Antivenom & Vampire

Slipping into the club, music pounding at your ears, in your bones, the thrum of life and song and dance; friends with you for a moment then gone in the kaleidoscope whirl, torn apart, joining the crowd–

And you go with them, lost in light and sound and movement.

The noise is inside you, it is you, filling your motions with beautiful Purpose; twirling through the crowd, intersecting and diverging, no partner lasting more than a few moments–that’s not what tonight wants of you.

Your friends’ faces flash by you, laughing, screaming–

Finally you fetch up in a quiet lee, the rim of a bar, far enough from the stage to hear your thoughts, your words, to taste the sparkling liquid that fills your cup. It’s bright and happy and bubbly, and as it fills you your thoughts spiral away again–

You’re still at the bar, still in a break in the noise, cups scattered across it before you; lost in conversation, scintillating and fascinating, your partner leaning in towards you, her neck invitingly arched, her hand on your thigh, blood pulsing in your ears–

Outside, in the dark, not far enough from the noise; your teeth buried in her neck, delirious blood pumping out to fill you with warmth and life and nofuckthisisn’tgood, her pleasured moans and twitches getting weaker with each ohnofuck pulse of blood out of her and into you–

She’s slumped on the ground as you desperately paw through your purse, dirty rain soaking into her beautiful dress; panic silences the last scraps of the noise, pops the last bubbles that filled you with such careless abandon.

Not that you can really blame them. This was you.

You finally find the ampoule after a too-long fuckitstoolatewhathaveIdone, check her glazed eyes and see the light starting to gather inside, spreading into the emptiness where her Self was supposed to be, which her blood was supposed to keep full–

You crack open the ampoule just below her nose, the sound reverberating through the street, far louder than it should be–inside, you think you hear the noise still for a moment, but that couldn’t possibly be real.

It wasn’t really that loud.

Right?

You try not to smell the liquid as it flows into her, try not to look too close–you hardly have to shake the ampoule, it knows what it’s for, climbs out and snuffs out the light, fills her up with something cold and wet and close enough to her to keep it out.

Night thoroughly ruined, you wait for her to wake enough to talk, help her into the back of a cab, send her off to her home.

Hopefully she won’t remember in the morning, won’t know how close she came to–well. Becoming like you.

She’s better off not knowing, not remembering the night as anything but getting too drunk and waking up with a long hangover.

If only the person who turned you had been able to offer you the same …