Remember the Blood

Vicki Pettersson

Ina moves through the crowd as if leashed and muzzled, careful to make eye contact with no one, to touch no one. Sensuality is her perfume – as it won’t be long now – so she can’t fault people around her from undressing her with their eyes. She can barely refrain from touching herself. Although knowing better, yesterday she opened a door she shouldn’t have, entered a club packed with people desperate to start their New Year’s celebration early and paid the price in mounting frustration. Dozens of bodies had ground against her, hands sliding over her waist, across her belly; seeking, too, the outer curves of her breasts, her ass. Fingers had pressed and kneaded, searching for something they’d never possess, begging with wordless, tensile strength, as if Ina were a living talisman.

The crowd tonight is different. No one dares to touch her at a black-tie event. Not even at a New Year’s Eve gala, when Dom flows as freely as water. Not even when she’s dressed in silk so thin it outlines her nipples. Not even though she’s so aroused she’s sure some of them can smell it on her.

Still, they watch. She feels their thoughts – pretty fireworks going off behind curtained gazes – rising into the air to explode with coloured lust and hopes and dreams. And that’s just the women.

Being at the centre of a desire that borders on worship is hard to describe and, if someone had asked her to, the closest Ina could come is this: she is more than woman; she is goddess. There are others like her, but she is uncommon enough to be idealized, the humours at such perfect balance inside her bodily vessel that she is at once both at peace with eternal life and kissing cousins to lumbering death.

And yet, and yet … Ina has found herself unexpectedly living in a world that worships girls. All of a sudden, to open one’s thighs is to declare yourself a woman, and to capture it in video or print is to make it true. If she’d known how lonely this would cause her to feel, displaced rather than elevated, an eidolon rather than a deity, she may have chosen to remain an innocent, ignorant girl herself.

She slips from the vaulted arcade of the museum and into the horticultural gardens of the Cuxa Cloister. She holds her champagne glass aloft, like she belongs there, but no one is around to see. It’s cold in Manhattan, and elsewhere bodies are tightly packed in a manic bid to stay warm and connected. Here, however, Ina freefalls into the darkness, with only torches to light her way as her heels clip-clop against 900-year-old Stine never meant to see the New World.

Russell is waiting where the note said he’d be, leaning against the rampart of the west terrace, with Fort Tryon Park dropping down the hill behind him and, beyond that, the Hudson. Ina’s first instinct upon sighting him is to flinch. He’s pretty in that unearthed way; a strong chin inherited from someone who may or may not have been strong and a physique built in front of mirrors, where grunting loudly and breaking a sweat while some pop tartlet’s video plays in the background means a good day’s work. He has done his work for the day, and showered since, but it’s the stench of his motives and thoughts and past deeds that helps Ina pinpoint him in the dark.

The scent is so strong, so perversely recognizable, that it takes a moment for her to notice the two women slumped on each side of him. Perfume and beer and desperation assail Ina as they both shift upon seeing her, and she can tell they just came from that twisting, gasping mass of humanity at the core of this city, which will soon pulse as one.

As if, she thinks, the entire world is one giant heartbeat pumping for her.

Russell laughs when Ina licks her lips. Clearly she has made the mistake of telling him in some previous ‘lifetime’ that in the eleventh hour every human she passes is a dusky red temptation. Thus the women.

“Ah, lovely Ina. Fucking ravishing . . .” His eyes trail her body like he knows it. “Though it looks as though you’ve been stealing kisses from nefarious places.”

Ina doesn’t smile, and his companions look disturbed that he should actually know her. Russell leans against ancient brick, enjoying the reaction. Ina imagines he’s said the same thing to her every year for the past eight. She both wishes she can remember and gives thanks that she can’t.

“Let’s go,” she says shortly. Even had she wanted to converse with him, she’d have trouble doing so. For the past three weeks she’s had trouble completing thoughts, much less sentences. She is now so distracted by the impending hour, so obsessed with crossing into the next, that she wants to jump from her own skin. Hunger and desire, her sharpest weapons, are now turned against her. She knows it was the same last year because she’d written it down in a pained, sharp scrawl.

Russell gifts her with an oily smile. “Come Ina. Stay awhile. Perhaps you’d like something to drink?”

He’s fucking with her. She’d written it down too. He will fuck with you. He always does.

Russell frowns when she doesn’t react, which would be enough to cause her to smile, but the shadow that cuts across the torchlight like a falling axe widens it on her face.

“The lady said move.”

The voice is silken death. It belongs to Alexander. And he is hers.

