at its furry body—and missed, the creature still too fast for my exhausted, struggling limbs. I wobbled on my feet but took another forceful lunge at it, shrieking in terrified frustration as I whirled around. The bat climbed toward the ceiling, too far from my reach.

“Don’t! It’s me . It’s only me. It’s Morrigan!”

Glaring up at the monstrous thing, I held the poker aloft. “You’re,” I panted, “…a bat ? A gigantic, winged, mon— ”

“I was hoping you would sleep through this,” Morrigan interrupted gently. “Step into this life one careful footfall at a time. But that was not meant to be.”

“A bat!” I yelled. “Oh, stars above, I think I’m still feverish.”

“Stop shouting, darling. You’re all right now.”

The Morrigan-bat flew down again and found a perch on the edge of the mantlepiece, hanging upside-down.

“Except for the small matter of being undead,” I countered. Reluctant, I lowered the poker but did not replace it just yet. “Speaking to a bat, who was a vampire only hours ago.”

She did not correct me this time. “Welcome to your new life.”

I swallowed hard. “How many days has it been, exactly?”

“Four.”

It was stranger still, having her voice in my head like this.

I sputtered out nothing except syllables, exasperated and startled by the passage of days—almost an entire week—I couldn’t remember. It seemed so long ago that I was only human.

Relaxing my arms, I let the poker slip back into the stand and sighed a breath that was too heavy for my lungs to hold. Morrigan blinked, her crimson stare especially beady in a bat’s canine face. Vampiric all the same. I tilted my head to follow her, my body moving with me and nearly losing my balance with an embarrassed little yelp. Righting myself, I planted one hand on my hip and tried to reconcile the silver-haired vampire with this creature. Her silvered wings rustled, black beneath the dusting of fur. She sensed my unease, my hopeless confusion.

“I’m still me,” she assured. “Just in another form.”

A hesitant smile worked itself onto my lips. “I suppose you are.”

Two more bats swept into the room then. I dodged them both, my arms thrown over my head until they’d cleared the space above. These bats were much smaller than Morrigan, but a touch larger than the ones that sometimes liked to roost in the attic eaves of the houses I’d cleaned. Their fur was soil-dark compared to Morrigan’s, though their vampiric teeth were the same, their eyes the familiar storm cloud grey of an autumn morning.

“Gwen?” I asked. “Josephine? All three of you, then?”

“ Oh, good, she’s found us out,” Josephine said. She fluttered at the window before perching on the sill. “The secrecy would’ve been exhausting.”

The Morrigan-bat loomed larger than the others, growing larger still, her wings’ massive shadow unfurled across the walls. As if her body wanted its true form again that she had bent its beast to her will. We were not much different in size now.

“How exactly are you doing that?”

Morrigan’s wings rustled. “What?”

“Growing,” I answered. “By the stars, look at you!”

Hearing a bat sigh in my thoughts was strange. “It’s the only modification I’ve managed over the years, stubbornly,” she said, though it sounded cryptic. “I wanted us to reveal ourselves to you in a gentler way—”

“She would have discovered it soon enough,” Gwen said. She made another diving maneuver around my head, and I wasn’t proud of the little scream I let out despite knowing she hadn’t intended to harm me. “No easy way about it, Mor. Nothing about this has been gentle, has it?”

“Looks like she was spared, though,” Josephine mused. “I wonder why. She’s taken your blood, I would’ve thought the curse would’ve transferred. Interesting. That warrants a closer study.”

“Later,” Morrigan said. “Elspeth needs at least a few days of proper feedings before you poke and prod.”

“Someone’s done this to you?” I asked. “You’ve been made to suffer this transformation?”

“It’s not so bad,” Gwen said in her dreamy tone, finally finding a perch on the mantel near Morrigan. She seemed especially restless in her bat form, her wings still itching to take flight again. Perhaps she resisted for my benefit.

“Speak for yourself,” Josephine protested.

“I quite like the wings, actually. The flights over the harbor are wonderful at night. The other senses really come alive.”

“Right,” I remembered. “You wouldn’t be able to see in this form.”

“A little better than an average wild bat,” Josephine said. “Mostly shadows and moonlight.”

“Our curse will lift in a few minutes’ time,” Morrigan explained. “It falls at midnight—precisely then, just as it breaks with each dawn.”

“Every night?”

“Every night,” Morrigan confirmed, tilting her head toward the mantle clock.

The uncanny movement reminded me of the dog that never liked to move from the floors I had to clean in a house that once employed me. He could only be compelled to move—until he wandered in later, tracking fresh mud on his paws—with scraps of raw meat, and his head moved just so at the sight of it dangling in front of his snout.

“The bat has been a symbol of our coven for as long as it’s stood,” Morrigan explained.

“Lovely, misunderstood creatures,” Gwen mused.

“When it split apart, another blood sorcerer bastardized its form as a means to punish us,” Morrigan continued.

Another blood sorcerer. How could that be?

“That’s awful,” I gasped. “How long? How long has it been since your coven fractured?”

“Century and a half,” Josephine replied.

“That’s…” I trailed off. “Stars above, that’s more than lifetimes to us mortals.”

“You’re no mortal anymore.” Gwen’s laughter filled my head .

“A century happens fast for a vampire,” Morrigan said. “It can feel like a decade in an immortal’s mind.”

“Not this one, nor the one before it,” Josephine said. “I’ve felt every single day of these hundred and fifty years. Every hour. Every cursed second.”

“The others are cursed in their own way,” she went on. “None of them escaped without consequences, either. Can’t walk under the sunlight. Can’t even let it touch them through the harbor’s fog or an overcast day, their bodies are so fragile in its light. They stole the night from us, and we made them burn.”

“Sunlight,” I muttered absently.

The thought struck me with the force of a lightning bolt.