He is wide, shoulder to thigh, muscled beneath the denim, menacing even as he drops a light palm to her shoulder. Her memory of him may only reach back a dozen months, but she knows that touch anywhere, and can tell it’s the same for him. The heart always recognizes its twin, even when the mind is forced to forget. Ina looks up, watches the light flickering in his black hair like it’s kindling there. She likes to tease that the threading grey is as golden as the sun. It makes him snarl, which she loves.

Russell jolts upright and the women flanking him actually flee, probably unaware it’s a prey’s instinct causing them to do so. Russell recovers by sucking on the neck of a dark bottle, scowling at the departing women. They had stifled their screams, but the squeals and relieved giggles fly over the rampart walls once they deem themselves safe. There’s nothing more reassuring than the receding effects of adrenaline.

Meanwhile, Russell soaks in the alcohol like a sponge. A foul weak human with poisoned blood, he’s a natural disaster, but that’s why they chose him all those years ago, and it’s what makes him perfect for the task. That, and that he can be so easily bought.

Recovered from the jolt Alexander has given him, Russell jerks his head. With drink-induced bravado he leads them back through the gardens and along the covered walkway, past brightly lit rooms filled with music and laughter and medieval treasures a man such as Russell shouldn’t even be allowed to breathe upon. But Russell is ignorant of real treasure and more intent on slipping through the narrow stone arcade before them, then down the dark stairs and into the ageing park. Ina sidles up to Alexander once their soles hit the winter earth, and when he takes her hand she’s almost warmed.

Still, right now Alexander reminds her of an ancient warrior, his gaze distant and trained on an unseen threat. He belongs in armour, palming shield and sword while he screams murderous intent to the skies. The only time that distant gaze melts into focus is when it’s turned upon her face, and this is what brings out Ina’s warrior side. That softening gaze makes her feel powerful as well, like she could crush a man with no more than a smile.

Russell keeps the lead all through the park, alternately swaying and swaggering as he steers them over the dormant heath and ivy clinging to the gently sloped hillside. A running monologue of curses and bullshit streams from his mouth like sewer water, which neither of them care to, or even can, concentrate on. They remain so silent that every few yards Russell has to look back to make sure they’re still there. Perhaps he’s hoping they’re not.

But despite his bluster and bravado, the path he carves towards the Hudson Parkway, where they first met, is unfailingly direct. It’s New Year’s Eve and he wants to be done with this dark chilling business, and get back to the light and warmth of those who age. The beer had made him boisterous and the night giddy, and he laughs too loudly in the silence of a park that has been abandoned for places that glitter and wink. It seems everyone in New York is indulging in the fantasy that tomorrow life somehow really will be different.

Ina smirks knowingly. For her, this is actually true, but even as the thought fans the embers of her hunger, she remains cynical. It’s hard to be expectant of a future when you never possess a memory beyond a dozen months. Still, to cynicism or not, there’s no way to stop that ticking clock, or to convince others that their hope for the future – now rising like impotent prayers in the empty night – is fragile, misplaced, unheard. Better to hope one simply lives through the night.

Ina grimaces as she swallows back blood-tinged saliva, her attention abruptly drawn to the artery in Russell’s neck. It pulses like cascading neon, beckoning and bright against the pitch-black park. He turns, thinks she’s smiling, and smiles back.

“Yo, Alex,” he calls, somehow knowing Alexander hates the grating of the single syllable on his foul tongue. “Your girl wants me.”

He laughs and laughs and Alexander grips Ina’s hand so hard he breaks the bones in her pinky finger. The pain gives her something to think about and takes the edge off her hunger, though it’s only a temporary solution, like putting a numbing ointment atop a fresh wound. But it’s her turn to calm Alexander now – thank God they alternate their little breakdowns; she thinks it’s one of the things that makes them so good together – and she keeps her tone light as they turn the final corner around an oak being strangled by ivy. The three of them slip under the recessed bridge like a series of dark tides. “Don’t you ever shower, Russell?”

“Wants me, Alex,” Russell sing-songs again, walking backwards and pretending to shoot at them with unloaded fingertips. “Bad.”

“Kindly retrieve the chains.” Alexander’s voice skirts beneath the bridge like wind-whipped gravel, and Ina shudders in pleasure. God, even his voice moves her. “Do her first.”

Russell is unhinged by the threadbare sound too, but he’s done this eight times before, and dismisses any threat of danger as he turns away, giggling something about freaks and peep-shows and shit. His boots slap at the grime-caked concrete reminding Ina of flippers or clown shoes, and she snorts. She likes clowns. Alexander tightens his grip again and, though she quickly sobers, she doesn’t mind his small show of temper. He’s doing this for her, after all. For them.

So she thinks of Alexander’s footsteps instead of Russell’s, the light and assured way in which he walks through this world … beside her. She’s written before about how the sight of him always calms her, and it does that again as she gazes up to find him backlit in grey silhouette, a three-dimensional cut-out against a two-dimensional world. In artificial light he is unremarkable, if tall, and he comes from an age that valued a close shave at pate and neck, fortunate that it is fashionably classic. But in the dark, where he is at home, those smooth features blur into a block of unyielding stone.

Alexander follows his own whim; he is wearing rims he doesn’t really need and still sporting a light accent he adopted in his time spent in Louisiana before finding himself, and Ina, in New York. She only knows this because he was keeping record even then.

Yet while no bald evidence of discomfort plays across that stoic face. Ina sees he isn’t entirely settled. There’s a midnight knowledge of the deed to come lurking behind his eyes, a carnal flinch as Russell calls Ina forwards, though Alexander never even blinks.

Ina joins Russell at the midway point, where the darkness narrows into a span of only eight feet, the light from each end of the tunnel flickering like tapers losing fuel. It’s not a proper bridge, mostly meant for run-off from the park, but it’s solid and remote and this perfectly suits their purposes. She drops her handbag along the incline of the wall where shadows eat it whole, while flicking a cursory glance at the sacrifice, already there, slumped in the tunnel’s concave centre. It’s a woman and it has dull brown hair that’s muddy and matted, jagged fingernails and a bottom lip split from an unnecessary blow.

Ina slips her back to the wall, ignoring the way Russell feels her up on the way to manacling her wrists. She can’t help but bare fangs when he grinds against her, but Alexander, more controlled, glares at her. She swallows her fury and stares out over Russell’s greasy head. His foul breath billows up like a garlic cloud around her as he laughs. Garlic. Yeah, that’s really fucking funny.

Russell isn’t so far drunk on drugs and power that he forgets Alexander, unchained, at his back, and he doesn’t linger over Ina. She imagines he’ll come back once they’re both tightly secured. Ina’s knees had been caked with the alley’s dirt at her rebirth this year. The previous year, she’d written about semen in her hair. It’s thinking about this, and about all the indignities she can’t remember, that makes her start to shake.

Be strong, Ina tells herself, strong like Alexander. See how he seeks Russell’s gaze, his own expression carefully blank? See how compliant he is when his wrists are shackled at his side? There’s more strength in one of those beautiful hands than in Russell’s entire body, yet he has pulled it back, hidden it deep and done it for you. No, Alexander has the hardest, lowest task by far. The least Ina can do is tolerate Russell’s prodding fingers.

Finally Alexander is bound too and his iron chains clank gently as he tries their hold. Russell turns back to her with a glint like acid rain sparking in his eye, and he steps over the sacrifice like it’s part of this wasted alley. He can go away now, his job done, his financial life, his mortal life, secured for another year. He doesn’t need to stay for the rest, and indeed – even though they’re both shackled to chains that’ll only give three feet in any direction – it’d be safer for him to be long gone by then.

But Ina has a feeling Russell never leaves. She feels that he’s the freak he was giggling about under his breath earlier. \he’s the one who likes his peep show.

“Tell me more about the build-up Ina. Tell me about how you can feel the year folding up around you –”

Folding up around me like a black silk scarf.

Oh, God. She’d told him about that. Ina swallows hard, a reflex unable to keep from glancing Alexander’s way. He is indiscernible against his wall, but she knows he isn’t happy. He hats surprises.

Russell nudges the sacrifice with a toe, but he only has eyes for Ina. In the dark, they are mere pinpricks, even with Ina’s strong sense of sight. “You’ll do anything for it, won’t you? Like some bitch in heat –”

“Fucking cliché.” The insult escapes as if on its own accord. She hates clichés, and this capacity to hate silly things is one of her weaknesses. Alexander hates nothing, therefore he cannot be moved to anger like this. He loves her, however, which Ina supposes makes her his weakness.

She hangs her head at her bad behaviour, but not before she sees Russell’s chin lower, the pinpricks tightening upon themselves. “Oh, because you bloodsuckers don’t deal in cliché? Shit.” Russell is pacing now, working up his mad, as they say in Louisiana. “You approached me, remember? No, of course you don’t.”

And the forgetting, at least, wasn’t cliché. No paperback or Hollywood flick had ever gotten that right. They just gloated over the compensation required to stay forever young, beautiful and strong. Odd that it wasn’t obvious. It makes perfect sense to Ina that mortals age under the weight of their memories – all they’ve done and, even more, what they haven’t. It is these regrets that make them old and wrinkled, wistful and bitter, that her death-day marches down upon her as their birthday’s do, wanted or not. However instead of waking each year to a new wrinkle, she wakes to a literal stranger in the mirror.

That, Ina thinks, she can handle. But Alexander as stranger? She looks over to where he is draped shapelessly in shadows. That she cannot.

Meanwhile, the ignorantly ageing Russell is still ranting in front of her. “You need me, you bloodless husk. You need me to set all this up, find a sacrifice, chain both you fuckers apart in order to keep you together. And you’ll do exactly what I say if you want to get it.”

“Remember your humanity,” Ina warns, though she’s chained like the bitch he compared her to.

“Remember the ‘man’ in that humanity, whore.” He is fast with his words. His mind could have gotten him far if he’d been a lawyer or a doctor or a comedian, and not a lazy, second-rate crook skilled only at turning his own luck bad. “I know all your homicidal secrets. Bite me and you’re lost to each other in the next lifetime. And for ever.” He has reassured himself at least, and he stands before her, straight-spined, in a practised pose, and within reach. “Now, tell me what it feels like right now. How you lose control and start licking and sucking everything in sight.”

If he were anyone else, she might, because this isn’t it at all. Simple lust can’t describe the way emotions are suddenly spun like silk, the textures soft, but so multi-layered and startling that when Ina finally feels the weight of them she wants to weep. It is this awakening need to feel that is the true hunger, and Ina becomes so addled that she even puts food in her mouth. (Her favourite chocolate on the tip of her tongue, its contrast and silkiness as it melts to coat the back of her throat. It is lovely all the way up until she pukes.) She eats this unnecessary subsistence, sightless and slightly manic, until colour suddenly blooms on her tongue. She looks down to find her finger in her mouth, her blood on the tip. Her blood, but no matter. Hunger soars like a bird of prey in flight.

But explaining nuance to Russell would be like reciting algebra to a dog. Besides, he’s right. He holds the keys to their fate, which probably explains his hard-on. He’s the fucker who demands they meet on the very last night, when decisions must be quick and absolute, and when he has someone more powerful than he’ll ever be by the metaphorical balls. It is the only time of year – and probably in his pitiful short human life – when he knows he can squeeze.

“Hope you took good notes this year, Ina, baby.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What? Ina?” he asks, with oily innocence. “But it’s your name, isn’t it?”

He tilts his head. His hair greased to perfection, doesn’t alter, but the move exposes his neck. “Or is it?”

Alexander jerks his head once. Ina bites back her reply.

“’Dear diary’,” Russell mimes a cursive hand in the icy air. “’Please don’t let me forget my true love after I suck the life out of my last victim of the year. Please let us stay together for ever. I really like the way he fang-fucks me.’”

“Fuck you,” Ina says before she can stop herself.

“Now there’s an idea.” Russell smiles crookedly. “But not a very novel one.”

An admission now that they are both shackled and he knows she’ll soon forget. He looks at his watch and pushes a button so the face lights up, then flashes her the time. Two minutes to midnight. In other parts of the city, party-goers are swilling drinks with bubbles, wearing shiny hats, hoping the mania they feel now will be a strong enough tide to ferry them across the threshold of the new year.

“But I have a better idea this year. Why don’t you let me read that little book you pass back and forth? I want to see what you remember. I want to see how you remember. It’s in there isn’t it?”

He points to Ina’s bag. He knows they must have it close. Their own belongings are the first things that call to them upon their rebirth, so it’s important to keep it all together and keep it near. That’s how it works. Find Russell, the fleshy guide who will bind them, ensuring they stay where they are and share in the same blood without killing one other. Then bring along the written guide so they may find themselves after and, finally rediscover each other. Russell clearly knows all this, though again, Ina doesn’t recall telling him.

“Don’t touch it,” Ina warns as he does just that. He leans low and, when he rises again, he swings the bag side to side in the air, laughing and nearly stepping on the sacrifice that currently divides, but will soon reunite. Alexander and her.

Russell is rummaging around inside the handbag now. It is packed as Ina instructed three years ago. She is only surprised it has taken him this long to think of it. “Where is it, you bloodthirsty bitch?”

Ina grits her teeth, holding in the now-strained silence. Far off, a chorus of cries is swept along in the wind like summer stalk, but it is Russell’s scream that blooms like a thick stem with thorns. A smile widens Ina’s face, stretching it, though her teeth are still clenched tight. The razors are sewn in every silken fold, every pocket. And while the scream is gratifying, it’s the scent of his elixir, fouled though it is, that causes her appetite to rear. Suddenly a film is lifted before her eyes, like she’s wearing a gauzy veil, and the entire world is instantly reduced to a two-toned wash of soothing sepia.

Alexander shifts into view and Ina gazes at him for clarity. Indeed he smiles back steadily, completely in control. She loves that about him, and is wishing she could take a long, refreshing sip from that calmness when she is slapped.

“Fucking whore.”

Fucking idiot. Russell leaves blood smeared on her cheek. She feels the smile on her face alter. A lone man’s premature holler fills the sky. Without willing it, Ina leans forwards, testing. Her restraints hold, but Russell backs from the strike zone, suddenly, careful to keep her in view. Goddamn straight.

She hisses.

The sacrifice screams in sepia.

“Where is it?” Russell tries to sound like he is still in control.

“I have it.” And though the words were whispered, it is Alexander’s warrior cry.

Russell’s eyes widen but it’s too late. Even the realization of death is a future event he won’t live to see. Just like the New Year that will soon chime in the sky. The abrupt way life abandons him is jarring, but fascinating, like a pile-up on the freeway. Pain firecrackers across his gaze, then falls and fades and disappears.

The sacrifice shrieks when Russell’s larynx lands at its feet, then it scrambles backwards until its bonds catch. Ina thinks it should be grateful it gets to watch the man’s demise, and she thinks of kicking it into silence, but its cries join the other, more joyful ones now hanging prettily in the city sky, and Ina doesn’t think anyone will know the difference.

Besides, she knows she can’t touch it without latching on, and Ina must share. Sharing its blood is what will connect her to Alexander. It is the last blood of the year, and the first of the new, which allows them to recognize one another when all else is forgotten. Alexander – clever, bold, imperturbable – thought of it years ago.

“Careful,” Ina warns, because she can see that Russell is long gone and Alexander is still tearing the torso. She hopes it’s in anger and not need. Russell’s blood may be bitter, but subtlety fades when they gorge. Tonight, of all nights, the blood has to be sweet. “You don’t want too much.”

If Ina’s heart could beat, it would be racing at the sight of that beloved dark head lowered over that rotted shell. She’d read an article this year that proved even the mortal scientists had realized that transfusions could affect personality. She half expects Alexander to glance up at her with Russell’s low gleam sparkling in his own eye and mutter, “Shut up, bitch,” before draining the man dry. That fear is what’s kept them from daring this before.

But Alexander does stop, tossing the husk aside with such force its bones crunch wetly against the curved concrete. Then he wipes a sleeve over his mouth, holds up Russell’s watch and smiles like a kid on Christmas morning. If possible, she falls more in love with him in that minute. It is the last.

Laughter bubbles up inside of Ina as Alexander cuffs himself to the wall with real shackles, pushing the ones he planted there before aside. The pure, clean blood has to be calling him, racing as it is in the sacrifice’s veins, tied in silky red ribbons to those futile screams, but he is tranquil self-assurance.

“Tell me again about the first day we met,” she says, once he’s settled across from her.

“In which lifetime?” he whispers. The sound rumbles like velvet thunder, the voice of the gods, reverberating in her chest.

Ina sends a sigh skittering back, shaky and vulnerable. “The only one that matters.”

“OK,” But his voice is suddenly wounded with regret.

He doesn’t want to forget.

The sacrifice doesn’t want to die.

Want, Ina thinks, has nothing to so with it.

“What time was it?” she encourages softly.

Now that beautiful, stained, marble mouth twitches. “You were there. You know what time.”

But she needs to know he still knows and, seeing her want laid bare, Alexander sobers instantly. “It was just past midnight, but it wasn’t this cold. The night had fallen softly, as if the sun was dragging its heels as it was pushed from the sky –”

“The fucker.”

His smile was brief. He was used to her: her language, the cadence, the way new words ran across that old tongue. “Then I saw you.”

“Saw me where?” she said coyly. He indulges her. He knows coy is reserved solely for him.

“Chained where you are now, of course.” His voice was proprietary; he was the one to discover her. He also knows she secretly wishes cats didn’t fear her, that she sometimes makes herself sick on fruit juice for reasons she can’t name and that she has dreams which place her across the Atlantic – ones that cause her to wake screaming. “The darkness was just one long stroke between us. It slid over my chest –”

“My breasts,” Which she caresses for him.

“And down my belly –” His fingertips play over it.

“Igniting the hunger,” she whispers, eyes trailing downwards.

The hunger is the worst. No one apart from Alexander can understand the irony that spikes in those final moments, the fear that giving in means giving up. That if she sips and lives she might lose the only one who makes her want to live at all. She knows it’s not true, that the forgetting will erase even that want and that the throbbing in her veins now is merely the elixir of the last blood calling to her, but as she feels fogginess cloud her clear mind, she panics. She looks down and discovers her knuckles are bleeding. She’s been wrenching them against her restraints without realizing it. The blood starts a rapid-fire reaction. Her jaw throbs, her mouth waters and her gums itch, eliciting a groan.

A movement distracts Ina and she suddenly remembers they have an audience. She shifts, eyes the warm body eyeing her and recalls – probably for the last time – the sacrifice who’d ushered in this year. He hadn’t been as young as this one is, but he’d been sweet and hopeful and alone. All requirements, and all guaranteed to be met with Russell choosing the sacrifices.

So it’s been perfect and, in the end, Ina liked to think the boy had been grateful to be part of something as large and meaningful as everlasting love. His blood infused them with new life, but their purpose gave him a life beyond the flesh.

Ina gazes down at this year’s sacrifice, wanting it to know its fortune in being chosen. The overwhelming wonder of little miracles couples with the late hour and her hunger, to bring tears to her eyes. She hisses her joy. Alexander responds, his elation deepening his growls. But the sacrifice screams louder at the sight of their fangs and Ina’s giddiness is snuffed by annoyance.

So as the sepia fades to black and the old year and life is rubbed out by the new, Ina holds on long enough to allow Alexander to lunge first. Even though numbness whips along her limbs to freeze her core, her love for him is so great she allows him to break the skin. She doesn’t know if it’s the buzzing in her ears that drums out the screams or if they just suddenly stop. All she knows is physical satisfaction and profound relief as she surges forwards and – together – they drain the sacrifice dry.

They tell Ina she is impatient and impulsive and she grunts because it’s dead on. Alexander is supposed to be cool-headed and implacable, and if that’s true she could see why she would love him. She watches him read, the way his brow draws down, deepening his features. Then he looks up and shrugs, an almost embarrassed smile touching his lips, touching her. Ina’s heart dips, the first plummet. That smile says he might be willing to believe … if she is.

She offers a tentative one in return.

“This is how you’ll learn to love me,” he told her the first time he handed her the guide. She reads about this account apparently written while her limbs are intertwined and he’s living deep inside her, a warm coal waiting to be stirred to life.

They had written it all down before meeting with Russell, what they’d done and why, and that they’d have to find someone new to help them in this year’s end. It reads like fiction to Ina and she can tell it does for Alexander as well, which must be why they left little clues in the text, breadcrumbs only known to them.

“I already love you,” is what she reports herself as saying, and she can imagine that, even as she scents lovemaking on the turning pages, even as she knows it is probably deliberate. She’s betting that would be her idea. Get to the mind through the nose, the body, the instinct, the appetites. In spite of all they forget, their own core personalities remain constant and, while she may not know another soul in this world – she may have to fight to re-know this Alexander year after year - she knows herself well. She is selfish, stubborn, temperamental, insatiable and – if what she reads here is true – always uncaring about anything else when Alexander is in her arms. She looks up. He is biting clean through his lip. It’s a mannerism she thinks she can learn to love.

Realistically, though, the attributes listed are true of most of their kind. It’s why they move and live alone, and run solo. Unions aren’t unheard of, of course, but when you have to begin your life anew at the dawn of each year – something none of them have to be told, something they each feel as plainly as the turn of the planets – it’s best to refrain from unnecessary attachments. But Ina and Alexander have apparently found necessity in keeping record, not only of their own liaison, but of the others as well. Daniel and Marcus, for example, who have also found one another year after year. It’s written down in black and white, at the place in the guide that they’ve marked for themselves at the beginning.

While Ina can’t be sure of Alexander yet, she knows this is a good approach to take with her. She is more willing to listen and believe a story about someone else’s happily-ever-after than she is about her own.

Ever is a long time.

Daniel and Marcus have somehow managed to find one another year after year without a guide. But then, Alexander reports, at the beginning of last year, Daniel moved from town before they could reacquaint, and the guide tracks Marcus’ resulting deterioration. It says in February he begins a manic quest to collect every blood type, which he hangs in a silver vial shaped like a cross around his neck. In March, he runs out of blood types and stops going out all together. By May he is drinking milk and Clorox and even liquefied vegetables just to taste something new.

Have they a need then, even in their ignorant forevers, to partner up? When you’ve tasted it all and there’s nothing new on earth, is true love really what they thirst for in a life without end?

Ina considers this as she walks with this beloved stranger along the streets of Washington Heights, silent and as if they have a destination in mind. They attract little attention from the giddy pockets of people still drinking and yelling in the frigid night. Their heads are bowed over their book, this written lifeline into the past, and they take turns reading.

In the fall just past, Ina consented to Alexander’s absence for two whole weeks – something she’d apparently never allowed before. The plan was to lure Daniel back to town with Alexander as bait, set up an accidental introduction between Marcus and him and let chemistry take over from there. It is Alexander’s soft spot for the idea of true love that does Ina in. The romance of his temporarily putting aside his love so two others might experience it makes her want to turn and immediately start memorizing his features. But Alexander is still reading, and the last word written on the Daniel and Marcus saga is that Ina and Alexander are invited to brunch with the couple the following week. They, too now share their sacrificial kill.

It is the most romantic thing she has ever heard.

Ina is hungry again by the time they finish their walk, but eating is a personal thing and, despite the way they woke, the idea of Alexander watching unnerves her. Instead, they return in silence to the apartment they share. The number has been written in bold black lettering in the guide. Ina recognises the handwriting as her own. Keys are pinned to their underclothes.

Except it isn’t an apartment. It is an abandoned Asian restaurant; lettering like smashed spiders sprawled across the walls, spices baked into the plaster. It looks deserted from the outside, is boarded up and reinforced by steel on the inside, and the appearance of dilapidation continues until a corner rounds out the view, provided anyone would wish to stop, reconsider and peer in. Alexander and Ina take the corner soundlessly, which makes her gasp stand out like an exclamation point in a poetic stanza.

The kitchen has been made into a library, with wall-to-wall shelves of shining oak, custom carved by a carpenter’s hand with built-in lighting, and packed from ceiling to floor. History books, memoirs, true crime – all hardcover, all pristine – some so old they’d make curators weep. There is only one chair in the room, an oversized leather monstrosity with a giant ottoman parked in front, a handmade cashmere throw at the back and a side table at each arm. She knows which table is hers. There is a small Indian box, marble with inlays of mother-of-pearl and gold, and an unmarked bottle scented with sandalwood and white tea, things she instinctively loves.

There is something else she instinctively turns towards – the large, commercial refrigerator, the stainless steel walk-in door softened by a curtain of wood and glass beads that jangle like wind chimes as Ina passes through. The walls inside are softened with diaphanous panels, a swirl of colour like the frothy ends of pastel clouds. The floor is littered with silken pillows, batik sheets and shawls with fringing like moth’s wings. The door locks from the inside.

Ina returns to the kitchen, lets her eyes wander over the volumes of history books, and wonders if she’ll recognize the actions of the few females within. It shouldn’t matter. The past is dead and one should live in the moment. It is what it is, all you have is the now: clichés, but valid because they were all true. They were also the golden rules of their race. If Ina’s personal history is inscribed in the makeshift book Alexander is loath to put down, these hated prosaisms are etched on her soul. She is grateful for the eternal life she’s been given, the youth and vitality that are the rights of immortals, but what she wouldn’t give or pay for just one true memory of a lifetime already lived. Yet living requires forgetting, and because Ina clings to life like an infant to the breast, she can handle wondering about herself.

But she looks over at Alexander, unconsciously running his thumb along the leather cover of their guide, along a soft spot already showing there, and suddenly knows she doesn’t want to wonder with him too.

“If we didn’t have this guide, this would be unimaginable.” She means the apartment, the shared life, the planning of the sacrifice year after year … all of it.

“And that’s why we do it. We knew we’d need the proof of the thing.” Even though proof enough was in their mingled scents, covering every square inch or that kitchen. It smelled to Ina like perfect madness.

“But knowing nothing more than you do now, do you think we’d have felt the lack, like Marcus?”

A frown mars that perfect brow for a long moment as Alexander thinks hard, considering the depth of emotion that would have to exist for a creature such as himself to feel such a thing, to care so deeply. He finally nods. More importantly, he says, he wants to remember. He believes the memories lie like stakes in the pockets of those who hunt them, no less dangerous for being hidden. Perhaps more so.

And Ina? Alexander looks at her with an expression she’s already beginning to recognize – one brow cocked in challenge while his chin lowers shyly – and he asks the unanswerable. What , of importance, does she believe?

Ina is silent for so long, light threatens the sky.

Ina believes truth lies in the blood.

Long ago, in a time when the streets of New York were filled with cobbled streets, horse shit layering them, soapboxes cornering them, dice games hidden among them, she was a factory girl with roughened hands and a back that was beginning to bend. She remembers this clearly, this and the way the entire world seemed intent on reaffirming she was no one special – from the foreman who would palm and pinch her for 14 hours straight, to the important men in carriages who ignored the pale, hunched girl trodding home in the gutter. Then there was the gaggle of urchins waiting for her care when she got back home, none of them her own. The experience of her short mortal life are seared in her grey matter like an anchor into humanity and are the only ones she would willingly cut loose.

But beneath the grime and helplessness and the resentment only beginning to form, her blood was sweet. Or sweet enough to attract one more monstrosity into her life. She never saw him coming, and had barely felt his arm wrap around her body before the twin needles pierced her, causing her to jerk with rigour. But, in spite of the pain, that unknown immortal did not let one drop hit the pressed dirt beneath her cheek, and despite the long, insistent tugs on her life, she’d been aware that this marked her as special enough.

After that, there was nothing. There is this morning. There is this stranger she supposedly loves. Alexander, standing across from her with a shyly raised brow.

The irony between the lack and poverty and pain, which she can remember, and the love and joy and acceptance that she cannot, makes her want to curl into herself. The only thing that stops her is the miracle of what she and this kindred stranger seem to have done. They’ve created a net for themselves, something that suspends them not only above humanity, but above the rest of their kind. They live in their own universe. How many couples, immortal or not, are able to claim the same? Ina thinks most simply go through the motions, doing what and who they’ve always done simply because momentum and habit carries them that way. She believes most spouses, wouldn’t be able to answer in the affirmative if asked if they’d choose their partner again today. Now. This minute and moment. This second. This life.

Monsters.

“What did his blood taste like?” she asked suddenly.

No matter that they forgot something as vital as pure love. They always remember the blood.

“As you’d think,” Alexander lowers himself into the leather chair and looks away.

She knows what she thinks. It tastes like the air after the fireworks have died. Like petrol freshly touched by flame.

Ina runs the tip of her tongue across her incisor, nodding slowly.

“There will be no one to help us this time,” she mutters before realizing what she’s just said. She looks at Alexander sharply, nicking her tongue, but he’s gazing at her with a new look on his face.

“We posses a year to find someone else,” he says, eyes on her lips and tongue as the puncture wound closes and she licks the blood away. Ina feels herself go light-headed. She has already noted that Alexander’s speech – he has told her he hates to be called Alex – is closer to the old tongue. To her, looking at him is like gazing at a living portrait. She has adopted the new – language and style and mores and dress – and she wonders if he minds.

Fuck it, she thinks and opens her mouth to ask him just that, but a child’s voice rings through the new night, sharp through the open window, though it’s at least two blocks away. Another shoots back like a bottle rocket, the sound crisp. It’s too late for them to be out, their mother should know better. You never know what lurks in the cradle of night.

“Hungry?” Alexander asks her. Is it a simple question, ot is he concerned for her?

“No, they’re just annoying.” Ina watches him for a moment, wonders if it’s only hunger that has him licking his lips or if the fouled blood has affected him after all, coating his mouth with the fumes of spent fuel.

“Stay inside,” Alexander says, rising like a sail. “I’ll go tell them to be silent.”

“No, I’ll go with you.” Somehow she already knows she must stay with him every possible second. A year is a very short time. She joins him with equal fluidity. “Besides, I like children.”

Ina does eat in front of Alexander and he in front of her and, later, when they’re back in their kitchen, nestled among pillows with the door locked tight, she thinks that watching him feast was perhaps the most erotic thing she has ever witnessed in her life. She has gorged to the point that she might burst with one more drop, and she drapes her arm across her belly only to find Alexander’s is already there. She touched his hand and finds it’s too warm as well. They have each been chasing a hunger they’re still afraid to name.

Surely it’s not the shared blood. She decides that by tomorrow’s sunset they will be in control again. They will part. They will inhabit their own universe.

But curling into Alexander’s too-warm side, Ina already knows this for a lie. It’s like those mortals who cheat on good spouses, opening themselves up to appetites best dampened and flesh that doesn’t belong to them. They start out in control, thinking they’ll be satisfied with just one smile, one caress, one kiss, one fuck, maybe once a year. Until their motto alters from ‘just this once’ to ‘you only live once’.

But Ina, not even able to claim the same, knows they’re wrong. Even without memory she knows that when it comes to the passions, once is never enough.

A hunger like this never dies.

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